When it comes to investing in individual stocks, Peter Lynch’s investment maxim is clear and distinct: Know what you own. By now, you know how we at Fidelity Investor distinguish ourselves from all other advisory newsletters and name-brand fund rating services (which are based on the fund’s past performance, not the current manager’s historical performance): We know who we own.

Our proprietary fund-manager ranking system continues to give all our members a decided edge in the market, and a specific advantage when it comes to scrutinizing their own portfolios. And as we head into the second half of 2005, we’ll continue to put our proprietary methodology to work for us. Our methodology ranks portfolio managers based on their risk-adjusted career-relative return as well as how much they outperform using unadjusted returns weighted toward more recent periods. The accompanying slide show runs down the ten highest-ranked portfolio managers at Fidelity in the areas of growth funds, growth and income funds, and international funds. These are the managers who have proven to be the best at managing investor funds. Fidelity Select or sector fund managers have been excluded from the ranking.

The top-ranked Fidelity manager through the first half of 2005 is Tom Soviero. Tom’s range of experiences in the junk bond realm continues to help him scale the jagged peaks and slippery slopes of Leveraged Company Stock (FLVCX).

Among diversified fund managers, Tom Allen is coming on strong at VIP Mid-Cap Stock; Matt Fruhan, who recently took over Large Cap Stock (FLCSX), has a career record that bodes well; Brian Hogan at Blue Chip Value (FBCVX), who is also the manager of the equity stake in Strategic Dividend Income (FSDIX), remains the rookie to watch; and Joel Tillinghast continues to do what he’s done throughout his career–outperform.

The bottom-ranked managers manage some of the biggest funds. Well, I don’t have to tell you this, but I will: Stansky at Magellan (FMAGX) continues to disappoint. Bob Stansky and Magellan seemed well matchedwhen theymet back in 1996. But since then, the case has been building against Stansky’s remaining at the helm of Fidelity’s flagship fund.

For the first half of 2005, Stansky continues to flag. The year-over-year losses relative to his benchmark are unquestionably poor. What is the root cause of this underperformance? I continue to think its risk aversion and/or index reversion.

Don’t be surprised to see two things happen inside the next 12 months if this situation doesn’t dramatically improve. First, Stansky could bow out. Second, Magellan could no longer be Fidelity’s largest mutual fund.

John Avery has been sub-par at Fidelity Fund (FFIDX), a fund that tends to be moderately more aggressive than Magellan, despite its placement in the growth and income category. There are, of course, some perennial laggards like Bettina Doulton and Bahaa Fam. But two such laggards are now gone; Karen Firestone and Harris Leviton.

See the ten highest-ranked portfolio managers at Fidelity.

Excerpted from the July 2005 Issue of Fidelity Investor. For more ideas and analysis from Jim Lowell, and to subscribe to Fidelity Investor, click here.

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Summary: Fidelity expert Jim Lowell identifies the ten Fidelity portfolio managers you want investing your money.


El Chapo, meet El Jerko.

Hollywood blowhard Sean Penn secretly met, interviewed, and posed for grip-and-smirk selfies with murderous druglord Joaquin Guzman Loera — even as the world’s most-wanted fugitive continued to elude authorities in the months after tunneling out of a Mexican prison.

“I don’t want to be portrayed as a nun,” El Chapo says in the interview. Nevertheless, to gain access to the kingpin’s secret jungle hideout, Penn agreed that Guzman would have the final edit of the resulting story.

Penn also agreed not to alert authorities to the killer’s whereabouts. Still, Guzman’s capture in a dramatic police shootout Friday came as a direct result of Mexican officials tracking their contacts, authorities there said.

And Mexican officials now are investigating Penn and actress Kate del Castillo, who traveled with the actor to visit the vile drug lord, ABC News reported.

Penn interviewed Guzman — whose nickname means “Shorty” — in person and via cautiously encrypted e-mail and video messages for Rolling Stone magazine.

“He asks me if many people in the United States know about him,” Penn writes of the celebrity-obsessed narcotics magnate.

“‘Oh yeah,” I say . . . He seems to delight in the absurdity of this . . . We eat, drink and talk for hours,” he said of their jungle tête-a-tête.

At one point, the tequila flowing, El Chapo jokes of Donald Trump, “Ah! Mi amigo!”

The clandestine contacts were brokered by del Castillo, who’d struck up a correspondence with Guzman after tweeting her support of him four years ago, the mag said.

The resulting account, published online Saturday night, shows the killer kingpin — described variously as “serene,” and “a simple man in a simple place,” and “a businessman first” — in an almost worshipful light.

In breathless, first-person prose, Penn marvels over El Chapo’s humble, hardscrabble childhood spent harvesting in the drug fields of Sinaloa state.

Scant mention is made of the river of blood in El Chapo’s wake, and none at all of his alleged assassinations of Mexican officials and police. Guzman is credited with responsibility for tens of thousands of deaths of rivals, informants and officials in Mexico and the US, his biggest market.

A 2014 indictment by the US Attorney’s office in Brooklyn charges him with 12 counts of murder among other charges; Mexico officials said Saturday they will cooperate with US efforts to extradite him.

Instead, Penn seems to swoon over the breadth of the fugitive’s deadly drug empire.

“While I was surfing the waves of Malibu at age 9, he was already working in the marijuana and poppy fields of the remote mountains of Sinaloa,” Penn says of Guzman, who, like the actor, is in his early 50s.

“Today he runs the biggest international drug cartel the world has ever known, exceeding even that of Pablo Escobar,” Penn says.

“He shops and ships by some estimates more than half of all the cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and marijuana that come into the United States.”

Penn concedes in the piece that he “may be perceived as protecting criminals.”

The actor also wants readers to know that in meeting with El Chapo — who was known to dispatch those who disappoint him with a bullet to the head — he is doing something really, really risky.

“The trust that El Chapo had extended to us was not to be f–ked with,” Penn writes.

“This will be the first interview El Chapo had ever granted outside an interrogation room, leaving me no precedent by which to measure the hazards,” Penn writes.

‘He’s wearing a casual patterned silk shirt, pressed black jeans, and he appears remarkably well-groomed and healthy for a man on the run’

“I’d seen plenty of video and graphic photography of those beheaded, exploded, dismembered or bullet-riddled innocents, activists, courageous journalists and cartel enemies alike.”

But Penn was not afraid.

“I’d offered myself to experiences beyond my control in numerous countries of war, terror, corruption and disaster,” he assures the reader.

Guzman may be a billionaire murderer and peddler of poison, but what of our own guilt, as customers of his wares, Penn muses.

“We are the consumers,” Penn says, “and as such, we are complicit in every murder, and in every corruption of an institution’s ability to protect the quality of life for citizens of Mexico and the United States that comes as a result of our insatiable appetite for illicit narcotics.”

Penn adds, “As much as anything, it’s a question of relative morality.”

Besides, “the War on Drugs has failed,” he announces, decrying “the tunnel vision of our puritanical and prosecutorial culture.”

Penn and del Castillo visited El Chapo in early October, a trip involving a flight to an undisclosed Mexican city and a 90-minute drive across farmlands in a convoy of armored SUVs to a dirt airfield.

Their escort on a subsequent, two-hour flight in El Chapo’s six-seat, single-engine prop plane is the drug lord’s 29-year-old son, Alfredo, Penn writes.

The plane has a scrambler that blocks ground radar, Alfredo boasts. After a few fortifying in-flight swigs of tequila, they land, somewhere, in a patch of dirt surrounded by jungle, and scramble into two waiting SUVs.

Nine bumpy hours later — after a drive that included their convoy being waved through a Mexican military checkpoint — “there he is,” standing beside a few “weathered bungalows,” Penn writes.

“He’s wearing a casual patterned silk shirt, pressed black jeans, and he appears remarkably well-groomed and healthy for a man on the run,” Penn notes.

“He pulls me into a ‘compadre’ hug, looks me in the eyes and speaks a lengthy greeting in Spanish too fast for my ears,” Penn says.

About 100 of his soldiers stand guard as El Chapo hobnobs with the two celebrities, del Castillo translating for Penn over tacos, rice and beans.

Penn is allowed no note-taking, so he’s unable to quote El Chapo at length. Did you know Pablo Escobar? the actor asks. “Yes, I met him. Big house,” is the answer remembered by Penn.

What was to be a series of in-person interviews was scuttled, though, when El Chapo’s security caught wind of a looming military siege.

A later, written interview consists of softball questions, including, “Do you consider yourself a violent person?”

The kingpin responds, “No, sir.”

Penn asks, “Are you prone to violence, or do you use it as a last resort?”

“Look,” El Chapo answers. “All I do is defend myself, nothing more. But do I start trouble? Never.”

Penn is no stranger to self-aggrandizement.

In the 2005 aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, he was pictured patrolling the streets of New Orleans brandishing a shotgun.

Summary: El Chapo, meet El Jerko. Hollywood blowhard Sean Penn secretly met, interviewed, and posed for grip-and-smirk selfies with murderous druglord Joaquin Guzman Loera — even as the world’s most-wanted …


Last month, Mr. Yuen was in Mountain View, in the heart of Silicon Valley, demonstrating his product to venture capitalists and other tech entrepreneurs. At a Y Combinator dinner, he asked Evan Williams, a co-founder of Blogger, who was a guest speaker at the event, for his cellphone number and then sent him $2 using TextPayMe. (Mr. Yuen, incidentally, has now accumulated a trove of cellphone numbers of Silicon Valley heavyweights and offers from three venture capital firms.) Mr. Williams, intrigued, mentioned he had the same idea earlier that day while brainstorming with friends. "It's something in the air," he said.

That night, at the dinner, Mr. Williams addressed a room full of refugees from Oracle, AOL, Microsoft and Accenture. "I think this is so cool what you guys are doing," said Mr. Williams, who sold his company to Google in 2003. "I would love to be part of something like this. I'm so jealous."

If it is possible to systematize the archetypal two guys in a garage (and they are generally guys), the year-old Y Combinator wants to do it. The company's formula is to throw smart people together and provide them $6,000 in seed money per person to cover the initial costs of the company, cookie-cutter legal paperwork and an extensive network of business contacts.

In return, Mr. Graham and his partners -- Jessica Livingston, Trevor Blackwell and Robert Morris -- collectively own 1.2 to 12 percent of the company, with an average of 6 percent a person. The company holds two boot camps a year for about eight groups each session, a summer one in Cambridge and a winter one in Mountain View. Y Combinator is not so much an incubator as a hatchery for baby companies, and as with all things spawned in bulk, some will die, some will flourish and some will eke by.

