A man fired from a Chicago auto-parts warehouse six months ago went on a shooting rampage yesterday, killing six of his former co-workers before cops shot him to death.

Salvador Tapia, 36, walked into Windy City Core Supply about 8:30 a.m. armed with a .380-caliber semiautomatic handgun and a deadly grudge.

"He tied up one victim inside and started shooting the other victims," Acting Chicago Police Superintendent Phil Cline said. "He went throughout the supply warehouse, killing them."

Five of the victims were shot in an office, the sixth on a ramp in the rear of the mazelike warehouse.

"Once he's inside and by the front door, he's got them cornered," Cline said.

All of the victims were men and some were related.

The man whom Tapia tied up managed to escape - his hands still bound behind his back - and stopped a co-worker coming in late. They called police from a nearby restaurant.

"He was really scared, like a chicken with its head cut off," said cook Pamela George.

Police briefly exchanged fire with Tapia outside the warehouse before he retreated back inside.

"We saw a guy shooting at police officers outside the building and saw people running around like crazy," said Al Martinez, who owns a business a half block away. "We came and saw all the cops running, hiding behind cars."

The police hostage, barricade and terrorist squad stormed the plant when no one answered the phone. "It was very hard for our . . . officers," Cline said. "It's a warehouse of used engine parts and there's just hundreds of 55-gallon drums filled with engine parts, crates [and] steel containers, and there's very little room to maneuver in there."

Tapia was hiding behind a box in a narrow passageway, police said.

"He had the gun, they ordered him to drop the gun, he refused to drop the gun," Cline said. "That's when the officers shot him."

Five of the workers were declared dead at the scene. Tapia and one of the victims were taken to a hospital, where they died.

Tapia was fired six months ago for causing trouble at work and showing up late or not at all, police said. He recently made threatening calls to one of the owners.

He had been arrested a dozen times since 1989 on domestic assault, weapons violations, theft and driving offenses, police said. He was convicted once, for a weapons offense.

Summary: A man fired from a Chicago auto-parts warehouse six months ago went on a shooting rampage yesterday, killing six of his former co-workers before cops shot him to death. Salvador Tapia, 36, walked into Windy City Core Supply about 8:30 a.m. armed with a .380-caliber semiautomatic handgun and a deadly grudge. "He tied up one victim inside and started shooting the other victims,"Acting Chicago


Sunday, November 23th 2003, 1:25AM

-MIKE JEROVEC, 18, a student at John Jay School of Criminal Justice, likes techie toys. The Nokia N-Gage - a game deck, MP3 player, wireless browser and phone - tops his gift list. "It's totally cool." ($299 at GameStop, 136-51 Roosevelt Ave., Queens, (718) 461-7308. Go to n-gage.com for other locations.)

-MARIA PEREZ, 17, goes to Chelsea's Fashion Industry High School. She wants Britney Spears' new CD, "In the Zone." "I love her," she says. ($20, Tower Records, 1961 Broadway, 212- 799-2500.)

-ANN THOMAS, 18, would love the chance to lace up a new pair of kicky Converse All-Stars. "Red, black, high, low, I like them all," she says.(Red bandana Chuck Taylor's, $60 at converse.com.)

-HELAINA HOVITZ Like many of her friends at Baruch College Campus High School, Hovitz, 14, wouldn't turn up her nose at a bottle of Abercrombie & Fitch's signature fragrance, 8. "All my friends are in love with it," she says. ($15.50 for 0.65 oz. Go to abercrombie.com for store locations.)

-BLANCHE ROCA, 17, a student at Fashion Industry High School in Chelsea, "would love to find a Ferrari" parked outside her door. A more down-to-earth wish: an iPod. "I love to listen to music," she says. ($299 at Apple Store SoHo, 103 Prince St., 212-226-3126.)

-VINCENT CORMAN, 17, likes to get around the city in style. "A Go-Ped motorized scooter will do the trick," he says. (Available at Le Petit, 427 W. 51st St., and at go-ped.com. Prices start at $440.)

- JACKIE PORT, 15, a student at Brandeis High School, doesn't make a Christmas list for herself. "We make a list of things to get for everyone else," she says. That said, Jackie wants gold hoop earrings this year. (Gold hoops with dangling charms, $125 at Fortunoff, 681 Fifth Ave., (212) 758-6660.)

-JEZEBEL MARIE Even Santa won't be able to grant one wish made by this 17-year-old Brooklynite: "Can I have the guy who plays Tarzan on TV?" As for her other wish - a gold name necklace - it's no problem to oblige. (From $51-$100 at findgift.com.)

-LINDSEY FILOWITZ "When I was a little girl I made a list and gave it to my parents," says Filowitz, 14, a ninth-grader at New York City Lab School for Collaborative Studies. "Now I just tell them what I want. Saves time." That includes "anything" by rapper Eminem. "He's huge this year." Ditto Juicy Couture tops. "They're so cute." (Juicy Forver tee, $60, Bloomingdale's, 1000 Third Ave., 212-705-2000.)

-JENNIFER FREEMAN Stars like pampering like the rest of us. One item on Freeman's list (the 18-year-old plays Claire on ABC's "My Wife and Kids") is a "reflexology foot massage." (When Freeman visits New York, $75 gets her a 60-minute reflexology session at Angel Feet, 77 Perry St., (212) 924-3576)

-MICHAEL B. JORDAN Lucy had Ethel. Batman had Robin. This "All My Children" actor also wants a sidekick - the T-Mobile Sidekick, which gives Internet browsing, E-mail and fun features such as mobile snapshots and games. "My friends have one," he says, "and I've wanted one for a long time." ($249 at tmobile.com.)

-IVY TAM This 16-year-old Bronx Science student knows what she wants in her stocking. "Makeup, makeup, makeup," she says. (Urban Decay -her favorite brand - Cocoa body shimmer powder boasts a cool leopard puff, $25 at Sephora, 71-30 Austin St., Forest Hills, 718-544-0009.)

-ROSALIE NERINE, 17, a senior at John Adams High School in Queens, has a simple message for Santa: "Send cash. Please." Her favorite place to spend it? Diesel. "They have cool things," she says. Pint-size bags are popular this season. (Work case in orange, $95 at Diesel, 68 Greene St., 212-966- 5593 or diesel.com.)

-LISA FOILES Nothing would make this 17-year-old a cast member of Nickelodeon's "All That" happier this holiday than a white Christmas. But she'll settle for these DVDs: "SpongeBob SquarePants, The First Season," "Finding Nemo" and "The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers." At amazon.com, $20-$50.

-BRITTANY SNOW The "American Dreams" star (she's 16) wants a plane ticket (her sweetie lives in Dallas), a teacup terrier puppy and clothes from Tommy Hilfiger.

-Kevin Clark, 14, played Freddy Jones, the drummer, in "School of Rock." No surpise he says he covets "a high-hat cymbal stand for my drum set." Apologies to Kevin's mom! ($50 and up at Sam Ash, 2600 Flatbush Ave., Brooklyn, 718-951-3888 or samashmusic.com.)

-SASHA COHEN It takes one to know one. Which is why this 19-year-old Olympic figure skater can suggest the perfect gift for girls her age.

"Every teenaged girl loves to get makeup," says Cohen, confessing that the dazzling axels and dizzying spins she executes aren't the sole reasons for her rosy cheeks. "I like Stila makeup. They have a line of cute holiday packaged makeup that would make a great gift."

Summary: TEENAGE TASTELAND These gifts are tops on adolescent wish lists BY JOE DZIEMIANOWICZ -MIKE JEROVEC, 18, a student at John Jay School of Criminal Justice, likes techie toys. The Nokia N-Gage - a game deck, MP3 player, wireless browser and phone - tops his gift list. "It's totally cool."($299 at GameStop, 136-51 Roosevelt Ave., Queens, (718) 461-7308. Go to n-gage.com for other locations.) -MARIA PEREZ, 17, goes to Chelsea's Fashion Industry High School. She wants


The draft for the First Congressional District commenced at Jamaica, L.I., yesterday morning, under the supervision of Capt. EDMUND ROSE, ProvostMarshal.

This District is composed of the Counties of Richmond, Suffolk and Queens, which are, for the convenience of drafting, designated as sub-districts.

The different quotas for these sub-districts, including the additional 50 per cent., are as follows, viz.:

The Board of Enrollment consists of the following gentlemen: Commissioner W.S. MCCOUN, Queens County; Surgeon, Dr, GEO. N. RICHARDSON, Richmond County; JAS. A. FLEWRY, Deputy Provost-Marshal, of Queens; JOHN C. THOMPSON, Deputy Provost-Marshal, of Richmond, and DAVID R. ROSE, Deputy Provost-Marshal, of Suffolk County.

The military on duty in the neighborhood consisted of the Fourth Ohio Volunteers, under Col. STEWART, and two companies of the Invalid Corps, under Capts. PRESTON and DUTTON, A body of sixty policemen were also on duty, under Capt. WADDY.

At 10 o'clock, Capt. ROSE announced, with the usual formalities, that the Draft of the First District was shout to begin, Richmond County, better known as Staten Island, was the first drawn, The whole number of ballots deposited in the wheel were 2,205,594 being the quota.

JOHN FLEURY, aged 12; HENRY FLEURY, aged 14; SIDNEY MCCOUN, aged 12; and BENJAMIN SNEDAKER, aged 13 years, relieved each other, performing the duties assigned to the "blind man."

Everything passed off quietly, no one of the large number present evincing other than good feeling, The following is the result of the first day's drawings, which completes this Sub-District, To-day Suffolk County will be attended to.

Among those drawn yesterday were five ministers, also five members of one family.

Conrad, Rev Thos K, Southfield.

Davis, George B Jr, New-Brighton.

De Boise, Geo W, Tottenville.

Dickerson, Rev. G F, Springville.

German, J H DeWitt, Middletown.

Hews, Wm P, Watch Oak.

Hall, Frank H, New Brighton.

Hooker, Thos M, New Brighton.

La Forge, F W, Westfield.

Roeck, John F, N Brighton.

Simonson, H M, Cherry La.

