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http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/10/13/15/24/melbourne-supermarket-groper-still-on-run
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http://web.archive.org/web/20161018002602id_/http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/10/13/15/24/melbourne-supermarket-groper-still-on-run
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Melbourne supermarket groper still on run
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20161018002602
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Police are appealing for help to catch a man who struck a woman over the head with a bottle after sexually assaulting her twice in a Melbourne shopping centre.
Described as balding and with missing teeth, the alleged offender grabbed the 38-year-old's bottom while following her into a Preston shopping centre and then grabbing her breast in a supermarket last Friday.
They say the man, aged in his 40s, hit the woman after she pushed him away with a basket and before fleeing the store, flagging down a car and being driven away.
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A man is on the run after allegedly groping a woman in a Melbourne shopping centre then hitting her over the head when she pushed him away with a basket.
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http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/10/17/15/35/pm-urges-dreyfus-to-talk-to-ag
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http://web.archive.org/web/20161019111208id_/http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/10/17/15/35/pm-urges-dreyfus-to-talk-to-ag
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PM urges Dreyfus to talk to AG
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20161019111208
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Malcolm Turnbull has suggested Labor frontbencher Mark Dreyfus "hold his nose" and consult the attorney-general about national security legislation.
In a series of testy question time exchanges in parliament on Monday, the prime minister said the shadow attorney-general liked to "engage in a sort of Guthrie Featherstone QC MP versus Rumpole" debate over Attorney-General George Brandis.
Mr Turnbull accused Mr Dreyfus of stirring up an issue about powers to revoke citizenship of dual citizen terrorists that risked taking his feud with Senator Brandis into an area where national security would be put at risk.
Mr Dreyfus claimed Senator Brandis said he had received advice from Solicitor-General Justin Gleeson that a dual citizenship law would survive a High Court challenge.
Mr Gleeson told a Senate inquiry last week his advice only related to an earlier draft, not the final bill.
It's been reported the first dual citizen facing loss of citizenship plans to challenge the law in the High Court.
Mr Turnbull said the disagreement between "these two learned gentlemen" could best be described as a "disturbance in the bar common room".
He said Mr Dreyfus should put aside his personal animosity, get on Australia's team and talk to the attorney-general if he had concerns about the legislation.
"I would suggest he holds his nose and does the unspeakable thing of talking to the attorney," he said.
Mr Turnbull, himself a lawyer, referred to the British legal drama Rumpole of the Bailey in which a crusty old hack routinely disagreed with his head of chambers.
"All of us understand that the shadow attorney-general likes to engage in a sort of Guthrie Featherstone QC MP versus Rumpole with the debate over the attorney-general," Mr Turnbull said.
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Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull says Mark Dreyfus should put aside his feud with Attorney-General George Brandis.
| 17.894737 | 0.947368 | 3.578947 |
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http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/10/19/03/35/gas-report-expected-in-nsw-murder-suicide
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http://web.archive.org/web/20161020055312id_/http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/10/19/03/35/gas-report-expected-in-nsw-murder-suicide
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Gas report expected in NSW murder-suicide
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20161020055312
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Police investigating the apparent murder-suicide of a family of four in Sydney's north are expecting more information to be revealed in toxicology reports.
The bodies of Fernando Manrique, 44, Maria Lutz, 43, and their autistic children, 11-year-old Elisa and 10-year-old Martin, were found in their home in Davidson on Monday.
Police said on Tuesday they were investigating whether the family was gassed, with toxicology reports imminent.
A dog was also found dead in the house, with all family members appearing uninjured, police said.
Media reports suggest an elaborate system of pipes carried the gas into the house via the ceiling.
The Davidson community has been rocked by the shocking event.
The children's school, St Lucy's in Wahroonga, held a memorial service on Tuesday after psychologists were called in to comfort distressed staff and students.
The home remains a crime scene while investigations continue.
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Police are awaiting a toxicology report which should have more information about the deaths of a family of four in Sydney's north, potentially by gassing.
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http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/10/18/09/48/former-mp-takes-conservatives-to-task
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http://web.archive.org/web/20161020063920id_/http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/10/18/09/48/former-mp-takes-conservatives-to-task
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Former MP takes conservatives to task
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20161020063920
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A former Liberal MP has taken aim at conservatives inside the Turnbull government who are using a complaint against cartoonist Bill Leak to push the case for amending race-hate speech laws.
"How about Andrew Hastie and others look for solutions to indigenous disadvantage rather than using Bill Leak as an 18C Trojan horse," Ewen Jones tweeted on Tuesday.
Mr Hastie has called on journalists to speak out against the Human Rights Commission's investigation of Leak, saying it could spark a fresh push for reform of Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act.
Mr Hastie said all media outlets should be concerned about the attempt to use the contentious section to stifle free speech.
"My view is that cartoonists and satirists play a really important role in the free press," he told The Australian.
Mr Hastie acknowledged the Leak cartoon, a blunt portrayal of a crisis in Aboriginal parenting, offended some people.
Critics of the cartoon have described it as a racist and hateful smear of indigenous parents.
But for the Human Rights Commission to investigate Leak was "just ridiculous, it's a step too far".
"I think this could well be the straw that breaks the camel's back," Mr Hastie said of 18C.
Prime Minister Malcolm told parliament on Monday the government had not revisited the issue since the Abbott government opted to leave the section unchanged.
Race Discrimination Commissioner Tim Soutphommasane denied the debate about indigenous disadvantage was being shut down by the use of Section 18c.
Nor did he pre-judge the matter when he declared society should not endorse racial stereotyping of Aboriginal people.
"I was responding to a question about the cartoon and that was a reflection of the concerns that were expressed on that day by many people," he told a Senate hearing in Canberra.
A similar comment was made by Indigenous Affairs Minister Nigel Scullion.
"I have no role in handling complaints ... the commission makes no legal determinations about matters brought before it," Dr Soutphommasane said.
Commission president Gillian Triggs said she could not comment on specific complaints.
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Defeated MP Ewen Jones has criticised some his former Liberal colleagues for pursuing changes to race-hate speech laws.
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http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/10/18/13/29/bob-day-the-man
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http://web.archive.org/web/20161020074104id_/http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/10/18/13/29/bob-day-the-man
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Bob Day: The man
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20161020074104
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* Born in Manchester in England in 1952, moved to Australia in 1963 and grew up in Gilles Plains in Adelaide's north.
* First qualified and worked as a science technician but joined the building industry six years later as a plumber's assistant.
* Built his first home in 1979 and founded Homestead Homes in SA in 1983.
* Married Bronte in 1981. The couple have three children.
* In 1996 founded Home Australia, which now owns Homestead Homes in SA, Collier Homes in WA, Newstart Homes in Queensland, Ashford Homes in Victoria and Huxley Homes in NSW.
* Was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2003 for service to the housing industry and social welfare.
* Made his first foray into politics in 2007 with a failed bid to win the federal Adelaide seat of Makin for the Liberals, having been a long-time Liberal Party member (1987-2008).
* Resigned from the Liberal Party in 2008 after a failed pre-selection bid for the federal seat of Mayo and joined Family First.
* Ran for a SA senate seat 2010 without success, but was elected at his second attempt in 2013 and was re-elected in 2016.
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SA Senator Bob Day, 64, switched from being a science technician to a builder and a Liberal man to a Family First contender en route to his political career.
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http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/10/20/11/55/labour-costs-differ-in-24-7-economy-pc
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http://web.archive.org/web/20161021120707id_/http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/10/20/11/55/labour-costs-differ-in-24-7-economy-pc
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Labour costs differ in 24/7 economy: PC
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20161021120707
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The Productivity Commission has again justified its recommendation for having a uniform penalty rate for weekend workers.
The Fair Work Commission is still considering a proposal to bring the Sunday rate in line with the lower Saturday rate.
It was one of several of recommendations made by the Productivity Commission in its workplace relations framework released last year.
Productivity Commission chairman Peter Harris told a Senate hearing on Thursday the price for labour when Australia was a five-day-a-week, nine-to-five economy may be out of kilter with the expectation for a 24/7 economy running today.
"We were proposing a weekend rate, not a Saturday rate and a much higher Sunday rate ," he said.
But Mr Harris emphasised the commission never said "no penalty rates".
"Quite the reverse," he said.
The report did point out penalty rates were "underdone" in some areas.
"But we didn't get much attention to that."
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The Productivity Commission has again explained its recommendation for a uniform penalty rate for weekend workers.
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http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/10/21/05/15/elite-high-school-student-slams-school-in-farewell-speech
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http://web.archive.org/web/20161021122851id_/http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/10/21/05/15/elite-high-school-student-slams-school-in-farewell-speech
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Elite high school student slams school in farewell speech
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20161021122851
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The principal of an elite Melbourne boys high school has hit back at claims the institution is out of touch with students after a video of a departing student leader's scathing speech went viral on social media.
In an address at the Year 12 final assembly, student representative council vice-president Ben Qin said he "no longer believed in Melbourne High".
The student's grievances reportedly stemmed from the school's decision to cancel senior socials and "the house captains' strip", modify the vomit-inducing "Milk Run", and for muck up day pranks to be put to staff in writing for pre-approval, The Age reports.
Principal Jeremy Ludowyke used an editorial in the school's newsletter to say the strip, customarily performed at the year 12 formal, had been stopped because it was a product of a "locker room mentality" that had led to complaints from female staff members and guests.
Mr Ludowyke said socials had been cancelled because of "the 'meat market' mentality that had developed around this event".
"Student commentary about the event on social media had increasingly descended into sexist and misogynistic puerility," he wrote.
The principal added that Year 12 leaders were offered the chance to develop an alternative arrangement for the socials but "they took no interest in the offer to rearrange the Senior Social at all".
Finally the Milk Run, which involves students drinking milk and lemon juice until they vomit, was changed because students allegedly shirked their clean-up duties.
"For the past two years, the Year 12 leaders have been charged with cleaning up afterwards and on every occasion it has been left to the staff to undertake the very unpleasant task of cleaning up a substantial amount of vomit," Mr Ludowyke wrote.
In his speech Ben said these decisions had caused him to lose faith in the school he once believed in.
"Melbourne High students are not gentlemen. We stopped being gentlemen a long time ago. We stopped being gentlemen when the demographic changed. We stopped being gentlemen when the world changed," he said.
"Someone who once wholeheartedly believed in this school is telling you, 'you don't understand your students anymore. You don't know who and what we are'."
He also used the speech to attack Melbourne High for allegedly telling students their legacy at the school would be measured by their fundraising efforts.
"A threat about a month ago that our legacy as a year level was contingent on demands of $50 donations ... I hardly think this was ever a good attitude," he said in the speech that was met with a standing ovation.
"Don't we give back our intellect and our academic ability? Don't we give back our physical, artistic and musical talents? We thought this was valuable. Don't we, every year, give back in leadership, student representation?"
Ben said he wrote the speech because he and other students felt disillusioned with the school but added that Melbourne High was still a good school that offered great opportunities.
© Nine Digital Pty Ltd 2016
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The principal of an elite Melbourne boys high school has hit back at a scathing speech from a year 12 student accusing him of being out of touch.
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http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/10/26/14/35/french-aust-defence-ministers-to-meet
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http://web.archive.org/web/20161027124134id_/http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/10/26/14/35/french-aust-defence-ministers-to-meet
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Fall of Mosul will be decisive blow: Payne
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20161027124134
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The liberation of the northern Iraqi city of Mosul from Islamic State control will be a decisive blow to the group but won't end the terrorist threat, Defence Minister Marise Payne says.
Senator Payne, who attended a meeting of defence ministers of nations in the coalition against IS in Paris this week, says the campaign remains on track and the terrorist organisation is under increasing pressure.
"The liberation of Mosul from Daesh control will be a decisive blow to the group, but it will not be the end of the terrorist threat," she said.
Senator Payne said IS was losing territory, finances, fighters and battles but the momentum needed to be maintained.
"This campaign is complex and will take some time. The forces fighting against Daesh are fighting with skill and bravery, with the support of the coalition," she said.
Senator Payne said Australia was a leading contributor to the US-led campaign, with RAAF aircraft supporting Iraqi forces on the ground and Australian and New Zealand troops training Iraqi soldiers for the Mosul battle.
On the sidelines of the meeting, Senator Payne held bilateral meetings with her counterparts from France, the United Kingdom and Italy.
A key outcome was an agreement with French defence minister Jean-Yves Le Drian for annual ministerial talks in the same manner as annual Australia-US and Australia-UK ministerial talks on security and defence issues.
Australia and France have longstanding defence ties but they've stepped up with Australia's decision to acquire submarines from French shipbuilder DCNS.
"Building on these links, and in light of the co-operation that we will have for decades to come under the Future Submarine Program, we will establish formal defence ministers' meetings," she said.
As well as submarines, Australia is also set to acquire new warships to replace Anzac frigates.
Senator Payne held bilateral meetings with UK defence secretary Michael Fallon and Italian minister Roberta Pinotti. Companies from both nations are bidding to build the new vessels.
Senator Payne heads to Jakarta for the annual defence and foreign ministers' meetings on Thursday and Friday.
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France and Australia are set to hold annual defence minister meetings in the latest step to boost security links.
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http://www.9news.com.au/World/2016/10/27/06/30/Donald-Trump-s-vandalised-Walk-of-Fame-star-replaced
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http://web.archive.org/web/20161027150107id_/http://www.9news.com.au/World/2016/10/27/06/30/Donald-Trump-s-vandalised-Walk-of-Fame-star-replaced
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Trump's Walk of Fame star under repair after being destroyed by axe-wielding vandal
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20161027150107
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Repair work has begun on Donald Trump's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame after an axe-wielding protester hacked out the gold lettering and television logo.
A man who identified himself to a local news agency as James Lambert Otis said he was the vandal, and had originally intended to remove the entire star from the sidewalk on Hollywood Boulevard.
He said he was going to auction it and donate the proceeds to the women who allege they were groped or sexually mistreated by Trump - charges the real estate tycoon denies - but he was unable to lift the slab.
"It was very difficult. The stone was like marble, hard to get through," he said about an hour after he reportedly attacked the star, at 5.45 on Wednesday (local time).
Dressed in construction overalls, Otis said he used a sledgehammer and pick to hack away Trump's name and the logo indicating the star had been awarded in the category of television for Trump's work on his reality show, The Apprentice.
Repair work has begun on Donald Trump's star after it was destroy by an axe-wielding vandal. (9NEWS)
Otis said he still hoped to sell the pilfered pieces and return to do the star further damage.
"I'm not frightened of jail and I'm certainly not frightened of Mr Trump," said the man, who claims to have been arrested around two dozen times for protesting various causes.
Repairmen have begun restoration work on the star, setting a barrier up around the area.
"Every star is earned, nobody should abuse any star," one onlooker said as workers cleaned the star.
It is not the first time the star has been vandlised which as been smeared with excrement and daubed with a swastika in the past. (9NEWS)
This is not the first time the 70-year-old Trump's Walk of Fame star, which he got in 2007, has been targeted.
In July, a Los Angeles street artist built a six-inch (15-centimeter) wall of wooden planks topped with barbed wire around the monument.
Trump has repeatedly vowed during his campaign to build a wall between Mexico and the United States, drawing criticism from rights groups.
Last year, excrement was left on the star and someone drew a large yellow X over it.
A swastika and a mute symbol were also drawn on the red tile earlier this year.
"Today is Hillary Clinton's birthday and I have a feeling that somebody decided to give her a birthday present," said Angela Turner, 71, a bystander at the scene of the latest attack.
Liliana Preciado, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles Police Department, told AFP a "male, Caucasian, approximately six feet (183 cm) tall" had used a pickaxe and sledgehammer on the star.
"We have surveillance video as well as video that has been uploaded to the internet that our detectives are taking a look at and they are confident they will be able to identify the suspect," she added.
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Repair work has begun on Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s Walk of Fame star after it was destroyed in the early hours of this morning.
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http://www.9news.com.au/world/2016/10/29/07/51/un-boss-warns-over-quitting-icc
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http://web.archive.org/web/20161029105936id_/http://www.9news.com.au/world/2016/10/29/07/51/un-boss-warns-over-quitting-icc
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UN boss warns over quitting ICC
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20161029105936
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United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has expressed regret that South Africa, Burundi and Gambia want to leave the International Criminal Court and said it could "send a wrong message on these countries' commitment to justice".
The International Criminal Court, which opened in July 2002 and has 124 member states, is the first legal body with permanent international jurisdiction to prosecute genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.
South Africa and Burundi have officially notified the United Nations of their intent to withdraw from the Rome Statute, the 1998 treaty establishing The Hague-based court, which will take effect in October 2017.
Gambia said this week that it also plans to withdraw from the court, but it has not yet notified the United Nations.
Ban acknowledged the concerns of some countries which have accused the court of being too focused on Africa.
"These challenges are best addressed not by diminishing support for the Court, but by strengthening it from within," Ban told a UN Security Council meeting on cooperation between the world body and regional groups.
"Deterring future atrocities, delivering justice for victims, and defending the rules of war across the globe are far too important priorities to risk a retreat from the age of accountability that we have worked so hard to build and solidify," said Ban, who steps down at the end of this year.
The withdrawal of South Africa and Burundi from the court are likely to embolden other African countries to leave.
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United Nations boss Ban Ki-moon understands concerns that the International Criminal Court is too focused on Africa, but regrets the exodus of nations.
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http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/10/31/10/52/warship-supply-chain-roadshow-starts-in-sa
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http://web.archive.org/web/20161101115612id_/http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/10/31/10/52/warship-supply-chain-roadshow-starts-in-sa
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Warship supply chain roadshow starts in SA
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20161101115612
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Australian businesses will learn how they may join the supply chain for the defence force's next warships through a roadshow touring the country.
Defence Industry Minister Christopher Pyne launched the roadshow in Adelaide on Monday, which will go on to host briefings in capital cities around Australia until mid-December.
Construction on 12 offshore patrol vessels will start in Adelaide in 2018 while the build of nine anti-submarine warfare frigates will begin in the city by 2020.
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Australian companies will learn how they can benefit from construction of the defence force's next warships through a national roadshow.
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http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/11/03/12/21/residents-file-action-over-toxic-water
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http://web.archive.org/web/20161104161031id_/http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/11/03/12/21/residents-file-action-over-toxic-water
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NSW residents file action over toxic water
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20161104161031
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More than 400 residents north of Newcastle have launched a class action against the Defence Department over the contamination of their local groundwater.
Residents say their livelihoods and property values have been severely affected since news broke that toxic chemicals once used in firefighting foam at the Williamtown RAAF base had leached into ground and surface water.
"It's had a devastating affect on the community," Lindsay Clout, who lives 5km from the base told AAP on Thursday.
"Businesses have suffered, fishermen have been put out of work for 12 months and house prices have collapsed," he said.
Residents have also been unable to drink bore water or eat home-grown fruits or vegetables or eggs from farmyard chickens.
The toxins, PFOS and PFOA, which have been linked to a number of health problems such as bowel and liver cancer in international studies, have also been detected in a number of residents' blood, Mr Clout said.
"But the main issue right now, is people's mental health," he said.
"We've got people who have been told their homes are worthless because they're in the contamination zone, and they want to leave but they can't because they don't have the money to leave.
"The anxiety and financial stress is really bubbling up for many of them.
"We just really want (Defence) to clean this bloody mess up."
Sydney law firm Gadens said the lawsuit was filed in the Federal Court after the Department of Defence responded to a letter of demand from the local community.
The department failed to provide any time-frame or meaningful way forward to remediate the land and offer reasonable compensation, lawyer Ben Allen said.
"The one-and-a-half page letter from the Department of Defence is a slap in the face for residents and business owners who have been looking for answers for over a year now," he said.
There are 17 other RAAF sites around Australia which have been similarly affected by the contamination.
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Hundreds of NSW residents have filed a class action against the Defence Department over chemical contamination of groundwater by the Williamtown RAAF base.
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http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/11/05/12/57/two-injured-in-sydney-factory-fire
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http://web.archive.org/web/20161106164520id_/http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/11/05/12/57/two-injured-in-sydney-factory-fire
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Two injured in Sydney factory fire
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20161106164520
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Two men have been taken to hospital as firefighters continue to battle a huge blaze at a car wrecking yard in Sydney's southwest.
Several homes have been evacuated after the fire broke out on Mavis Street in Revesby about 11am on Saturday, a police spokeswoman says.
One man has been treated for minor burns and taken to Liverpool Hospital and another man has been taken to Bankstown Hospital suffering from smoke inhalation, she said. Motorists are being urged to avoid the area.
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Two people have been taken to hospital after a fire broke out at a Sydney factory.
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http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/11/06/13/17/senate-woes-occupy-government-thoughts
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http://web.archive.org/web/20161107151047id_/http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/11/06/13/17/senate-woes-occupy-government-thoughts
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Senate woes occupy government thoughts
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20161107151047
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The Senate and its denizens will occupy the government in the coming week of federal parliament.
Legal action against two senators is set to dominate politics and the fallout complicates crossbench equations on key pieces of legislation.
Family First senator Bob Day has resigned to deal with his construction company collapse, and the government has revealed legal advice casting a cloud over both his and One Nation senator Rod Culleton's election.
The Senate will on Monday decide whether to refer Mr Day and Senator Culleton to the High Court, sitting as the Court of Disputed Returns.
The cloud hanging over the two crossbench spots changes dynamics as the government pushes ahead with its same-sex marriage plebiscite legislation and delays a pair of industrial relations bills.
The government insists it doesn't know what will happen to the plebiscite bill, even though the numbers appear set against it.
"When you're in politics, lots of people make predictions," Liberal MP Tim Wilson told ABC TV on Sunday.
"But until the final vote is counted ... in the Senate you can't make any prediction."
Conversely, it has pulled legislation to re-establish the Australian Building and Construction Commission and a registered organisations watchdog - the bills used to trigger the double dissolution election - because it doesn't believe the Senate support is there yet.
Mr Wilson said it was doubtful those bills would go to the Senate before the end of the year.
Opposition leader Bill Shorten said the prime minister had spruiked the industrial relations legislation and a company tax cut as the two big reasons to vote Liberal at the federal election.
"Why did we have a double-dissolution election?" he asked on Sunday.
The "backpacker tax" bill is also before the Senate and Labor is open to a proposal from Tasmanian independent Jacqui Lambie to to drop the tax rate further to 10.5 per cent.
The government is set to introduce legislation for a lifetime Australian visa ban on asylum seekers on offshore immigration centres.
Labor is scrutinising the draft bill and will decide its position in a caucus meeting on Tuesday.
Indonesian president Joko Widodo had been due to address parliament on Monday morning but cancelled his visit to deal after a protest in Jakarta spiralled into violence.
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Federal parliament will be dominated by dramas in the Senate when politicians return to Canberra in the coming week.
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http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/11/08/08/56/home-detainee-escapes-a-risk-sa-minister
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http://web.archive.org/web/20161108131351id_/http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/11/08/08/56/home-detainee-escapes-a-risk-sa-minister
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Home detention escapes a risk: SA minister
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20161108131351
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There is no fool-proof way to ensure South Australians on home detention don't try to remove their monitoring bracelets, the state's corrections minister says.
Peter Malinauskas says home detention always comes with the risk of situations like that of Para Hills West man Isaac Marley Morris, 22, who is wanted by police after cutting off his home detention monitor in late October.
SA police on Monday asked for the public's help to find Morris, who was placed on home detention by the state's parole board after serving jail time for threatening a female security guard who reported him for shoplifting.
"Unless we're going to start locking up people convicted of shoplifting for the term of their natural life, then things like the instance that occurred here are going to happen," Mr Malinauskas told FiveAA radio on Tuesday.
"But I think it is better to have them on electronic monitoring than not, which is what was previously the case.
"Previously, before electronic monitoring came in, we had people on parole who were out in the community and we had no idea where they are."
The search for Morris comes as the government reviews how new laws that give courts the option of sentencing an offender to home detention from the outset, rather than jail, are being applied since coming into effect in September.
"I think that's something that's really important in making sure that we get the balance right, which arguably the legislation doesn't have at the moment," Mr Malinauskas said.
But he said the risk of people on home detention removing their bracelets remains, whether they are on parole or serving their sentence.
"Because these aren't always people that are predisposed to doing the right thing," he said.
The Director of Public Prosecutions is currently appealing two home detention sentences.
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South Australia's corrections minister says it is not possible to avoid the risk of people on home detention trying to take off their monitoring bracelet.
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http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/11/09/16/56/us-voters-give-australians-a-jolt
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US voters give Australians a jolt
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20161110134915
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If Australians had been troubled by the US presidential election campaign, a sleepless night is on the cards as global financial markets went on a rollercoaster ride in anticipation of a shock win by Republican Donald Trump.
Billions of dollars were wiped off the Australian share market as predictions of a win by Democrat Hillary Clinton fell by the wayside, finishing around two per cent lower on Wednesday.
Shares tumbled nearly four per cent at one stage, as the US S&P 500 futures market slumped 4.5 per cent.
Some analysts have predicted a 10 per cent slide on Wall Street should a Trump win be confirmed.
"The count is ongoing, but it would appear that Donald Trump is mostly likely to claim the presidency at this stage," Foreign Minister Julie Bishop told Sky News..
The unexpected election turnaround rolled out during Australia's trading session and came as new figures showed confidence among local consumers have been undermined in the past month by the political shenanigans in the US.
The Westpac-Melbourne Institute consumer sentiment index for November fell 1.1 per cent.
Westpac chief economist Bill Evans said events in the past month have included weakness in the share markets as investors dealt with the uncertainties around the US election.
This and disappointing monthly jobs numbers and an unchanged cash rate after the Reserve Bank board meeting - there had been earlier speculation of a rate cut at the November 1 board meeting - offset the surprise surge in commodity prices in recent months and the potential lift in the national income.
However, the more timely weekly ANZ-Roy Morgan confidence gauge released on Tuesday jumped 3.2 per cent.
Confidence readings provide a pointer to future retail spending.
As Commonwealth Securities chief economist Craig James describes it, "confidence is far from effervescent but nor are people decidedly glum".
"But that is far from surprising when you consider the background of a contentious US election."
There was also some bad news for retailers.
The Westpac survey also gauged respondents on their Christmas spending intentions - asking whether they will spend less, about the same or more on gifts compared to last year.
The net balance of those spending more, minus those spending less was minus 20.1 per cent - the average since this question was first asked on 2009, but down from minus 13 per cent last year.
"That is a disappointing result given the promising improvement in spending plans in 2015," Mr Evans said.
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Growing anticipation of a US presidential win by Donald Trump has sent markets into a tailspin, potentially undermining confidence among Australians.
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Working with Trump will be 'harder': EU
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20161110160338
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The election of Donald Trump as the United States' 45th president will make work "harder" for the European Union, the European Parliament President Martin Schulz says.
"It will be hard, harder than with previous administrations but he is the freely elected president," Schulz said on Europe 1 radio.
"We must respect the future president of the United States (...) I hope we will find a slot to co-operate," he said.
Republican Trump stunned the world by defeating heavily favoured Hillary Clinton in the race for the White House, ending eight years of Democratic rule.
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The election of Donald Trump as the US President will make work "harder" for the European Union, the European Parliament President Martin Schulz says.
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http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/11/11/19/40/aust-indo-relations-in-great-shape-summit
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Aust-Indo relations in great shape: summit
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20161112123854
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Indonesian president Joko Widodo's abrupt cancellation of his visit to Australia could be seen as a setback in a long-troubled relationship but ambassadors for both countries say the friendship has never been better.
President "Jokowi" has committed to rescheduling and coming to Australia very soon, the country's ambassador Nadjib Riphat Kesoema told the Indonesia Business Summit in Perth on Friday.
Last week's the three-day visit was cancelled after a protest in Jakarta spiralled into violence, with up to 150,000 demonstrators demanding the jailing of the city's Christian governor for insulting Islam.
"The postponement does not reduce the commitment from both countries to pursue further co-operation ... strengthening economic relations between the two countries will be central to his agenda," Mr Kesoema said.
Mr Widodo is a former businessman - as was Australian PM Malcolm Turnbull - who "does not like filling out complicated forms" and wants to make Indonesia an easier place to do business, he said.
It was working well, with Indonesia one of the big climbers on the World Bank's ease of doing business index, he said.
The lowest points in the two countries' relationship include East Timor's violent secession in 1999 and revelations Australia tried to monitor the phone of former Indonesian president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, leading to the recall of Mr Kesoema in 2013.
However the relationship was now in good shape, with its respective leaders getting along well, which had flowed through to its governments, Australia's ambassador to Indonesia Paul Grigson said.
"There is an acceptance that from time to time we will have differences ... in the past perhaps we spent too much time on our differences and not look at the great wave of common interests," he said.
"I spend 95 to 98 per cent of my job on positive issues, encouraging greater connections."
The actual number of businesses with a presence in Indonesia was far higher than official numbers, he said. At least 1000 Australian enterprises - some only "micro" in scale - had interests in Bali and nearly 400 Jakarta before the embassy stopped counting, he said.
The number of Indonesians visiting Australia on short term visas jumped 30 per cent last year, he said, suggesting tourism was becoming more two-way.
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The Indonesia president might not be here but ambassadors for both countries have told a Perth conference the friendship with Australia has never been better.
| 16.846154 | 0.884615 | 2.576923 |
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Tas award for inmate literacy volunteer
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20161112191438
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A speech pathologist who helps inmates learn to read has been named 2017 Tasmanian Australian of the Year.
Hobart woman Rosalie Martin was on Friday announced overall winner among four categories and will represent the island state at the national Australia Day awards.
For three years Ms Martin has volunteered at Hobart's Risdon Prison, working with convicted criminals, some who have learned to read within months.
She has designed a program using her skills in language and speech sounds to uncover hidden literacy problems.
In private practice, Ms Martin specialises in services for children with autism spectrum disorder.
"A truly deserving recipient, Rosalie received the honour for her work supporting individuals with severe literacy disorders," Premier Will Hodgman said, acknowledging all recipients.
Tasmanian Young Australian of the Year is Mitch McPherson, 29, recognised for his work in suicide prevention following the death of his brother in 2013.
Sustainable living advocate Margaret Steadman, 72, is the Tasmanian Senior Australian of the Year.
Youth worker Anthony Edler has been named Local Hero for his work with at-risk young people.
Readers seeking support and information about suicide prevention can contact Lifeline on 13 11 14.
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For three years Rosalie Martin has been using her expertise as a speech pathologist to help convicted criminals learn to read.
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What you need to know about the Supermoon
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20161115141710
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* The gap between the Earth and the moon will close to its shortest point, known as "perigee" - a distance of 221,525 miles (356,510 km) - at 10:22pm AEST on Monday
* NASA says the moon will be "opposite" the sun for the full moon two and a half hours later
* Monday night's spectacle will be the closest a full moon has come to Earth since 1948
* We won't see another supermoon like it until 2034
* Victoria will be mostly cloudy this evening with some showers on and south of the ranges, including Melbourne, so the best viewing conditions will be in the north of the state
* NSW and the ACT will experience clouds along the coast and ranges, including Sydney and Canberra, but western districts will be mostly clear
* Skies in Queensland will be clear on Monday night over most of the state, including Brisbane, with just a little cloud about the north tropical coast and Darling Downs
* The Northern Territory can expect thunderstorms in the north, especially over the northwest Top End
* Western Australia should be clear statewide
* South Australia will have cloud over the southeast of the state, including the Adelaide region, while the west coast and north of the state should be mostly cloud-free
* Tasmania will be mostly cloudy, with showers over the western half of the state, but there will be some breaks in the cloud in the east, including the Hobart area
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Cloudy conditions over much of Australia could spoil our view of the biggest supermoon in almost 70 years.
| 14.789474 | 0.473684 | 0.578947 |
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http://www.9news.com.au/world/2016/11/16/05/42/zuma-threatens-prosecutor-with-suspension
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http://web.archive.org/web/20161116154004id_/http://www.9news.com.au/world/2016/11/16/05/42/zuma-threatens-prosecutor-with-suspension
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Zuma threatens prosecutor with suspension
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20161116154004
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South African President Jacob Zuma has asked National Director of Public Prosecutions Shaun Abrahams to give reasons by November 28 why he should not be suspended, the president's office says.
The request was made pending an inquiry into Abrahams' fitness to hold office, the president's office said.
Its statement said rights groups had asked Zuma to suspend Abrahams and two other officials in the department over the manner in which they handled allegations of misconduct, since dropped, against Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan.
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South Africa's President Jacob Zuma has asked the country's public prosecutor to tell him why he shouldn't be suspended over alleged misconduct.
| 3.615385 | 0.730769 | 1.807692 |
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http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/11/21/07/41/we-may-take-more-syrian-refugees
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We may take more Syrian refugees
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20161121112253
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The federal government has flagged it may take more refugees fleeing war zones in Syria and Iraq.
So far 6507 have arrived in Australia - a little over half the intake announced by the Abbott government in 2015.
"If we get this program right (it allows us) to say to the Australian people that we may want to expand this program," Immigration Minister Peter Dutton has told the ABC's Australian Story.
"And if people have faith in the integrity of the process, then it does give the government the ability to expand beyond the 12,000."
Mr Dutton acknowledged the process could be "long and protracted" but defended the need for security checks.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull told reporters in Lima, Peru where he is attending the APEC summit, the government had no plans to increase the 12,000 number.
But he noted there were plans to increase the annual humanitarian intake.
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Australia may accept more than the 12,000 refugees it's planning to take from war-torn areas of the Middle East.
| 7.652174 | 0.652174 | 0.826087 |
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http://fortune.com/2013/09/03/japans-energy-savior/
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http://web.archive.org/web/20161121203450id_/http://fortune.com/2013/09/03/japans-energy-savior/
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Japan’s energy savior?
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20161121203450
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FORTUNE — It’s a gas that wiped out much of life on Earth 275 million years ago, and Japan is now touting it as the world’s next unconventional energy supply.
Known as inflammable ice, or clathrates, the new potential fuel is a sherbet-like substance consisting of methane trapped in water ice. To the eye, it looks remarkably like ice and typically resides just below the seabed off our continental shelves.
Japanese calculations suggests the resources-poor country has enough supply just off its coasts to meet the economic superpower’s energy needs for the next 100 years. The frozen gas is also prevalent in other parts of the globe and can provide more energy than all the world’s known gas and oil reserves combined, according to one estimate.
“The initial area of study in Japan was the coastal region stretching 400 km (from Tokyo to the western tip of Japan’s Honshu island). This region alone is thought to hold enough reserves to supply all of Japan with natural gas for nearly 14 years,” says the Japanese government, which is leading the trials.
MORE: Handicapping bank risk to emerging markets
Japanese researchers working for the government were the first to tap natural gas from seabed methane hydrates this March. Massive technological hurdles stand in the way of extracting the gas, which is difficult to access, as it is often deep below sea level. Some say these resources will never be commercially applicable.
Tokyo points to the challenges of fracking in the 1990s and says similar technological advances will make energy from methane hydrate a possibility. With few natural resources of its own, a stalled nuclear power program, and little in the way of renewables, Japan is hoping methane clathrate can save it from energy dependency.
Revised estimates, based on data collected over the last year and released last week, say there are massive deposits of methane hydrate below the Sea of Japan. These will be easier to reach than most gas deposits as they are located close to the seabed surface, officials say. Methane hydrates are believed to collect along geological fault lines, and Japan sits atop a nexus of three of the world’s largest deposits.
“Methane hydrate could become an important energy source for Japan, because a substantial part of the known or proven resources globally are around Japan,” says energy technology analyst Gerhard Fasol of Eurotechnology Japan.
Good news for Japan Inc., which showed boosted figures for manufacturing output recently. With nearly all nuclear power stations offline, Tokyo is fueling its mini boom with imported fossil fuels, particularly propane gas. At $16 per million metric units, compared to around $3.50 in the U.S., this has proven to be very expensive, particularly in light of the recent fall in the yen’s purchasing power and a ballooning trade deficit.
The state-owned Japan Oil, Gas and Metals National Corporation (JOGMEC) is behind the successful methane hydrate drillings so far, but it says private companies will take over once test drilling finishes sometime between 2016 and 2018.
The Japanese team say they have cracked technical difficulties by sending down what officials describe as “an excavator” one kilometer below the waves. There the machine separates solidified methane hydrate into water and natural gas, and funnels the gas up to the surface.
“Holes are drilled into the methane deposits to produce water to decrease the pressure, allowing the methane to separate out from the ice-like material and flow up the wellhead,” explains Koji Yamamoto, project director of JOGMEC’s Methane Hydrate Research Team.
While some welcome the potential benefits a new supply of energy, others point to the dangers of tampering with unstable beds of frozen gas and adding more CO2 to the atmosphere.
