BRISTOL, Conn. – ESPN pulled Hank Williams Jr.'s classic intro song from its broadcast of Monday night's NFL game after the country singer famous for the line "Are you ready for some football?" used an analogy to Adolf Hitler in discussing President Barack Obama.

In an interview Monday morning on Fox News' "Fox & Friends," Williams, unprompted, said of Obama's outing on the links with House Speaker John Boehner: "It'd be like Hitler playing golf with (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu."

Asked by the hosts to clarify, Williams said, "They're the enemy," adding that by "they" he meant Obama and Vice President Joe Biden.

Anchor Gretchen Carlson later said to him, "You used the name of one of the most hated people in all of the world to describe, I think, the president." Williams replied, "Well, that is true. But I'm telling you like it is."

"While Hank Williams Jr. is not an ESPN employee, we recognize that he is closely linked to our company through the open to 'Monday Night Football,"' the network said in a statement. "We are extremely disappointed with his comments, and as a result we have decided to pull the open from tonight's telecast."

Williams released a statement through his publicist, saying: "Some of us have strong opinions and are often misunderstood. My analogy was extreme -- but it was to make a point. I was simply trying to explain how stupid it seemed to me -- how ludicrous that pairing was. They're polar opposites and it made no sense. They don't see eye-to-eye and never will. I have always respected the office of the president."

ESPN did not say whether the intro, synonymous with "Monday Night Football" since 1989, would be used again after this week's Colts- Buccaneers game.

"Every time the media brings up the tea party it's painted as racist and extremists -- but there's never a backlash -- no outrage to those comparisons," Williams' statement continued. "Working-class people are hurting -- and it doesn't seem like anybody cares. When both sides are high-fiving it on the ninth hole when everybody else is without a job -- it makes a whole lot of us angry. Something has to change. The policies have to change."

The song "All My Rowdy Friends Are Here on Monday Night" is a remixed version of his 1984 hit "All My Rowdy Friends are Coming Over Tonight." The version won Williams four Emmy Awards in the early 1990s as the opening theme to "Monday Night Football," then on ABC.

Summary: ESPN is pulling Hank Williams Jr.'s classic intro song from its broadcast of Monday night's NFL game after the country singer famous for the line Are you ready for some football? used an analogy to Adolf Hitler in discussing President Obama


Let’s imagine that new wind turbines or solar panels are being installed near where you live. Maybe if you are lucky enough to live on the coast, it’s a new system to generate power from the ocean’s waves.

What happens on those days when there’s no breeze, no sun, or no surf - or on those blazing July afternoons when your town’s electrical needs exceed what nature can provide?

The answer is that you’d get power supplied from more traditional sources. In New England, that means a plant powered by natural gas, radioactive rods, oil, or coal - producing greenhouse gases or facing the challenge of handling spent nuclear fuel.

But a handful of companies around the region are designing new kinds of energy storage systems that could provide a different answer, perhaps helping to speed the spread of renewable power. Using large-scale battery banks or serpentine pipes filled with compressed air, they hope to capture the power produced by a wind turbine or solar panel and release it to the electrical grid when it is most needed. Both approaches would have zero emissions.

“The challenge for people developing renewable power projects is that you get a low price if you can only provide sporadic power,’’ explains Rob Day, an investor at Black Coral Capital in Boston who focuses on the energy industry. “If you can deliver a consistent load of power, you can get perhaps double the price, so developers might be willing to invest in additional equipment.’’

The caveat, though, is that energy storage systems need to be efficient, reliable, low-maintenance, and low-cost. The two main approaches - batteries and compressed air - “are making good technical progress,’’ says Day, “but neither is ready for prime time yet.’’

In New Hampshire, not far from Seabrook Nuclear Power Station, a start-up called SustainX is designing and testing compressed air storage systems. Founder Dax Kepshire says the technology could store power from any sort of generating facility. Electricity from the facility powers an electric motor that pulls air into a maze of pipes and compresses it to about 3,000 pounds per square inch. (A typical car tire is inflated to about 30 pounds per square inch.) “When you reverse the process, uncompressing the air drives the same electric motor, which functions as a generator,’’ Kepshire says.

One challenge, however, is that when you compress any gas (oxygen, for instance), it gets hot, and when you expand it gets cold. To keep temperatures constant, SustainX injects a fine mist of water into the system, which captures heat in one phase and then gives it back in another, according to Kepshire. Avoiding temperature extremes will ensure that the system has a long life, SustainX believes.