Scheille J B, N Brighton.

Taylor, Rev T T, Southfield.

Van Pelt, John, Old Place.

Van Name, David H. N'field.

Van Namee, David, Mar Har.

Van Neime, Joshua N, Tot'e.

Van Pelt, Nicho's, Mar Har.

Van Pelt, Aaron W, North'd.

Wright, G F, Long Neck.

Summary: First Congressional District, Staten Island.  The draft for the First Congressional District commenced at Jamaica, L.I., yesterday morning, under the supervision of Capt. EDMUND ROSE, ProvostMarshal.


WASHINGTON | Mon Feb 7, 2011 3:32pm EST

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. trade panel Monday approved combined final duties ranging up to nearly 450 percent on steel drill pipe from China used in oil production.

The U.S. International Trade Commission on a 3-3 vote said there was sufficient evidence U.S. companies are threatened with harm by unfairly low-priced imports from China.

A tie vote is enough under U.S. trade law to win import relief, even if it is based only on a threat of injury and not actual injury that has already occurred.

The decision is a victory for the United Steelworkers union and four U.S. producers that joined together to bring the case.

They were VAM Drilling USA, Texas Steel Conversions Inc and

Rotary Drilling Tools of Texas and TMK IPSCO of Illinois.

The United States imported $119.2 million of the drill pipe from China in 2009, down from $193.8 million in 2008.

The vote clears the way for the Commerce Department to issue final antidumping and countervailing duties on the imports for at least five years.

The department last month approved antidumping duty rates of 69 percent to nearly 430 percent on a swath of Chinese companies to offset unfairly low pricing.

U.S. drill pipe importers criticized the vote, which they said would increase the cost of U.S. oil production.

"As a direct result of the vote, drilling companies will have to spend millions of dollars more on drill pipe and less on hiring workers to do the drilling," David Lesco, general manager of Downhole Pipe & Equipment of Sugarland, Texas, said in a statement.

Two Chinese companies, Baoshan Iron & Steel and Shanxi Yida Special Steel Import and Export, escaped being hit with any antidumping duties in that investigation.

But those companies risk future duties after annual administrative reviews in which Commerce looks at the actual price of imports and adjusts duty rates, said Lewis Leibowitz, a lawyer who represented drill pipe importers in the case.

As a result of Monday's vote, all Chinese drill pipe producers and exporters will face an 18.18 percent countervailing duty to offset subsidies they receive from the Chinese government.

Summary: WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. trade panel Monday approved combined final duties ranging up to nearly 450 percent on steel drill pipe from China used in oil production.The U.S. International Trade Commission


Published November 28, 2011 | Associated Press

Doris Day, America's pert, honey-voiced sweetheart of the 1950s and 1960s, beguiled audiences with her on-screen romances opposite top Hollywood leading men Cary Grant, Rock Hudson and Jack Lemmon.

She adored and misses them all, says the 88-year-old Day. But her deepest yearning is reserved for her late son Terry Melcher, a record producer whose touch and voice are part of Day's first album in nearly two decades.

"Oh, I wish he could be here and be a part of it. I would just love that. But it didn't work out that way," Day said, her voice subdued. It's a voice rarely heard since she withdrew from Hollywood in the early 1980s to the haven she made for herself in the Northern California town of Carmel, where Clint Eastwood was once mayor.

"My Heart," set for a Dec. 2 U.S. release, has induced Day to edge back to public attention. The CD includes 13 previously unreleased tracks recorded over a 40-year span, including covers of Joe Cocker's "You Are So Beautiful," the Lovin' Spoonful's "Daydream" and a handful of standards. All proceeds go to Day's longtime cause, animal welfare.

A condensed version of the album was released in Britain earlier this autumn and landed on the top 10 chart.

Melcher, who worked with bands including the Byrds and the Beach Boys, produced most of the songs and sang on two. He died of melanoma in 2004 at age 62, leaving a void that draws tears from Day when she speaks of him.

"I loved doing it and having Terry with me. That was important, just for me," she said in an interview from Carmel. "I wouldn't think it would be what it is. ... I just love that he is on it. And I miss him terribly, but I have that."

The album's release coincides with new recognition for the actress and singer.

It was announced this week that her recording of "Que Sera, Sera" ("Whatever Will Be, Will Be"), featured in Alfred Hitchcock's 1956 thriller "The Man Who Knew Too Much" starring Day and Jimmy Stewart, will be included in the Grammy Hall of Fame. In January, Day is to be honored with the Los Angeles Film Critics Association's career achievement award.

And that career was storied. She once ruled the box office in a string of fluffy comedies including "Pillow Talk" with Hudson (which earned her a best actress nomination) and "That Touch of Mink" opposite Grant, movies that showcased her verve and fresh-faced sexiness. Her sweet vocals helped make hits of pop tunes including "Sentimental Journey" and Oscar-winners "Que Sera, Sera" and "Secret Love."

On screen, Day often played the determined single career girl who could be swept off her feet (but never into premarital sex) by such irresistible suitors as Grant or three-time co-star Hudson. She was also the loving wife and mother in such movies as "Please Don't Eat the Daisies" (1960), with David Niven.

Day came off as a straight-shooter who didn't let her beauty go to her head; she was no "Mad Men" toy. Granted, she was too ladylike to fit the definition of a dame, in the parlance of her early career. But she could hold her ground without fraying the hem of her tone-perfect cinematic femininity, or her co-star's masculinity.

She ventured into exceptions to her signature romantic-comedies, most notably the Hitchcock thriller and "Love Me or Leave Me" from 1955, in which Day played jazz singer Ruth Etting in the story of Etting's career and tempestuous marriage.

Day said she had no quarrel with the studio system under which she worked, one in which her films were largely dictated. She had stumbled into the craft, after all, pushed from band and club singer to actress by her agent. Day got the first role she tested for, in 1948's "Romance on the High Seas," and sailed on from there.

"I was just put there, put there, put there. And I've never gotten over that. How could life be so good for me and I was never looking? I was never looking for it," she said.

As for her personal life, she said, "There are always things that you go through that aren't perfect." For Day, that included three divorces and widowhood. When her third husband died, she learned that he and a business partner had lost her multimillion-dollar fortune. (She righted herself to some extent with the 1968-73 sitcom "The Doris Day Show," and a lawsuit.)

Her decision to leave Los Angeles and the industry behind was an impromptu one, Day said. She had regularly visited Carmel-By-The-Sea, decided it suited her and made the move up the California coast and away.

"I just loved what I was doing. But then, when I came up here, I thought well, I had my turn, and that's just fine. And the other people are coming up and starring and it was their turn. I didn't think a thing about not working," she said.

Instead, she devoted herself to promoting the well-being of animals with the Doris Day Animal Foundation, which she created in 1978 and which is the new album's beneficiary. Her own pets, including some half-dozen cats, have it good: She built a glass-ceiling extension off her house so the felines can enjoy the view without the risks of going outside.

Why the attention to animals? "They're the most perfect things on Earth," Day replied. "They're loyal. They love you. And they'll never forget you. ... I think they're put here for us to learn what love is all about."

They're also steadfast companions as her circle of family and friends has been narrowed by death. She's still in regular touch with two-time co-star James Garner -- who shares anecdotes about their working relationship in his newly published autobiography, "The Garner Files" -- but she notes sadly how many other colleagues have passed away.

Although dampened by loss, the buoyancy that infused her work in movies and music remains part of Day. In her ninth decade of life, however, the pace has changed.

"Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries" ("Life is just a bowl of cherries. So live and laugh at it all"), a snappy tune and a favorite since she danced to it as a 5-year-old in Cincinnati, is on her new album. But the arrangement has turned it into "beautiful ballad," Day said

"When I sang it slowly, it became a super song," she said.

The same can be said of Day, in any tempo.

This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. © 2011 FOX News Network, LLC. All rights reserved. All market data delayed 20 minutes.

Summary: Doris Day, 88, Caps Unexpected Resurgence With New Album, 'My Heart'


The man in the middle is off on the sidelines — again.

That’s just how Mitt Romney likes it this year. But it’s not going to last — and that’s only partly by his own doing.

Romney was the only top-tier candidate to skip a big weekend in Iowa that included a candidates’ forum organized by religious conservatives. It drew him some barbs from his rivals, and from spurned Iowa powerbrokers.

But Romney is making decisions like this one from a position of strength, as he has all primary season. Alone among the contenders — since he’s the only one to be able to boast of extended stability in the polls — Romney has the luxury of letting the campaign that’s swirled around him come to him, on his own terms.

Even so, Romney is in a position where he can make a serious play in Iowa over the last six weeks before the caucuses. The state famously resisted his expensive play in 2008, when he finished a distant second behind Mike Huckabee, who consolidated social conservative support late to ride to victory.

For Romney this year, the state is a tempting target: His presumed strength in New Hampshire could let Romney build unstoppable momentum by taking Iowa first. Romney advisers are nudging in that direction, and his considerable resources will be brought to bear on the state in the weeks to come.

Romney is helped by the fact that no one else has built an organization or on-the-ground buzz that suggests the kind of consolidation of support a candidate needs to win the caucuses.

Not counting Romney, six different candidates see pathways that lead them to the top in Iowa, and wins by any of them wouldn’t be beyond the realm of possibility.

Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain have been the beneficiaries of the latest polling surge, both nationally and inside the Hawkeye State. Rick Perry has the money to vault himself back into contention, and he’s got Iowa’s airwaves almost to himself these days.

Michele Bachmann has faded in her native state, but she did win the contested Ames straw poll over the summer and retains strong pockets of support. No one has traveled more widely inside Iowa than Rick Santorum, and perhaps none of the candidates better aligns ideologically with social conservatives in the state.

And don’t forget Ron Paul. His views on foreign policy leave him well outside the GOP’s mainstream, but dedicated supporters are critical in the caucuses, and a splintered field means Paul could be well in the mix.

It’s precisely that splintering that gives Romney a window now. He has the resources to play virtually anywhere, and once again gets to make a decision from a position of strength in this race.