MORE: Argentina’s gargantuan knock-off mall: Heading to the U.S.?
“Environmentalists are horrified by the idea of releasing huge quantities of methane from under the seabeds,” says Leo Roodhart, director of the Roodhart Energy Consultancy. (Methane gas is a greenhouse gas that’s 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide.)
“Although methane is a cleaner-burning fossil fuel than coal or oil, the as-yet untapped methane hydrates represent ‘captured’ greenhouse gasses that some believe should remain locked under the sea. The mining of methane ice could also wreak havoc on marine ecosystems.”
Yamamoto disagrees that there is any danger of such blowouts or major environmental damage — although a small methane hydrate blowout was linked to the BP BP spill in the Gulf. Larger releases of methane from clathrate beds throughout history, known as the actions of a “Clathrate gun,” have been responsible for mass extinction events.
Researchers do not agree on the risks associated with methane hydrate exploration for commercial energy use. Oceanographer and Rice University professor Gerald Dickens agrees with the Japanese research team, arguing that there is little danger of such catastrophes coming from human action.
“The only potential issue in regards to drilling would be if there is greatly over-pressured gas immediately beneath the gas hydrate,” Dickens says. “However, there is growing belief and rationale to suggest that this cannot occur in nature. So, as far as drilling is concerned, there should be no issue.”
Tim Collett of the United States Geological Survey, a leading expert on methane hydrate, believes it is possible that both natural and human induced changes can lead to hydrate destabilization, triggering catastrophic landslides.
“Evidence implicating gas hydrates in triggering seafloor landslides has been found along the Atlantic Ocean margin of the United States and off northern Europe,” he told the U.S. Congress in 2004. “These processes may release large volumes of methane to the Earth’s oceans and atmosphere.”
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It’s a gas that wiped out much of life on Earth 275 million years ago, and Japan's touting it as the world’s next unconventional energy supply.
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http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/11/21/11/52/locals-scour-qld-bushland-for-missing-man
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Locals scour Qld bushland for missing man
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20161122191601
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Locals in central Queensland are scouring bushland on horses and quad bikes to find a man who has been missing for more than a week.
Aaron Flynn, 29, was en route from the Sunshine Coast to Charters Towers for his uncle's funeral when he was last seen on November 12 walking with a jerry can near Rubyvale in central Queensland.
His car was found last Thursday alongside Rubyvale Road, abandoned after it had ran out of fuel.
A number of Mr Flynn's personal items, including his mobile phone, were also found in the car.
Police and SES workers searched nearby bushland last Friday.
While authorities have since scaled back their search efforts, locals have taken to horseback and quad bikes to try and find Mr Flynn.
With temperatures in the area soaring to 40C in the past week, his family has acknowledged the prospect of finding him alive is not looking good.
"But we have to try our best," his sister Renee Napthali posted on Facebook.
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Queensland communities have taken to horseback and quad bikes to scour the bushland for a missing 29-year-old man.
| 9.190476 | 0.761905 | 3.428571 |
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http://nypost.com/2016/11/23/inside-zapruder-familys-complicated-history-with-jfk-film/
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Inside Zapruder family’s complicated history with JFK film
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20161123085458
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Alexandra Zapruder was not born when her grandfather trained his home-movie camera on President John F. Kennedy’s motorcade rolling through downtown Dallas 53 years ago on Tuesday, but that 26-second film has become a difficult family legacy.
On Nov. 22, 1963, Abraham Zapruder, a devoted supporter of Kennedy and his vision for America, shot a home movie on 8 mm film that became the best-known moving image of the Kennedy assassination.
“Growing up, my parents didn’t talk about this because it was grandfather’s wish that we approach it with discretion and respect for Kennedy,” Alexandra Zapruder, 46, said in an interview.
An immigrant Russian Jew who became a successful clothing manufacturer in Dallas, Abraham Zapruder went to Dealey Plaza to film Kennedy’s motorcade, his granddaughter said.
He ended up capturing one of the most indelible moments in American history.
Growing up in Washington, D.C., where her father, Henry Zapruder, worked as a government attorney, Alexandra Zapruder, an author and member of the founding staff of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, knew little of the film’s back story.
She decided the family’s complicated relationship with the film, which has been used in government probes, fueled conspiracy theories and been viewed by billions of people, may make for an interesting book.
Zapruder, who came to Dallas for the anniversary of the assassination to discuss her book on the film, “Twenty-Six Seconds,” said her family had always been guided by her grandfather’s wishes to maintain the integrity of its deeply disturbing contents.
Abraham Zapruder sold an original copy and the rights to Life magazine for $150,000 to help tell the story of that fateful day in Dallas.
The magazine published several frames of the film days after the assassination. It did not surface again publicly until a version appeared on Geraldo Rivera’s ABC-TV show, “Good Night America” in 1975.
Abraham Zapruder testified before the U.S government’s Warren Commission investigating the assassination. The commission concluded that a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, killed the president and wounded Texas Governor John Connally. Zapruder died in 1970.
Film rights returned to the family in 1978 and Zapruder said she watched her father juggle the demands for public disclosure with her grandfather’s wishes “to do good with it,” she said.
In 1999, the government paid the family $16 million plus interest for the original version of the film.
“He said he would have been happy to have never seen it again,” Alexandra Zapruder said of her grandfather.
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Alexandra Zapruder was not born when her grandfather trained his home-movie camera on President John F. Kennedy’s motorcade rolling through downtown Dallas 53 years ago on Tuesday, but that 26-seco…
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http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/11/22/12/00/gold-coast-lawyer-committed-again
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Gold Coast lawyer to stand second trial
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20161123142301
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Gold Coast lawyer Briana Ioannides has been ordered to stand a second trial over a spate of drug charges relating to alleged offences between November of last year and May 2016.
Ioannides had already been committed to face a trial at Brisbane Supreme Court for allegedly producing steroids.
On Tuesday at Southport Magistrates Court, she had a further three charges added to that case for the possession of dangerous drugs, including heroin.
She was also committed to stand another trial at Southport District Court in relation to producing and possession of dangerous drugs after a Broadbeach police raid in May this year.
A number of other matters have also been adjourned for another hearing in January at Southport Magistrates Court.
The suspended criminal lawyer arrived 75 minutes late for her hearing on Tuesday.
"She should know better," Magistrate Bernadette Callaghan told the court.
The 27-year-old entered no plea, but outside the court she said she planned on "fighting the majority of them".
"There's different plans for each charge," she said.
Ioannides said she was attempting to turn her life around with volunteer work, and still held hopes of resuming her legal career.
"It's obviously not possible in the immediate future," she said.
"Not in the coming months, but when everything is finalised, who knows."
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Gold Coast lawyer Briana Ioannides has been committed to stand trial on further drug charges.
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http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/11/23/11/51/evidence-points-to-xie-s-guilt-crown
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Evidence points to Xie's guilt: Crown
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20161124144106
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The combination of evidence against Robert Xie inevitably leads to the conclusion that he murdered five family members, a jury has been told.
"This is why we say to you, your verdicts, there are five, in each instant should be guilty," said prosecutor Tanya Smith.
She was concluding the Crown's final address at the NSW Supreme Court trial which began on June 29.
Xie, 52, has pleaded not guilty to murdering five relatives of his wife in their bedrooms at their Sydney home in the early hours of July 18, 2009.
He is accused of using a hammer-like object to inflict horrific head injuries on his newsagent brother-in-law Min Lin, 45, his wife Lily Lin, 43, her sister Irene, 39, and the Lins' two sons, Henry, 12, and Terry, 9.
The Crown says Xie was motived to kill them out of jealousy, being infuriated with his perceived "subordinate status" within the extended family.
On Wednesday, Ms Smith listed the main pieces of evidence the Crown relied on to establish that "the single assailant who killed the five members of the Lin family was the accused".
Noting the electricity had been disconnected to the residence, Ms Smith said Xie had detailed knowledge of its layout and had easy access to a house key.
Referring to the method of killing, she reminded the jurors that Xie was medically trained, having been an ear, nose and throat specialist.
A recording with witness A, who was in jail with the accused, revealed Xie showed him a particular location on the neck that was incapacitating, she said.
One of the causes of death for four of the victims was asphyxia - "having injuries to the neck indicative of neck compression".
When Xie's wife, Kathy Lin went to the home on the Saturday morning to check why her brother did not turn up at his Epping newsagency, Xie followed her closely upstairs to the bedrooms.
"The accused - the Crown relies on - hugged Kathy Lin and told her not to look upon entry in the main bedroom at a point at which he was not in a position to see Lily Lin's body," Ms Smith said.
"The accused left his wife at the scene at the end of the second triple-zero call at a time when she was clearly scared and didn't want him to leave."
In a recording with witness A, he "implicitly admits there may be CCTV footage of him disposing of the hammer" when he left his wife at the scene.
Xie's lawyer Robert Webb will begin the defence final submissions on Thursday.
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The crown has told the jury in the NSW supreme court trial of Robert Xie, who is accused of murdering five relatives, that their verdict must be guilty.
| 16.806452 | 0.935484 | 2.032258 |
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http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/11/23/17/31/zebra-comment-crossing-a-line-lib-senator
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http://web.archive.org/web/20161124152641id_/http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/11/23/17/31/zebra-comment-crossing-a-line-lib-senator
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Zebra comment crossing a line: Lib senator
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20161124152641
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Minister for Women Michaelia Cash. (AAP)
A Labor senator has been chastised over an accusation he likened cabinet minister Michaelia Cash to a zebra.
Liberal senator Linda Reynolds complained to the Senate president on Wednesday about a comment Glenn Sterle made in the chamber.
She was just about to ask the minister for women about domestic violence ahead of White Ribbon Day.
"One of the senators opposite, when the minister stood up, made a highly derogatory comment to the minister about her appearance," Senator Reynolds said.
"I think particularly on this subject, on this day, (he) referred to her as a zebra, in fact, I just think it was highly inappropriate."
Senator Cash was wearing a black and white striped outfit.
Senator Sterle denied the remark was directed at Senator Cash, saying he was just sharing a joke with a colleague.
"I just said: 'What's black and white and eats like a horse?''" he said.
"I didn't mention anything about anyone over there."
Senator Reynolds was having none of it, saying it wasn't the first time the opposition had made disparaging remarks about Senator Cash.
She pointed to Labor senator Doug Cameron's comment earlier this week that Senator Cash needed to hold a male colleague's hand, and another earlier this year calling both women "silly little schoolgirls".
"I hope both senators apologise to minister Cash," Senator Reynolds told AAP in a statement.
"Their comments not only demean them, but all of us."
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Liberal senator Linda Reynolds says a Labor senator made a disparaging remark about Women's Minister Michaelia Cash.
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What was the real sound of the ’90s? It was wider than this.
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When you project nostalgia from the personal to the cultural, the picture can get distorted. And no decade has been strip-mined for “remember that?” content in recent years like the ’90s. The decade of “Bridget Jones’s Diary” and the Starr Report, of “Saved by the Bell” and “The Blair Witch Project,” looms large in the minds of Buzzfeed listicle crafters (“48 Reasons ’90s Kids Had the Best Childhood,” “29 Signs You’re Stuck in the ’90s”), tour promoters, and radio programmers alike.
The “I Love the ’90s Tour,” which stops at the DCU Center in Worcester on Saturday, presents a somewhat specific version of the decade, one that’s reflected by stations whose slogans include the code word “throwback.” (In the Boston area, that station — Hot 96.9 — also promises “today’s best hip-hop and R&B.”) Representing the decade are the girl-power-focused hip-hop trio Salt-N-Pepa and the hot-then-not Miami rapper Vanilla Ice, two artists who ruled radio in the early half of the decade — and in the case of Vanilla Ice, became a running joke in the same period. But this tour’s idea of the ’90s extends back into the end of the ’80s, thanks to the presence of Tone Loc, the battery-acid-voiced California MC who broke through in 1988 with the Van Halen-sampling “Wild Thing,” and Young MC, whose songwriting credit on that track was the prelude to his goofy “Bust a Move.”
Appealing to nostalgia is probably a good idea in the media-saturated world of 2016. In 1992 Bruce Springsteen released “57 Channels (And Nothin’ On),” which marveled at the vast array of entertainment available at home, if with a touch of disdain. Today, cable systems boast 10 times the number of channels, to say nothing of the on-demand programs offered by Netflix. Radio, too, has been boosted by satellite and streaming services, allowing listeners in Chicago to tune into Kiss 108’s Matty in the Morning and Bostonians to burrow into a rabbit’s hole of “American Top 40” reruns, both via the radio behemoth iHeart’s app. (SiriusXM, a merged version of this country’s two major satellite-radio suppliers, which had their first broadcasts in the early 2000s, is the presenter of the “I Love the ’90s Tour.”) Streaming services like Spotify and Apple only allow more opportunity for listeners to customize their listening.
Yet there wasn’t necessarily more of a monoculture back then. The wall-to-wall, massively revenue-generating discussions of Beyoncé and Taylor and Kanye show that musicians can still dominate the conversation, even if they don’t necessarily appeal to everyone. But until the Telecommunications Act of 1996 loosened restrictions on radio station ownership, allowing companies like iHeart and CBS Radio to establish strongholds all around the country, a larger number of artists could reach if not the 99th percentile of fame then perhaps the 85th or 70th, or even the nebulous place where they’d receive late-night airplay on MTV. Check out the lower reaches of any Hot 100 singles chart from that decade — when the only criteria for making the chart were radio airplay and singles sales — and you’ll see gloomy alt-rockers butting up against big-voiced divas, jangly country-pop alongside sleek New Jack Swing.
Today, it seems like the 1-versus-99-percent idea that so animated Occupy Wall Street’s protesters just a few years ago can be transferred to any entertainment entity. Music offers perhaps the most severe example. Streaming services offer listeners the chance to browse through a good chunk of recorded music’s history; but spend one car ride flipping the channels on terrestrial radio and you’ll almost certainly hear the Chainsmokers’ laconic, blippy “Closer,” which has been atop the Hot 100 for the past 10 weeks. On a recent trip from Allston to Cambridge that topped out at maybe 22 minutes, I heard two Drake songs, thanks to the drum-tight playlist guiding Jam’n 94.5 that week.
Biggie or Kool Herc? As a cultural juggernaut hits middle age, two parallel visions emerge for what “classic” should mean.
No one tour can encompass the entirety of a decade, although even with the focus on hip-hop and R&B the “I Love the ’90s Tour,” which is rounded out by the New Jack Swing-tinged boy band Color Me Badd, the Compton-born MC-turned-chef Coolio, and the harmony-rich vocal group All-4-One, has some holes. There’s no big-voiced diva like Toni Braxton, nor is there an all-woman vocal group like En Vogue or SWV. Salt-N-Pepa being the tour’s only female representatives shortchanges a decade when women like Mary J. Blige and Janet Jackson were not only doing it for themselves, they were commanding pop.
Still, the tour will probably do well enough to be back next year. It’s a funhouse-mirror view of a decade suffused with optimism and ideas of individuality that proved potent — even if what we tend to remember are the songs that let us all sing and rap along.
I Love the ’90s Tour
With Salt-N-Pepa ft. DJ Spinderella, Vanilla Ice, Coolio, All-4-One, Color Me Badd, Tone Loc, and Young MC. Oct. 29 at 8 p.m. Tickets: $39-$85. 800-745-3000, www.ticketmaster.com
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Led by Salt-N-Pepa and Vanilla Ice, the nostalgic selection of hip-hop and R&B in the “I Love the ’90s Tour” more closely resembles today’s radio than the free-wheeling Top 40 of the time.
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TripAdvisor serves up the Airbnb of food
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Have a hankering for an authentic French meal served in the Paris home of a retired teacher and home chef? Like the idea of meeting a group of fellow travelers for a homemade dinner in someone’s family kitchen in Rome?
TripAdvisor is betting customers will. The Needham-based travel company has invested in San Francisco’s EatWith, a four-year-old social dining start-up that wants to become the Airbnb of food. The company did not disclose the size of the investment.
Starting this week, TripAdvisor will allow users in select cities to book a seat at the table of an EatWith host, often a local chef or home cook who will prepare a meal in a private setting for a group of people. The host posts a profile, menu, and cost per guest. Customers pay EatWith in advance of the meal, which can cost anywhere from $30 to more than $100 per guest.
EatWith said it offers an “easy way to access the underground food scene and connect with creative, open-minded and interesting people.”
For now, the “Dine with a Local Chef” option is tucked among many dining possibilities on the TripAdvisor website. The platform will be available in 10 cities, from Barcelona to New York to Sao Paulo, by the end of this week. A rollout in other cities, including Boston, is expected shortly.
TripAdvisor said it will also let customers review their EatWith dining experiences on its website. Founded primarily as a forum for traveler reviews, TripAdvisor has been aggressively expanding its services in recent years to include lodging, restaurant, and flight bookings, as well as things to do.
Earlier this year, some EatWith users criticized the service, saying it can be difficult to secure a reservation because events may be cancelled if a local chef doesn't get a critical mass of guests.
Adam Medros, a senior vice president of global product at TripAdvisor said EatWith has been working out the kinks. Bringing the idea to a wider audience on TripAdvisor will help “smooth out what might be some of those pockets of supply and demand,” he said.
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The Needham-based travel company has invested in the San Francisco’s EatWith, a social dining start-up that lets travelers eat in local homes.
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Artisanal pizza - with a robot’s personal touch
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20161125233422
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WASHINGTON — When robots inevitably take over our planet, as the dystopian vision of science fiction writers foretells, we’ll lose our jobs, our freedom, our humanity. But take comfort in one thing the robots will provide for us lowly carbon-based life-forms: artisanal pizza.
They’re already making it in a commercial kitchen in the heart of Silicon Valley: Two robots named Pepe and Giorgio squirt sauce on dough, and another robot, Marta, spreads it. A robotic arm named Bruno puts the pizza in the oven. They don’t operate independently from humans yet — two or three people still load the dough onto the conveyor and sprinkle cheese and toppings — but Zume Pizza in Mountain View expects to be fully automated by spring, delivering made-to-order, customizable pizzas in as little as seven minutes.
Say it with a straight face: artisanal robotic pizza. Like jumbo shrimp and boneless ribs, it seems like a culinary oxymoron. For many years, our culture has fostered a movement that rewards people who grow and prepare food with thoughtfulness, by hand. We’re all about knowing your farmer, shopping small and local, and caring about the human stories behind the food we eat.
In seemingly direct contrast to that stands technology. Some of the same purveyors who are part of that movement are looking for ways to maximize efficiency and cut costs as their businesses grow.
‘‘There’s a connotation with ‘artisan’ that speaks to an artist behind it,’’ said Sarah Weiner, director of the Good Food Foundation. ‘‘I am not sure that robots have evolved to the point where they can convey emotion and meaning.’’
Maybe not, but there are now robots that can reflect and simulate emotions. And technology is moving quickly: Engineers are developing robots to automate single tasks, but experts predict that eventually, artificial intelligence could become as common a kitchen tool as a whisk.
‘‘It’s easy to take two things that seem completely at odds with each other and assume that there’s a tension,’’ said Zume Pizza co-founder and co-chief executive Julia Collins. ‘‘That doesn’t exist in this case. Robots are enabling us to deliver artisanal food.’’
How can something made by the steely mechanical hand of a robot be considered artisanal? It further stretches the definition of a word that is already in danger of becoming little more than marketing-speak, for sure. But Collins and others in the field assert that if the base ingredients, processes and technique come from artisanal origins, the food itself can be considered artisanal.
‘‘Food has to be made with love,’’ said Collins. ‘‘That’s why humans make the food, and when I say ‘make the food,’ humans do all of the scratch cooking’’ at Zume. That means making the dough, which is aged for up to 24 hours, and the sauce, which Collins said comes from ‘‘single-source organic dry-farmed tomatoes’’ and is made using executive chef Aaron Butkus’s grandmother’s recipe. Humans also must chop and prep the toppings, which are all locally sourced and use seasonal produce. Robots assemble and cook the pies; at peak capacity, they can make 288 every hour.
Apparently, we don’t want our food to look like it’s made by robots. Zume has taken particular care to ensure that: The machine they are commissioning to press the dough will create three slightly different shapes. Because the tomatoes are hand-crushed, the consistency of the sauce changes, so Marta the robot spreads it differently with every pie — ‘‘perfectly but not too perfectly,’’ said Collins. And the menu is constantly changing.
‘‘If I see too much homogeneity, I know that something is wrong with our creative process,’’ said Collins.
They don’t hide the fact that the pizzas are made by robots, but they don’t promote it on their website, either. Given the company’s location in a community full of programmers and engineers, it’s part of the appeal.
The automation doesn’t stop in the kitchen: The delivery-only pizza joint has special patented food trucks that bake your pizza en route, in an oven that turns on automatically 3½ minutes before the truck delivers it to your house after following an algorithmically optimized route. It eliminates dwell time, which is pizza-biz lingo for ‘‘that horrible time when it’s in a cardboard box in the back of a Camry,’’ said Collins. She foresees a fleet of cook-en-route delivery vehicles serving people across the country, and not just bringing pizza. Zume can have the food at your door minutes after you place the order, by front-loading the truck with the most popular pizzas and circling neighborhoods on busy nights.
Pizza isn’t the only food that’s getting a robotic boost. Momentum Machines announced plans to open a robot-operated burger joint in San Francisco, with systems that will allow diners to customize their blend of ground meat. There are robot noodlemakers in Japan and robot cocktailmakers in Italy.
Technology yet to come could further blur the artisan-robot divide. There are already robots that can quantify taste. One was created in Thailand in 2014 to combat the adulteration of flavors in Thai food and to set standards for the taste of classic dishes. And an engineering Ph.D student at Berkeley has been exploring the use of virtual reality to teach robots human motions. A human wearing a VR headset could demonstrate culinary tasks, such as knife use or deboning a duck, that the robot could emulate. Eventually, those robots could be able to prepare entire meals in the style of their teachers.
‘‘This is kind of an absurd image, but equip a grandmother with a system that would record every motion that she makes when preparing a dish,’’ said Sarah Smith, research and design manager at the Institute for the Future. ‘‘Then you could basically upload that to a robotic system to reproduce later.’’
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When robots inevitably take over our planet, take comfort in one thing the robots will provide for us: artisanal pizza.
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Kelsea Ballerini, from East Tennessee girl to holiday headliner
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Kelsea Ballerini (pictured at a Chicago performance earlier this month) will play at the House of Blues Dec. 1.
Kelsea Ballerini got started on her country music career early — she wrote her first song when she was only 12 years old. Now 23, the Tennessee-born singer-songwriter has a debut release, “The First Time,” made up of bubbly tracks that push at country’s boundaries. Its portrayals of the heart’s affairs recall the straight talk of Dolly Parton and Reba McEntire, but other influences — from the velvety textures of mid-’90s pop-rock to rapid-fire delivery that recalls the work of tongue-twisting MCs — make for an album that sounds as inspired by streaming-music algorithms as by Nashville.
Ballerini’s girlish drawl animates peppier songs like the flirtatious “Dibs” and gives relatable gravitas to the wistful “Peter Pan,” while the head rush of attraction lends her new single “Yeah Boy” a giddy bounce. Her inviting mix of influences has resulted in three country chart-toppers, an American Music Award nomination for Favorite Country Artist, and now her first headlining tour, which stops in Boston on Dec. 1. The Globe spoke to Ballerini before her first headlining show in her hometown of Knoxville, Tenn.
Q. It must be really exciting being back in Knoxville, and thinking about how you got started.
A. It’s where I wrote my first song, and played my first song on stage, and all of that. I was 12. I forgot it was Mother’s Day the next day, and I knew that my mom loved what she calls “gifts of the heart” — you know, things that are just really sweet. I was like, ‘Oh, I’ll just write her a song.’ That was the beginning of the end for me.
Q. What initially drew you to country music specifically?
A. I grew up in east Tennessee, and my voice is from east Tennessee. You know? But on my record, you can hear that I listen to pop, and you can hear that I listen to R&B, and rap, and all that, because I love it. I feel like it’s my job as a songwriter and an artist to be honest about that, but my roots are extremely Southern.
Q. How would you say your approach to songwriting has changed over time?
A. I hope it hasn’t. I think that being in the room with bigger . . . songwriters is [an opportunity to] learn the craft a little more. But I always hope that my songwriting comes from the heart, and it comes from a place of experience, and a place of vulnerability, because that’s kind of what started this journey for me — that sentiment of it.
Q. Do you write on the road at all?
A. I do. If I don’t have other writers out with me, I’ll just kind of either start something or just write an idea down and bring it back to Nashville, but sometimes I’ll have writers out on my bus with me and we’ll write before the shows. I really enjoy that. In December, before the new year, we’ll have half the album done.
Q. What drew you to the Peter Pan story as a framework for “Peter Pan”?
A. I just loved the idea of Peter Pan because it’s a story that everyone knows — it’s timeless. Then I think, relating it to the kind of heartbreak that most people have had where not necessarily something goes wrong, or someone cheats, or anything like that, it’s just like where one person doesn’t emotionally match the other person. I think the concept of both of those was cool to me.
Q. What about “Dibs” — how did that come to be?
A. I was reading Seventeen magazine and I saw the word “dibs,” and I thought it was super cute so I put it in my song idea list on my phone. The whole time we were writing it a few months later, we actually couldn’t tell if it was too quirky or not — we weren’t sure if it was good or if it was silly.
Q. How has prepping for your first headlining tour been?
A. It’s been exciting, creating moments that I loved as a fan going to shows growing up — a dramatic entrance, or sharing new music for the first time, or going out into the audience to hug people, or just playing my guitar alone. I literally went to every concert that we could get tickets to. I was a concert junkie, and I still am. I still love going to shows and just watching because I feel like I learn so much.
Country 102.5 Holiday Jam with Kelsea Ballerini
At House of Blues, Boston. Dec. 1 at 7:30 p.m. Tickets: $20 and up. 888-693-2583, www.houseofblues.com/boston
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At just 23, the bubbly singer-songwriter has made it to the top of the Country 102.5 Holiday Jam, coming to Boston on Dec. 1.
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Senior SA cop avoids discipline over crash
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20161126154801
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A high-ranking South Australian police officer will not face disciplinary action after causing a road crash that seriously injured a motorcyclist.
SA Police Commissioner Grant Stevens says he won't take disciplinary action against Assistant Commissioner Philip Newitt, who was last month convicted, fined and handed a six-month driving ban over the 2015 crash.
"I determined the penalty imposed by the magistrate was sufficient and proportionate," Mr Stevens said in a statement on Thursday.
Mr Newitt could have faced a range of penalties - counselling, a fine or the loss of his job.
In full reasons for his decision Mr Stevens said he had considered having the matter determined by another officer because of having known Mr Newitt for about 20 years and socialising with him on occasions.
"However, I believe that my clear and unambiguous role as the commissioner of police must be performed without fear or favour," he said.
In August, Mr Newitt pleaded guilty to one count of aggravated driving without due care over the crash in the Adelaide Hills on December 28, 2015.
He was off duty at the time and driving his own car at Cudlee Creek when he came to an intersection and entered to turn onto another road.
He had driven his vehicle partially into the oncoming lane before seeing the motorcyclist coming in the opposition direction.
The rider hit Mr Newitt's vehicle, suffering fractures to an arm and cheekbones and spent six days in hospital.
Mr Stevens said at the time of the crash the assistant commissioner immediately stopped his vehicle, rendered assistance and called triple zero.
He said speed was not a factor, nor was Mr Newitt under the influence of drugs or alcohol and his actions had not caused any harm to the reputation of the police force.
"Having stated my observations and considerations, I find that you have acted professionally and responsibly at all times from the moment of the collision," Mr Stevens said.
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SA's top cop says he will not take disciplinary action against a high-ranking officer who was convicted of causing a crash that injured a motorcyclist.
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Man jailed for killing mate in WA crash
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A father-of-four who was speeding when he crashed into another car, killing his friend and injuring two other people, has been jailed in Perth for five years.
Karl Peter Simanu, 36, was driving at double the 60km/h speed limit in Cloverdale in June 2014 when he hit a turning car, the WA District Court heard on Friday.
Passenger Mark Brown, who was not wearing a seatbelt, died at the scene.
Two people in the other car, 16-year-old Renee Correya and 22-year-old Simone Weller, also suffered "dreadful injuries", including permanent disabilities and short-term memory problems, Judge John Staude said.
The judge said Simanu's driving was not just dangerous, but also reckless and showed a "selfish disregard of the rights and welfare" of other people.
"By driving at such a speed you deprived the other driver the opportunity to see and avoid your vehicle, and you were not able to control your vehicle so as to avoid a collision," he said.
One witness described Simanu's speed as: "Like, if you've ever watched racing car movies or (The) Fast and The Furious and you hear this, the car speeding down the highway."
Simanu was found guilty after a trial on charges of dangerous driving causing death and two counts of dangerous driving causing grievous bodily harm.
He did not give evidence because he had no recollection of the crash due to his own injuries, and Judge Staude noted Simanu was lucky to survive.
"Your injuries and disabilities will be a constant and painful reminder of your wrongdoing," he said.
"You will also be burdened by your responsibility for your friend's death and the injuries suffered by the other victims."
Judge Staude also referred to a letter by Simanu's wife, which described the devastating effect of the crash on their young family.
"She describes many good qualities that you possess, particularly as a father to your sons," he said.
"The loss to your family caused by your offending cannot be measured."
Simanu must serve at least three years in prison before he can be eligible for parole and will be banned from driving for three years upon his release.
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A speeding driver who crashed into another car, killing his friend and hurting two other people, has been jailed in Perth for at least three years.
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Polish au pair 'attacked' in Brisbane
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Police are appealing for information after a Polish au pair was reportedly attacked while out walking near her Brisbane home.
The 24-year-old, who lives with a Polish family in Petrie, went out for her daily stroll about 8.30pm on Friday.
She knocked on the door of a house in Boona Street about 9pm with serious facial injuries after allegedly being assaulted.
Police are appealing for anyone who was in Dayboro Road, Boona Street or Beeville Road around that time to come forward.
Inspector Russell Halfpenny appealed for any CCTV or dashcam footage from anyone who was driving, riding or walking in the area.
"At this stage not sure who else was involved as we have not been able to speak to the victim," he added.
The woman is being treated at Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital while police arrange for an interpreter so that they can interview her about what happened.
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A public appeal has been launched after a Polish au pair was allegedly attacked while on a walk near her Brisbane home.
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New Indigenous language and music centre
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Indigenous Australian languages and music will be taught and researched at a new national centre at the University of Adelaide.
The National Centre for Aboriginal Language and Music Studies will open on Monday, combining three bodies of the university that promote Aboriginal music or languages, including the Kaurna language of the Adelaide Plains.
Director Aaron Corn said the centre aims to help Indigenous people play a leading role in ensuring their languages and music have a future.
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A new centre at the University of Adelaide aims to strengthen Indigenous communities by researching and teaching Aboriginal music and languages.
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NSW beachgoers safe from sharks: expert
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There is no need to cancel holidays to Australia's shark hot spots because the risk of an attack is "virtually zero", a senior marine studies lecturer says.
Dr Daniel Bucher, from Southern Cross University, says the rate of fatal shark attacks in Australia is one per year compared to 2000 deaths each year from skin cancer.
"I don't want to downplay it ... because of course for that person, for their family and friends, the first responders to the scene and to the whole community, it can be a far-reaching impact," Dr Bucher said at an Australian Science Media Centre briefing on Wednesday.
But the general public's perceived risk of a shark attack is often much greater than the real risk, he says.
"I've heard people say they're cancelling their holidays to the north coast of NSW because there are too many sharks," Dr Bucher said, citing south-western Western Australia as the other "hot spot" for shark activity.
"If that's your approach to life, don't get in the car in the first place because that's where the real risk is."
The NSW government fast-tracked a six-month trial of shark nets in Ballina earlier this month, despite strong opposition from locals, after three attacks on surfers in the region across six weeks.
Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce warned the frequency of attacks would deter tourists.
However, Dr Bucher said for families and small children playing in shallow water, the risk of attack from a large shark "is very, very low".
"If you're talking about a three-metre white shark, that animal is about 1.5-metres-high through the middle, so in order to get through shallow water it's going to have a very clean belly and a very sunburnt back."
Patrols across summer combined with aerial surveys, drones and volunteer shark observation programs have made the beaches on the north coast of NSW "amongst the safest in the country", Dr Bucher said.
He said the risk of an attack on surfers "is still very low, but somewhat higher" than swimmers and noted water users should avoid being out at dawn or dusk, or in dirty water and river plumes after a summer storm.
He also encouraged the use of preventative measures including high-contrast surfboards, camouflage wetsuits, magnetic wrist and ankle bands, and Shark Shields.
The deterrent device distorts the electroreceptors in a shark's snout and turns them away.
"It has been shown to significantly reduce the risk of shark attack," Dr Bucher said.
"If you're going on a surfing holiday, start dropping the hint to family and friends that a really good Christmas present would be a Shark Shield. If they don't take the hint, go and buy it for yourself."
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A senior marine studies lecturer says the beaches on the north coast of NSW are "among the safest in the country" due to increased vigilance over shark attacks.
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Tiffany & Co.’s Manhattan store learns downside of being in Trump Tower’s shadow
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NEW YORK — Of the more than 300 Tiffany & Co. jewelry stores across the globe, perhaps none is more important than the flagship outpost on Fifth Avenue in New York.
A torrent of tourists pass by it each day, many of them ponying up for the luxury trinkets from a Manhattan institution. And with the likes of Gucci, Bergdorf Goodman, Dior and Fendi all within a block or two, plenty of big-spending locals and international travelers see the area as a prime shopping destination.
But the location has a temporary downside: It is situated next to Trump Tower. President-elect Donald Trump has been holed up there with his top aides interviewing potential Cabinet appointees, and even before his election, Trump often retreated to his penthouse there in between stops on the campaign trail.
On Tuesday, Tiffany executives acknowledged that business has been hurt by the security-related disruptions that have come with having Trump as a neighbor.
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As it reported its third-quarter earnings, the company said that because of that situation, ‘‘management has noted some adverse effect on traffic in that store and a continuation of sales softness relative to prior year and to the company’s other US stores this year.’’
The luxury jewelry chain was quick to note that the Fifth Avenue store represents less than 10 percent of the company’s overall sales. So, its 2 percent decline in global sales this quarter reflects a host of other challenges.
But it’s not clear how fast the problem at the Fifth Avenue store is going to go away: Since Trump was elected, Trump Tower has become his home base for hammering out the details of his transition. Some areas have been barricaded or otherwise restricted for security reasons, making it hard for pedestrians to get around.
The latest sales results don’t even reflect the most recent weeks of transition-related activity; they are for a quarter that ended Oct. 31.
Then there’s the fact that Trump reportedly plans to be travel back and forth frequently between Trump Tower and the White House after the transition, raising the specter that the Fifth Avenue security precautions could come back intermittently throughout his presidency.
This is likely why Tiffany also said Tuesday that it ‘‘cannot provide any assurance that sales in that store will not be negatively affected by this activity in the fourth quarter or in any future period.’’
Flagship stores are not just important for retailers because of the sales they pull down: They are critically important marketing vehicles. Chains hope that when shoppers see their outposts on the toniest urban streets, it will favorably shape their perception on the brand.
But the retailer could lose future opportunities to put new customers under the spell of the ‘‘Blue Box’’ if people start avoiding Tiffany’s landmark location because it is a pedestrian’s nightmare.
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Tiffany’s executives acknowledge that business has been hurt by the security-related disruptions that have come with having Donald Trump as a neighbor.
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http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/11/30/14/18/anti-offshore-processing-protesters-disrupt-question-time
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Protesters super glue hands to public gallery railings during Question Time demonstration
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Question Time in the House of Representatives was thrown into chaos today, after it was suspended due to a protest in the public gallery.
About 30 protesters yelled anti-offshore processing chants, as bewildered MPs looked on and security scrambled to disrupt the demonstration.
Speaker Tony Smith was forced to suspend proceedings as security officers dragged some of the demonstrators from the building.
It is understood around seven of the protesters super-glued their hands to the railing in the gallery.
Hand sanitiser was brought in to help peel the protesters' hands from the railing and all were eventually removed from the gallery.
"We are here today because your policies are breaking our hearts, because every day on Manus and Christmas Island is another day in hell," one of the protesters said.
“I was ripped off Parliament House today as a result of my actions,” protester Samantha Castro told 9NEWS.
“Every person here was prepared to get arrested.”
A protester is dragged from Parliament House. (AAP)
Some Coalition MPs, including Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, left the chamber after the protest, but the majority of Labor's representatives remained in their seats.
Question Time resumed after the last of the protesters was ejected from the chamber.
