US Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has defeated Hillary Clinton in West Virginia's primary, winning over voters deeply sceptical about the economy and keeping his candidacy alive against the frontrunner.

"Tonight it appears that we won a big victory in West Virginia," Sanders said after the results for Tuesday's primary came in, "and this is a state where Hillary Clinton won with 40 points against Barack Obama in 2008."

The loss slows Clinton's march to the nomination, but she is still heavily favoured to become the Democratic candidate in the November 8 election.

Deep concerns about the economy were key in West Virginia's Democratic primary.

About six in 10 voters said they were very worried about the direction of the US economy in the next few years. The same proportion cited the economy and jobs as their most important voting issues, according to a preliminary ABC News exit poll.

OPINION: Muslims for Bernie Sanders

A remark Clinton made at an Ohio town hall in March that the country would "put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business" may have hurt her chances with voters in coal-mining states such as West Virginia.

West Virginia miners switch loyalties

During Clinton's visit to West Virginia and Ohio last week she repeatedly apologised to displaced coal and steel workers for her comment, which she said had been taken out of context, and discussed her plan to help retrain coal workers for clean energy jobs.

But, Al Jazeera's Kimberly Halkett, reporting from Charleston, said the damage was already done.

"Coal mining is the lifeblood of West Virginia," she said. "Voters I talked to said they are throwing support behind Sanders, or switching parties altogether, and voting in the primary for Donald Trump.

"West Virginia was once solid Democratic party territory. But, that's no longer the case. The Republicans are gaining support here due to Barack Obama's clean energy policies decimating jobs in the state in the last four years, by the thousands." Â

To secure the Democratic nomination, a candidate needs 2,383 delegates. Going into West Virginia, Clinton, a former US secretary of state, had 2,228 delegates, including 523 so-called superdelegates, elite party members who are free to support any candidate.

Sanders had 1,454 delegates, including 39 superdelegates. Another 29 delegates will be apportioned based on West Virginia's results.

Clinton and Sanders will compete in another primary contest on May 17. Both candidates are also looking ahead to the June 7 contests, the last in the long nominating season, in which nearly 700 delegates are at stake, including 475 in California, where Sanders is now focusing his efforts.

Sanders has vowed to take his campaign all the way to the Democrats' July 25-28 convention in Philadelphia, and wants a say in shaping the party's platform.

Sanders has repeatedly told supporters at packed rallies that most opinion polls indicate he would beat Trump in a general election match-up by a larger margin than polls show Clinton defeating Trump.

"When you look at a Donald Trump-Hillary Clinton match-up, Donald Trump comes ahead, but when you pair Donald Trump to Bernie Sanders in a general election, it is Sanders who comes out on top," Al Jazeera's Halkett said. "This is the challenge that Hillary Clinton faces.

"She does have the lead in terms of the pledged delegates, the establishment if you will, but what she doesn't have is a strong support from those who are working-class."

READ MORE: Trump's the choice

TrumpÂ won contests in West Virginia and Nebraska handily on Tuesday.

Recently, Trump has zeroed in on Clinton's protracted battle with Sanders. He has taunted Clinton by saying she "can't close the deal" by beating Sanders.

Clinton has said she will ignore Trump's personal insults, including his repeated use of his new nickname for her, "Crooked Hillary", and instead will criticise his policy pronouncements.

Trump, shifting into general election mode, has already begun to consider running mates. He told Fox on Tuesday night that he has narrowed down his list to five people.

He did not rule out picking New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a former rival who ended his presidential bid in February. Christie, who endorsed Trump and then campaigned for him, was named on MondayÂ to head Trump's White House transition team.

Source:Â Al Jazeera and agencies

Summary: Sanders deals another blow to Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton in US state hit by job losses.


“Star Trek Beyond” plays like an episode of the old “Star Trek” TV series.

This, I submit, is what’s enjoyable about it.

It’s longer, of course, with a different cast, a more hectic pace, and state-of-the-galaxy digital effects. But those boulders strewn across the planet on which the characters have landed look like Styrofoam even if some of them are real, and the dramatic stakes are the kind that get resolved in an hour with commercial breaks rather than two hours-plus of epic cinema. It might even feel like you’re back in your rec room, circa 1967, drinking Tang and waiting for the Tribbles.

Gone is the exuberance of “Star Trek” (2009) and “Star Trek Into Darkness” (2013), movies in which ringmaster J. J. Abrams reintroduced 21st-century audiences to Gene Roddenberry’s original “Star Trek” characters with wit, flair, and pop-culture affection. Justin Lin is now directing — Abrams is still overseeing as producer — and with four installments in the “Fast and Furious” franchise under his belt, Lin at least knows how to keep things moving.

So if “Star Trek Beyond” takes a while to rev its engines to warp speed and if it never comes close to the delirious peaks and emotional depths of the earlier films, the movie ultimately cruises along with workmanlike charm and energy, buoyed by the playing of actors who by now know each others’ rhythms well. It’s a fine summer B-movie, and it gives good Trek.

To “Star Trek,” and its fans, may you live long and prosper, for another 50 years.

It says a lot that most of the plot unfolds on one planet, just like an episode of the show. First, though, the USS Enterprise docks for R&R at the interstellar space station Yorktown, which looks like a city-state that M.C. Escher might have designed after studying a gyroscope. (“Star Trek Beyond” wasn’t screened for the press in 3D, but it’s the rare movie I wish had been.)

Captain James Kirk (Chris Pine) is having a smallish existential crisis after too long at the helm, and Spock (Zachary Quinto) and Uhura (Zoe Saldana) have put a halt on their romance because Spock apparently wants to raise the kids Vulcan. We briefly glimpse Sulu (John Cho) reunited with his husband (Doug Jung), while Scotty (Simon Pegg, who co-wrote the script with Jung) and “Bones” McCoy (Karl Urban) mostly riff on their long-established characters.

And every time the camera passes across the face of Anton Yelchin as Chekov, you’re allowed to feel a pang of grief, since this gifted young actor died just last month in a freak auto mishap. (The movie is dedicated to him and to the late Leonard Nimoy.) Life is far crueler than anything a Hollywood screenwriter could invent.

“Star Trek Beyond” quickly gets the crew out of Yorktown and beyond a distant nebula to rescue a ship captained by the alien Kalara (Lydia Wilson), who sets off ambush alarms in the audience but not, surprisingly, onscreen. A long action sequence in which the Enterprise is beset by an immense swarm of fighter pilots — they’re called “bees” and they look like them — is eye candy of the first order, after which our heroes are split up into subgroups as they run around the planet’s surface.

We meet an alien bad guy, Krall, played by Idris Elba under heavy latex, and even if his villainy feels puny by, say, Khan standards, Elba’s regal bearing goes a long way. (Unlike Oscar Isaac in the recent “X-Men: Apocalypse,” Elba escapes with his dignity intact.) We also meet an alien heroine, Jaylah, who looks like Daryl Hannah’s kabuki vixen in “Blade Runner” and who is played with propulsive grace by the Algerian dancer-model Sofia Boutella.

Both those new characters are welcome, but “Star Trek Beyond” knows we’re here for the old gang. The movie panders to the blockbuster summer marketplace more than it should. For a story set in the 23rd century to wedge in “classical music” like the Beastie Boys and Public Enemy is a cheap crowd-pleaser. (It’s also foolproof.) But it always comes back to the bedrock of these 50-year-old figures, much loved, virtually indestructible, outliving even the people who’ve played them.

“Beyond” indulges the catchphrases and intra-crew rivalries and in one lovely moment shows all the characters communally brainstorming a solution to a major galactic crisis. After so many decades spent together on our screens and in our imaginations, there are no leads or supporting players on the bridge of the Enterprise. Everyone’s essential. Everyone belongs. Life may be cruel, but a half-century in, “Star Trek” has become a comfort. It’s one of our oldest futures and one of our better utopias.

Directed by Justin Lin. Written by Simon Pegg and Doug Jung, based on characters created by Gene Roddenberry. Starring Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Zoe Saldana, Karl Urban, Simon Pegg, John Cho, Anton Yelchin, and Idris Elba. Boston Common, Fenway, suburbs; Jordan’s IMAX, Reading and Natick. 122 minutes. PG-13 (sci-fi action and violence).

Summary: “Star Trek Beyond” plays like an episode of the old “Star Trek” TV series. This, Ty Burr submits, is what’s enjoyable about it.


There's something in her eyes. Something more than the bafflement you so often see in the faces of innocents victimised by the wars of others. It's something that haunts. Something that reaches you most powerfully not in your mind, but somewhere more prosaic. In your guts. In your bones.

Her expression seems to plead directly. To ask of you, do you care? Do you see me?

When we saw this image, there was no other that seemed more apt to lead our website on March 15th, the day Syria entered its fifth year of misery and mayhem. Its fifth year of slaughter.

Several human rights groups, and many Syrians, had a powerful accusation to make that day. The world, they said, had failed the country and her people. The world didn't care anymore.

The twisted steal the attention. And the people we should pay attention to fade into the background, bit players in a narrative wrongly and unfairly dominated by the grotesque.

Sometimes journalism itself feels like a fight to get people to care.

And as often, maybe more often, it's a fight to get yourself to. Every day, the media deals in stories of death and devastation and despair. Too often, it feels like work, just there to be processed. A day's pay to be earned.

But we have a duty. Because these are other people's stories.

And they deserve to have them heard.

On the anniversary, we published a lot of content. There were stirring documentaries, powerful polemics, Syrian paintings, infographics, analysis, interviews, features and news. There was streaming TV. We tried to take our audience into the lives of those caught up in this.

And all of it was fronted with the bloodied woman, that gaze taking up most of the screen.

But the number of people who came to our site that day was far lower than expected. As we watched the analytics, tracked our traffic, that stinging accusation of apathy seemed justified.

There are variables, of course. Anniversaries don't tend to grab the imagination, some people may prefer other news organisations for Syria reporting, and perhaps our work wasn't what it could be.

Then there's fatigue. It's been a rough few years for the world. Syria, Iraq, Nigeria, Libya, the Central African Republic, South Sudan, Ukraine, Somalia and more. Dark stories dominate.