Summary: (Winslow Townson/AP Photo) The man in the middle is off on the sidelines — again. That’s just how Mitt Romney likes it this year. But it’s not going to last — and that’s only partly by his own doing. Romney was the only top-tier candidate to skip a big weekend in Iowa that included a candidates’ forum organized by religious conservatives. It drew him some barbs from his rivals, and from spurned Iowa powerbrokers. But Romney is making decisions like this one from a position of strength, as he has all primary season. Alone among the contenders — since he’s…


By Grant McCool and Caroline Humer

NEW YORK | Fri Feb 20, 2009 3:20pm EST

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Going back as far as 13 years, there is no evidence that the firm of accused swindler Bernard Madoff bought securities for customer accounts, the trustee liquidating the firm to recover assets said on Friday.

In the first meeting of creditors of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, a lawyer for the court-appointed trustee said his staff was "looking at every Madoff family member and every insider associated with the Madoff firm" as part of the effort to find assets.

Madoff, a once-respected Wall Street trader and investment adviser, was arrested and charged with securities fraud on December 11 after authorities said he confessed to running a global Ponzi scheme with losses of $50 billion. A Ponzi scheme is one in which early investors are paid off with the money of new clients.

All Madoff's assets were frozen and his firm is being liquidated by court order.

"The work done to date indicates that for some substantial period, perhaps as much as 13 years ... we have found no evidence that securities were purchased for customer accounts," the trustee, New York lawyer Irving Picard, told the meeting in an auditorium at U.S. Bankruptcy Court.

The meeting for Madoff creditors -- including individual investors, banks, charities and others -- was attended by about 100 people and was at times emotional.

Picard was confirming statements made by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority in January that there were no trades made by the Madoff firm. Examinations had also shown no evidence of trading by Madoff's investment fund.

That means Madoff either placed trades through other brokerages, a move industry officials have considered unlikely -- or he was not executing trades at all.

Picard said at a news conference after the meeting that although no securities were bought or sold, customers still received statements showing trades.

"We know how that was done but we can't tell you now," said Picard, citing a criminal investigation by U.S. prosecutors.

Picard said his staff was in the process of receiving bids for the market-making part of the firm. The trustee told reporters that the market-making operation and the proprietary trading arm of the firm were legitimate.

He said 2,350 customer claims had been filed through Thursday, most of them from individual investors, not the hedge funds that had invested client money with Madoff by the billions and which also consider themselves victims.

"To my recollection the total amount is more than $1 billion."

The deadline for filing all claims is July 2. The lawyers said creditors would begin to receive letters in one or two weeks about how their claims will be treated. They said creditors were entitled to recover money invested, but none of the phantom profits.

Picard said his team is "getting a feel for how this operation worked."

Bennett Goldworth, 52, a Manhattan real estate broker who said he lost several million dollars and introduced relatives to investing with Madoff, came away disappointed.

"We got some answers but what you heard is there's a lot of frustration and fear because it doesn't seem like anyone is really doing enough to deal with the individual investors," Goldworth said.

Retired New York economist Raymond Spungin, 77, said outside the auditorium that he did not expect to get anything back from hundreds of thousands of dollars invested.

In the meeting, Spungin told the trustee: "We are victims of the incompetence of the SEC." The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission investigated Madoff several times over the years but found no wrongdoing.

Miriam Siegman, a 65-year-old retiree from New York, told Reuters she had felt alone since discovering that 40 years of savings had evaporated.

"I've felt the need to be around other victims. I'm not sure why," said Siegman, who first invested with Madoff in 1992. "It's comforting in a way."

Picard is working with the Securities Investor Protection Corp (SIPC) to liquidate Madoff's brokerage and find assets to distribute to customers who believe they were defrauded.

(Reporting by Grant McCool and Caroline Humer, editing by Gerald E. McCormick)


By David Fogarty and Alister Doyle

LONDON | Mon Nov 15, 2010 10:56pm EST

LONDON (Reuters) - Rising greenhouse gas levels mean the planet is very likely to become warmer, threatening more disasters such as Russia's record drought and Pakistan's deadly floods.

A warmer world is expected to place more risks on food supplies for a growing population. Changes in rainfall patterns could disrupt riverflows, water supplies and crops.

The U.N. panel of climate scientists says it is more than 90 percent probable that human activities, led by burning fossil fuels, are the main cause of warming in the past half-century. It says the world needs to dramatically reduce the amount of carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels and deforestation to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

Following are some key questions about rising temperatures.

THE HEAT IS ON. BUT HOW MUCH?

Average surface air temperatures have warmed more than 0.7 degrees Celsius over the past century. But the rise has not been continuous, scientists say.

The warming trend over the past 50 years of 0.13 deg C per decade is nearly twice that for the past 100 years and the past decade is the warmest yet recorded.

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says the first nine months of 2010 tied the same period in 1998 for the warmest combined land and ocean surface temperature since records began in the 19th century.

The U.N.'s World Meteorological Organization says 1998 is the warmest year on record, followed by 2005, both years of powerful El Nino patterns that drove up temperatures globally.

For January to September 2010, the global combined land and ocean surface temperature was 14.75 deg C. This is 0.65 deg C above the 20th century average, NOAA says.

While this doesn't sound much, so sensitive is the climate system that the difference between an Ice Age and now is a rise of about 5 deg C.

WHAT ABOUT TEMPERATURES IN THE FUTURE?

In all depends on how nations tackle the rapid growth in greenhouse gas emissions. Computer models say the world could be between 1.1 and 6.4 deg C warmer by 2100 and that climate change would continue for centuries, the U.N's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says.

Leaders of more than 120 nations agreed at the U.N.'s Copenhagen summit last December to limit warming to below 2 deg C to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, without giving a timeline. The IPCC says emissions would need to peak within 10 years.

There are many. The IPCC says climate change, from heatwaves to rising temperatures, will put people, crops and livestock at greater risk.

Extreme droughts and floods are likely to be more frequent, hurricanes and cyclones are also likely to become more powerful, though not necessarily more frequent, and rising seas are expected to threaten river deltas, erode famed tourist beaches and damage coastal cities.

Crops such as wheat and rice will also face greater production uncertainty because of stronger droughts, floods and storms, while warmer seas and rising acidity threaten coral reefs that are nurseries for fish stocks crucial to millions of people.

Some areas might initially benefit -- longer growing seasons might boost crop growth in Siberia or northern Europe, for instance.

Sea levels have risen more than 20 centimeters since 1870 and the U.N. climate panel says sea levels could rise between 18 and 59 cm this century, and more if parts of Antarctica and Greenland melt faster.

The IPCC said in its latest report in 2007 that it will cost less than 0.12 percent of world GDP a year until 2030 to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. By 2030, that would cut about 3 percent from the world economy, mostly to fund a shift to renewable energies such as solar and wind power from fossil fuels.

Insurer Swiss Re says the costs from hurricanes in southern Florida from winds, storm surges and floods could double over the next two decades to $33 billion in 2030, from an annual average loss of $17 billion in 2008.

Issued losses are also rising because more and more beachfront properties are being built in many coastal parts of the world from the Caribbean to Queensland in Australia and Bali.

In a September 2010 report, Swiss Re says climate change could exacerbate the death and destruction from droughts and floods, wiping out years of development gains and costing some countries up to 19 percent of their annual GDP by 2030.

(Sources: NOAA, WMO, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Australian Academy of Science)

Summary: LONDON (Reuters) - Rising greenhouse gas levels mean the planet is very likely to become warmer, threatening more disasters such as Russia's record drought and Pakistan's deadly floods.A warmer world


12/11/2010 at 07:00 PM EST

Prince William and Catherine Middleton's engagement portrait

To go glamorous or relaxed in the world's most-anticipated engagement photos? For Â

, the answer was clear: both!

The newly released photos – the official portrait photographs for the engagement of Prince William and Miss Catherine Middleton – were captured during a two-hour shoot by

, who was hand-selected by the groom-to-be, 28, for the task.

"Prince William has worked with Mario Testino on many occasions before, and so the couple decided that he was the right choice for such an important portrait," said a Clarence House spokeswoman.

Middleton, 28, did her own makeup for the photos (as she did for her televised

), a source tells PEOPLE, though Testino's makeup artist was on hand for touch-ups.

And those famous tresses? The princess-to-be got her hair done by her usual stylist, James Pryce, from the Richard Ward salon.

For the formal photo – which was snapped in the historic Council Chamber linked to Clarence House, the official residence of William's father Prince Charles – Prince William donned a Turnbull and Asser suit, while Kate chose a white Reiss dress and Links earrings. For the dressed-down denim look – taken in the Cornwall Room of St. James's Palace – William changed into a Turnbull and Asser shirt and Brunello Cucinelli sweater, with Kate opting for a Whistles blouse.

Prince William and Kate Middleton in an official engagement portrait

Testino is famous for his photos of celebrities and royalty, among them

, Prince Harry and their late mother, Princess Diana. Â

"I am very happy to have been asked to cover this historic moment that the whole world was waiting for," Testino said in a statement. "They are in their prime and brimming with happiness. I have never felt so much joy as when I see them together."

Summary: The royal couple do dressed down and high style with fashion photographer Mario Testino


, a Needham company specializing in product lifecycle management and computer-aided design software, has given a gift of $18.8 million of its software to

. The plan is for the university to use the software in its new Engineering Product Innovation Center, or EPIC. In a statement, Kenneth Lutchen, BU’s dean of the College of Engineering, said: “The EPIC facility is meant to expose students to how you go from an idea to a manufacturing-ready and deployable product. We want to create engineers that are excited about innovation. PTC is a leader in how product design and development insures leadership in product innovation. PTC recognizes that, through EPIC, PTC can support a realistic design environment that prepares tomorrow’s engineers for advanced product design and management.”

Monday-Friday 6:00 a.m.- 5:00 p.m.

Saturday, Sunday and Holidays 7:30 a.m.- 12:00 noon

Monday-Sunday 8:00 a.m.- 5:00 p.m.