"Y Combinator comes down to two kids in a room with two computers and ramen noodles for a summer," said Chris Sacca, a principal of new business development at Google and a speaker at Y Combinator's one-day start-up school conference in October at Harvard. "It takes ambitious geeks and puts them in a situation with no distraction and expects audacious outcomes from them. The reason we like it is that that is what Google is." Indeed, Google has made acquisition overtures to one of the companies that was formed during the summer session, which the founders turned down.

Mr. Graham got the idea for starting Y Combinator after giving a talk to student entrepreneurs at Harvard, where he received his Ph.D. in computer science. He told them to look for seed money from rich people they knew, preferably ones who had made their wealth from technology. "Then I said, 'Not me,' and they all looked kind of downcast and then I felt like a jerk," he said. Then, on reflection, Mr. Graham thought, why shouldn't he try to support young hackers?

The goal for Y Combinator's young entrepreneurs is twofold: to make something people want (which is the company's motto); and to stretch their financing long enough for additional investment or to get acquired. For instance, Mr. Graham's former company, Viaweb, which made software to build commercial Web sites, was bought by Yahoo and reborn as store.yahoo.com. One Y Combinator business created last summer, a company that uses cellphones for social networking, got financing from a venture capital firm. Two other Y Combinator companies, a calendar Web site called Kiko.com and a news site, Reddit.com, received additional angel financing.

Y Combinator relies on certain premises: that open-source software and falling hardware prices means that tech start-ups are cheap to finance; that large companies are no longer at the forefront of innovation; and that mature technology companies find it cheaper to buy than to build.

The company takes its name from an obscure mathematical term, describing a function that generates other functions. Y Combinator is a company that creates other companies -- a sly reference that would elicit a smile from a very narrow set of people, but luckily the same set that the company is trying to appeal to. It is the philosophical triumph of the passionate computer hacker over the uptight M.B.A.

"Paul is telling us, 'If you are having a good time, and you are building something that other people want, then the money is not going to be a problem,' " said Beau Hartshorne, 24, whose vision for a company he is calling Pixoh will allow people to resize and crop their photos within a Web browser.

Mr. Graham is more focused on creating cool products -- that is, coding as art -- than developing revenue models and protecting intellectual property. Thus, Y Combinator may not be as good at teaching participants how to build self-sustaining companies than it is preparing them to sell, or flip, their businesses. For Silicon Valley corporate war chests, acquisitions are often made for technical talent as well as product, which generally has to be rebuilt if it is kept at all. The whispered acquisition rate for companies is about $1 million to $2 million per technical employee.

"It's a way for recruiting for Yahoo where you don't have the risk and uncertainty of knowing if they can actually do something," said Joel Spolsky, a technology entrepreneur in New York City who also has a wide readership on the Internet.

"The danger is that you will run out of money before a buyer shows up," said Peter Rip, a managing director of Leapfrog Ventures, a venture capital fund in Menlo Park, Calif. "We are seeing a lot of guys being attracted to the ease with which they can start a company, but starting is really only the first step."

From a financial standpoint, the Y Combinator investments are small in a world where valuations are measured in millions of dollars, if not billions. "In the traditional venture capital model, $6,000 isn't enough to pay your corporate lawyer fees for your first financing," said Mr. Sacca of Google.

"It's not just about the money," said Jeff Mellen, 24, who quit Oracle with three of his friends to build an operating system that works within a Web browser.

Y Combinator provides the validation that young techies should keep pursuing their dreams. "I could get the same amount of money from my parents, but that wouldn't tell me if my business plan or idea was a good one," Mr. Mellen said. "That tells me my parents love me."

GROWTH SPURT Correction: February 22, 2006, Wednesday A picture caption yesterday on the front page of the special Small Business section, with an article about a boot camp for entrepreneurs, misidentified two participants. They were Adam Siegel, in a blue shirt, and Cole Poelker -- not Chris Smoak and Beau Hartshorne.

Correction: February 23, 2006, Thursday An article in the special Small Business section on Tuesday about Y Combinator, a venture capital firm that runs a boot camp and provides seed money for start-up companies, misstated the amount of equity it takes in them. The partners collectively own 1.2 to 12 percent of the start-ups, with an average of 6 percent -- not an average of 6 percent per person.

Summary: Article on Y Combinator of Mountain View, Calif, and Cambridge, Mass, that gives seed money to computer hackers to start businesses; word 'hacker' is not derogatory in computer world, but it is someone who is creative and resourceful with code; Y Combinator was started by Paul Graham, Jessica Livingston, Trevor Blackwell and Robert Morris; some of started with help of Y Combinator noted; photos (special sections, Small Business) (M)


You really can’t overstate the case for visiting Cape Town. First, there’s the in-your-face beauty of a craggy mountain range that drops precipitously into a glittering sea, its flanks carpeted in greens and delicate florals – the Cape Floral Kingdom, smallest yet richest in the world.

Clifton beach comprises four crescent-shaped strips of sand, each attracting a slightly different sunworshipper.

Then there’s the pristine white beaches lapped by – it must be said – a chilly Atlantic, their curves defined by giant granite boulders to bake on, and burbling mountain streams in dappled forests. The proximity of nature is a constant source of amazement here, whether it is spotting zebra and wildebeest grazing on the slopes of Table Mountain from the highway, watching whales breach from a restaurant deck overlooking False Bay, supplicating before the Twelve Apostles mountain during a yoga class on Camps Bay beach or being halted by cavorting baboons near Cape Point.

Yet Cape Town has a cool urban edge, too: excellent art galleries, hip bars, world-rated restaurants, design-savvy shops, and home to Africa's innovative artists and designers, drawn by the city's innate beauty.

Certainly it has always been the most cosmopolitan city in Southern Africa: the Dutch who planted the first gardens and built the sombre Castle of Good Hope in 1666 were followed by the French, who augmented the wine-making skills and gabled homesteads of the original colonists; Malay slaves brought spices and minarets; the English left Georgian mansions and Victorian terraced homes, and refugees from all over Africa have made their way south to seek their fortune in the shadow of its flat-topped mountain.

Food, jazz and gospel tours introduce a broad spectrum of cultural experiences, and no visit is complete without at least one full day exploring some of the surrounding vine-carpeted valleys, their rich terroir spawning not only award-winning wines but superb produce, accounting for some of the best (and most affordable) fine dining in the world. It’s a city that has only really been open to the world for the last two decades, and - at R17/18 to £1 – still offers excellent value for money, and a sense of new discovery. Small wonder then that Cape Town has - for the third year in a row - won the Telegraph reader’s survey award as the best city in the world to visit. Despite this the city remains highly seasonal, which keeps a cap on development – and the number of beds. Like most things, it pays to plan ahead.

You can visit Cape Town pretty much any time of year. Summer is the most popular, with peak season falling between mid-December and early January.

You haven’t truly understood the scope of Cape Town until you’ve ascended Table Mountain and seen the city sprawled below.

Another surge of visitors descends during the hot months of February and March. In April, the temperatures are balmy, the light is softer, the Cape Doctor (the South-easterly wind that howls through the city) is dormant and the sunsets are spectacular.

The temperate winter sometimes starts in May, more often June/July. Sunny days alternate with downpours that bring verdant relief, the mountain streams gushing into rocky gullies and watering the winter-flowering fynbos, including proteas, lilies and aloes. This is the most exhilarating time of year to explore the slopes of Table Mountain on foot.

July to November is the time when the southern right whales migrate to calve and nurse, providing the best land-based whale-watching in the world – but be warned, July and August can be wet. October to November is when the Cape floral kingdom again wows with a new cycle of flowering species, while the beaches, still relatively empty, sparkle in the temperate sun. This is when some of the best deals of the summer season are to be had – especially if you book early.

No visit to Cape Town is complete without circumnavigating the peninsula, travelling south from the city, Waterfront or Camps Bay (the most popular areas where visitors choose to base themselves) along the M3, stopping at Kirstenbosch (these gardens are essential viewing) and visiting a few Constantia wineries en route (Klein Constantia and Eagles Nest make a good contrast). I’d recommend you stop for lunch in the charming seaside village of Kalk Bay, and set aside an hour or so to browse the quaint shops and art galleries there (or revisit them at a later time), before tackling Cape Point and Chapman’s Peak Drive. Llundudno, Clifton and Boulders are the city’s prettiest beaches. And do set aside a day to tour the Winelands options, ringed with mountains – Stellenbosch terroir produces the best red wines and has a lovely historic town centre. With so much choice, it’s best to book a winetour (gourmetwinetours.co.za) but do ask that your tour includes the Helshoogte pass: linking Stellenbosch to pretty Franschhoek, the scenery will have your spirit soaring.

British High Commission, Cape Town: 00 27 21 461 7220UK Embassy, Pretoria: 00 27 12 483 1200; britain.org.zaEmergency services: Dial 082 911 or 084 911 (ambulance), 10111 (police and fire). To contact any emergency service from a mobile phone, dial 112.Medical care: To find the nearest private clinic, or to contact a specialist, see netcare.co.za. For travel-specific queries, see travelclinic.co.za.Tourism offices and information: The biggest and best-staffed is the centrally located Cape Town Tourism (00 27 21 487 6800; capetown.travel) on the corner of Burg and Castle Streets. Mon-Fri, 8.30am-5.30pm; Sat-Sun, 9am-1pm. For any itinerary queries in and around Cape Town, or how best to combine Cape Town with a suitable safari and/or Victoria Falls, please feel free to contact me, pippadebruyn@mweb.co.za.

You can visit Cape Town pretty much any time of year.

Currency: South Africa Rand (R or ZAR). Telephone code: From the UK, dial 00 27 for South Africa, followed by 21 for Cape Town. From within South Africa, dial 021 for Cape Town.Wi-Fi: Most hotels and guest lodges offer free Wi-Fi as do an increasing number of excellent coffee shops. For a list of some of them, see redbutton.co.za (then click on “sites”). Loading Bay (30 Hudson Street, De Waterkant) ticks all the right boxes - good coffee, good food, cool people, close to Cape Quarter shopping precinct and free Wi-Fi. If you want a bit of a sea view, head to Caffe Neo at 129 Beach Road, Mouille Point.Time difference: +1 hour/2 hoursFlight time: From London to Cape Town is about 12 hours.