I have never heard so many journalists say that the job is grinding them down nor so many people who watch the news say that they cannot stand to do so anymore. Bearing witness is gruelling.

We have seen a stagnation in traffic to our Syria conflict stories since 2012 with intermittent peaks when it makes headlines - Assad says something unusual, the possibility of Western missiles.

Recently, there have been occasional spikes but they appear mostly related to ISIL. The taking of Fallujah, the fall of Mosul, the detestable beheadings, and the sledgehammering of history.

The twisted steal the attention. And the people we should pay attention to fade into the background, bit players in a narrative wrongly and unfairly dominated by the grotesque.

We find that stories about the suffocating grind and everyday hardship of war don't do as well. Stories about the almost four million Syrians who have been forced to flee their country, the same.

When we tweeted the accusation that the world didn't care, many people retweeted it. But most didn't click the link to read our stories. Perhaps they wanted to be seen to care. Perhaps they believed that people should care. But they didn't care enough to read what we had written.

Because this was an opportunity to take stock. To stand back. To reflect on the fact that more than 220,000 people have been killed and half a country's population pushed from their homes. To ask the Syrian people what they need from us. To pressure our governments to take them in.

Our indifference is something we need to think about and talk about. As journalists, we should question our performance. As people, our humanity. Because we can do better.

And that woman in the photograph should know that we see her.

Barry Malone is an online editor at Al Jazeera. Twitter: @malonebarry

Summary: AJE this week ran special content on a grim milestone because it's important. But our data told us something: few cared.


John Hutton, the former defence secretary, today accused Ms Thornberry of being a "mouthpiece" for the anti-Trident lobby, adding that her "tired old science fiction" had been debunked by experts. He warned that Labour must back Trident if it wanted to "retain any credibility on defence whatsoever".

Ms Thornberry admitted to Radio 4's Today programme that "four, five or six people" at the meeting had "kicked off", but insisted: "If we are prepared to go into this and look at the evidence, the evidence will draw us to certain conclusion.

"I had been challenged that it was either Trident or nothing but our view is that it is not just a binary option. There are questions to be asked about Trident.

"I think we shouldn’t be afraid of having this debate in the Labour party."

MPs reported a "waffly and incoherent" speech by Ms Thornberry, who is thought to have suggested Britain could update rather than replace the Trident system - likening it to Tornado jets in the Air Force.

A source said Ms Thornberry told MPs that some technology must be replaced - like Spitfires - while other old machinery can be updated and made useful for many years.

One MP described it as the worst presentation they had ever heard.

Andy Burnham, who is pro-renewal, took to the BBC Radio 4's Today programme to declare that the party's differences were "irrenconcilable".

The shadow home secretary said scrapping the nuclear deterrent would be "a step on our own into the unknown" which the UK could not afford in an uncertain world, and called for an "accommodation" to end the distraction.

He said: "There are two positions here which are difficult to reconcile - maybe impossible to reconcile - and the party has got to find some way of accommodating those positions and move forward and don't let this issue take over everything."

Both Mr Corbyn and Ms Thornberry have urged Labour MPs to "keep an open mind" on Trident and debate the broader future of the UK's defence needs, rather than throw their support behind the weapons system without considering alternatives.

The Labour leader faces tough opposition from within his own ranks, as many of his senior MPs want to renew the nuclear deterrent, fearing it will make the party look weak if it does not support David Cameron's plan to renew.

Stephen Kinnock became the latest Labour MP to openly vow to campaign on a pro-Trident platform even if Mr Corbyn decides the party should not back renewal. A significant number of senior Labour MPs in the shadow cabinet also share this view.

A Labour source said the meeting last night was "very open and mixed" and said there were "a range of opinions", denying Ms Thornberry was heckled.

The meeting is the latest in a series of fraught sessions during which Mr Corbyn has not been present. He is understood to be planning to attend the next meeting of his party in two weeks time.

Ms Thornberry has agreed to visit the shipyard at Barrow where Trident submarines are built but Mr Corbyn will not be attending.

Summary: Emily Thornberry, shadow defence secretary, openly heckled by Labour MPs   following suggestion that nuclear deterrent could be updated, not replaced


Nintendo’s ultra-secretive NX console could be quite different from the tethered devices you might have sitting under your television right now, according to a new report.

Nintendo’s NTDOY next console will be a portable device featuring a docking station for users to continue playing games while home, video game site Eurogamer is reporting, citing sources. The console, which the site’s sources say will be a handheld, will also come with its own display and button-based controller units on the side. Those button-based controller units will be detachable from the left and right sides of the device, according to the report.

While Nintendo hasn’t shared much about its plans for the NX, the company did say that it would unveil a new concept to the traditional gaming market. It also said the device will launch in March.

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Given the state of the console market, one would be forgiven for thinking the NX won’t come with any of the features touted by Eurogamer’s sources. After all, the console market’s most successful devices—Sony’s PlayStation 4 and Microsoft’s Xbox One—are traditional consoles that need to be plugged into a wall outlet for power and connect to televisions with an HDMI cable. Even Nintendo’s Wii U, which has been overshadowed by its competitors, has the same tether.

Nintendo, however, has in the past changed home gaming in major ways. The Wii, for instance, presented gamers with movement and balance boards that caught fire. Nintendo also tried out virtual-reality gaming long before it became a popular technology. The company trying something entirely different with the NX isn’t necessarily so far-fetched.

Still, there are several questions. Both Sony SNE and Microsoft MSFT next year are planning new, high-end consoles that are likely to deliver better graphical capabilities than anything a portable console could deliver. Whether the NX touted by Eurogamer could keep pace is unknown. It’s also unknown whether gamers who are already playing games on their smartphones and tablets really want to buy a new console that effectively allows them to do the same thing as their smartphone counterparts with one added benefit: The ability to dock it and continue playing titles on a television.

But the sources’ claims become yet more vexing. According to Eurogamer’s sources, the NX will go back in time and nix the now-ubiquitous disc-based game media for cartridges. The device will also run on mobile processors, which means it likely won’t be able to match the power in upcoming consoles from Microsoft and Sony, and will not be backward compatible with Wii U games consumers have already purchased.

For more about Nintendo NX, watch:

The NX, in other words, will be a complete departure from traditional game consoles and from Nintendo’s own strategies of the past, according to Eurogamer’s sources. The whole idea, the sources say, is for gamers to be able to take their games wherever they go.

But the question remains: Will they want to?

Nintendo did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The company plans to announce NX details sometime later this year.

Summary: And it might have mobile-ready controllers.


After sharing responsibility for Google's day-to-day operations for 10 years, Brin and Larry Page are officially decoupled -- on this list and at the Googleplex. With Page running the show, Google's other golden boy now devotes his time to special projects, many of them in stealth mode.

Billionaire Brin is apparently having some fun too. His Google page shows newly uploaded photos of himself skydiving and scuba diving in Egypt's Red Sea. He has also invested $5 million in a Virginia-based space tourism company and is waiting for his private ride into space.

Summary: They're the hottest young stars in business across the globe. They're innovators, disrupters, and job creators; in fact, it's a pretty safe bet you're going to be working for them someday -- if you aren't already! They're in technology, yes, but also in movies, music, athletic wear, and even curry-flavored chocolate. And the scary thing is they're just getting started.


Roberts says, “A lot of it relates to a disconnect between Liverpool and the rest of the country. If you look at the EU referendum, even the general election – Liverpool seems to be very different. There’s huge support here for Jeremy Corbyn; that’s not the case in the rest of the country.”

How do you rebuild that relationship? Short of turningthe clock back 50 years or writing a blank cheque, how do you reconnect a city with a country? “The first one would be to stop doing the Wembley thing,” says Roberts. “Take England on the road. They need to redefinehow the FA’s perceived. There’s an arrogance there, and it’s from football in general.”

Liverpool looks a transformed city. The population is rising again after decades of decline. Private sector investment is flowing. But that sense of disconnect endures. A feeling that England is some place over there. Somebody else’s land, somebody else’s culture.

“Most of us want to watch a player who can get you on the edge of your seat,” he says. “Who can take another man on. Not somebody who can make sure their Opta index is in the top-10 percentile by passing square balls. Someone who can take a risk, break through a tight defence. Somebody like Peter Beardsley now would be worth £100 million.”

If you want to know how to produce world-class players, you could do worse than coming to Wallsend Boys Club.

Summary: Exactly 50 years ago, Bobby Moore lifted the Jules Rimet trophy and Wembley hailed England’


Plans to increase the aid budget were branded "absurd" by several former Tory MPs, who said the money would be much better spent on protecting the armed forces.

Sir Gerald Howarth, former Tory defence minister, told The Times: "What is the point of this arbitrary figure of spending 0.7 per cent of GDP?

"The idea that if we spend this amount all the world's problems will end is so absurd, or that by providing that magic figure we suddenly become paragons of virtue.

"If a change in the formula means the British taxpayer has to contribute yet more in overseas aid despite five years of austerity a lot of people will start questioning the largesse of this country," he added.

"There are many military figures who just don't see the logic of putting money into aid instead of defence."

In January, it emerged that civil servants had gone on a £1billion spending spree over eight weeks last year to hit the government target of allocating 0.7 per cent of national income to overseas aid.

The new EU accounting rules, which are being phased in to all government departments, have not yet been applied to foreign aid spending. If the new rules had been implemented, the government would have had to spend an extra £1 billion in 2014 and this year, official figures show.

The Dfid insisted last night that the rules would not apply to aid until 2016 at the earliest. Informed sources admitted that when they come in by the next government it would lead to a sharp rise in aid spending.

One aid expert suggested that the increase would be at least £1 billion across 2016 and 2017.

A forecast from the House of Commons library shows that Britain's international development budget at current rates will exceed military spending by 2030-31.

A report by the Independent Commission for Aid Impact last October found that taxpayers' money spent abroad was actively encouraging corrupt practices.