Founded in 2007 as a spin-out from Dartmouth College, SustainX has raised $24 million in private financing, along with a $5.4 million grant from the Department of Energy. “I live in Gloucester where the wind blows like crazy at night, but the electrical demand is lowest at night,’’ says SustainX chief executive Tom Zarrella. “You could let wind turbines run all night long, store the energy, and use it in the day. We think that would have huge potential in the energy value chain.’’ The company is building its first full-scale system, capable of storing two megawatts of electricity, enough to supply about 500 homes, in partnership with AES Corp., a Virginia-based power producer. The target date for installation is mid-2013.

In addition to helping renewable power supply electricity consistently, Kepshire notes that SustainX’s system could back up more traditional power plants, avoiding the need to build auxiliary “peaker plants’’ to handle periods of high demand (often on summer’s hottest days). Those plants typically burn diesel fuel or natural gas, and once they’re built, they sit idle most of the time.

Another company developing a compressed-air system, Newton-based General Compression, has raised $75 million in funding. The company hasn’t said much about its technology, although it plans to use “underground geologic formations’’ - think caverns and aquifers - to store the compressed air. Company executives didn’t respond to multiple phone calls for this story.

At least three local battery makers - A123 Systems, Boston-Power, and 24M Technologies - are working on large-scale energy storage systems. “We’re still in the R&D phase,’’ says Throop Wilder, chief executive of Cambridge-based 24M, which received $10 million in venture capital funding last year. Like executives at SustainX, Wilder wonders whether his company will find interested buyers in Asia and Europe before the United States.“Even though the US doesn’t believe in climate change, the rest of the world does,’’ he says.

When I called New England’s most prominent wind power developer, Jim Gordon of Cape Wind, to ask his opinion on energy storage technology, his reply was simple. “The question is what are the economics of adding it to a project, and how long will the payback be?’’

Power generation is a highly regulated, commodity business. No one - neither businesses nor consumers - wants to pay a higher price for a kilowatt of electricity than they have to.

And the process of persuading utilities or project developers like Gordon to invest in energy storage could be a slow one. “Utilities may say ‘I’ve never had storage before, so how can I be missing it?’ ’’ says John Harper a Framingham financial adviser to renewable power developers.

But federal regulations are starting to change in ways that could provide incentive for utilities to invest in energy storage, Harper says, and they “could change more in ways that helps this technology get adopted.’’

New approaches to energy storage “hold a lot of promise,’’ says Day, the cleantech investor, “but there’s not a market for it yet.’’

The best entrepreneurs, of course, see markets emerging before anyone else does.

Summary: A handful of companies around the region are designing new kinds of energy storage systems that could speed the spread of renewable power. Using large-scale battery banks or serpentine pipes filled with compressed air, they hope to capture the power produced by a wind turbine or solar panel, and release it to the electrical grid when it is most needed. Both approaches would have zero emissions, but neither is ready for prime time.


Antonella Barba: The XXX Bidding War

TMZ has learned that an adult video company has joined the

who are offering "American Idol's" controversial competitor major dough, as they attempt to cash-in on her newfound slut-ebrity status.

, the largest renter of adult DVDs online, tells TMZ they've offered Antonella Barba a whopping $500,000 to become their new spokesperson. Last month, the same company offered $1 million to Kim Kardashian, which she refused.

If Barba signs, Sugar CEO "Jax" claims that her first gig would be hosting a launch party for their new video-on-demand service. Jax said he welcomed a bidding war, telling TMZ, "You saw her photos online, she's smokin'. We will not lose because of money." Neither will Antonella.

Summary: TMZ has learned that an adult video company has joined the check danglers who are offering "American Idol's" controversial competitor major dough, as they…


Ai Weiwei warned relatives his activism may one day lead to his arrest, said his older sister, Gao Ge. Photograph: Frederic J Brown/AFP/Getty Images

China's foreign ministry has insisted that a police investigation into artist Ai Weiwei has "nothing to do with human rights or freedom of expression" after an international outcry against his detention.

Relatives say official claims that the 53-year-old is being investigated for "economic crimes" are absurd, claiming the accusations are politically motivated because of his record of activism and social criticism.

Foreign ministry spokesman Hong Lei told a regular news conference that it was his "understanding that the public security authorities are investigating Ai Weiwei according to law on suspicion of economic crimes".

State news agency Xinhua had previously published a one-line report announcing the probe, only to delete it within the hour.

Asked about criticism by western governments, Hong added: "China is a country ruled by law and will act according to law. We hope that the countries concerned will respect China's decision.