Labor leader Bill Shorten thanked security staff for their professionalism and defended why opposition MPs stayed in the chamber.
"We will never give in to those who wish to shut this parliament down, no matter what the protest, no matter who tries it or what the issue they think it is - this is the exact opposite of democracy," he said.
Leader of the House Christopher Pyne said it was the most serious incident since "the riots organised by the ACTU in 1996".
"In 1996, the ACTU organised a barbecue on the lawns of Parliament House which resulted in a riot and the invasion of the parliament," he told parliament.
The group called for refugees in offshore processing centres to be brought to Australia. (AAP)
The protesters, from the Whistleblowers Activists and Citizens Alliance, said offshore detention represented a "state of emergency" as asylum seekers continued to be abused.
Members of the group earlier this month chained themselves to the roof of Immigration Minister Peter Dutton's electorate office in Brisbane.
The same group also disrupted a business speech by Malcolm Turnbull in Melbourne in August.
MPs took to social media in the wake of the protest.
The protest comes just days after it was announced security will be tightened at Parliament House.
© Nine Digital Pty Ltd 2016
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Question Time in the House of Representatives has been suspended due to a protest in the public gallery.
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http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/12/02/13/33/man-charged-over-teen-tyre-changer-s-death
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Man charged over teen tyre-changer's death
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A man has been charged over the death of a teenager who was hit by a ute while changing a tyre in Sydney's northwest.
The 19-year-old Wentworthville man was fixing a tyre on James Ruse Drive in North Parramatta in early June when he was hit by a ute allegedly driven by a 41-year-old man.
Paramedics tried to save the teenager but he died at the crash site.
Aerial footage showed the young man had pulled over in the inside lane of the busy roadway.
Police charged a 41-year-old with negligent driving occasioning death on Thursday and he will face court in January.
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A man has been charged with negligent driving after he fatally struck a teenager who had pulled over on a Sydney road to change a tyre on his car.
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https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/music/2016/12/06/beyonce-adele-nominated-for-top-grammy-awards/Ewxp4C2OVlkPeYAi5jbE0H/story.html
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http://web.archive.org/web/20161207013532id_/https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/music/2016/12/06/beyonce-adele-nominated-for-top-grammy-awards/Ewxp4C2OVlkPeYAi5jbE0H/story.html
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Beyonce leads Grammy nominations with 9; Kanye, Rihanna, Drake score 8
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NEW YORK — The Grammy Awards are sipping all of Beyoncé’s lemonade.
The pop star is the leader of the 2017 Grammys with nine nominations, including bids for album of the year with ‘‘Lemonade,’’ and song and record of the year with ‘‘Formation.’’ The singer, who already has 20 Grammys, is also the first artist to earn nominations in the pop, rock, R&B, and rap categories in the same year.
Behind Beyoncé are Drake, Rihanna, and Kanye West, who scored eight nominations each.
Like Beyoncé, Adele is also nominated for album, record, and song of the year. For album of the year, ‘‘Lemonade’’ and ‘‘25’’ — which has sold 10 million copies in a year — will compete against Drake’s multi-hit ‘‘Views,’’ Justin Bieber’s redemption album ‘‘Purpose,’’ and surprise nominee ‘‘A Sailor’s Guide to Earth,’’ the third album from respected and rebellious country singer Sturgill Simpson.
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Beyoncé’s ‘‘Formation’’ and Adele’s ‘‘Hello’’ are up against Rihanna and Drake’s ‘‘Work,’’ twenty one pilots’ ‘‘Stressed Out,’’ and Lukas Graham’s ‘‘7 Years’’ for record of the year. ‘‘7 Years’’ is also up for song of the year — a songwriter’s award — battling Bieber’s ‘‘Love Yourself,’’ co-written with Ed Sheeran, Mike Posner’s ‘‘I Took a Pill in Ibiza,’’ as well as Beyoncé and Adele’s songs.
The mother of five has somehow put together a music career that revolves around her family.
Beyoncé’s nine nominations include best rock performance (“Don’t Hurt Yourself’’ with Jack White), pop solo performance (“Hold Up“), rap/sung performance (“Freedom’’ with Kendrick Lamar), and urban contemporary album (“Lemonade“). With 62 nominations over the years, Beyoncé is the most-nominated women in Grammy history.
‘‘Artists are feeling emboldened and courageous and just wanting to step out of the predictable boundaries of what they have done. Of course, (Beyoncé) is the poster child for that,’’ Recording Academy CEO and President Neil Portnow said in an interview with The Associated Press.
Adele, who has five nominations, is up for best pop vocal album (“25“) and pop solo performance (“Hello.”) The Grammys will be presented in Los Angeles on Feb. 12, 2017.
David Bowie, who died from cancer in January, earned four nominations for his final album ‘‘Blackstar,’’ including best rock performance, rock song, alternative music album, and engineered album, non-classical.
‘‘I think this is beyond sort of the sympathy vote, because sometimes you’ll see those kinds of things happen just ’cause people feel sorry about it. But listen to [his] album — it’s quite extraordinary,’’ Portnow said of Bowie.
This year the Recording Academy allowed streaming-only recordings — released on paid-subscription platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, and Tidal but not for sale on iTunes — to be eligible for nominations, giving Chance the Rapper a fair chance. The breakout performer scored seven nominations including best new artist, pitting him against country singers Maren Morris and Kelsea Ballerini; singer-rapper Anderson Paak; and pop-EDM duo the Chainsmokers, whose recent hits include ‘‘Closer’’ and ‘‘Don’t Let Me Down.’’
Chance the Rapper earned three nominations for best rap song: His hit, ‘‘No Problem,’’ is nominated, and he has writing credit on the Kanye West songs ‘‘Famous’’ and ‘‘Ultralight Beam.’’ West will compete with himself in three categories: best rap song, rap performance and rap/sung performance.
Chance’s ‘‘Coloring Book’’ and West’s ‘‘The Life of Pablo’’ are nominated for best rap album along with Drake’s ‘‘Views,’’ De La Soul’s ‘‘And the Anonymous Nobody,’’ DJ Khaled’s ‘‘Major Key,’’ and Schoolboy Q’s ‘‘Blank Face LP.’’
Simpson, who had been nominated for best Americana album at the 2015 Grammys, also sees his nine-track album nominated for best country album. Simpson was in a bit of controversy this year when he posted on Facebook that the Academy of Country Music Awards should not have created an award named after Merle Haggard when he felt they never showed true love to the country outlaw, who died this year. He closed his long post saying: ‘‘[Expletive] this town. I’m moving.’’
Simpson’s album is up against Loretta Lynn’s ‘‘Full Circle,’’ Keith Urban’s ‘‘Ripcord,’’ Morris’ ‘‘Hero’’ and Brandy Clark’s ‘‘Big Day in a Small Town.’’
Stoughton’s Lori McKenna, who won a Grammy this year for co-writing Little Big Town’s ‘‘Girl Crush,’’ is nominated for best country song for penning Tim McGraw’s ‘‘Humble and Kind.’’ She also scored nominations for best Americana album, American Roots performance and American Roots song for her own work.
Acts tying McKenna and Bowie for four nominations include Bieber, Morris, Kirk Franklin, engineer Tom Coyne, and producer-songwriters Max Martin, Greg Kurstin, Benny Blanco and Mike Dean. Tyler Joseph, the lead vocalist of twenty one pilots and the duo’s main songwriter, scored five nominations for ‘‘Stressed Out’’ (record of the year, pop duo/group performance) and ‘‘Heathens’’ (best rock song, rock performance and song written for visual media); twenty one pilots, which includes drummer Josh Dun, earned three nods.
Some well-known acts scored their first Grammy nominations Tuesday, including Solange, Blink-182 and Demi Lovato, who will compete against Adele, Bieber, Sia, and Ariana Grande for best pop vocal album.
Amy Schumer earned two nominations, including best spoken word album and comedy album. Deceased nominees include Joey Feek of the duo Joey + Rory (best gospel roots album for ‘‘Hymns“).
About 13,000 Recording Academy members voted in the 84 Grammy categories from 22,000 submissions. Songs and albums released from Oct. 1, 2015 through Sept. 30 were eligible for nomination.
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The announcements were made by Nantucket’s Meghan Trainor.
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http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/12/07/03/34/killer-nsw-nurse-faces-sentence-hearing
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Nurse told of grief caused by her murders
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20161207073112
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The distraught daughter of an elderly woman murdered in her bed has told a judge of her guilt at having moved her mum into an aged-care facility which she thought would be safe.
"I lost my chance and my duty to take care of the rest of my mum's life, the way she took care of me," said Janet Parkinson in her victim impact statement.
Her brother, Jeff Darragh, said their mother was "only a little lady with a big heart" who loved him whether he was nasty or nice, regarding him "as her baby boy".
Six victim impact statements were read out on Wednesday at the NSW Supreme Court sentence hearing of 49-year-old nurse Megan Haines.
She was found guilty of murdering Marie Darragh, 82, and Isabella Spencer, 77, by administering insulin to them in the middle of the night in May 2014 at Ballina's St Andrews Village on the NSW north coast.
Haines had learnt of complaints about her refusals to help Ms Spencer reach the toilet and to give a cream to Ms Darragh to soothe an itch.
Crown prosecutor Brendan Campbell contended Haines decided to "eliminate" the cause of the complaints as they were potentially career-ending given her prior suspension.
In his statement, Donald Spencer said he had been very close to his sister Isabella and had great difficulty in getting over her losing her life in "such a shocking way".
Janet Parkinson said when her mother became ill in 2010, she felt guilty "about putting her in care because I said I never would".
But Ms Parkinson's own health had been deteriorating and family discussions led to her mother being placed in the facility "because I trusted she would be safe and comfortable there".
She lamented never again being able to "take her pancakes for breakfast".
Mr Campbell submitted it was open to Justice Peter Garling to jail Haines for life, noting the women were murdered by a registered nurse in what was supposed to be "a place of safety".
Describing the crimes as "abhorrent", he said the women were there for medical reasons and their frailty.
Haines' lawyer Troy Edwards referred to the lack of pre-meditation, in that the crimes occurred on the night she heard of the complaints.
She will be sentenced on December 16.
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A former nurse who murdered two elderly women on the NSW north coast is set to face a sentencing hearing.
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http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/12/07/10/22/man-extradited-for-2007-qld-kidnapping
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Man extradited for 2007 Qld kidnapping
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20161208140803
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A 69-year-old man who allegedly fled the country after a kidnapping in Queensland in 2007 has been extradited from NSW and will face court.
Police say he forced another man in his 60s into a van after pretending to be a police officer in Brisbane in April 2007.
He allegedly drove to an unknown location and threatened the other man before robbing him.
He was charged in 2008 with kidnapping and a string of other offences but failed to appear in court before allegedly fleeing to Southeast Asia.
He is set to appear in the Brisbane Supreme Court on Wednesday.
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Police have extradited a man from NSW over a kidnapping in Queensland in 2007.
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Weekend Sports in Brief
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20161212195645
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ISTANBUL (AP) Turkey declared a national day of mourning and paid tribute to the dead Sunday after two bombings in Istanbul killed 38 people and wounded 155 others near a soccer stadium. The carnage was claimed by a Turkey-based Kurdish militant group.
The Kurdistan Freedom Falcons, or TAK, said two of its members had sacrificed their lives in the Saturday night attack that targeted security forces outside the Besiktas stadium shortly after the conclusion of a match.
It described the blasts as reprisal for state violence in the southeast and the ongoing imprisonment of Abdullah Ocalan, the leader of the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK. TAK is considered by authorities as a PKK offshoot.
The twin car-and-suicide bombings near the stadium enraged top officials, including President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who vowed to hunt down the perpetrators. The attack was the latest large-scale assault to traumatize a nation confronting an array of security threats.
The attack targeted police officers, killing 30 of them along with seven civilians and an unidentified person, Turkish Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu told reporters. He said 13 people had been arrested in connection with the ''terrorist'' act.
NEW ORLEANS (AP) - The man who fatally shot retired New Orleans Saints defensive leader Will Smith was convicted of manslaughter, ending a week-long trial in which the defendant insisted he only fired because the popular football star was drunk, violent and had grabbed a gun following a traffic crash on the night of April 9.
Smith was part of the Saints team that lifted the stricken city's spirits in the years after Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, helping carry the team to a winning season in 2006 and a Super Bowl win four years later. His death at the hands of Cardell Hayes, 29, was stunning, even for a city where residents are accustomed to reports of multiple gunfire deaths every week.
Hayes faces a possible sentence of up to 40 years in prison at his sentencing on Feb. 17. Jurors opted for the lesser charge rather than second-degree murder, which would have carried a mandatory life sentence.
Hayes also was convicted of attempted manslaughter for wounding Smith's wife, Racquel Smith.
MOSCOW (AP) - Russia will accept an International Olympic Committee plan to retest all drug test samples given by its athletes at the 2012 and 2014 Olympics, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Vitaly Mutko said.
The IOC's declaration Friday followed the publication of a report by World Anti-Doping Agency investigator Richard McLaren. This alleged that more than 1,000 Russian athletes, including medal winners at the London and Sochi games, had benefited from a state-backed campaign of doping and drug test cover-ups.
Mutko, whose brief as deputy prime minister covers sports policy, also suggested that he does not expect Russia to be barred from the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang. He said the IOC set a precedent when it decided against a blanket ban for Russia from this summer's Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.
NEW YORK (AP) - The NFL says no formal complaint was filed last week by the New York Giants, who reportedly alerted the league that the Pittsburgh Steelers were using deflated footballs during their game.
Fox reported that after the Giants forced two turnovers during their 24-14 loss last Sunday, they tested the footballs on their sideline. After both of the footballs tested below the NFL standards for PSI, according to the report, the Giants sent them to the league office.
The NFL issued a statement saying: ''The officiating game ball procedures were followed and there were no chain of command issues. All footballs were in compliance and no formal complaint was filed by the Giants with our office.''
Fox reporter Jay Glazer, who had the report, wrote on Twitter that the NFL was ''correct in saying no FORMAL complaint was FILED, Giants tested balls & informed the NFL they were under legal limit. Giants confirmed.''
BEVERLY, Mass. (AP) - NCAA officials plan to hand deliver an award to the former Boston College baseball captain who inspired the Ice Bucket Challenge that raised millions of dollars for ALS research.
The collegiate sports organization says Pete Frates is unable to attend an awards celebration in Nashville, Tennessee, this January to accept the 2017 Inspiration Award because the neurodegenerative disease is progressing.
So NCAA President Mark Emmert and NCAA honors committee chair Dr. Michael Benson will present the award to him at his home in Beverly, Massachusetts.
Frates was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis in 2012. The disease, also called Lou Gehrig's Disease, weakens muscles, impairs physical functioning and has no cure yet.
The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge raised more than $220 million when it took off worldwide on social media in 2014.
NEW YORK (AP) - Lamar Jackson leapt over a loaded field of Heisman Trophy contenders early in the season and by the time he slowed down nobody could catch him.
The sensational sophomore quarterback became the first Louisville player to win the Heisman Trophy, beating out preseason favorite Deshaun Watson of Clemson despite some late-season struggles.
Baker Mayfield finished third and Oklahoma teammate and fellow finalist Dede Westbrook was fourth. Michigan's Jabrill Peppers was fifth.
Jackson, wearing a red velvet blazer with shiny black lapels, said he could feel his heart pounding in his chest right before his name was announced, and he barely held it together while giving his speech with the former Heisman winners standing behind him on stage.
BALTIMORE (AP) - Donald Trump was greeted with cheers on his arrival at the annual Army-Navy game, basking in one of the nation's most storied football rivalries as he prepares to enter the White House.
The future commander in chief, protected by panes of bulletproof glass, waved to the crowd Saturday and pumped his fist as he arrived during the first quarter of the 117th game between the military academies at West Point and Annapolis. The game, on a sunny but chilly day, was being held on relatively neutral ground, at M&T Bank Stadium in Baltimore.
Trump, in an interview with CBS Sports announcers Verne Lundquist and Gary Danielson, said he was ''totally neutral'' on the outcome of the game and quipped that he might make Lundquist, who was retiring from the play-by-play booth, his ambassador to Sweden.
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http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/12/14/03/33/search-to-continue-for-missing-sa-boat
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Fears missing SA boat may have capsized
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20161214202136
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A search for a boat missing off South Australia's southeast coast is set to be scaled back amid fears it has capsized, increasing concerns for the three people on board.
The search will continue on Thursday but most likely only from the air and along the coast as fears grow for Len and Annette Vandepeer and their adult son Doug.
Police say a seat from the seven-metre boat was found on Wednesday with a bucket and a plastic tub recovered earlier.
"Unfortunately, the finding of the seat would indicate to us that the boat is no longer upright," Detective Superintendent Grant Moyle told reporters.
"The search is continuing with the hope that there is something still on the surface."
But boats will only return to the water if more items are found.
The Vandepeers' boat failed to return to Cape Jaffa on Monday night.
The search so far has centred on the waters between Beachport and The Granites, about 20km north of Kingston.
More than 2000 square nautical miles have been covered.
Three helicopters have been involved, along with State Emergency Service volunteers and local fishermen.
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A search is set to continue for a missing boat off South Australia's southeast coast with three people on board.
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Gold Coast shooting witness jailed
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20161215142509
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A woman who was at the scene of a Gold Coast shooting death earlier this month has been sentenced to 12 months in prison.
Renee Moseley, 31, pleaded guilty to a string of charges at Southport Magistrates Court on Wednesday, including a single count of unlawful use of a motor vehicle.
She was charged with that offence after travelling with accused murderer Taylor Ruatara in a stolen car to the home of Jason Boyd at Carrara on December 2.
Mr Boyd was shot dead soon after the pair's arrival, with 18-year-old Ruatara having been charged with the father's murder.
Moseley was given a two-month prison sentence for the unlawful use of a motor vehicle charge as part of a total prison term of 12 months on her various offences.
The court heard Moseley had been since 2014 in an abusive relationship which included being cut by her partner on the arm with a samurai sword.
Moseley's lawyer Michael Gatenby told the court his client had then had her stitches pulled out by the man after seeing a doctor for treatment.
"She has some very, very unfortunate lifestyle partners she has engaged with," Mr Gatenby told the court.
Magistrate Rod Kilner said Moseley's history of offending could only be partially excused by her involvement in a domestic abuse situation.
"Why should the rest of the community suffer as a result of your client's unfortunate partner choices?" Mr Kilner said.
"As the saying goes, 'if you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas'."
Mr Kilner said Moseley had committed "extreme offending" for an "extended period of time".
Moseley will be eligible to apply for parole from December 28 having already served a total of 118 days in pre-sentence custody for her various offences.
Mr Kilner also fined Moseley a total of $1050 and disqualified her from holding a driver licence for three years and one month.
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A woman who police believe witnessed the shooting death of a man on the Gold Coast has been sentenced to 12 months in jail.
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All In Agenda: Obamacare and the lie about part-time jobs
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Tuesday night on All In with Chris Hayes: One of Republicans’ favorite talking points about Obamacare is that new regulations are forcing people into part-time work. The September jobs report - released over two weeks late thanks to the government shutdown - refutes this idea. The number of part-time workers whose hours have been cut back or are unable to find a full-time job stayed constant last month at 7.9 million. Dean Baker, Co-Director of the Center for Economic & Policy Research, and Rep. Karen Bass, Democrat from California, will join Chris Hayes to debunk this GOP myth.
Progressive Activist and Columnist Sally Kohn will also join the table to talk about her successful experience signing up for Obamacare in New York. She wrote about her positive experience for FoxNews.com.
Plus: Republicans often talk about balancing the budget and reducing the country’s debt for the sake of our children and grandchildren. Chris Hayes will explain why these ideas are actually bad for young people graduating into this economy and looking for work.
Later, Alexis Goldstein, Communications Director at The Other 98%, and Ed Conard, former partner at Bain Capital, will join Chris Hayes to talk about the record $13 billion settlement between the DOJ and JP Morgan over the bank’s wrongdoing in the lead up to the 2008 financial crisis.
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The September jobs report blows up Republicans' talking point about Obamacare and part-time work.
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Gender equality embraced by NSW fire
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An equal number of female and male firefighter recruits have graduated from the highly competitive Fire & Rescue NSW (FRNSW) training college, in an effort to close the gender gap.
In his final graduation, FRNSW Commissioner Greg Mullins said he was very proud of the new policy and was honoured to be presenting the certificates on Thursday as his last official act before retiring in January.
"I've loved being a firefighter for the past 38 years and I'm confident that each of them will uphold the high standards of integrity, courage and professionalism expected of a FRNSW firefighter," Mr Mullins said in a statement.
"This is an exciting day for me, it's our first graduation of a 50/50 male/female class," Mr Mullins told 2GB earlier in the day.
"(I'm) very proud that we have this policy," he said.
Women have been frontline at FRNSW for more than 30 years but they represent only a small number of its permanent firefighter ranks. Last year, about 20 per cent of applicants for the 120 firefighting positions were women.
Earlier this year, FRNSW made changes to the recruitment campaign to increase the number of females progressing through the recruitment stages.
Thursday's 24 graduating recruits, who have completed their intensive training course, are ready be posted to fire stations across greater Sydney.
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The NSW firefighting class of 2016 has welcomed a record number of female graduates, in a policy bid to put out the flames of gender inequality.
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https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/nov/28/man-charged-over-alleged-rampage-at-melbourne-train-station-refuses-to-face-court
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http://web.archive.org/web/20161220154435id_/https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/nov/28/man-charged-over-alleged-rampage-at-melbourne-train-station-refuses-to-face-court
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Man charged over alleged rampage at Melbourne train station refuses to face court
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20161220154435
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A man charged with four counts of attempted murder over an alleged rampage at a Melbourne railway station is being kept in a padded cell and has an extensive history at Melbourne’s forensic hospital, a court has heard.
Craig Hansen, 47, of Carnegie, is accused of assaulting five women at Glenhuntly station on Sunday in an armed daylight attack that resulted in four of the alleged victims – including one aged in her 80s – being pushed on to rail tracks.
He was arrested and charged on Sunday but refused to face the Melbourne magistrates court on Monday. He has also refused to have any legal advice.
Magistrate Jelena Popovic said the court system showed he had a 17-page mental health history. A court advice officer, Bob Allen, said the man was “extremely violent” and “very unwell”.
“He’s had a significant history at Thomas Embling [forensic hospital],” Allen said. “He’s currently in a padded cell.”
Allen asked Popovic to adjourn the matter for three weeks, saying a week would not be long enough for Hansen to recover sufficiently to face court. “He chose to go off his meds,” Allen said. “Whether he chooses to go back on them is another matter.”
Popovic adjourned the filing hearing for one week. She said ordinarily she would make some effort to see an accused person in his or her padded cell. “Given how unwell he is that would not be a sensible position,” she said.
The matter will come back to court on 5 December.
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Craig Hansen, 47, charged with attempted murder over women allegedly being pushed on to Glenhuntly tracks, has long mental health history, court is told
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http://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/a-local-bank-in-amish-country-flourishes-amid-dearth-of-small-lenders-1427677879
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http://web.archive.org/web/20161220184541id_/http://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/a-local-bank-in-amish-country-flourishes-amid-dearth-of-small-lenders-1427677879
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A Local Bank in Amish Country Flourishes Amid Dearth of Small Lenders
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20161220184541
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BIRD-IN-HAND, Pa.—William O’Brien, chief loan officer at the Bank of Bird-in-Hand, closed so many loans in the bank’s first year of business that locals call him “Gelt Chappie,” or “money man” in Pennsylvania German.
Based in a rural village in the heart of Amish country, Bank of Bird-in-Hand is the only new bank to open in the U.S. since 2010, when the Dodd-Frank law was passed and enacted. An average of more than 100 new banks a year opened in the three decades before Dodd-Frank.
Bankers say the drought is a sign of new regulatory requirements in the wake of the financial crisis, which are boosting expenses and discouraging potential startups from even trying. Regulators say the profit squeeze from rock-bottom interest rates is a bigger problem.
“There was, still is, a pent-up demand for a local bank,” Mr. O’Brien says, describing a local man who manufactures mattresses for dairy cows. Though the mattresses are common in dairy barns, the man told Mr. O’Brien he had trouble getting a loan from a large bank, which didn’t understand the product.
“He never forgot that,” Mr. O’Brien says. “And that gets around.”
Bank of Bird-in-Hand caters mainly to the local Amish community, though it welcomes other customers, too. The bank doesn’t offer online banking, but its sole branch does have a drive-through window that can accommodate a horse and buggy.
Lancaster County, Pa., has abundant farms and small businesses, but larger banks often aren’t interested in business loans of less than $1 million, says Mr. O’Brien.
He says loan demand is so high that “if there would have been two of me, we could have done more” than the $60 million in loans made in the first year after Bank of Bird-in-Hand opened its doors in late 2013.
Last year, the more than 6,000 locally focused “community banks” in the U.S. increased their combined earnings by 9.1% from 2013, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. The overall U.S. banking industry suffered a profit decline because of problems at the biggest firms.
A Federal Reserve study concluded that the number of bank startups has historically tracked the Fed’s interest-rate policy, suggesting that higher rates might encourage investors to start a new crop of banks.
Earlier this month, regulators gave conditional approval for the second postcrisis bank, Primary Bank of New Hampshire.
Lawmakers are concerned about the dearth of new banks because small banks make the majority of farm and small-business loans, federal data show.
“There are many on both sides of the aisle that believe improvements [to rules impacting small banks] can and should be made,” Senate Banking Committee Chairman Richard Shelby (R., Ala.) said earlier this year.
Low interest rates are especially painful for small banks because they rely on interest income more than big banks do.
In the fourth quarter, Bank of Bird-in-Hand had a net interest margin of 1.38%, far below 3.63% for community banks overall, as it altered loan and deposit rates to seek out new customers. Net interest margin is the gap between what banks earn on loans and pay for deposits.
The new bank posted a loss of about $1.4 million in 2014, hurt by reserves set aside to cover future loan losses. Experts say profits aren’t expected right away at startup banks.
Like other banks, Bank of Bird-in-Hand has had to hire compliance experts, buy new computer systems and spend more time writing policies and regulatory reports. One of its 16 employees is dedicated full-time to regulatory compliance, despite Mr. O’Brien’s desire to hire another loan officer.
Last fall, the management team spent more than a month preparing for its first annual exam, a three-week visit from a team of about 10 FDIC and state examiners, who visited in shifts.
The examiners looked at hardware and software systems geared toward meeting regulatory requirements for loan reviews, information technology, anti-money-laundering controls and treatment of low-income borrowers, among other areas.
The bank paid for “white hat” hackers to test its cyber-security infrastructure and hired a consultant to test the bank’s sensitivity to interest rates.
Chief Executive Alan Dakey says the examiners “obviously want to see us be successful, and the attitude is constructive in their approach.”
The bank’s early success suggests there is a place for small lenders, but it is also in a position others would struggle to replicate. More than half of its borrowers are local Amish businesses. That group is known for being financially stable, conservative and disinterested in the types of technology that are threatening typical bank branches.
Instead of planning to cash out with a future merger, Bank of Bird-in-Hand’s board members have thought about the long run, attending FDIC training sessions before the bank opened.
The board has expanded to include banking experts from other parts of Pennsylvania. The original group had a storage-shed maker, accountant, concrete contractor and real-estate lawyer, all local.
The bank’s backers won regulatory approval partly by raising and contributing $17 million in initial capital, far more than would have been expected before the financial crisis hit.
“It was a serious commitment in terms of time and money,” said Nick Bybel, a Pennsylvania banking lawyer who advises Bank of Bird-in-Hand.
A recent board meeting lasted six hours. Directors discussed the bank’s finances and employee compensation. They voted on eight internal policies, including 10 pages about advertising, even though the bank had run just three newspaper ads.
When the bank’s first CEO stepped down for health reasons last fall, regulators told the bank that the successor should have prior experience as a CEO, according to people at the bank.
Regulators wouldn’t discuss Bank of Bird-in-Hand but have told lawmakers that they are trying to ease rules that impose an undue burden.
Doreen Eberley, the FDIC’s director of risk management supervision, pointed Mr. Shelby last month to data showing that capital is flowing into community banks at a rate of more than $3 billion a year.
“That’s capital that at some point will shift into [brand new] institutions as the economy continues to improve,” she said.
Write to Ryan Tracy at ryan.tracy@wsj.com
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Bank of Bird-in-Hand is the only new bank to open in the U.S. since 2010, when the Dodd-Frank law was passed.
| 43.965517 | 1 | 27.068966 |
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http://nypost.com/2013/08/11/failing-upward/
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Failing upward | New York Post
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20161221092346
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Maybe next year’s expensive Common Core tests will include this political axiom: The amount of spin is directly proportional to the size of the screw-up.
Last week we saw a lot of spin.
The education/political establishment went into overdrive, with defensive statements from Education Secretary Arne Duncan, state Commissioner John King and Chancellor Dennis Walcott, among others. All assured us that the bitter medicine of poor test scores is good for us and good for our kids. We were told to ignore their decade-long assertions of educational success and take it on faith that now things will get better.
King even went so far as to warn, “There are those who will use the change in students’ proficiency rates to attack teachers and principals.”
But, as far as I know, no one is attacking educators for this debacle. The blame should be shouldered, not deflected, by the edu-pols who got us into this.
The Common Core is a set of national standards meant to deepen students’ skills and knowledge beyond what is currently taught. By “currently taught,” I mean teaching-to-the-test promoted by these and other political appointees, plus elected officials like Mayor Bloomberg, who put raising scores above all.
Prior to the Common Core, the federal No Child Left Behind law led states to develop tests designed to produce artificially high test scores — which politicians wanted, but was inconveniently out of whack with what students need to succeed in modern, well-paying jobs.
Now Duncan says those scores were “lies” even though he and his colleagues originally pushed that agenda. They introduced the Common Core and the new tests as a corrective to NCLB.
This campaign of self-inoculation by our political elite against widespread disappointment should not protect them. They got us into this. We must reject their spin.
The problem is that we suffer from the same sense of powerlessness that infects politics in general. Bloomberg and state Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch are two of the richest people in America. Over-testing is the result of exam-centric evaluation of schools and teachers bankrolled by President Obama and Bill Gates, our most politically and financially powerful citizens.
How, then, can we overcome the constant shape-shifting of educational policy by an elite that always claims to know it all, yet has repeatedly failed to deliver?
The mayoral election presents a slim opportunity for change.
With less than a third of city students passing Common Core math and reading tests, we must demand that candidates speak truthfully about how they plan to address this complex problem. We need candidates to confront the city Department of Education’s admitted need for 150-200 new principals every year and 350-400 new assistant principals. This replacement rate is unsustainable and has already resulted in a largely inexperienced corps of supervisory personnel. What will the next mayor do to correct this crucial leadership deficit?
One out of seven students in New York City is an English-language learner requiring bilingual education. A disproportionate number are mandated for special education. Graduation rates for each group lag far behind non-ELL peers. How can we better educate these students, especially under the new standards they must attain?
Finally, we must meet the needs of students in desperate poverty who fill the lowest test score tiers. Pre-kindergarten from infancy? Lower class sizes? More time? These pricey reforms — not more or better tests — show the greatest promise. But will we back a mayor who has the guts to implement even partial steps toward reform?
It’s easy to keep beating the drum of standards. More, higher, broader. In the end, this is just the hypnotic rhythm of politicians seeking to lull the public.
We need to move away from test scores as the basis for our educational system. And if that means moving aside a bunch of old-school edu-pols, that will be for the better.
David Bloomfield is a professor of Education, Law and Policy at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center
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Maybe next year’s expensive Common Core tests will include this political axiom: The amount of spin is directly proportional to the size of the screw-up. Last week we saw a lot of spin. The educati…
| 18.809524 | 0.952381 | 23.380952 |
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https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/dec/09/judge-sentences-two-men-to-20-years-over-sydney-terrorism-plot
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http://web.archive.org/web/20161222093543id_/https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/dec/09/judge-sentences-two-men-to-20-years-over-sydney-terrorism-plot
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Judge sentences two men to 20 years over Sydney terrorism plot
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20161222093543
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Two men who planned to bomb a Sydney Shia prayer hall and vowed to stab people in the kidneys to impress an Islamic State recruiter have been jailed for at least 15 years.
Omar Al-Kutobi, 25, and Mohammad Kiad, 27, each pleaded guilty to one count of acting in preparation for a terrorist act, after they were arrested during counter-terrorism raids in February 2015.
In the NSW supreme court at Parramatta in Sydney’s west on Friday, Justice Peter Garling sentenced them to 20 years’ imprisonment with a non-parole period of 15 years.
The pair were arrested during a raid of their western Sydney flat by counter-terrorism police in February 2015, with officers finding a hunting knife, a machete and a homemade Islamic State flag.
Garling said neither of the offenders had been raised to follow an extreme version of Islam. But by the end of 2014 both “had been drawn to and had embraced the ideology of the Islamic State and extremist Islamic views”.
He said the prosecution had alleged that the conspiracy between the two amounted to detonating an improvised explosive device to damage or destroy a building, and/or using a machete or hunting knife to attack a member of the public.
Outside court, Detective Chief Inspector Darren Sly said police acted swiftly because they believed a terrorist attack was imminent.
“I think we were very, very lucky in the circumstances and if it wasn’t for the intervention of police there then I think we would have had a terrorist event on our hands,” he said on Friday.
“From a police perspective we’re happy with the sentence. I think it sends a good message to the community that we’re strong on terrorism.”
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Omar Al-Kutobi and Mohammad Kiad pleaded guilty to one count of acting in preparation for a terrorist act in 2015
| 15.090909 | 1 | 8.909091 |
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http://www.thepostgame.com/christmas-holiday-fitness-tips-trainer-eating-exercise
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http://web.archive.org/web/20161222153118id_/http://www.thepostgame.com/christmas-holiday-fitness-tips-trainer-eating-exercise
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Christmas Holiday Fitness Tips
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20161222153118
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The biggest challenge around the holidays is maintaining a healthy eating pattern. This is not just about binging out 2-3 times but using a privation strategy to try to compensate for the binges. "I see people fasting either the day of a binge or the day after to 'make it OK,' to binge," renowned bodybuilder and strength trainer Christian Thibaudeau says.
This is a mistake because it often leads to an even more disastrous pig-out event. "But more than that, it reinforces negative mental patterns that can actually make it really hard to get back to a solid nutrition plan," he adds.
Usually, there is always a way to eat healthy at holiday gatherings if you overcome the temptations and make the right choices. "So it's a matter of deciding what is important to you: Having the body you want and the health you deserve or having short-term sensory pleasure," Thibaudeau says.
It's important to exercise, too. "An hour of cardio might 'burn' 400-500 calories and an hour of weight lifting about the same," Thibaudeau adds. "So if you train hard for 90 minutes you are likely burning around 600 calories. Note that this should not be used as a strategy to justify eating poorly all the time. I’ve seen a lot of people gain fat when they started to train because they thought the training would completely prevent fat gain."
For the complete list of Personal Trainer's Christmas Holiday Fitness Tips, go to TheActiveTimes.com.
More From The Active Times: -- Workouts Top Trainers Do When They Only Have 15 Minutes -- Overhyped Exercises That Are Actually Wasting Your Time -- 16 Ineffective Exercises You Should Never Do -- Stretches You Should Never Do Before a Workout
Diet, Exercise, Fitness, Holidays, The Active Times, Workout
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Fasting and then binge eating can lead to trouble, so consider these Christmas holiday fitness and nutrition tips from a personal trainer.
| 14.833333 | 0.791667 | 1.125 |
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http://www.foxnews.com/category/us/environment/cities.html
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http://web.archive.org/web/20161224060852id_/http://www.foxnews.com/category/us/environment/cities.html
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Cities | Category | Fox News
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20161224060852
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The concrete needed for New York's new, $4 billion Tappan Zee Bridge, under construction over the Hudson River, would be enough to make a 1,500-mile sidewalk reaching all the way t...
About 30 tents remained in place Friday as the deadline for homeless people to vacate a San Francisco tent city came and went without any action.
Environmental and civil rights groups want a federal judge to order the prompt replacement of all lead pipes in Flint's water system to ensure that residents have a safe drinking s...
California Gov. Jerry Brown declared a state of emergency in a Los Angeles suburb on Wednesday over a massive natural-gas leak that has been spewing methane and several other gases...
The escape of tons of natural gas from storage under a Los Angeles neighborhood is not likely to be fixed for at least another two months because of the specific dynamics of the le...
When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in 2005, Air Force Reserve Master Sgt. Mike Maroney and his team rescued a 3-year-old girl and her family.
A shipment of radioactive material weighing 27 pounds sent to an on-campus office at Texas A&M University reported missing has been located, officials announced Tuesday.