Summary: New European Union rules on overseas spending branded "absurd"


The centenary of the Easter Rising was commemorated in Dublin yesterday. The unsuccessful revolt of Irish Republicans helped pave the way for the breakaway of southern Ireland from the United Kingdom in 1922 and the horrible civil war.

In the phrase “Easter Rising” is contained the central blasphemy of terrorist acts committed in the name of God. What has the resurrection of the Prince of Peace got to do with trying to shoot the British out of Ireland?

Patrick Pearse, the rising’s leader, who proclaimed the republic outside the General Post Office, suffered from what Yeats called “the vertigo of self-sacrifice”. He had a homoerotic vision of the macaomh, the beautiful young scholar warrior who would die for his country – half the Irish mythical hero Cuchullain, half Jesus. The night before he was shot by a British firing squad, Pearse wrote a mawkish poem comparing the Virgin Mary’s loss of her son to his own death.

A century later, this distasteful confusion of political fanaticism with faith is even more in fashion, but nowadays in Islam, not Christianity. Among those rebels executed by the British shortly after Pearse was his devoted brother, Willie. In Brussels last week, a pair of brothers, Ibrahim and Khalid al-Bakraoui, detonated

two of the three bombs which killed 31 people.

In modern Ireland, I am glad to say, sentimentality about the murderous and self-righteous revolutionaries who helped condemn the Republic to

70 years of economic backwardness and narrow priest-domination – and the North to terrorist guerrilla warfare – is at last being superseded by a more clear-headed approach. I strongly recommend Ruth Dudley Edwards’s new book, The Seven, which dissects the attitudes of the founding fathers. The repentant IRA terrorist Sean O’Callaghan has published a brave, hostile account of the life of Pearse’s socialist co-conspirator and martyr, James Connolly.

It no longer seems so heroic to have provoked violence against a parliamentary democracy and slaughter among one’s own people, however much one may support an independent Ireland. Must it take another century before a comparable questioning of supposedly holy killing comes to dominate the Muslim world?

“A terrible beauty is born”, famously wrote Yeats. Actually, it was a terrible ugliness, and it is getting uglier.


Police have stepped up the search for an arsonist who targeted a Sydney fruit shop and have released CCTV footage of the store going up in flames.

The Casula shop was damaged by fire in the early hours of April 30 2014, and was gutted less than two months later in a second blaze, on June 14.

NSW Police on Tuesday released CCTV footage of the attacks showing a van ramming through the shop door followed by what appears to be an explosion, a man fleeing, and large clouds of smoke.

In a separate attack a man is seen appearing to pour the contents of a jerry can through a hole in the shop door before fire breaks out.

Police believe the fires are linked and wish to speak with a man shown in the footage wearing a white hooded jumper.

They're urging anyone with information to contact Crime Stoppers.

Summary: NSW Police have released footage of two blazes at a Sydney fruit shop in a bid to catch whoever is responsible.


Pangsau Pass, India-Myanmar border - India, China, Bangladesh and Myanmar plan to connect their volatile frontier regions with a transnational highway - one that Beijing ultimately aims to convert into an "economic corridor", involving huge investment in industry and tourism.

But amid misgivings in India and Myanmar, China has given up on using the World-War-II-era Stillwell Road, which some said was ideal because it merely required renovations.

Instead, officials from India and Myanmar have confirmed that Stillwell will only be used for limited cross-border trade between India's Assam and Arunachal Pradesh states and Myanmar's Sagaing and Kachin regions.

If we open this road, it can be adversely used against us during any war with China.

- J R Mukherji,Â Retired Lieutenant General

"The Stillwell Road will not form part of the the BCIM [Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar] highway," Rajeet Mitter, a career diplomat now heading an Indian study group evaluating the Chinese "economic corridor" proposal, told Al Jazeera.

"In all likelihood, this highway will follow the route taken by the BCIM car rally in February-March 2013."

The rally route was developed by interlinking existing national highways in each of the four countries.

Mitter has been consulting with stakeholders in eastern India about the project over the past few months, after former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh agreed to "joint research" for the proposed corridor during his last visit to China in October 2013.

During a recent consultation in Calcutta, former military officials strongly objected to using Stillwell as the northern arm of the BCIM highway.

Built by Allied Forces during World War II to supply China in its war with Japan, the 3026km Stillwell Road starts from the town of Ledo in Assam and enters Myanmar through the Pangsau Pass.

It traverses Myanmar's insurgency-ravaged Sagaing and Kachin states before winding into China's Yunnan province.

"If we open this road, it can be adversely used against us during any war with China," retired Lieutenant General J.R. Mukherji, former chief of staff of India's eastern army, told Al Jazeera.

China and India fought a month-long border war on the Himalayas in 1962, and the humiliating defeat of the Indian army still haunts soldiers and citizens alike.

Mukherji says in the event of any future war, China could use an opened Stillwell to better facilitate the movement of its own troops.

Indian commerce ministry officials say the road could also be used by the Chinese to dump cheap electronics and other consumer goods on India's under-developed northeast, where there is very little local manufacturing. Although others, including former Arunachal Pradesh Governor J J Singh, have spoken in favour of opening Stillwell for trade with China to boost local economies and spur investments in northeastern India, the fear of potential negative impacts has weighed heavily on Delhi.

Binoda Mishra, secretary-general of the Kolkata-Kunming Forum, set up decades ago to improve relations between India's and China's frontier regions, said Stillwell is "not in the BCIM connectivity map".

Rather, he suggested the BCIM highway would, like the rally route, originate in the Indian city of Calcutta, pass through Dhaka and Sylhet in Bangladesh, and then wind through Silchar in lower Assam state and Imphal in Manipur state before linking up to the highway leading to Mandalay, Myanmar.

It would continue on to Kunming, China, from there.

The situation has dismayed residents of upper Assam and eastern Arunachal Pradesh, where Stillwell begins.

"If the Stillwell Road was opened to trade with China, our local economy would boom," said Saroj Roy, chairman of the municipal committee running the coal town of Margherita, south of Stillwell's origin in Ledo. "We are sorry to hear that is not happening, and we request a rethink in Delhi."

The upper Assam region around Margherita is the only developed industrial zone in India's northeast, with rich tea, oil and coal industries, Roy told Al Jazeera. Ripunjoy Das, a local newspaper editor in upper Assam, said if the country opened trade with China via Stillwell, "Indian industrial groups would rush to our area to set up units for exporting to China."

RELATED:Â Indian tea tastes success in China

Assam's industries minister, Pradyut Bordoloi, agreed. "This is the best route for trading with China," he told Al Jazeera. "This will save our exporters huge transport costs and delivery time because China's eastern seaports are far away. And if the trade opened up with what is perhaps already the world's biggest economy, the spinoff to our area will be considerable."

Indeed, the removal of Stillwell as an option for the BCIM highway is bad news for the state of Assam, which is considered a pivot for northeastern India's industrialisation - but one whose growth has been seriously impeded in recent years by raging ethnic insurgencies, which have challenged India's control over the region.

"Indiaâ¦ intends to boost growth in the region, but if upper Assam misses out on the proposed BCIM economic corridor, it would be unfortunate," C.J. Thomas, northeast regional director of the Indian Council of Social Science Research, told Al Jazeera.Â

Reservations about using Stillwell, however, extend beyond India to Myanmar. The area in Myanmar around the historic road has been controlled for decades by ethnic rebels, including the Kachin Independence Army.

"The Myanmar government, now run by former generals, fear the benefits from cross-border trade through Stillwell Road will accrue to the rebels, so they are less than enthusiastic about opening it to India-China trade," Alok Sen, the former Indian ambassador to Myanmar, told Al Jazeera.

While parts of Stillwell are already paved, other parts remain undeveloped; the stretch from the Indian border into Myanmar is a dirt track, in which heavier vehicles often get stuck during the monsoon season.

At the Pangsau Pass, soldiers with India's paramilitary Assam Rifles force stand guard, although there is no customs or immigration unit.

"They are not yet needed here," soldier Havildar Suresh Kumar told Al Jazeera, as he checked to ensure Indian residents crossing the checkpoint had the necessary permits for travel along Stillwell.

"Trade here is small-scale and localised. Indians sell their goods twice a week inside the bazaar in Myanmarâ¦ and the Myanmarese do that twice a week in our bazaar here."

Unless Stillwell is opened to India-China trade, observers believe little will change on this road, which helped the Allied Forces transport thousands of tonnes of military hardware seven decades ago.

According to Naqeeb Ahmed, who heads the Northeast Initiative at the Confederation of Indian Industries: "It is a potential totally wasted."

Summary: Assam officials upset that WWII-era Stillwell Road won't be used in transnational highway linking four Asian nations.


With less than a year remaining in Barack Obama’s presidency, many observers are already focusing on the substantive elements of his legacy: ending the Great Recession, bringing affordable health care to millions, rescuing the American auto industry, restoring the nation’s international credibility, and so on.

But every president is judged not only by what they accomplish in office, but also what they bring to the presidency itself. What kind of people were they? What kind of leadership qualities did they demonstrate? How did they conduct themselves in one of the world’s most difficult jobs?

[O]ver the course of this campaign it feels as if there’s been a decline in behavioral standards across the board. Many of the traits of character and leadership that Obama possesses, and that maybe we have taken too much for granted, have suddenly gone missing or are in short supply. […]

Obama radiates an ethos of integrity, humanity, good manners and elegance that I’m beginning to miss, and that I suspect we will all miss a bit, regardless of who replaces him.

Brooks’ compelling case highlighted the president’s (1) “basic integrity” and ability to maintain a “remarkably scandal-free” administration; (2) sense of “basic humanity”; (3) “soundness in his decision-making process”; (4) “grace under pressure”; and (5) “resilient sense of optimism.”

It’s a welcome assessment, not just because it’s a Republican pundit praising a Democratic president, but because Brooks is entirely right about this aspect of the Obama era being taken for granted.

Though, once he leaves office, that’s likely to change.

But that line stood out for me because Obama might as well have been talking to the political world overall – because quite a few folks are likely to miss the president once he’s left the stage, for more reasons than one.

