Cannes has its Palme d’Or. Venice has its Golden Lion, and Berlin has its Golden Bear. But Provincetown, now celebrating its 15th anniversary, has its Filmmaker on the Edge, who is publicly interviewed by John Waters, known to raise awkward topics, such as when he challenged 2008 recipient Quentin Tarantino about his foot fetishism. Edgy indeed, but no big deal for this festival, and for this community, a longtime asylum for those who take pride in their nonconformity.

Waters, an indie legend for the trash masterpiece “Pink Flamingos” (1972), among others, and himself the first Filmmaker on the Edge, in 1999, has served as the festival’s reigning antic spirit and as a member of the advisory board. “One of my jobs is to write them [Edge candidates] letters talking them into it,” Waters said last month over the phone, fresh from his first dip in the surf. “And it’s been an amazing run. It’s really impressive to see Quentin Tarantino just walking down the street, as well as all the other people we’ve had here.”

Indeed, the list of honorees reads like a who’s who of independent cinema, with such luminaries as Gus Van Sant, Todd Solondz, and Roger Corman. To mark the 15th year, festival programmer Connie White has invited back previous Edge winners Mary Harron, Christine Vachon, producer of “Bluebird,” which is in this year’s festival, and Todd Haynes, represented by his 2002 film, “Far From Heaven.” Also returning are 2010’s winners of the Faith Hubley Award for Career Achievement, Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, whose “Lovelace,” a biopic about the star of the porn classic “Deep Throat,” is the festival’s opening night film.

Throw in this year’s Hubley winner, cinematographer Ed Lachman, whose “Desperately Seeking Susan” (1985) will have a screening, and the Excellence in Acting Award winner, Matt Dillon, and that makes for a lot of talent to watch window-shopping on Commercial Street.

As for this year’s Filmmaker on the Edge conversation, Waters will be hosting aging enfant terrible Harmony Korine, whose latest film, “Spring Breakers” (screening in the festival) polarized critical opinion. “I thought it was delightful,” opined Waters about the film. “It was like ‘Where the Boys Are’ meets ‘Scarface.’ A friend said, ‘That was the most irresponsible movie I ever saw.’ I said, come on — it’s not that good!’ ”

Erik Jacobs for the Boston Globe

Rob Epstein (center) and Jeffrey Friedman accepting the Faith Hubley Memorial Achieve-ment award in 2010. Their “Lovelace” is this year’s opening night film.

Sounds like it will be a lively discussion.

Provincetown’s appeal isn’t limited to the attendees. White has put together a program of features and documentaries that she thinks rivals the best of the past 15 years. “ ‘I’m So Excited!’ [Pedro Almodóvar’s new film] I thought was hilarious,” she said over the phone last week. “ ‘Fruitvale Station’ — so good, so talented, that filmmaker [Ryan Coogler] is going places. There’s a great world premiere called ‘The Volunteer’ [directed by Vicky Wight], about a woman who quits her job to work in a soup kitchen. And ‘The Moo Man’ [directed by Andy Heathcote] is a vérité film about a dairy farmer in southern England: He’s very attached to his cows and by the end you will be, too.”

Waters has also picked a film to be shown in a special screening. “This year I’m showing a film by Ulrich Seidl,” he said. “In Artforum I said that Fassbinder died, so God gave us Seidl.” The film, “Paradise: Faith” (2012) “is the second in a trilogy. It’s about a woman who’s so religious she falls in love with God – and then He breaks up with her. An extremely Catholic movie.”

Another film that has personal resonance for him is Jeffrey Schwarz’s “I Am Divine,” a documentary about the 300-pound transvestite star of “Pink Flamingos” and many other Waters films, who died in 1988 at 42.

Christine Vachon, producer of “Bluebird” in this year’s festival.

“It’s a loving, honest tribute to who Divine really was,” he said. “Divine was never in drag except when he was working; he was a gentleman, almost the opposite of that character. I think for that character he drew on the rage he felt when he was hassled as a kid. But when you see the movie, you see a different picture.

“I’ve probably made as many movies without Divine as I made with him,” he added. “But Divine was my muse. We were partners, we were friends. I wrote movies for him. And I don’t write movies for a specific person anymore.”

But don’t get the idea that Waters, 67, is getting pious or nostalgic in his later years. He still sees the festival as a time to have fun. Asked about his most memorable experiences, he says, “I’ve had plenty but none I can share with The Boston Globe! I have a private party every year that I will keep private.” He wouldn’t comment on whether this is his rumored “popper” party, but he noted that this is the only state where the recreational use of those frisky amyl-nitrate capsules is illegal.

Other than the poppers ban, Waters had no complaints about Provincetown, which was reached in 1620 by Pilgrims fleeing persecution and a place that has offered refuge to nonconformists ever since. He thinks it’s the ideal spot to celebrate independence in cinema.

“Provincetown has always been a great place for bohemians,” said Waters, a summer resident for the past 49 years. “And a bohemian in the old days was a nicer way to say ‘part gay.’ It’s still a very mixed crowd of people who don’t like to be like everybody else. It’s like Mortville in [Waters’s 1977 film] ‘Desperate Living’ — a town where you could live if you were too embarrassed to live anywhere else.

“When I’m trying to get celebrities to come here I write, ‘You’ll love it, it’s a gay fishing village!’ ”


If you blinked, you missed it: The Eric Wright era with San Francisco is over.

On Monday, less than 100 hours after he was acquired in a trade from Tampa Bay, the sixth-year cornerback failed his physical with the 49ers, and the deal was voided. The San Francisco native's rights reverted to the Buccaneers, who subsequently cut him. Wright, 27, is now a free agent and the 49ers will keep the conditional late-round 2014 pick they had surrendered.

Thanks to his failed physical, the aborted trade was bookended by surprises.

Shortly after the deal was announced Friday, it was learned that Wright had been arrested for suspicion of DUI in Los Angeles on July 12. It was his latest off-the-field transgression: In 2012, he was arrested for DUI - charges were later dropped - and also served a four-game suspension for using performance-enhancing drugs.

Were the 49ers aware of the Wright's most recent DUI when they made trade? On Friday, general manager Trent Baalke alluded to Wright's past when he said the team had done its "due diligence," but head coach Jim Harbaugh shed no light on the matter Monday.

Harbaugh, who declined to say which portion of the physical Wright failed, referred questions about Wright's DUI this month to his general manager.

"I mean, really, the better guy to talk to is Trent," Harbaugh said. "He's got a clear understanding of the specific transaction. So I'll defer to him on that."

Baalke declined comment through a team spokesman.

It was believed the 49ers acquired Wright with an eye to the future. Starting cornerback Tarell Brown is entering the final year of his contract, and there has been speculation that fellow starter Carlos Rogers could become a salary-cap casualty. Rogers, 32, is scheduled to earn base salaries of $5.5 million and $6.25 million, respectively, the next two seasons. In addition, Nnamdi Asomugha, 32, who could grab the No. 3 cornerback role with a strong training camp, signed a one-year deal in April.

Harbaugh acknowledged it was possible the 49ers would fill Wright's roster spot with cornerback Lowell Rose. The undrafted rookie from Tulsa was cut Friday to make room for Wright on the 90-man roster.

Crabtree on PUP: The date of Michael Crabtree's return remains uncertain, but his injury designation is no longer a mystery.

Harbaugh said the 49ers plan to place their No. 1 wideout on the active physically unable to perform list this week. The team can place Crabtree on the reserve PUP list after the final roster cuts of training camp and he would be sidelined for the first six weeks of the season. The 49ers could activate Crabtree at any point between Weeks 7 and 13. In Week 13, the 49ers host the Rams on Dec. 1.

Harbaugh offered an optimistic update on Crabtree, who, he noted, has stayed in town to rehabilitate the torn Achilles he sustained May 21.

"Talking to the doctors and talking to Michael, they feel very good about where he is right now," Harbaugh said. "I wouldn't categorize it as ahead of schedule because he's just starting now to start moving on it. It's healing, but it looks great. That's from the words of the doctors."

Reid ready for contact: The 49ers' rookies had their first padded practice Monday, and safety Eric Reid was eager for contact. The first-round pick from LSU noted he hadn't worn pads since he played in the Chick-fil-A Bowl on Dec. 31.

"That's my favorite thing about football," Reid said. "It was good to finally be back in pads today."

Reid, who sported a small cut on the bridge of his nose, reported with the rest of the rookies and the team's four quarterbacks Friday. The veterans will report Wednesday, and the first practice will be Thursday.

Eric Branch is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: ebranch@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @Eric_Branch

Summary: In 2012, he was arrested for DUI - charges were later dropped - and also served a four-game suspension for using performance-enhancing drugs.  On Friday, general manager Trent Baalke alluded to Wright's past when he said the team had done its "due diligence," but head coach Jim Harbaugh shed no light on the matter Monday.  Harbaugh, who declined to say which portion of the physical Wright failed, referred questions about Wright's DUI this month to his general manager.  Starting cornerback Tarell Brown is entering the final year of his contract, and there has been speculation that fellow starter Carlos Rogers could become a salary-cap casualty.  [...] Nnamdi Asomugha, 32, who could grab the No. 3 cornerback role with a strong training camp, signed a one-year deal in April.  The team can place Crabtree on the reserve PUP list after the final roster cuts of training camp and he would be sidelined for the first six weeks of the season.  The first-round pick from LSU noted he hadn't worn pads since he played in the Chick-fil-A Bowl on Dec. 31.


“I’m not a backward-looking guy, but this has prompted a look back,” says Huey Lewis of his decision to take his longtime band the News out on the road to celebrate the 30th anniversary of their best-selling album album “Sports.” “What’s interesting is that I see ‘Sports’ now as very much a record of its time; that is, a collection of singles. Because in its time everything was programmed, all there was was CHR [Contemporary Hit Radio], both AM and FM, and it was the only avenue to success. You needed a hit record, period.”

“Sports” was most assuredly a hit, selling 7 million copies, garnering two Grammy nominations, and spawning five top ten hits including “The Heart of Rock and Roll,” “Heart and Soul,” “If This is It,” and “I Want a New Drug,” sending the Bay Area-bred bar band into the upper echelons of pop.