Summary: PTC Inc., a Needham company specializing in product lifecycle management and computer-aided design software, has given a gift of $18.8 million of its software to Boston University. The plan is for the university to use the software in its new Engineering Product Innovation Center, or EPIC. In a statement, Kenneth Lutchen, BU’s dean of the College of Engineering, said: “The EPIC facility is meant to expose students to how you go from an idea to a manufacturing-ready and deployable product. We want to create engineers that are excited about innovation. PTC is a leader in how product design and development insures leadership in product innovation. PTC recognizes that, through EPIC, PTC can support a realistic design environment that prepares tomorrow’s engineers for advanced product design and management.”


Don Johnson must be out to break Elizabeth Taylor's record for marriages.

The 48-year-old star of "Nash Bridges" just got engaged to a 29-year-old former debutante. Johnson, who has been married four times before twice to actress Melanie Griffith has slipped a 5 1/2-carat diamond ring on the finger of Kelley Phleger. The dark-haired beauty, whose late father was a board member of Wells Fargo Bank, is a school teacher. She met Johnson in San Francisco, where he has been shooting his series and livening up the social scene. "They've been seeing each other about six months," Johnson's spokesman, Elliot Mintz, told us. "They met, they fell in love, they intend to wed.

" Johnson proposed to Phleger after being linked in the past year with one woman young enough to be his daughter (his "Nash Bridges" co-star Jodi Lynn O'Keefe) and another old enough to be his mother (San Francisco socialite Denise Hale). The couple plans a small fall wedding. Murphy `passenger' falls to death The drag queen who got a lift from Eddie Murphy last May has met a bizarre end. High-heeled hitchhiker Atison Siuli fell to his death from the ledge of his fifth-floor apartment in Los Angeles after accidentally locking himself out, KCBS-TV reported yesterday. Siuli, known to friends as Shalimar, was stopped by police on an outstanding prostitution warrant after Murphy stopped to pick Siuli up in his car. Murphy claimed he was prompted by good will in offering Siuli a ride home. A spokesman for Murphy said the star "has no comment regarding anything to do with that person.

" A peek experience Good thing Jerry Seinfeld wasn't at the fashion show the Duchess of York hosted Wednesday night. His ex-girlfriend Shoshonna Lonstein looked so hot strutting the catwalk that the comic might not have remained "the master of his domain" as Seinfeld likes to say when his flesh gets tempted. Lonstein was certainly working that low-cut black gown that designer Pamela Dennis slipped on her. "I was feeling all red here," sighed Lonstein, pointing toward her famous decolletage. "They had to powder me backstage.

" Lonstein, there with current beau, Jay Aston, was just as coquettish when asked whether she'll tune in to her ex' final episode, on May 14. "I actually am going out that night," she said with a wink. And what does she think about his moving back to New York? "I haven't really thought about it," she said. Right. Joining Lonstein at the Yale Club benefit for Sarah Ferguson's "Chances for Children" charity were Karen Duffy, Dana Reeve, Stephanie Seymour, Donald Trump, Dominick Dunne and Fergie herself. The duchess, who's in talks to host her own talk show here, is headed next to Russia. "I'm going to do a project in St. Petersburg, where I will be looking after homeless children for two or three days," she told us. Bull session Say what you will about his feather boa, Dennis Rodman has stamina. The cross-dressing Chicago Bull partied at the Life club till close to dawn on Wednesday morning. A few hours later, The Worm was back on the court, scoring 11 points and grabbing 17 rebounds to help the Bulls bounce the Nets from the playoffs. Rodman may have even less time to sleep soon. He's in talks to star as a mercenary in a TV action series called "S.

Summary:
Don Johnson must be out to break Elizabeth Taylor's record for marriages.The 48-year-old star of "Nash Bridges" just got engaged to a 29-year-old former debutante.
  Johnson, who has been married four times before  twice to actress Melanie Griffith  has slipped a 5 1/2-carat diamond ring on the finger of Kelley Phleger.
  The dark-haired beauty, whose late father was a board member of Wells Fargo Bank, is a school teacher. She met Johnson in San Francisco,


Antony Gormley was announced as one of this year’s winners of the world’s richest arts prize. Photograph: Nigel Roddis/Reuters

British business could learn valuable lessons from Japan, which has a tradition of corporate philanthropy that views spending on creativity and the arts as a duty, according to sculptor Antony Gormley.

He was speaking on Tuesday as he was announced as one of this year's winners of the world's richest arts prize. He was named as the sculpture laureate of the Praemium Imperiale awards, a Japanese prize in its 25th year, which rewards fields of achievement not covered by the Nobel prize.

The other winners were Francis Ford Coppola for film, Placido Domingo for music, Michelangelo Pistoletto for painting and David Chipperfield (whose recent buildings include Turner Contemporary in Margate and the Hepworth in Wakefield) for architecture.

Gormley said there were a number of foundations in Japan linked to corporations, citing the Inimori Foundation and the Daiwa Foundation as "exemplary institutions", which saw it as their duty to use some of their profits to support creativity in a wider way. "I think they are really inspirational," he said.

In Japan, he added, there was an extraordinary number of foundations where there was "an absolute belief in the duty of corporate money to reinvest in a collective future. There are examples in this country but there could be more".

The UK government regards encouraging philanthropic giving as a key arts policy and the culture secretary has also called on arts organisations to "hammer home" the economic case for funding.

Lord Patten, an adviser to the awards, said the UK's cultural vitality was immense and doubted whether theatre in Britain had ever been stronger.

"I hope the government and all governments recognise the contribution which that creative vitality makes economically. It's not the main reason for it – my God, to have to argue for the arts in so utilitarian terms is deeply depressing – but there are utilitarian arguments as well as the ones about the human spirit."

Gormley follows previous sculpture laureates who have included Richard Serra and Louise Bourgeois, and from the UK Anish Kapoor, Richard Long, Tony Cragg and Anthony Caro; while Chipperfield follows in the footsteps of Zaha Hadid, Norman Foster, Richard Rogers and James Stirling.

All winners are required to attend a formal ceremony in Japan where they are given their 15m yen prize (£95,000) by Prince Hitachi, the patron of the Japan Art Association.

Gormley said the prize money would go towards the less well-funded public arts projects he works on, including one coming up in Japan. "There are many aspects of my work that really require this kind of extra help."

Summary: British sculptor, named sculpture laureate of the Praemium Imperiale awards, praises Japanese corporate philanthropy


Atlanta-based Coca-Cola will use technology made by XL Hybrids Inc., a Boston startup with ties to MIT, to retrofit 100 of the soft drink giant’s service vans to run on electric power.

The hybrid powertrain systems generally help cut fuel use by roughly 20 percent, said Tod Hynes, president of XL Hybrids. The technology works by capturing the energy generated by braking, converting it into usable power, then storing it in a lithium-ion battery pack until that power is needed to accelerate.

Bruce Karas, Coca-Cola’s vice president of environment and sustainability, said the company was attracted by the convenience of XL Hybrids’ technology — it can be dropped into a vehicle the company’s drivers already know how to handle — and its price, about $8,000 per unit when ordered in bulk.

The powertrains will be used in the company’s service van fleet, and will help Coca-Cola meet its goal of reducing its carbon footprint by 25 percent by the end of the decade.

“This seems to be, for this sector, a pretty solid technology,” said Karas, adding that Coca-Cola could add more XL Hybrids’ powertrains to its vehicles in the near future.

Founded by MIT graduates, XL Hybrids has until now mainly tested its technology on a small scale: Canadian Linen, a uniform rental and supply subsidiary of AmeriPride Services in Minnesota, has been using the technology in several of its Chevy Express vans since August; XL Hybrids has also retrofitted 10 FedEx vans.

“Our company’s goal is to accelerate fuel and emissions reductions at a large scale,” said Justin Ashton, vice president of business development at XL Hybrids. Payback on the investment generally takes just a few years.

Still the advanced battery market has been a tough business, with some companies suffering setbacks; for example, Boston-Power and A123 Systems have had to turn to China to remain competitive. Moreover public demand for electric vehicles has not been as high as many in the industry had expected, especially as gasoline prices remain well below the $4-a-gallon peak of 2008.

And while big fleet owners such as Coca-Cola and FedEx have been testing different hybrid and electric vehicles, no company has yet committed in a big way to any one technology. Karas did say the company is happy to act as an early adopter, helping to spotlight clean technology advancements.

“We hope to inspire others to consider some of the things that we’re doing,” Karas said.

Lisa Jerram, a senior consultant at Navigant Research, said XL Hybrids has so far done a good job of addressing the two major challenges it faces in the market — cost and integration — and Coca-Cola’s interest in the company is a welcome endorsement of its technology.

Still, she said, XL Hybrids and its peers will need to show they can bring in large orders over time.

“It’s a challenging market,” Jerram said. “No one is going to survive on orders of a couple of batteries.”

But Theodore O’Neill, a technology analyst with Litchfield Hills Research LLC in Connecticut, was not optimistic about XL Hybrids’ long-term prospects, predicting the company will run into the same roadblocks as others before it.

“I wish them luck, but it’s another A123,” O’Neill said, referring to the Waltham battery maker that filed for bankruptcy in 2012 and was bought by a Chinese conglomerate. “I expect it all to end the same way.”

Hynes, however, is upbeat about his company’s technology, particularly given the partnerships and funding it has landed in recent months.

Last year, the company began using Johnson Controls Inc. of Milwaukee as a battery supplier. Now he expects XL Hybrids to expand its annual production capacity from 1,000 powertrains to more than 10,000.

“If we were working with a smaller supplier, that would be a major risk; but it’s not because we are working with a company like Johnson Controls,” Hynes said. “We see our market growing very rapidly in the next few years.”

The company this week also received another endorsement — a $3 million investment from WindSail Capital Group, which is comanaged by former Massachusetts Energy and Environmental Affairs secretary Ian A. Bowles. Bowles said the WindSail investment will help XL Hybrids grow from a 15-person startup to a commercial producer.