I include congressional Republicans among them, by the way. Sure, GOP lawmakers have nothing but contempt and disgust for the president, whom they hate with the heat of a thousand suns, but whether they realize it now or not, Obama has gone to almost comical lengths to compromise with them, meet them halfway on contentious issues, search for common ground, avoid questioning their motives or patriotism, and offer policy measures that were designed to appeal to the mainstream of both parties (before the radicalization of Republican politics).

I can’t say with any confidence what will happen on Election Day 2016, but I can say if President Hillary Clinton or President Bernie Sanders is inaugurated next year, his or her attitude towards Republicans will probably be less accommodating and less deferential than the current president’s.

More than a few GOP leaders on Capitol Hill might want to refer back to David Brooks’ column when they find themselves saying, “Maybe Obama wasn’t such a bad guy after all.”

Summary: "Obama radiates an ethos of integrity, humanity, good manners and elegance that I'm beginning to miss," a prominent center-right pundit argued today.


The humble houseplant is on the attack. Building on NASA experiments for air purification in space, scientists are pinpointing plant species—from the peace lily to the asparagus fern—that are particularly skillful at cleaning indoor air of pollutants that can cause a range of health problems.

A growing body of global research is showing plants can reduce dust particles and contaminants, such as formaldehyde and benzene, that come from cigarette smoke, paint, furniture, building materials and other sources. Big growers...

Summary: Scientists are working to pinpoint plant species, such as the peace lily, bamboo palm and devil's ivy, that are particularly proficient at removing specific pollutants from indoor air.


WASHINGTON — There are plenty of perks to being president of the United States. One of them is glamorous birthday parties.

For the past seven years, from the ages of 48 to 55, President Obama has celebrated the annual occasion with a growing collection of celebrities, sports stars, business executives, movie moguls and politicians — all dancing into the small hours of the morning.

On Friday night and well into Saturday, Mr. Obama did it again, celebrating his 55th birthday — his last as commander in chief — with a big White House party. East Wing staff members were told to expect to be working until 4 a.m. Guests were asked not to tweet pictures (some did anyway) or spill any details.

One birthday guest, who normally has a very good memory, insisted late Saturday that he had imbibed too much to remember a thing. (It’s not clear what the guest was drinking, but Mr. Obama favors extra-dry Grey Goose martinis.) Another birthday friend recalled only seeing Alonzo Mourning, a retired Miami Heat basketball star, and watching Stevie Wonder perform.

Magic Johnson tweeted a picture of himself and his wife on Friday evening. “Cookie and I getting ready to go to President Obama’s birthday party!” he wrote. The Rev. Al Sharpton tweeted at 1:10 a.m.: “Leaving the White House after the celebration of President Obama’s birthday. His last birthday as President.”

Others spotted at the White House before the party included the talk show host Ellen DeGeneres; Grant Hill, a former N.B.A. star; George Lucas, the creator of “Star Wars”; and a collection of former Obama aides and media celebrities. The singer-songwriter Nick Jonas tweeted afterward: “Tonight was a night I will never forget. #BarackObama #happybirthday.” Paul McCartney was also a guest.

The president has demonstrated little interest in the political schmoozing and official social life of the nation’s capital and spends hours each weeknight largely alone, working in his private office in the White House Treaty Room. It is safe to say that more than a decade ago, when he was a little-known state senator in Illinois, he would not have expected one of the Beatles to sing him “Happy Birthday.”

But like the Kennedys, the Reagans and the Clintons, the Obamas have reached outside Washington and embraced an elite, moneyed stratum of American life. In his second term, Mr. Obama has been going to, or hosting, small dinner parties with actors, intellectuals, scientists, tech giants and billionaires. Two years ago in Rome, the architect Renzo Piano, the particle physicist Fabiola Gianotti and the chairman of Fiat, John Elkann, were at his table.

The Obamas have also insisted on keeping the partying as secret as possible. Names of those invited to nonofficial parties at the White House are never made public, and what does come out is usually from tweets from guests, like Mr. Johnson and Mr. Sharpton.

In June 2015, Mr. Obama had a private party at the White House for 500 people, including Wall Street executives, Washington lobbyists, movie stars, members of his cabinet and others. Prince performed at the weekend bash, 10 months before his death from an accidental drug overdose.

The White House had not provided notice of the party on Mr. Obama’s public schedule, and when word leaked out — through a tweet by Mr. Sharpton that said, in part: “Awesome to see Prince and Stevie Wonder on keyboards together. Unbelievable experience.” — there was an outcry from the White House press corps.

The White House was unmoved. “The president and first lady are going to reserve the right to host private parties at the White House,” Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, said at the time.

This time, the White House made a formal announcement of the birthday party a few hours before it started. “This evening the first lady is hosting a 55th birthday celebration for the president at the White House,” a statement said. “The guest list includes a large number of family members and friends to mark the occasion. The private event will be paid for with the family’s personal funds.”

White House officials say all similar private events are paid for by the Obamas, though it is unclear whether those costs include security and staff workers, who would be on hand at the White House anyway.

But one thing is certain to change: The address for Mr. Obama’s next birthday party won’t say 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

The White House Letter article on Monday about President Obama’s 55th birthday party at the White House referred incorrectly to one musician who was a guest. While Paul McCartney attended the party, he did not perform.

A version of this article appears in print on August 8, 2016, on page A10 of the New York edition with the headline: A Classified Matter at the White House: Obama’s Star-Studded Galas. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe

Summary: President Obama’s 55th birthday party — which, like other private White House celebrations, was kept mostly secret — reflected his embrace of a glamorous stratum of American life.


A crowdfunding campaign to pay for a protest group's High Court legal challenge against WA's controversial Perth Freight Link project has raised $37,000 towards a $50,000 target in less than a week.

The gofundme campaign was set up by the Save Beeliar Wetlands group that has taken their fight against the federal-funded $1.9 billion highway extension to the High Court.

The new road aims to divert heavy trucks on to a direct route to Fremantle Port and will be the state's first toll road, but conservationists are up in arms as the first stage, known as Roe 8, will cut through the environmentally sensitive Beeliar wetlands.

Summary: A crowdfunding page has raised $37,000 on the way to a $50,000 target to finance a High Court challenge to West Australia's Roe 8 road.


An elderly woman has survived being struck by an express train in Sydney's west.

The woman, believed to be in her 70s, was on the tracks when she was hit at Granville station around 7.45am on Thursday.

She was taken to Westmead Hospital with suspected head injuries, and is in a stable condition, a hospital spokeswoman said.

NSW police said there were no suspicious circumstances.

Train services on five of the city's main lines were delayed for several hours while police investigated.

* Readers seeking support and information about suicide prevention can contact Lifeline on 13 11 14.

Summary: Sydney train commuters can expect delays on western lines after an elderly woman fell onto the tracks at Granville station.


Endangered animals might avoid hooking up with their close relatives in captive breeding programs with the help of a new software program.

Swinger, which was created by researchers at Adelaide's Flinders University, can determine how closely related various animals are using an algorithm that compares their DNA markers.

The software aims to identify and increase genetic diversity in breeding programs, especially for wild animals that have multiple partners and whose family lines can be difficult to trace.

"Genetic diversity is important to conserve as it has developed through evolution, making a species what it is now," Flinders University molecular ecology professor Luciano Beheregaray said.

"It allows individuals of that species to survive, reproduce, and adapt to environmental changes."

The software is being offered free online and is first being used on a rare kind of rainbowfish only found in northern Queensland's Running River.

The fish is being swamped out of existence by the illegal introduction of another more common variety.

The University of Canberra's Peter Unmack, who is trying to save the endangered fish, said Swinger had helped him form several ideal breeding groups.

"The breeding groups have been highly successful, producing thousands of fingerlings that we have begun releasing to the wild," he said.

"It is still a work in progress, but it is looking positive."

Flinders University has already been contacted by others interested in exploring the technology, including a turtle centre at the Galapagos Islands.

Summary: Humans have Tinder but animals now have Swinger, a new software program to help their breeders find them ideal mates - who aren't in their close family.