Fortunately, the album — recently reissued with a bonus disc of live material, including a track recorded in Boston — is only 42 minutes long, so Lewis and the band will have plenty of time to play other hits they scored before and since, including “The Power of Love,” “Do You Believe in Love,” and “Stuck With You” when they hit the stage at the Bank of America Pavilion on Wednesday.

And if you were born in ’83 you’re in luck. “All you have to do is phone the box office,” says Lewis, when we catch up with the cheerful rocker, 63, by phone from his home in Montana. “When you show up, show them your license and they let you in free!” (Based on availability.)

Q. Is performing the album in its entirety helping to make it fresh for you?

A. Yeah and we re-arranged everything. We went back to the original arrangements basically. These songs have sort of morphed into other things and we brought them all back to the record again so it’s fun.

Q. Your songs still get a lot of radio play and even though they’re from the ‘80s, it’s not just on the classic rock stations.

A. They hold up, I would like to think, for two reasons. Number one, the song needs to be true. It can be about war, it can be about love, it doesn’t matter, as long as it rings true. The other thing musically is [it has] none of the ’80s [quirks]. Our stuff was anachronistic even then. Our thing is the old American pop song formula: you start in fours or 8 or 16 or 32, there’s an intro then the verse, the chorus, the verse, the chorus, the bridge, the chorus, and out. That’s been the pop song formula for American popular music since it began. Suddenly in the ’90s that wasn’t the formula anymore.

Q. So when you hear those songs on the radio do you turn them up or off?

A. I listen to them. It’s always interesting to me. They’re still collections of parts to me. I think “Wow, we sure used a lot of snare drum back in those days.” (Laughs.) That’s the ’80s, man, that big reverb-y snare drum. There’s no right or wrong to that stuff. The way I see it, our records get better as they go along. I really believe that, we’re still improving. We have a new song that we’re playing that’s fantastic.

Q. Does this mean you’re working on a new record?

A. We will, I guess. I don’t know how one does that yet. But we’ll figure that out. Do you need 12 songs? Do we do an EP? Twelve is awful tough. What I think you do is you record a song and you film yourself doing it and put it on YouTube. You don’t need a record today, you need a YouTube clip.

A. It’s called “While We’re Young.” Get it? (Laughs.)

A. Oh yeah, absolutely, they all are. (Laughs.) Or they start that way and if the real story gets in the way I just change it.

Q. You recently allowed Jimmy Kimmel to sit in with you on his clarinet and the results were comically less than tuneful. Was that fun?

A. That was his idea. He did it once before. He played with us at the Forum. Kimmel’s a great guy. He [didn’t have time to] practice it at all. He kind of clams on it and it’s a measure of what a good guy he is, because we could’ve redone that or they could’ve even done an insert to fix him up, but he said “Ah it’s funnier this way, let it rip.”

Q. In terms of buzz you all experienced great highs, the regular cooling off, and then a darker time when it couldn’t have been less hip to like the square Huey Lewis. Like many groups it seems like a renewed appreciation is swinging around for you.

A. It’s happened. And we’ve totally noticed that this year. Our merchandising went from a dollar or two a head to eight dollars a head. I have no idea why that is, but it feels great.

Summary: “I’m not a backward-looking guy but this has prompted a look back,” says Huey Lewis of his decision to take his longtime band the News out on the road to celebrate the 30th anniversary of their best-selling album “Sports.” “What’s interesting about it is that I see ‘Sports’ now as very much a record of its time, that is, a collection of singles. Because in its time everything was programmed, all there was was CHR radio both AM and FM and it was the only avenue to success, you needed a hit record, period.” “Sports” was most assuredly a hit, selling 7 million copies, garnering two Grammy nominations, and spawning five top ten hits. Huey Lewis and the News play the Bank of America Pavilion Wednesday.


He's not the only one.

New York Jets receiver David Clowney was benched after his Twitter message riled coach Rex Ryan. The Texas Tech team was banned from tweeting after a player criticized the coach. The Miami Heat was told no more messages from the arena.

Not such a sweet tweet Monday for social networking in sports.

It's "a bunch of narcissists that want to sit and type stuff about themselves all the time," Texas Tech coach Mike Leach said. "We'll put mirrors in some of their lockers if that's necessary but they don't have to Twitter."

So, what got him so worked up?

A day after the Red Raiders lost to No. 12 Houston 29-28, Leach was running late to a meeting. According to the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, linebacker Marlon Williams asked on his Twitter account why "the head coach can't even be on time."

Plus, the Texas Tech captain Brandon Carter was suspended indefinitely Sunday for violating team rules. After the loss, he tweeted: "This is not how I saw our season."

Clowney sat out the Jets' 24-17 win over Tennessee on Sunday. His offense? After the Jets beat New England the previous week, he tweeted: "1 play in the 1st Half, 4 plays in the 2nd half ... A bit disappointed about my playing time but very happy and satisfied about the win."

"I was upset with him, yep," Ryan said Monday. "For a couple of reasons. One of them is you'll hear things if a guy's unhappy or whatever. I'm not a big Twitter guy, but you hear different things."

The Heat sent a message to its players: No more tweets from the arena, home or away, practice or gametime.

Star guard Dwyane Wade sounded OK with the edict.

"When you come to work, you come to work," he said. "You can tweet before, you can tweet after. It's not addicting like where I'm going to take a bathroom break, go downstairs and tweet. I think people take it a little too far with that."

Summary: @davidclowney Rex is watching. He's not the only one. New York Jets receiver David Clowney was benched after his Twitter message riled coach Rex Ryan. The Texas Tech team was banned from tweeting after a player criticized the coach. The Miami Heat was told no more messages from the arena.


Thousands of pages of documents from former President Bill Clinton’s time in office that had been previously withheld from the public were released Friday afternoon.

The documents are part of a larger trove of 33,000 pages that have remained unavailable to the public despite the fact that the legally permissible period to withhold them—12 years from the end of the Clinton presidency—expired last January. It remains to be seen what the documents released Friday will add to the body of knowledge about Clinton’s presidency. But they will be closely watched for any impact they could have on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s possible presidential run in 2016.

The larger trove of documents contains information relating to the Whitewater investigation and Clinton’s attempts at health care reform, Politico reports. Some of the records come from the office of then-First Lady Hillary Clinton. In all, 25,000 of the 33,000 pages have been cleared by attorneys for release, with no decision yet made on the remaining 8,000. It remains unclear why the documents remain unavailable to the public 13 months after the 12-year period came to an end.

Summary: Will be closely watched for impact on Hillary Clinton's potential 2016 candidacy


The territories of Francis Bacon's soul have been explored widely; they have been the subject of a film, books and endless speculation. But the senior art historian John Richardson – who, at 85, is working on the last volume of his acclaimed biography of Picasso, and who knew Bacon from his 20s – has now laid down his views and recollections of Bacon, amounting to a reappraisal of his life and work.

Writing in the forthcoming issue of the New York Review of Books, Richardson argues that Bacon's sado-masochistic relationships lay at the heart of his best work, but with terrible consequences for his lover George Dyer, whose fragile mental state Richardson attributes to Bacon's endless "goading".

Having provoked Dyer into "a state of psychic meltdown" he "would exorcise his guilt and rage and remorse in images of Dyer aimed, as he said, at the nervous system". This "goading" resulted in Dyer's suicide, writes Richardson.

An earlier relationship, with Peter Lacy, was violent to the extent that "he hurled Bacon through a plate glass window. His face was so damaged that his right eye had to be sewn back into place".

Bacon's art went rapidly downhill when sado-masochism ceased to be a part of his life, argues Richardson, who describes the "angst-free, soft-porn glow" of his later work.

Richardson, who has hitherto held back from revealing his full memories of Bacon since the artist's death in 1992, also pours scorn on critics, such as the late David Sylvester, who attempted to defend the self-taught Bacon's "inability to draw". He calls the celebrated Screaming Popes series "either magnificent flukes or near-total disasters" and refers to Bacon's failure to convey "subjects that call for graphic skill, subjects, for instance, that include hands". Richardson also refers to Bacon's early adventures as a rent boy; his shoplifting, using his elderly nanny as an accomplice; and the vividly bohemian life around him, including a three-day party in 1950, whose guests "included members of parliament and fellows of All Souls, as well as 'rough trade', slutty debutantes, cross-dressers, and the notoriously evil Kray brothers".

Summary: Senior art historian John Richardson has now laid down his views and recollections of the artist


This has been a standout year for initial public offerings — and this week’s lineup is the busiest yet.

Twenty-five companies are set to go public in the U.S. over five days this week. Two of them, ContraFect and Spark Energy, have already started trading and a host is set to follow.

This week will be the busiest for IPOs since the second week of August 2000 when 28 companies went public in one week, according to Dealogic.

The rise in public listings comes on the heels of a booming U.S. stock market. The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index is up 7% so far this year without much volatility. In fact, the benchmark index has closed 1% higher or lower only twice since April.

The biggest IPO of the year so far, and the largest U.S. debut since Facebook [fortune stock symbol="FB"] in early 2012, is set for this week. Synchrony Financial, the consumer-credit arm of General Electric [fortune stock symbol="GE"] could raise $3.5 billion if it prices at the mid-point of its forecasted range.

That has helped to boost this week’s expected IPO value count to about $6.8 billion. Most of the 25 deals are expected raise less than $100 million each if they price in the middle of the company’s proposed range. A few are expected to raise more than $100 million, such as Catalent, the Blackstone-backed biotech.

The final IPO count for the week could change if companies shy away from going public. Any number of uncertainties could cause companies to back away, from growing geopolitical tensions to an unexpectedly poor U.S. GDP number on Wednesday.

Summary: Initial public offerings are on track for their biggest week since 2000 as a booming stock market attracts companies looking for cash.


Cameron Diaz and Benji Madden

An unlikely couple? Perhaps. But

, 41, and Benji Madden sure are lucky in love after

And things have gotten serious – fast. "It's early, but they have talked about marriage," says an insider.

While home in Los Angeles, the duo have been nearly inseparable. "Benji spends so much time at Cameron's that it seems he now kind of lives there," says another source. "They look very happy together â¦ Cameron hasn't looked this happy for years."

Last week, the pair took their romance to a new level on a romantic European getaway, sailing along the French and Italian coasts aboard the $633,000-per-week, three-story

mega yacht, with friends in tow.