Summary: Atlanta-based Coca-Cola will use technology made by XL Hybrids Inc., a Boston startup with ties to MIT, to retrofit 100 of the soft drink giant’s service vans to run on electric power. The technology works by capturing the energy generated by braking, converting it into usable power, then storing it in a lithium-ion battery pack until that power is needed to accelerate. Bruce Karas, Coca-Cola’s vice president of environment and sustainability, said the company was attracted by the convenience of XL Hybrids’ technology — it can be dropped into existing vehicles — and its price, about $8,000 per unit. “This seems to be, for this sector, a pretty solid technology,” said Karas, adding that Coca-Cola could add more XL Hybrids’ powertrains to its vehicles in the near future.


April 2011: a beautiful day in Venice. I'm in the Giardini, sitting on the terrace of the British pavilion, interviewing Mike Nelson, the installation artist chosen to represent Britain at this year's biennale. Nelson is something of a biennials veteran, having contributed to those in Sydney (2002), Istanbul (2003) and São Paulo (2004). And Venice too: as part of the 2001 biennale, the London gallery Peer commissioned him to make a huge work in a former brewery on Giudecca. But this is his biggest challenge yet, thanks both to the prestige of the commission and the pavilion itself. It's a listed neo-classical brick box featuring 2ft-thick walls, 3,000-odd square feet of exhibition space and a 30ft-high ceiling. Nelson is the first exponent of installation to take it on and he's set himself the exacting job of "making it disappear".

"It's proving hard to get rid of," he tells me, "but I'll deal with that." His early plans targeted the pavilion's exterior. One idea was to transform it into a grimy, dilapidated tyre store, which would have struck a strange note in a watery, car-less city. But Nelson feared the Giardini's "theme-park-ish, fairground" character would rob the concept of any ambiguity. So he changed tack and headed indoors to magick away the pavilion's insides.

Nelson makes installations that are claustrophic and disorienting. His best-known work is The Coral Reef (2000), currently on display at Tate Britain, a maze of corridors and small cubicles, variations on the theme of a "reception area". There's the foyer of some kind of budget hostel, a scary-looking dive tricked out with JFK memorabilia and US militaria. There are ramshackle taxicab offices and shabby waiting rooms whose fixtures, reading matter and general clutter hint at an absent cast of disturbing characters: revolutionary extremists, satanists, religious cultists, fundamentalists of many stripes. And as in all Nelson's works, The Coral Reef features a mass of pungent, brilliantly realised small details. My stomach pitched on discovering that "Room Fifteen" (a minicab office cobbled together from batten and plywood, but with an ominously sturdy grille to keep punters away from staff, or vice versa) is identical to "Room Two" (through which you've entered). How many rooms are doubles, you wonder, and where the hell is the way out?

The Coral Reef's duplicated room isn't just about giving visitors a frisson. It feels like a literary device, like something out of Borges. It signals Nelson's passion for literature, not least for genre fiction with its recurring characters and plot devices and its skewed relationship to the real.

Nelson's concept for Venice is to test out ideas of repetition and duplication on a giant scale. He tells me he's going to "build a biennial within another biennial" by reconstructing his 2003 Istanbul piece. But he's not stopping there. The Istanbul work was housed in a remarkable building: the Büyük Valide Han, a vast, once-palatial 17th-century travellers' inn that survived, in 2003 at least, as a crumbling warren of artisans' workshops. (Gentrification is now under way, and the artisans are being priced out of their old accommodation.) Nelson is set on turning the British pavilion into a dream-like, disjointed suite of chambers inspired by the Han, reinventing its vaulted arcades, domes and vertiginous stairways, invoking both the look of the antique building and the low- to no-budget adjustments wrought by its more recent occupants.

The remains of his 2003 installation will be dovetailed into this invented architecture. They'll also form the project's reference material. The piece featured a dimly lit, old-fashioned photographic darkroom covered with hundreds of black-and-white prints of the Han. The darkroom, we guess, must be the hangout of some odd, obsessive, absent photographer; a character whose identity, and whose relationship to Nelson, invite our speculation.

The scheme's most daring element involves the pavilion's lofty central gallery. Nelson wants to disguise this prestigious space as one of the Han's ramshackle internal courtyards, opening it up to sun, wind and rain. But it's a listed structure; permission is needed. So he says he's awaiting the thumbs-up – and then he'll clamber on to the august roof of the pavilion and rip off the skylight.

Nelson would usually draw up plans before starting, but this time he's having to improvise each move as he goes. His goal, he insists, is not to produce a replica of the Han but to realise a memory of it, in all its cobbled-together confusion and curious beauty. So it's not work that can be farmed out to a fabricator. That goes for all his installations: building them is a technical and imaginative discipline that Nelson loosely compares to method acting. He has to get "into character" slowly, arduously. "Making the pavilion disappear" means three months of intense work for the artist and his small team of technicians. In the present age of artistic fabrication and delegation, this hands-on approach is relatively uncommon.

This isn't Nelson's only difference from his peers. Most will be generously bankrolled by the wealthy commercial galleries that represent them. Nelson is looked after by three galleries (the London not-for-profit organisation Matt's Gallery, the Franco Noero gallery in Turin and 303 Gallery in New York), which don't have such deep pockets. The British Council has come to the rescue, funding his costs and balancing his marathon effort with an honorarium. Nevertheless, for an internationally known mid-career professional, his material reward for the work will be tiny. His livelihood to date has rested on project funding rather than gallery sales, and that may well remain the case despite the accolade of having installed for Britain. In short, his creation is a labour of love, "a strange act of obsession" over a place that exists primarily in his imagination.

31 May 2011: I, Impostor, Nelson's experiment in pavilion-vanishing, is unveiled. Permission has been given – the skylight is gone, and the effect of stepping out from the installation's dim, dusty, intimate spaces into the teetering, sunlit "courtyard" is breathtaking. But it's not just the building that's been opened up. I, Impostor clarifies a shift in Nelson's practice. The menacing undertones of The Coral Reef and other works from the earlier 2000s are gone. This work feels wistful, delicate, melancholic. In a nod towards The Coral Reef the labyrinth contains two near-identical rooms. They are domed spaces, sparsely punctuated by skeletal, dirt-blackened weaving machinery. But their effect is refinedly sculptural, not lugubrious.

Visitors to the British pavilion would ordinarily walk through its front entrance into a high, elegant central gallery. Nelson's installation brings you hard up against an old, splintery locked door, then swerves you sideways down a dim corridor and into a low-ceilinged, electric-lit room hung with three mass-produced, grimy, wonky chandeliers. On a table is a heap of dusty crystal drops. The description sounds depressing but the effect is exquisite. Without spelling out a literal narrative, the scene hints at activities of salvage and repair. It's a subtle preface to Nelson's poetic project: invoking a half-remembered, half-imagined place using found objects. It's reminiscent of the psychoanalytic quip about the dynamic of romantic love: "giving something you don't have to someone who doesn't exist".

The project's larger historical agenda is to remind viewers of Venice and Istanbul's intertwined histories. A small plaque decorated with Islamic calligraphy sways one's reading of the room's crystal trinkets. The image of Venetian tourist kitsch gives way to the stereotype of cut-price orientalist finery. Throughout the piece, objects bearing writing (packages, posters, bills, dockets) reinforce a Turkish identity while architectural details and metalwork do their best to muddle it up with Venice. I, Impostor was partly inspired by the two cities' physical similarities and was built using reclaimed materials from both places, but Nelson comments that by using Venetian scrap alone he could have made something perfectly "Turkish".

The British Council flags the work's agenda with the clever phrase "Mike Nelson to make history at the Venice Biennale". The usual European perspective on Istanbul is as a bridge between western liberal capitalism and the Islamic world. In the Renaissance, though, Venice was viewed along similar lines – the Italian city-state's eastern allegiances earned it the hatred of its European neighbours. They believed the Venetians were inciting a Turkish invasion: Venice is one of those places that reveals the porosity of European cultural identity.

Lurking in Nelson's mind as his project progressed was Orhan Pamuk's novel The White Castle, the tale of a 17th-century Venetian who's enslaved by Turkish pirates and taken to Istanbul. There, he's bought by a scholar who is also his double. The pair's mutual fascination, loathing and dependence climaxes in an apparent trading of identities. At the end of the book, one protagonist departs for Venice and "home": the Turkish character, it seems, though much is left in doubt.

The tense, faintly nightmarish tenor of Pamuk's novel forms an intriguing parallel with Nelson's work. In a Nelson installation a brick is a brick, render is render, and a fibreglass boulder is a fibreglass boulder, not a stand-in for a real rock that couldn't be manoeuvred on site. But like Pamuk, Nelson is an allegorist, not a realist. His works ask audiences to suspend disbelief at the level of the "who" rather than the "what". In I, Impostor, someone has been doing this building, working with these tools, taking these photographs, but who? Who is the "impostor" of the title?

When we "read" Nelson's installation we're invited to let our sense of its authorship, its authenticity, slip and slide in a quasi-literary fashion. I, Impostor's mystery photographer is clearly an admirer of Atatürk: the Turkish reformer's portrait presides over his workbench. He's a narrative invention, Nelson's Islamic (maybe Pamukian) alter-ego. But the work can also be read as a fictionalisation of his earlier self, as an interrogation of the status of his own memories of Venice and Istanbul, and as a reflection on art's representation of both personal and global histories. These are difficult agendas, and to see the British pavilion hosting work with this kind of depth and scope is a pleasure.

• The art exhibition at the Venice Biennale runs from 4 June until 27 November.

Summary: Mike Nelson spent three months transforming the British pavilion in Venice for the biennale. The resulting installation is a delicate and melancholic meditation on identity and historical memory, writes Rachel Withers


One of Martin Creed's works of art is not a sculpture or an installation but a little essay about the tiny Italian island of Alicudi, where he bought a house in 2002. The thing about living on an island that is only reachable by boat, he writes, is that every time you leave you have to watch it "get smaller and smaller in the distance until it is gone".

The image is both beautiful and sad. As the island recedes, it takes on the perfect form of a rock sticking out of the sea: but to appreciate this you have to leave. Getting away from Alicudi "takes hours", observes Creed, "and hours later you can still see it there in the distance".