As in any large city, crime is an ongoing concern, but note that most incidents occur away from tourist areas. That said, take the usual precautions: don’t flash your wealth; don’t visit no-go zones (your host or concierge will advise); don’t walk when there are no other people around; and be alert/keep a close eye and hand on your belongings.

It takes only a fraction of a second to clone a card, using a skimmer concealed in the hand. Don’t let your card out of sight and keep a close eye on how it is handled.

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Summary: An insider's guide to Cape Town featuring the best attractions, restaurants, shops and hotels.


The 19-year-old, who was born in California and moved to Britain aged nine, is currently training for a 640-kilometre (398-mile) journey from the Antarctic coast to the South Pole.

If he successfully makes the journey in 22 days as planned, he will break the speed record for the fastest trip from the continent’s coast to the South Pole by foot.

He would also be the youngest male to achieve the feat, although there has been a younger female to do so in the past.

He says he was initially motivated by the opportunity to raise awareness about climate change, rather than pushing his own physical limits.

“I had to change my mindset, where I am trying to think like a professional – and I’m not a natural athlete," he added.

Citing Ben Saunders, the British explorer who recently embarked on an expedition to travel to the South Pole and back, as an inspiring influence in his physical preparation, he said: “Training is something I used to feel very out of place doing, but now I feel very confident about my ability to get from A to B physically."

Given that background and a training schedule involving two or three hours’ preparation, as well as the logistics to manage, he might be expected to take a hiatus from his studies at Yale University.

However, he is continuing his course in geology and geophysics, until he heads out to the Antarctic next month.

While in Antarctica, he will be carrying out tests to help demonstrate how the climate is changing, including testing a lightweight weather station for the first time on the continent.

His preparations have included spending a night in a cold chamber near Tower Bridge last month to raise awareness of his trip.

He admitted feeling anxious about the journey, which he is carrying out with expedition partner Doug Stoup and due to complete on Christmas Day, but said: “The best way to respond to pressure is to be as well prepared as humanly possible.”

“I don’t mind telling you that I am very nervous – but that’s a good thing.

“Being over-confident could be a tremendous plague when you’re approaching a place as humbling and powerful as the Antarctic.”

Summary: Parker Liautaud, a teenage student, is preparing for a potentially record-breaking expedition to the South Pole – despite admitting he is not a natural athlete.


Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, is now the third-richest person in the world.

According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Bezos surpassed Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett to snag the number three spot behind Spain’s Amancio Ortega, the founder of the clothing retailer Zara, and Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, and the world’s richest person. Both are worth $73 billion and $89 billion, respectively.

Bezos’s net worth was $65.05 billion on Thursday, which topped Buffett by $32 million on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. And despite Bezos’s fall to $43 billion in February due to turbulent global markets, his wealth has increased by $5.4 billion this year.

Bloomberg reports that most of Bezos’s wealth comes from Amazon, which is the fifth most valuable company in the U.S., falling behind Apple aapl , Alphabet, Microsoft msft , and ExxonMobil xom .

Bezos’s move past Buffett is partly a result of the Berkshire Hathaway chairman’s $2.2 billion donation in stock to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Even still, Buffett’s net worth still rose by $2.7 billion in 2016.

And despite his current status on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Amazon amzn founder could see his rank climb even higher.

In May, Carlos Kirjner of Sanford Bernstein set his Amazon target price at $1,000—a 30% increase from $770—even while Wall Street estimated an average 12-month target price of $809.28. Kirjner’s figure is one which Amazon has yet to reach. But with stock at that price, Bezos’s fortune would be about $86 billion, sliding past Ortega and claiming the number two spot just under Bill Gates.

Summary: Making him the third wealthiest person in the world.


Kate Gosselin has a very rich man firmly in her grip, and vice versa judging from the pics we just got.

Kate’s new sugar daddy, millionaire businessman Jeff Prescott, romanced Kate a few days ago at the uber-fancy Talula's Garden in Philly.

Prescott was doting over Kate during their meal, even walking her to the bathroom. And when dinner was over, they drove to Valley Forge Casino, where he flashed Benjamins left and right.

Jeff and Kate called it a night at 1:30 AM.

Maybe money really can buy happiness.

Summary: Kate Gosselin has a very rich man firmly in her grip, and vice versa judging from the pics we just got. Kate’s new sugar daddy, millionaire…


TOKYO — Nintendo Co. shares plunged by the most since 1990 after the company said late Friday that the financial impact from “Pokemon Go” will be limited.

The stock sank 18 percent at the close in Tokyo Monday, the maximum one-day move allowed by the exchange, wiping out $6.7 billion in market value. After debuting in the United States this month, “Pokemon Go” launched in Japan on Friday and became available in Hong Kong on Monday.

The correction comes after the release of the game almost doubled Nintendo’s stock through Friday’s close, adding $17.6 billion in market capitalization. Nintendo is a shareholder in the game’s developer Niantic Inc. and Pokemon Co., but has an ‘‘effective economic stake’’ of just 13 percent in the app, according to an estimate by Macquarie Securities analyst David Gibson.

‘‘It’s still possible to say that in the short term it’s overheated,’’ said Tomoaki Kawasaki, an analyst at Iwai Cosmo Securities Co.

In a press release after the market closed in Japan on Friday, the Kyoto-based company said the game’s financial impact will be limited and that it is not necessary to revise its annual forecast even after factoring in current conditions. It also said revenue from Pokemon Go Plus, a Nintendo-produced accessory for the game expected to go on sale soon, has already been factored into the current guidance.

‘‘The content of the announcement itself is not that shocking, but it is a surprise they said it on Friday instead of when they report earnings’’ later this week, said Nobuyuki Fujimoto, a senior market analyst at SBI Securities Co. ‘‘The game has been published in Japan, so for the time being we’ve exhausted all the catalysts.’’

The company will report first-quarter earnings Wednesday after the market close, a period which ended before the release of “Pokemon Go.” The firm is forecasting an annual net profit of $333 million in the current fiscal year, up from the $157 million it earned last year.

Short interest in Nintendo surged this month as bears bet the stock rally had gone too far. As of July 20, short-sellers had built up a bet worth $940 million — or 2.6 percent of outstanding shares — that the stock would fall, according to researcher IHS Markit.

At current prices, such a bet would have generated about $140 million in profits.

Shares of related companies also fell. McDonald’s Holdings Co. (Japan), the game’s exclusive launch partner, declined 12 percent. Electronic parts maker Hosiden Corp., which Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group said may produce Pokemon Go Plus, sank 16 percent.

Besides the earnings announcement Wednesday, Morgan Stanley said the next focus point is if “Pokemon Go” launches in China, where access to geographical data necessary for the game is restricted by the government.

Investors are also waiting for announcements on Nintendo’s other upcoming mobile games and its next-generation console expected to be released next year, analysts Mia Nagasaka and Yuki Maeda wrote in a July 22 report.


Tulsa Country district attorney Benjamin Fu has said that he was “completely gobsmacked” by the ruling, which he said puts the victim at fault and places the onus on them to defend their intoxication.

He said: “The plain meaning of forcible oral sodomy, of using force, includes taking advantage of a victim who was too intoxicated to consent,” Fu said. “I don’t believe that anybody, until that day, believed that the state of the law was that this kind of conduct was ambiguous, much less legal. And I don’t think the law was a loophole until the court decided it was.”

Experts have declared that the ruling is a wake-up call for legislators to modernise Oklahoma’s laws. They point out that the state has a separate statute to protect intoxicated victims who could not consent to vaginal or anal intercourse, but that cases like this, which don’t fit either of these categories, were being allowed to fall through the cracks.

Dean of the City University of New York law school, Michelle Anderson, called the ruling “archaic”.

She said: “This is a call for the legislature to change the statute, which is entirely out of step with what other states have done in this area and what Oklahoma should do.

“It creates a huge loophole for sexual abuse that makes no sense.”

Summary: An Oklahoma court has declared that oral sex should not be classed as rape if the victim is unconscious from drinking alcohol.


However, Arsene Wenger did at least receive one piece of good news yesterday. His number 1 goalkeeper, Petr Cech, admitted to reporters that the Frenchman had the necessary qualities for the England job, but urged him to stay at Arsenal for the time being.

"Obviously that is a question for Mr Wenger, if he would like to take this (England) job, but he is someone who has been coaching in England for such a long time, he definitely has the pedigree and the quality," Cech told Sky Sports News HQ.

"He knows the atmosphere, the mentality and knows the expectation and the love England has for football, so obviously this is to his big advantage.

"But I think he is enjoying his time at Arsenal being a club manager, having the day-to-day job and it would be more of a question for him."

Summary: Big news for Arsenal fans.


The scoring started early as right-back Danilo beat the offside trap to collect Bale's pass and bag his second goal since joining in the summer.

But the game was turned upside down within the next nine minutes, first Antonio Amaya heading in from a corner before Jozabed stole a march on Danilo to nod in from close range.

The home fans at the Bernabeu - which had many empty seats on display - were incensed but Benitez was offered a lifeline in the 15th minute as Tito was shown a straight red card for a two-footed tackle on Toni Kroos.

Real took advantage as Bale headed in his first of the afternoon after getting on the end of Danilo's 25th-minute cross and soon after Rayo were another man down.

Baena - already booked for a foul on Kroos - was adjudged to have pulled Sergio Ramos' shirt in the area and was dismissed, before Ronaldo swept home from the spot.

With two extra men the white shirts swarmed forward on numerous occasions and it was a simple question of how many they were going to score.

It was four at the break, with Bale adding his second in the 41st minute after running unchallenged from 35 yards out before firing past goalkeeper Yoel.

Benzema got in on the act early in the second half when James Rodriguez played him in down the left after a lovely passing move, with the French striker slotting into the far corner.

Ronaldo, denied by a fine save from Yoel minutes after Benzema's goal, eventually added his second in the 54th minute when he headed in completely unmarked from Rodriguez's cross.

Bale then took centre stage, completing his second Primera Division hat-trick when tapping in from Ronaldo's right-wing cross before rolling in a fourth into an empty net when his attempted square-ball to Ronaldo bounced back to him off Quini's leg and wrong-footed Yoel.

The Wales international departed to a warm reception from the fans who did make it to the game - but Real still did not ease up the pressure on Rayo.