Madden, 35, is going the extra mile, having

on a recent trip to Florida.

"It seemed important to Cameron that Benji met her family, and she looked very proud to introduce him to everyone," says a witness. "They were very sweet to each other, constantly kissing and flirting. It was obvious that they had a great vacation."

Summary: The unlikely couple are on cloud nine – and already talking marriage, a source tells PEOPLE


Halfway through Jonathan Dee’s 2010 novel The Privileges, the married protagonist Adam Morey, a private equity hotshot, asks a waitress for her phone number. When she looks at his wedding ring, he says, “Oh, this… this comes right off.” She writes the number on his hand, he leaves the bar, and on his walk home, he promptly washes the number off in a playground fountain.

The whole thing is just a momentary diversion, something that offers him fleeting fun. Dee explains, “He’d never cheated on Cynthia and never would… But sometimes there was a thrill in walking right up to that line, and in charming the other person into stepping over it. He figured it was probably all downhill after that moment anyway.” Doug Fanning, the rich young banker being closely watched by the New York Federal Reserve in Adam Haslett’s 2011 novel Union Atlantic, seems similarly bored. He builds an ostentatious mansion in a Massachusetts town and begins an illicit sex affair with a high-school boy. It feels like a similar moment when, in the opening story of Joan Wickersham’s recent collection The News from Spain, the character Barnaby (who inhabits a world similar to that of Adam and Doug) sneaks off to an upstairs bathroom at his own engagement party on Long Island to smoke a cigarette. He knows it’s pathetic: “Bad behavior. He knew this. He was forty-seven. He was an executive vice president in charge of corporate communications for a mid-size financial services company.”

MORE: Mika Brzezinski’s Obsessed is sympathetic and real

The suggestion of these stories about rich men is that managing large amounts of money, your own and that of others, leaves room only for brief moments of solitary fun—that, in fact, these breaks are the only fun thing left once you’re rich and bored.

The characters in two new novels about wealth don’t have time to be bored; they get very few of these little moments—for different reasons. Kevin Kwan’s debut novel Crazy Rich Asians, out last week, depicts the social burdens that come with outrageous opulence. The three Chinese families of Kwan’s raucous satire have already made their money when the book begins—it is old money, so old that it stifles the young protagonist Nicholas Young, a Singapore-born New Yorker who faces sneering criticism from the pompous elder women of his family when he brings his plain, American-born girlfriend Rachel Chu home to Singapore.

Young is a modern man struggling under the weight of his family’s crusty customs and its adoration of diamonds, designer clothing, and gargantuan mansions. The super-wealthy in the world Kwan has painted don’t get much time to enjoy their riches. They are too busy working to show it off, attending dinner parties, galas, fundraisers, and balls to remind everyone else they have it. They face decisions like whether to borrow a famous friend’s personal plane for a trip. (One particularly grating brat, Eddie Cheng, rails to his mother, “Why are you always like this, Mummy? Why do you always behave so provincial? You are filthy rich! … Squeeze into economy on China Airlines for all I care. My family and I are taking Leo’s plane. And it’s a Bombardier Global Express. It’s huge, state-of-the-art. There’s even a Matisse in the cabin.”) Being rich, it appears, can be such a burden.

Although Crazy Rich Asians is not a story of obtaining wealth, it still serves up—albeit using a light, slapstick tone—a warning as to its perils. Its pursuit, as well as its unmitigated enjoyment, can change a human being, usually for the worse. (“If the neighbors have five bedrooms, give me six… Make the envying types envious,” Doug tells his broker in Union Atlantic.) Dee and Haslett, in their books, seem to say the same, though one author allows his pompous rich man to go unharmed, while the other ultimately sentences his to prison.

MORE: Did Apple’s lawyer just throw the e-book publishers under the bus?

Mohsin Hamid’s faux self-help guide How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, published in March, arrives at similar conclusions. The unnamed hero begins his disciplined journey to wealth as a child, the moment that a simple “yes” (to the question of whether he’d be okay moving) convinces his father to relocate the family from a poor village into the city. The country is not named, though one could safely imagine it is Pakistan, where Hamid is from. The story is told in second person (“you”) using clear, utilitarian prose. Getting rich is treated as the ultimate, obvious goal: “A young jaundiced village boy, radish juice dribbling from the corner of your lips… it must seem that getting filthy rich is beyond your reach. But have faith… Your moment is about to come.” The narrative tone seems to ask, Is there any other purpose in life?

To escape his constrained circumstances, Hamid’s character must toil methodically, entrepreneurially, and ruthlessly. In school, he boldly corrects the teacher, whom he quickly surpasses in knowledge. He sells pirated DVDs and then joins a local criminal organization. All the while he pines for a girl from his village; she, too, is working toward a dream (in the modeling world). But he doesn’t have time for her, can’t take his eyes off the prize. The narrator even asks him (and thus the reader), like a coach, “Is getting filthy rich still your goal above all goals, your be-all and end-all, the mist-shrouded high-altitude spawning pond to your inner salmon? In your case, fortunately, it seems to be.”

Hamid’s novel is strict and tightly structured as it carries its man forcefully from poverty to wealth (though, in the end, not necessarily to happiness—in that regard, the book is like Union Atlantic and The Privileges). His mother gets sick and dies painfully, his relationships crumble, and he abandons ethics.

None of that should suggest that it isn’t an enjoyable read. The narrative voice is so authoritative that, as we come along on this Horatio Alger tale, we share the character’s frustration when he has to bribe an official and feel his exhaustion when he deals with a rival trying to intimidate him (he must sleep with a gun under his pillow; there are people who want him dead). Hamid’s hero sacrifices nearly everything for wealth; he doesn’t afford himself much time for his children or wife (he divorces her). In order to create the top bottled water company during a time of sweeping socioeconomic transformation in the region, his focus must be unsparingly narrow.

Many of these characters see moneymaking as a pleasant pastime—at least, until they end up spiraling down in their own unique way. Adam Morey leaves Morgan Stanley for private equity firm Perini Capital, “an outfit with a shitload of money behind it” where he can apply “his vision of what a man’s work should be: a tight group of friends pushing themselves to make one another rich.” The “millionaire thing hadn’t interested” the young man in Peter Mountford’s 2011 novel A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism when he was younger, but once he has lived modestly in New York for five years, “the feeling of wanting matured until what had been straightforward professional ambition became tinged by a hint of avarice… Money, in general—the plain and unassailable acts of acquiring and spending it—had turned out to occupy a more important role in adulthood than he had expected.”

For the characters in Hamid’s and Kwan’s books, money isn’t just “important,” it is everything, and it is the characters’ life’s work to both make and spend it. But Hamid and Kwan suggest there may be at least partial redemption in love. Hamid’s “you” certainly makes a long line of mistakes, but in the end, the reward for his toil is to enjoy old age with someone he truly loves (that doesn’t give much away because it isn’t the kind of book that relies on plot twists; its joy is in the telling). That redeeming romance and the happiness it brings him in old age does not come thanks to his wealth. It has nothing to do with the money he worked so furiously to obtain. Kwan’s Nicholas, meanwhile, finds that he loves Rachel enough to choose her company over the grand perks that come with being in his family’s good graces.

The New York Times this month included Crazy Rich Asians in a roundup of “beach reads,” and it is indeed a laugh-out-loud, bawdy, oftentimes-silly 400-page breeze, but to pigeonhole Kwan’s book that way is to overlook the legitimate statement it makes about what decades and decades of absurd wealth can do to a family—it can corrode its ties, rot the relationships. Very few of the characters are redeeming beyond Nicholas and his cousin Astrid Leong. And in Kwan’s book, that’s all right since the comedy comes from laughing at the horrible behavior and attitudes of the cast. The “you” of Hamid’s novel may not be very likeable either, but it doesn’t matter, and the same is true of Haslett’s and Dee’s protagonists. These writers aim to depict one version of the path to wealth. There are other paths, but theirs are certainly plausible (perhaps Dee’s and Hamid’s more than Kwan’s).

Crazy Rich and Filthy Rich are also set apart because they focus on Asia, where, if their stories are to be believed, a shift is taking place among the upper echelons. Kwan is interested in the spoiled rich Asians, the Eastern equivalent of the “ugly American,” whereas Hamid’s book is more interested in the grueling task of getting, rather than flaunting, riches. But both novels find less moral ambiguity in the Asian pursuit of wealth. In this “rising” part of the globe, the pursuit of money for money’s sake carries no negative baggage.

The success of all these books—each one is entertaining, lucidly written, and never feels too didactic or moralistic—suggests a rising tide in this group once again. In the years just after the financial crisis, most novels that dealt with wealth did so in an indirect manner. People didn’t want to read about the super-rich unless bad things were happening to them. In Alexandra Lebenthal’s 2010 novel The Recessionistas, a socialite gets comeuppance when her banker husband makes some bad bets. Eric Puchner’s 2010 novel Model Home is also about a rich man whose financial mistakes send his family down a few income brackets.

During the depths of the recession, novels like The Privileges and Union Atlantic laid the groundwork for Crazy Rich Asians and How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia. As the U.S. climbs out of its recession, as jobs return and big business thrives again, the reading public appears ready again for stories about fabulous wealth.

Summary: Money and luxury are back in vogue for popular literary fiction. We take a look at two new novels about wealth—and what they suggest about its pursuit.


Luxtera, a Carlsbad, Calif.–based silicon photonics company, has raised $21.7 million in Series C funding. Tokyo Electron was joined by return backers New Enterprise Associates, August Capital, Sevin Rosen Funds and Lux Capital. www.luxtera.com

Meteor Entertainment, a Seattle-based publisher of free-to-play games like Hawken, has raised $10 million in VC funding from firms like Benchmark Capital and FirstMark Capital. www.meteor-ent.com Vaultive, a New York-based provider of cloud data encryption solutions, has raised $10 million in VC funding. Backers include .406 Ventures, New Science Ventures and Harmony Partners.www.vaultive.com

Poppin, a New York-based office products startup, has raised $6 million in Series A funding. Shasta Ventures led the round, and was joined by First Round Capital and individual angels. www.poppin.com

Duo Security, an Ann Arbor, Mich.-based provider of mobile phone security solutions, has raised $5 million in Series A funding. Google Ventures led the round, and was joined by seed backers True Ventures and Resonant. www.duosecurity.com

XCOR Aerospace, a Mojave, Calif.-based developer of reusable rocket powered vehicles and propulsion systems, has raised $5 million in new equity funding from backers who include Esther Dyson and Pete Ricketts. www.xcor.com

Karma, a mobile gifting startup from TapJoy co-founders Lee Linden and Ben Lewis, has raised around $4.5 million in VC funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Sequoia Capital, Obvious Corp., Felicis Ventures and Stephen Gillett. www.getkarma.com

SoCore Energy, a Chicago-based solar energy developer for retailers, municipalities and commercial property owners, has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Lightbank LLC.www.socoreenergy.com

Windeln.de, a German e-commerce site for baby products, has raised an undisclosed amount of Series B funding from return backers Acton Capital Partners, DN Capital and High-Tech Gründerfonds.www.windeln.de

Want deal news in your inbox each morning? Then get Term Sheet!