Perhaps, in the last moments, it resembles one of Creed's earliest creations, a blob of Blu-Tack that he stuck to a wall in 1993. Everything in Creed's art is on the brink of disappearing. From tiny sculptures made of Blu-Tack or square pieces of tape laboriously built up into cubes, to an entire nation ringing all the bells it can find for three minutes, his art is fragile and fleeting. The bells rang out and then they stopped.

Creed is a man who wears his passion on his sleeve. His art is a self-portrait, which may seem an unlikely way to describe works that are often either dismissed as empty gestures or praised with big cold words like Minimalism. In fact autobiography is what connects all Martin Creed's efforts. This is inherent in one of his most hifalutin gimmicks, the fact that all his Works are numbered in an ongoing series. His article for Italian Vogue about Alicudi for instance is Work No 577, while All The Bells, the public artwork that opened the 2012 Olympics, is Work No 1197. Is this numbering some quest for order, some attempt to give his art the qualities of a musical score? Perhaps, but what it really does is absolve him from defining his art or even calling it "art": what he has created is a special category of things in the world created by Martin Creed. What connects them is him, and that makes his entire output an epic act of slow, subtle confession.

When Creed opens a retrospective at London's Hayward Gallery on Wednesday it will be the latest chapter in one of contemporary art's most glittering careers. It's hard to believe he was once such a nobody that when this unknown artist sent Work No 88, A sheet of A4 paper crumpled into a ball, to Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate, Serota's secretary sent it back flattened out – at least that's what Creed used to say.

He had his first public gallery show at Southampton Art Gallery, then he was shortlisted for the 2001 Turner prize and chose to exhibit Work No 227: The lights going on and off. He won. The rest is history written in white neon, as galleries and public buildings around the world can't resist putting up his reassuring sign, EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE ALRIGHT – art's equivalent of a Keep Calm and Carry On mug.

He has risen without being widely hated – quite an achievement in the competitive and divisive world of art. Ask about Creed and you find his art elicits a huge fund of admiration and affection from critics and curators. "He's a sweet, charming act", says critic Julian Bell, author of the art history book Mirror of the World, whose demand for art to reflect life is very much a description of Creed. "His work is all done in this light banter with the audience. It's deliciously irritating at times in the way conceptual art is supposed to be."

The warm feelings are shared by Stephen Deuchar, head of the Art Fund, who as director of Tate Britain commissioned one of Creed's most powerful pieces. Work No 850 sent athletes running a relay along the museum's stately Duveen Galleries, galloping past Turner, right through the summer and autumn of 2008. "It had the most incredible impact on the daily life of Tate Britain", remembers Deuchar. "One of the staff said to me when it ended that it was as if the soul had gone out of the building. There was that sense of it being the heartbeat of the gallery. It was such a visceral experience." Deuchar puts his finger on the universal simplicity of Creed at his best: "I always feel with Martin's work that he brings you close to the essence of things."

Every few years since the 1990s, Creed has used that knack for the essential to create a public work of art so lucid and human that it is irresistible. Along with the Tate Britain runners these include his installation of a room half-filled with balloons – it makes the world seem so light and loving – and his drop-dead gorgeous permanent inlaying of the Scotsman Steps in Edinburgh with coloured marbles as rich and various as the floor of a Venetian palace.

Yet in recent years his art has become more wayward. His personal life has directly spilled into his work. On his website, the only works currently exhibited for the whole of 2013 – as other pieces wait to be unveiled in his South Bank extravaganza – are naive portraits including one of Anouchka Grose, a psychoanalyst who became his girlfriend after other relationships, including the one with Paola Pivi that led him to buy the house on Alicudi, broke up.

That same emotional outpouring can be heard in his songs. He has always made music as well as art. Creed's music is essential if you want to get the sense of his art. It's raw retro-punk. But while his early songs are arty sequences of numbers and words, his 2012 album Love to You is much more passionate. The feelings roar out. While the title track and a song called I Can't Stop Thinking About You express his need for love, Creed lashes out in Fuck Off, which goes "Fuck off, Fuck off, Fuck off …"

Creed was born into a Quaker family in Wakefield in 1968, then moved to Scotland when he was three. His Quaker inheritance rings out like a very loud bell as a clue to his art.

The restraint and "minimalism" of his Works echo the moral inheritance of Puritanism, its preference for the plain and honest. In the eloquent statement of his beliefs that is Work No 232, Creed declares in white neon that "The whole world + the work = the whole world." There's a moral imperative to this, a desire to make art that takes its place modestly and usefully in the world.

And yet, a savage rage and wild lusts have pushed more and more openly against the calm Quaker discipline of his series. He's made videos of people defecating and vomiting.

His exhibitions sometimes have a quality bordering on the obsessional, including a show at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh in 2010 that was full of repeated images of steps and numbers. This ordered mathematical side of his work can feel like an artistic compulsion. It can be headache inducing. His paintings and drawings, which have become a more prominent part of his work, can seem astonishingly empty in their simpistic slashes or ziggurat-like repetitions.

When they say things like this it's no wonder critics annoy him. The angriest song on his recent album has the same title as his new exhibition – "What's the point of it?" In the song, a vicious, reedy voice – a hostile critic's voice? – asks over and over again, "What's the point of it? What's the point of it?"

He certainly got asked this when he won the Turner prize. Sunday Times art critic Waldemar Januszcak has called Creed "the worst winner of all time of the Turner Prize". The lights go on; the lights go off. What's the point of it?

It's certainly funny. Work No 227 is currently installed at Tate Britain, after Tate purchased it last year. Standing in a grand empty room in this refurbished museum, appreciating it as art, is an inescapably ambivalent experience. On a sunny afternoon, the skylit room is not plunged into darkness when the overhead lights switch off. Instead it is blue and shadowy, a valley of natural light. Then the lights go on again and everything is bright. Falsely bright? The contrast is between illusion and truth – and for Creed, it seems, truth is dark.

The experience is both moving and self-conscious: thought-provoking and boring. You can't help feeling a bit like a caricature of a modern art lover, standing there appreciating … nothing. Other visitors poke their heads round the door, decide it's an empty room and head off for the Rossettis.

Yet it's a simple universal metaphor. The secret of Creed's art is that it speaks of ordinary things like love and loss. When someone dies the lights go off. That's what it's like. Or like seeing an island slowly vanish in the distance. What's the point of it? What's the point of lit?

Education Slade School of Fine Art, London 1986-1990

Career MartinCreedWorks, 2000 Winner, 2001 Turner prize I Like Things, Milan, 2006 Solo show, London, 2007 Work No 850, Tate Britain, 2008 Scotsman Steps, Edinburgh 2011 All the Bells, 2012

High Point When an entire nation participated in All the Bells.

Low Point When then culture secretary Jeremy Hunt's bell flew off on TV as he joined in All the Bells

He says "You have to hang on to being a loser, because every moment is lost. Every work is a desperate attempt to stem the flow of loss, to grab on to a floater amongst the dross."

They say "The deliberately irritating Fuck Off is like being harangued by a drunk, and will surely be responsible for one or two scratched heads and grumblings of 'Is this art?'"

Dave Simpson reviewing Creed's 2012 album in the Guardian.

"He has an amazing ability to find tension in things such as putting the smallest dog in the room next to the biggest dog."

Summary: Contrast is between illusion and truth, and for Creed, whose first major retrospective opens next week, it seems, the truth is dark


SEOUL — Samsung Electronics Co. will begin selling a smartphone that runs on its Tizen operating system in the third quarter of this year, advancing its plans to reduce dependence on Google’s Android software.

Samsung, the top smartphone maker by sales volume, said the Samsung Z will go on sale in Russia first. Tizen is already used in a few products, including a smartwatch, but has not been deployed in a mass-produced smartphone.

Samsung’s popular Galaxy smartphones and tablets use Google’s open source Android platform, a reliance that prevents Samsung from challenging the dominance of Apple’s App Store and Google Play in the lucrative market for smartphone apps.

The Tizen phone will have preinstalled apps and users will have access to additional apps through Tizen Store.

The company said the Tizen smartphone has a 4.8-inch high-definition display, a fingerprint sensor for security, and a ‘‘slim, angular’’ design.

It said the operating system will allow users to browse the Internet faster and utilize applications more effectively.

Summary: Samsung Electronics Co. will begin selling a smartphone that runs on its Tizen operating system in the third quarter of this year, advancing its plans to reduce dependence on Google’s Android software. Samsung, the top smartphone maker by sales volume, said the Samsung Z will go on sale in Russia first. Tizen is already used in a few products, including a smartwatch, but has not been deployed in a mass produced smartphone.


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Summary: Gnarly in pink!


Catherine the Great bought Titian's The Flight Into Egypt in 1768. Since then the large painting, described by the 16th-century art historian Giorgio Vasari as Titian's first masterpiece, has not been seen outside Russia – until Tuesday.

Loaned to the National Gallery in London by the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, the 505-year-old artwork is looking better than it has for decades, after undergoing intensive cleaning and restoration.

The Hermitage began restoring it in 1999, and the whole process took two people more than 12 years. "It was so dark, under layers of varnish and retouches which completely altered it," said Irina Artemieva, curator of Venetian paintings at the Hermitage. "There was no green or blue, only grey and brown and black."

Two years ago, Artemieva sent an image of the work to the National Gallery director Sir Nicholas Penny, another specialist in the Venetian paintings of the period. "He was so surprised by the results of the restoration, we immediately had the idea to present it here in the National Gallery."

The painting is displayed alongside works that inspired it, by artists including Giovanni Bellini, Giorgione and Albrecht Dürer. Titian trained under the first two, and the third was working in Venice at the time The Flight Into Egypt was painted. The curator Antonio Mazzotta described the other works as the ingredients that went into Titian's painting.

"The National Gallery has an ideal context for this painting," Artemieva said. "You have so many pictures [here] which can explain how this masterpiece was born – and in other British institutions too.

"In the British Museum there are drawings by Dürer and his circle and also in some private collections we have many painting from the same period – the same crucial decade of the 16th century."

The Flight into Egypt was painted in 1507, when Titian was still a teenager, working for Giorgione. Commissioned by Andrea Loredan for his palace on Venice's Grand Canal, it depicts the holy family riding through a vibrant rural landscape alive with animals, plants and children. Vasari marvelled that the animals in the picture were "truly natural and almost alive", an impression not diminished by time.