Foes of Royal Dutch Shell's use of a Seattle seaport terminal to prepare for exploratory oil drilling in the Arctic Ocean attacked on two fronts Monday as a few hundred protesters ...
The city wants to recycle or compost 60 percent of all waste by the end of this year.
Energy alternatives may come at a higher cost.
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Cities news articles and videos from foxnews.com's US section
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/11/28/jd-sports-bets-brexit-staycations-go-outdoors-takeover/
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http://web.archive.org/web/20161224230656id_/http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/11/28/jd-sports-bets-brexit-staycations-go-outdoors-takeover/
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JD Sports bets on Brexit staycations with GO Outdoors takeover
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20161224230656
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JD Sports has carried on camping with a £128.3m takeover of GO Outdoors, which cements its status as the largest outdoor equipment retailer in the UK.
JD Sports, already owns tent and hiking equipment retailers Blacks, Millets and Ultimate Outdoors, but will add the 58 GO Outdoors shops to its group.
There had been concerns last month that talks between GO Outdoors' backer, private equity firm 3i, and JD Sports had hit a stumbling block amid the sterling slump which had caused tensions over pricing.
However, sources said that JD Sports' had still been committed to the deal as it is widely thought that consumer uncertainty following Brexit will fuel a rise in staycation holidays.
Earlier this year UK tourism boards reported record-breaking booking inquiries while the number of Brits holidaying in England in the first quarter of the year rose by 10pc on the year before to 7.3m, with the weaker pound making trips abroad more expensive.
"Consumers appear to be undeterred by what has been a politically tumultuous year," said Rob Baxter of KPMG who advised on the deal. "Confidence for the moment remains resilient, supporting retailers' prospects, and we would expect to see more buyout activity in the coming months.”
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JD Sports has carried on camping with a £128.
| 21.636364 | 0.818182 | 5.909091 |
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http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/12/25/06/44/torture-charges-after-qld-house-ordeal
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http://web.archive.org/web/20161225141254id_/http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/12/25/06/44/torture-charges-after-qld-house-ordeal
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Torture charges after Qld house ordeal
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20161225141254
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A 42-year-old man was beaten, burnt and robbed over a 20-hour period before managing to flee a house at Marsden in southeast Queensland, police say.
The man had arrived at the address in the Logan City suburb at around 10pm on Friday to ask about buying a motorcycle from people known to him but was allegedly detained against his will.
"The man was allegedly assaulted with unknown implements and burnt with an unknown substance during his ordeal, and had personal property stolen," police said in a statement early on Sunday.
The man managed to escape at around 5pm on Saturday and raise the alarm before being taken to Beaudesert Hospital for treatment to bruises, lacerations and burns.
Two men aged 29 and 48 have been arrested and charged with torture, deprivation of liberty, acts intended to maim or disfigure, armed robbery in company using personal violence and assault occasioning bodily harm.
Both were denied bail to appear in the Southport Magistrates Court on Monday.
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A man is being treated for serious cuts, burns and bruises after allegedly being held against his will and tortured at a home in southeast Queensland.
| 6.75 | 0.714286 | 1.142857 |
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http://www.cnbc.com/2014/10/08/want-to-lift-your-google-ranking-hire-writers.html
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http://web.archive.org/web/20161226072226id_/http://www.cnbc.com/2014/10/08/want-to-lift-your-google-ranking-hire-writers.html
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Want to lift your Google ranking? Hire writers
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20161226072226
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"Naturally people prefer high-quality content, so we design Google to reflect that," said Jason Freidenfelds, a spokesman for the Mountain View, California-based company. "If you're producing content, avoid the junk. Produce something that's genuinely interesting and useful to people. That's really the sustainable strategy."
It's not always so easy.
HubPages has been the poster child for Panda victims. Founded in 2006 and led by former Microsoft product manager Paul Edmondson, the company hosts a collection of user-generated articles on thousands of topics, written by people from all over the world. After the first Panda update, HubPages lost 49 percent of its traffic. Pages that had been popular were declared spammy and dropped in the rankings.
HubPages, which is ad-supported, saw millions of dollars in annual revenue evaporate, according to Edmondson. The company downsized dramatically through several rounds of layoffs and Edmondson poured his energy into finding the problem and fixing it.
The answer was editing. Because a very small percentage of its content drew the bulk of traffic, Edmondson focused on improving the quality of those top pages, while removing spammy links and excess ads as well as unpublishing hundreds of thousands of hubs.
Traffic started coming back, and Edmonson doubled down. Since early this year, he's hired seven professional writers and editors to liven up the most popular pages.
"How to eliminate, kill or get rid of frogs," for example, was an entry that got a lot of traffic but was very light on information and thus left users unhappy with what they saw. Now, it features a detailed 10-step process that includes original illustrations as well as a link to a frog-killing product on Amazon.com.
"Everything we're trying to do is about improving the reader experience," Edmondson said, from his office in San Francisco. "If we're leaving money on the table but we're comfortable that we're creating a better reading experience, that's OK. Ultimately we're going to create something really special."
Read MoreFacebook takes on Google
As of August, traffic had increased about 47 percent from the prior year. The lights in the office were comfortably on and Edmondson was predicting annual revenue in the $5 million range, about half the company's pre-Panda level.
But the latest Panda update—the one that Google said helped smaller sites—was a major setback. Edmonson said it may be the result of HubPages' recent acquisition of a user-generated content company called Squidoo, which added 160,000 articles to the company's own 325,000 pages.
Combined traffic is down 46 percent, and Edmondson said the plunge will significantly alter his plans to hire more editors.
"If there was a playbook on how to handle the Panda issue, we would do it to the best of our ability," he wrote in a follow-up email.
Edmondson, like many people punished by Google, is frustrated by the constant struggle to stay compliant with the search engine, even as he pours money into creating a better site. Google controls 68 percent of the U.S. search market, according to comScore, but accounts for 73 percent of HubPages' traffic and more than 90 percent on mobile, Edmonson said.
Plenty of executives can empathize. While Google says that Panda is democratizing search for smaller sites, the playing field isn't level, according to 3Q's Rayden. HubPages has survived, albeit barely, by investing heavily in content creation, but many niche sites no longer exist because they lacked the technical expertise or the money to stay current and invest in content creation.
"If your website is old, isn't designed right, is not designed for usability or your content is stale, you're not going to stand a chance," Rayden said.
Read MoreHas Google lost control of its anti-spam algorithm?
Glenn Gabe, a longtime expert in search engine optimization, published a post on Sept. 29, a week after the latest Panda rollout began, laying out his findings.
Poorly written sites, keyword stuffing, deceptively blending ads into content and over-reliance on "how-to" articles all result in a Panda pummeling, he wrote. As for what works, his advice is pretty simple: "Make sure user engagement is strong, users are happy with your content and they don't have a poor experience while traversing your website."
It's not just small brands playing the new content game. In New York, a 65-person start-up called Contently is working with close to 100 large companies, including American Express, Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola and even Google, to help their marketing departments evolve from messaging to content.
The company has a roster of 55,000 journalists that get hired to assist with storytelling, and Contently's software is designed to help businesses communicate with their fans and followers on social media. Some former reporters are making upward of $80,000 a year, working on a freelance basis for Contently clients, said CEO Joe Coleman.
"In five to 10 years, people will have a very different perception of what a media company is and where the lines are drawn," said Coleman, who co-founded Contently in 2010, just months before Google introduced Panda. "We went into business wanting to create a high-quality product and planting a flag in the ground around quality. We got really lucky."
At online lender Prosper Marketplace, CEO Aaron Vermut recognizes the importance of staying up to date on the latest algorithm changes. Since joining the San Francisco-based company in early 2013, he's outsourced those duties to a third party. But on Monday, Prosper announced the hiring of Cheryl Law, former chief marketing officer at Hotwire, as its CMO. A big part of her job will be helping Prosper transition into this new world.
"We have some resources but not enough," Vermut said. "As the algorithm changes, we put resources into adapting."
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Climbing Google search requires a new strategy. Updated algorithms punish once prominent sites, lifting pages deemed content rich.
| 55.952381 | 0.52381 | 0.714286 |
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http://people.com/bodies/troian-bellisario-anorexia-voting-psa/cm.peo/
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http://web.archive.org/web/20161227100637id_/http://people.com/bodies/troian-bellisario-anorexia-voting-psa/cm.peo/
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Troian Bellisario Opens Up About Her Anorexia Battle in Voting PSA
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20161227100637
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Troian Bellisario knows firsthand what it feels like to have a mental illness — anorexia — and she’s imploring voters to elect Hillary Clinton in a new PSA.
The Pretty Little Liars star says she supports Clinton because of her work to improve the health care system, particularly for those suffering from mental illnesses.
Bellisario opened up about her battle with anorexia as a child.
“With anorexia, a lot of it is presenting a front of ‘everything is okay’ as you’re slowly killing yourself,” she says in the voting PSA for ATTN. “Gone were the days when I was just a happy, carefree kid who was running around, and suddenly I felt this inability to interact with people and to nourish myself.”
Bellisario first shared that she struggled with an eating disorder in 2014, but didn’t explicitly say it was anorexia.
Now, Bellisario’s experience pushed her to campaign for Clinton.
“[Mental illness] is a huge issue, and I am such a huge supporter of Mrs. Clinton for so many reasons. Specifically because she’s been such a huge advocate for health care,” she explains. “And her definition of health care includes mental health care. And that to me is just — it’s the deciding factor between both candidates.”
RELATED VIDEO: Naya Rivera Reveals She Battled Anorexia as a Teen, Had an Abortion While on ‘Glee’
Bellisario says that getting treated for her anorexia was life-changing.
“If I had just been sort of shunned to the side as not having real problems, I don’t know that I would be living today,” she says. “I just want to make sure that everybody has the same opportunity for treatment that I have, and I think that we have to make sure our government invests in those programs.”
“What matters is that we continue to make our voices heard in this great democracy, so please vote.”
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Pretty Little Liars’ Troian Bellisario opens up about her anorexia battle in a voting PSA and advocates for Hillary Clinton’s support of mental health issues
| 14.538462 | 0.807692 | 1.5 |
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http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2016/12/27/lowell-sage-bank-hit-regulators-again/c697YGTxdlzcPBs1zZqzAJ/story.html
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http://web.archive.org/web/20161228150333id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2016/12/27/lowell-sage-bank-hit-regulators-again/c697YGTxdlzcPBs1zZqzAJ/story.html
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Lowell’s Sage Bank hit by regulators again
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20161228150333
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State and federal banking regulators have again taken a struggling Lowell bank to task for failing to improve its management and oversight, particularly of its mortgage business.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Massachusetts Division of Banks issued a consent order against Sage Bank earlier this month requiring the institution to hire qualified management, rein in the growth of its mortgage business and increase its capital.
“At a minimum, the bank’s management shall include: a chief executive officer with proven ability in managing a bank of comparable size and complexity; a secondary market lending officer with appropriate level of experience and ability in managing mortgage banking operations,” the consent order states.
This is the small community bank’s second order in two years. Regulators also hit the bank with a consent order in December 2014.
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Sage Bank, which has $156 million in assets, has gone through several leadership changes in recent years, and in 2015 agreed to spend $1.2 million to settle allegations by the US Department of Justice that it charged African-American and Hispanic borrowers more for their home loans than white applicants .
The bank declined comment, but provided a copy of an email that chairman Ken Bishop sent employees Tuesday in which he noted examiners did not find any problems with the quality of the bank’s loans. He also said the December order replaces the bank’s 2014 agreement with regulators.
However, the order is an “acknowledgment that even as we have taken steps to tighten our policies and improve on our plans to reduce overall risk, there is more we can and should do,” Bishop wrote. “Sage Bank can and will take the necessary steps to demonstrate to our regulators that the Consent Order can and should be lifted.”
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State and federal banking regulators have again taken a struggling Lowell bank to task for failing to make adequate changes to its management and oversight, particularly of its mortgage business.
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The mystery of the missing Social Security data
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20161228174411
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Retirement expert Alicia Munnell of Boston College has brought a simmering Social Security mystery out into the open: Why were key figures about the program's benefits for retirees deleted from the latest trustees' report?
Munnell's conclusion, as set forth in a column published this week on MarketWatch, is that the reason is nefarious.
"The deletion," she writes, "is the culmination of a concerted effort by a band of critics" who contend that Social Security is too generous to retirees. Among their goals is to undermine a growing effort in Congress to increase and expand the program's benefits, and make it easier for policymakers to cut back the benefits.
The deleted figures that concern Munnell measure the program's "replacement rate." This is the percentage of a retiree's lifetime earnings replaced by Social Security benefits. It's among the most important measures of the program's effectiveness. The statistic has been listed in the annual Social Security Trustees Report since 1989 -- until this year.
For retirees with median lifetime earnings, the replacement rate has been somewhere in the neighborhood of 40% -- if, say, your lifetime average earnings were about $75,000, a Social Security benefit of $30,000 would give you a 40% replacement rate. (The calculations are somewhat more complex than that -- the replacement rate is designed to be higher for low-income workers and lower for wealthier workers -- but you get the gist.)
This matters because financial experts say that to retire without a jarring reduction in one's standard of living requires a replacement rate of 70 to 75%. Social Security doesn't aim to provide it all, but to supplement employer pensions and retirees' savings in 401(k) plans and other accounts (both of which have gotten very shaky in recent years).
Until this year, a chart in the annual Social Security Trustees Report listed replacement rates for retirees at all levels of income, and projected them decades into the future. (See accompanying illustration.) This year, however, those figures disappeared from the report. In their place was a chart that showed benefits only in dollar terms. But in isolation, those figures don't tell you anything about how those benefits correspond to retirees' needs over time.
Deleting the replacement rates plays into the hands of those critics Munnell alludes to (but doesn't name). Among them are the independent analyst Sylvester Schieber and Andrew Biggs of the American Enterprise Institute.
Their argument is that American retirees are, in fact, pretty flush. They try to show this in two ways. One is to suggest that estimates of retiree incomes systematically overlook a huge portion of the income that seniors live on. We analyzed this assertion in January, and found it profoundly misleading.
Their other point is that Social Security's replacement rate formulas are faulty, and that the real rates are much higher than 40% -- more than 60% for average earners and 70% for low-income retirees, in fact. Part of their argument is that Social Security's replacement formula gives retirees too much credit for wage growth in the economy, so the replacement rate seems lower than it really is.
As Munnell and Social Security's own actuaries point out, some critics also base their replacement rate calculation on a retiree's income in his or her last five years before taking Social Security. Since many retirees have no income in the last few years before starting benefits -- that's 14% of all new retirees, the actuaries say -- the replacement rate for those years is infinity (that's what you get when you divide a number by zero), which pushes up the overall replacement rate. The actuaries say the right way to calculate a replacement rate is against years with non-zero income.
In any case, if you can put over the idea that Social Security already is replacing close to 70% of retirees' income, then you've damaged the argument that benefits should be made more generous.
But including zero-income years in the replacement rate calculation, Munnell says, "makes no sense." Those last five years before retirement often are marred by poor health and disability, the twilight of a worker's career -- they're by no means reflective of his or her working experience.
The real question is why the replacement rates were deleted this year. The trustees didn't explain the change, and until Munnell's column, few people noticed it. But its impact on policy-making will eventually be felt.
"No rational case can be made for deleting replacement-rate numbers from the Trustees Report," Munnell writes, and she's right. The only reason is to clear the way for a concerted attack on the program and to undermine the campaign to improve it for the millions of Americans who depend upon it.
"If Social Security replaces less, then future workers must depend on what is now a fairly wobbly 401(k) system for more. Without replacement-rate numbers, policymakers will have no idea what they are doing to the retirement security of future workers as they consider alternative Social Security provisions.
"This is not inside baseball," she concludes. "This is important."
Keep up to date with The Economy Hub by following @hiltzikm.
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Retirement expert Alicia Munnell of Boston College has brought a simmering Social Security mystery out into the open: Why were key figures about the program's benefits for retirees deleted from the latest trustees' report ?
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Granddaughters of Missing Woman Helen Dymond Push for Answers Decades Later
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20161229055024
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The research is kept in an over-stuffed binder.
It includes police reports with scribbled notes, faded maps and whatever is out there in the narrative of a woman who has been missing for 35 years. Her name is Helen Dymond.
"I felt like it was a story we wanted for our family, to keep her alive somehow," Holly Letson told Dateline. Holly and her older sister April Lawer are two of Helen's granddaughters. April was very small and Holly was not yet born when their grandmother disappeared in the early morning hours of June 28, 1981.
Helen's disappearance has been a nagging mystery to them all these decades. Although rarely discussed, the girls say, it's an ever present question. "It's been a family mystery since 1981," April told Dateline. "What happened to Helen that night? Where did she go? Someone knows and we think it's about time the answers are found."
The Middle of the Night
It was a hot summer evening in National Mine, Michigan, a small town once fueled by the nearby iron ore mines in the 1950s and '60s.
Helen spent the day at a town picnic and ballgame with several of her children. She was 48 at the time and her four grown children were beginning to start families of their own. That evening was traditionally one for celebrations in the town and they had every intention of participating.
Once activities at the picnic began to wrap up, she and her husband Roy went to the Tilden Club, a private club for members and their guests. One of their daughters and her husband, Holly and April's mother and father, joined for a time before leaving to grab pizza and head home.
The story then goes that Helen's husband Roy wanted to head home as well, but she was not ready yet. An argument followed in the parking lot. It was decided Roy would head home alone and Helen would head back inside the club. Her plan was to then walk to her son's home, about a mile or so away, to spend the night, as she often did whenever there was a fight.
According to several club patrons, Helen left alone sometime between 3:00 a.m. and 4:00 a.m., despite conflicting earlier statements stating it was 2:00 a.m. Helen's family believes some thought the club could get into trouble for serving alcohol past 2:00 a.m.
Helen was spotted walking on the wrong side of the road towards her son's home. That was the last time she was seen.
"We have walked the path she would have gone dozens of times," Holly told Dateline. "It would have taken 13-15 minutes. So what happened during those minutes that prevented her from getting there?"
After Helen's husband Roy got home, he phoned his daughter, the one who had been with them earlier at the club. He asked if she had seen or heard from Helen, and told her they'd had a fight. It wasn't the first time something like this had happened, so alarms didn't immediately go off at the sound of Helen spending the night at her sons.
Little did they know at the time, Helen hadn't made it there.
The next morning, a Sunday, no one knew where Helen was and the severity of the situation set in quickly. "She wasn't at her son's, she wasn't at our house, wasn't at our aunt's, wasn't home. Our family realized pretty quickly she was just missing," Holly said.
A big storm was blowing in that night, so instead of waiting the recommended 24 hours authorities insisted in during those days, Helen was reported missing right away. Family members say officials told them Helen probably left on her own accord and there wasn't anything they could really do right then.
The following week, an article ran in the local paper. Police reportedly took the case more seriously.
But none of it helped find Helen.
There have been a number of leads over the years, but none has set the official investigation in a solid direction.
"They didn't have many suspects, but we really do," April told Dateline.
At first, authorities questioned Helen's husband Roy. "It didn't look good for him at first," says Holly. "But he was so distraught and my mom remembers it's the only real time she's seen him cry and break now."
Although their grandfather has since passed away, both Holly and April are sure he had nothing to do with their grandmother's disappearance. "I had that blunt, hard conversation with our mother about if it was possible that her dad did something. Wasn't even remotely a possibility," Holly says.
Another tip was called in that Helen stopped into a party that was on a road she would have had to walk down to get to her son's. The tip wasn't taken seriously by police, family members say.
The next lead involved the mine pits that dotted the landscape outside the town. Could Helen have been accidently hit by a car and her body dropped in the dark shafts? The pits were filled with rain and groundwater a majority of the year at that time, so a thorough search was never conducted.
Yet another witness discovered a purple windbreaker along a nearby fishermen's path. The pull string was ripped out. "My grandmother pulled all the pull strings from her jackets, she despised them," Holly says.
Family members identified the jacket as hers, but that's all that has come of the possible clue.
"This whole process was and is still frustrating for us all," April said. "How does no one know anything?"
Holly and April spent their lives seeking information about their grandmother. When they became adults, they decided it was time to try and solve the mystery of what became of the grandmother they never got to really know.
"Every year on June 28, we talked about it but then that was it for a year," Holly told Dateline. "My sister and I decided we needed more than that."
Holly started her own investigation, phoning detectives, requesting reports and making copies of local articles from the time of Helen's disappearance. Although both sisters are busy in their own lives -- both work in the education field -- they dedicate whatever time they can to unraveling the pieces of a puzzle that just doesn't seem to fit. Yet.
"I just think if we talk to enough people and ask the right questions and keep up with it, answers could come," explained Holly.
It was April who decided they might gain some traction if they posted their grandmother's story on Facebook. The page 'The Disappearance of Helen Dymond' was created and is filled with memories, old photos and an ever-present request; if you know something, come forward. They encourage anyone with information to reach out on the page.
The girls have tracked down a number of potential witnesses over the years, and have several theories about what became of Helen. Crucial information is still out there to be discovered though, they say. Someone out there knows.
Helen's case is now in the hands of the Michigan State Police, who say the case is still open and being investigated.
Helen would turn 83 this September. She'd be a great-great-grandmother now.
Her disappearance continues to be a source of speculation and attention in the town. For their aunts and uncle, talk about Helen can sting.
"Our mother is very matter of fact about it, very stoic. Our one aunt is very, very sensitive about it. You don't bring it up around her really," Holly told Dateline. "I think, though, that if answers were found, it would close this chapter in some way for everyone."
The girls say that with no memories of their grandmother, the case isn't as personally raw to them. But that doesn't deter their persistence in finding answers.
"I really feel we're one piece short of the full puzzle," says Holly. "We can't help but wonder and try to find the answer for Helen."
If you have any information regarding Helen's disappearance, you are urged to call the Michigan State Police at (906) 475-9922.
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This summer marks the 35th anniversary of Helen Dymond's disappearance.
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Christina Grimmie's Family Sues Venue, Promoter Over Her Death
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20161229061315
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WATCH: The singer that got her start on "The Voice" died after a gunman opened fire at a Orlando, Florida, concert.
Family of the late singer Christina Grimmie filed a wrongful death suit in Orange County, Florida, Tuesday against the venue and the promoter of the concert where she was shot and killed this past June.
Grimmie, 22, was signing autographs after performing at Plaza Live in Orlando when Kevin James Loibl shot her before eventually turning the gun on himself. At the time of the incident, Orlando Police said Loibl had two guns and a knife on him.
The lawsuit, obtained by ABC News, names AEG Live and the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra Plaza Foundation, which owns the venue, as defendants. The cause of the suit is listed as "negligent security."
"The owners of the facility in which she performed and the outside security company hired to provide security for the concert ... failed to take adequate security measures to ensure the safety of the performers and the attendees at the concert venue," the suit reads.
The security company is not named, but additional defendants include "ABC Corporation, John Doe and Jane Doe."
The venue allowed "superficial bag checks with no body pat downs," according to the suit.
Grimmie and the band Before You Exit were signing autographs after the show concluded at 10 p.m. on June 10 when Loibl walked up to her and shot her. He later killed himself after being tackled by Grimmie's brother Mark, who intervened.
The lawsuit states the Grimmie family "is entitled to recover from defendants the future support and services Christina would have provided" to them "from the date of her death to her anticipated life expectancy." The amount could be determined at a trial, which the family is seeking.
The family's lawyer Brian Caplan released a statement from the family to ABC News that read, "No amount of money will bring Christina back. We believe that those parties who contributed to Christina's untimely death should be held responsible for their conduct or failure to act."
It continued, "We are hopeful that our lawsuit will bring widespread attention to the issue of concert security and safety and more effective safeguards will be implemented to protect performers and attendees at concerts around the U.S. in the future."
Plaza Live also released a statement about the former "Voice" star's death.
“Our thoughts continue to be with the Grimmie family, particularly at this time of year. We will not be speaking about this matter and allow it to be addressed through the proper legal channels," the venue stated to ABC News.
A rep for AEG Live did not immediately respond to ABC News' request for comment.
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Family of the late singer Christina Grimmie filed a wrongful death suit in Orange County, Florida, Tuesday against the venue and the promoter of the concert where she was shot and killed this past June.Grimmie, 22, was signing autographs after performing at Plaza Live in Orlando when Kevin James...
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These kid-made hitchbots just might restore your faith in humanity
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20161229100702
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Judging by the gloomy headlines, there's no love lost for 2016 — but let's not forget the roaming robots that did their part for national cheer.
This past summer, 22 handmade robots left Calgary looking for adventure. These "hitchbots," with ice bucket bodies and pool noodle arms, were made by a group of grade 4 and 5 students at Erin Woods School. While the bots looked low-tech at first glance, they had a top level mission.
Each of the hitchbots — named after the original Hitchbot that hitched rides from Halifax to Victoria in 2014 — had a "bucket list" attached to them; a bucket list dreamt up by the students of the "ultimate Canadian adventure."
And ultimately, the adventures surpassed the kids' dreams.
"The whole idea behind this project was to identify what it means to be Canadian," says Jim Quigley, one of the teachers involved in the project at Erin Woods.
BEEP! BOOP! BEEP! What is Canadian Identity? What does it mean to be Canadian?!? I intend to find out...
"One of the most interesting things was that one of the student's identified they wanted to meet a Syrian refugee which I thought was really thoughtful and reflective" says Quigley. "Another one was a student wanted to hear an oral story from a First Nations elder."
The students collected materials to withstand all types of weather, and they built simple circuits to light up the hitchbot bodies and make them easier to spot at night. For the bucket list of adventures, the kids spent time researching Canadian landmarks and chose places they wished to see.
Just hitting the swings before our adventure begins. The first official EWS Hitchbots have been launched! <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Canada?src=hash">#Canada</a> <a href="https://t.co/kuT3RwgUE7">pic.twitter.com/kuT3RwgUE7</a>
At first, Quigley thought the students' goals were maybe a little ambitious — far away places like Peggy's Cove in Nova Scotia seemed far fetched — but the hitchbots, and the kindness of strangers, surprised Quigley and the kids.
Thoughtful strangers not only picked up the hitchbots but also took care of them, often sharing their adventures across Canada on Twitter.
Quigley was the first to see the online notifications.
"The first update I got I was extremely excited and I wanted Monday to roll around so I could share it with the kids, and the moment I did they were just ecstatic, they were blown away that this kind of social project was actually working for us."
Just got an update on our blog that one of our Hitchbots is already on its way to Mackay's Ice Cream in Cochrane! We are on the move!
This collective Canadian road trip designed by a group of Calgary kids and relying on the adventurous spirit of strangers, managed to reach the western reaches of British Columbia, as far east as Prince Edward Island and many stops in between.
Made it to Quadra Island, BC !! <a href="https://twitter.com/HitchbotWoods">@HitchbotWoods</a> <a href="https://t.co/lKJgnzyMVR">pic.twitter.com/lKJgnzyMVR</a>
We had so much fun with Hunter <a href="https://twitter.com/HitchbotWoods">@HitchbotWoods</a> today! He even got to meet <a href="https://twitter.com/kaetlyn_23">@kaetlyn_23</a> 🙌🏻 <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/exploreedmonton?src=hash">#exploreedmonton</a> <a href="https://t.co/XJtogjZ2Gy">pic.twitter.com/XJtogjZ2Gy</a>
<a href="https://twitter.com/HitchbotWoods">@HitchbotWoods</a> travelled all the way to Banff yesterday for a stay at the Banff Inns. <a href="https://t.co/Tu4WUkbfdx">pic.twitter.com/Tu4WUkbfdx</a>
<a href="https://twitter.com/HitchbotWoods">@HitchbotWoods</a> Picked up Fun2D2 at <a href="https://twitter.com/LakefieldCS">@LakefieldCS</a> and thought I'd take him to get a glimpse of Parliament in Ottawa! <a href="https://t.co/j8kr2ajWkw">pic.twitter.com/j8kr2ajWkw</a>
<a href="https://twitter.com/HitchbotWoods">@HitchbotWoods</a> Day 7! Hitch excited about what's behind him. Can you guess where we are? <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/hitchbot?src=hash">#hitchbot</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/arewethereyet?src=hash">#arewethereyet</a> <a href="https://t.co/w8oMaYH0K7">pic.twitter.com/w8oMaYH0K7</a>
Charlie with Anne herself <a href="https://twitter.com/HitchbotWoods">@HitchbotWoods</a> <a href="https://t.co/JJFmvvBZr2">pic.twitter.com/JJFmvvBZr2</a>
The hitchbots didn't just hitch rides by car, they also travelled by plane and boat.
Had a special guy on my flight to YYZ. Have a fantastic journey discovering Canada Hitchie! <a href="https://twitter.com/HitchbotWoods">@HitchbotWoods</a> <a href="https://t.co/fLLvox3MOC">pic.twitter.com/fLLvox3MOC</a>
What a beautiful day for <a href="https://twitter.com/HitchbotWoods">@HitchbotWoods</a> to visit <a href="https://twitter.com/LakefieldCS">@LakefieldCS</a> in Ontario. Even got a canoe lesson. Stay tuned. <a href="https://t.co/LPOPRTjTrU">pic.twitter.com/LPOPRTjTrU</a>
Back at school in the fall, the students of Erin Woods School put out a call for their hitchbots to come home.
Calling all Hitchbots! Calling all Hitchbots! It's time to head home. Back to Erin Woods we go! <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/hitchbotphonehome?src=hash">#hitchbotphonehome</a> <a href="https://t.co/Xq5vc1fxxp">pic.twitter.com/Xq5vc1fxxp</a>
But unfortunately, none of the 'bots have found their way back. (Canada, if you see a hitchbot, give it a ride to Calgary, eh?) Either the cold weather has been their demise or they've gone rogue, as we know from the movies that robots sometimes do.
Undeterred and still inspired, the students are already looking ahead and planning new ways to adapt the hitchbot experiment next year.
Be sure to keep an eye out while on your own 2017 road trip adventures.
Follow the Erin Woods hitchbots on Twittter @HitchbotWoods.
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See what happened when grade 4 and 5 Calgary students took a chance on the kindness of strangers.
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http://web.archive.org/web/20161229151611id_/http://www.cbc.ca/2017/reconciling-canada-s-150th-why-2017-should-start-with-tears-1.3904865
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Reconciling Canada's 150th: Why 2017 should start with tears
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20161229151611
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At Gord Downie's recent performance of Secret Path in Halifax, I stood on the side of the stage, eyes fixed on the crowd in the hall. I watched as the room shed a collective tear — glasses pushed aside, furtive eye wipes by burly looking men, bodies slumped low in their seats.
They were feeling our untold national history, awakening to 150 years of supposed greatness. Canada exposed.
As we look to the future and this era of reconciliation, we should not be afraid of those tears.
To the contrary, we need to seek them out.
In less than two weeks, the clock will tick over from 2016 to 2017 and Canada will begin to celebrate its 150th birthday. Candles will be lit on novelty-sized cakes. Fireworks will grace the sky.
But as those candles are lit, my mind will be on a different birthday celebration: the celebrations we held at the end of the National Events during the course of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's work. At the close of these events, we lit candles and sang happy birthday in rooms full of survivors and their families.
We remembered all of those children who grew up without birthdays in the residential schools. We tried to give them back something stolen from them in their childhoods.
At the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, millions of records document Canada's violence towards Indigenous peoples. It is a history filled with unimaginable pain and sorrow; abuse and rape; neglect and the attack on love. It is a history of state-sanctioned child abduction and the steady, deliberate and ever-so-patient destruction of Indigenous nations across this country.
If it sounds bleak, it's because it is. If it sounds horrifying, it's because that is also true. If it sounds like an exaggeration, it's not.
This history is only now starting to emerge from the shadows and remains largely misunderstood — that is, unless you are an Indigenous person on the receiving end of it.
How will this celebration of Canada's history reconcile with the history experienced by Indigenous peoples in this coming year? Will this be a turning point in our national journey towards reconciliation or will this be a celebration of the status quo?
Indigenous peoples have long called this place called Canada home. The names fill our maps — Winnipeg, Saskatchewan, Esquimalt, Keewatin, Wetaskiwin to name but a few. Even the name "Canada" comes from the Iroquoian peoples — Kanata.
This land was also shared for millennia. It was shared with millions of buffalo, billions of birds and seas that teemed with what once seemed to be limitless fish, whales and sea life. Forests grew rich and strong while along our coasts 800-year-old cedars that celebrated multiple 150th anniversaries towered over the landscape.
In the creation of Canada we signed treaties of peace and friendship; agreements to continue the sharing of this land as we had for so long.
But we as a nation have not shared well. For Canada, "sharing" equated to the destruction of Indigenous languages and the disavowal of the wisdom and knowledge of generations. It meant the destruction of Indigenous families and communities, ceremonial lodges set on fire, sacred pipes passed through generations destroyed, ceremonies outlawed.
We also have not shared this land well with all other forms of life. In my own short life I have witnessed the collapse of fisheries on the East and West Coast and forests that have been stripped of life. We now only see buffalo behind fences and in protected areas.
The path that we have walked upon for the last 150 years of Canadian history is not sustainable. Changing rights frameworks, such as the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, demand we change our actions. And the environment will collapse around us if we do not take bold and immediate action.
So what is the alternative?
Looking hard to the future demands we explore some very fundamental questions about how we have carried ourselves as a nation.
This is the time to be thinking long term: an opportunity to project forward and dream of a better future for our country.
What would our future look like if we finally start listening hard to the original inhabitants of this land? To date, we have been quick to throw this wisdom aside.
Many Indigenous peoples speak of the seven generations — the idea that we exist within a continuum of action — where we are at once accountable for the actions of our ancestors who walked before us while also being accountable to those generations that will inherit the earth.
It is time for this idea to permeate Canadian society. We need to move beyond short-sighted four-year mandates and start thinking about how we can pull together as a society to make visionary changes. We need to start thinking about 100-year plans for reconciliation and the future of our country — and we need to create the structures that will help us stay on track. The recent Federal announcement of a process to establish a National Council on Reconciliation is a positive step in this direction.
But herein lies the danger: if we are not fully aware of what we need to move away from — the treatment of Indigenous peoples and the destruction of our natural environment — then we risk repeating the mistakes of the past.
That's precisely why Canada 150 needs to be a break in the continuum of this country's story. Somehow, we as a country need to feel the weight of the harms we have inflicted if we are truly going to have a shot at celebrating Canada's 300th.
This is why, as we approach 2017, we need to seek out tears. These are not the sobs that reduce us to paralysis. They are the kind of tears that show us we are human — that at our core we can be guided by a common sense of humanity.
These are the tears the elders speak of — the tears that wash away pain and help move us forward. These are the tears that rise to the sky and fall as rain to wash our streets, clean the air, replenish our rivers and fill our glasses. These are the tears that bring life to the young buds that push from the ground each spring and guard babies inside the mother's womb.
Until we each shed a tear for our history, we will not know who we are as a nation.
Ry Moran is the first Director of the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation. Through the Truth and Reconciliation commission, he helped gather thousands of statements from residential school survivors and millions of documents. Moran is a proud member of the Métis Nation.
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What could our future look like if we listen to the original inhabitants of this land? Ry Moran, the first Director of the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, walks us through his vision.
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Troll Week - The Trolliest Trolls So Far
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20161229153826
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Look, trolls. We're all seasoned World of Warcraft / EVE online players here. Plus, we read Fark and Digg. This means that your feeble attempts at trolling would pass as polite, heartwarming and insightful commentary on the message boards we frequent every day. Capisci? If you want to get your paws on those Troll Week prizes, including the $700 in cash, you're going to have to do better than that.
Some of you are showing promise, though. Here are some of the Troll Week highlights so far:
FakePeteCashmore on First NYC Mash Meet Approaches
Awesome.Adam, don't forget I'm flying in from London (I'm bringing the bongs after all.) You said you were going to bring some hemp? How strong is American cannabis? Do you think there will be enough hits for everyone?I can already tell this is going to be a good time. Hopefully Zuckerberg shows up (said he had a meeting with Google but he would try to make it.)
BRIX on the Prediction Markets:
I predict that I'll now bounce from Mashable.. *yawn*I also predict that tomorrow the 40+ Tools For Google Calendar link will still be broken.
garethjax on Blog Rush Phase 2
Those filthy, lice-ridden, mangy lepers, ugly shampooers, bald condors, male suffragettes, stale croissants, memory dumps, stack heaps, illegal operations, leftist midgets of blogrush, suspended my bloody blog.I graciously demand reintroduction, please.
ACafourek on the WhoIs Debate
Well, in observance of Troll Week, i say that if someone wants to look up my personal info and come creep around my apartment, I say let 'em come! I'll shove my 200GB HD up their back-end user support center!That'll teach them to touch my ICANN...I think it should be UCANNT!