Rafa Benitez is teetering on the brink at Real Madrid

Ronaldo went close on a couple of occasions as he chased a hat-trick, but it was Benzema who scored the final two goals of the game to complete a treble of his own.

First he was picked out in the area by a lovely ball from Luka Modric before tucking a shot beyond Yoel into the bottom left corner in the 80th minute, before Mateo Kovacic teed him up for another in the final minute.

Summary: Real Madrid bounce back from 2-1 down to thrash nine-man Rayo Vallecano as   Gareth Bale nets four, Karim Benzema three and Cristiano Ronaldo a brace


Drugs like Ecstasy and LSD have become staples in nightclub scenes around the world. But there's a new product taking over parties in Europe -- and some claim it's a totally sweet trip.

SEE ALSO: Jet-black coconut ash ice cream is the flavor to try this summer

Clubbers have started snorting lines of cocoa to get high, according to the Daily Mail.

Users reportedly get buzzed from taking the chocolate in drink, pill or powdered form.

It then sends a rush of endorphins into users' bloodstreams, which can give them a euphoric feeling, especially when coupled with dancing.

See a cocoa snorting machine:

Snorting chocolate becomes all the rage in Europe nightclubs

Belgian chocolatier Dominique Persoone snorts cocoa powder off his Chocolate Shooter in his factory in Bruges, February 3, 2015. When Belgian chocolatier Dominique Persoone created a chocolate-sniffing device for a Rolling Stones party in 2007, he never imagined demand would stretch much beyond the rock 'n' roll scene. But, seven years later, he has sold 25,000 of them. Inspired by a device his grandfather used to propel tobacco snuff up his nose, Persoone created a 'Chocolate Shooter' to deliver a hit of Dominican Republic or Peruvian cocoa powder, mixed with mint and either ginger or raspberry. Picture taken on February 3, 2015. REUTERS/Francois Lenoir (BELGIUM - Tags: FOOD SOCIETY)

Belgian chocolatier Dominique Persoone poses with his Chocolate Shooter in his factory in Bruges, February 3, 2015. When Belgian chocolatier Dominique Persoone created a chocolate-sniffing device for a Rolling Stones party in 2007, he never imagined demand would stretch much beyond the rock 'n' roll scene. But, seven years later, he has sold 25,000 of them. Inspired by a device his grandfather used to propel tobacco snuff up his nose, Persoone created a 'Chocolate Shooter' to deliver a hit of Dominican Republic or Peruvian cocoa powder, mixed with mint and either ginger or raspberry. Picture taken on February 3, 2015. REUTERS/Francois Lenoir (BELGIUM - Tags: FOOD SOCIETY)

Belgian chocolatier Dominique Persoone displays his Chocolate Shooter in his factory in Bruges, February 3, 2015. When Belgian chocolatier Dominique Persoone created a chocolate-sniffing device for a Rolling Stones party in 2007, he never imagined demand would stretch much beyond the rock 'n' roll scene. But, seven years later, he has sold 25,000 of them. Inspired by a device his grandfather used to propel tobacco snuff up his nose, Persoone created a 'Chocolate Shooter' to deliver a hit of Dominican Republic or Peruvian cocoa powder, mixed with mint and either ginger or raspberry. Picture taken on February 3, 2015. REUTERS/Francois Lenoir (BELGIUM - Tags: FOOD SOCIETY)

Belgian chocolatier Dominique Persoone snorts cocoa powder off his Chocolate Shooter in his factory in Bruges, February 3, 2015. When Belgian chocolatier Dominique Persoone created a chocolate-sniffing device for a Rolling Stones party in 2007, he never imagined demand would stretch much beyond the rock 'n' roll scene. But, seven years later, he has sold 25,000 of them. Inspired by a device his grandfather used to propel tobacco snuff up his nose, Persoone created a 'Chocolate Shooter' to deliver a hit of Dominican Republic or Peruvian cocoa powder, mixed with mint and either ginger or raspberry. Picture taken on February 3, 2015. REUTERS/Francois Lenoir (BELGIUM - Tags: FOOD SOCIETY)

A Chocolate Shooter is displayed on a cocoa bean in the factory of Belgian chocolatier Dominique Persoone in Bruges, February 3, 2015. When Belgian chocolatier Dominique Persoone created a chocolate-sniffing device for a Rolling Stones party in 2007, he never imagined demand would stretch much beyond the rock 'n' roll scene. But, seven years later, he has sold 25,000 of them. Inspired by a device his grandfather used to propel tobacco snuff up his nose, Persoone created a 'Chocolate Shooter' to deliver a hit of Dominican Republic or Peruvian cocoa powder, mixed with mint and either ginger or raspberry. Picture taken on February 3, 2015. REUTERS/Francois Lenoir (BELGIUM - Tags: FOOD SOCIETY)

Belgian chocolatier Dominique Persoone snorts cocoa powder off his Chocolate Shooter in his factory in Bruges February 3, 2015. When Belgian chocolatier Dominique Persoone created a chocolate-sniffing device for a Rolling Stones party in 2007, he never imagined demand would stretch much beyond the rock 'n' roll scene. But, seven years later, he has sold 25,000 of them. Inspired by a device his grandfather used to propel tobacco snuff up his nose, Persoone created a 'Chocolate Shooter' to deliver a hit of Dominican Republic or Peruvian cocoa powder, mixed with mint and either ginger or raspberry. Picture taken on February 3, 2015. REUTERS/Francois Lenoir (BELGIUM - Tags: FOOD SOCIETY)

The Chocolate Shooter is displayed in the factory of Belgian chocolatier Dominique Persoone in Bruges, February 3, 2015. When Belgian chocolatier Dominique Persoone created a chocolate-sniffing device for a Rolling Stones party in 2007, he never imagined demand would stretch much beyond the rock 'n' roll scene. But, seven years later, he has sold 25,000 of them. Inspired by a device his grandfather used to propel tobacco snuff up his nose, Persoone created a 'Chocolate Shooter' to deliver a hit of Dominican Republic or Peruvian cocoa powder, mixed with mint and either ginger or raspberry. Picture taken on February 3, 2015. REUTERS/Francois Lenoir (BELGIUM - Tags: FOOD SOCIETY)

Some clubs, like Lucid in Berlin, even offer the cocoa to party goers in place of alcohol.

"We have local artisans and culinary adventurers serving various high vibe medicines such as raw Cacao, super-food smoothies, herbal concoctions, vegan cuisine and much more," their website reads.

Lucid organizer Ruby May told OZY she mixes 18 lbs of cocoa for the night with honey, agave syrup and cinnamon to give users an even more aromatic experience.

"It's like a smooth, sensual hug in a cup," she said.

While advocates claim this is a safe and legal way to get high, medical experts aren't so sure, Yahoo News reported. "Snorting chocolate powder is not safe, because the powder is perceived by the nose as a foreign toxic substance," said Dr. Jordan Josephson, an ear, nose and throat and sinus specialist at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City.

Perhaps ravers should just stick to the old fashioned method of eating it as candy.

More from AOL.com: Do you know these celebrities' real names? This $39M Hamptons mansion puts Gatsby's to shame Rebecca Louise reveals the secret to staying in shape

Summary: Move over drugs and alcohol! There's a new product taking over parties in one country -- and some claim it's a totally sweet trip.


San Francisco has installed an outdoor urinal in Dolores Park near the Mission District as part of the more than $20 million renovation of the recreation area in an attempt to combat a “rampant” public urination issue.

“The more options we can give them to relieve themselves, the better for the parkgoers,” San Francisco Supervisor Scott Wiener told the Associated Press.

Last summer, the city’s public works division made headlines by experimenting with coating some walls with a paint that causes fluid to splash back onto public urinators.

The park also now has 27 toilets for people who prefer to have privacy.

Summary: An outdoor urinal has been set up in Dolores Park


On May 3, the day after an artful deal to end the diplomatic crisis over Chen Guangcheng, China’s now-famous dissident, unraveled spectacularly, Hillary Rodham Clinton followed a scrum of Chinese ministers around an exhibition of clean cookstoves. These are safer, portable alternatives to the crude stoves used by hundreds of millions of women in the developing world — at grave risk to themselves, their children and the planet. Not long after becoming secretary of state in 2009, Clinton took up the cookstove cause, one of what she describes as “smart power” issues — though skeptical veterans of American foreign policy tend to deride them as soft more than smart.

In September 2010, Clinton announced the creation of a partnership led by the United Nations Foundation to provide 100 million cleaner and more efficient stoves around the world by 2020, and she has since used every opportunity to implore world leaders to adopt policies to encourage their use. Among them was China’s top foreign-policy official, Dai Bingguo, with whom she first raised the issue over lunch at the State Department in May 2011. Clinton can recite the arguments by rote: The smoke from poorly ventilated stoves kills nearly two million people a year, more than malaria. Foraging for wood consumes the time and effort of women and children and exposes them to attack. The stoves are a significant source of black carbon in the atmosphere, contributing to climate change. After a year of discussion, Dai agreed to put it on the agenda for their annual meetings this year in Beijing, raising the prospect that China, which accounts for more than a quarter of the world’s deaths from the old stoves, would become the 33rd country to join the partnership that Clinton started.

The Chinese are fussy about diplomacy and protocol — they like neither surprises nor confrontation — and months of preparation went into the meetings in Beijing. Then late at night on April 25, a week before Clinton was to arrive, she held an emergency conference call over secure lines with her top advisers at the State Department, arriving at a decision that put the entire visit at risk, not to mention years of effort to improve relations with China. Chen, a blind, self-taught lawyer who endured a prison term and ongoing harassment, had escaped house arrest in his village in Shandong Province and made his way to the outskirts of Beijing. An American diplomat secretly met with him there and reported back to Washington that he needed urgent medical treatment in the only safe place imaginable: the American Embassy in Beijing, where a doctor could examine him. After her aides briefed the White House, which traditionally does not involve itself in consular affairs, Clinton agreed. Hours later, the Americans spirited him in. The next challenge was to resolve Chen’s fate in a way that wouldn’t scuttle essential Chinese cooperation on the nuclear ambitions of Iran and North Korea, the worsening conflict in Syria, the fighting between Sudan and South Sudan, cyberattacks emanating from China — and cookstoves. No one close to her would dare put it quite this way, but a question at the heart of her legacy is this: As important as the plight of Chen might be, what is it compared to the deaths of nearly two million people a year from toxic smoke in their kitchens?