"This has nothing to do with human rights or freedom of expression."

Chinese law states that police must inform an individual's relatives or place of work within 24 hours of detention, unless there is no way to do so or it would "impede the investigation".

His family say they have yet to be informed. In a letter to police, Ai's wife Lu Qing demanded to know her husband's whereabouts and condition and why he was being held.

"As of 8am today [Thursday], it has been 96 hours since Ai Weiwei was taken away from Beijing airport, and I haven't heard a single word about him," she wrote.

The police have not answered media queries about the artist, who has been missing since Sunday, or his friend Wen Tao, 38, who was also reportedly detained that afternoon.

"The economic crimes report is absurd, because the way he was taken and then disappeared shows it's nothing of the sort," Ai's older sister, Gao Ge, told Reuters.

"This is more like a crime gang's behaviour than a country with laws."

She said the artist had previously told relatives he might one day be jailed for his activities. "He was very clear that we shouldn't try to meddle and stop him speaking out … My mother cried," she said.

Ai's mother, Gao Ying, said the "economic crimes" allegations were being used to stifle his activism, adding: "If he's not released, this will be the start of a long struggle."

She said her son was unlikely to accept charges to win a swift release.

"If he's not given justice, he'll refuse to come out, I think. That's his character," she said.

Human rights groups say similar accusations of financial wrongdoing – such as tax-related charges – have been used to intimidate activists in the past.

In an interview last year, Ai told the Guardian that he recognised the state might take action against him and said security officials had visited his bank.

But he added: "I also have to speak out for people around me who are afraid, who think it is not worth it or who have totally given up hope. So I want to set an example: you can do it and this is OK."

Liu Xiaoyuan, a lawyer who has worked with Ai, said that "economic crimes" was a wide-ranging description and it was not clear what the actual accusations were.

Ai's detention comes amid a crackdown that has seen scores of activists, dissidents and lawyers criminally detained, formally arrested or simply disappear.

Twitter users reported that police detained human rights lawyer Ni Yulan and her husband Dong Jiqin on Wednesday and a contact of the couple confirmed they had been taken.

Ni was disbarred after helping residents who were being evicted, and is disabled as a result of being badly beaten after filming a forced demolition. Her own house was bulldozed and she was jailed for interfering with public administration.

On her release, the couple were blocked from renting a flat or staying with friends. For several weeks last year they lived in a tent in a park. As attention to their case grew, police moved the couple to a hotel, but authorities cut off their power and water several months ago.

Police did not respond to faxed queries about the couple. A receptionist at the Yuxingong hotel said he did not know about the situation.

Summary: Foreign ministry insists security authorities acting lawfully as family claim 'economic' investigation is politically motivated


The statue looted from St Olave's church in London during the Blitz was discovered in an auction house. Photograph: Sophia Evans for the Observer

A treasured 17th-century statue that was looted from one of London's last-surviving medieval churches during the Blitz has been returned to its rightful owners more than 70 years after it disappeared.

The work, a sculpted and painted likeness of Dr Peter Turner, an eminent 17th-century botanist and physician at London's St Bartholomew's hospital, was stolen from St Olave's church near the Tower of London on the night of 17 April 1941, when bombing severely damaged the church.

Last month, the 1614 statue was finally brought back home to the church, restored in the 1950s, ending a 14-month legal dispute, which exposed the art trade's failure to question the origin of works being sold on.

In 2009, churchwardens received a tip-off from the Museum of London that the statue was about to be sold by Dreweatts, a British auctioneer, on behalf of an anonymous seller for an estimated £70,000.

The church lodged a claim, and Dreweatts withdrew the statue from auction, retaining it until the case was resolved. The seller rejected calls to hand it back, insisting he had acquired it in good faith. The Art Loss Register, which liaises with the police and the art trade to help track down stolen artworks, waived its fees to take up the church's cause. Detective work by the register's lawyer, Christopher A. Marinello, revealed a chain of previous buyers included Paul de Grande, a Belgian ecclesiastical dealer, who had bought the statue from a trader in Holland who, in turn, had named a British dealer, Gray Dench from West Malling, as the original seller. Marinello's research showed that the name was false and the trail led him to Gray Elcombe, who operated as an antique dealer and had been imprisoned for serious crimes.

Marinello said: "I do not believe that de Grande or the Dutch dealer knew that this bust was stolen. The legal issues involved are very complex and will likely be discussed in art law publications in the future. However, both dealers knew that the bust originated from St. Olave's. One simple phone call to St. Olave's would have brought the true history to light."