Summary: Luxtera, a Carlsbad, Calif.–based silicon photonics company, has raised $21.7 million in Series C funding. Tokyo Electron was joined by return backers New Enterprise Associates, August Capital, Sevin Rosen Funds and Lux Capital. www.luxtera.com Meteor Entertainment, a Seattle-based publisher of free-to-play games like Hawken, has raised $10 million in VC funding from firms like  Benchmark Capital and FirstMark…


Tim Cook would be the first to tell you — as he told Charlie Rose Friday night — that he’s not Steve Jobs and never will be.

But the Tim Cook that gave Rose enough material for two episodes is pretty interesting these days in his own right. The small army of scribblers who follow Apple — analysts, journalists, tweeters — will have plenty to pick over in the days ahead.

Cook was predictably circumspect about future products, including things that “haven’t been rumored about yet.”

But he’s a straight-talking guy, and he had a lot to say about Apple as a corporation — its horizontal structure (a puzzle, not a stack of chicklets), its philosophy (favoring the simple over the complex), its leadership team (singling out five executives by name, and Angela Ahrendts in particular).

By the end you got a pretty good sense of how Cook stacks up as CEO of the world’s most valuable corporation. He’s not Steve Jobs. But he’s a guy worth watching.

Part 1 aired Friday night and appeared on Hulu Sunday morning. Part 2 is scheduled to air Monday evening on PBS.

Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter at @philiped. Read his Apple AAPL coverage at fortune.com/ped or subscribe via his RSS feed.

Summary: Every serious Apple investor should set aside 54 minutes for this one.


Roger Goodell’s days are numbered.

The embattled National Football League commissioner’s decisions and actions in a crisis will no doubt become the subject of some management case study. But it’s already clear that Goodell has become an indelible part of the problem and not a part of any solution to the NFL’s Ray Rice fiasco.

Some chief executives and management academics I spoke with have been more cautious on the Goodell question. They said they would wait for the results of former FBI director Robert Meuller’s independent investigation. But I can’t see how he could or should survive that report, no matter what it concludes.

Here’s why: The report will almost certainly be part of a larger announcement. It will be wrapped in some greater commitment to deal with a serious problem. In the NFL, that means anything that threatens growth of the league’s profitability.

So can you imagine Roger Goodell standing up as the executive responsible for making good on promises of real change? Any credible plan will need a new leader.

“Now the question of his effectiveness is squarely in front of” NFL owners, said James Post, a professor emeritus of management at Boston University. “It probably turns, in a bizarre sort of way, not on the issues of domestic violence. It’s a business decision.”

One of Goodell’s principal responsibilities as NFL commissioner involves catching and containing flack aimed at the league for everything from head injuries to underpaid cheerleaders. Goodell himself has been very well compensated for that job — earning roughly $70 million over the past two years. That puts him within range of the 10 highest-paid chief executives of US public companies.

But the Rice backlash should become a tipping point for Goodell. He made at least three kinds of serious management mistakes trying to deal with the domestic abuse case.

First, everyone knows the commissioner initially handed out an insufficient punishment by suspending Rice for two games. Even Goodell conceded he blew that decision and offered tougher league policies to deal with abuse cases.

Then there were the commissioner’s comments after the devastating elevator video of Rice knocking his fiancee unconscious became public. Those statements sounded unbelievable or — at best — made him appear incompetent. Goodell said the NFL had asked for the video but never saw the incendiary images. He described Rice’s own explanation of events to the league as ambiguous (contrary to the straightforward account described by the player’s lawyer).

The third and most serious mistake? The NFL seemed to be caught completely off guard when the ongoing problem of violent and otherwise criminal behavior by some players finally blew up into a front-page story. The league didn’t have a plan for that. It didn’t appear to have a clue.

Fans had never seemed to care so much before. The off-field behavior of men paid millions to play a violent game is hard to control — certainly without stern penalties that could hurt the NFL’s product.

But some individual player and episode was bound to trigger a crisis sooner or later. This problem has gotten worse, not better, over time. It’s the kind of thing managers are paid to recognize and deal with in advance.

Goodell has been a popular commissioner among NFL owners and paid that way because the league’s growing profitability during his tenure. The value of the top 10 franchises in the league increased between 22 percent and 44 percent in the past year alone, according to rankings by Forbes. The New England Patriots, worth $2.6 billion, was that team appreciating 44 percent.

Goodell has laid out ambitious revenue growth goals for the NFL. Women are a relatively untapped demographic the league hopes to attract. Even owners who support their commissioner are likely to see him as a liability before long.

“It’s clear what their motive is,” said Marcus Stewart, a Bentley College business professor focused on leadership and ethics. “It’s the bottom line.”

The NFL is a business, as players often say when they are traded. That goes for commissioners, too.

The former CEO of Alere Inc. disclosed Monday that he has been talking with shareholders about a plan to take the Waltham medical diagnostics company private for $3.8 billion. Ron Zwanziger, who left the company in July, said he’s been talking about a $46 per share offer since July. Alere’s stock jumped $4.53 to $41.14 per share Monday.

Summary: Roger Goodell’s days are numbered. The embattled National Football League commissioner’s decisions and actions in a crisis will no doubt become the subject of some future management case study. But it’s already clear that Goodell has become an indelible part of the problem and not a part of any solution to the NFL’s Ray Rice fiasco.


British-American researcher John O'Keefe (C), Norwegian neuroscientist Edvard Moser (R) and his wife May-Britt Moser (L). (Getty Images)

British-American researcher John O'Keefe has won the Nobel Medicine Prize with a Norwegian couple, Edvard and May-Britt Moser, for discovering how the brain navigates.

They earned the coveted prize for discovering a positioning system - an "inner GPS" - which enables us to orient ourselves in space, the jury said.

The research has implications for Alzheimer's and other diseases of the brain, it said.

"The discoveries of John O'Keefe, May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser have solved a problem that has occupied philosophers and scientists for centuries," it said.

"How does the brain create a map of the space surrounding us and how can we navigate our way through a complex environment?"

In 1971, O'Keefe discovered the first component of the system, finding that in lab rats, specific cells in the hippocampus were stimulated when the animal was at a certain location in a room.

Other nerve cells were activated when the rat was at other places, leading O'Keefe to conclude that these "place cells" formed a map of the room.

More than three decades later, in 2005, May-Britt and Edvard Moser discovered another piece of the invisible positioning system.

They identified "grid cells" - nerve cells which generate a coordinated system, rather like longitude and latitude, and allow the brain to make precise positioning and pathfinding.

Research into grid cells may give insights into how memories are created - and explain why when we recall events, we so often have to picture the location in our minds.

The jury pointed out that sufferers of Alzheimer's disease often lose their way and cannot recognise the environment.

"Knowledge about the brain's positioning system may, therefore, help us understand the mechanism underpinning the devastating spatial memory loss that affects people with this disease," it said.

May-Britt Moser told the Nobel Foundation that she was "in shock", and that her husband didn't even know yet as he was on a plane to Munich.

Part of their success comes from being a couple, she explained.

"We have the same vision, we love to understand and we do that by talking to each other, talking to other people and then try to address the questions we are interested in, the best way we can think of," she said.

"And to be able to discuss this when you get an idea on the spot instead of (having to) plan a meeting in one or two or three weeks - that makes a huge difference."

The jury said the work had led to a "paradigm shift" in understanding how groups of specialised cells work together in the brain.

The question of place and navigation has occupied philosophers for centuries and was a central problem for German thinker Immanuel Kant, it said.

John O'Keefe was born in 1939 while May-Britt Moser was born in 1963 and her husband Edvard Moser in 1962.

The winners will share the prize sum of eight million Swedish kronor ($A1.19 million), with one half going to O'Keefe.

Last year the honour went to James Rothman, Randy Schekman and Thomas Suedhof, all of the United States, for their work on how the cell organises its transport system.

In line with tradition, the laureates will receive their prize at a formal ceremony in Stockholm on December 10, the anniversary of prize founder Alfred Nobel's death in 1896.

Do you have any news photos or videos?

Summary: British-American scientist John O'Keefe and Norwegian couple, Edvard Moser and May-Britt Moser, have won the Nobel Medicine Prize.


The topic was the future of sports cars and the experts at Ward’s Automotive weighed in. Their outlook was gloomy: “While the overall vehicle market appears to be rising, sports cars are ailing,” the publication observed, “They are feeling the effects of a marketplace more concerned with value than leather seats and horsepower. One explanation for the decline: the last of the baby boomers are outgrowing sports cars. “

Interesting? Yes. True? Very much so. New? Not so much. Ward’s observations about sports cars were published October 1, 1996 – 18 years ago.

Like live Broadway shows and daytime baseball games, sports cars have been viewed as an endangered species ever since their golden age in the 1950s and 1960s, when MGBs and Austin-Healeys warmed the hearts of auto enthusiasts.

The topic was given new life recently when BMW’s veteran sales executive Ian Robertson exposed some unpleasant facts of life in an interview with Bloomberg. “The sports-car market is roughly half of what it used to be,” Robertson said. “Post-2008, it just collapsed. I’m not so sure it’ll ever fully recover.”

According to the numbers, the situation is actually worse than that. Robertson was referring to three models in particular: the Audi TT, Mercedes SLK, and BMW’s own Z4. All of them are dedicated sport models within the product line of a luxury manufacturer. Sales of these three cars are a quarter of what they were in 2000 when they peaked at 41,339, according to data compiled by Edmunds.com. In 2013, only 9,290 examples of this trio found buyers. Their combined market share has tumbled from 0.24% in 2000 to 0.05% this year.