Mark on Breaking Google To Announce GPhone Plans
Ha Ha Ha!! All those lemmings who went out and bought an iPhone are gonna be crying when the gPhone comes out. Losers.Ryan King on Internet Giants Compete For The Ugliest Halloween Logo
Summary of this post:"A bunch of companies tried to do halloween logos, but they're ugly. Other companies didn't try so those companies are boring."Tough job you have there.
Nate on Breaking Google To Announce GPhone Plans
Hang on, hang on...Are you stupid? You have even linked to a previous post where you claimed that "details will be available in two weeks", are you Sergey Brin in disguise just trying to keep interest in the Googlesphere whilst you can put out nothing but extremely boring updates to Gmail?Fish slaps all around!
mrshl on Google's Open Social
This post was completely free of content. The coup de grace was your decision not to elaborate on the weakness of Google's solution vs. Facebook. Will Google's distributed approach best Facebook's walled garden?Mashable's expert analysis: "Nope."
Think on GMail Gloats About its Superior Spam Protection
Pete, spammers don't generally send penis-enlargement e-mails to men that don't need them. Perhaps it's time to take a closer look at yourself.
If that's the best you can do, we're just gonna create fake accounts, write *much* cooler comments, and take the $700 for ourselves. Or you can try a bit harder and really earn that money!
SENATUS, we will ask people to network like they haven't before. We are a network that also does seed funding like an incubator, we also invest in member projects, ask members to act on creating a virtuous cycle that leads to an effective collaborative environment. Visit us at our staging area within facebook and you'll understand why.
WordHugger, FantasyVent and Mojo Energy Drink
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Look, trolls. We're all seasoned World of Warcraft / EVE online players here. Plus, we read Fark and Digg. This means that your feeble attempts at trolling would pass as polite,...
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Digsby First to Support Facebook Chat
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20161229155719
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New(ish) chat tool Digsby is probably amongst the most curious of the recent entrants to the market, because of its all inclusive approach to communication—not just chat. It supports all the major chat services, and also pulls in your email messages and status updates across various services as well.
To stay in line with its cool take on desktop communication, Digsby has just announced Facebook Chat support. I'll go ahead and say that I prefer using Digsby for Facebook chat as opposed to chatting on Facebook, for all the obvious reasons—as slick as Facebook's chat window actually is, it's far easier to be able to chat directly with Facebook friends using Digsby.
This is the first multi-access chat service to support Facebook's recently launched chat tool, and it's still pretty new to even Digsby. Don't be surprised if you see a but here or there.
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New(ish) chat tool Digsby is probably amongst the most curious of the recent entrants to the market, because of its all inclusive approach to communication—not just chat. It sup...
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Twitter is Not Your Average Social Network
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20161229164032
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A study conducted by Harvard Business Review reveals that most Twitter users don't actually use the service much, or even at all. In fact, 10% of active users are responsible for over 90% of all Tweets.
According to the research, conducted on a random sample of about 300,000 Twitter users in May 2009, 25% of Twitter users don't tweet at all, while 50% of users tweet less than once every 74 hours. Active users, on the other hand, tweet a lot, which makes Twitter a lot more like Wikipedia than an average social network (see graph below, courtesy of HBR).
Although this may sound strange at first, Twitter really is more like Wikipedia than, say, Facebook. Twitter is not so much about connecting with your friends, it's about broadcasting information. Although it doesn't necessarily take much creativity to create a tweet, only the most creative users actually persist in tweeting every day over a longer time period.
However, Twitter is also similar to a instant messaging tool, which should have a very different curve, with a larger proportion of users contributing to the number of overall tweets. It seems that Twitter's micropublishing component is winning over its chatting component.
The Harvard Business Review study reveals another interesting tidbit: men seem to follow men more than women on Twitter. There are more women than men on twitter - approximately 55% of all users are female - but an average man will follow a man in 65% of all cases, while a woman will follow a man in 56% of cases. It's hard to pull any meaningful conclusions from this anomaly, except one: Twitter is different than other social networks. But you already knew that.
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A study conducted by Harvard Business Review reveals that most Twitter users don't actually use the service much, or even at all. In fact, 10% of active users are responsible fo...
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National Geographic Explores Gender Through New Issue, Documentary
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20161229171818
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In an effort to shed more light on a topic that has been at the center of social and political debates all year, National Geographic will be debuting a new magazine and accompanying documentary dedicated to examining gender around the world.
"National Geographic is almost 130 years old, and we have been covering cultures, societies and social issues for all of those years. It struck us, listening to the national conversation, that gender was at the center of so many of these issues in the news," Susan Goldberg, editorial director of National Geographic Partners and editor in chief of National Geographic magazine, told NBC Out.
Avery Jackson, a nine-year-old girl from Missouri, graces the cover of the magazine, making her the first transgender person to be on the cover of National Geographic.
"We wanted to look at how traditional gender roles play out all over the world, but also look into gender as a spectrum. There's lots of coverage on celebrities, but there wasn't an understanding on real people and the issues we face every day in classrooms or workplaces in regards to gender."
The magazine issue, titled "Gender Revolution," covers a wide range of topics, from examinations of traditional gender roles and rituals of manhood or womanhood, to conversations with people who do not identify with these traditional roles. While putting together this January issue, National Geographic spoke with more than 100 children and teens around the world.
"Youths are articulate and smart and key observers, and they don't have a social veil. They'll tell you what they think, and that is a true reflection of how societies really are. It's harder to get more candid responses out of adults. We wanted to understand how gender plays out in society, and what are the limits, or lack of limits, they think they have because of their gender," Goldberg said.
Goldberg told NBC Out there was a stark pattern of young girls, regardless of where they were located in the world, telling National Geographic that they felt they were not treated equally because they were female.
"It's heartbreaking that, almost in 2017, 9-year-old girls, no matter they live, already see their potentials limited."
Goldberg hopes that one of the things readers take away from the issue is a deeper understanding of the gender spectrum and those who do not identify with traditional gender binaries. As part of that hope, the issue begins with a glossary of a multitude of terms related to the subject of gender identity, including definitions for "genderfluid," "intersex" and "transgender."
The topic of transgender and gender-nonconforming individuals is further explored in an accompanying two-hour documentary hosted by Katie Couric, also titled "Gender Revolution". In the documentary, Couric speaks to the parents of trans kids, people undergoing gender-confirming surgery and individuals who are intersex.
"It's hard to avoid hearing about some aspect of gender these days. Every time you check your phone, turn on the TV or scan Twitter, there's another story that's challenging our preconceived notions of what gender is, how it's determined and the impact these new definitions are having on society," Couric said in a statement. "I set out on a journey to try to educate myself about a topic that young people are living with so effortlessly—and get to know the real people behind the headlines. Because the first step to inclusiveness and tolerance is understanding."
The documentary also contains interviews with various activists, including Professor Kristina Olson, who is conducting a 20-year study of hundreds of young transgender and gender-nonconforming kids; Georgiann Davis, an activist for intersex individuals; and Gavin Grimm, who's involved in a Supreme Court case that could determine whether transgender people will be able to have equal bathroom access.
At the core of both the magazine and documentary, however, is a focus on everyday individuals, something Goldberg and other editors at National Geographic specifically sought to accomplish.
"What I really like about the story about people who identify on the gender spectrum is that it isn't about famous people. It's about regular people who are making this journey. I commend their bravery for letting us into their lives," Goldberg said.
The documentary "Gender Revolution" will premiere in February. Further information regarding National Geographic's "Gender Revolution" series will be available here starting January 3.
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In its latest issue and a new documentary film, National Geographic explores gender around the world.
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http://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/at-the-new-museum-we-all-have-gone-a-little-bit-insane-1403579823
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http://web.archive.org/web/20161229173331id_/http://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/at-the-new-museum-we-all-have-gone-a-little-bit-insane-1403579823
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At the New Museum, 'We All Have Gone a Little Bit Insane'
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20161229173331
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This summer, "marathon museum troubadour" surely ranks among the city's oddest jobs.
As part of the New Museum's solo exhibition devoted to the Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson, a group of 15 musicians have been playing a single song all day, every day the museum is open. When the gig ends along with the show at the end of the month, they estimate it will have been performed roughly 6,000 times, for 308 hours, and with the help of several dozen gallons of beer.
"I understood what I was going to be doing," said Asher Kurtz, a 22-year-old graduate of the Berklee College of Music who now lives in Bushwick, Brooklyn, "but I didn't realize what that would really mean."
Since the exhibit's May opening, 10 of the musicians have been singing and strumming acoustic guitars, any time the museum is open, with two others cycling through short breaks and a few additional performers on-call. Otherwise, the star of the show is "Take Me Here by the Dishwasher: Memorial for a Marriage," a song about three minutes long, to be played over and over. Its lyrics draw on dialogue from a scene in a 1977 Icelandic film, starring Mr. Kjartansson's parents, that is projected onto a wall in the room.
"As a musician, I've had all kinds of gigs, and this is one of the strangest things I've ever done," said Kenji Herbert, 26, from Crown Heights.
"We all have gone a little bit insane," Mr. Kurtz said.
The troubadours answered a call put out to friends of the museum staff. It didn't take long to fill up the roster, even though the particulars of the job were unknown. Chief among them was the prospect of enduring a single song in heavy rotation Wednesdays through Sundays, when the New Museum is open seven to 10 hours a day.
"When lying down, I've started listening to white noise," said Graham Corrigan, 25, from Prospect Heights. "There's a guy who does rain sounds that I've downloaded. That's helped, but it's definitely there. It carries over."
Spencer Stewart, 23, from Bedford-Stuyvesant, agreed. "It's with me all the time," he said, "but I don't see it as a nuisance. Sometimes it just comes up from the depths of my consciousness to say hi and remind me that it's not going away."
The song, luckily, features lilting melodies and lush, pastoral chords scored by Mr. Kjartansson and his collaborator Kjartan Sveinsson, a former member of the Icelandic band Sigur Ros.
"It's always in my head, and that does get tiresome," Mr. Corrigan said, "but musically I haven't really gotten sick of the song. It was designed to have all these interlocking parts, so depending on where you're standing in the room or who you're next to, it's a totally different experience."
For their daily performance, the troubadours are arranged across the fourth floor of the museum, singing and strumming on an assemblage of homey furniture (tattered mattresses, a cast-off couch, threadbare chairs) or else wandering around to stay limber. They are encouraged by Mr. Kjartansson to drink beer from bottles that accumulate during the course of the day, to achieve the ambience of guys playing guitar at home alone.
"When we met," Kevin Johnston said of Messrs. Kjartansson and Sveinsson, "they brought us all little Icelandic bottles of schnapps, and we had a morning toast. It set the whole tone of the piece."
Mr. Kurtz remembered a suggestion from Mr. Kjartansson that he has puzzled over ever since: "Ragnar said it's supposed to be mind-blowingly boring."
"It becomes theirs," said Margot Norton, the New Museum assistant curator who hired the troubadours. "It's like this living artwork that can transform as it goes along."
Museum-goer reactions have ranged from indifference to tears.
"There's been a lot of crying," Mr. Corrigan said, noting the emotional lyrics referencing the artist's estranged parents in their happier early years. "It takes you out of there. You can be playing this thing over and over again and lose sight of what it can do to a person."
Other audience members grow interested in the musicians themselves.
"I got a girl's number," said Mr. Herbert. "She just slipped it into my boots, which were lying next to me."
Even the museum workers have been struck. "It's hard to let go when you're here every day," said Ferdinand Hoyos, a New Museum guard who visits the piece, which closes on June 29, in his regular rotation. "It's magnetic."
Mr. Stewart, who like his fellow troubadours is an aspiring musician, said he was pleased to turn down other paying jobs, such as working at a juice bar, in favor of this one. Despite the grind of the repeat performances, the museum's ambience is noticeably different from others as a result, he believes.
"At the Met or MoMA, people rush around with their phone taking pictures," he said. "Here, people sometimes lay on the floor. There have been people who have stayed for a couple hours, just looked and listened."
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As part of the New Museum's solo exhibition devoted to the Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson, a group of 15 musicians have played a single song all day, every day the museum is open.
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http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-social-media-resolutions-2016-20151229-column.html
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http://web.archive.org/web/20161231003114id_/http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-social-media-resolutions-2016-20151229-column.html
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Social media 2016: Resolutions you can keep
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20161231003114
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Every year it's pretty much the same thing. 10-9-8-7-6 … Oooh, I guess I should think of some New Year's resolutions.
5-4-3-2-1 … Happy New Year!
And next thing you know, it's May and you haven't lost those 10 pounds or left work on time.
By all means, eat healthier and be better at delegating at work, but why not make some resolutions that are not only easy, but easy to keep? There's where I come in with my recommended list of simple social media resolutions for 2016.
Stop sharing things without doing just a little research.
Guess what? Mark Zuckerberg is not giving you $4.5 million, but judging by all of the people sharing this nonsense on Facebook, you'd never know it. Nothing angers me more than people who share incorrect content without taking a quick second to Google it.
Resolve to pay attention and respond.
If someone sends you a message and a response would be helpful/appreciated, respond to it. It amazes me that, even in 2015 and 2016, people don't seize every opportunity to connect with their audience. Whether you run a business or are just trying to grow your community/following, this is an easy one.
Try something new in social media.
If you're pretty good at using Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, maybe it's time to go outside your comfort zone and sign up for a new network. Snapchat is all the rage, and contrary to what you may have heard, you don't have to be 15 to enjoy it. Ello is a tiny social network that's easy to use and has a passionate community.
Try not to take everything so personally.
The Internet is full of mean trolls who exist mainly to get a rise out of you. It's an unfulfilling online life, but it's one many people choose. I see people get so frustrated that they stop participating, and when you do that, the trolls win. Never let the trolls win.
Apple1234 is a terrible password.
I know the requirements are at least eight characters with one capital letter and one number, but you should resolve to make all of your passwords secure. Don't repeat them, and don't make them easy to remember, despite how convenient that is. Apple1234 is a terrible password, but n!QsLWkH%Dz5[.4j is a terrific one.
Update your settings every three months.
Change your passwords, make sure you didn't grant access to your account through a service you no longer use, look for new settings deep in the preferences menu. Assuming you spend 15 minutes once every three months, that's a total of 60 minutes a year. Your accounts and private information are worth that little investment.
Be selective in the accounts you follow back.
I know so many people who have thousands of Facebook friends and LinkedIn connections, and they hardly know any of them. It's much easier to just hit accept than it is to scrutinize, but it's better to be picky in the long run. Your social media, no matter what platform, will be better and more interesting if you care enough to pick and choose whom you follow. And there's no rule that forces you to follow back those who follow you.
I'd like to start 2016 by thanking each and every one of you for reading and sharing So Social. Every time I see someone use the hashtag #SoSocial, it brings a smile to my face. I couldn't do this without you. Happy New Year.
What questions do you have about social media? Tweet them to @scottkleinberg with hashtag #SoSocial. He might select yours for use in a future column.
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Every year it's pretty much the same thing. 10-9-8-7-6 … Oooh, I guess I should think of some New Year's resolutions.
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Jehovah's Witness Church Release Statement
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20161231023432
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The Jehovah’s Witness Church has released a statement following the untimely death of
, who officially converted to the religion in 2003.
“We are saddened to hear about the death of Prince Rogers Nelson, who was baptized as one of Jehovah s Witnesses in 2003,” a church spokesperson, David A. Semonian, said in a statement obtained by PEOPLE.
Semonian said that Prince “found fulfillment as a Witness and in sharing his faith with others.”
The statement added: “We do not have any details regarding his medical condition or the cause of his death. Our thoughts are with his family and friends, particularly his fellow worshippers in the Saint Louis Park congregation of Jehovah s Witnesses in Minnesota. We hope that all find comfort in the Bible s promise of a future time when death, pain, and tears will be no more. Revelation 21:3, 4.”
Behind Prince’s Paisley Park home on Audubon Road, the Jehovah’s Witness Church was seen with the lights off in the days after his death. Orange cones had been set up to prevent people from entering the building driveway.
Prince’s conversion to the Jehovah’s Witness religion actually started, in a roundabout way, with Graham Central Station, the funk group started by Sly and the Family Stone bassist Larry Graham after his tenure in that band.
News of Prince’s conversion circulated in 2001 (the Associated Press was the first large outlet to report it, apparently based off an interview Prince gave to Gotham magazine), but people seemed to have a hard time believing the man who wrote songs like “Jack U Off” and “Sexy MF” was now a devout Jehovah’s Witness until October of 2003.
On Oct. 5, 2003, a couple in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, opened their door at 2 p.m. to find Prince standing on their doorstep, Bible in hand. Needless to say, they were shocked. Compounding their surprise: They were Jewish, it was Yom Kippur and the Vikings were playing.
“My first thought is, ‘Cool, cool, cool. He wants to use my house for a set,'” the woman, identified only as Rochelle, recalled to the paper. “Then they [Prince was accompanied by Graham on this particular outing] start in on this Jehovah’s Witnesses stuff.”
“They stayed for about 25 minutes,” Rochelle continued. “Left us a pamphlet.”
• Reporting by ALEX HEIGL, ROSE MINUTAGLIO and ELAINE ARADILLAS
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The singer converted in 2001 after two years of study with former Sly & the Family Stone bassist Larry Graham
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NYPOST.COM Sports: New York Giants
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20000817053750
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JACKSONVILLE - At this time a year ago, the Giants were not especially impressed with Andre Weathers. The sixth-round draft pick out of Michigan did not appear ready to make a major contribution, but then came the first regular-season game.
Weathers intercepted a pass from Trent Dilfer and returned it for a touchdown to give the Giants a 17-13 upset victory over the Buccaneers in Tampa Bay.
The Giants learned that day that Weathers was not a strong practice player, but that when given the chance, he could make big plays. Weathers, though, tore up his left knee in mid-November and was lost for the remainder of the season. The Giants were hoping Weathers would be ready for a full load this summer, but it hasn't turned out that way. That's too bad, as Weathers has good size (6-foot, 190) and would have been in prime position to fit into the all-important nickel back spot.
"He's just not there yet, and it's kind of an enigma because I think he's capable when healthy," defensive coordinator John Fox said. "The knee's fine but just getting it strengthened takes time. I saw enough last season to where I felt comfortable, because he's smart, he's aware, he's got some size, some cover ability when healthy. He does make some plays, even hobbling. It would be a good thing for us if he does come on."
Fox has been forced to improvise, which is why Emmanuel McDaniel is at present the nickel back, with Reggie Stephens and rookie Ralph Brown next in line in the pass-defense packages. Weathers will play tonight vs. the Jaguars, and perhaps he can regain his form. McDaniel, 28, has bounced around with four teams and has started just two NFL games. Stephens was activated for one game for the Giants last season.
There is a chance an attempt will be made to convert Weathers into a safety, as the Giants are dangerously thin at that position. "He's shown me enough where it's not as far-fetched as it would have been a year ago," Fox said.
Once again, Jim Fassel is playing it conservative with his injuries, as several players will sit out tonight's game vs. Jaguars with nagging ailments. Those who won't play: FB Greg Comella (back), WR Joe Jurevicius (shoulder), TE Dan Campbell (hamstring), DT Keith Hamilton (hamstring), LB Mike Barrow (knee) and T Mike Rosenthal (shoulder). ... Last year's Giants-Jaguars pre-season game was bizarre. Playing at home, the Giants opened up a 24-7 halftime lead but then lost the ball on fumbles on six consecutive possessions in the second half. The Giants held on to win 27-20. ... Starters will play the first half. Giants face the Jags again, but not until Dec. 23, the final game of the regular season, so there's no need to hold anything back. "Because we play them again so late in the season, I won't worry about our play selections," Fassel said. "I probably won't even view the tape of this pre-season game in December." ... Giants GM Ernie Accorsi took special notice of the retirement of Jerry West, the Lakers executive vice president of basketball operations. Accorsi has a long and deep admiration of West, whom he considers "the model" for how a front-office executive should be.
"This guy is on the road all winter, they have a lot more games to scout than we do, he's in Utah In the middle of January on a Wednesday night, working," Accorsi said. "He always talked about every summer going back to Cabin Creek, to walk the streets, see where he was from, to keep in touch where he was from. The other thing I can identify with is he said he got to a point where he couldn't even watch the games. I'm almost there. I thought he was so humble and did such a great job for so many years. I think he's a model, I really do."
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New York Post Online: New York Giants
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Editorials: MORE MICROSOFT MADNESS
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20010221002109
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The plaintiffs - the federal government and assorted state attorneys general - had hoped to leapfrog that appellate court in favor of an expedited review by the high court.
That is to say, they intended that Microsoft be denied a due-process point critical to its defense - the better to hang Bill Gates high. Happily, the Supreme Court has greater regard for the rule of law than does the Clinton-Gore
The administration has already done much damage. Financial markets have been unstable since U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson's ruling last spring that the firm was an illegal monopoly and his subsequent order that the company be split in two.
But what Judge Jackson really found was this: Gates and his company had become too successful to suit the court.
Will the appeals court agree?
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New York Post Online: Post Opinion: Editorials
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http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/14/washington/14rogers.html
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http://web.archive.org/web/20060613034435id_/http://www.nytimes.com:80/2006/05/14/washington/14rogers.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5088&en=47206ba3010f23d6&ex=1305259200&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
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In Kentucky Hills, a Homeland Security Bonanza
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20060613034435
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WASHINGTON, May 13 The Department of Homeland Security has invested tens of millions of dollars and countless hours of labor over the last four years on a seemingly simple task: creating a tamperproof identification card for airport, rail and maritime workers.
Yet nearly two years past a planned deadline, production of the card, known as the Transportation Worker Identification Credential, has yet to begin.
Instead, the road to delivering this critical antiterrorism tool has taken detours to locations, companies and groups often linked to Representative Harold Rogers, a Kentucky Republican who is the powerful chairman of the House subcommittee that controls the Homeland Security budget.
It is a route that has benefited Mr. Rogers, creating jobs in his home district and profits for companies that are donors to his political causes. The congressman has also taken 11 trips including six to Hawaii on the tab of an organization that until this week was to profit from a no-bid contract Mr. Rogers helped arrange. Work has even been set aside for a tiny start-up company in Kentucky that employs John Rogers, the congressman's son.
"Something stinks in Corbin," said Jay M. Meier, senior securities analyst at MJSK Equity Research in Minneapolis, which follows the identification card industry, referring to the Kentucky community of 8,000 that has perhaps benefited the most from Mr. Rogers's interventions. "And it is the sickest example of what is wrong with our homeland security agenda that I can find."
Mr. Rogers said that any mandates imposed on the TWIC program, as it is commonly called, have been motivated by a desire to end the delays.
"I have been extremely frustrated with the slow, wandering pace of the program," he said in a statement. He declined to comment beyond the statement, which was issued Thursday.
Asked about the legislative mandates and the delays in starting up the program, Darrin Kayser, a Homeland Security spokesman, said, "We are not going to get into finger-pointing back and forth." He added, quoting the department secretary, Michael Chertoff, "This is an initiative which languished for too long."
Mr. Rogers, 68, whom The Lexington Herald-Leader last year called the Prince of Pork, has never been shy about using clout gained over 13 House terms to steer federal dollars to his sparsely populated, poor corner of southeastern Kentucky.
"We see Hal pretty often," Mayor Amos Miller of Corbin, a Republican, said in an interview. "And he always brings good news."
Corbin was settled as a railroad depot for nearby coal mines, and its first claim to fame came with Col. Harland Sanders, who began serving up dishes of fried chicken there in the 1930's. Mr. Rogers has made it a mission to create a new growth industry: domestic security.
"Our people will be on the front lines in the war against terrorism worldwide," Mr. Rogers told Corbin leaders in 2003, as he announced plans to build a plant for NucSafe, a radiation detection equipment company.
Mr. Rogers began his push even before the 2001 terrorist attacks, when he was elevated, in 1995, just after Republicans took control of Congress, to the so-called College of Cardinals, the elite body of chairmen of House appropriations subcommittees that help control the federal budget.
The Clinton administration needed Congressional backing and money to fix problems it was having in printing a new fraud-resistant green card for permanent legal immigrants. To win Mr. Rogers's endorsement, administration officials offered to set up the centralized card production plant in Corbin.
"It clearly was a convergence of interests," said Doris Meissner, then commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which has since been renamed and merged into Homeland Security. The $5.2 million plant, run by contract employees, opened in 1998.
The transportation worker identification card, first proposed in 2002, would be an identity card equivalent of a maximum security prison. Not only would it be tamperproof, it would eventually allow transportation workers to be positively identified by a fingerprint in less than half a second. To ensure security, the card and the automated reader at the port entrance gate would have to communicate, like two small computers.
But within months after the plans for the card were announced, Mr. Rogers started to intervene. He inserted language into appropriations bills that effectively pushed the government to use the same patented green card technology and to produce this new card in Corbin.
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A Kentucky congressman has benefited from a multimillion-dollar program to produce an ID card.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/18/international/europe/18parrot.html
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http://web.archive.org/web/20060624184153id_/http://www.nytimes.com:80/2006/01/18/international/europe/18parrot.html?ex=1295240400&en=781a901adcf0dc67&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss
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Kiss and Tell: She Kisses and the Parrot Tells
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20060624184153
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LONDON, Jan. 17 - "Hiya, Gary!" the parrot trilled flirtatiously whenever Chris Taylor's girlfriend answered her cellphone.
But Mr. Taylor, the owner of the parrot, did not know anyone named Gary. And his girlfriend, Suzy Collins, who had moved into his apartment a year earlier, swore that she didn't, either. She stuck to her story even after the parrot, Ziggy, began making lovey-dovey, smooching noises when it heard the name Gary on television.
And so it went until the fateful day just before Christmas when, as Mr. Taylor and Ms. Collins snuggled together on the sofa, Ziggy blurted out, "I love you, Gary," his voice a dead ringer for Ms. Collins's.
"It sent a chill down my spine," Mr. Taylor, a 30-year-old computer programmer from Leeds, told British reporters on Monday. "I started laughing, but when I looked at Suzy I could tell something was up. Her face was like beet root and she started to cry."
Gary, it turned out, was Ms. Collins's former colleague and current secret lover. And not only had Ms. Collins, a 25-year-old call-center worker, been cheating on Mr. Taylor, but she had been doing it in front of the bird.
"It makes my stomach churn to think about what he might have seen or heard them doing," Mr. Taylor said of Ziggy, as reported in The Daily Telegraph and other newspapers.
He had owned Ziggy, named after the David Bowie character, since Ziggy was a chick, eight years ago, and looked on with pride as Ziggy began mimicking everything he heard - the television, people's voices, the vacuum cleaner, the doorbell. But when it became clear that Ziggy could not be taught to stop saying "Gary," Mr. Taylor found a new home for the bird through a dealer.
"I felt like I'd been stabbed through the heart every time my phone rang or he heard the name on the telly," he said.
As for Ms. Collins, she and Mr. Taylor split up the evening of the "I love you, Gary" incident.
Tracked down by the newspapers at the home of friends, Ms. Collins (who has since split up with Gary, too) said that while she was not proud of what had happened, she and Mr. Taylor had been having problems and would have broken up anyway. Nor, she said, had she ever taken to the bird, resenting Mr. Taylor for preferring to stay home with Ziggy rather than go out with her.
"I'm surprised to hear he's got rid of that bloody bird," Ms. Collins was quoted as saying. "He spent more time talking to it than he did to me." She added, speaking of Ziggy: "I couldn't stand him, and it looks now like the feeling was mutual."
Editors' Note: Jan. 21, 2006, An article on Wednesday about infidelity exposed by a chatty parrot described the way the parrot, owned by a man living with his girlfriend in Leeds, England, kept screeching the name of the woman's secret lover. When the parrot said "I love you, Gary," in what sounded like the woman's voice, her boyfriend (whose name is not Gary) broke up with her. Although the article reported that the information had been obtained from reports in The Daily Telegraph and other British newspapers, The Times could not verify the former couple's accounts because the information was given to the British press by a freelance journalist who charged for the account. The Times does not pay for information. The Times should have disclosed fully to readers why we relied on other news reports. Or, perhaps it would have been prudent, given that condition, for The Times to have resisted parroting the episode at all.
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Not only had Suzy Collins been cheating on her boyfriend, but she had been doing it in front of his bird.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/18/opinion/18schiff.html
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Our Little Women Problem
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20060628194203
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As it seems to be the way things are done around here, I asked my spouse's opinion. Could this working mother thing ever be mastered? "On two conditions," he said, but the rest of the sentence was drowned out by a wail from the other room, where the youngest had raced out of bed so fast that she had collided with her door.
She was also in the mood for poached eggs, which - my husband helpfully pointed out - Robert Novak was presumably not making this morning. If he was, I wonder if he too was under strict instructions to keep the yolks runny, and to position the eggs in the precise center of each slice of toast. The 5-year-old is a gourmand and a tyrant, equally exacting in her menus as she is stern in her conviction that mothers do not go to their offices on weekends.
This is especially galling as the little tyrant is named for a feminist icon, in a novel I clearly should have read more closely. Jo March represented many of our first encounters with a capable, independent-minded heroine. She stands alone in a field crowded with submissive women.
She isn't sitting around with dwarfs or sweeping floors. She is waiting neither for a fairy godmother nor a handsome prince. She makes choices - and seemingly perverse ones, too. Perhaps most significantly, she is the first girl in literature with a room of her own.
Or so I remember it.
Writing in the May l6 New Republic, Deborah Friedell offers a startling revelation. I have misread "Little Women." It is true that Jo is spunky, thirsty for adventure and grappling with her "disappointment in not being a boy." It's also true that - 15 years later - she has entirely reconciled herself to her disappointment. Having relinquished her dreams, she looks from stout husband to unruly children and pronounces herself happier than she has ever been.
She is philosophical about her early ambition: "the life I wanted then seems selfish, lonely and cold to me now." One day she may well write a good book - as indeed she will, in a sequel - but she has no qualms. Nor does she care that she has kissed the tenure track goodbye.
How could I have got this so entirely wrong? It's like holding up Emma Bovary as an emblem of marital bliss. In part I have conflated the Jo of "Little Women" with the Jo of the sequels. And in part I've had help from Hollywood, which has filmed "Little Women" three times, and three times blessed Jo with both career and children.
Friedell feels that Alcott was not so much swayed by market pressures as she was eager to spare Jo her own fate. She lent her heroine the domestic bliss she would have preferred. (She also allows Jo the luxury of not working, something she could never afford.) So it was that from the proto-feminist, the single woman who put in 14-hour days at her desk, supported her extended family, and died of overwork, we got Rapunzel redux.
Two volumes later Jo indeed finds work she loves, and success, and money to spare. But the realization of her "wildest and most cherished dream" comes at a price. It is exhausting, and a strain on the domestic front. The feather duster brings more satisfaction than the fan mail. Alcott's message is loud and clear. Evidently it does not in fact require testosterone to deliver an opinion.
It helps, though. "First of all," resumed my husband, swabbing the counter, "two parents have to know how to make breakfast." Yes, and 75 percent of male executives have non-working wives. Seventy-four percent of female executives have working husbands. Guess who's making breakfast? "And," he continued, "the women who manage well will be the ones whose fathers listened to them."
I suspect he's reading this stuff while I'm wielding the feather duster. But the research bears him out. Mr. Alcott was a case in point. John Munder Ross, clinical professor of medical psychology at Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons, is among those who have argued that for the Jos in this world to manage work and love, they need fathers who teach them to think - and to think that they deserve to marry their equals. Those men are as crucial to a girl's development, Ross holds, as the frantic mother who brings in a paycheck.
It could well be the route to the Hollywood version of "Little Women." Happy Father's Day.
Maureen Dowd is on book leave.Stacy Schiff is the author of "A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America" and a Pulitzer Prize winner.E-mail: schiff@nytimes.com
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To manage work and love, independent-minded women in this world need fathers who teach them to think.
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At an Industry Media Lab, Close Views of Multitasking
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20060719221927
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LOS ANGELES, May 14 In a sleek media lab hidden in a Los Angeles high-rise, some of the country's biggest media companies and their prominent clients are seeking to understand the state of the divided American attention span.
Monica Almeida/The New York Times
Observing the behavior in the test room of people using media devices.
The space looks like the most advanced of homes: the living room is outfitted with the latest in video technology, and in the kitchen, the refrigerator has a television monitor for leaving notes for the children, and for looking up recipes on the Internet.
The installation, the Emerging Media Lab in Los Angeles, is run by the Interpublic Group of Companies, a holding company for ad agencies as well as media buyers like Universal McCann and Initiative. Since February, clients like Sony, L'Oréal and Microsoft have been using it to figure out a central question vexing marketers: how do you reach consumers who seem to be doing so many things simultaneously?
People now surf the Internet while watching television. Their children instant-message friends while listening to music. They all talk on the phone and check their e-mail while they cook.
"Our research showed that people somehow managed to shoehorn 31 hours of activity into a 24-hour day," said Colleen Fahey Rush, executive vice president for research at MTV Networks, which worked with an online research company, OTX, last year. "That's from being able to do two things at once."
As media companies plunk down billions of dollars in advertising at the major networks' fall presentations this week, market researchers are still struggling to understand the realities of what has been called "concurrent media usage."
Thus far, the researchers have found some common ground, but differ widely in crucial areas of interpretation. They do seem to agree on two points: that this kind of multitasking does not apply only to young people and that the amount of time spent multitasking is rising across the board.
For advertisers, the challenge is getting their message across in one medium while the consumer is active at the same time in several others. The buzzword these days is "engagement" as in how engaged, or involved, the consumer is in a particular activity, a notion that is still relatively new in a media world that has for decades relied on stable indicators like the Nielsen ratings.
The question for programmers is whether it is possible to break through the clutter and offer material that commands more of their viewers' attention, and perhaps more advertising as a result.
In the Emerging Media Lab, major advertisers can observe engagement for themselves, watching consumers try new technologies or use old ones, through cameras that feed back into an observation room.
"Multitasking is not quantified yet," said Greg Johnson, the lab's executive director. "The metrics of all this is a big piece of what our clients want to know, and they want to know desperately. They don't know where their customers are, and it's our job to find them again and what they're doing."
Using the lab themselves, media executives can assess how their ads or other content appear on devices like portable video game players or cellphones.
"You can see things here in context," explained Lori Schwartz, the director of the lab project. Standing in the living room, she wielded a wireless mouse to navigate a media center, a flat-screen monitor on the wall that fed into the Internet, television channels, a DVD player, an Xbox 360 and a stereo system.
"For a lot of our clients, it is hard to keep up," Mr. Johnson said. "It's hard for them to know what to do next when every day there is something new a blog, a site. They know to move their dollars, but they don't know how much or what media to pick."
Last week, 40 executives from the Sony Corporation of America came to explore the lab's possibilities after one division had tested its video-on-demand service there. "It's another way for us to further understand how consumers are using new media," a Sony spokeswoman, Lisa Davis, said. "We expect the learning here to benefit all of our businesses."
David Sklaver, president of KSL Media, who buys advertising time for clients like Western Union and Bacardi, said multitasking was either "a blessing or a curse" for advertisers. "If someone is watching a TV drama and has CNN News on the Internet," he said, "it's most likely you don't have an engaged viewer." But on the other hand, someone watching a sports event on television could enhance the experience by simultaneously surfing the Internet for game statistics.
A widely cited study conducted last year at Ball State University in Indiana observed 400 people over a broad age range for a day, and found that 96 percent of them were multitasking about a third of the time they were using media. A university white paper recently estimated that consumers spend about nine hours a day in media use, most of it watching television.
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In a sleek Los Angeles lab, advertisers and media companies are researching Americans' propensity for "concurrent media usage."
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http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/08/fashion/08DRES.html
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http://web.archive.org/web/20060720020800id_/http://www.nytimes.com:80/2004/08/08/fashion/08DRES.html?ex=1249617600&en=fd45ddb83836abdf&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland
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Less Bling, More Elegance
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20060720020800
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hen she is not riveted by reruns of "Sex and the City" or pitching for her Staten Island softball team, Christina Roperti is inclined to dream of fashion. One recurring fantasy involves a long halter-topped crimson ball gown by Carolina Herrera. Ms. Roperti would snap it up in a heartbeat if her income ever permitted, she said, "but that's a long shot."
Ms. Roperti, 18, an intern at Elle Girl, splurges from time to time at sample sales and supplements her wardrobe at Express, where she tends to bypass casual items in favor of dresses and lace-bordered shirts. Nearly all her choices, she says, are inspired by her current celebrity role models, film world luminaries like Jennifer Aniston and Sofia Coppola.