The Dutch dealer declined to comment, but de Grande told The Observer that he did not ring St Olave's because wartime photographs of its bombed state led him to believe it had been destroyed. In fact, St Olave's stonework was largely reconstructed in the early 1950s.

He detailed its connection to St Olave's to the auction-house - information which, he said, ultimately led to its return.

The statue, which had stood in St Olave's for centuries, surviving the Great Fire of 1666 and watching over the resting place of diarist Samuel Pepys, will undergo conservation work before being reinstalled in the church.

Summary: A medieval statue stolen from a London church in 1941 was spotted at an auction house


Editor's note: As the 49ers play their 43rd and final season at Candlestick Park, The Chronicle recounts memorable moments in the stadium's history. This week, in the last entry of the series, we reprint parts of Tom FitzGerald's story on the 49ers'42-17 blowout of the Cowboys in the final game of the 1983 season. It was the teams' first meeting since The Catch in the 1982 NFC Championship Game. Despite predictions of another playoff meeting, the teams wouldn't play again in the postseason until 1993 - a 10-year stretch in which San Francisco won three more Super Bowls and Dallas became, in 1989, the worst team in football.

Hey, this could be catching on. Do the 49ers really have the Cowboys' number after beating them three straight times, twice in a rout?

Are the Cowboys in trouble if they venture back into Candlestick in the playoffs?

Sorry, trend seekers. None of the 49ers was talking domination after last night's rout. Moments after enjoying the exhilaration of another victory over Dallas, the players were busy praising the Cowboys as a worthy foe. Nobody thinks it will be this easy if the teams play again in the playoffs.

"It's probably going to be just like it was in '81," said nose tackle Pete Kugler. "The first time we played, we kicked their butts. The second time the game could have gone either way. Dallas will be back, no doubt about it."

Even before savoring their nationally televised picnic, the 49ers sensed an electric atmosphere. "I told Ronnie (Lott) during introductions, 'This reminds me of the Super Bowl,' " said cornerback Eric Wright, whose return of an interception for a touchdown drove the climactic dagger into the Cowboys' ribs.

But Wright said, "No we don't have their number. I think we'll play them again, but I don't think it will be like this."

Summary: Niners blow out Cowboys to end '83 regular season  Despite predictions of another playoff meeting, the teams wouldn't play again in the postseason until 1993 - a 10-year stretch in which San Francisco won three more Super Bowls and Dallas became, in 1989, the worst team in football.  Do the 49ers really have the Cowboys' number after beating them three straight times, twice in a rout?  Moments after enjoying the exhilaration of another victory over Dallas, the players were busy praising the Cowboys as a worthy foe.


TORONTO — BlackBerry reported a massive $4.4 billion loss in the third quarter and a 56 percent drop in revenue in its first quarterly report under new chairman and chief executive John Chen.

Despite the results, Chen said on a conference call with analysts that BlackBerry ‘‘has a really good shot’’ of turning a profit in 2016 and management will try its best to achieve the goal.

The former Sybase chief executive is credited with turning around Sybase, a data company that was sold to SAP in 2010. Chen said reviving BlackBerry will be his most ‘‘complicated’’ challenge but noted, however, that the company has $3.2 billion in cash, which will ‘‘definitely allow us to engineer our turnaround.’’

Chen later told reporters he is dropping the interim label from his title and will stay chief executive until BlackBerry is on a much firmer footing.

BlackBerry also said Friday it is entering into a five-year partnership with Foxconn, the Taiwanese company that assembles products in vast factories in China. Foxconn, known for its manufacturing contract work on Apple’s iPhones and iPads, will jointly design and manufacture some BlackBerry devices and manage inventory of the devices.

‘‘I’m hoping we never have to have a conversation going forward about inventory write-downs,’’ Chen said. He said Foxconn’s BlackBerry phones will be released in March or April and will be built in Indonesia and Mexico.

BlackBerry reported revenue of $1.2 billion, down from $2.7 billion in the same quarter last year.

Chen has said the company ‘‘is very much alive’’ but is putting more emphasis on BlackBerry’s software business than its hardware business.

BlackBerry said it sold just 1.9 million smartphones in the quarter compared to 3.7 million in the previous quarter. Most of those were old BlackBerry 7 devices. This year’s launch of BlackBerry 10, its revamped operating system, and fancier devices — the touchscreen Z10 and Q10 for keyboard loyalists — was supposed to rejuvenate the brand and lure customers. But the much-delayed phones failed to turn the company around and have led to a billion-dollar loss last quarter and a multibillion loss in the third quarter.