As traditionally defined, a sports car is designed primarily for performance. They are light, maneuverable, provide space only for a driver and passenger, and contain minimal room for storage. The Mazda MX-5 Miata, introduced in 1989, is a classic sports car and, in its day, very successful. Neither Ford F nor Chrysler FCA sells a sports car and General Motors GM only one. A lot of popular models often referred to as sports cars don’t qualify under a strict definition: The Ford Mustang and Chevy Camaro are too heavy; the Volkswagen GTI and Subaru WRX are too tall.

Some of the sports car’s suffering simply represents progress. Sport sedans and crossovers offer comparable speed and handling, with the bonus space for four passengers and their luggage. “Instead of committing to true sports cars with their very narrow functionality, shoppers can now select from a growing number of models that have sports car performance with the size and utility of models that better suit their lifestyle,” says Jeremy Acevedo, analyst for car shopping website Edmunds.com. Manufacturers have quickly picked up on the trend. On view at the Los Angeles auto show in November were a number of performance models making their debut, including Cadillac’s ATS-V and BMW’s X5M and X6M.

Another cross-current is making life difficult for sports cars, according to Acevedo. Green cars, those with fuel-saving powertrains, are beginning to function as a psychic substitute for rakish two-seaters. In certain circles, say the Pacific Northwest, it is more fashionable to show up in a Nissan Leaf than a 370 ZX. “They make a strong lifestyle statement that resonates with many affluent lifestyle shoppers that may have once been sports car shoppers,” Acevedo says.

Finally, there is the all-purpose explanation for the shift in buyer sentiment: the millennial generation isn’t interested in cars. It is said they’d rather fiddle with Facebook than fantasize about a Ferrari. That may be true, but their diffidence likely has more to do with economics than psychology. The job market is frozen, wages are stagnant, and young people are burdened by college loans. Under these circumstances, only a motorcycle is less practical than a sports car.

As the former owner of a 1965 MG-B (with old-fashioned wire wheels and chrome bumpers), purchased with the proceeds from my first full-time job, and the British racing green 1970 Datsun 240Z that followed it, this saddens me. True, paying for repairs to the MG almost drove me to the poorhouse, and Michigan road salt ate gaping rust holes in the body of the Z-car. But when they were healthy, both cars gave me an adrenalin boost every day that I drove them.

Manufacturers share some of the blame for the waning interest in sports cars. Development costs are rising and manufacturers haven’t been willing to invest because profits can be ephemeral. Except for the occasional classic like the Jaguar XK-E or Porsche 911, sports cars sell like fashion items and demand begins to fade after 18 months on the market. They need frequent updating to stay fresh. Mazda has waited nine years to replace the third generation MX-5 Miata, which came out in 2005. That helps explain why Mazda sales have slipped to 4143 this year.

Manufacturers argue that tiny sales volumes makes it too costly to update sports cars more often. But when they do, the payoff can be enormous. Since Chevy redid the 2014 Corvette after an eight-year interval, its sales have more than tripled and it is out-performing every car in Cadillac’s lineup. GM says the $55,000 Corvette is solidly profitable.

One way for manufacturers to reduce development costs is to share them. Toyota found modest success with the Scion FR-S and Subaru with the SX-4, which came out two years ago. Toyota is now trying again. It is teaming up with BMW to develop a mid-size sports car. Robertson says the project, which began back in 2012, has moved from a feasibility study to the concept stage.

At the high end of the market, sports cars seem less endangered because profits per unit are higher and manufacturers are more concerned with the halo effect than the bottom line. FCA cut the $99,895 price of the 2015 Dodge Viper SRT by $15,000 to raise its visibility but still sold just 80 cars in October. After what seems like several years on the show circuit, Honda is getting ready to launch the mid-engine Acura NSX next year. And Mercedes is getting plenty of mileage with its reveal of the muscular AMG GT S (0-60 mph: 3.6 seconds; top speed: 192 m.p.h.), which will sell for about $135,000 when it reaches dealers in April.

I’m not willing to give up on sports cars yet. I don’t believe they are going the way of canvas convertible tops and manual transmission. As anyone who has driven one knows, there is no substitute for the sensation of being connected to the machine through the steering wheel and gearshift while seated a few inches above the payment.

I wonder where I can get another MGB.

Summary: Reports of its death are somewhat exaggerated.


The Bass Museum of Art, a medium-sized institution not far from the sands of South Beach, is opening its winter exhibition on Wednesday: a showcase of both the work and the collection of Peter Marino, the New York architect known as much for his designs of global luxury emporia as for his perennial uniform of black leather, even in the Floridian heat. I had a preview of the show, and it’s – well, it’s perfect for Miami, I can say that.

The exhibition starts on a long ramp ascending from the ground floor to the main galleries upstairs, whose usually white walls have been covered in black unspooled videotape: an intervention by the artist Gregor Hildebrandt, whose dark luminescence sets the tone of high-end punk. Against this backdrop, in recessed spaces, are paintings from Marino’s collection: universally black and white, and utterly unconcerned with art history or for that matter quality. Ideas are out, looks are in. An important painting by Rudolf Stingel, one of the most trenchant interrogators of the possibilities of abstraction, hangs next to a vapid Dan Colen; a fine Christopher Wool is displayed next to, no joke, a projection of a Chanel runway show. (The show has been organized by Jérôme Sans, a peripatetic French curator.)

But even the luxe leather bar does not prepare you for the subsequent galleries: first, a dozen images (hung cheek-by-jowl, like at an auction preview or a storage facility) of Marino himself, biceps bulging out of his leather vest, as well as a Madame Tussaud’s-style wax sculpture perfect for selfie snappers. Photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe, that earlier leather lover, against walls covered in shiny black cowhide. Dozens of flatscreen televisions projecting Marino’s luxury boutique designs: Armani, Bulgari, Chanel, Dior, all the way from LA to the Gulf, as well as a model of one of his Louis Vuitton stores. And, in the last room, of all things, an opera: a multi-screen video recording of Glück’s Orfeo ed Euridice, performed last year in Marino’s own house and reconstituted here with custom furniture, a shimmering silver backdrop, and all the trimmings.

It is, in a word, obscene. And yet there is something almost perversely admirable about the overtness of its obscenity – the show’s unconcerned commingling of art and commerce, its total indifference to history and scholarship, its assurance that art’s recession into fashion and luxury is not just inevitable but something to be celebrated. Philanthropy is marketing, alas, but this show takes it to new heights. Too many luxury brands to count have stumped up to support the show, and here’s something I’ve never seen before: individual galleries bear the names of luxury sponsors. “This gallery is sponsored by Chanel.” “This gallery is sponsored by Louis Vuitton.”

The funny thing is that he actually owns some truly major works of art. Along with numerous Stingels, you’ll see some important photographs by Thomas Struth, a totemic Baselitz sculpture I liked more than I thought I would, and there’s even a Robert Ryman white monochrome if you can find it shunted near the emergency exit. (Female artists are not his thing; I counted just three – Paola Pivi, Claude Lalanne, and Michal Rovner – alongside more than 40 men, though Marino’s wife Jane Trapnell collaborated on the opera.) If a private collector wants to hang such important works in such decadent circumstances, that’s no concern of mine. Whether a nonprofit museum should be the forum for this, though, is a thornier matter.

Summary: This show of the leather-clad architect’s private collection suggests that art’s recession into fashion and luxury is not just inevitable but something to be celebrated


The year’s second-largest merger suddenly faces a giant roadblock.

The U.S. Department of Justice has sued to block AT&T’s T planned $39 billion acquisition of T-Mobile from Germany’s Deutsche Telekom, on antitrust grounds. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski also said today that the proposed tie-up raised “serious concerns” for his agency.

AT&T expressed surprise at the move, and said it would defend the merger in court.

AT&T shares are off more than 4.5% on the news, perhaps in part because AT&T would have to pay Deutsche Telekom $6 billion (including $3b in cash) were the deal to fail. Sprint S shares, on the other hand, are up more than 8% to $3.83 a piece. Verizon VZ is down 1.4%.

All of this comes just hours after AT&T announced that it would bring 5,000 call center jobs back to the U.S. after the T-Mobile acquisition closed. It also said that it would increase its U.S. infrastructure investment by more than $8 billion, which could create around 96,000 new U.S. jobs. The company did not, however, publicly discuss how many job losses could result from the merger, due to redundancies with T-Mobile.

That could be a pretty big bargaining chip with the jobs-hungry Obama Administration, and the timing perhaps indicates that AT&T knew what Justice had planned for today.

At a press conference, Acting Assistant Attorney General Sharis Pozen said: “We conducted dozens of interviews of customers and competitors, and we reviewed more than 1 million AT&T and T-Mobile documents. The conclusion we reached was clear. Any way you look at this transaction, it is anti-competitive. Our action today seeks to ensure that our nation enjoys the competitive wireless industry it deserves.”

Bank analysts are still scrambling to digest the news, but Wells Fargo’s Jennifer Fritzsche has already released an initial report. She says, in part: “If it is not approved, we would remind investors that while T likely would need more spectrum longer term (like VZ), it does have over 20 MHz of 700 MHz spectrum in the top 100 U.S. markets. We anticipate that T would pull back on its commitment to over 95%+ of the U.S. with LTE. But in no means do we believe T is a broken wireless story without T Mobile in hand.”

What follows is a copy of the DoJ complaint, filed in U.S. District Court in Washington:

Sign up for my daily Term Sheet newsletter on deals & dealmakers .

Summary: The year's second-largest merger suddenly faces a giant roadblock. The U.S. Department of Justice has sued to block AT&T's planned $39 billion acquisition of T-Mobile from Germany's Deutsche Telekom, on antitrust grounds. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski also said today that the proposed tie-up raised "serious concerns" for his agency. AT&T expressed surprise at the move, and…


Ellen Pao vs. Kleiner Perkins moves into the closing argument phase today, after which it heads to the jury. Barring a last-minute settlement — which seems highly unlikely — that means we should have a verdict by the weekend.