BETTING against Elon Musk is surely a fool’s game. As co-founder or inspiration of a string of technical successes—PayPal, SpaceX, SolarCity and Tesla Motors—the Silicon Valley billionaire has, time and again, proved naysayers in established fields wrong and left them scrambling to catch up.On September 16th Mr Musk’s scrappy upstart SpaceX (short for Space Exploration Technologies Corporation) of Hawthorne, California, won a $2.6 billion contract from NASA to build and operate spacecraft for ferrying astronauts to the International Space Station. The only other firm to be selected was the long-standing aerospace heavyweight Boeing, which has had a hand in building every manned American spacecraft since before astronauts walked on the Moon.This came on the heels of news that Nevada had voted to grant Mr Musk $1.3 billion worth of tax credits and other benefits to ensure he builds Tesla’s $5 billion “gigafactory” for making lithium-ion batteries for its electric-vehicle (EV) programme near Reno. Panasonic of Japan, Tesla’s partner in the lithium-ion venture, had already promised $1 billion towards the humongous plant. Tesla will build and manage the gigafactory and occupy half the premises to assemble battery packs for its electric vehicles. Panasonic will use the other half for manufacturing the thousands of lithium-ion cells that go into each pack.Two innovations have contributed greatly to Tesla’s success, and distinguish its EVs from all others. The first, and most significant, is that its electric cars are capable of travelling 250 miles (400km) or more on a single charge, where other EVs manage between 75 and 110 miles at most. That puts Tesla’s electric vehicles more on a par with conventional petrol- or diesel-engined cars, and greatly reduces the “range anxiety” that plagues owners of other EVs.Tesla’s second distinguishing feature is that its EVs use thousands of standard laptop cells, rather than several hundred much larger and pricier proprietary units. In Tesla’s case, the small, cylindrical “18650” lithium-ion cells (so called because each is 18mm in diameter and 65mm long) are wired together to form a flat battery pack that stretches beneath the floor of the vehicle. The pack can be detached from the car’s underside and a fresh one bolted on in minutes. So far, no such battery-exchange service has been offered. But the option is there if needed.The biggest advantage of using standard 18650 cells is that they are a commodity item. Over the years, all surplus cost has been squeezed out of them by the sheer scale and competitiveness of the laptop business. Even on the retail market, 18650 lithium-ion cells can be had for as little as $4 a piece. Tesla probably buys them wholesale for less than half that price.Apart from cost, there are technical advantages of using 18650 cells. Because they are small, they can shed heat rapidly. By pumping liquid coolant between them, Tesla can remove any heat produced so quickly that all individual cells are kept within a few degrees of one another. As well as preventing any damaged cell that overheats from affecting others, being able to keep all of them cool makes charging easier, improves reliability and lengthens battery life. It also allows more energy-dense materials to be used—which, in turn, reduces their weight and increases the vehicle’s range. One further advantage is that, because the liquid-cooling system itself has temperatrure sensors, the safety circuitry normally built into each lithium-ion cell—to prevent thermal runaway and the possibility of fire—is no longer necessary. That makes Tesla’s 18650 cells cheaper still to manufacture.While all EV makers are notoriously shy about revealing the costs of their lithium-ion batteries, the consensus figure for the industry is between $400 and $500 per kilowatt-hour. Given its unique advantages, Tesla is probably nearer $350/kWh. If that is the case, the 85kWh battery in its Model S probably costs around $30,000—cheap, but still over a third the basic price of the vehicle. Tesla’s task now is to get battery costs down to less than $250/kWh.This is where the gigafactory comes in. When in full production, the plant will be capable of producing 35 gigawatt-hours worth of lithium-ion cells a year—more than the world's entire production of lithium-ion cells last year. When these are assembled into battery packs, they could provide power sources for 500,000 EVs.That is an awful lot, for J.D Power and Associates, a market research firm in California, expects EVs to make up less than 2% (ie, 1.3m) of all new cars bought around the world by 2020. Clearly, Mr Musk thinks the numbers add up. In 2013, his company sold around 20,000 Model S cars, its sole product at the moment. Having started to deliver vehicles to China and Europe, Model S sales could edge up towards 30,000 this year. From now on, though, the going will get tough. Carmakers such as Audi, BMW, Cadillac, Mercedes and Porsche have introduced luxury EVs of their own that will go head-to-head with the Model S.But Tesla is more than a one-trick pony. In late 2015, it will launch its more affordable Model X, an SUV which will be built alongside the Model S at Tesla’s assembly plant in Fremont, California, sharing many of the same components as well as the battery system. Following a recent expansion, the assembly line there can now produce up to 56,000 vehicles a year.That will be the upper limit of Tesla’s sales until its third-generation EV, the Model III, arrives in 2017. It is not clear where this will be assembled, but a dedicated line for 100,000 units a year has been specified. With an entry price of $35,000, the Model III is to have a range of at least 200 miles and compete in the executive (rather than luxury) segment of the market alongside such conventional vehicles as the BMW 3-series, Audi A4 and Mercedes C-class. If everything goes according to plan, adding the Model III to its line-up could raise Tesla’s total output to 150,000 units a year.Hence the need for the gigafactory. Tesla already accounts for a large proportion of its suppliers’ output of 18650 cells. Panasonic recently built a new battery factory in Japan to help meet Tesla’s future demand. Even so, Tesla could face a serious shortage of lithium-ion cells if the gigafactory is delayed in any way.At this point, Babbage admits he is a bit lost. The circle he has trouble squaring is the difference between a plant capable of producing 500,000 battery packs a year, and Tesla’s likely output of less than a third that number of EVs. The cavernous plant could, of course, be run on one shift instead of three. But that would defeat the object of using its economies of scale to drive the cost of batteries down by at least a third.Tesla could always add other EVs to its range—a panel van, a sportscar (to replace Tesla’s original Roadster), or even an urban runabout like the Mercedes Smartcar. But none would mop up anything like enough spare capacity to change things significantly.There is always the chance that Tesla could become a big supplier of lithium-ion battery packs to other EV makers. The company already provides a limited number to Mercedes and Toyota (both of which have minority stakes in Tesla) for a couple of their small EVs. For wider acceptance, though, many proud names in the automobile industry would have to eat crow and admit they had chosen the wrong lithium-ion form-factor. That is unlikely to happen.Then there is the possibility of selling “grid-storage” batteries to electrical utilities—for buffering the unpredictable nature of renewable wind and solar energy. SolarCity, a company closely associated with Tesla, has talked also about producing solar panels with battery packs for consumers to install at home. However, neither the residential nor the utility market can be considered volume businesses.The whole point of Tesla’s gigafactory was to use its vast economies of scale to drive down battery costs—so the forthcoming Model III could be competitively priced at around $35,000. To achieve the promised 200-mile range, the Model III will need at least 60kWh of battery capacity. (The Nissan Leaf, somewhat smaller than the proposed vehicle, gets 75 miles from its 24kWh battery.) If Tesla’s battery costs remain over $300kWh, the Model III’s pack is going to cost around $20,000. And if that is the case, no way can Tesla sell the Model III for the price quoted without losing money. At $250/kWh, the Model III will begin to make a profit, and at $200/kWh Tesla will be rolling in it. Assuming, of course, cheap natural gas has not slammed the brakes on all EV sales by then.The one thing to be said about Mr Musk is that, no matter the challenge, he has always delivered. Babbage is a keen admirer of his achievements in space as well as on the road, and sincerely hopes he is wrong about Tesla’s fortunes. He has cast longing eyes at the Model S on numerous occasions. A much cheaper Model III could be right up his street.

Summary: Has Elon Musk bitten off more than he can chew with his Tesla for the masses?


Paul Nash is arguably the greatest war artist Britain has produced. The works that first earned him real renown, We Are Making a New World and The Menin Road, are iconic images of the trenches: with their splintered tree stumps and lumpy mud seas, they shockingly captured the annihilation of nature at bomb-blasted Ypres and Passchendaele. Nash found a new style of art to represent a new horror. Two and half decades later, more esteemed than ever and a war artist once again, he painted the unforgettable ocean graveyard of crashed German planes, Totes Meer.

Nash is also one of the most interesting British landscape painters of the 20th century, much loved for his pictures that divine the “spirit” of Avebury, Wittenham Clumps and other English places with which he felt a strong, almost mystical, connection. His work Wood on the Downs (1929), a study of beech trees and chalklands, has been subject to constant reproduction since first exhibited, and its popularity is unsurprising: it is a hugely pleasing coming together of Englishness and modernistic art. His pictures found a refreshing, contemporary way to express a deeply felt communion with the English countryside – trees, paths, birds, hills.

Nash’s transformations of reality were the product of a visionary sensibility that harked back to William Blake and Samuel Palmer; he searched for inner meanings in the landscape, what he called the “things behind”. Yet he also was constantly on the lookout, as he said, for “a different angle of vision”, and as such was alert to the new movements transforming art on the continent, including abstraction and surrealism. His solutions to the problem of how to represent the forms and patterns of nature changed throughout his career. One thing stayed the same, however: his pictures are strange, unsettling and rather melancholy, and are so appealing precisely because of their strangeness.

It is impossible to consider Nash without the influence on him of modernism, which began as early as the 1917-18 war pictures with the zig-zag vorticism of Christopher Nevinson – geometric planes and night skies sliced by searchlight beams. Nash’s engagement with abstraction and surrealism took different routes through the late 1920s and 30s – in the exceptional Winter Sea, for example, begun in the mid-20s in Dymchurch, Kent, where moonlit waves become recessive straight lines and firm-edged blocks of colour.

The dreamscapes of Magritte and De Chirico redirected his 1930s work – Blue House on the Shore is lovely and disquieting, seemingly conjured in a reverie; while one oil, Nocturnal Landscape, seemed so Freudian that Nash said its interpretation would offer “jam for the psycho boys”. Equivalents of the Megaliths is different again, a meeting of deep history and maths: the standing stones at Avebury are reimagined as solid, abstract forms – cylinders, a girder and a white gridded screen – set down in a Wiltshire cornfield.

While critics have recognised this engagement with modernism, many have preferred to dwell on Nash as a painter with a personal response to landscape, and to emphasise that his version of continental experimentalism was thoroughly domesticated. Several of the newspaper reviews of the last major Nash exhibition, at Tate Liverpool in 2003, were typical in suggesting that he is best seen as part of an English tradition, that his efforts at surrealism are clunky (a Betjemanesque version of Magritte), and that the cubism he practised was merely a decorative, salon variety. His interest in abstraction and surrealism was not at his core, it has been argued, and such borrowed styles conflicted with his native gift.

The exhibition about to open at Tate Britain challenges this head on. With over 160 works (the biggest show since the 1975 Tate retrospective), it is large enough to accommodate any interpretation of Nash, but it underlines his importance as a pioneering figure of the British avant garde. Here he is not only a romantic individual communing with the land, but a highly varied artist at the centre of networks of experimental creators. According to the curator Emma Chambers, the goal “is not simply to move consideration of his art beyond the war work, but also to show aspects of his work beyond landscape. In the 1930s, still life, surrealism, found objects are all areas that Nash explored, and this is also a moment when he expanded his use of media into photography, collage and assemblage.” The effect is to round out a major artist and make him even more beguiling.

Unsettling and melancholy, Nash’s pictures are so appealing precisely because of their strangeness

In his writings of the late 1920s and early 30s, Chambers points out, Nash attacked the insularity of British art, and robustly defended abstraction; he was clearly on the side of the experimenters. Looking for new inspiration, he castigated what he called the “safety first” tendency of domestic art; the French, on the other hand, had “reached out, they have real mental daring”. Over a decade, he responded with vigour to the ideas of Picasso, Cocteau, Ernst and other leading continental figures.

Three episodes in his career are given special consideration in the new Tate show. In 1933, Nash helped found Unit One, a group that included the artists Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and Edward Burra and the modernist architect Wells Coates. Announcing its creation, Nash wrote that “Unit One may be said to stand for the expression of a truly contemporary spirit”; an exhibition toured the country over the next couple of years. A room at the Tate brings together works from the Unit One artists, and showcases their catalogue. Though it remains difficult now to apprehend just how embattled they felt – what outliers they were in the English art world of the 1930s – this is a valuable attempt to relive what Chambers calls “an important moment” for Nash, “staking out a place for modernist art in an unsympathetic environment”.