Penny said: "It's a very ambitious picture, enormously important for our understanding of his work. There are very few large paintings of this kind produced by Italian artists at that date."

He said the depiction of landscapes and animals prefigured those in Titian's later masterpieces such as Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto, which the National recently acquired for £95m. "It's fundamental in any posssible meaning of that word."

Later this year the painting will be displayed at the Accademia art gallery in Venice, and after that, said Penny, "it will never travel again in our lifetime", adding: "We're very honoured that having scanned the museums of the world to find the most suitable place for the debut of this picture our colleague Irena should have selected the National Gallery."

The Titian is the latest in a series of loans between British and Russian cultural institutions, marking a thaw in relations after a crisis four years ago when the British Council was ordered to close its offices near Moscow. However, Artemieva stressed that the loan was nothing to do with diplomatic policy but the result of good relations between the Hermitage and the National Gallery.

Summary: National Gallery borrows The Flight Into Egypt, not seen outside Russia since it was bought by Catherine the Great in 1768


Prize guy ... Dennis Hopper. Photograph: David Levene

Actor and director Dennis Hopper will present the Turner prize at this year's ceremony at Tate Liverpool on December 3.

The 71-year-old Hollywood veteran, who has appeared in more than 150 films, follows in the footsteps of Madonna, Yoko Ono and designer Agnès B, who have all announced the winner of the award in recent years.

Hopper, a passionate collector and artist whose own work has been exhibited in Paris and St Petersburg, will present the £25,000 cheque at the gallery next Monday, with the event broadcast live on Channel 4.

The artists vying for this year's award are Zarina Bhimji, Nathan Coley, Mike Nelson and Mark Wallinger. An exhibition of their work is on show at Tate Liverpool until January 13 2008.

The prize is being held at Tate Liverpool, as a curtain-raiser for Liverpool European Capital of Culture 2008, and will return to Tate Britain in London next year.

Hopper said: "I am very honoured and excited to be giving this award, as I believe the Turner prize is the most prestigious award in the art world."

Summary: The Easy Rider star will hand out this year's award at Tate Liverpool


After a 18-month takeover battle that featured bids and counterbids followed by even more counterbids, Club Med eventually went to China’s Fosun International FOSUF last week for a winning share offer that was 45% higher than Fosun’s original price.

While the Chinese investment group won the iconic French vacation brand, they did so by paying a hefty $1.1 billion, a price that may decide whether China’s media continues calling Fosun’s chairman Guo Guangchang the Warren Buffett of China.

Guo is widely considered one of the country’s best value investors and a report released Monday confirmed his spot atop China richest investors—a group that continues gaining influence around the world.

Shanghai-based Hurun Research, run by the British accountant Rupert Hoogewerf, compiled the ranking of China’s richest investors. To make the cut, investors needed to be worth at least $50 million, with 30% of that derived from investments. The key stipulation was that they had to be investors first and foremost, so Alibaba’s founder Jack Ma and Xiaomi’s Lei Jun, both billionaires from stock holdings in their companies, didn’t qualify. Almost 90 individuals made the list, including nine billionaires.

Guo is worth $4.5 billion from Fosun’s investments, according to Hurun, which include U.S. fashion label St. John and the One Chase Manhattan Plaza skyscaper on Wall Street.

The rest of the Chinese top five investors ranked as follows:

As overseas acquisitions by private Chinese companies continue—the latest annual data from 2013 shows $23 billion spent, almost three times the amount in 2010—these investors should appear in more headlines, accompanied by more comparisons, even if there can only be one Oracle of Omaha.

Summary: New rankings crown the Middle Kingdom’s wealthiest investors from private equity and venture capital.


Holland Cunningham and Londyn James

Courtesy The Cunningham Family; Courtesy Tomeka Fisher

01/12/2015 AT 04:30 PM EST

For parents, there is nothing worse than seeing your child in pain. And one mother will never forget the heartbreaking moment her 4-year-old daughter told her the reason she was crying on her ride home from school.

"She told me that a girl told her she didn't want to be friends with her because she was black," Tomeka Fisher, 35, of St. Louis, Missouri, tells PEOPLE about her daughter Londyn. "I didn't know who would believe me so I decided to videotape it."

on her Facebook page, asking her friends, "What would you tell her in this situation?"

Before she knew it, the video went viral garnering almost 10 million views, and people from around the world were offering words of encouragement and support.

"It was remarkable," she says. "I just wanted people to know that no child should be told someone doesn't want to be their friend because of their race or how they look."

Shortly after the video was posted, Jeff Cunningham – a news anchor for KFVS-TV in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, – saw the story in

"As a dad, it just broke my heart to see a child cry," Cunningham, 44, of Jackson, Missouri, tells PEOPLE. "I also thought it could be a good learning tool for my 5-year-old daughter."

Cunningham went home and asked his daughter Holland if she wanted to be friends with Londyn.

"She drew a picture for Londyn that said, 'I will be your friend,' " he recalls.

The next day, Cunningham called Londyn's daycare and asked if it would be okay if to send Holland's drawing to her.

"I honestly then kind of forgot about it over the holidays," he says. "Until I saw that Tomeka had

of Londyn's response to my daughter's picture."

"I wanted Londyn to make her a thank-you video because I just thought it was so sweet," Fisher says. "I also wanted to show people that there are so many good people out there and that the smallest act of kindness can make someone so happy."

Now that the two are friends, do they plan on meeting any time soon?

"I would love that," says Cunningham.

We just hope that when they do meet, it's caught on video.

Summary: A 5-year-old girl reached out to a 4-year-old girl who was told someone didn't want to be her friend because she was black


Companies are getting adept at using big news events for marketing, especially on social media. The blizzard that stuck the Northeast over the past couple of days proves the point.

A few opportunistic companies used the wintery weather as an excuse to get the word out about their products on Twitter. Here are five companies – all incidentally in the food and beverage industry – that tried to feed off the Snowpocalypse media frenzy in 140 characters (or less).

2. Olive Garden, owned by Darden Restaurants

In honor of #Snowmageddon2015 we've built our own snowman. Stay safe & warm everyone! ⛄❄ http://t.co/E6OZpdClMR— Olive Garden (@olivegarden) January 27, 2015

#Snowmaggedon2015 checklist: Bread ✓ Eggs ✓ Milk ✓ http://t.co/941suaMleZ— McDonald's (@McDonalds) January 26, 2015

4. Guinness, owned by Diageo

A sign from #snowpocalypse to head home, stay safe, and enjoy a Guinness responsibly. http://t.co/s8UhHaxBZs— Guinness US (@GuinnessUS) January 26, 2015

5. Dr Pepper, owned by Dr Pepper Snapple Gorup

Snow is the perfect Pepper chiller. #Snowmageddon2015 http://t.co/0ceGsMJVBE— Dr Pepper (@drpepper) January 27, 2015

Reuters and Storyful contributed to this report.

Summary: With the blizzard come and gone, here's how 5 companies took to social media to feed on the hype.


02/09/2015 AT 01:20 PM EST

has released three more tracks off her forthcoming

"Hold Tight," "Joan of Arc" and "Iconic (feat. Chance the Rapper & Mike Tyson)" dropped on iTunes overnight Monday. Like the first six tracks off

, Madge's latest songs focus on perseverance, devotion and fame, while the production varies from strumming acoustics to driving electro beats.

The pop legend, 56, debuted the album's lead single "Living for Love" Sunday at the 57th Annual Grammy Awards before

In addition to the three new tunes, the full track listing is now available on iTunes:

6. "Bitch I'm Madonna (feat. Nicki Minaj)"

9. "Iconic (feat. Chance the Rapper & Mike Tyson)"

14. "Wash All Over Me"

And on the deluxe edition:

16. ""Veni Vidi Vici (feat. Nas)"

– Madonna's 13th full-length album – drops, fans will have heard almost half of it. The veteran performer unexpectedly

in December after unfinished demos leaked online. The full album is expected to drop March 10.

Summary: Madonna's 13th full-length album drops Mar. 10


Today Fortune has an interesting assemblage of pundits opining on the future of print — books, magazines, newspapers, all the objects that convey information, news, fiction and other effluvia on what columnist and radio host Kurt Andersen (right) calls “dead trees.”

It hurts me a little bit that nobody asked me what I think. After all, I work for Fortune, and I pretend to be a pundit. My qualifications for punditry go back decades. True, I didn’t start an online destination like Digg or spectacularly blow up several magazines like another of those selected who I’m too afraid to mention because of his media bulk, but I’ve been offering bad advice to people for a long time now, and have been almost honored several times.

At any rate, while directing you to the site, which contains a bunch of good opinions, I think I’ll take this opportunity to offer my own. The general wisdom among those who have made their livelihoods in the print realm is that it will soon be transcended by electronic communications. This has been noted here previously in various exhortations on my part. If I had a nickel for every party I’ve been to recently with book, newspaper and magazine people keening over the death of their medium, well, I’d have a lot of nickels. And that general view is sustained by the punditry on display today elsewhere on this site.

I suppose it’s easy to come to that conclusion. At the Consumer Electronics Show, it was difficult to walk without tripping over new iterations of the e-reader, and a national paroxysm of sweaty joy accompanied the launch of the iPad, which is being already heralded as the savior of literacy.

But I don’t know. Wherever I go, the people I see who have e-readers are all graybeards. I use that term advisedly. Some of them are women and have no beard at all, at least most of them. But almost to a man/woman, those who have quickly adopted the digital reader are the borderline elderly. You see them bending over their little e-readers trying to make out the huge letters in whatever dim light is available, scrolling through the thousands of screens that make up your average novel.

True, I read much of my news online these days, as do most of you, I’m sure. But I also read newspapers. So does my son, who is in his twenties, and all his friends, who are a surprisingly well-informed bunch. They also find Facebook boring, as do a lot of people I know under the age of 50 and over the age of 19.