I have absolutely no idea what the jurors are thinking, but let me briefly play out worst-case for Kleiner Perkins. It seems that Judge Kahn’s weekend ruling on punitive damages means that the VC firm could be on the hook for a whopping $160 million.

Pao sued the management company, rather than individual funds, and LPs tell me that they would not be required to pay any of a guilty verdict (namely thanks to LPA carve-outs for internal firm disputes, as opposed to the firm being sued by a portfolio company or other third-party entity). KPCB does have some insurance for this sort of thing, but legal sources say they’ve never heard of VC firms having insurance that even approaches the $160 million figure.

So who pays? This is where things get pretty murky. KPCB has a management company that collects fund fees, but even 2% annually on committed capital for its four most recent funds would only work out to $57 million per year (and, again, it isn’t still earning 2% on the full commit from an invested 2010 vehicle).Plus, a lot of that money is needed to keep the lights on, pay employees, etc. So my best guess is that there would be some sort of clawback situation, although it’s unclear how expansive that would be. Would it only apply to those who were with KPCB at the time of the alleged offenses? Or just those there now? If the former, would that include Ellen Pao herself?

Perhaps the only ones paying out of piocket would be the LLC’s actual three owners, which SEC registration docs list as John Doerr, Ted Schlein and Brook Byers. Or (big longshot) could the LLC file for bankruptcy, with a new LLC being formed to house the funds?

And, of course, all of this is predicated not only on a massive loss in this round, but also on losing an almost-certain appeal. So yes, we’re getting way ahead of ourselves. So let’s maybe revisit in a few days.

Get Term Sheet, Dan’s daily newsletter on VC and private equity.

Summary: Ellen Pao's gender discrimination case against VC stalwart Kleiner Perkins is almost over.


12/05/2014 AT 06:25 PM EST

Authorities are looking for a man they believe shot and killed three people on Thursday afternoon – including in his wife and a pastor.

The suspect, Andres "Andy" Avalos, 33, is still at large, according to Manatee County's Sheriff's Office, and officials are offering up to $15,000

"We don't know if whether or not he is still alive," sheriff's spokesperson Dave Bristow said. "We presume he is."

At about 1:20 p.m, deputies responded to a shooting at Bayshore Baptist Church in Bradenton, Florida, the sheriff's office said, according to

At a residence on the church's property, deputies found the body of Pastor James "Tripp" Battle, 31.

, Battle and his wife, Joy, who is the church's secretary, have a 5-year-old daughter and 2-year-old son.

"We have to be strong for Joy," church member Linda Stewart told the

. "I don't know how she will get through this."

When deputies arrived at the church, they learned of a second shooting at a home.

After arriving at the second location, they found two women shot to death, according to reports. One of the women was identified as Amber Avalos, 33, who is Andy's wife, along with a friend, Denise Potter, 46.

According to the church's website, Avalos's wife is also the nursery/children's director. Her father-in-law is a pastor in the town.

"She is married to Andy Avalos and they have 6 amazing children (yes we said 6!)," her bio states.

"We believe this all stemmed from a domestic situation," sheriff's spokesperson Bristow told the

The pastor and Andy Avalos met face to face in the church courtyard moments before the shooting, Manatee Sheriff Brad Steube told the newspaper. "The pastor saw this coming. They were facing each other."

Anyone with information should call Crime Stoppers at 866-634-TIPS or the sheriff's office at 941-747-3011, ext. 2159.

Summary: Church members mourn loss of their pastor and friends


AS the cable television industry opened its first national conference on advertising yesterday, there seemed to be an undercurrent of concern about how much of the camel to allow into the tent.

''Madison Avenue smells blood and is moving in for the kill,'' said Irving Kahn, chairman and president of Broadband Communications and one of the three keynote speakers. ''I am concerned that if we at cable don't take a firm stand to control our industry, then someone else will.''

Later he said that the cable television industry ''must assert itself and take control,'' or these ''nice folks'' from advertising ''will slip in and impose their own standards, their own measurements and their own timetables.''

As proof of the ad agencies' desire to control, he cited to his audience at the New York Hilton remarks made last week by Michael Lepiner, president of Benton & Bowles's Telecom Entertainment. Mr. Lepiner urged agencies to secure more control creatively and economically of the programming of cable, saying they should have done so in broadcast television.

However, a number of agencies, as well as magazine publishers and the television networks, have leaped into the void of cable programming, where one day there could be more than 100 channels for system operators to worry about.

High on the agenda of the newly formed Cable Television Advertising Bureau and its parent, the Cable Television Administration and Marketing Society, sponsor of the conference, is cable audience research. As William Donnelly, vice president and director of resource management at Young & Rubicam, put it: ''Accountability is critical. We can't live without it.''

And in fact an ad hoc committee is looking into methods of audience research, made up of five agency people and a like number from cable systems. An agency man is chairman.

But the cable industry must put its needs first, according to Robert H. Alter, new president of CTVB, who in his speech said: ''We will work hard to develop an accurate methodology for measuring cable TV's audience. This measurement must have its primary function serving the needs of the cable TV industry, while being acceptable to the advertisers and agencies for their purpose.''

Mr. Donnelly, for his part, said that there had been a reluctance on the part of system operators to undertake research either because they feared the cost of research or that the findings might show no viewers, or just plain indifference.

Gabe Samuels, a vice president at J. Walter Thompson, and chairman of the ad hoc committee, reported that $250,000 must be raised to finance an audience research feasibility study and that A.C. Nielsen had been selected to do it. According to David H. Harkness, vice president of Nielsen, eight separate methodologies are being tested, two of the telephone interview type and the rest variations of the diary system.

Another point made by Mr. Kahn deserves noting in that it may come up again later in the center of a major dispute. He said that when it came to pay cable, the channels continued to belong to the system, not to the program supplier, like Home Box Office, which has leased them.

''If I want to pre-empt a promo (of the supplier) to experiment with advertising, I want the right to,'' he said. ''It will take daring, but it can be done and you have@n't heard the last of it.''


To the The Port Authority, which has just decided formally to build a series of industrial parks in and around the city, is in principle adopting a certain model of economic trend here and in other Northeastern cities: it assumes that manufacturing and other industry are shrinking primarily because of shortages of suitable land and buildings and that removing these shortages by public action will retain manufacturing firms and indeed attract new ones.

To adopt this model - despite the devastating criticisms recently brought against it in terms of both analysis and experience - is to suppose that a necessary physical condition for industry is the sufficient condition for its survival and recovery. In brief, the authority's decision seems to be a Pyrrhic victory of real estate thinking over comprehensive economic analysis.

The complex of operational factors working against manufacturing in this area ranges from transport congestion and expensive electric power through high costs of labor, frequent turnover and restrictive work rules all the way to climate, pollution, vandalism, burglaries and personal assaults - in addition to high rents and dilapidated loft-type buildings.

Perhaps the P.A.'s industrial parks can address the problems of rents and buildings, although specific estimates by the Public Development Corporation suggest high costs that will necessitate public subsidies to tenants. Yet such parks will do little to remedy the foregoing operational difficulties; nor will the parks reduce the heavy burden of local taxes, unless tax reductions of the ''enterprise zone'' type are also provided. As a matter of fact, buildings and rents have been found to be only secondary factors in businessmen's attitudes toward leaving the city.

The pattern of costs, returns and alternative investments does not favor the P.A.'s program, which reportedly ''envisions investing $1 billion to produce 30,000 jobs.'' This amounts to $33,333 for each job in these parks, just for the buildings. To this must be added the city's cost for the land, roads, water and sewage, plus the private tenant firms' investments in machinery and equipment. The total cost per job will be staggering.

But even so, there is little or no assurance that these expensively generated jobs will net new jobs - rather than the mere transfer of old firms from nearby locations. An investigation conducted by me last year found that nearly all the firms that moved into recently built industrial parks in New York - both publicly and privately owned parks - came from locations within New York City. Such mere transfers yield a zero return on social investment.

To be sure, industrial parks will be less costly if they are limited to the vest-pocket type (small areas already supplied with most of the needed facilities). And they may be more successful if they are a function of a free-trade zone or are of the Hitrep type (high-technology research parks rather than sites for volume manufacturing).

The social objective of enlarging the city's tax base and providing blue-collar jobs for our multitude of unemployed, unskilled youths, especially male members of minorities, is certainly vital, but investment in industrial parks is not likely to serve that objective. It is more likely to waste scarce funds that are badly needed for more promising investments: in improving mass transit and other infrastructure, in promoting commercial and financial and tourist services here and in training and assisting jobless persons toward better opportunities in other regions. EDWIN P. REUBENS Professor of Economics City College of New York New York, March 15, 1981


TAMPA, Fla., Feb. 25— The issue that has led the players association to set a strike date is the baseball club owners' demand for significant compensation, in the form of players, to teams that lose veterans through free agency.

Under the system that has been in effect for the first five years of the free-agent draft, a player who was selected by two or more clubs required compensation from the club that signed him to the team that lost him. But the compensation was merely an amateur draft choice, a relatively insignificant payment in baseball's structure.

However, in the plan implemented unilaterally by the owners last Thursday, a so-called ranking player would require compensation not only of the amateur draft choice but also of a professional player not on a team's protected list.

The plan defines a ranking player as one who is selected by eight or more clubs within a limited number of rounds in the draft (number to be determined by the amount of players in the draft) and who in the previous season ranked in the top one-third or one-half of his league's players in certain appearance categories: number of starts for pitchers, relief appearances for relief pitchers and plate appearances for catchers and fielders.

If a free agent fell in the top third, his new team could protect 15 players in its entire system and his old team would select one player from the unprotected. If the free agent fell in the top half but not the top third, the new team could protect 18 players.

If that plan had been in effect last November, the owners say, only three players - Dave Winfield, Don Sutton and Darrell Porter - would have been affected. The players counter that, if the plan had been in effect, the clubs would have made sure many more players qualified, by agreeing among themselves to select more players at least eight times.

In addition to added compensation, the owners' plan calls for a predraft draft, in which each club would submit to the commissioner, with copies to the players association and the player relations committee, a list of free agents it wanted to choose, ranked in the order of desired selection. The clubs could not alter their selections in the actual draft.

The owners say the purpose of this secret predraft proceeding would be to insure against the very thing the players fear: a conspiracy among the owners that would increase the number of free agents who would qualify as ''ranking.''