That was not always the case. Just a couple of years ago, Ms. Roperti and many of her contemporaries were more apt to take style cues from the street-tough glamour of Jennifer Lopez, Avril Lavigne, Ashanti or Lil' Kim. "But lately people my age are trying to dress to avoid that clichéd punk or ghetto sort of style," Ms. Roperti said, "kind of going toward a more polished Hollywood aspect, more like an actress."
Ms. Roperti was in the vanguard of a trend that emerged throughout the spring and summer and is likely to be even more visible come fall, as teenage girls and young women head back to school or enter the work force. Many have already turned their backs on track suits, tank tops and bling, putting their money instead on the seed-pearl-studded camisoles, streamlined flats and unabashedly flirtatious party frocks currently favored by young film and television stars.
This shift in allegiance, from the world of music to that of film and television, comes just as a raft of pop artists like Eve, Missy Elliott and Foxy Brown have rolled out their own fashion lines. But while no one is suggesting that the extravagant designs of those stars are going to be ignored, "right now we see our readers looking more to film stars like Lindsay Lohan and Reese Witherspoon than they would to a Missy Elliott," said Brandon Holley, who is Ms. Roperti's boss as the editor in chief of Elle Girl.
Ms. Holley has drawn her conclusions from a series of dinner conversations and informal focus groups with young readers from Bangor, Me., to Beverly Hills. At such affairs, held twice a month, "the talk goes in lots of directions," she said. "But always, it comes back to shopping, and in particular what the celebrities on their favorite shows are wearing."
Hollywood beauties have exerted this sort of pull, to greater and lesser degrees, since well before Jean Harlow's day. But their influence, which waned in recent years, is returning with particular force a reaction, perhaps, to the renegade style of music stars, whose multiple piercings, tattoos and over-the-top wardrobes have begun to strike a jarring note. In style terms, at least, American society has entered a more conservative moment, as demonstrated by designers' recent embrace of suits, capelets and other starchy revivals from the Eisenhower years.
"Kids today are feeling less rebellious and more positive," said Sam Shahid, the creative director of the new Abercrombie & Fitch catalog, which is dense with photographs of aspiring young actors immaculately styled and groomed in the manner of 1950's screen idols. "These kids are interested in their futures and what they're going to do with their lives," added Mr. Shahid, who personally vetted many of the models for the company's new ad campaign. "They're not all trying to look like Britney Spears. They want something cleaner and more wholesome than that."
The focus on young Hollywood style has also been driven by the explosion of celebrity magazines like Us, In Touch and Star, aimed at young female readers and documenting every moment of a movie star's day, from the beach to the minimart to the Golden Globes.
Bonnie Fuller, the editorial director of American Media, who revamped Star this year as a glossy version of a supermarket tabloid, said that many of the young actresses covered by the magazine "fashion role models" like Ms. Lohan and Mischa Barton share a tendency to get "glammed up," and not just for special occasions. "They are covered in labels, but not in a funky way," she said. "Dressing up is part of their image and they are very aware of it."
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Many teenage girls and young women are turning their backs on track suits and tank tops and instead buying unabashedly flirtatious party frocks.
| 36.75 | 0.916667 | 3.333333 |
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http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/29/movies/29voic.html
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http://web.archive.org/web/20060908232427id_/http://www.nytimes.com:80/2004/10/29/movies/29voic.html?ei=5090&en=5fa918cca413ada1&ex=1256788800&partner=rssuserland&pagewanted=all&
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For the Iraqis Interviewed, Daily Life Is Better Today
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20060908232427
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rom April to September this year the producers of "Voices of Iraq" - Archie Drury, a former United States marine and gulf war veteran, and Eric Manes and Martin Kunert, two filmmakers educated at New York University - distributed 150 digital video cameras to Iraqi citizens and encouraged them to make their own movies.
The cameras were passed from hand to hand throughout the country and were used by more than 2,000 Iraqis. The resulting 450 hours have been edited down to this 85-minute documentary, a music-video-like collage (fittingly enough, since Mr. Manes and Mr. Kunert have both worked at MTV) of dirty jokes, angry rants, reminiscence and thoughtful testimony from a huge and diverse sampling of Iraqi men, women and children.
Except for a few Iraqi political and media figures, the speakers are not identified. For their brief moments on screen widows weep, children laugh and new college graduates dance and throw confetti. With no voice-over or narrative to hold it together, the film is dizzyingly chaotic, at times exuberant, at times numbing. The only continuing commentary comes from the American newspaper headlines that periodically appear at the bottom of the screen, usually in ironic counterpoint to the image. "Fear of Militias Forces Iraqis to Stay Home'' reads one headline under a busy street scene of people shopping and selling their wares.
With all this overwhelming stimuli scored to the throbbing rhythms of a Canadian-Iraqi hip-hop group called Euphrates, it takes a good hour to begin to notice that the general view of the American occupation being put forth by the speakers is positive - a majority of voices affirm that life under the American occupation, however precarious, is preferable to the tyranny of Saddam Hussein. How much of this is attributable to the filmmakers' editing choices, of course, is unknown. But if this film cannot claim to represent the political "truth" about the war - what film could? - it certainly provides a broad glimpse of daily life in Iraq. There are communities of former marsh dwellers in the south whose way of life was destroyed when Mr. Hussein drained the marshes to make policing the territory easier. In the north, Kurdish refugees who have been relocated to a stadium speak matter-of-factly of the atrocities they suffered under him.
The Washington Times recently included "Voices of Iraq" in a roundup of conservative-leaning documentaries while maintaining that the film was "neither partisan nor conservative in any meaningful sense." In the end, "Voices of Iraq'' reminds the viewer that, in cinema as in politics, every storyteller invents his own truth.
Opens today in Manhattan; Atlanta; New Orleans; Dallas; Los Angeles; San Francisco; Madison, Wis.; St. Louis; Minneapolis; and Washington
Filmed and directed by Iraqi citizens; edited and produced by Eric Manes, Martin Kunert and Archie Drury; released by Magnolia Films. At Landmark's Sunshine Cinema, 139-143 East Houston Street, East Village. Running time: 85 minutes. This film is not rated.
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If "Voices of Iraq" cannot claim to represent the political "truth" about the war, it certainly provides an unprecedented glimpse into the texture of daily life there.
| 17.323529 | 0.882353 | 6.352941 |
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http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/28/technology/28soft.html
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http://web.archive.org/web/20060913051320id_/http://www.nytimes.com:80/2006/04/28/technology/28soft.html?ex=1303876800&en=94a45d5d31d18318&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
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Is Microsoft Preparing a Big Attack?
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20060913051320
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SAN FRANCISCO, April 27 Microsoft reported strong third-quarter revenue growth on Thursday, but analysts said the company also telegraphed a significant increase in spending, an indication that it was preparing to take on its big online rivals, Google and Yahoo.
Microsoft's chief executive, Steven A. Ballmer, giving the keynote speech at a conference for Web developers and designers in Paris yesterday.
The company reported a 13 percent increase in sales for the quarter, to $10.9 billion, and a 16 percent rise in net income, to $2.98 billion, or 31 cents a share, from $2.56 billion, or 28 cents, in the period a year earlier.
The earnings were 2 cents a share below what analysts surveyed by Thomson First Call had forecast.
The chief financial officer for Microsoft, Chris Liddell, said: "Over all for the quarter, we are very happy with the continued market momentum we're seeing. Revenue is accelerating for the year."
Despite a bullish stance on revenue, Microsoft evidently surprised analysts by predicting significantly higher expenses in the next fiscal year. Its shares, which had gained 15 cents, to $27.25, in regular trading, fell on the expectation of higher expenses, dropping more than 6 percent after hours, to $25.50.
Executives also said they did not see any immediate increase in profit on the horizon even as Microsoft prepared for its largest release of new products in more than five years.
The company said once again that the update for its new operating system software, Windows Vista, would not be available until January.
For the first time, the company offered guidance on the coming year; its 2007 fiscal year starts in July.
Microsoft said revenue for 2007 would be $49.5 billion to $50.5 billion, with earnings expected to be $1.36 to $1.41 a share. Financial analysts were forecasting $1.53 a share. That guidance created some concern among securities analysts in a conference call with Mr. Liddell.
Richard G. Sherlund of Goldman Sachs, in a comment during the conference, said, "There is something really big here that we haven't put our fingers on."
Other analysts were more direct in their assessment.
"It looks like Microsoft is going to war with Google, and trying to get their product development back in track," said Eugene Munster of Piper Jaffray.
According to Mark Stahlman of Caris & Company, the fact that Microsoft plans to spend significantly more in 2007 was an indication of renewed aggressiveness in its competitive strategy and an indication that the company was returning to the kind of actions it exhibited before the Justice Department's antitrust lawsuit in the mid- and late 1990's.
"It's pretty clear that Bill is running the company again," Mr. Stahlman said, referring to Bill Gates, "and they are going to remake the business. They are being much more combative and much more strategically managed."
After Microsoft released its report, Mr. Sherlund issued a research note saying it appeared that the company planned to spend $2.4 billion more than he had expected in the 2007 fiscal year. He pointed to the costs of building the new Windows and Office Live online services, both intended to reposition the company to compete against Google and Yahoo.
When confronted with that figure during the question-and-answer session with analysts Thursday, Mr. Liddell only partly disputed the conclusion of several of them that Microsoft had begun preparing to "go to war" with its online search rivals.
"I would characterize it as a broad-based approach," he said. "There are some big numbers there, that is certainly true."
Several other analysts noted that Microsoft's expenses appeared to be running away even before 2007, many of them focusing on what they called "margin compression."
"It looks like a mess," said Brendan Barnicle, an analyst with Pacific Crest Securities, "and the big issue is margins and expenses, the big issue is the bottom line. It makes it hard to get very excited about the company's near-term prospects."
During the conference call, Mr. Liddell was optimistic about progress in the introduction of the next-generation Xbox 360 video game player. He said that a significant part of the increased spending this year was related to a push Microsoft is making in an effort to capitalize on a delay in Sony's PlayStation 3.
Microsoft now says it will ship 5 million to 5.5 million of the new Xbox systems in 2006. Sales of Xbox rose 85 percent, to $1.06 billion, in the quarter.
The company also noted that its search ad revenue fell during the quarter as it tried to shift its online advertising away from a service provided by Yahoo to the newly developed MSN Ad Center system.
It also reported that losses widened in its home and entertainment division, the Mobile and Embedded Devices Group, and the MSN service.
Sales of Windows for PC's increased 7.5 percent, to $3.19 billion, in the quarter, while office sales rose 5 percent, to $2.95 billion.
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In its quarterly report, Microsoft revealed a significant increase in spending, which could indicate the company is preparing to take on its online rivals.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/07/business/yourmoney/07gold.html
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http://web.archive.org/web/20060924191701id_/http://www.nytimes.com:80/2006/05/07/business/yourmoney/07gold.html?ex=1304654400&en=afa2033df42766fd&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
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Finding Comfort (and New Friends) in Gold
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20060924191701
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Gold now trades at more than $680 an ounce. Gold bugs are predicting that the price could soon top $1,000.
IT'S a splendid spring day in Connecticut's horse country and James E. Sinclair, perhaps the best-known gold speculator of his era, is sitting before his trading terminal, contemplating the upward thrust of gold on his trader's chart.
The sun, bursting through the bay windows, catches the glint of gold that is everywhere in Mr. Sinclair's home office: on the coins near his computer, on his chunky Rolex watch, on the rings on three of his fingers, on the cuff links on his monogrammed shirt, and could it be? a hint of it in his one working eye.
"I love gold, O.K.?" he said, his voice rising in excitement. "Gold has made me wealthy. It feels nice. It's exchangeable. It's money."
On his television set, which is tuned to CNBC, news breaks of a terrorist attack in Egypt, the price of oil pushes higher and traders continue to sell the dollar, which is approaching a one-year low against the euro.
With gold trading at $683.80 an ounce, a 25-year high, it's a good time to be a gold bug like Mr. Sinclair, especially if, like him, you own a gold exploration company (his is in Tanzania) and were a buyer when the metal sank as low as $250 an ounce in 2001. Now Wall Street, traditionally a laggard when it comes to making the investment case for gold, has jumped on Mr. Sinclair's bandwagon.
Investment banks like J. P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs are putting out bullish research notes, retail investors are heavy buyers through exchange-traded funds and hedge funds; and the trading desks of investment banks have been piling into the market, especially in the last week.
For Mr. Sinclair, who rode the last bull market in gold to its peak, in 1980, the surging price of his beloved metal is sending out clear signals that take him back to the 1970's, when inflation, a weak dollar and an oil spike driven by turmoil in the Middle East propelled gold to a high of $875 an ounce, or more than $1,800 in current dollars after adjusting for inflation. His ultimate price target now is not far from that: $1,650 an ounce, assuming that things become really bad.
"Gold is a barometer of the common stock of a country, and right now gold is sniffing out weakness in the management of the United States as a business," said Mr. Sinclair, 65, a lifelong Republican who twice voted for President Bush. "Iran is becoming a nuclear power. The chairman of the Federal Reserve is on a puppet string controlled by the White House, and there is no such thing as a strong-dollar policy when the dollar is heading south."
For more than two decades, the apocalyptic lament of Mr. Sinclair and other gold bugs has been largely dismissed as the United States has experienced aside from a few hiccups a 25-year bull market in a range of assets, from stocks and bonds to real estate and art.
Sustained by a continuing flood of liquidity, these assets have continued their mighty climb, even as crucial gauges of economic health in the United States the budget and current account deficits have continued to worsen. But now, with gold making a run for $700, dedicated gold investors are getting a wider hearing.
THEIR passion notwithstanding, gold bugs tend to be small-time investors. Gold's recent surge has instead been underpinned by a rush of mainstream investors, including hedge funds, commodity-based mutual funds and exchange-traded funds.
For these investors, gold is less a way of life than it is hedge against inflation and a prudent measure of diversification during an increasingly worrisome time. The extent to which this new wave of capital remains invested in gold will determine if the recent spike is just another anomaly or the onset of the second coming of the great gold bull market that the true believers have been calling for since the price of gold crashed a quarter-century ago.
Of course, many investors say that given gold's sharp recent climb, a correction would not be surprising. It's another asset bubble, they say, the latest investment fad. But for Mr. Sinclair and a small clutch of other self-exiled Wall Streeters, the metal's recent climb is just deserts for their unwavering, if not mystical, devotion to gold as an investment, an adornment, a means of exchange and, more than anything else, a moral bulwark in a corrupting sea of paper money, credit and what they see as insidious financial instruments.
Mr. Sinclair, who in the 1970's ran his own trading firm, achieved his renown by selling 900,000 ounces of gold at an average price 0f $810 in early 1980. That was when the metal was capping a decade-long bull market that commenced in 1971, when President Richard M. Nixon severed once and for all the dollar's link to gold.
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For some, gold is a way of life. For others, it is a hedge against inflation.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/15/world/europe/15london.html
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http://web.archive.org/web/20060925034707id_/http://www.nytimes.com:80/2006/05/15/world/europe/15london.html?ex=1305345600&en=7062b8662f407d4b&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
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Blair Weighs Move to Limit Courts' Power in Rights Laws
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20060925034707
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LONDON, May 14 Prime Minister Tony Blair says he is contemplating changes in Britain's human rights laws, limiting the power of courts to challenge the government, after a paroled rapist killed a woman and a judge refused to send several hijackers back to their country.
Wide-ranging coverage of Russia and the former Soviet republics, updated by The Times's Moscow bureau.
The government depicts the debate as one weighing individual rights against potential threats to public safety a familiar discussion in the United States in its campaign against terrorism.
The changes were proposed on Saturday by Lord Falconer, who as lord chancellor is Britain's highest judicial official, and confirmed Sunday in a letter from the prime minister to the new home secretary, John Reid. They reflect a consistent complaint by Mr. Blair that Britain's vaunted human rights practices are sometimes skewed to the detriment of victims.
Human rights advocates expressed outrage at Mr. Blair's plans, arguing, in the words of a lawyer, Louise Christian, that "the government is deliberately trying to distract attention from its own incompetence."
In a radio interview on Saturday, Lord Falconer, one of Mr. Blair's close allies, referred to several cases in which criminals had committed offenses, including murder, after being released early from prison.
His remarks followed a bruising controversy over the discovery that more than 1,000 foreign prisoners, including 150 convicted of serious crimes, including murder and rape, had been freed after serving their prison terms without being considered for deportation. Those disclosures cost the previous home secretary, Charles Clarke, his job in a recent government reshuffling by Mr. Blair.
In the past week, the debate resurfaced in different forms. In one case, a convicted rapist, Anthony Rice, killed a 40-year-old woman after being freed on parole. Andrew Bridges, the chief inspector of prisons, said too much attention had been paid to his rights.
In another case, a High Court judge castigated the government for failing to grant permanent residency to nine Afghans, who hijacked a plane to Britain in 2000 saying they were fleeing from the Taliban.
After their conviction in the hijacking was overturned, an immigration court ruled that they should be given refugee status because they would be in danger if they were deported back to Afghanistan. In an unusual harsh criticism of a judicial ruling, which accused the government of abusing its powers, Mr. Blair condemned the decision as "an abuse of common sense." Mr. Reid, the home secretary, called the decision "inexplicable or bizarre."
In the radio interview, Lord Falconer said, "There needs to be public clarity that the Human Rights Act should have no effect on the public safety issues. Public safety comes first."
In his letter to Mr. Reid, Mr. Blair said, "We will need to look again at whether primary legislation is needed to address the issue of court rulings which overrule the government in a way that is inconsistent with other European Union countries' interpretation of the European Convention on Human Rights."
Mr. Blair asked Mr. Reid to "ensure that the law-abiding majority can live without fear," the letter said. Details of the letter were published in The Observer on Sunday and later confirmed by Mr. Blair's office.
In a television interview on Sunday, Lord Falconer said Britain did not plan to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights, which was written into British law by the Human Rights Act in 1998. But, he said, the government was concerned about the way the values reflected in the legislation had been applied.
In an editorial, The Observer said, "This hostility to the Human Rights Act rests on the myth that it empowers criminals at the expense of law-abiding citizens; in fact, it protects citizens from the abuse by the state."
But Jan Berry, the chairwoman of the Police Federation, which represents officers, indicated that the organization would support a change in the law, saying, "In some respects I think our law at the moment has actually got the balance wrong between rights and responsibilities."
Some political analysts interpreted Mr. Blair's moves as an attempt to grab back the political initiative, after days of unrelenting speculation over when he might step down in favor of his rival, Gordon Brown, the chancellor of the exchequer. In response, Lord Falconer said: "He is the prime minister. He's remaining the prime minister."
Yet two London newspapers reported Sunday that Mr. Blair had told members of his cabinet that he planned to step down next summer to give a successor time to prepare for the next general election, expected in 2009.
Mr. Blair's office refused to comment on the reports.
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The proposed changes reflect the prime minister's belief that Britain's vaunted human rights practices are sometimes skewed to the detriment of victims.
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http://mashable.com/2006/05/09/myspace-im-client-launches-today%23comment-5305
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http://web.archive.org/web/20061029181546id_/http://mashable.com:80/2006/05/09/myspace-im-client-launches-today%23comment-5305
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MySpace IM Client Launches Today!
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20061029181546
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is this based on a platform like jabber? making it compatible with gtalk? also, why would you want to install software made by intermix, which makes spyware. intermix is the company that bought up myspace originally, and then was bought by fox. lastly, spyware aside, everything on myspace is broken or not fully functional, whats to say this is even worthy of “beta” ?
I’m testing it now. I’ll let you know how buggy it really is.
its not letting me login. keeps saying incorrect email or password >:( This is exactly why I took tom off my friends list!
[…] And now MySpace IM is making its presence felt. The IM client is now being made available to MySpace users. Now you can IM, Tom and let him know how you really feel about him. Kareem Mayan, a FIM insider has all the details, and Mashable takes a look at the the new IM client. Pete, we are waiting for the full review… come on now! […]
I previously wrote about MySpace Messenger. Well, MySpaceIM has actually launched now (verified by my downloading and installing it). Pete Cashmore has some pointers about it, including this download link. Om Malik notes the news trend of the day was I…
It truly is a slick piece of work. I still can’t believe that MySpace has released something that made me sit back and go “man, that’s pretty” instead of “man, that’s pretty ugly.”
[…] Vía: Mashable y genbeta […]
It’s actually good? Hmm, then maybe MySpace didn’t develop it and paid a bunch of people to do it. Can I skin/theme the IM? I think some phat animated backgrounds would rawk.
[…] MySpace launches its own IM client. Perverts everywhere rejoice. [via] […]
There’s another SN service called babbello which offers an IM service that can handle not only Babbello messaging but also MSN and Yahoo accounts.
[…] Web 2.0 Squidoo: Seth Godin’s Purple Albatross? Il servizio Squidoo promosso dal guru del marketing Seth Godin (permission marketing) sta morendo: dove sta l’errore del progetto? MySpace IM Client Launches Today! MySpace, una delle webcommunity più interessanti, lncia il servizio di instant messenger […]
[…] Mashable– Mashable blogs about the launching of MySpace IM client which the blog hyped up in March. It will be officially called “MySpaceIM” and the slogan is “IM for friends”. The client is only available for Windows PCs at the moment. Technorati Tags: IM IM for friends Mashable MySpace MySpaceIM | Send a Voice Comment […]
I added it to wikipedia… anyone care to edit the article? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MySpaceIM
[…] MySpace launched its Instant Messenger 2 days ago (MySpaceIM, download here) and marked yet another milestone in the recent resurrection of the IM market. If 3 years ago we were facing a stagnant, confused, walled gardened menu of 3 independent IM clients (AIM/ICQ, MSN, Y!), we now have 3 additional ones to choose from – MySpace, Google and Skype. Out of the latest additions, MySpace stands out as the farthest from the boat. I can imagine the so called rational process behind the decision to go with IM, after all the MySpace contact list is indeed a very valuable, unique, communication prone buddy list. But that’s where it ends. My hunch is that this time ego-trip and erroneous judgment prevailed over simple common sense. […]
Is anyone else getting a .dll error and the intallation aborting?
i have an error message at the installation
i can’t write the @ for my e mail address. why is that… it won’t accept the key combo
Yep…dll error and aborted install for me, too.
It is not letting me log on. It is saying check internet connection!
how come when i download this fild, it says “error, a DLL is required”?
If you’re getting this error: “Error 1723. and this is what it says… There is a problem with this Windows Installer package. A DLL required for this install to complete could not be run. Contact your support personelle or package vendor.”…Try to download Windows Installer
Go to www.microsoft.com and search for something like this “Windows Installer Windows XP” if you have Windows XP or “Windows Installer Windows 95″ if you have Windows 95, then choose the right installer for your system. Then download and install.
After installing it, Restart your computer, then install MySpace IM again.
THIIS NOT WORKING FOR ME. IT KEEPS SAYIN PSWD AND OR EMAIL IS NOT VALID. HAVE DOWNLODDED TWICE ALREADY AND NOTHING STILL.
I have downloaded myspace Im howeverit won’t let me sign in I sign in to my screen name which is my account and password but it just keeps saying connecting and it won’t let me in…
This is cool. How do you access myspaceIM?
this is cool but when will it be available
this is cool but when will it be available
I have tried several times and I cannot get the IM to download. It gets to 99% and then stops. I’ve tried saving the file, and nothing I do helps. Any suggestions?
Myspace want let me log in it saye’s login is temporiarly disabled.tell me what i need to do to fix it
well i dont know to fix my myspace im so can om one fix it
When will this actually be out of beta? I’ve tried several times, with several profiles, on two different XP boxes, and it still won’t let me log in.
Oh, wait, don’t tell me - “unexpected error”?
Login is temporarily disabled while we fix some database problems. We’ll be back shortly. 6/28/2006 HELP!!!! i cant log in, im on a band profile by the way help help help!!! pleease!
If every little company and its microsite started coming up with their own IM, well, the market will soon IMplode.
I already download myspace IM but the email and the password that i use for myspace it doesnt want to go.
login/pw doesnt work here either.
Have tried it over and over..
The same login/pw works just find on Myspace
are you able to use ur webcam on myspace??????If not it would be a good idea so many people pretend to be someone else with fake photos…Me for one I like to know if the person Im talking to is who they say.
do you have to make up a screen name for your IM… because when put my address and password it doesnt work and i do it corectly?
well it all works for me very cool stealth theme!!
my myspace says temporarily disabled for mainteainance or whatever…what does that mean? i need to get on, someone plzzz help me
[…] One interesting tactic might be to merge social networking widgets with a Meebo-like aggregator, allowing you to log in to your IM clients from your profile page. Someone smarter is bound to drop by and point out that this isn’t technically feasible with Flash, but the idea of combining social networks and web-based IM is an interesting one: I constantly wonder why MySpace doesn’t snap up something like Meebo and integrate it right into the profile pages, adding profile-to-profile messaging while they’re at it. Since the under-25s now communicate almost entirely through IM and social networks, this would let MySpace own nearly 100% of the user’s online time. Why mess around with MySpace IM when you can integrate instant messaging on the site itself? […]
[…] For more on instant messaging, see MessengerFX, e-Messenger, Meebo, KoolIM and MySpace IM. Share and Enjoy:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. […]
[…] For more messengers, see MySpace IM, Tagworld IM and AIM Pro. Share and Enjoy:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. […]
well, i have tried to download myspace im 3 times and unistalled after each time it did not work –i even went to my control panel,fire wall, and internet opt., then enabled all of my acticve-x security features –nothing works if any one else knows how to work this —i would like to know
[…] Tagworld Chat is both a downloadable IM client and a web-based app. You can use it as a conventional desktop client and chat via text, video and audio. But you can also ping your friends by hitting a button on their Tagworld profile - the video streams on the page itself. This means that only one of the users needs to have a copy of the desktop application. Web-to-web chat isn’t currently supported. I tested the client version with Fred earlier today, and the video streaming is pretty smooth. And unlike the MySpace IM client, Tagworld Chat synchronizes with your friends list - adding a friend on Tagworld automatically adds that user to your IM buddy list. For the time being, the client only works on Windows. […]
the messenger doesn’t download on my compter help
I can’t login. it says disable error profile 8/14/06. Please help?????
DisabledErrorMessage 8/18/2006- what does this mean? please help me!
Um… I can’t log into Myspace!
i cant get through my space whats wrong?
i cant log into myspace it says diabled error message 8/24/06…what do i do?
I get the same message, what’s up with this?
disable error…is my account disabled? yu cant be serious..
Hey what’s going on i can’t log onto myspace keeps saying disabled some crap and todays date wth ?
I am getting a DisabledErrorMessage 8/24/2006 What do I have to do ?
I too have the disabled error!!
DisabledErrorMessage 8/24/2006——- my site keeps saying this everytime i try to login… are you kidding me? i just had to make a complete new one because someone obviously changed the password of my old one… so why is my new one disabled!?!?
Btw: often can’t connect to my myspace account, is it some kind of bottleneck problem?
disable error…is my account disabled? yu cant be serious
i can log in it keep saying diabled error message 8/24/06.
same here - still having problems…since about 11:00am - has anyone found a solution??
Same here. I get the “DisabledErrorMessage 8/24/2006″ error when I try logging into my account. At least I’m not the only one. Did I disable my account or something? They better not be deleting my account! And when I go to my website it says, “This profile is undergoing routine maintenance. We apologize for the inconvenience!” What are they doing to my account!! I sell wedding binders, there should be nothing wrong with that! I tried logging into my personal myspace account and it works, so they are definitely doing something to my website!
i cannot eather sign in just disabled error message shows up ….so thats going on ??? any ideas
DisabledErrorMessage 8/18/2006 it also happened to me! HOPE ITS SOME MISTAKE AND WILL BE FIXED SOON!!!!
i cannot eather sign in just disabled error message shows up ….so thats going on ??? any ideas
I HAVE DISABLE ERROR MESSAGE 8/24/2006. WHAT IS WRONG?
We are having the same problen getting on to our account. It has to be on there end. I don’t think they can be disabling all these accounts.
Don’t feel alone- I’m getting the same message. Why don’t these idiots get these problems fixed? This just happend to me last week too.
i 2 have disable error message when i try to login whats going on
WTFFFF!!! disable error message!!?? its weird cause i can logg in to my original avount… but not my new one….
I’m also receiving the login error: DisabledErrorMessage 8/24/2006 and the profile error“This profile is undergoing routine maintenance. We apologize for the inconvenience!” I’ve sent the error message to the myspace customer service. Hope they will respond with an answer.
Mine says disbaled too …..
It’s happened to me as well!
I GOT A DISABLED ERROR MESSAGE, WHEN WILL IT BE FIXED?
I have the DisabledErrorMessage today also,how long does this last?
I AM ALOS GETTING THE DISABLED ERROR MESSAGE 8/25/06. I read on another page that described “myspace” error messages that the “maintenence” or “disabled error message” means you are being deleted, but I really don’t think that is the case since everyone is getting this stupid message today! Probable a problem on their end and it will be resolved.
I AM ALOS GETTING THE DISABLED ERROR MESSAGE 8/25/06. I read on another page that described “myspace” error messages that the “maintenence” or “disabled error message” means you are being deleted, but I really don’t think that is the case since everyone is getting this stupid message today! Probable a problem on their end and it will be resolved.
one ? i wonder what we all have in common on these ones that were disabled? i had a karma sutra painting as my pic???
This happened to me a few weeks ago. I reported the problem to MySpace using a different account. Then later that day I was suddenly able to log into my profile that was previously saying “DisabledErrorMessage”. I don’t think my messages to MySpace had anything to do with it being fixed, though.
My guess is that some program is crashing at a time when Microsoft’s error messaging function is disabled, so “DisabledErrorMessage” is being sent to our browsers by default. It’s telling us that the software was unable to give us the REAL error message, because error messaging is currently disabled.
That doesn’t help any of us, but — having working on Microsoft technology for quite a few years, that’s my guess as to what’s happening.
my myspace isn’t logging in
I’ve got the same message, HELP!!!
What does diaableerror message mean??
I went to my profile without trying to log in, and when I do that, I get this message:
“This profile is undergoing routine maintenance. We apologize for the inconvenience!”
So, MySpace is doing something that won’t allow us to log into our accounts and won’t allow our profiles to be viewed either. I doubt it has anything to do with what’s in our accounts.
One possibility is that they’re installing new software upgrades that can’t be installed unless they block everyone from using their profiles. So, as they move to each computer, the people whose profiles “live” on that computer have their accounts disabled for a period of time.
At least I hope it’s something as simple as that!
i cant get on myspace it keeps on saying disabled message wuts up wit dat crap
My account is the same, but I dont think it is anything we did on the site… sometimes stuff happens and gremlins get into the servers and half the stuff will stop working. I have seen this same thing on my kids accounts at myspace then in a few hours.. their sites are back up. Since myspace not working, (and free by the way) it wont be the end of my life, I will just wait till later to try. Rememeber the thing on the wall that has a cord.. occationally it rings. Pick it up and actually talk to someone. its a pretty cool gadgit… and no typing, or spelling skills needed. Just kidding really but I wouldnt worry so much about your myspace account, I mean if you built it once. you can build it again. didnt you save a copy of your profile style?
guess what, in the time it took me to type that last clip.. My site is back up… and I didnt die
well i have 2 accounts and one works but the other one doesnt….when i logged in i logged in one right after the other and one workd but the other didnt…but i hope is that simple too!
is there anybody who nows what this f***** disabled message means?????
DisabledErrorMessage 8/24/2006 in my space…. why? what is? …how fixing? …please help me…..
WOOT!! DONT WORRY ABOUT IT!! jus wait, try logging in later, mine just worked, and nothing got deleted ^_^
OK OK IT WORKS AGAIN!!
After i log in, when i click the ‘home’ link on the navigation bar it comes up with “Sorry! an unexpected error has occurred. This error has been forwarded to MySpace’s technical group.”
So i cant even edit my profile or chack messages/friend requests. Does anyone else get this message repeatedly? Would appreciate feed back at glenn_j88@hotmail.com
DisabledErrorMessage 8/30/2006 came up when i went to log into myspace. How long does it last for?
I am getting this “DisabledErrorMessage” as well… any help would be appreciated
well most disabled error messages only last for like a couple hours or even sometimes all you have to do is refresh the page.
Ok… now I have the disabled message… I thought i just read something that said that means you’re being deleted. If that’s the case, what the heck? Why? Someone please help me I’m freaking out here.
Im getting the disabled error message when i try and sign in….. can someone just give me some advice as to what to do about it!
DisabledErrorMessage 9/9/2006 Urfgh. They really need to sort problems like this out. Its so annoying.
9-11 and myspace is being no fun..
not a single member of my family can log in!
Surely not all of us are deleted! My pre-teen and my near 60 mom couldn’t have posted anything to get deleted (profiles are still viewable anyway) But the litttle FAQ/FYI areas doesn’t mention this .. Is it to much to ask for them to post the current issue at their end so everyone don’t freak? They used to be real good about that! I can see my profile just becoming a contact point for old friends and me not going to there often if this is the way the service will run. It has been a major PITA for a couople months now..
Already have to log in 4-8 times to connect. I don’t like being forced to see ads that are of no interest.
my myspace keeps reading disabled error 9/12/2006
I’ve got the disabled error message, but if that means im deleted that is sick.. They dont know me I use myspace every day ive put so much effort into it, it would really knock me for sick!
I was nasty to someone yesterday but not without being provocked AND i had a particularly BAD day so I just gave it to her.. but thats rediculas ONE time of coming down on someone who in there own way came down on me and provocked me, they could have cautioned me.. out of order myspace - IF this is the case!
I’m getting a “DisabledProfileToo 9/12/06″ message. I hope my profile isn’t deleted either. Something has to be wrong with their system…I hope.
I’m getting the disabledProfile error message too! It’s weird - i can login to my OLD MySpace account just fine. I can see EVERY PERSON’s profile on MySpace that I have on my Friends list (over 100) EXCEPT for my NEW profile that I created last week. I don’t understand. It won’t let me view or login to my new account profile. It DID let me go to the MAIL section and read my new message, but I couldn’t reply or anything. This is really weird. I know for certain that I’ve no offensive or obscene material or photos anywhere on my profile. My profile is almost blank because it’s new and I haven’t put much on there. Does anyone know how long this will take to resolve, or why I can access every other profile I go to accept for this one new profile of mine? Thanks!
I am get the DisabledErrorMessage too Whats going on
Iam from Portugal i have 2 accounts an i cannot acess them either! It appears DisabledErrorMessage 9/13/2006 And i didn’t do nothing wrong either!
Myspace should be re-maked to myCrap. I’ve got…
>>This profile is undergoing routine maintenance. We apologize for the inconvenience!
DisabledErrorMessage 9/13/2006 keeps coming up evertime i try and sign in!! im going crazy here! i just started makin my myspace last week and i got addicted and now i dont know what to do with myself. how long will it take to recconect?
some1 tell me why mypsace always has errors….. i have the DisabledErrorMessage 9/13/06 on one account, but my other myspace works jus fine…
I have the same problem, it’s usually resolved in a few hours and happens every once in a while. Profiles have been known to be down for a couple of days though, so don’t panic. It isn’t deleted. The ‘disabled’ message does not mean that your profile is disabled permanently. It means that the actual error message you are supposed to see is disabled because Myspaces servers are crap and not sending you the right information. If you visit your profile and see the ‘routine maintenance’ message then that’s whats happening. If you visit your profile and see ‘this profile has been deleted’ then that’s whats happening. This is unlikely unless you have broken the terms of service by covering up the ads or being a paedophile, aha. Relax! Your Myspace account being offline for a day isn’t really a problem on the universal scale of things is it?
i am also getting the DisabledErrorMessage 9/13/06 nvr seen it b4, i hope theres nothing wrong wiv my account
I found this page by searching Google for “DisabledErrorMessage 9/13/2006″. I’m having the same problem and I assume it will be back to normal sometime soon. Every other week I get a error message that last a few days. I guess I won’t be able to talk to my friends until Saturday. Back to my lonely dark room.
Add me to your list. I got the myspace disablederrormessage 9/13/2006 too. Hoping it will clear itself up shortly. I have a hot chic I’m suppose to be meeting today!!
Same here. My public account keeps giving me the disabled error message, but my private one is completely accessible. I just sent a message to their tech support from the working account. To my knowledge, I don’t have any offensive material on either page.
i am also getting the disabled error.
Everything is back to normal now!
hey what exactly is the DisabledErrorMessage ? why did i get it too? does anyone know how to fix it or what caused it?
I am having the same problem ack!
I must have the most boring profile on Myspace, it’s all blank, I only use it to send messages to my kids overseas. Now I am disabled as well.