Three years later, Nash was an organiser of the International Surrealist Exhibition in London, which featured Dalí, André Breton and Miró, and caused something of a stir. One article dubbed Nash “English surrealist-in-chief”. The Tate gives this episode some prominence too, and includes treatises on surrealism published at the time, as well as a number of Nash’s paintings that were on display to the thousands of intrigued visitors in 1936. In one of these, Harbour and Room, a Magrittian meditation on sleep, dreams and death, a ship sails into an interior space and water laps towards a fireplace and mirrored wall. Outside meets inside, and it is odd indeed.

Nash had a passionate affair in the mid-1930s with the surrealist artist Eileen Agar; together they looked about them, in town and country, for suggestive shapes and juxtapositions. The Tate presents a number of her photographs and objects (rocks, shells, wood, bones) alongside those of Nash, not least to highlight the variety of the nature art he was making – partly thanks to her. Found objects played a central role in many of his best-known surrealist works, for instance in Event on the Downs the gnarly tree stump and giant tennis ball in front of the white cliffs of the Dorset coast – where Nash and Agar first met.

Asked to identify two significant lesser-known works in the Tate show, Chambers first identifies the urban still life Dead Spring from 1929, which depicts a dead pot plant and set of drawing instruments on the window sill of Nash’s London flat overlooking an empty St Pancras advertising hoarding. This is the “observed reality”, but the canvas is also a working through of cubist ideas of overlapping planes and multiple viewpoints.

Chambers’s second choice is the amusing Forest (1936-7), a surrealist wooden relief “made from glove stretchers slotted into a wooden backing; the stretchers metamorphose into tree forms while continuing to suggest hands”. The work reflects Nash’s interest in Ernst, who also metamorphosed landscapes and natural objects into “strange and contradictory states”.

Nash’s official identification with the surrealist movement was short-lived, though its ideas lasted longer. That it spoke to him at all was no doubt because he always had a kind of surrealist sensibility, one that emerged in his earliest paintings (“Surrealism found me,” he later claimed). From the beginning, after a mentor advised him to “go in for Nature”, his work had a metaphorical quality, with things standing in for or implying something else (“I have tried … to paint trees as though they were human beings,” he said).

The first room of the Tate exhibition has a dozen or so of the delightfully spooky ink and watercolour works that the young Nash made in 1911-13, and the lines of continuity between, say, The Pyramids in the Sea and his later work are clear to see. Here already is a kind of tension of opposites: a peculiar meeting of geometry and stormy waves, it shows the influence of Blake and Yeats and symbolism; Nash at the time described the eclipsed moonlight as “uncanny”.

Then came the war, which was slow to affect him, but when it did caused emotional devastation. The Tate show doesn’t include many of his wartime works but has several of the most important ones; it is a testament to their power that they remain disturbing despite their familiarity. When 25-year-old Lieutenant Nash first arrived at the Ypres trenches in the spring of 1917 he wrote home expressing something like ecstasy. As an artist drawn to new ways of seeing nature and landscape, the battlefields offered a strange vision – “wonderful ruinous forms”. And in fields pocked with shell holes, with trees torn to shreds and reeking of poison gas, flowers bloomed everywhere: “This place is just joyous, the dandelions are bright gold over the parapet.”

Late in May, he fell heavily, broke a rib and was sent home. Just a few days later, his unit was engaged in an offensive and was almost wiped out; he knew how lucky he had been. When he returned to Flanders in the aftermath of Passchendaele, this time as an official war artist, he no longer found any trace of beauty or rejuvenation. That was when he wrote the haunting, often quoted letter to his wife, Margaret, that is on display at the Tate:

I have seen the most frightful nightmare of a country more conceived by Dante or Poe than by nature, unspeakable, utterly indescribable … Sunset and sunrise are blasphemous, they are mockeries to man … The rain drives on, the stinking mud becomes more evilly yellow … the black dying trees ooze and sweat and the shells never cease … I am no longer an artist interested and curious, I am a messenger … Feeble, inarticulate, will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth, and may it burn their lousy souls.

The years after the Armistice were difficult; Nash was, in his own description, a “war artist without a war”; he suffered a nervous collapse, and was visited by terrible images; poison gas had damaged his lungs. What’s more, he had money worries and enemies in the art world. With the exception of the angular bleakness of The Shore and other Dymchurch paintings, along with his illustrations for an edition of Genesis, his work during much of the 1920s indicates he took a long time to recuperate.

Late in the decade he started to respond to a new visual stimulus, as exhibitions of avant-garde international art began to be staged in London. His imagination was set free once more. A man who had a fervent attachment to the English land but never a settled home, he lived in various locations – Iden, Rye, Swanage, Hampstead – finding particular places that spoke to him and new ways of representing them. Even after his most obvious surrealist phase was over, he continued to think about “objects as personages”, for instance in his late-1930s photos of animal-like fallen trees, which he called ‘“monsters”. During his life he identified different kinds of monsters, from rusted anchors to Dorset dinosaurs to bomber planes; it was another way of rendering the English pastoral uncanny.

The disorientations of surrealism also prepared him for painting the wreckage of shot-down German planes when another war arrived in 1939 and he was attached to the RAF and Air Ministry. The Tate exhibition includes photos he took of the twisted metal carcasses of wrecked enemy aircraft at a vast dump at Cowley, near Oxford. These fed directly into Totes Meer, and are of more interest than Nash’s more naturalistic and propagandist pictures of planes. The set piece Battle of Britain, with its swooping vapour trails against vivid blue, and Battle of Germany, with its fiery explosion-red sky and huge moon, are among his late masterpieces, though given their subject matter they seem to offer almost too much beauty.

Nash painted right up to his death in 1946, and the work in the final room of this marvellous show is bold and surprising, and certainly visionary – how else to describe a huge sunflower head spinning down a hill, or a great magnolia flying in the sky? He had been ill for a while, and the “aerial flowers” were a presentiment of death, though the sun paintings refer to eternal cycles of nature and rebirth. These late pictures are less cerebral, and have an air about them of letting go; the brushwork is freer too. The direct influence of modernism was now in the past, but he was caught up, as ever, in looking at the world and seeing patterns and mysterious “things behind”. An artist both full of wonder and wonderful, knowing the end was near, painted pictures that were stranger than ever.

• Paul Nash opens at Tate Britain, London SW1, on 26 October. tate.org.uk/visit/tate-britain.

Summary: Nash lost his heart to the English countryside – and his illusions in two world wars. A major retrospective coming to Tate Britain gives a more complete picture of a modern master


THE low point came in 1997, a year before personal computers and the Internet came to the libraries of Terrebonne Parish, a swatch of bayou country in South Louisiana, where people make their living on the water, harvesting shrimp and crabs or servicing oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. Four of the nine branch libraries had been shut down for lack of funds, and the main library, a dreary concrete-slab building that locals nicknamed "the bomb shelter," needed repairs and books.

Today, the Terrebonne Parish main library is a year-old spacious postmodern building of red brick and skylights, built on a former sugar cane plantation. There are 81 computers linked to the Internet, all with high-speed connections, in the parish libraries. Three of the closed branches have been reopened.

Technology, to be sure, is only part of the story. The arrival of the first few dozen Internet-connected computers in 1998 - courtesy of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation - brought people in and helped revive community interest in the libraries. Local leaders saw an opportunity and ran with it. They put a one-quarter-cent sales tax on the ballot for the parish libraries, a proposal that narrowly passed in 1998. That provided the funds for the new library, 81 computers, more staffing and a 10-fold increase in the annual book budget.

"Before we had the Internet and this building, the library was not considered a winner," said Mary Cosper LeBoeuf, the head librarian. "But now it is."

This bayou parish is a showcase, an example of how a major institution like the American public library has been transformed by an Internet connection. (The impact on corporations, schools and government has been significant, too; for each of those institutions, the Internet has been a tool to further its main purpose - making money, educating people and delivering services.) For the library, supplying patrons with access to the Internet and the Web has become central to its mission, an updating of its long tradition of providing information free to the public.

The transition has come quickly. In 1996, 28 percent of all libraries had PC's for public access to the Internet. Now, 95 percent of libraries offer Internet access. The Gates foundation accelerated the trend. There are now more than 120,000 Internet-connected PC's for public use in municipal libraries nationwide. Since 1998, the foundation has installed or paid for more than 47,000 PC's. The raw numbers somewhat overstate how many of the foundation-sponsored machines are currently in use. (In Terrebonne Parish, for example, the 35 Gates foundation computers have been replaced by newer PC's purchased by the library.)

But the computer count alone may well understate the influence of the Gates foundation, librarians an academic experts say. Beyond PC's and cash, they point out, the foundation also provided leadership, training and a simplified recipe for using and maintaining PC's in public libraries.

And Internet-connected computers are clearly bringing more people into libraries. A year after computers are put in libraries that do not have them, visits rise 30 percent on the average and attendance typically remains higher, according to a study led by Andrew C. Gordon, a professor of public policy at the University of Washington. Over the last six years, visits to the nation's 16,400 public libraries have increased more than 17 percent, a trend that can be partly attributed to the spread of computers with Internet access.

Critics say the Gates foundation's library program is a Microsoft marketing exercise masquerading as philanthropy. The foundation does not require recipient libraries to use the program's preferred package of software - Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office and other Microsoft products - but 83 percent have opted for the bundle recommended by the foundation.

"Sure, there is a huge self-interest, but when you look at what the Gates foundation has accomplished it is fairly phenomenal," said Charles R. McClure, a professor of information studies at Florida State University. "The impact has been especially important in rural and inner-city libraries."

Summary: Public libraries have been transformed over the last decade as Internet-connected computers have increased their traffic  and, in some cases, even their book budgets.


Ayn Rand, the writer and philosopher of objectivism who espoused ''rational selfishness'' and capitalism unbound, died yesterday morning at her home on East 34th Street. She was 77 years old and a longtime resident of New York.