Mergers and acquisitions have always been common in the oil industry, but oil companies are generally the purchasers, not the targets. Thus U.S. Steel's $6.3 billion offer for Marathon Oil is a striking departure, and there could be others like it. And with oil prices expected to fall in real terms next year, some analysts say oil company assets and stock prices are likely to continue falling, setting the stage for more takeovers.

Although a 40 percent decline in the value of oil company shares since last November suggests that the markets have already discounted falling oil prices, further declines next year are likely to hit smaller oil companies particularly hard, experts say.

To finance new drilling, many borrowed heavily against reserves. If the recession deepens and oil prices weaken further, these small companies may not be able to finance loan payments, increasing their attractiveness as takeover candidates in 1982. If that happens, analysts say that U.S. Steel's offer may seem extravagant. Higher Efficiency Ahead

Thanks to a strong first-quarter, when productivity rose 4.1 percent at an annual rate, 1981 should show the first annual gain in output per man hour since 1977. However, recessions are seldom conducive to increased efficiency, as a shrinking labor force and lower demand generate less output per worker. Third-quarter figures on productivity, due out this week, should reflect these conditions. Sara Johnson, an economist at Data Resources Inc., says productivity fell around 2 percent at an annual rate in the third quarter, and could record a similar decline in the fourth. And with the effects of recession expected to linger into 1982, the positive impact of business tax cuts on productivity are likely to be delayed, she says, and could result in little improvement in efficiency next year. But with growth in the labor force slowing, energy prices stabilizing and research and development expenditures expected to rise, Mrs. Johnson expects productivity to rise at about a 2 percent rate in 1983 and 1984. Bounding Bonds

After witnessing the worst bear market in history, some bond traders are beginning to worry that the sharp increase in corporate offerings, which could rise to between $65 billion and $85 billion in the next 12 months, may flood the market, kill the current rally and send interest rates higher again. But economists say the cyclical effects of the recession make such an outcome unlikely, even though trading may ebb a bit.

According to Edward Yardeni, chief economist at E.F. Hutton, potential demand for long-term bonds far exceeds the anticipated supply. As the recession unfolds, Mr. Yardeni expects further declines in short-term interest rates, and an increase in long-term bond offerings. Traditionally, corporations have used those receipts to pay off short-term debt, putting further downward pressure on interest rates.

In the face of sharp declines in returns on short-term assets, Mr. Yardeni says that investors, who now have about $650 billion in money market funds and six-month certificates, are likely to find longterm, higher-interest commercial bonds increasingly attractive. In order to fund the new calendar of offerings, only 10 percent of that money would have to move into bonds, he says. Another Crisis for the E.E.C.

Since its birth nearly 25 years ago, the European Economic Community has lurched from crisis to crisis. This week, another may erupt, when heads of state from the 10 member countries gather in London.

There are two focal points to the current dispute: the community's $21 billion budget, and its common agricultural policy, which sets prices on food products and generates 75 percent of the E.E.C.'s revenues. The British and Germans, who import much of their food and finance much of the Community's budget, want to put a ceiling on food price rises. The French, whose highly productive farmers benefit most from the agricultural policy, opposed such a notion.

With some 9 million E.E.C. citizens out of work, and a million more projected to swell those ranks next year, analysts say pressure to reach a compromise on the farm policy is rising, and that a pact is likely in early 1982. Unless a compromise is reached, public support for the E.E.C. may weaken. Kenneth N. Gilpin

Summary: Buying Oil Companies   Mergers and acquisitions have always been common in the oil industry, but oil companies are generally the purchasers, not the targets. Thus U.S. Steel's $6.3 billion offer for Marathon Oil is a striking departure, and there could be others like it. And with oil prices expected to fall in real terms next year, some analysts say oil company assets and stock prices are likely to continue falling, setting the stage for more takeovers.   Although a 40 percent decline in the value of oil company shares since last November suggests that the markets have already discounted falling oil prices, further declines next year are likely to hit smaller oil companies particularly hard, experts say.


MYSTIC SCENTS of nutmeg, cinnamon and apple have been wafting through the November air the last two Monday mornings near the Buckingham House at Mystic Seaport Museum.

The curious - and perhaps hungry - passerby who investigated would have discovered an unusual cooking class in progress: fireplace cooking.

This is the third year that a series of three two-and-a-half-hour lessons in such cooking have being given. This year's theme, ''Preparing the Thanksgiving Feast,'' has drawn six students from nearby towns to learn the technique. (Classes are kept small so that the students can participate in all the steps of preparation.)

One thing is certain. You don't have to dress up like Priscilla Alden to prepare much of your Thanksgiving dinner right in the fireplace. ''In these days of high fuel costs,'' said Anne King, the cooking-class instructor, ''it is useful to know how much cooking can be done from a single source - the wood-burning fireplace.''

Mrs. King, curator of the Ledyard Historical Society, became interested in using the fireplace 13 years ago when her family bought an 1803 house in Ledyard that had a big open hearth and bake oven built into the back wall of the fireplace. ''It just asked to be used,'' she said.

She experimented and adapted old recipes to modern taste. ''Then an antique dealer asked me why I wasn't roasting my Thanksgiving turkey in the fireplace and convinced me it was easy,'' she said. ''But then he added, 'Keep some tickets for McDonald's handy - just in case.' ''

The first settlers cooked their whole meal in their fireplaces - and so does the class. This means boiling, deep-fat frying, baking and roasting.

In the course of the three lessons, the class will have prepared everything needed for Thanksgiving dinner. The first class was spent boiling pumpkin, skinning it and mixing spices with it for the pumpkin pie; baking apples in a tin biscuit oven, and deep-frying doughnuts.

In the second lesson, students learned how to make gravy in the reflector oven, how to stuff and roast a chicken (also in the reflector oven), how to make pumpkin pie in a bake kettle, how to make cranberry sauce on the side of the fire in an iron spider, or frying pan, and how to make cranberry pudding in a tin mold over the fire.

Tomorrow, at the last lesson, the class will cook a chicken pie in the bake oven, caraway cakes in the biscuit oven and Marlborough pudding in the bake oven - all within the confines of the big sixfoot-long hearth.

Mrs. King began the first lesson by getting a good strong wood fire going in the hearth in the Buckingham House kitchen. It should be done about an hour ahead to give you enough ashes. They are the most important element to control the heat.

''A slow steady fire is essential,'' Mrs. King told the class. ''Pine kindling makes a good starter, and then use hardwood. Oak, maple and hickory are best, and then fruitwoods, birch, chestnut, beech and ash to keep the fire going.'' To be avoided: elm, pine, green wood or any sap wood soaked in creosote (such as cut up telephone poles).

Recipe sheets were passed out, along with instructions for the tools and implements needed for today's fireplace cooking and where items such as cranes for holding pots, ''S'' hooks, bake kettles and cast-iron pots could be purchased.

The kitchen of the early-18th-century barn-red clapboard house in Mystic Seaport actually dates back to 1690 and makes a perfect setting for such a course. Apple slices were strung and hung to dry above the mantel alongside clusters of sage, rosemary, lemon verbena and dill. The wood-burning aroma was mesmerizing. It is best suited, noted Mrs. King, to poultry, meats, fish and vegetables such as carrots, potatoes and cabbage, but not good for more delicate dishes or those made with milk, such as custards.

While wedges of pumpkin steamed in a big kettle hung on a crane, class members dropped spoonfuls of whole-wheat dough into a kettle over the fire full of boiling hot lard. The small, finished doughnut balls were removed from the kettle and rolled in a bowl of cinnamon sugar, and then eaten as fast as they were made.

Pared apples filled with currants and raisins were baking in a reflector oven on the floor facing the logs. ''We put aluminum foil around the inside and edges of the oven,'' Mrs. King said. It catches more heat and expedites the process. That was a luxury the early colonists did not have.

One of the drawbacks of fireplace cooking is that it takes time. ''All the more reason to do it as a family,'' she said, ''so that everyone is busy with a job.''

Why would anyone want to cook in a fireplace? Isn't it messy? Nancy Haenlein, one of the women taking the course, had her reason. Her family plans to build a log cabin and she wants to learn all she can about cooking that can be done in a fireplace. Luella Bergsma of New London said, ''I have five kids and we do a lot of camping. But what we're learning today is more sophisticated than the things I've been making out in the open.''

Cathleen Ruhe has a 1706 house in North Stonington and already there is considerable cooking in her fireplace. ''I've boiled lobster, barbecued chicken and baked pies in my bake oven.'' She expects to cook this Thursday's Thanksgiving dinner - two 15-pound turkeys, pies and cornbread -in her fireplace.

''It's really not such a big deal, and the wood ash gives the food an especially good taste,'' she said. ''Also, with everyone pitching in to help, it's going to be like a real old-fashioned Thanksgiving.''

The recipes used in the Mystic Seaport cooking classes are, for the most part, taken from an 1833 cookbook, ''The American Frugal Housewife'' written by a Mrs. Child, which can be purchased at the Mystic Book Shop for $5.95.

The Mystic Seaport fireplace-cooking classes (three for $30) will be offered again in November 1982. Meanwhile, there are fireplacecooking demonstrations in Buckingham House at Mystic every day. For information, contact Mystic Seaport Museum, Mystic, Conn. Telephone: 536-2631, ext. 316.

The recipe for deep-fried doughnut balls comes from the ''New England Economical Housekeeper'' by Mrs. E.S. Howland, published in 1845.

The steamed cranberry pudding recipe is an old one adapted by Mrs. King. It is made in a tin melon mold that is placed on a metal trivet in a large cast-iron pot filled with boiling water that extends halfway up the outside of the mold. The covered pot is placed on an ''S'' hook extending from a crane over the fire and steamed for approximately one and a half hours. Doughnut Balls 2 eggs 1 cup sugar 1 cup milk 1 teaspoon baking soda Salt to taste Spice (half a teaspoon of mace optional) A small piece of butter (1 teaspoon) Flour enough to make a stiff batter (whole-wheat flour)

1. Mix together until solid dough, then drop by teaspoonful into hot lard. Note: The lard gives a pronounced flavor. Modern cooks would more happily use Crisco or corn oil. Yield: Approximately 2 dozen balls. Steamed Cranberry Pudding 1 cup cranberries 1/4 cup butter 1/2 cup sugar 2 eggs 1 cup milk 1 teaspoon baking soda 2 teaspoons cream of tartar 2 cups flour A pinch of salt

1. Mix together, then pour into a greased tin melon mold only two-thirds full. Steam for 1 1/2 hours.

2. When cooked, serve with a sauce or glaze of your choice.

Illustrations: photo of Anne King


* British Petroleum Corporation agreed in principle to buy the 75 percent interest it does not own in BOC Subocean Services Ltd., an underwater welding company, from BOC International Ltd.