What has been most striking about Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state is at once how suited for the job she has proved to be and how improbable it once seemed, even to her. “Not in a million years,” she replied by e-mail in November 2008 when her political aide Philippe Reines first told her that President-elect Barack Obama was considering her appointment, despite having derided her experience in foreign affairs as first lady during the campaign. His experience, Obama said during the primaries, was “grounded in understanding how the world sees America, from living overseas and traveling overseas, and having family beyond our shores” and “not just of what world leader I went and talked to in the ambassador’s house, who I had tea with.” It’s true that Clinton lacked the foreign-policy experience of recent secretaries like Condoleezza Rice, Colin L. Powell or Madeleine K. Albright. Nor was she personally close to Obama in the way James A. Baker III was to President George H. W. Bush. What she possessed was energy, the dogged loyalty she displayed campaigning for Obama after she lost and, not insignificant, her fame. Clinton vacillated for days, at one point deciding to decline. (Her aides say Obama would not take no for an answer; he avoided at least one phone call from her, the story goes, by having an aide explain he was in the bathroom.) Ultimately, as the chief of protocol of the United States, Capricia Penavic Marshall, who has worked with Clinton since she was first lady, told me: “When asked to serve, she does. And her president asked.”

The buzz at the time was that Obama was building a “team of rivals” to oversee national security — not just Clinton but also Vice President Joseph R. Biden. They all had “their own public profiles and their own public histories and their own policy views,” as Obama’s national security adviser, Thomas E. Donilon, told me. The meme was a presumptuous allusion to Abraham Lincoln’s quarrelsome war cabinet, and the Beltway punditocracy waited eagerly for the egos to clash and the backstabbing to begin. “This is a building full of people, on a political level, who tried to prevent him from being president,” one of Clinton’s aides said of the State Department. “And that” — meaning the White House — “is a building full of people who tried to prevent her from being president.” Three and a half years later, the anticipated schisms have not appeared — “much to the chagrin of everybody who’d love to know on the outside where the disagreements are,” Melanne S. Verveer, another close aide, said.

Obama and Clinton have instead led the least discordant national-security team in decades, despite enormous challenges on almost every front. They share a vision of diplomacy that is high-minded in its support for democratic rights (in Libya and elsewhere) but hardheaded when those values run up against American security interests (Egypt and Bahrain) or other limits of American power (Syria). They have handled crises with neither rancor nor, for the most part, public leaks intended to shape their private debates. Clinton set the tone from the start, enforcing respect for the man who bested her on the campaign trail. “Early on, when there were people around complaining about the Obama folks, she wouldn’t brook it at all,” Andrew J. Shapiro, Clinton’s former Senate aide and now an assistant secretary of state, told me. The message “was delivered quite clearly.” “We work for the president,” he recalled her saying.

Not that the two have agreed on everything. Clinton, for example, strongly advocated keeping more troops in both Afghanistan and Iraq, according to a senior White House official. Publicly, though, she unwaveringly supported the president’s determination to bring to an end America’s increasingly unpopular wars, withdrawing the remaining American troops from Iraq last December and scheduling the withdrawals from Afghanistan by 2014.

The re-election of Russia’s paramount leader, Vladimir V. Putin, after a campaign orchestrated to produce only one possible winner, prompted one of the sharpest internal debates so far. In December, Clinton denounced parliamentary elections that were a fraud-tainted prelude to Putin’s return to the presidency. “The Russian people, like people everywhere, deserve the right to have their voices heard and their votes counted,” she said in Bonn, Germany, prompting Putin to suggest that she had signaled — somehow — the protesters into the Russian streets.

After Putin won re-election to the presidency on March 4, some at the State Department wanted a new denunciation, arguing that Putin respected only toughness. The White House, however, did not want to make relations with Russia any worse by questioning the legitimacy of his victory. Too much else was at stake for the administration to pick a fight over something it could not change. And so three days later, Clinton appeared at the State Department and, whatever her own misgivings, dutifully voiced the administration’s accommodating line, even as tens of thousands of Russians took to the street in protest. “The election had a clear winner,” she said, “and we are ready to work with President-elect Putin.” “The thing about Hillary,” a senior official in Bill Clinton’s administration once told me privately, “is that she is always the Girl Scout.”

By the time Clinton landed in Beijing on May 2 for the fourth round of what’s called the Strategic and Economic Dialogue, the two countries had come to an understanding about what to do with Chen. After days of secret discussions, during which no official from either country acknowledged publicly that he was in the embassy, Chen agreed to leave the embassy and get treatment at a hospital where his wife and children had been taken to rejoin him. The Chinese agreed to allow Chen to study in a university and promised an investigation into the abuse he suffered, even as they denounced American interference in China’s internal affairs and demanded an apology Clinton had no intention of giving. “They had to do that,” one senior official said, explaining the Chinese aversion to the appearance of making concessions to the Americans.

Clinton called Chen as he was being taken in a van to the hospital, and in his excitement, he blurted out, “I want to kiss you.” “I am pleased that we were able to facilitate Chen Guangcheng’s stay and departure from the United States Embassy in a way that reflected his choices and our values,” Clinton said in a brief statement. She then went to dinner with Dai Bingguo and their two senior aides, Cui Tiankai and Kurt M. Campbell, who had hashed out the arrangement over three sleep-deprived days. Even as they ate and discussed the agenda of the coming meetings — including the cookstoves exhibition — Chen had second thoughts, having seen his wife and spoken to other dissidents who told him he had made a mistake by leaving the embassy. Using three cellphones the Americans had given him, he began calling supporters and even journalists, upending the carefully orchestrated narrative. He said he no longer felt safe. He denied, untruthfully, that he said he wanted to kiss Clinton. (He later explained he was embarrassed by having spoken so intimately to her.) Most of all, after saying he wanted to stay in China, he now made clear that he wanted to leave.

It was only after dinner that Clinton learned that her diplomatic triumph was turning into a debacle. She met with her aides, scrambling to learn why Chen’s mood had changed so radically. And then she went through the next day acting as if nothing had happened, despite the “massive elephant in the room,” as one senior aide put it. With Dai, she toured the cookstoves exhibit, listening earnestly to the minister of science and technology, Wan Gang, explain technology she already understood. She and Dai also had three lengthy meetings and a working lunch, covering issues including Syria, Iran and North Korea, China’s territorial ambitions in the South China Sea and American complaints about Chinese cyberattacks, but not Chen. “Even beside all the happy stuff,” the senior official said, referring to the cookstoves, “there was an unbelievable amount of very pointed, specific business to do with these guys.” Meanwhile, Campbell and others couldn’t reach Chen, who was undergoing medical tests for much of the day.

Even Clinton remarked to her aides about the mind-bending experience of taking on so many disparate topics simultaneously, cookstoves one moment, grave security threats the next and then the fate of a dissident whose case, the senior official added, “just exploded into an absolute circus.” Sympathizers showed up at Chen’s hospital, some wearing dark glasses in solidarity. In Washington, human rights advocates and Republicans, including Obama’s challenger, Mitt Romney, excoriated the administration for abandoning Chen and failing to receive assurances from the Chinese about his safety. That night Clinton and her aides agreed to ask for another meeting with Dai the next morning, ahead of her meetings with President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. “We woke up Friday not knowing still if any of them were going to be canceled” because of the public furor over Chen, the official said.

During the meeting, Clinton informed the Chinese that Chen, before dawn in Beijing but Thursday afternoon in Washington, had telephoned Bob Fu, a Chinese activist who works for the ChinaAid organization in America. Fu was then in the middle of an emergency Congressional hearing, and he put Chen on speaker, translating for the lawmakers. The Chinese, who had honored their part of the bargain to allow Chen to attend university in China, “were floored” to hear it, according to one person in the meeting. Clinton then had to explain that the United States now wanted Chen to study in the United States. Critically she did not mention the subject of asylum, allowing China to save face. The Chinese were furious at the public scandal they were now facing but ultimately relented, having decided, as Clinton had, that they had more at stake in the relationship than one man’s fate. Clinton went on to meet China’s top leaders without again mentioning the blind dissident. Sixteen days later, exactly as arranged, Chen and his family flew to Newark, and he took up residency at New York University.

A truth often overlooked in the Beltway obsession with assigning blame and credit is that in any administration, the president ultimately determines foreign policy. This was true even under George W. Bush, despite Dick Cheney’s best efforts to create a separate foreign-policy apparatus inside the Office of the Vice President. The job of the secretary of state is to help shape and then carry out the president’s policies, something her aides emphasize repeatedly.

Clinton and Obama do not seem particularly close personally, though in addition to cabinet and National Security Council meetings, they also meet once a week whenever she is in Washington, joined usually by Biden and Donilon. “It’s a relationship that has evolved, as you would expect, and it’s one where — and I don’t say this lightly — the president has total confidence and trust in Secretary Clinton, in her advice, in her policy views and in her representation of the United States,” Donilon told me. “It’s a total trust, and that, by the by, is also historically not always the case.” Despite their differences in upbringing, age and temperament, they share, in his words, the “common experience” of running for president, living in the White House and raising children there, “of being famous people.” When it comes to policy, both she and Obama are guided by pragmatism, a nonideological, case-by-case approach. It’s one reason that no one can really define an Obama or Clinton doctrine and why, at times, the administration has frustrated those who would have had it act more forcefully when street protests auguring the Arab Spring swept Iran in 2009 or now, as Syria savagely represses its opposition.

Clinton was the first elected official to become secretary of state since Edmund S. Muskie served a turbulent eight months at the end of the Carter administration, when Iran held Americans hostage and the Soviet Union occupied Afghanistan. Whatever she might have lacked in scholarship or experience in foreign affairs, she has made up for with a politician’s touch, inside the State Department and around the world. She has an acute attention to detail, remembering names and personal details. In a meeting, she once recalled, unprompted, an obscure article about diplomacy in tough places written by a young foreign-service officer who twice served in Iraq, Aaron D. Snipe. Two people who work in the building told me of instances in which she called to express condolences when relatives died. These gestures and her strong advocacy for the budget at the State Department have re-energized the American Foreign Service, which felt beleaguered under President George W. Bush. Clinton makes a point of visiting American embassies and consulates — 109 so far — wherever she travels to thank the diplomats and their families, as well as the local staff who make up most of the work force abroad. She became the first secretary to hold special Christmas parties at the State Department for the families of diplomats with hardship posts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

On matters of policy, her political experience and her travels as first lady — having tea, as it were — have served her in ways few anticipated. When she traveled to Uzbekistan in October, Clinton reminded the country’s authoritarian leader, Islam Karimov, of her previous visit in 1997. “That was such a great trip,” she bantered with Karimov, who has the demeanor of the Soviet apparatchik he once was. The next day she visited a women’s health clinic where she had been 14 years earlier. The median outside was newly sodded with grass. On a placard inside was a picture of a younger Clinton. “I’m really impressed how far you’ve come,” she said after surveying the clinic’s medical equipment. Uzbekistan’s human rights record is abysmal, and Clinton raised it in her meetings, but she won Karimov’s support for expanding the flow of supplies for the military operation in Afghanistan through what’s called the Northern Distribution Network, which became vital when Pakistan closed its borders to NATO matériel.