If you go to a newsstand anywhere, there are literally dozens and dozens of magazines, too. I don’t get that. If the medium is dying, why does my 14-year-old step-daughter have a treasured collection of glossy dead trees in a box by her bed containing an archive of Elles, Glamours, Seventeens and InStyles? Yeah, she’s online too much. But there are those magazines. Not to mention the massive, dog-eared vampire books she totes around like totemic talismans.

I don’t like getting all my news from the web. I don’t like reading books on e-readers. I have been an early adopter of every digital implement and owned every generation of gizmo since the Kaypro lunchbox computer. But I don’t think the future holds nothing but eternal life for our forest friends. I think they still have reason to be concerned.

Those who are making the business decisions in the magazine, newspaper and book industries just might be mourning their own deaths way to early. And those who still see some life in paper may be positioning themselves far better for the opportunities that lie ahead.

Summary: Today Fortune has an interesting assemblage of pundits opining on the future of print -- books, magazines, newspapers, all the objects that convey information, news, fiction and other effluvia on what columnist and radio host Kurt Andersen (right) calls "dead trees." It hurts me a little bit that nobody asked me what I think. After all,…


Crocodile cracks, potholes, frost heaves: deteriorating asphalt is the bane of motorbike riders all over the world. But Honda may have an answer.

At the 31st Osaka Motorcycle Show in Japan, the company pulled the wraps off the well-named Bulldog, a knobby-tired concept bike designed from the ground up to conquer a crumbling infrastructure.

The Bulldog amounts to a more grown-up version of Honda's successful – and wholly endearing – Ruckus 49cc scooter. Like the Ruckus, the Bulldog features an industrial-style exposed tube frame and two big headlamps. A modest seat height keeps the centre of gravity lower than that of a typical motorcycle, giving the Bulldog greater stability and making it easier for newbies to handle.

There are gear racks fore and aft, and storage compartments on both sides of the fuel tank. Fifteen-inch wheels wear fat tires suitable for rough trails or urban roadways, and a liquid-cooled, 399cc four-stroke DOHC in-line 2-cylinder engine, matched to a six-speed transmission, provides the motivation.

No word yet on availability, but considering the cult following the Ruckus scooter has earned all over the world, a production version of the Bulldog looks like a safe bet.

If you would like to comment on this or anything else you have seen on BBC Autos, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.

Summary: Inspired by the heroic Ruckus scooter, this concept motorbike aims to conquer a crumbling infrastructure.


04/03/2015 AT 12:35 PM EDT

Do you smell what The Rock is cooking? It's another viral moment.

delivered again on the inaugural episode of Spike's

Instead of picking a macho metal number for his fight against

star went with something a little sweeter. To open the show, Johnson mimed along to

's "Shake It Off." The former wrestler gave the "sick beat" his all, even taking on the song's rap breakdown.

tried to best The Rock with Harry Belafonte's "Jump in the Line" and

's "Like a Prayer," but when Johnson came out in flared pants to perform The Bee Gees' "Stayin' Alive," he locked down the win.

Summary: Watch Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson dominate Swift's sick beat


With 1 billion user “endorsements” and counting, Jeff Weiner explains the secret behind LinkedIn’s red-hot streak. (Hint: It has nothing to do with the 3,500 iPads he just gave employees.)

FORTUNE — Why doesn’t LinkedIn LNKD suffer from the same news leaks as companies like Yahoo LNKD ? As LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner put it simply at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech dinner in San Francisco last night: It’s all about transparency.

Weiner knows what he’s talking about. His previous experience includes seven years at Yahoo and five years at Warner Brothers. “I’ve come to learn there is a virtuous cycle to transparency and a very vicious cycle of obfuscation,” he says. People have an insatiable curiosity, and if they’re officially denied access to information, they’re going to dig for it on their own. And if they find it, they’ll become resentful and want to leak it. “That’s when executive management says, well, clearly we can’t trust our employees with this information. So, we’re going to have to buckle down and release even less information.” Employees become even more resentful, dig even deeper, and that, as Weiner explains, is when the witch hunt starts.

Instead, Weiner argues to treat employees “like adults” and be completely transparent. It provides optics into what’s working around the company and what’s not. It also breeds a sense of trust within the company, so employees are far less likely to leak sensitive information.

MORE: Outsourcing the algorithm of love

The strategy seems to be working.

LinkedIn leaks are few and far between. Although employees this week revealed Weiner gave 32-gigabyte iPad minis to the company’s 3,500 employees — a perk that may have cost the company nearly $1.5 million. The award comes on the heels of LinkedIn’s fourth-quarter earnings last week, which came in far above Wall Street’s expectations. Revenues soared 81% year-over-year to $304 million; net income jumped 60% to $11.5 million from the same time last year. The news marks the seventh consecutive quarter LinkedIn has handily beat estimates. Gifts like the iPads “just make all the difference in the world,” says Weiner.

Over the last seven months, LinkedIn has rolled out a slew of new features, including new profile pages, alerts, and endorsements which allows users to recommend one another in different skill areas like say, writing, editing, and blogging. Now, the company is fast approaching 1 billion user endorsements, and 1 million unique domains across the Internet now feature the LinkedIn share button. Though such features aren’t revenue drivers themselves, LinkedIn’s CEO argues they’re critical to the company’s ongoing success. The more time users spend using them, the higher the user engagement and loyalty, which in turn spills over into the way LinkedIn does make money, which includes selling premium subscriptions to 200 million-plus users.

MORE: How Chillingo picks winners in mobile games

Don’t expect that kind of innovation to stop. According to Weiner, product teams will continue to crank. Whether it’s a new product, a minor improvement to an existing feature, or behind-the-scenes work, every team is capable of “launching” twice a day. Provided what they launch is compelling, it’s a win both for the company and for its users.

Summary: With 1 billion user "endorsements" and counting, Jeff Weiner explains the secret behind LinkedIn's red-hot streak. (Hint: It has nothing to do with the 3,500 iPads he just gave employees.) FORTUNE -- Why doesn't LinkedIn suffer from the same news leaks as companies like Yahoo ? As LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner put it simply at…


Bali Nine drug traffickers Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran will have some small choices in the way they die and those who execute them will be counselled.

The process by which the pair will be executed has been revealed and comes after a mortician was photographed inscribing the dates of their death on wooden crosses – the 29th of April, this Wednesday.

The prisoners will be executed by firing squad, recruited from a unit within Indonesia's police force, known as the 'Mobile Brigade'.

Recruits for the firing squad are chosen based on their marksmanship and "physical and spiritual health", according to Indonesian police. They are offered counselling before and after participating in executions.

They reportedly receive less than $100 on top of their existing salary to carry out the task.

Condemned inmates are moved into isolation cells 72 hours before execution. Families and religious counsellors are allowed to visit up to a few hours before execution.

Prisoners are given the choice to stand, kneel or sit before the firing squad, and whether they are blindfolded. Their hands and feet are bound.

Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran. (AAP)

Each prisoner has 12 marksmen aiming M16 rifles at a circle drawn above his or her heart. Only three of the 12 have live ammunition in their rifles. Authorities say this is so the executioner remains unknown.

A team of medical personnel are on site to pronounce the prisoner dead after execution.

The prisoners' bodies are then cleaned and handed over to families, who wait outside the prison during the execution.

Chan and Sukumaran are scheduled to be executed along with prisoners from Nigeria, Brazil and the Philippines.

"Nothing can be gained and much will be lost if these two young Australians are executed," Foreign Minister Julie Bishop said in a statement today, again urging Indonesian President Joko Widodo to show clemency and allow legal challenges still outstanding to be heard.

Do you have any news photos or videos?


Jay Z, owner of music streaming service Tidal, slammed his biggest competitors in a freestyle rap in New York City this weekend.

Spotify, Apple, Google and YouTube were all part of Jay Z’s rap, his answer to the critics who’ve accused the artist of launching Tidal to make more money. It’s not the first time he’s defended his streaming service: Last month the rapper argued how Tidal was in fact doing pretty well, tweeting out a slew of #TidalFacts, some of which, well, didn’t turn out to be facts.

Read next: We Fact-Checked All of Jay Z’s #TidalFacts

Summary: Jay Z is trying to promote his streaming service, Tidal


SEASON OF GLASS. Yoko Ono. Geffen GHS 2004.

YOKO ONO has been making controversial art since her pioneering work in ''happenings,'' or performance art, during the early 60's. During most of her years as the wife of John Lennon, her recordings, with their unbridled screaming and other extreme vocal techniques, were subjected to scathing critical attacks and sold poorly. After Mr. Lennon's murder in December, Miss Ono's plight won her the support and sympathy of millions. But ''Season of Glass,'' her new album directly and sometimes brutally confronts her grief at Mr. Lennon's passing. The album may make her a controversial figure once again.

The glasses Mr. Lennon was wearing the night he was murdered are in the foreground of the photograph that Miss Ono took for the cover of the new album, which Geffen will release to radio stations this week and to the public early next month. Some of the songs on the album are new; others date to the early 70's.

But ''Season of Glass'' displays little of the vocal brinksmanship that marked Miss Ono's recordings of those years. It is a melodic pop-rock album, recorded with the same cast of studio professionals who played on ''Double Fantasy,'' the album Mr. Lennon and Miss Ono released late last year. Her anger and hurt are expressed in her lyrics and in the anguished tone of her singing, not in avant-garde vocal mannerisms.

At first, Miss Ono worked on ''Season of Glass'' with Phil Spector, the celebrated pop producer, but she supervised the later stages of recording. The record sounds more like ''Double Fantasy'' than like a typical Spector ''wall of sound'' production. Several particularly intense songs - ''She Gets Down on Her Knees'' and ''Dogtown'' -move to churning disco-rock rhythms and recall the urgency of ''Walking on Thin Ice,'' the single that was her last collaboration with her husband.

Other tunes are lyrical ballads that reflect Miss Ono's early classical training. Her grasp of traditional pop and rock song forms has never been surer, and she has written some of the most striking lyrics in recent popular music. But the several explicit references to John Lennon's murder are likely to offend fans whose memory of the tragedy is still fresh and who would rather forget the trauma associated with it than be reminded of it all over again. Robert Palmer