* Consolidated Aluminum Corporation announced a five-year, $700 million capital expenditure program and the sale of four aluminum extrusion plants to Indal Inc.

* Cook United Inc. signed a definitive agreement to buy Gray Drug Stores Inc.'s discount department store division.

* Cooper Laboratories Inc. received approval from the Food and Drug Administration to sell its permalens extended-wear soft contact lens for general vision correction.

* Dial Corporation agreed to buy about $38 million of consumer installment receivables from subsidiaries of the Leucadia National Corporation of New York.

* Kirsch Company's directors approved an accord under which Kirsch would be purchased by Cooper Industries for $35.51 a share.

* Hospital Corporation of America plans to build a specialty hospital for maternal and infant care in Atlanta at a cost of about $20 million.

* Hyatt International Corporation plans to build a $100 million, 357-room hotel in Budapest.

* Leslie Fay Inc. terminated an agreement in principle for the sale of its assets to Wertheim & Company.

* Manufacturers National Corporation acquired the Bank of Lansing, Mich., for about $20 million in cash.

* McDonnell Douglas Corporation received a $98 million Air Force contract for F-15 fighter planes.

* Mitre Corporation received a $91.3 million Air Force contract for engineering work on information and communication systems for the military and other Government agencies.


About 400,000 Verizon FiOS customers in Massachusetts remained without Fox 25 programming as a standoff between Verizon and Cox Media Group, the new owner of WFXT-TV (Fox 25) continued.

The Fox 25 signal went dark Thanksgiving morning for FiOS customers after the companies failed to reach agreement on the fees Verizon pays Cox to carry the station. Verizon officials say the dispute arose after Atlanta-based Cox acquired control of Fox 25 as part of a station swap with Rupert Murdoch’s Twenty-First Century Fox in October.

Cox came to the table with what Verizon called an exceptionally high hike request. The two sides worked with an early morning deadline Thursday to resolve the issue, before a featured National Football League game between the Dallas Cowboys and Philadelphia Eagles aired on Fox affiliates.

Unless the issue is resolved over the next day or so, local FiOS subscribers also will miss Sunday’s New Orleans Saints vs. Pittsburgh Steelers game on Fox 25.

These kinds of blackouts have becoming increasingly frequent across the country, and they can last for days or weeks.

“We’re still hopeful that Cox will come back to the negotiating table so that we can reach an agreement that puts significantly less pressure on our consumers’ wallets and bank accounts,” said Terry Denson, Verizon’s vice president of content strategy and acquisition.

Neither side would specify the size of the rate increase sought by Cox. Tom Raponi, the general manager at Fox 25 in Dedham, declined to comment on the negotiations.

RELATED: 11/27: Stalemate over fees leaves FiOS viewers without Fox 25

Summary: About 400,000 Verizon FiOS customers in Massachusetts continued to go without Fox 25 programming as a standoff between Verizon and the station’s owner continued.


By burning a Jordanian pilot alive in its most savage execution video yet, the Islamic State (IS) group aims to terrify its Arab and Western opponents into ending their anti-jihadist war.

Already infamous for beheading and stoning to death its victims, IS is trying to "up the ante" with the latest execution, experts said.

With the murder of an airman participating in the US-led coalition fighting IS, the jihadists hope to sow division and fear among their opponents.

"It is a message for the coalition... your men will end up in videos that are even more horrific and will do lasting damage to public opinion in your countries," said Romain Caillet, an expert on jihadist movements.

No "head of state wants to see a young soldier end up in one of these videos," he said.

Jordanian pilot Maaz al-Kassasbeh was captured by IS in December when his fighter plane crashed in Syria as he participated in the US-led campaign against the group.

Amman said publicly that it was willing to free an Iraqi female jihadist on death row in exchange for Kassasbeh and a Japanese journalist being held by IS.

But Jordanian state media said Tuesday that Kassasbeh appeared to have been killed on January 3, suggesting the group never planned to exchange the pilot.

It preferred instead the shock and propaganda value of killing him, said Hassan Hassan, an expert at the Delma Institute, a research centre based in Abu Dhabi.

"It was a huge opportunity for IS to inflict maximum pain on the international coalition, especially to Muslim countries that took part in it," he said.

"The main purpose of this video is to send a message that retribution against fellow Muslims who assist the United States in its fight against the group will be unimaginable."

Iraq-based security expert Hisham Alhashimi agreed, saying the gruesome execution method was intended to evoke the maxim "an eye for an eye".

"IS wants to terrorise the Jordanian air force and say that any pilot who falls into their hands will meet the same fate," he said.

"As the pilot brought down fire on the jihadists (with air strikes), so they burned him according to the law of an eye for eye," Alhashimi said.

Even for a group infamous for its brutality, the execution of Kassabeh marked a significant escalation.

Thomas Pierret, a Syria specialist at the University of Edinburgh, said the group was being forced to "innovate" to gain maximum effect.

"They are operating within the logic of the news cycle, where the public becomes used to everything and they have to 'innovate' to get attention," he said.

"IS has used beheadings so often that they have become almost banal. Burning a prisoner alive is a way to get maximum 'buzz', as it were."

The video, more than 22 minutes long, seeks to justify burning Kassasbeh alive by showing footage of the air strikes launched by the US-led coalition in Syria since September.

"Burning alive is a sort of response to the 'fire from the sky' that F-16 jets represent," Pierret said.

Do you have any news photos or videos?

Summary: Experts say the Islamic State group has "upped the ante" in its latest execution video which shows a Jordanian pilot being burnt alive.


updated 08/06/2015 AT 04:45 PM EDT

•originally published 08/06/2015 AT 02:45 PM EDT

After 16 years as host of

sits behind the desk for the final time Thursday night.

While fans prepare both to share a last laugh and to possibly break out the tissues, let's take stock of what we'll miss most about the comicâturnedâanchor at the helm of the show.

There is no shortage of impression-worthy figures in the American political system (or the 24-hour news cycle, for that matter), and Stewart, 52, always owned the opportunity to take on a new character. Some of his funniest moments on the show came from his spot-on affectations. His pucker-lipped

, Southern Belle-esque Senator Lindsey Graham, condescending Fox News personality

and frequent slips into a generic Jersey mobster were unforgettable moments we're already missing. But even his top-notch

pales in comparison to the crowning jewel of Stewart's impressions: The squinty-eyed, George W. Bush

that may have been the best part of 43's presidency.

As Stewart increasingly became – against the show's intentions – one of the more trusted voices on television, he fearlessly confronted personalities he believed to be destructive to the American public. Sometimes he'd use humor to criticize, like when he told Fox News "Go F--- Yourselves"

, but when a situation called for it, Stewart wasn't afraid to offer up a sincere, straight-faced skewering. In 2009, Stewart

, the host of CNBC's

, onto the show. Telling Cramer his handling of the economic collapse was "disingenuous at best, and criminal at worst," Stewart was upfront about his scorn for the host's brand of financial punditry. Other people on the receiving end of Stewart's wrath include

has been a major stepping stone for some of the biggest players currently on TV. We have the show's success under Stewart to thank for

, and it was always special to see

vets appear alongside Stewart on their old stomping grounds. Before

between the two hosts always ended

on a high note. Now without Stewart, we've lost the chance for more reunions with ex-correspondents like

, whose new TBS talk show will debut later this year.

As the host of a comedy show, Stewart had a tough job when it came time to address tragic moments that were gripping the nation. Whether he had to

or comment on the ever-increasing number of

across the country, Stewart allowed his vulnerability to connect with and comfort his audience. In what was probably his most difficult monologue during his tenure on the show, Stewart returned to his desk after the 9/11 attacks. "I want to tell you why I grieve, but why I don't despair,"

, "this attack happened, it is not a dream. But the aftermath of it, the recovery of it, is a dream realized. â¦ Any fool can destroy, but to see these guys, these firefighters, these policemen, and people from all over the country rebuilding â¦ that is extraordinary. And that's why we've already won."

Probably the most heartbreaking thing about Stewart's February announcement that he would be departing

was the realization that he won't be on air to sort through the mayhem that is sure to be the 2016 presidential election. From his hilarious handling of the Bush/Gore

in 2000 to the beginning of his "Democalypse 2016"

, Stewart has always been there to help us digest American democracy. The upcoming debates, campaign ads and polling just won't be the same without the fake newsman's two cents.

series finale airs tonight at 11 p.m. ET on Comedy Central.

Summary: As the fake newsman prepares to permanently sign off, we rounded up what we'll miss most about the host of 16 years


U.S. Treasury yields are bound to head lower thanks to a mix of European monetary policy and a widespread institutional trade, the managing director at Southwest Securities told CNBC on Wednesday.

Mark Grant said activity in futures markets indicate big institutional investors drove U.S. Treasurys down and then front-ran the European Central Bank ahead of its bond-buying program, which kicked off on Monday. Those institutions got out of Treasurys and bought sovereign debt all over Europe, he said in a "Squawk Box" interview.

As the ECB pushes rates into negative territory, those investors "are making very nice profits," Grant said. Eventually that money will come back into Treasurys and drive down yield in a second leg, he added.

Read More Prepare for euro-dollar parity—and fast

The whole process will take two or three months—if that, he told CNBC.

"We're seeing velocities pick up—and the ECB—it really depends on how quickly they start buying bonds and start driving everything into negative territory," he said.

The 10-year Treasury fell to 2.1 percent on Wednesday ahead of an auction of U.S. debt.

Grant previously predicted the euro would reach parity with the U.S. dollar. On Wednesday, he said the only surprise is how quickly the currency has fallen.

The euro dipped to a nearly 12-year low below 1.06 to the dollar on Wednesday.

Summary: U.S. Treasury yields are bound to head lower thanks to a mix of European monetary policy and an institutional trade, Mark Grant tells CNBC.