Summary: What’s the future for the secretary of state? Given the problems facing the world, it’s hard to look past the next six months.


In his most extensive remarks about feminism, President Obama wrote an essay for Glamour magazine in which he reflected on American women’s long fight for equality and called on men to fight sexism and create equal relationships.

In the 1,500-word essay, which was published online Thursday and will appear in the September print magazine, the president argued that “when everybody is equal, we are all more free.” He praised the progress of American women over the past century while pledging to work on securing equal pay and reproductive rights. The president also warned against “dated assumptions about gender roles.”

The president said that it was important to his daughters that he be a feminist, “because now that’s what they expect of all men.”

“We need to keep changing the attitude that raises our girls to be demure and our boys to be assertive, that criticizes our daughters for speaking out and our sons for shedding a tear,” he wrote. “We need to keep changing the attitude that punishes women for their sexuality and rewards men for theirs.

“We need to keep changing the attitude that permits the routine harassment of women, whether they’re walking down the street or daring to go online. We need to keep changing the attitude that teaches men to feel threatened by the presence and success of women.”

Brenda Weber, the professor and the chairwoman of the gender studies department at Indiana University, said she was “delighted” by the essay, which she said showed a nuanced sense of women’s issues. It is unusual for a man to write such an essay, let alone a president, she said.

To claim the identity of feminism and discuss why it is personally important to him and his daughters is a meaningful gesture coming from someone with the cultural authority of the president, she said.

“Those are all pretty radical statements in terms of a politician at that level of influence,” she said.

It is not the first time that the president has declared himself a feminist. In June, while speaking at a White House summit meeting on women, he declared: “This is what a feminist looks like.”

Cindi Leive, the editor of Glamour, said on “CBS This Morning” that she thought the essay went “beyond the kind of boilerplate ‘I believe in strong women’ that at this point anybody can mouth pretty effectively.”

“It did strike me as this very modern moment, something that we wouldn’t have heard probably from any other president, but honestly we would not have heard before this year,” she said. “I do think the embrace of the term feminism by men as well as women has really been on the rise.”

Summary: The president wrote a 1,500-word essay in the magazine, calling for equality and explaining that it was important to his daughters that he be a feminist.


An alleged would-be murderer who has a soft spot for injured wildlife, drug traffickers and alleged child sex attackers are among a group of eight men named as Victoria's most wanted criminals in a national campaign.

Operation Roam was launched by Crime Stoppers on Monday to find fugitives believed to have fled interstate.

Eight out of the 19 men wanted across Australia come from Victoria.

The Victorians include Graham Gene Potter who's accused of conspiring to commit murder and drug trafficking in 2008.

Potter was last seen in remote Queensland in 2010 and is known to prefer staying in rural communities.

"He's involved with some significant organised crime figures in Victoria," Assistant Commissioner Stephen Fontana told reporters in Melbourne on Monday.

"He has an interest in animals and helping injured animals and things like that, so people might recognise him from some of those efforts because I don't believe people change their habits in that regard."

James Mahoney, 79, is wanted in relation to a 1988 sexual assault of two 13-year-old boys he allegedly lured to his home - on the promise girls were there - before feeding them alcohol.

He was charged but failed to appear in court.

Mr Fontana said elderly fugitives could blend into a community.

"We're not always looking for people who might be on pensions, or are elderly, that are wanted for some of these serious offences," he said.

Many fugitives change their appearance, cut ties with friends and family and use false identification to hide from authorities, the assistant commissioner said.

The complete list of fugitives is available at fugitivehunt.com.au.

* Anthony Sitar - drug trafficking

* Daryl Dean Wellington - recklessness

* Eugene Thomas Rumjahn - theft, deception offences

* Graham Gene Potter - conspiracy to murder, drug trafficking

* James Mahoney - sexual assault

* Lullo Pata - sexual assault

* Robert Douglas Cairns - aggravated burglary, weapons, threats to kill, serious assault

* Thuc Van Chu - large quantity of narcotic plants

Summary: Victoria has named eight men in a national hunt for the country's most-wanted fugitives.


ROME — Though it may have come as a shock Monday to the world’s one billion-plus Catholics, Pope Benedict XVI’s plan to retire on Feb. 28 appears to have been in the works for some time, and was known to a handful of close advisers.

Still unclear, however, are some of the practical consequences of Benedict’s decision, Vatican officials acknowledged Tuesday, from how the former pope will be addressed, to what to do with the papal ring used to seal important documents, traditionally destroyed upon a pope’s death. “There are a series of questions that remain to be seen, also on the part of the pope himself, even if it is a decision that he had made some time ago,” the Rev. Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman, said at a news conference. “How he will live afterward, which will be very different from how he lives now, will require time and tranquillity and reflection and a moment of adaptation to a new situation.”

Even though the Code of Canon Law allows popes to resign, the occurrence was rare enough to have caught Vatican officials off guard, including on issues like the protocol and potentially awkward logistics of having a former pope and his successor share a backyard.

When he leaves the papacy at the end of the month, Benedict will retire to his summer home in Castel Gandolfo, in the hills outside Rome, before moving to the Mater Ecclesiae convent, a plain, four-story structure built 21 years ago to serve as an international place “for contemplative life within the walls of Vatican City,” as it is described on a Vatican Web site.

Workers began transforming the building into a residence in November, after the cloistered nuns who had occupied the convent left, Father Lombardi said. He did not tip his hand about whether the renovations were carried out with the pontiff as the future occupant in mind. “The pope knew this place, this building and thought it was appropriate for his needs,” he said.

The timing, however, raised suspicions that the pope had been planning the details of his retirement for some time. The editor of the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, wrote Monday that the pope had made his decision “many months ago,” after a demanding trip to Mexico and Cuba in March 2012, “and kept with a reserve that no one could violate.”

Father Lombardi said that the stress of that trip had further convinced the pope that he no longer had the stamina to do the job.

Pope Benedict XVI is likely to be remembered for his work as a scholar, including his writings on love, charity and capitalism.

In fact, the pope had meditated on the possibility of resigning for years. In the 2010 book “Light of the World: The Pope, the Church and the Signs of the Times,” from a series of interviews conducted by Peter Seewald, a German journalist, Benedict said that if a pope “clearly realized that he is no longer physically, psychologically and spiritually capable of carrying out the duties of his office,” he would have “the right, and under some circumstances also an obligation, to resign.”

Rumors of his imminent resignation began to appear periodically in the Italian news media in recent years, as the pope appeared increasingly frail in public appearances.

A Vatican official, who asked not to be named because he was discussing papal business, said that the number of people who had known about the pope’s decision “a long time, could be counted on one hand.” But the pope had informed a small group of other collaborators “in recent days.”

When he retires to Vatican City, the pope will be able to move freely, Father Lombardi said, though it was “premature” to say how involved he will be in day-to-day activities — like saying Mass — at the Vatican.

He would not, however, intervene in the choice of his successor. “You can be sure that the cardinals will be autonomous in their decision and he will have no specific role in this election,” Father Lombardi said, adding that the pope was “a very discreet person.”

The conclave to choose the next pope will begin 15 to 20 days after the pope resigns, and a new leader of the Roman Catholic Church is expected to be in place by Easter, which falls on March 31 this year.

Father Lombardi said the pope would continue to perform his regular duties until the end of the month, and would keep all the appointments on his calendar. Some parts of his schedule will be modified to take into account the heightened public interest in the pope during his final days in office, Father Lombardi indicated.

For instance, this week’s commemoration of Ash Wednesday, beginning the 40-day period of Lent preceding Easter, usually takes place in a church on the Aventine Hill. But this year it will be conducted in St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican instead, to allow a greater number of the faithful to attend, Father Lombardi said.

His final audience, on Feb. 27, will be moved to St. Peter’s Square instead of the usual indoor venue used in winter, “to allow the faithful to say goodbye to the pope.”

A version of this article appears in print on February 13, 2013, on page A14 of the New York edition with the headline: Benedict Will Live in Vatican City, but Many Details Remain Undecided. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe

Summary: The unusual circumstance of Pope Benedict XVI’s plan to retire at the end of this month presents a series of questions for the Vatican to address.


NEW YORK — Federal regulators on Tuesday delivered the latest blow to a giant private equity firm, announcing an enforcement action against affiliates of Apollo Global Management for an array of securities law violations.

The Securities and Exchange Commission issued a roughly $53 million punishment to Apollo, one of Wall Street’s most prominent private equity firms, and Apollo agreed to settle the case.

The settlement resolves accusations that Apollo misled its investors — about two different issues — and separately failed to supervise a senior executive suspected of misconduct. The executive, who was not named or charged in the SEC case, was twice caught “improperly charging personal items and services” to Apollo’s funds and, by extension, its investors, the SEC said.

The case represents a continuation of the SEC’s crackdown on private equity misdeeds. Over the last few years, the agency has taken action against nearly 10 private equity firms, including such prominent players as the Blackstone Group and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co.

At its core, the SEC scrutiny stems from a concern that private equity firms are not always transparent with their investors, even as those investors reap significant returns. In some cases, the SEC says, the firms hid crucial details that would have revealed conflicts of interest.

“A common theme in our recent enforcement actions against private equity firms is their failure to properly disclose fees and conflicts of interest to fund investors,” Andrew J. Ceresney, the SEC’s head of enforcement, said in a statement on Tuesday announcing the case against Apollo.

In its own statement, Apollo said that it “seeks to act appropriately and in the best interest of the funds it manages at all times.” Apollo, which neither admitted nor denied the accusations, added, “Long before the SEC inquiry began, Apollo had enhanced its disclosure and compliance relating to these matters.”