I am getting this error when I try to login to myspace. DisabledErrorMessage 9/14/2006…If anyone can help please do. Kavonz@gmail.com
I am glad I am not the only one..I too, googled “disable error message”…myspace sux
I am getting it too - I dont think anyone can get into myspace- usure whats going on.
Your home page is undergoing routine maintenance. We apologize for the inconvenience!
Your home page is undergoing routine maintenance. We apologize for the inconvenience!
Your home page is undergoing routine maintenance. We apologize for the inconvenience!
Okay, so… i keep signing on to myspace IM, and it lets me get on, but it wont let me do anything on it! I know one of my friends is signed on, cause he is telling me he is, but i cant see that he is online. I cant see that anyone is online. I tried uninstalling it, and then installing it again, but its still not working. What do i do?
Go to this link and explain to me how this brainiac did a skin layout for the myspace messenger I want to make one.
its saying my password is wrong and now its saying my email isnt registered!.. so i cant delete the account or do anything. any suggestions guys??..
Make sure your using the right email account. Which email account informs you that you have a new friend request or comment? or fill this form http://collect.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=misc.contactInput&primarySubject=1&secondarySubject=2
My school Blocked Myspace form being used. That is not fare and I got people I need to network with.
[…] Not content with a standard social network, Babbello also features a 3D chatroom similar to Cyworld, Habbo Hotel or Gaia Online. A downloadable IM client has also been released in beta - this lets you talk to your Babbello friends, as well as those on Yahoo, MSN, ICQ and AIM (see also MySpace IM). […]
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While multiple people emailed me to say the project was a non-starter, I'm glad to say that the MySpace IM ...
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In Dubai, an Outcry From Asians for Workplace Rights
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20061125213959
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DUBAI, United Arab Emirates, March 25 For Rajee Kumaran, this was the city of dreams.
Stephanie Kuykendal for The New York Times
Many workers, at sites like this one in Dubai, paid corrupt recruiters high fees to get to the emirates, ending up in cramped camps earning low pay.
Dubai's gleaming high rises, idyllic beaches and seemingly limitless opportunities glittered on the pages of brochures and in the stories told by laborers returning home to his native Kerala, India. But after five years here, surviving in squalid conditions and barely making ends meet on less than $200 a month, Mr. Kumaran, 28, says his dream has long since faded.
"I thought this was the land of opportunity, but I was fooled," he said Thursday, as he stood with several other construction workers outside their work camp in the desert on the outskirts of the city.
When hundreds of workers angered by low salaries and mistreatment rioted Tuesday night at the site of what is to become the world's tallest skyscraper, not only were they expressing the growing frustration of Asian migrants here, they offered a glimpse of an increasingly organized labor force.
Far from the high-rise towers and luxury hotels emblematic of Dubai, the workers turning this swath of desert into a modern metropolis live in a Dickensian world of cramped labor camps, low pay and increasing desperation.
For years, workers like Mr. Kumaran have done whatever they could to get here, often paying thousands of dollars to unscrupulous recruiters for the chance to work at one of the hundreds of construction sites in the emirates.
Of the 1.5 million residents of Dubai, as many as a million are immigrants who have come here to work in some capacity, with the largest subgroup being construction workers, said Hadi Ghaemi, a researcher with Human Rights Watch who covers the United Arab Emirates, citing government statistics. A vast majority of the immigrants come from the Indian subcontinent and the Philippines.
With the cost of living rising, many have abandoned dreams of returning with a fortune. The construction workers' camps, in particular, have been set up ever deeper in the desert. That adds an hour or two just to get to the job site every morning, in addition to the workers' 12-hour shifts.
A growing number have resorted to suicide rather than return home with empty pockets: last year, 84 South Asians committed suicide in Dubai, according to the Indian Consulate here, up from 70 in 2004.
Mr. Kumaran, who earns 550 dirhams every month, or about $150, as a laborer, sends home almost half his earnings and lives on the equivalent of roughly $60 a month. That is barely enough to pay for food and cigarettes and using his cellphone from time to time. But he is not sure how he will repay the loan he took to get here.
"If I'd stayed in India and worked just as hard as I do now, I could have made the same money," he said. "And I wouldn't have needed to get a loan to come here."
Since last September, when 800 workers staged a protest march down a main highway in the heart of the city and set off a national debate about the treatment of foreign workers, laborers have held at least eight major strikes to demand their rights and get their pay, which is sometimes withheld.
But the mass action on Tuesday was the most significant of its kind. Hundreds of workers building the Burj Dubai skyscraper chased security guards and broke into offices, smashing computers, scattering files and wrecking cars and construction machines. When they returned to work the next day, demanding better pay and improved working conditions, thousands of laborers building an airport terminal across town also laid down their tools, demanding better conditions, too. The workers also halted work on Thursday, until a settlement was negotiated.
"It was a watershed moment in coordination and organization," Mr. Ghaemi said. "It started with increasing numbers of strikes, and has now evolved into very organized and coordinated activities. If these grievances are not addressed quickly by the government they are sure to begin hurting the economic growth of the country."
Those workers have few rights. Visa sponsors and employers typically confiscate their passports and residency permits when they sign on, restricting their freedom of movement and their ability to report abuse.
Mohammed Fadel Fahmy contributed reporting for this article.
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Asian workers lured to Dubai by dreams of wealth often end up living in squalid conditions. But lately, they are becoming an organized labor force.
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VIEQUES, P. R.'S GOV TO FEDS: STOP THE BOMBING
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20081021105031
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By FRANK LOMBARDI and RICHARD SISK DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU
Wednesday, October 20th 1999, 2:11AM
WASHINGTON Puerto Rico Gov. Pedro Rossello yesterday said, "Never again" to the Navy's bombing on the island of Vieques and warned against any move to evict protesters camped out on the beaches to stop the live-fire training.
"What I'm giving you is good advice don't push it," Rossello told a stunned Senate Armed Services Committee hearing in a series of angry exchanges.
At one point, 96-year-old Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.) popped out of his seat and waved his arms over "too much quibbling let's move on." Thurmond then stormed out.
Rossello's adamant stance against a Pentagon plan for resuming the bombing on Vieques during a five-year phaseout period put President Clinton on the spot in the political controversy over the tiny island. The dispute has spilled over into the budding New York Senate campaign between Mayor Giuliani and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Giuliani, who had declined to take a position in recent weeks, yesterday said he was against any more bombing and shelling of Vieques. He bristled at suggestions he was following the lead of the First Lady, who announced her opposition on Monday. "This is not a campaign issue," he said. "You guys want to make everything into a campaign issue."
Hillary Clinton's stance was caught in the crossfire at the politically charged Washington hearing. Committee Chairman John Warner (R-Va.), who apparently was unaware of Giuliani's City Hall statement, questioned the First Lady's decision to join those advocating that the Navy stop bombing on the island.
"I'm deeply concerned about the politics," Warner said.
A special Pentagon panel has submitted a report to Defense Secretary William Cohen favoring continued bombing on Vieques for five years while the Navy searches for another site.
White House spokesman Joe Lockhart said more time is needed "to see if we can't work out something that's mutually acceptable," but the Puerto Rico governor appeared to rule out any chance for compromise.
Rossello said he would not agree to allow any more bombs or shells "Not one!" to fall on the island of 9,300 residents off Puerto Rico's east end.
The face of Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) reddened as Rossello charged GOP senators were playing politics with 3,000 civilian jobs by threatening to shut down the massive Roosevelt Roads naval base in Puerto Rico if the Navy had to leave Vieques.
"Are you referring to me?" Inhofe asked. Rossello shot back, "Absolutely. I'm glad you picked up on it."
Inhofe fumed, "This governor had directly impugned my character, my integrity."
Rosello would not apologize. "I think the senator doth protest too much," the governor said.
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WASHINGTON Puerto Rico Gov. Pedro Rossello yesterday said, "Never again"to the Navy's bombing on the island of Vieques and warned against any move to evict protesters camped out on the beaches to stop the live-fire training. "What I'm giving you is good advice don't push it,"Rossello told a stunned Senate Armed Services Committee hearing in a series of angry exchanges. At one point, 96-year-old Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.) popped out of his seat
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CULTURE CLUB. Join those yogurt lovers who are making their own
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20081030044939
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Wednesday, October 5th 2005, 1:10AM
If Americans used to scorn yogurt as hippie food, we're now making up for the snub: We spent nearly $2.8 billion on yogurt in 2003, and sales continue to grow.
But if you're one of those plunking down nearly $1 for 8 ounces - and even more if it's organic or artisanal - consider Nathan Donahoe's approach: He makes his own.
A recent graduate of the city's Natural Gourmet Cookery School, Donahoe discovered that homemade yogurt is both cheap - a quart costs about the same as a quart of milk - and easy.
Yogurt is simply curdled milk, says Donahoe. It's fermented and thickened by bacteria that help it last longer than milk. Back before refrigeration, nearly 4,000 years ago, he says, tribes in Central Asia made yogurt to preserve their milk, storing it in animal skins or clay jars.
"The combination of hot climate and friendly bacteria present in the jars and bags," he says, "were the perfect conditions for the yogurt to form."
Requiring just a pot, a thermometer and a bowl, making yogurt today is nearly as effortless, says Sabrina Sexton, a chef-instructor at the Institute of Culinary ÂEducation who specializes in cheese and often makes yogurt at home.
You heat up any animal's milk to the temperature where bacteria reproduce, says Sexton, add a bit of fresh yogurt with "live active cultures" (Lactobacillus bulgaricus, Streptococcus thermophilus and other unharmful bacteria that some scientists say aid our digestive and immune systems) and keep the mixture warm while the bacteria go to work.
This can be six hours in a yogurt machine, or 24 in a warm place. The longer you incubate your yogurt, as this process is called, the tarter your yogurt will be.
Either way, Sexton and Donahoe agree, the results are usually better than the yogurt you buy in a store, which can come with sugars, stabilizers and preservatives.
And while not as jelled as Americans may be used to, says Donahoe, now a chef at The Canyon spa in California, homemade yogurt is creamier and tangier, with a flavor that's fresher and more complex. "It just tastes far superior," he says.
For Indian, Middle Eastern and southern Mediterranean cooks, of course, the unique tang of homemade yogurt is a hallmark of their cuisines. This lesson is clear to Christos Christou, the chef now working on Ammos, the midtown traditional Greek spot that opens later this month.
Using his Cypriot grandmother's recipe and huge, traditional earthenware pots, Christou will be making fresh sheep's milk yogurt every evening, to include in savory mezze spreads like tzatziki or to serve as dessert.
Topped with dates, figs, walnuts and Cypriot honey, it'll be a very sweet ending for sour milk.
You can use any kind of milk, although Nathan Donahoe and Sabrina Sexton prefer organic products from animals that are grass-fed. Fattier sheep's milk and whole milk will be richer, while goat's milk and fat-free are thinner. Some cooks also mix in a bit of unflavored gelatin or powdered milk to thicken the final results. Check the yogurt, too: The more bacteria it has, the more in your own batch, and fresher is better.
1/8 cup of organic yogurt with "live active cultures" (or 1/18 teaspoon of dried yogurt culture, available from some health-food shops or online)
Warm milk in a pot to a minimum of 100 degrees and a maximum of 115 (1). Stir constantly to prevent scorching. Add yogurt culture (2) and mix well. Do not heat above 120 degrees or the culture will die. (If milk gets too hot, let cool before adding culture.)
If you're not using a yogurt maker, put the milk in a clean jar, thermos or bowl (3), cover it and set it in a warm place. A thermos should work perfectly, or try putting the jar in a gas oven with the pilot light on; or in a pot filled with warm water and other jars filled with very hot water. (You might have to refill the bottles with very hot water.)
The ideal temperature is around 112, but yogurt will form at 90 degrees - it just takes longer. At 115 it takes 4-6 hours, says Donahoe, while 100 takes about 24. One easy method is to let it sit overnight. But remember that the longer it incubates, the thicker and tarter it will be.
When yogurt has reached desired consistency and firmness, refrigerate; it should last at least two weeks. (If it doesn't jell, you may have overheated or had old yogurt.) Reserve several tablespoons as starter for your next batch.
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CULTURE CLUB. Join those yogurt lovers who are making their own By RACHEL WHARTON If Americans used to scorn yogurt as hippie food, we're now making up for the snub: We spent nearly $2.8 billion on yogurt in 2003, and sales continue to grow. But if you're one of those plunking down nearly $1 for 8 ounces - and even more if it's organic or artisanal - consider Nathan Donahoe's approach: He makes his own. A
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DIRTY MONEY BOUGHT MOBSTER FORT: FEDS
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By MICHAEL CLAFFEY DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Tuesday, June 26th 2001, 2:22AM
Joe Watts, a close pal of former mob kingpin John Gotti, used loansharking proceeds to build a magnificent "fortress" on Florida's Gulf Coast, prosecutors told a jury yesterday.
As Watts' money-laundering trial got underway in Brooklyn Federal Court, the feds described how he hid his ill-gotten gains in an elaborate scheme to avoid detection.
What the jury didn't hear was the juiciest part of the Watts' case: that the 60-year-old mobster came into a $30,000-a-week loansharking windfall by going in with Gotti on the 1985 rubout of Gambino boss Paul Castellano and his right-hand man, Thomas Bilotti.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Dan Dorsky, who has made those accusations in court papers, told the jurors only that after Bilotti was killed by unnamed persons, "his loanshark business went to Joe Watts."
Defense lawyer Gerald Shargel countered that Watts' involvement with the property was entirely aboveboard. Shargel said the case "will rise or fall" on the word of the government's star witness, mob turncoat and former Gambino soldier Dominic (Fat Dom) Borghese.
Shargel charged Borghese admitted in a wiretapped conversation with another turncoat, Salvatore (Sammy Bull) Gravano, that he had conned the government out of $16,000 for dental work.
"This case will explode the myth," Shargel said, that once criminals agree to cooperate, "they are no longer liars and manipulators."
Watts, nicknamed Joe the German, was reputed to be one of the Dapper Don's most trusted lieutenants. Watts allegedly earned $12 million from his loansharking business.
Although prosecutors say he was "accorded the respect of a captain in the Gambino family," he was barred from formal membership in La Cosa Nostra because he lacked Italian heritage.
Dorsky said the "magnificent estate" in Sarasota, Fla., will be at the center of the case. The prosecutor displayed a poster-size photo of the beachfront compound that showed two large houses surrounding a tennis court.
He described it as a "fortress" surrounded by a concrete wall about 10 feet tall, protected by a high-tech security system and a pack of "ferocious Doberman pinschers."
Watts started out with the purchase of a simple waterfront cottage in 1984 on Casey Key in Sarasota, Dorsky said. Two adjoining parcels were added in 1986 and 1987. The existing structures were torn down and replaced with large houses.
Watts hid his ownership, buying the first two properties under friends' names, Dorsky said.
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Joe Watts, a close pal of former mob kingpin John Gotti, used loansharking proceeds to build a magnificent "fortress"on Florida's Gulf Coast, prosecutors told a jury yesterday. As Watts' money-laundering trial got underway in Brooklyn Federal Court, the feds described how he hid his ill-gotten gains in an elaborate scheme to avoid detection. What the jury didn't hear was the juiciest part of the Watts' case: that
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L.A.'S FUTURE LOOKS LIKE HELL WHY MOVIES DEPICT LA-LA LAND AS CENTER OF A NIGHTMARE SOCIETY
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20090328121503
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Thursday, October 12th 1995, 4:23AM
TRASH IN THE STREETS, GRAFfiti on the walls, crime and homelessness everywhere.
This isn't the South Bronx or Detroit. It's Los Angeles at the millennium, the film version of hell on earth. In pictures like "Seven," "Falling Down," "Grand Canyon," "Menace II Society," "Rising Sun" and "Strange Days," L.A. has supplanted just about every other metropolis as the city you'd least like to live in. It's a far cry from the days of "Beach Blanket Bingo."
"Since the 1992 riots [following the Rodney King verdict], you've seen a conjunction of events in Los Angeles unique in 20th-century American history," says Mike Davis, a columnist for L.A. Weekly and author of "City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles."
"No city," says Davis, "has suffered such a combination of natural and manmade disasters: flooding, fires, earthquakes, the Simpson trial. We've seen a recession which put an end to 50 years of unbroken growth and expansion, followed by some of the most devastating cutbacks in social services any city has experienced, followed by bankruptcy in Orange County."
Certainly the recent downturn in L.A.'s fortunes has affected its onscreen image. But that representation has actually varied widely over the years, from sun-drenched paradise to corrupt, crime-ridden site of many noir films made in the 1940s and '50s.
"There always have been dark portrayals of L.A., going back to 'The Day of the Locust' [a 1939 novel about Hollywood's underbelly made into a film in 1975], which has an apocalyptic ending," says Kenneth Turan, film critic for the Los Angeles Times.
Turan says the 1982 movie "Blade Runner" has been a major influence, particularly visually, on the downbeat vision of L.A. The futuristic film paints the city as a combination Third World bazaar and environmental catastrophe.
"Blade Runner's" impact is seen in several recent films, including "Seven," with its dreary downtown, bad weather and psychotic atmosphere, and "Strange Days," which portrays L.A. as dark and evil, filled with crime, drugs, hostile racial minorities, murderous police and a sense of all-pervading moral bankruptcy.
"Los Angeles has always been a strange city," says James Cameron, who co-wrote the "Strange Days" screenplay. "There's always been a psychic unease related to the seismic activity. People don't talk about it a lot, but there's a sense of precarious reality, where anything could come crashing down at any time."
Of course, L.A. isn't the only cinematic vision of urban hell: Movies have long explored New York's seamy side, from the 1912 D.W. Griffith film "The Musketeers of Pig Alley" to contemporary works like "Clockers" and "Kids." But in the case of Los Angeles, current motion-picture horror stories stand out because of the way they contrast with the dreamy images of the past.
"The difference is not so much in the films, but how they're perceived," says Turan. "In the past there was a counterbalance, positive [images] as well. Now it's harder to find the positive. These films can be seen as more representative of the way people who live here think."
Still, there are those who feel this downbeat image isn't quite accurate. Davis believes that in movies like "Strange Days," the film industry is wedded to a vision that owes more to high-rise New York than the Levittown-like, low-rise look of Southern California.
" 'Blade Runner' has become our official nightmare," he says. "But it is not a realistic portrayal of the bad future. The real nightmare you see being created in L.A. is in [suburbs like] Canoga Park or Pomona 1950s tract homes and 1960s stucco apartments turning into the slums of the 21st century."
Cameron agrees to a point. "The 'Strange Days' vision is one potential vision," he says, "of a more centralized urban environment. But it's not just in L.A. I hope people will look at 'Strange Days' and say it's a metaphor for our collective reality."
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TRASH IN THE STREETS, GRAFfiti on the walls, crime and homelessness everywhere. This isn't the South Bronx or Detroit. It's Los Angeles at the millennium, the film version of hell on earth. In pictures like "Seven,""Falling Down,""Grand Canyon,""Menace II Society,""Rising Sun"and "Strange Days,"L.A. has supplanted just about every other metropolis as the city you'd least like to live in. It's a far cry from the days of
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STRANGE BEDFELLOWS IN 'WEST WING'?
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BY GEORGE RUSH AND JOANNA MOLLOY With Kasia Anderson and Lauren Rubin
Wednesday, January 9th 2002, 2:24AM
Aaron Sorkin prides himself on the research that goes into his NBC series,
"The West Wing." And his episodes about a call girl during the program's first season in 1999 were no exception, says a woman who claims the writer paid her for sex for nearly two years.
Dimitra Ekmektsis, 35, alleges she met Sorkin in 1990 when she worked for a New York escort service and he was a customer. At the time, he was 29 and enjoying the success of his hit Broadway play, "A Few Good Men." Ekmektsis tells us she'd visit his upper West Side apartment "almost weekly."
"It was very formal," she says. "When I got there, he'd give me $2,000. I might arrive at midnight and leave the next morning."
Ekmektsis says she liked Sorkin because "he treated me like a normal person. It wasn't like, 'Take off your clothes.'
He wasn't always trying to have sex. He was very shy. We'd talk for hours on end. We'd watch movies. Sometimes I'd sit and read a book."
She says they smoked pot almost every time and sometimes did cocaine. (Sorkin plead guilty in June to drug-possession charges and is in an 18-month, court-supervised rehab program.)
Not long after meeting Sorkin, Ekmektsis says, she kissed off her other customers.
"I was very depressed about doing what I was doing," says Ekmektsis, who'd come from Europe hoping to be a photographer. "He made me feel good. Toward the end, I think he kind of started to like me."
Still, Ekmektsis says, "I thought he would never see me as a girlfriend."
She says she last saw Sorkin in the summer of '92. After that, he headed to L.A. to work on film scripts.
Until last fall, Ekmektsis says, she kept up a frisky E-mail correspondence with Sorkin despite his marriage to Julia Bingham in 1996 (they separated last summer).
Ekmektsis says Sorkin confided that she was the inspiration for his "West Wing" prostitute Britney, who slept with Sam Seaborn, Rob Lowe's character in the White House drama. Sorkin has insisted to others that Britney sprang from his imagination.
Sorkin's rep had no comment on Ekmektsis' claims. One Sorkin pal says he has acknowledged "hanging out" with her. But, according to the friend, Sorkin maintains that "he never paid for sex."
She's now studying for her real-estate broker's license and hoping to write a memoir of her adventures in the skin trade.
Self-appointed fashion dictator Mr. Blackwell has issued his annual list of the best and worst dressed. The former designer considered giving the list a rest after Sept. 11 but, after a moment's thought, decided "It may be good for a laugh!"
Topping the list as "fashion's weakest link" is game-show queen of mean Anne Robinson, who favors those long black housecoats. Showing who's the supreme bitch, Blackwell sniffs that Robinson "looks like Harry Potter in drag. A Hogwarts horror."
He's not much kinder toward friendlier celebs. He pronounces Britney Spears a runnerup for the "belly-baring bombs" she uses as outfits.
Others on Blackwell's loser list included "haute couture catastrophe" Juliette Binoche; the members of Destiny's Child, for their "off-pitch kitsch"; Bjork; Kate Hudson, who "looks like a cyclone victim from the OK Corral," and Camilla Parker Bowles.
Julia Roberts tops Blackwell's best-dressed list, followed by Gwyneth Paltrow, Nicole Kidman and Penelope Cruz.
President Bush's latest encounter with the English language produced an inadvertent ethnic slur against a key ally and a prompt apology from the White House.
Bush meant no disrespect to the Pakistani people by referring to them as "Pakis" during a Monday session with reporters, a spokesman stressed.
The term "Pakis" is considered derisive by most Pakistanis, particularly those living in Great Britain.
Bush used the term when discussing the threat of a war between India and Pakistan.
"We are working hard to convince both the Indians and the Pakis there's a way to deal with their problems without going to war," he said.
"The President has great respect for Pakistan, the Pakistani people and the Pakistani culture," said deputy press secretary Scott McClellan.
Michael Jordan better be ready to fork over big, big bucks if he hopes to avoid a messy public split, according to our local mavens of the matrimonial bar.
"All I can say is, 'Yum, yum,' " said Norman Sheresky, who represented Robert Duvall's wife Barbara and Dustin
Hoffman's wife Anne in divorce battles.
Jordan is said to be worth $398 million, with an endorsement empire that dwarfs his multimillion-dollar NBA salary.
He runs his own clothing and sneaker division at Nike, owns a piece of the NBA's Washington Wizards and a string of steakhouses, and lends his name to everything from Gator- ade to Palm hand-held organizers.
Jordan was already a millionaire athlete when he married Juanita Jordan in 1989 after meeting her at a restaurant. They have three children.
He is an admitted high-rolling gambler, and tabloids have branded him as a cheating husband, which he has denied.
Lawyers for both Jordans have not said whether the couple had a prenuptial agreement, "If they didn't, he should be seeing a psychiatrist," lawyer Raoul Felder tells The News' Dave Goldiner.
Tibetans believe that each Dalai Lama is a reincarnation of the last one. But the current Dalai Lama has announced that he wants to be reincarnated somewhere else if his homeland is not free from Chinese rule by the time he dies.
The 66-year-old spiritual leader says that when his time comes, he will not be reincarnated in any territory under Chinese rule, including Tibet, according to the Indian news agency UNI.
His Holiness, who has lived in India since fleeing Tibet in 1959, fears that the Chinese will choose a child to succeed him who would be their puppet. So he'll choose to be reborn in a free country. Let's hope his followers can find him.
PRINCE WILLIAM appears to have a mouth on him. British paparazzo Clive Postlethwaite claims he was waiting to photograph Prince Charles and his family horseback-riding near their Highgrove estate when 19-year-old William rode toward him shouting, "[bleep]ing p-- off." Postlethwaite said he was forced to jump backward into a ditch when the prince charged "with his eyes wide and his teeth showing." A royal rep says the story "sounds a bit unlikely. But the hunt is a very fast-moving event, and it is dangerous if you are standing in the way" ...
LIZA MINNELLI's March wedding to music producer David Gest is beginning to sound like a sequel to "That's Entertainment." You know Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston are coming. Now she's asked aquatic screen legend Esther Williams to join Elizabeth Taylor as a matron of honor. Williams injured her right foot in May, but tells Variety's Army Archerd her cast will be off in time to "march [Liza] down the aisle" ...
DEPARTING AOL Time Warner honcho Gerald Levin will have one last hurrah when he is honored tomorrow night at the Gay Men's Health Crisis' benefit concert at Carnegie Hall, "You Gotta Have Friends: Partners in the Fight Against AIDS." The gala event boasts a hefty lineup of celebs, including Whoopi Goldberg, R.E.M., Jewel, Rosie Perez and Sweet Honey in the Rock.
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Aaron Sorkin prides himself on the research that goes into his NBC series, "The West Wing."And his episodes about a call girl during the program's first season in 1999 were no exception, says a woman who claims the writer paid her for sex for nearly two years. Dimitra Ekmektsis, 35, alleges she met Sorkin in 1990 when she worked for a New York escort service and
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Team Telegraph Running Diaries: Emma Firth
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By Emma Firth Published: 2:01PM BST 28 Jul 2009
My trusty Asics GT 2140s, now with more supportive lacing Photo: JAMES FIRTH
Emma Firth is hoping to complete the Great North Run in under two hours Photo: CLARA MOLDEN
Aug 25: This week I learnt how to tie my laces. I thought I knew what I was doing. I have been wearing shoes with laces since my primary school days with no obvious problems. But apparently this is not the case.
When I went to Bupa to have a training session videoed, I spoke to sports podiatrist Anne-Marie O'Connor about my (low-level) shin splint, when I noticed she was eyeing up my trainers.
I had gait analysis done before I bought them, so was confident I was in the right footwear, but was puzzled when she asked if I laced them all the way to the top.
Now, I don't know about you, but I have always ignored that strange last hole on my trainers, the one that’s out of line with the rest. I am not sure what it was there for and not sure why it was needed.
But before you could say ouch, Anne-Marie had me whipping my shoe off and was doing some complicated threading with my laces. The upshot is I have a whole new way to tie them, which will apparently provide more ankle support. This should in turn help my lower leg tendons.
I am having to think twice every time I slip on my trainers, but am happy to pay that price if it helps my shin even a bit. Time will tell.
Aug 19: I am nursing my first injury of the training programme. I pushed quite a few of my training sessions together last week, as my sister and her family were coming to stay for the weekend and I wanted as much niece-and-nephew time as possible.
So I ended up doing a ten mile steady run, a five mile speed session and a six mile steady in the space of four days, with just one rest day. But this was probably not ideal, in retrospect.
I was all set to complete four runs in five days on Thursday, when my leg started to complain heavily at the start of an eight-mile fartlek session. This caused me to pull up sharply. My lovely trainer Nicola, who got me in shape for my wedding, happened to be at the gym and gave my troublesome lower leg a quick once-over. It seems that I have a slight shin splint, a common running injury affecting the muscles at the front of my leg. They are hard to stretch, which can make them prone to tightness.
I was ordered to cross-train on a bike etc for a few days, not do any impact training and ice it once a day. James (my husband) added massage to his list of running-related tasks, and has been dutifully (and quite painfully) kneading my leg each evening. Thankfully, it seems to be on the mend and I managed my long run yesterday with minimal pain.
Fingers crossed it stays that way for next month's Bupa Great North Run.
Aug 12: Last weekend, I had the first run in my training programme for the Bupa Great North Run that scared me.
It was a 10 miles steady, which sounds innocuous enough until you realise that steady, as determined by my Garmin GPS watch, is shorthand for something approaching race pace.
So, most of a half marathon, at most of my race pace, just four weeks into my training. Fabulous.
It didn’t help that, once again, we’d been away for a wedding so, once again, my eating and drinking had been less than ideal.
But I duly set off at the appointed time, with my lovely husband on his bike acting as support crew/chief cheerleader/drinks carrier.
One mile in I was breathing hard and feeling grumpy at the prospect of nine more tough miles, which I promptly (and unforgivably) took out on the aforementioned support crew.
One strop and an apology later, I gradually got into the swing of things. It was far from easy, but I did find a pace that my legs seemed happy with, and my breathing gradually settled down.
I managed to stay away from hills too – not always easy in my neck of Surrey – and finished the run in the allotted 95 mins.
Working out that if I’d managed to continue that pace for another 3.1 miles I’d have had a 2.03 finish on my hands sent my spirits soaring – even if my ankles are complaining heavily today.
Aug 5: Once again, as my weekly mileage has increased so has my appetite, meaning I’ve yet to see any hoped-for weight loss.
I kind of expected it to be like this – I’ve never lost a substantial amount of weight during any training programme, despite the fact that I up my exercise levels substantially for nearly three months.
The problems are: 1) the increase in activity makes me much hungrier than normal, but mainly, 2) the little voices in my head. While I mean to stick to a nice, healthy diet which will see me shed the pounds, the voices know my weaknesses – particularly the urge for chocolate about 4pm, when dinner is still a long time and several miles away.
But I’ve resolved (again, admittedly) that with just under seven weeks to go things are going to be different from now on.
So my late afternoon snacking, even when I get hit by ravenous hunger (and when you’re clocking up between 25 and 30 miles a week, it does tend to strike quite a bit) is going to be a thing of the past. Honest.
My Bupa health check flagged up my weight as the one less-than-ideal aspect of my overall wellbeing, so if I can get that sorted and go sub-2 in the Great North Run, I’ll be pretty much perfect (ahem).
So here’s to trying to lose a stone before September 20. Wish me luck!
Aug 4: As I still count myself very much as a novice racer, I like to find and follow a plan that will tell me what to do every step of the way with no room for error or misinterpretation. Oh, and get me the best results possible without taking over my life completely.
I tried ones that have hill and speed sessions and get you out five times a week, but this time I’ve changed tack and taken a step up technologically with a downloadable plan dispensed via my Garmin GPS watch.
The Garmin was a treat to myself after I ran my one and only marathon in 2006, and I’ve always found it useful and motivating to know how far/fast I’m going.
Usually I have a paper plan that tells me how many minutes or miles I should be running each day, and at what level of effort.
But this, this does everything for me bar putting my trainers on. I’ve chosen the sub-2hr schedule, and when I turn the watch on it tells me how far to go and at what speed. Too fast or too slow, and it beeps at me until I get it right, which keeps me on the straight and narrow
Obviously the proof will be in the Great North pudding, but it saves me having to do lots of maths in my head to work my pace out, and for that I am constantly grateful.
July 30: One of the mysteries about running is that you don’t always get the outcome you deserve.
Take last weekend. My training plan for the Great North Run has me doing four sessions a week, but I moved the Saturday one to Friday as we were off to the Midlands early for a family party (more on which in a bit)
On paper, it should have been a straightforward five-miler. My plan had me plodding along an easier pace than the same distance two days earlier, and I’d eaten well and hydrated properly.
In reality it was a aching-legged struggle that I couldn’t wait to get through. I did it, but felt I couldn’t have gone faster or further.
Forty-eight hours later, and I should have had the run from hell. I’d been at a surprise 60th party for my aunt on Saturday night and had drunk rather more than planned. Sunday morning was spent under the duvet, and I emerged only for lunch.
A ten-miler (admittedly at easy pace) beckoned later and I wasn’t looking forward to it. But, in a major surprise, I loved it, and it loved me. Pace was steady, legs felt strong, and while I was tired at the end, I could have carried on. I’m not advocating gin as a training drink, but my body certainly surprised me on this occasion.
July 28: I can see the shopping opportunities in most things, but running was not initially one of them. Shopping for shoes and handbags is fun, but running gear? Please.
One of the big plus points of running is that all you need to get started are some trainers, a sports bra, some tracksuits trousers and a T-shirt you paint the house in.
But the problem with running is that - whatever your intentions - the urge to be quicker, faster and stronger creeps up on you steathily. Then before you know it you’re scouring the shops (and running forums) for anything that gives you even a slight edge against other people and the elements. Or just makes you look like you know what you are doing. Or feel better about putting on your trainers and getting out there.
I have always spent big on trainers, figuring that I am protecting my ankles and knees for my dotage (and a recent muscular-skeletal check by a Bupa physio suggests that so far, so very good).
But then I veered into the world of the wicking T-shirt, the padded sock and vented shorts and got hooked. I’ll never be the fastest or the thinnest, but, whatever the weather, I have always got the right tools for the job. And if they come in pink, that’s even better.
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Emma Firth is in training for the Great North Run as part of Team Telegraph and
will be updating this page regularly with her progress. Fellow Team
Telegraph runners are Tom Horan and James Cracknell.
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RE-'TURNING' TO SEXTUPLETS
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Thursday, May 2th 1996, 2:00AM
TAKE SIX adorable 3-year-old siblings, six fragile premature newborns, two sets of frazzled parents, a star anchor/correspondent and a first-rate production team. What do you get?
With tomorrow's ABC News "Turning Point" special, network programers get a perfect alternative to the crime/adventure shows competing in the Friday-at-10 ti me slot.
More to the point, viewers get an irresistible news hour, produced by Ann Reynolds, with Diane Sawyer on camera. A followup to two reports, "Baby, Oh Baby: The Six-Pack Is Back" includes just enough informational content to satisfy the brain, though this program clearly targets the eyes and heart.
The "Six-Pack" in the title refers to the Dilley sextuplets of Indianapolis -- Claire, Adrian, Ian, Brenna, Quinn and Julian -- who were chronicled in "Turning Points" in 1994 and '95.
At the time of the first broadcast, Keith and Becki Dilley were the parents of the first surviving sextuplets in the United States. That changed just a few weeks ago, when Michelle and Norman Haner of Chatham, in upstate New York, brought six tiny babies of their own into the world.
"Turning Point" spends a little time with the Haners, but there's only so much TV work possible with the 12-weeks-premature kiddos still hospitalized. The Dilleys, meanwhile, supply more than enough raw material to fill most of a mere hour of prime-time TV.
Sawyer and company, for example, include a cursory but intriguing examination of the real-world, nature/nurture experiment that the Dilleys represent: six kids of the same age in the same environment and possessing similar but distinct genetic makeups. What accounts for the personality and behavioral differences already apparent in these toddlers?
It's also instructive to learn that the flood of financial and in-kind assistance that the Dilleys received following the birth of their bunch three years ago has pretty much dried up. This news may be disquieting to the Haners who, with their six newborns yet to come home, are only beginning to confront the practical realities of tripling the size of their family overnight.
Easily the most entertaining segment of tomorrow's "Turning Point" (entertaining in the sense of "Thank God that's not me") follows Sawyer as she spends one complete day with the Dilleys, who employ no baby-sitters or nannies.
Some may complain that the piece makes too much of Sawyer's participation, but it's a bum rap. The truth is, Keith and Becki Dilley are so abnormally easygoing and well-adjusted to the chaos of rearing six toddlers simultaneously, viewers need Sawyer there in order to understand what all this seems like to the average person.
It's worth noting, too, that the shot of an exhausted Sawyer falling, legs akimbo, down a flight of stairs on her behind and her head pretty much vaporizes that old ice-queen image.
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TAKE SIX adorable 3-year-old siblings, six fragile premature newborns, two sets of frazzled parents, a star anchor/correspondent and a first-rate production team. What do you get? With tomorrow's ABC News "Turning Point"special, network programers get a perfect alternative to the crime/adventure shows competing in the Friday-at-10 ti me slot. More to the point, viewers get an irresistible news hour, produced by Ann Reynolds, with Diane Sawyer on camera. A followup to two
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FRANKIE CROCKER DIES Deejay helped create 'urban contemporary'
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By DAVID HINCKLEY DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Monday, October 23th 2000, 2:14AM
Frankie Crocker, a radio legend whose influence over three decades was matched only by his flamboyance, died Saturday night in Miami. Published reports said he was 63.