Miss Rand was perhaps best known for her novels ''The Fountainhead'' of 1943, for which she wrote the screenplay when it was turned into a movie with Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal, and ''Atlas Shrugged,'' published in 1957. From the 1960's on, she increasingly devoted herself to expounding her views more directly, in such books as ''The Virtue of Selfishness'' (1965) and ''Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal'' (1966).

She also served as editor of The Objectivist, a monthly journal, from 1962 to 1971 and wrote The Ayn Rand Letter from 1971 to 1976. Her philosophy of objectivism holds that only individual ability and effort account for real achievement and that laissez-faire capitalism provides the optimal environment for talent. Her view of selfishness as a virtue and altruism as a vice was a reversal of the traditional Judeo-Christian ethic.

'Man as a Heroic Being'

Her detractors decried objectivism as the deification of selfishness. But Miss Rand, its founder, asserted that she had never advocated the ''pursuit of mindless self-interest at all cost.''

The concept of rational selfishness ran counter to altruism. Miss Rand despised altruism as personal weakness and believed it responsible for much of the world's dishonesty and misery.

''My philosophy, in essence,'' Miss Rand once wrote, ''is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity and reason as his only absolute.''

It was during the 1970's that Miss Rand, giving lectures across the country, attracted the attention of a new generation of students who believed in unfettered freedom and made her something of a cult figure in libertarian circles.

Miss Rand spurned the libertarians as a ''random collection of emotional hippies-of-the-right who seek to play at politics without philosophy,'' as she put it in a letter to the editor of The New York Times in 1976. She proclaimed herself a supporter of President Gerald R. Ford because, she wrote, he was ''the most honest defender of free enterprise.''

At the same time, Miss Rand declared that she was ''profoundly opposed'' to Ronald Reagan and his Presidential ambitions. ''Since he denies the right to abortion, he cannot be a defender of any rights,'' she wrote. ''Since he has no program and no ideology to offer, his likeliest motive for entering the Presidential race is power lust.''

It remained unclear whether she changed her mind about Mr. Reagan once he became President. Miss Rand, whose first name rhymed with ''pine,'' shied away from reporters in recent years, fearful that they were hostile to her philosophy and would distort her views.

Miss Rand's views were much in demand in 1974, when President Richard M. Nixon named Alan Greenspan, the economics consultant, to become chairman of his Council of Economic Advisers. It turned out that Miss Rand had been the mentor and a 20-year close friend to Mr. Greenspan.

Miss Rand helped persuade the somewhat reluctant Mr. Greenspan to join the Government so he could put their confidence in the capitalist spirit into action. ''I helped Alan to analyze what was involved,'' she told an interviewer that year. ''But, of course, the decision was his own.''

Ayn Rand was born Feb. 2, 1905, in St. Petersburg, now Leningrad, and graduated from the University of Leningrad in 1924, two years before she came to the United States and headed for Hollywood to work as a movie extra and junior screenwriter. At that time, she met Charles Francis O'Connor, an artist, on a movie set and married him in 1929. Mr. O'Connor died in 1979 in New York.

Miss Rand came to New York in 1929 to work for RKO Pictures, starting as a filing clerk and becoming office head in the wardrobe department. Through the 1930's, she began her career as a screenwriter for Universal Pictures, Paramount Pictures and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

She also worked without pay in 1937 as a typist for Eli Jacques Kahn, the architect, in New York in order to do the research for her novel, ''The Fountainhead.'' The story was that of an architect, later portrayed by Gary Cooper, who blew up his construction project when he found that its design had been adulterated by others. It also served as a vehicle for her presentation of her hero as the stubborn and lonely individualist.

As her novel took shape, she continued as a screenwriter, working six months each year under contract to the movie companies. She took the next six months off to write that and other books as well as a play, ''Night of January 16th,'' which was revived as ''Penthouse Legend'' in New York in 1973.

From 1951 until her death, she worked full time as a writer and lecturer. Her last completed book, ''Philosophy: Who Needs It,'' will be published in November. An associate, Leonard Peikoff, said last night that she also was about one-quarter into the script for a television mini-series based on her novel ''Atlas Shrugged.''

Her last public appearance was last November in New Orleans at a conference sponsored by the National Committee for Monetary Reform. Miss Rand leaves no immediate survivors. Visitors may call at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Home, Madison Avenue at 81st Street, tomorrow from 7 to 9 P.M. Burial will be on Tuesday at 1 P.M. at Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, N.Y., where her husband was buried in 1979.

Summary: Ayn Rand, the writer and philosopher of objectivism who espoused '‘rational selfishness’' and capitalism unbound, died yesterday morning at her home on East 34th Street.


Big change in the air in the world of publishing.

Michael Crichton, Anne Rice, John LeCarre, Tom Wolfe, William Safire, Sidney Sheldon, Judith Krantz, Danielle Steel, not to mention Vice President Gore, Jimmy Carter, Ronald and Nancy Reagan and the Pope are among the people who could suddenly find themselves clients of William Morris if the venerable talent agency ends up merging with deal makers Mort Janklow and Lynn Nesbit.

William Morris isn't commenting. Janklow maintains the rumored merger "is an exciting possibility, but not exciting reality. I'm not currently in discussions with anybody."

But we hear that Janklow and Nesbit had at least one hush-hush meeting with William Morris honchos Lou Weiss and Walt Zifkin and Weiss and Zifkin have put the proposed marriage before the WM board.

Reaction in the suites of WM, which swallowed Hollywood's Triad Artists a few years ago, has reportedly been mixed.

WM's top agents are said to be intrigued by the thought of JN's stars joining their own stable of best sellers:Tom Clancy, Gore Vidal, Dominick Dunne, Jackie Collins, Barbara Taylor Bradford, Dean Koontz, Ivana Trump and Susan Isaacs.

But West Coast sources say some noses at WM are out of joint because Weiss and Zifkin supposedly were slow to tell some fellow board members about their talks.

Then there's the question of what Janklow and Nesbit expect to be paid for their authors, particularly since the 65-year-old Janklow, who underwent heart bypass surgery last winter, may be getting ready to cash out. If Janklow bolts, so might his writers.

"Authors like to determine their own destiny," notes a publishing insider.

WM agents whose jobs are safe may still bridle at answering to new bosses. Joni Evans, for example. Janklow was a friendly witness for her ex-husband, former Simon & Schuster head Dick Snyder, in their divorce. What's more, Evans now dates Nesbit's ex-boyfriend, author Stan Pottinger.

Evans declined to comment. Janklow insisted, "I'm having a wonderful time right where I am. Of course I don't want to foreclose on anything in the future."

The Copeland brothers Stewart, Ian and Miles grew up wild as the sons of a CIA agent in Beirut, and they brought that rough-and-tumble attitude to rock and roll. In Ian's new book, "Wild Thing" (Simon & Schuster), the rock impresario says his brother Stewart, the drummer for the Police and Sting, frequently had wrestling matches that got serious. So serious that Stewart broke Sting's rib just before they went onstage at Shea Stadium.

In his book, a primer for anyone wanting to make it in the music business, Ian also writes how the Sex Pistols helped them solve a little personal problem.

A friend of theirs had sublet a gigantic apartment in the Mayfair section of London to Lady Georgina Campbell on the understanding she'd only stay a short time.

But Campbell wouldn't leave, and the friend called the Copeland boys for help. They moved into the apartment, and purposely began inviting undesirable people over to party.

It so happens that Stewart Copeland met Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten before they'd been discovered on a men's room line one day.

"Stewart, thinking they'd be a perfect contribution to our efforts to terrorize Lady Georgina Campbell, invited them to one of our wild parties at our Mayfair pad. He told them to bring all their friends."

The lads showed up with a gang, got into a fight over what music should be played, and pogoed into the night. Lady Campbell packed her bags soon after.

South African President Nelson Mandela will come to the premiere here Oct. 23 of "Cry the Beloved Country," which will benefit his charity, Friends of the Nelson Mandela Children's Fund. The Miramax film is the first major motion picture filmed in democratic South Africa. Hillary Rodham Clinton, Whoopi Goldberg, Denzel Washington and Spike Lee are among the chairs for the gala. . . .

And Mrs. Clinton will be at the N.Y. home of Revlon billionaire Ronald Perelman and his wife, Patricia Duff, to benefit the N.Y. State Democratic Committee, chaired by Judith Hope, Nov. 2. Duff may yet convert her Independent husband to the Democrats. . . .

More on O.J.: He didn't waste any time selling pix of him and his kids to Star Magazine for a cool million. He had to put Jason and Sydney in front of the tabloid's cameras just hours after his release in order for the pix to make the magazine's Wednesday morning deadline. Peter Burt, the son-in-law of owner Peter Callahan, handled the controversial story himself . . .

Hugh Grant hasn't exactly mended his ways. While girlfriend Liz Hurley was away filming "The Spear" in South Africa, Grant was causing a stir in the London clubs. He told British model Nicola Peel at one that she looked "very erotic" in her tight pink jeans . . .

Jerry Della Femina's appetite for restaurants continues to grow. The adman already owns a celeb-packed restaurant and deli in East Hampton. Now he means to go beak-to-beak with Colonel Sanders by opening two Pudgie's chicken franchises probably in Riverhead, L.I., and Greenwich, Conn.

Della Femina and his wife, Judy Licht, are moving into an E. 63d St. townhouse now that casino owner Steve Wynn has bought their Fifth Ave. apartment . . .

Come out of the closet better dressed! Lucky Cheng's will change its coat check to a thrift shop Oct. 11. Patrons will have three minutes to change into a new ensemble before being displayed to the crowd. Voluntary donations will benefit Housing Works. If your waiter isn't an Asian-American drag queen, you're in the wrong place.


BY GEORGE RUSH AND JOANNA MOLLOY With Suzanne Rozdeba and Ben Widdicombe

Friday, January 24th 2003, 7:58AM

The 30th anniversary of the Supreme Court's landmark Roe v. Wade decision has celebrity Bush-bashers on the offensive.

On Tuesday, Ed Harris questioned the President's maturity.