Ceresney said Apollo failed to fully inform its investors about so-called monitoring fees. Apollo charges monitoring fees to some of the companies it owns, arguing that it is entitled to collect on the consulting and advice it provides these companies.

The fees might extract crucial resources from a company, but they also theoretically benefit a private equity firm’s investors. For example, monitoring fees might help offset the roughly 2 percent fees private equity firms charge their investors, which include some of the world’s biggest pension funds.

However, the SEC found that in Apollo’s case the firm was “accelerating” the monitoring fees when one of its companies was sold or went public. In other words, upon the sale or IPO, Apollo would accelerate the remaining years of monitoring fees into lump-sum payments.

The accelerated lump-sum payments, the SEC said, effectively reduced the “amounts available for distribution to fund investors.” And compounding the problem, Apollo failed to fully disclose its practice of accelerating monitoring fees before clients invested in the firm.

The SEC also discovered that an Apollo affiliate failed to accurately disclose details about a loan it took from some of Apollo’s private equity funds. Under the loan agreement, the Apollo affiliate was supposed to pay interest to the funds — and yet that interest was “instead ultimately allocated solely” to the Apollo affiliate itself.

While executive misdeeds cannot always be pinned on an employer, Apollo in this case knew about the misconduct and failed to act, the SEC said. Instead, it said, the firm simply issued a verbal reprimand and prompted the executive to repay the expenses. Apollo did not discipline him in any other way.

Eventually, after hiring an independent firm to audit the expenses, Apollo cut ties with the executive.

Although the executive was not named or charged Tuesday, the SEC said its investigation was continuing.

“As the SEC acknowledges, Apollo itself discovered and remediated the expense account misconduct committed by a partner several years ago as part of a periodic compliance review of expenses,” the firm said in its statement. “Apollo reimbursed its funds for any improper expenses, voluntarily reported the matter to the SEC and cooperated fully with the agency’s review.”

Summary: Federal regulators announced an enforcement action against affiliates of Apollo Global Management for an array of securities law violations.


A car for many Australians is something that gets you from A to B - but for Dean Capuano his XW Ford Falcon is part of the family.

He bought it when he was just 14 and it's been there for all the major milestones of his life - including his engagement and wedding.

For Dean, driving a Ford has never been a choice - it's a family legacy.

"We were a Ford family - we weren't allowed to park anything else in the driveway. You'd either buy a Ford or didn't come home," he told AAP.

So the closure of Ford's Broadmeadows and Geelong manufacturing plants on Friday has been a bitter pill to swallow.

"Ford is going to live on through American made cars - but it's just not the same - we'll never have that Aussie-built muscle and talent again," he said.

"My son won't be able to buy an Australian made Ford - and that for me is sad."

Even as a child the now 32-year-old knew exactly the car he wanted - a Ford Falcon XW GT Silverfox.

He had posters on his wall and has spent "a lot of money" on it since.

"It was the car for me, it's so iconic."

He also drove a number of other Fords including a XR8 before purchasing a Australian designed, Thailand-built Ford Ranger as his daily Ford.

A traditionalist at heart, Dean wasn't one of the many Ford lovers to purchase one of the last Falcons off the production line.

But if he came into money he would definitely splash out.

Wheels news editor Toby Hagon says Australian-made cars hold a special place for people like Dean.

"Producing the Falcon put Ford Australia on the map - it was designed solely with Australians in mind and took the fight to Holden," Mr Hagon told AAP.

The Ford Falcon and Holden Commodore were fierce competitors in the Australian car marker for decades - until a love of SUVs took hold in the 2000s.

But the shift to a different type of car isn't the sole reason that lead to the demise of Australian car making, according to Mr Hagon.

The diversified market, extremely low tariff barriers and the low Aussie dollar all had a part to play.

"Plus the success of the Territory, which was built with great foresight, was so successful that in some ways it hurt Ford itself - after it's launch the Falcon wagon was killed off and it actually hurt Falcon sales too," Mr Hagon said.

Now hundreds of factory workers, many who have spent their whole working lives at Ford, will close the door on a piece of Australian manufacturing history on Friday.

The closure coincides with the first day of Bathurst's V8 Supercar Championships - an unfortunate coincidence after the car maker withdrew from racing at the end of 2015.

Ford will continue selling cars in Australia and now has the challenge of finding or creating a car that appealing to the local market.

Summary: As the car-maker closes its doors on Australian manufacturing, Ford enthusiasts reminisce


Thousands of Victorian homes will spend a third night without power after the weekend's deadly winds wreaked havoc across much of the state.

Crews continue to try to restore power to more than 10,000 properties that have been without electricity since Sunday, mostly in Melbourne's outer eastern suburbs and nearby hills.

AusNet Services spokesman Hugo Armstrong said power would be restored to most customers on Tuesday.

"We hope to get the bulk of those customers on supply at some point today but certainly some (works) will run through to tomorrow," he told AAP.

Almost 130,000 properties were left without power on Sunday as wind gusts of more than 100km/h lashed the state.

The government is talking to the national energy market regulator about securing its supply and reducing the impact of future severe weather events.

"The resilience of our electricity network is an important matter for our government but we can't pretend these are issues that can be easily resolved," Energy Minister Lily D'Ambrosio said.

Emergency Services Minister James Merlino said the government would consider additional support for affected communities but the immediate focus was the clean-up and restoring power.

A woman was killed on Sunday when a tree fell on her Millgrove house and at least 20 others - many injured by flying debris - were hospitalised.

Authorities have responded to 5932 calls for help and continue to warn people to stay clear of trees.

"The ground is still soaked and soft so trees are still likely to fall," an SES spokesman said.

People are also being told to be careful consuming food that might have defrosted once the power went off.

Neighbours are being encouraged to check on vulnerable community members and help them relocate if they're not coping.

Flood warnings are still current in the north of the state, but an evacuation warning for Ulupna Island on the Murray River has been cancelled with floodwaters subsiding.

The threat of flooding has now stabilised in the north and central areas of the state.

Summary: Crews have worked through the night to restore power to thousands of properties cut off after Victoria's deadly winds at the weekend.


It remains a mystery why Melbourne father Kenan Balikel was violently killed the day after the birth of his fifth child.

The 42-year-old was hit over the head with a crowbar by business associate John Butorac, who later got a friend to help him get rid of Mr Balikel's body by burning it in the boot of a car.

In sentencing Butorac to 12 years' jail on Friday, Victorian Supreme Court Justice Lex Lasry said the 2014 killing was "violent and extremely serious".

Butorac had no drug, alcohol or mental health issues at the time he attacked Mr Balikel in a Tullamarine factory after an argument.

He wrapped Mr Balikel's body and hid it between two cars in the building before enlisting another friend, Ante Bacak, to help dispose of it.

Mr Balikel's body was discovered in the boot of a burnt-out car near Diggers Rest on October 31, 2014, by CFA crews called out to control the blaze.

"The mystery as to why this occurred remains," Justice Lasry said of Butorac's "senseless act of violence".

Mr Balikel's wife, Mihriban Balikel, was in hospital recovering from a caesarean when she heard of her husband's death, the court has previously heard.

"That day I felt like my life suddenly ended," she said in a victim impact statement.

"The death of my husband and the age of my son is the same, which makes celebrating his life hard."

For months, Butorac denied knowing what happened to Mr Balikel. He admitted to killing the father of five just before he was due to face trial charged with murder.

The 50-year-old subsequently pleaded guilty to manslaughter and attempting to pervert the course of justice.

He had no significant prior criminal history.

Butorac was handed a non-parole period of eight and a half years.

He has already served 658 days in pre-sentence custody.

Summary: A man has been sentenced to 12 years in jail after admitting he killed a Melbourne father of five.


Big Mac founder, Michael "Jim" Delligatti, has died. (AFP)

The US man who invented the quintessential American fast-food burger, the Big Mac, and inadvertently set off a race to create ever more expansive fast-food hits, has died.

Michael "Jim" Delligatti passed away Monday surrounded by family at his home in a Pittsburgh suburb, according to his relatives. He was 98 years old.

Mr Delligatti laid claim to one of the most indelible inventions in American cuisine since sliced bread - a double hamburger with two beef patties, lettuce, cheese, pickles and onions, which is covered in a special sauce. As the owner of a McDonald's restaurant in western Pennsylvania nearly half a century ago, Mr Delligatti convinced the company to venture away from its brief menu of simple burgers, fries and drinks, according to a 1993 profile of the Big Mac in the Los Angeles Times. He got permission to try his new burger in 1967 and sales jumped 12 percent, the Times said.

Within a few years, McDonald's was advertising the Big Mac nationwide. "This wasn't like discovering the light bulb," Mr Delligatti said. "The bulb was already there. All I did was screw it in the socket." He said the idea came from rival burger restaurants in the mid-1960s. After the Big Mac's invention, the company expanded its menu further, creating an age of new menu items such as the Egg McMuffin and Filet-o-Fish.

But, it was the Big Mac that became a cultural icon.

In a statement, McDonald's said Mr Delligatti was a "legendary franchisee" who made a "lasting impression" on the company. "We will remember Jim as an insightful franchisee, a knowledgeable businessman," the company said.

McDonald's says it sells hundreds of millions of the oversized burgers globally, although sales have slowed in recent years as millennials reportedly show less interest in super-sized fast food. According to Delligatti's family he went on to own 48 McDonald's restaurants.

He is survived by his wife Ellie, two children, and a number of grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Summary: The US man who invented the quintessential American fast-food burger, the Big Mac, and inadvertently set off a race to create ever more expansive fast-food menus, has died.


Kansas State was an underdog Thursday night in the Texas Bowl, taking on SEC foe and once-upon-a-time playoff-hopeful Texas A&M in Houston, not far from the Aggies’ home base of College Station.

But the Wildcats were up to the task, building a 23-14 halftime lead and holding off A&M for a 33-28 win. The victory vaulted Kansas State to 9-4 on the season, a nice bounce-back after going just 6-7 a year ago.

It was time for celebration, and the customary Gatorade bath for longtime Kansas State head coach Bill Snyder. Except for one tweak:

Bill Snyder: Construction Paper Gatorade Bath… Awesome. #KStateFB pic.twitter.com/kPTn83OiT2

— Zaldy Doyungan (@ZaldyKSNT) December 29, 2016

Yes, instead of a liquid energy drink, the 77-year-old Snyder was doused with colored paper. That’s probably for the best considering how he reacted the last time Kansas State won a bowl, scurrying away from a Gatorade shower attempt at the end of the 2013 Buffalo Wild Wings Bowl.