He had been sick for several months, then hospitalized last month after a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. At his request, the news was not made public.
"He was at peace before he left," his producer, Maurice Singleton, said yesterday.
Crocker, who never had a self-confidence problem, im-printed himself on a generation of city listeners as the velvet-voiced "Hollywood," "Love Man" and "Chief Rocker." His signature signoff song was "Moody's Mood."
"Put a glide in your stride and a dip in your hip," he said. "If Frankie Crocker isn't on your radio, your radio isn't really on."
He was working for WRKS at the time of his death, but he was best-known for four stints at WBLS, where as afternoon host and program director in the '70s he helped create the influential "urban contemporary" format.
This included music from jazz and R&B to Barbra Streisand and disco, and it propelled WBLS to No. 1, topping longtime leader WABC and WKTU.
When Crocker returned to WBLS the second time, in 1979, he announced his arrival by riding into Studio 54 on a white horse, wearing a tuxedo.
"He was one-of-a-kind," said longtime radio host Imhotep Gary Byrd. "He was the quintessential black-radio personality."
Hal Jackson, who was at WBLS when Crocker started, devoted much of his show yesterday to memories of Crocker.
"He can't be replaced," Jackson said.
Outside radio, Crocker was the host of TV's "Friday Night Videos" and "Solid Gold." He was an original VH1 veejay and appeared in five movies, including "Cleopatra Jones" and "Darktown Strutters."
A well-known man about town for years, with a slim elegance and matinee-idol style, Crocker had in the last year become an ordained minister. During the Monica Lewinsky scandal, he called for a national day of reconciliation and healing.
His own life was not without controversy. After a 1976 payola investigation, he was convicted of lying about taking cash and drugs. The conviction was later overturned. He was charged in 1983 with hitting a girlfriend, Penthouse Pet Carmela Pope, but the charges were dropped.
He suggested in the mid-'90s that his profile often made him a target. But he said he never lost confidence in himself, even when others called it arrogance.
"If you mean do I know how good I am," he said in 1995, "I do. I know my value."
In recent years he expressed concern that the radio industry was trying to "get rid of strong personalities like me," playing it too safe with music and message.
Bob Law, former program director of WWRL, yesterday said Crocker understood how radio could go beyond music to reflect listeners' lives and culture.
"He encompassed all of the urban sophistication," Law said. "He appreciated the culture, the whole urban experience, and he wove it together. That's missing now, even in black radio."
Crocker was born in Buffalo, the only child in a middle-class family. He started at WUFO there and got his foot in the New York door at WWRL in 1965. In 1969 he became the first full-time black host at top-40 WMCA, then moved to WBLS in 1972.
Crocker is survived by his mother, Frances. A private funeral will be held in Miami, followed by a memorial service in New York with details to be announced this week.
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By DAVID HINCKLEY DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER Frankie Crocker, a radio legend whose influence over three decades was matched only by his flamboyance, died Saturday night in Miami. Published reports said he was 63. He had been sick for several months, then hospitalized last month after a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. At his request, the news was not made public. "He was at peace before he left,"his producer, Maurice Singleton, said yesterday. Crocker, who
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Schizophrenia in Children: FAQs
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By ELISSA STOHLERMarch 11, 2010
ABC News spent almost eight months profiling three families in Southern California whose children suffer from childhood schizophrenia.
Studies suggest schizophrenic brains may deteriorate at an accelerated rate.
Last spring, 7-year-old Jani Schofield was diagnosed with schizophrenia, in part because of her incessant hallucinations that she says command her to hit and bite people. Nine-year-old Rebecca Stancil was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia after she tried to kill herself to stop the voices inside her head. Brenna Wohlenberg, 14, has not yet been diagnosed with schizophrenia, but she says sinister spirits instruct her to become a serial killer. Her 12-year-old sister Ailish also struggles with hallucinations and violent inclinations.
Click here for more on each family's struggle with childhood schizophrenia.
We decided to put to paper many of the questions the parents we profiled are constantly asked. Even though some questions seem unanswerable, the families try to do the best they can to explain how they live with such a ravaging disease.
Many people wonder if simply adjusting the children's diets would make a difference.
"[Jani] will starve herself rather than eat if she doesn't like the food," says her father Michael Schofield, who regularly blogs about his daughter's schizophrenia. "Assuming she will eat when she gets hungry enough is a logical idea. Schizophrenia isn't logical."
Jennifer Wohlenberg, mother of Brenna and Ailish, tells ABC News she has tried numerous diet changes.
"The girls' diets were severely restricted when they were young due to Ailish's numerous severe allergies," says Wohlenberg, who also maintains a blog about her family. "They were off gluten completely, off nearly everything, and it did not affect their behavior."
Jennifer Wohlenberg also tells ABC News that many people have suggested her daughters' problems are more behavioral than psychiatric.
"I read every discipline book I could get my hands on," she says. "I believe I have been very consistent with discipline and follow through. No motivation or punishment works unless the girls are in a good space. They want to be good girls, it's just that sometimes, they can't."
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Families whose young children have severe mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia, face a costly and emotional struggle. Families share the daily struggles, breakdowns and the overwhelming strain such illnesses place on relationships and finances.
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Children's activities for the Easter holidays: Unlimited action, unlimited adventure
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By Mike Peake Published: 12:54PM BST 01 Apr 2010
Get involved: Sport England hopes to attract 900,000 children into taster courses across a range of sports, including horse riding, climbing, orienteering and canoeing Photo: ALAMY
Getting children active is very much a government priority. Last summer, Sport England cajoled 177,000 youngsters into completing 10-week courses in a venture called Sport Unlimited, which was aimed at encouraging children to try sport outside school. But the initiative wasn’t just about meeting government targets. It offered children a chance to get out of the house and do some exercise while making friends and trying something new.
Few parents want to let junior loose on a slippery rock face, which is why indoor climbing is such a hit. The number of man-made walls in Britain is now nudging 400. “Climbing helps improve co-ordination, muscle tone and general health and fitness,” says Nick Colton at the British Mountaineering Council. “And it can help kids develop a sense of personal responsibility that can stand them in good stead throughout their lives.” The BMC publishes a free downloadable booklet for parents of children interested in climbing. Find it at thebmc.co.uk/parentsguide.
You don’t need an alp to get into skiing; Snowsport England (www.snowsportengland.org.uk) lists more than 80 clubs across Britain and most of them are child-friendly.
Ski Rossendale (www.ski-rossendale.co.uk) in Lancashire, for example, offers taster sessions for children on their dry slopes from just £10.
More than 15,000 children aged 8-16 signed up for triathlons in Britain last year and the number is rising by more than 10 per cent a year. Competitions follow the same format as adult triathlons, but distances are shorter, typically 100m swims, 2km bike rides and 1km runs for eight to 10 year-olds, and three times that for 15 and 16 year-olds. There are around 80 triathlon clubs offering training and events for children. Details can be found at britishtriathlon.org.
The British Federation of Sand & Land Yacht Clubs has just eight clubs on its roster, so attracting new members is a priority. One day they might form their own new clubs. “It’s perfect for kids, because it offers almost instant gratification,” says the federation’s Mark Lloyd, who tells us the Victorians were early adopters of the sport. The two clubs best suited to children are near Cambridge (anglialandsailing.co.uk) and in Brean near Bristol (breanlandyachtclub.org.uk).
Children generally know no fear when it comes to horses, which makes riding an excellent pursuit for adventurous, animal-loving youngsters.
“It can be a hugely rewarding experience for children,” says Chris Doran at the British Horse Society (bhs.org.uk), “but finding somewhere to send your child, especially for the first time, can be a bit daunting.” Doran recommends a look at the website’s “Approved centres” list (click on the “Riding” tab); more than 600 riding centres across the country that have been inspected by BHS officials.
There are more than 30 junior ice hockey teams in Britain and youngsters who are hooked talk of a physical and demanding team sport that is high on drama but equally big on discipline. Most of the country’s ice hockey clubs subscribe to regional youth leagues and there are usually separate teams for under-10s, young teens and under-18s. The website of the English Ice Hockey Association (www.eiha.co.uk) has more details.
Almost two million Britons have been in a canoe in the past 12 months and according to the British Canoe Union (bcu.org.uk), about half of them were youngsters. “Kids can be challenged on white water, relax on tranquil water or be part of a canoe polo team,” says Chloe Nelson at the BCU.
“All it requires is for someone to want to give it a go.”
From May 1-9, the BCU’s sister body, Canoe England (canoe-england.org.uk) is running nationwide “Come And Try It” sessions.
Junior caving clubs are not easy to find, but if you live in an area where the terrain is like Swiss cheese, then the odds are that one of the local clubs will welcome kids. One such club is the Bradford Pothole Club (bpc-cave.org.uk), which regularly explores the Yorkshire Dales and where a seasoned caver will happily show new members the ropes, so to speak. See also trycaving.co.uk.
There are 120 orienteering clubs dotted across Britain and many of them welcome young members, but if none of these appeal then British Orienteering (britishorienteering.org.uk) recommends that children encourage a teacher to start up a club at school.
The association’s website is full of ideas about getting things rolling and if everything goes to plan your map-reading offspring could soon be competing in the British Schools Orienteering Championships, which take place every November.
“Kids love windsurfing,” says champion British windsurfer Guy Cribb (guycribb.com), who teaches both children and adults. “Modern kit and coaching enables them to get the bug within the hour,” he explains, pointing out that windsurfing is a sport with a never-ending climb as you strive constantly to accomplish something new.
Guy, who began windsurfing aged 13, recommends that young newcomers find out more about Team 15, a coaching programme for the under-15s organised by the Royal Yachting Association (rya.org.uk). See also ukwindsurfing.com.
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With the Easter holidays stretching ahead, Mike Peake picks out 10 activities for children to enjoy.
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AUTUMN IN THE CITY
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Friday, October 20th 1995, 4:15AM
Ladies and gentlemen and children of all ages: The Big Apple Circus has once again pitched its tent in Lincoln Center's Damrosch Park.This year's production, "Jazzmatazz," celebrates Manhattan's Jazz Age, when New York was the music center of the world. But there's more to the circus than jazz. Making their American debut are Swiss juggler Kris Kremo, slack-wire dancer Masha Dimitri, Russian trapeze artist Rizhov Trio and Elena Egorova, who spins hula hoops. There's also a trio of elephants Anna May, Ned and Amy. Since it's a one-ring affair, the kiddies won't have to strain their eyes. Tickets range from $10 to $49, from Centercharge, (212) 721-6500, or Ticketmaster outlets. For other information, call (212) 268-0055.
Need to decorate your bedroom wall? Or maybe the living room? The 14th annual Vintage Poster Fair is back again, tomorrow and Sunday, at the Park Central Hotel, 56th St. and Seventh Ave. The stars of this year's show are the winners from the prestigious Poster Festival in Chaumont, France. The fair is always an interesting event, with thousands of posters, dating from 1890 to the present, on display or on sale at prices ranging up to $2,500. The gallery is open from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. tomorrow (6 p.m. Sunday) and admission is $10 daily ($15 for the weekend). Call (212) 206-0499. Patricia O'Haire
Maybe they don't dance, dance, dance all night, but the Alvin Ailey company will make a pretty good attempt at it this weekend when they put in an appearance at the Queens Theater in the Park in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park. The highly acclaimed troupe, led by Judith Jamison, performs tomorrow at 8 and Sunday at 3 (that performance is sold out). Tickets are $18, members' price $13.50. Call (718) 760-0064.
Want to know about alternative medicines? Acupuncture? Tai Chi? The undersea world? The Museum of Natural History is your best bet this weekend. As part of its Month of Sundays for October, there's a series of demonstrations, lectures and workshops exploring nontraditional forms of healing, including a lecture on Food as Medicine, the practice of Chinese forms of medicine and exercise and the significance of the fish in various cultures. Programs run 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., and all events are free with the cost of regular suggested museum admission ($7 for adults, $4 for children and $5 for students and seniors). The museum is at 79th St. and Central Park West (212-769-5800).
Free is a good price
Theater for nothing? What a lovely idea. But that's what's happening weekends through Nov. 12 when the Frog & Peach Theater Company presents a two-hour version of Shakespeare's rarely seen "King John." The play is a political tragi-comedy showing what happens when church and state try to walk the same path together. The production is free. Seating at the West-Park Church, 165 W. 86th St., is first-come, first-served. Performances are at 7:30 Thursdays through Saturdays and Sundays at 2. P.O'H.
Dance images and movements from various Asian cultures are combined with elements of Western dance in "Nine Songs."Based on the 2,000-year-old poems of Qu Yuang and set in a large, water-filled lotus pond, "Nine Songs" incorporates music from India, Tibet, Japan and Taiwan as dancers reflect the changing cycles of nature. Presented by the Brooklyn Academy of Music, "Nine Songs" is part of the 13th Next Wave Festival. At BAM Opera House, 30 Lafayette Ave., Brooklyn. Tonight and tomorrow at 8. Tickets are $15 to $40. Call (212) 307-4100. Robert Dominguez
Man who would be King
Elvis lives! in a collection of photographs taken in 1956, when the King was a 21-year-old up-'n'-coming rock star. Although they were meant to be publicity shots for RCA Victor, Presley was captured in casual, often unguarded moments at home and on the road by photographer Alfred Wertheimer. The candid photo sessions turned out to be a freeze frame for what would soon become a turning point in Elvis' life: A few months later came his controversial appearance on "The Ed Sullivan Show" and superstardom, prompting manager Col. Tom Parker to restrict photographic access to Presley. Today through Nov. 13 at Circle Galleries (468 West Broadway) and at the Woodbridge Center in Woodbridge, N.J. Call (212) 941-0606. R.D.
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Apple corps Ladies and gentlemen and children of all ages: The Big Apple Circus has once again pitched its tent in Lincoln Center's Damrosch Park.This year's production, "Jazzmatazz,"celebrates Manhattan's Jazz Age, when New York was the music center of the world. But there's more to the circus than jazz. Making their American debut are Swiss juggler Kris Kremo, slack-wire dancer Masha Dimitri, Russian trapeze artist Rizhov Trio and Elena Egorova, who spins hula hoops. There's
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REALITY BITES. This week's roundup of TV's guiltiest pleasures
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Sunday, April 23th 2006, 1:20AM
"The Real Housewives of Orange County" (BRAVO) Everyone has dogs in this ritzy community and everyone loooves their dogs - a lot. "There is a pug cult," said Kara as one woman loaded her tiny pooch into a baby stroller. "People around here are freaks about their pugs. They are a mix between a dog and an alien." But twentysomething Jo doesn't share the nabe's affinity for canines. "I think I'm going to have to slaughter him and have him for dinner," she said of her pup, after having to pick up the poop he left. Then hubby Slade upped the ante: If she wins a go-cart race, she gets a new Louis Vuitton bag. If he does? She dresses up in a French maid costume and cleans the house. "I don't clean," she said, definitively. "How about French maid costume, calling the cleaners? That's very sexy," she suggested when she lost. Amid all the fun, struggling Lori's son returned from juvenile hall and got-it-all Kimberly got some bad news: a mole proved to be malignant.
NOW THAT'S GOOD TV: The classic "MILF" (a nasty term to suggest you'd be interested in relating to a friend's mom in an unmotherly way) debate was raised again as a bunch of teens converged on a hot tub where Lauri and Vicki were steaming in bikinis. "You know, when I first heard the term MILF, I was actually offended, but now I think it's flattering. I'm flattered," Lauri said.
"Celebrity Cooking Showdown" (NBC) Anybody hungry? Well that's too bad, 'cause you'll only get to watch the food being prepared on this week-long contest special. Alan Thicke of "Growing Pains" fame played host to three teams of celebs and celeb chefs: Monday saw downloadable dame Cindy Margolis paired with Wolfgang Puck, for example. Tom Arnold joined the group, as did Patti LaBelle and O-Town's Ashley Parker Angel. The audience watched, starving, as foodie Gael Greene and party planner Colin Cowie chowed down. When volleyball siren Gabrielle Reece flipped a filet of Dover sole, the tension reached a fever pitch. Thicke yelled things like "Ashley's got eggs!" with as much enthusiasm that could be mustered for a man who barely gets a bite. We would have kept watching, but the burrito delivery guy arrived.
NOW THAT''S GOOD TV: "I don't mind how arrogant he is 'cause he sure is cute," Greene cooed over Angel. But Reece's braided stringbeans were "tortured vegetables." At least she got to eat.
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REALITY BITES. This week's roundup of TV's guiltiest pleasures BY AMY DILUNA "The Real Housewives of Orange County"(BRAVO) Everyone has dogs in this ritzy community and everyone loooves their dogs - a lot. "There is a pug cult,"said Kara as one woman loaded her tiny pooch into a baby stroller. "People around here are freaks about their pugs. They are a mix between a dog and an alien."But twentysomething Jo doesn't share the
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TRACY'S GIRLS STAND BY THEIR MAN
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BY GEORGE RUSH AND JOANNA MOLLOY With Kasia Anderson
Tuesday, March 13th 2001, 2:20AM
Katharine Hepburn is said to be livid over a claim that her longtime lover, Spencer Tracy, was bisexual. So is Tracy's daughter, Susanna.
"It's bunk," the 93-year-old Hepburn has been telling friends, according a well-placed source. "It's ridiculous."
Richard Gully, long an aide of studio boss Jack Warner, makes the surprising claim in the new issue of Vanity Fair. "Homosexuality for many stars was an opportunistic thing, a passing phase to get their careers off the launching pad," Gully says, mentioning Tracy.
Gully, a gay British aristocrat who died last year, went on to allege that the star of such films as "Captains Courageous," "The Old Man and the Sea" and "Inherit the Wind" was "never sober. I don't think he functioned as a man. He and Katharine Hepburn had chemistry only onscreen."
Hepburn and Tracy, who co-starred in such classics as "Pat and Mike," "Adam's Rib," and "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," began a lifelong relationship in 1942. Even dirt-digging author Christopher Anderson has described theirs as one of Hollywood's great romances, though the ardently Catholic Tracy never divorced his wife, Louise.
A friend of Hepburn's says she has assured one and all Tracy was all man.
Susanna Tracy, his 68-year-old daughter by Louise, tells us: "Anybody who knew him is going to just laugh. Oh, Lord! It's just absurd."
Whoopi Goldberg must figure that Pardongate-plagued Bill Clinton could use a drink. And what a drink she sent him last week, when the devoted Democrat heard the ex-President was dining upstairs at '21' with former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger. Goldberg sent the table a bottle of 1982 Lafite Rothschild, which runs about $1,200. "It was unbelievable," says one who sampled a glass.
As for Goldberg, she wasn't swigging the cheap stuff, either. Spies tell us she and her dinner companions put away several bottles of '82 Petrus, at about $3,000 a pop. Looks like Whoopi is following Clinton's Truman-esque advice that you have to vote Democratic "if you want to live like a Republican."
Sumner Redstone looked mighty proud of his latest
lady Saturday afternoon. The 77-year-old Viacom chief smiled and put his arm around thirtysomething blond Manuela Herzer when a photographer snapped them strolling down Madison Ave. The pair did some shopping at Barneys before returning to Redstone's suite at the Pierre Hotel, says a spy. Herzer, who was Redstone's date at the premiere of "What Women Want" in December, appears to have replaced fortysomething Christine Peters as the billionaire's main squeeze. Meanwhile, Redstone's divorce from his wife of 52 years, Phyllis, grinds on. "He doesn't seem to want to give her a divorce," says a Phyllis friend.
Sixties rocker John Phillips has been clean and sober for some time, but he's still paying the price for his wild youth. The 66-year-old Mamas and Papas singer spent the last three weeks in L.A.'s Cedars-Sinai hospital for a kidney condition stemming from his 1992 liver transplant.
"It was touch-and-go for a while," a source tells us. Phillips' rep says doctors discovered the kidney problem after he checked in with a shoulder injury. "He fell off a stool and tried to ignore the pain because he was finishing his solo album," says his spokeswoman.
The father of Bijou Phillips is due to be transferred any day
to a clinic in Palm Springs for rehab - "physical rehab," his rep emphasizes. Due out in May is Phillips' CD "Pay, Pack and Follow," featuring songs he recorded with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards back in the day.
Steven Seagal may need some pointers on the care and feeding of New York "it" girls. Hotel heiress Nicky Hilton and some other beautiful young things encountered the aging action star Friday at the premiere of his flick "Exit Wounds." The girls weren't bothered by the metal detectors outside the Ziegfeld Theater or the Rainbow Room, scene of the after-party. (Organizers worried Seagal's co-star, fresh-from-jail rapper DMX, might attract very harsh critics.)
But trouble came when Seagal invited the 17-year-old Hilton and her pals to join him at a party at the Hudson Hotel. According to a witness, they'd piled into a limo outside when one of Seagal's handlers informed them they had to get out because "Steven thought you'd follow him in a taxi."
Hilton and company made a beeline to Spa instead. Seagal was later seen huddling with Sean (Puffy) Combs at Lotus.
ROBIN WILLIAMS doesn't have to worry about any actors' strike. He's also a talented coat-checker. The comic snuck into the coatroom of La Caravelle Saturday and, chattering in French, Italian, Russian and Chinese, tossed out wraps as only he can. He also made out nicely in the tip departmentÂ
REV. AL SHARPTON and a comely female companion hit the Four Seasons for lunch Thursday. Controversial "Yo Mama's Last Supper" artist Renee Cox also opted for the Pool Room over the restaurant's traditional power scene in the Grill RoomÂ
TALK EDITOR Tina Brown and Time honcho Norman Pearlstine had media Kremlinologists buzzing when they lunched at Patroon last week. Brown says there's nothing more to the meal that two old friends catching upÂ
MICHAEL YORK, Robert Stack, Valerie Perrine, Ahmet Ertegun and Beverly Johnson toasted Nikki Haskell the other night at her L.A. pad. The party celebrated her nearby Sunset Blvd. billboard that advertises Nikki and her Star Caps papaya pills. "I can open the window and see myself in lights," says Nikki.
COUNTRY COUPLE Amy Grant and Vince Gill welcomed their first child yesterday.
Grant gave birth to a 7-pound, 9-ounce baby girl just a little after midnight at a Nashville hospitalÂ
GOURMET MAGAZINE critic Jonathan Gold doesn't skimp on the vinegar in his stinging review of Atlas, the New York restaurant that has foodies waiting three weeks for a reservation. Gold says chef Paul Liebrandt delights "more in vandalizing food than in preparing it well" and compares one appetizer to "a brand of antihistamine." Gourmet editor Ruth Reichl will no doubt make sure everyone eats well on April 23, when she chairs this year's Matrix Awards, given by New York Women in Communications. Due to be at the Conde Nast-sponsored lunch are Barbara Walters, Michael Crichton, Sheryl Crow and Michelle Pfeiffer.
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Katharine Hepburn is said to be livid over a claim that her longtime lover, Spencer Tracy, was bisexual. So is Tracy's daughter, Susanna. "It's bunk,"the 93-year-old Hepburn has been telling friends, according a well-placed source. "It's ridiculous."Richard Gully, long an aide of studio boss Jack Warner, makes the surprising claim in the new issue of Vanity Fair. "Homosexuality for many stars was an opportunistic
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MEGAN'S PARENTS GIRD FOR TRIAL
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Monday, May 5th 1997, 2:02AM
After three years of agony, the parents of Megan Kanka are ready to face the man accused of raping and killing their 7-year-old daughter.
"We'll be there, there's no doubt about that," Megan's mother, Maureen, 36, said of Jesse Timmendequas' trial, which begins today.
Both Maureen and Richard Kanka will testify which they expect will be so painful that they asked Judge Andrew Smithson to ban cameras from the courtroom.
They also plan to attend all of the six-week trial, in which Assistant Mercer County Prosecutor Catherine Flicker is to present a gruesome, step-by-step recreation of Megan's rape and slaying.
But the worst is already over, Maureen Kanka said.
"The hardest thing was losing my daughter," said Kanka, who crusaded for Megan's Law, which requires sex offenders to register with police after release from jail.
According to authorities, Timmendequas lured Megan into his home in 1994, then raped and murdered her.
The twice-convicted sex offender a scrawny, moustached laborer at the time of his arrest in 1994 goes on trial this morning in Megan's slaying.
After nearly three months of jury selection, a panel of nine women and eight men has been chosen for the trial in Mercer County Court.
If he is convicted of murdering the Kankas' youngest child, stuffing her body into a box and dumping it in a park, Timmendequas, 35, will face the death penalty.
Megan's is the third and most serious sex crime to which Timmendequas has been linked he was convicted in the assaults on two other New Jersey girls in 1980 and 1981, police said.
Timmendequas, who lived across the street from the Kankas in Hamilton Township, N.J., lured Megan from her yard on July 29, 1994, promising to show her a puppy, police say.
He allegedly ushered her into a bedroom of the house he shared with three other convicted sex offenders at 27 Barbara Lee Dr. There, he raped Megan, cops said.
Afterward he silenced her, cops said, using a belt and a plastic belt to strangle her.
Across the street, Richard Kanka arrived home to find his daughter was missing. The only sign of her was her bicycle on the lawn.
The Kankas mounted a frantic hunt, running helicopter and foot searches throughout the area. Timmendequas joined in, even volunteering to get art supplies to make posters.
A day after Megan disappeared, the search stopped. Her body was found 3 miles away.
The neighborhood reeled in shock as police arrested the helpful neighbor, who turned out to be a former psychiatric patient. Timmendequas broke down in police custody, cops said, admitting to assaulting the girl and carting her body away.
He later pleaded not guilty to murder and two counts of aggravated sexual assault.
The Kankas became activists. They petitioned Gov. Christie Whitman, pushing for a law to alert communities when released pedophiles move in. They founded the Megan Nicole Kanka Foundation and turned the murder site into a park.
They helped win legislative change in more than half a dozen states. Forty-four states now have variations of Megan's Law, and President Clinton signed a sweeping federal version last May.
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After three years of agony, the parents of Megan Kanka are ready to face the man accused of raping and killing their 7-year-old daughter. "We'll be there, there's no doubt about that,"Megan's mother, Maureen, 36, said of Jesse Timmendequas' trial, which begins today. Both Maureen and Richard Kanka will testify which they expect will be so painful that they asked Judge Andrew Smithson to ban cameras from the courtroom. They also
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CATCH THIS: PIAZZA HAS MET HIS MATCH
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BY GEORGE RUSH AND JOANNA MOLLOY With Jo Piazza and Chris Rovzar
Wednesday, January 19th 2005, 6:55AM
Mike Piazza's bachelorhood is going ... going ... gone!
The Mets slugger is due to marry former Playmate Alicia Rickter the weekend after next, we've learned. Word is that the nuptials will take place in Florida, where Piazza owns a condo in Miami and a house in Boynton Beach.
Last April, Piazza's reps denied talk that he'd given Rickter an engagement ring whose value was estimated at between $98,000 and $500,000.
But there's no question the fetching brunette had Piazza's attention. Time was when he estimated that he'd had
as many as 100 sex partners.
"I try to be faithful when I'm in a relationship," he told Playboy in 2003. "Of course, there are the girls ... here and there who you don't have relationships with, but they're not just friends, either."
He'd previously dated "Playmate of the Millennium" Darlene Bernaola - going so far as to have her initials tattooed on his ankle. (After their break-up, he had them reinked to resemble a stallion with a horn.)
Despite Bernaola's testimony that they had an active sex life, Piazza was dogged by rumors that he was a switch-hitter - provoking him to hold his famous "I'm not gay" press conference after a Mets-Phillies game in 2002.
Soon afterward, he met Rickter, who graced Playboy's October 1995 centerfold. It wasn't long before he told an interviewer, "I'm thinking the next chapter is settling down, starting a family."
Piazza recently bought a $4.1 million Tribeca penthouse that should fit the couple nicely. But they may not have much time for a honeymoon. He's due to show up for spring training a week after their wedding.
The ladies of "Desperate Housewives" don't need any help relieving their desperation.
We told you how Teri Hatcher claimed in FHM that she didn't need a man because she has "some fabulous
electronics." Now we hear that the
Golden Globe winner just got a gold, limited-edition sex toy engraved with the word "trouble," courtesy of Jimmyjane, which sells erotic accessories.
Maybe she should share it with her co-star Eva Longoria, who is positively evangelical about the benefits of self-gratification.
"I bought my first vibrator three years ago," she tells Self magazine. "Now I give [one] to all my girlfriends. They scream when they unwrap it."
"I was working on a movie and knew I'd be there for a month," she goes on, "so I used my per diem [meal allowance] to buy [one]."
Shouldn't her supposed boyfriend JC Chasez be taking care of her needs?
Brad & Jen's photo finish
Jennifer Aniston better spare herself a peak at this week's issue of Star.
Brad Pitt, has vigorously denied that Angelina Jolie came between them, he and Jolie look awfully tender in photos taken in October on the Italian set of their movie "Mr. and Mrs. Smith."
The tab reports that the shots were taken after the cameras stopped rolling as the two strolled through the streets of Costiera Amalfi.
Pitt's rep insists that the photo was snapped during rehearsal and that "it's been retouched - and pretty badly, because it looks like her hand is coming out of his stomach."
Sir Ben Kingsley and his third wife, Alexandra Christmann, are officially calling it quits after 15 months of marriage.
The "Gandhi" star's rep confirms to us: "For some months now, Ben and Alexandra have been leading separate lives. The separation is very amicable, and they remain very fond and very close."
Christmann, 30, in October 2003.
Though they rang in the New Year together at Christmann's Berlin home, the relationship's end became apparent when a German tabloid ran a photo of Mrs. Kingsley kissing Sammy Brauner, the 41-year-old son of German movie producer Atze Brauner.
Lindsay Lohan's mom, Dina, has finally had enough of her dad, Michael.
Dina filed for divorce yesterday from her wild-man hubby in Nassau County Supreme Court. A source close to Dina tells us she's claiming cruel and inhuman treatment and adultery.
The couple has been fighting almost from the start of their almost-20-year marriage. More than once, Dina has sought a restraining order against
Michael, who was arrested in November for allegedly violating an order of
protection by trying to enter the
Last year, Dina was awarded full custody of Lindsay and her three younger brothers.
A lawyer for Michael, who was released from rehab yesterday, did not return a call.
A rep for Lindsay, who is in New Orleans shooting "Just My Luck,"
said the teen star supports her mother/manager.
Says a family friend: "Dina is really just hoping that Michael stays sober and that this can be resolved quickly and painlessly."
Who says the Rev. Al Sharpton isn't a uniter?
The Rev managed to honor both the women in his life - his soon to be ex-wife, Kathy, and his alleged paramour, Marjorie Harris - at his Martin Luther King Jr. Day forum on Monday.
"My family has always been a movement family," Sharpton told the Canaan Baptist Church crowd, which included Mayor Bloomberg, former Bronx Borough President Fernando Ferrer and former HUD Secretary and potential attorney general candidate Andrew Cuomo. "I don't care what happens in life - all of us remain committed in part for the movement, with dignity."
With that, Sharpton asked everyone
to give a hand to Kathy, the head of the National Action Network's Women's Auxiliary.
The Rev proceeded to give a shout-out to Harris, who took the opportunity to explain why she wants to be a vice chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee.
LOVEBIRDS HEIDI Klum and Seal have have found an L.A. nest. The couple, who have a pad in New York, will be moving into a $4.3 million Bel-Air estate on nearly 2 acres, the L.A. Times reports. Meanwhile, the supermodel was back in town last night, celebrating her holiday engagement (you read it here first) and the success of her Bravo show, "Project Runway," which airs tonight ...
NOT EVERYONE in showbiz is shrugging off this week's inauguration. 'Tween idol Hilary Duff performed last night at the youth ball. Lyle Lovett headlines tonight's Black Tie & Boots Gala. And while Creative Coalition member Alan Cumming told us he'd sooner leave the country than watch Dubya's victory lap, Coalition colleagues like Macy Gray, Joe Pantoliano and Dennis Hopper are showing their bipartisan spirit by attending the group's "Ball After the Ball" in D.C. tomorrow night ...
FORMER "X-FILES" star Gillian Anderson has tied the knot with her longtime boyfriend, journalist and documentary filmmaker Julian Ozanne, People reports. The wedding took place on Dec. 29 on Lamu's Shella island, off Kenya's Indian Ocean coast ...
BRACE YOURSELF for Norah Jones' musical makeover. The Grammy-winner, who straddles folk and jazz, tried out a harder rock sound at an unadvertised gig at Don Hill's the other night.
Abandoning her piano, Jones strapped on an electric guitar and jammed with
a Japanese girl and a guy on drums.
The News' Brittany Schaeffer reports that Jones and the other gal wore short skirts. All them were disguised in pink wigs ...
JEREMY IRONS checked out the Trippen Boots at Marine Penvern's boutique on Orchard St. ...
EVANDER HOLYFIELD may be good with his fists, but someone should untie his tongue. "American Idol" star Ruben Studdard, "The West Wing's" Dulé Hill, soul legend Roberta Flack and Destiny's Child's Michelle Williams were among those who watched in disbelief last weekend when the boxer attempted to read from a TelePrompTer at the Stellar Awards in Houston. A source says he mistook "leave" for "live" and fumbled over numerous other common words.
With Jo Piazza and Chris Rovzar
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Mike Piazza's bachelorhood is going ... going ... gone! The Mets slugger is due to marry former Playmate Alicia Rickter the weekend after next, we've learned. Word is that the nuptials will take place in Florida, where Piazza owns a condo in Miami and a house in Boynton Beach. Last April, Piazza's reps denied talk that he'd given Rickter an engagement ring whose value was estimated at between
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PARK-SLAY TEEN GETS 10 YEARS
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Tuesday, January 26th 1999, 2:05AM
A furious judge stared baby-faced killer Christopher Vasquez "straight in the eye" yesterday and dared him to tell a hushed courtroom how and why he fatally stabbed a man to death in Central Park.
But Vasquez, 16, his expression blank, refused to explain the grisly 1997 killing of Michael McMorrow so Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Michael Corriero sentenced him to 31/3 to 10 years in prison.
Ending a horrific case that stunned the city with a mix of cruelty, wealth and drunkenness in the park, the visibly frustrated judge also recommended that Vasquez not be paroled before 10 years is up.
It was a recommendation he did not make for Vasquez accomplice Daphne Abdela, now 16, the troubled daughter of a wealthy upper West Side couple, who got the same sentence last year.
Speaking directly to Vasquez, Corriero said the evidence shows that "you had the knife . . . you used the knife . . . you inflicted the wounds" that killed McMorrow, 44.
He said jurors were able to "pierce" Vasquez' defense his attorney charged Abdela killed McMorrow, her drinking buddy and see "a young man whose emotions were so fierce and uncontrollable that they exploded."
He then laid down his challenge, urging the upper East Side teen to break his silence about a night that began with a beer party in John Lennon's "Imagine" circle and ended with McMorrow's mutilated body dumped in Central Park Lake.
"You have the opportunity . . . to resolve the issues," Corriero said. "You'll gain little by your silence. You'll lose the opportunity to speak the truth, explain your behavior and accept responsibility."
Corriero's challenge was unusual because judges usually speak last at sentencings. He asked Vasquez' attorney to allow him to speak first, saying Vasquez' response could affect the sentence. But Vasquez refused to answer on the advice of attorney Arnold Kriss, who said his client intends to appeal. Instead, Vasquez read a statement in which he expressed sympathy for his and McMorrow's families.
Corriero shot back: "The only sentence I'm left with is a sentence that takes your youth away from you."
Earlier, Assistant District Attorney Matthew Bogdanos described how Vasquez exploded with rage at McMorrow after Vasquez swam nude in Central Park Lake with Abdela. He said Manhattan prosecutors would continue to fight any parole effort.
Charles McMorrow, the victim's older brother, said he was "very comforted" by Corriero's recommendation. "He looked him straight in the eye and said, 'You killed Michael McMorrow,' " the brother said. "That's what we feel, too."
McMorrow said the family, which donated $5,000 to put a bench in Central Park's Strawberry Fields in the victim's memory, will fight parole for both teens.
For the first time since he was arrested, Vasquez looked directly at the McMorrow family as the victim's siblings spoke of their loss and McMorrow's mother wept in the front row. Most of the time Vasquez kept a poker face until he left the courtroom, eyes red-rimmed and head twisted, searching for a last glimpse of his own family.
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A furious judge stared baby-faced killer Christopher Vasquez "straight in the eye"yesterday and dared him to tell a hushed courtroom how and why he fatally stabbed a man to death in Central Park. But Vasquez, 16, his expression blank, refused to explain the grisly 1997 killing of Michael McMorrow so Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Michael Corriero sentenced him to 31/3 to 10 years in prison. Ending a horrific case that stunned the city with
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