"Being a man, I have got to say that we got this guy in the White House who thinks he is a man, who projects himself as a man because he has a certain masculinity," the actor said at a NARAL Pro-Choice America gala in Washington.

"He's a good old boy, he used to drink, and he knows how to shoot a gun and how to drive a pickup truck. That is not the definition of a man."

Harris' dig prompted cheers from a crowd that included Kathleen Turner, Tipper and Karenna Gore, Ossie Davis and Madeleine Albright.

Other stars took aim at Bush's right-to-life stance at a Planned Parenthood gala on Thursday.

"We are in dire jeopardy of losing the right to choose," Camryn Manheim told us. "Soon Justices [John Paul] Stevens and [Sandra Day] O'Connor, who are pro-choice, are going to retire. Bush will nominate two pro-life judges, and therefore Roe v. Wade will be overturned. That will be devastating."

"This Supreme Court chose [President] Bush," agreed Cybill Shepherd, who is about to star as Martha Stewart in a TV movie directed by ex-lover Peter Bogdanovich. "They are clearly capable of dooming Roe v. Wade."

"Sex and the City" stars Sarah Jessica Parker, Kristin Davis and Kim Cattrall said they were proud of their show's episode dealing with abortion.

"For me, it was incredible that it was [in the script]," said Cattrall. "Out of the four characters, two of them were actually stating that they had abortions. We dealt with it in a mature, conscious way."

"I don't do enough of this [activism] in my life," said Diane Keaton, proud to be there. "I stay home and I look at the TV."

Elizabeth Hurley doesn't mind a guy experienced in the ways of makin' rupee.

Hurley may have turned down the $2.8 million offered by real-estate heir Steve Bing, her estranged boyfriend, for the support of their son, Damian. But the darkly handsome fellow canoodling with Liz at the Christian Dior fashion show in Paris this week was Arun Nayar, heir to an Indian textile and mail-order empire.

Word is Nayar recently split with his gorgeous Italian wife, Valentina.

Author Candace Bushnell met him last year at the wedding of his brother Niki, general manager of OTTO-AGN, the family's Bombay-based business.

"They're both lovely guys," says Bushnell.

As for Bing, some people won't let him forget that he asked for a DNA test to establish that he was Damian's dad. Actor Jerry O'Connell tells interviewer Robin Milling that every time Bing stopped by the set of "Kangaroo Jack," which Bing co-wrote, O'Connell and co-star Anthony Anderson would sing Michael Jackson's "Billy Jean."

"We were like, 'The kid is not my son!' "

"He's one of the richest men and he couldn't afford a condom?" jokes O'Connell. "You gotta tease people."

Carmen Electra and her fiance, ex-Chili Pepper and Jane's Addiction guitar ace Dave Navarro, are keen to begin breeding.

"I've had two dreams lately that I'm pregnant," she told us Wednesday before she joined Jaime Pressly onstage at Irving Plaza in the burlesque show "Pussycat Dolls." "It's really been on my mind lately."

And what does Dave think?

"He said, 'Anytime you're ready!' "

Electra added, "We're planning an engagement party in Los Angeles on Valentine's Day. Just friends and family. It'll be my most romantic Valentine's Day ever."

Also at the show was Cris Judd, whose divorce from Jennifer Lopez becomes final on Sunday. (Some reports claim he'll walk away from the union with as much as $15 million.) Asked about talk he's hooked up with Rosario Dawson, he said simply, "No, still single."

A little jail time didn't stop R. Kelly from bouncing back into the limelight.The R&B star, who was busted in Florida on child pornography charges, went right back to work after his release from a Miami jail late Wednesday. A spy tells us Kelly spent most of the same evening filming his new video at the Shore Club Hotel and the nightspot, Mynt, wrapping in the wee hours.

"There was tons of security," says the source. "When he saw the press, someone gave him an umbrella to cover his face, but it didn't help."

Roughhousing Russell Crowe has been invited back to the British film awards where he tussled with a producer last year.

You may remember that Rusty pinned the BBC's Malcolm Gerrie against a wall and verbally abused him after Gerrie refused to broadcast Crowe's complete recitation of a poem at the BAFTA awards.

Although Crowe later apologized, some said the incident damaged his Oscar chances.

Gerrie will again be producing the show. But insiders say the BBC has told Crowe he can read what he wants.

Abe Hirschfeld better check his hearing. The wacky parking-lot developer claims that the late caricaturist Al Hirschfeld once told him he was "three times bigger" than anyone he ever drew in his 80-year career.

But Al's rep, Margo Feiden, begs to differ.

"Mr. Abe Hirschfeld got it wrong," she tells The News' Jose Martinez. "What Al Hirschfeld actually said was, 'You're three times piggier.' "

Meanwhile, Al's death has put a chill on folks at the Paterson (N.J.) Museum, where Webster Hall art guy Baird Jones had just mounted some of Hirschfeld's drawings.

"We've had seven celebrity painters who have died in Baird Jones' recent shows," says museum director Giacomo DeStefano, who has taken to calling Jones the "Curator of Doom." He adds: "It is so spooky that many of the older artists in Paterson don't want to show at the museum anymore."

THE SNIPING continues between "Two Weeks Notice" co-stars Hugh Grant and Sandra Bullock. "He's a bit poofy and queenie, and he warned me he'd have hissy-fits, or 'tanties,' as he calls them," says Bullock. Grant recently said that Bullock "kissed me like she'd never been kissed before in her life. I hesitate to use the word 'desperate,' but that flashed through my mind"

HARRY BELAFONTE is still scourging Colin Powell. The Secretary of State has spoken out against President Bush's stance on affirmative action. Has the calypso king changed his mind about Powell being the "house slave" of the Bush administration? "Not at all," he told us Wednesday at the Marriott Marquis gala for the University of the West Indies

DHANI JONES, Walt Frasier and Jason Fabini will be some of the star jocks in the starting lineup of rib-eaters at Gourmet magazine's Super Bowl bash at Blue Smoke on Sunday. With chefs Joey Campanaro,

Michael Roman, Wayne Harley Brachman and Sara Moulton cooking, it should be one tasty tailgate party. For details, go to www.tickets.com

RICKY MARTIN really must visit his future neighbor Lady Henrietta Spencer Churchill, when the two move into their new $10 million digs at the AOL Time Warner Center at 1 Columbus Circle. Wednesday night at Bergdorf Goodman, Churchill, a cousin of Winston Churchill, unveiled the fantasy bedroom that she designed for her pad (said to have cost her at least $8 million).

Summary: The 30th anniversary of the Supreme Court's landmark Roe v. Wade decision has celebrity Bush-bashers on the offensive. On Tuesday, Ed Harris questioned the President's maturity. "Being a man, I have got to say that we got this guy in the White House who thinks he is a man, who projects himself as a man because he has a certain masculinity,"the actor said at a NARAL


Updated 5:41 p.m. Eastern Time

House Speaker John Boehner addressed one of the biggest sticking points for the 12 member Congressional "supercommittee" today, acknowledging that any bipartisan agreement will need to include some new tax revenue.

"I think there is room for revenues, but I think there clearly is a limit to the amount of revenues that are available," Boehner told reporters.

The comment was significant because Boehner and other Republican leaders have repeatedly insisted that tax increases are off the table, and most Republicans in the House and Senate have signed a "taxpayer protection pledge" vowing not to raise taxes.

That pledge was devised by Americans for Tax Reform, an advocacy group run by Grover Norquist, whom Boehner dismissed as "some random person in America" when he was asked about Norquist today. Later in the day, Boehner revised his comments.

"What I was attempting to do," he said, grinning, "was to suggest that Mr. Norquist, like millions of Americans, believes that raising taxes is not good for our economy."

Boehner insisted that Republicans would only compromise on tax revenue if Democrats were willing to take significant and painful steps to shore up Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. "Without real reform on the entitlement side, I don't know how you put any revenue on the table."

He said any new tax revenue would not come from raising rates but from overhauling the tax code, sweeping out loopholes and deductions in order to reduce individual and corporate rates.

"I do think that our efforts to have a flatter, fairer tax system, with our targets being 25 percent top rates for corporations, 25 percent top rates for individuals, is achievable. That means you clean out all the garbage. I think it's very important that it get done," Boehner said -- either by the supercommittee or by the relevant Congressional committees over the next year.

After meeting almost every day for weeks, the supercommittee has appeared stalled in recent days, as members huddle with their respective party leaders to determine their next move. "Expectations for the success of the Supercommittee are low," said a pessimistic House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-MD) earlier this week.

But today, Boehner expressed confidence the group would meet its goal of $1.2 trillion in debt reduction.

"I didn't agree to set this thing up with any idea that it wouldn't succeed," he said. "And I've been clear with everyone through this process that we have to meet the goal. I'd love to exceed the goal. But we have to meet the goal and I'm going to put every effort in to make sure that we do."

So what's holding up the talks? "It's the same conversation that's been going on all year," Boehner said. "They want more revenue than what we're willing to give, and they're not willing to do as much entitlement reform as we'd like to do." He indicated that he has been heavily involved in the minutiae of debt negotiations. "There's all kinds of discussions and permutations and models. I've seen more models than I can count about how you can do this. A lot of possibilities."

He was unwilling to list specific entitlement reforms under consideration, such as raising the retirement age, except to express support for switching to a new measurement of cost-of-living increases, often referred to as the chained CPI. "There's been some discussion about moving to one inflator that certainly has some merit that people have talked about," he said.

Boehner's comments about Norquist indicate that the anti-tax crusader -- and his pledge -- may be a thorn in Boehner's side as he attempts to negotiate this debt deal with Democrats. "My biggest regret I've had this year is that the President and I weren't able to come to an agreement on solving our...deficit and debt problems," Boehner said.

Norquist told CBS News he was confident Republicans would stick to their guns and reject any deal involving tax revenue increases.

"I understand that the (Democrats) are desperately trying to grasp at every straw that Republicans will raise taxes," Norquist said. "The Republicans are not going to raise taxes."

Summary: House Speaker breaks with past insistence that tax increases are off the table in supercommittee negotiations Read more by Nancy Cordes on CBS News' Political Hotsheet.