Congrats to Snyder and Kansas State on a big win.

Summary: The Wildcats swapped out Gatorade for confetti for their 77-year-old coach.


CAIRO  From an office on the 26th floor of his family's gold-domed twin towers overlooking the Nile, Naguib Sawiris, chief executive of Orascom Telecom, scans the world for opportunities to expand his telecommunications empire. He tends to find them in places others fear to tread.

Take, for instance, Orascom's $160 million investment in Iraqna, the first mobile phone provider in Iraq. Iraqna operates in the volatile central provinces of Baghdad, Anbar and Diyala. Its employees have been kidnapped and its outlets have been attacked, pushing the company's annual security costs to $30 million.

But two years after it introduced service, Iraqna has 1.5 million subscribers, or 41 percent of the current Iraqi market. In the first nine months of 2005, the company generated $249 million in revenue.

"Wherever the risk is high, the profits are also high," said Mr. Sawiris, 50, the son of an Egyptian construction magnate. "Soon we will reach two million subscribers in our network."

The only major difference between doing business in Iraq and any other place in the world, said Mr. Sawiris, is having to negotiate with kidnappers. "We know that calm will come one day and Iraq will be a second Saudi Arabia," he said. "In the mobile telecom business, we invest where the service is needed and we can create value."

Iraqna is just one example of a drive by Orascom into emerging markets in Asia and the Middle East. The company has a subscriber base of 30 million people in Algeria, Egypt, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Tunisia and Zimbabwe, among other countries. Those countries represent a market of 460 million people, but on average only 11.5 percent of them have mobile phones.

In 2005, the company more than doubled its subscriber base, and it is on target to reach 50 million subscribers by the end of 2006. Orascom's net income was $298 million in 2004, up 184 percent from 2003. Income in the first half of 2005 was $296 million, up 49 percent from the same period a year earlier.

Mr. Sawiris said he approached each market the same way, through quick decisions and network-building. In 2003, the Coalition Provisional Authority, the United States-led civil administration in Iraq, awarded a two-year operating license to Orascom Telecom, one of three cellphone companies to receive licenses. Mr. Sawiris embarked on a network construction spree and an intensive advertising campaign, and dotted Iraqi cities with distributor outlets.

"He has the companies that sell the network," said Wael Zaida, a senior analyst with EFG-Hermes, a brokerage house based in Egypt. "He has the companies that provide the handsets. All he needed is a license to start operations.

"Despite the high risk involved in putting an operation in Iraq, it is the Iraqi operation that has been doing fantastically well," Mr. Zaida said.

Orascom has weathered its share of reversals, and Mr. Sawiris admits to having made some mistakes. He says that his business partner in Syria, a cousin of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, took over the partnership for his own benefit, prompting Orascom to pull up its stake and arbitrate the dispute, settling for $20 million. After similar problems in Yemen, Mr. Sawiris decided he would never again enter into partnerships with those who have close ties with a country's leadership.

Orascom moved into 22 countries between 1999 and 2002, but that rapid expansion led to ballooning short-term debt. Mr. Sawiris decided to sell most of Orascom's African holdings as well as its Jordanian subsidiary, Fastlink, even though it had been performing well.

In May, Mr. Sawiris moved into the European market, paying $3.6 billion to take control of Wind, a leading phone company in Italy. To limit Orascom's debt burden, Mr. Sawiris made a leveraged purchase by fusing personal and family funds; he created a buyout vehicle called Weather Investments in partnership with Wilbur L. Ross Jr., the American buyout specialist, and Philippe Nguyen, a French financier.

The Wind deal "was an opportunity to gain a foothold in Europe," Mr. Sawiris said. He has also shown interest in buying TIM Hellas Telecommunications, a Greek operator. "I am convinced that telecoms will consolidate and I do not want to sell off my companies," Mr. Sawiris said. "I want to be one of these players at the end of the game."

In December 2005, Orascom paid $1.3 billion for a 19.3 percent stake in Hutchison Telecommunications International, a unit of the Hong Kong conglomerate Hutchison Whampoa. Mr. Sawiris said the deal was part of an effort to take a slice of the Southeast Asian market, which he said he wished he had entered earlier.

Though the strategy of investing in emerging markets is risky, other companies have taken the same path as Orascom. "Those countries have more resources than you read, because of the gray economy and the cash economy," said Azmi T. Mikati, chief executive of Investcom Holding, a mobile communications provider that operates in countries like Sudan, Syria and Afghanistan. "These countries are not as poor or as dangerous as they are portrayed."

Mr. Sawiris says that people do not fully understand the needs of his customers. "Whether poor or rich, people still need to communicate," he said.

Summary: Orascom Telecom invested in the first mobile phone provider in Iraq and is now making a drive into emerging markets in Asia and the Middle East.


Most everyone agrees, America's health-care system is a mess.

Millions of Americans lack health insurance and still our annual health-care costs exceed $2 trillion — that's about the size of the entire economy of China. For the country with the world's "best" medical care, a lot of people seem unhappy.

Many hate the insurance industry.

Employers have seen insurance premiums rise 87 percent over the last seven years. General Motors now spends more on its employees' health insurance than on steel. Doctors are fed up, too; the average physician's office spends 14 percent of its income filling out paperwork.

No one seems angrier than the patients who have been denied care. Vicki Readling of North Carolina was diagnosed with breast cancer after she had quit her job and lost her employer's insurance. Readling purchased temporary insurance for herself, but when it expired she was told that because of her pre-existing condition — cancer — she would now have to pay $27,000 a year for a new policy. With an income of $60,000 and twin sons in college, she couldn't afford it.

Insurance industry spokeswoman Karen Ignani is eager to report that most people aren't like Readling. Polls show that while people dislike the insurance industry in general, 87 percent of people with health insurance are happy with their coverage. Only 3 percent of health insurance claims are denied, she says.

In his hit documentary "Sicko," Michael Moore focuses on tragic stories of people whose insurance claims have been denied. His prognosis? He calls for "the elimination of private profit-making health insurance companies" and suggests turning over all health-care spending to the government to provide "free" health care to everyone. He goes to countries like Canada and Britain and implies that their socialized systems are far better than that of the United States.

There are many problems with health insurance, but that doesn't mean we should put the government in control. If it's decided that health care should be paid for with tax dollars, then it's up to the government to decide how that money should be spent. There's only so much money to go around, so the inevitable result is rationing.

It's just the law of supply and demand. Lowering prices increases demand. Lowering the price to nothing pushes demand through the roof. Author P.J. O'Rourke said it best: "If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it's free."

When health care is free, governments deal with all that increased demand by limiting what's available.

The reality of "free" health care is that people wait. In the United Kingdom, one in eight patients waits more than a year for hospital treatment and the British government recently set its goal to keep wait times to less than 18 weeks — that's more than four months! In Canada, almost a million citizens are waiting for necessary surgery and more than a million Canadians can't find a regular doctor. In the small town of Norwood, Ontario, a weekly drawing is held in which a townsperson wins the right to access the town's one family doctor.

Summary: John Stossel: Whose Body Is It, Anyway? Sick in America


Posted Sep 12th 2007 11:29AM by TMZ Staff

The third Mrs. Cruise tried to go incognito in Paris on Tuesday, by dressing like an androgynous X-Files agent! The truth is out there!Outfitted in a Matrix- trench coat, mens Oxford shirt, pleated (!) gabardine pants, and tasseled loafers, the Scientolomom had all the style and grace of ... an '80s Wall Street investment banker! Styling by Gordon Gekko!It's clear who wears the pants in her family!

Summary: The third Mrs. Cruise tried to go incognito in Paris on Tuesday, by dressing like an androgynous X-Files agent! The truth is out there!  Outfitted in a ...


Friday, November 17th 1995, 4:01AM

HBO and Warner Music chief Michael Fuchs got the boot yesterday after losing a bitter power struggle among Time Warner honchos.

The company said Fuchs, who had been at Time Warner 20 years, was "stepping down," but a Fuchs spokesman said his boss was axed.

Once considered an heir apparent to Time Warner chairman Gerald Levin, Fuchs, who took the music job in May, saw his fortunes turn in recent months when Ted Turner arrived on the scene.

Under the proposed $8 billion merger of Time Warner and Turner, Fuchs would have been forced to report to Turner an arrangement apparently not acceptable to the architect of HBO.

Meanwhile, Bob Daly and Terry Semel, co-chairmen of the Warner Bros. movie studio were angling for more power and they won. Yesterday, Levin announced that the $4 billion-a-year music division, which includes such labels as Warner, Atlantic and Elektra, would be headed by them.

Some said they saw it coming for Fuchs. The 49-year-old executive, who is known for being a combative manager, came under fire for his management of the shaky music division. He cleaned house of top executives and sold the company's rap music label, Interscope Records, after critics attacked it for controversial lyrics moves that rocked the music industry.

"Fuchs overstepped his bounds," said Porter Bibb, a media banker with Ladenburg, Thalmann.

"Let's face it. Terry Semel and Bob Daly make money for Time Warner," said a West Coast entertainment lawyer. "Michael Fuchs knew as much about running a music company as Howard Stern would in running Pat Robertson's 700 Club. He was their sacrificial lamb."

But in his departure he offered no apologies. "I'm proud of my record and for what we all built first at HBO and the efforts and accomplishments we have made at Warner Music Group in the last six months," he said. "I am deeply saddened to leave Time Warner."

HBO President and Chief Executive Jeff Bewkes will assume Fuchs' position as chairman of the pay channel.

Time Warner termed the personnel changes a "restructuring" and, in a two-page statement, didn't even mention Fuchs' departure until the last page.

Levin did not comment on the reasons for Fuchs' resignation, but said: "He will be missed from our company and we wish him well."

Summary: HBO and Warner Music chief Michael Fuchs got the boot yesterday after losing a bitter power struggle among Time Warner honchos. The company said Fuchs, who had been at Time Warner 20 years, was "stepping down,"but a Fuchs spokesman said his boss was axed. Once considered an heir apparent to Time Warner chairman Gerald Levin, Fuchs, who took the music job in May, saw his fortunes turn in recent months when Ted