BlackBerry’s net loss amounted to $8.37 per share in the latest quarter. Its adjusted loss from continuing operations, which excludes restructuring and other items, was $354 million, or 67 cents per share.

The BlackBerry smartphone, pioneered in 1999, had been the dominant mobile device for on-the-go business people and other consumers before Apple introduced the iPhone in 2007. Apple’s device showed that phones could handle much more than e-mail and calls.

Summary: Eds: Adds that interim label has been removed from Chen’s title. Updates stock move. Minor edits. With AP Photos.TORONTO — BlackBerry reported a massive $4.4 billion loss in the third quarter and a 56 percent drop in revenue in its first quarterly report under new chairman and chief executive John Chen. Despite the results, Chen said on a conference call with analysts that BlackBerry ‘‘has a really good shot’’ of turning a profit in 2016 and management will try its best to achieve the goal. Chen later laughed when an analyst wished him the ‘‘best of luck Chen is credited with turning around Sybase, a data company that was sold to SAP in 2010. Chen said reviving BlackBerry will be his most ‘‘complicated’’ challenge but noted, however, that the company has $3.2 billion in cash, which will ‘‘definitely allow us to engineer our turnaround.’’ BlackBerry also said Friday it is entering into a five-year partnership with Foxconn, the Taiwanese company that assembles products in vast factories in China.


CONCORD — Steeped in colonial and literary history, this affluent suburb, with its graceful 18th and 19th century buildings, appears untouched by the last recession.

Tourists stroll through the downtown amid quaint shops selling hardware, clothing, cookware, toys, books, and other goods. The outdoor restaurant patio at Concord’s Colonial Inn, festooned in colorful patriotic bunting, is filled with patrons eating mid-afternoon meals. Homes are routinely selling for $1 million or more.

“We’re ultimately a wealthy town surrounded by a lot of other wealthy towns,” said Rebecca Bilodeau, the long-time owner of the Grasshopper Shop, a women’s boutique store on Main Street in downtown Concord. “We weren’t as affected by the recession as other towns.”

Five years after the downturn ended, this town of 18,000 is doing as it usually does, quite nicely. The unemployment rate has slipped under 4 percent, more than a point below the state average. The housing market has recovered. Median household income, at $121,000, is approaching twice the state median.

That’s not to say that Concord was completely unaffected by the recession. Unemployment jumped to 6.6 percent in 2009, below the state average of 8.4 percent at the same time, but double the pre-recession level.

Professionals making six-figure salaries suddenly lost jobs at their companies in Boston and Cambridge. Business quickly dried up for local firms. A spattering of home foreclosures took place.

“It was a roller-coaster time,” recalls Robert Prestidge, co-owner of Concord Cookware, a shop on Walden Street in the downtown. As the financial crisis intensified in the fall of 2008, Prestidge said, sales of high-end appliances dropped as nervous customers tightened their belts and stuck to “only basic purchases, like spatulas and wooden spoons.”

Bilodeau’s Grasshopper shop saw a 25 percent decline in business. Other Concord shop owners reported similar plunges.

But for Concord, the recession was more like a brief, sharp shock that gradually wore off as the state and national economies slowly stabilized and improved, they say.

“Once the downturn ended for us [around 2010] there was a sort of reboot,” said Frank Serio, general manager of the 56-room Colonial Inn, which has two restaurants. Today, the Colonial Inn’s business, helped by both domestic and foreign visitors, is about 10 percent above press-recession levels, said Serio.

Other Concord businesses report that they’ve largely recovered from the recession, though there’s still nervousness about the long-term strength of the US economy. “People are jittery and watching their costs very closely,” said David Anderson, owner of the Main Streets Market & Café in Concord’s downtown.

Still, commercial and retail rents are on the rise, as are housing prices. Developers are responding. In West Concord, construction recently commenced on the Brookside Square, a $32 million mixed-use development with 74 luxury apartments and 36,000 square feet of ground-floor commercial and office space.

As with other red-hot housing markets across Eastern Massachusetts, high demand and short supplies of homes for sale have sent home prices soaring in Concord. By the end of last year, the median home price there hit $857,000, easily exceeding its pre-recession high of $725,000 in 2005, according to data from the Warren Group, a Boston real estate research firm.

Julie Dolan, a real estate agent at William Raveis Real Estate, said the trend shows no sign of abating. So far this year, the median price of homes sold in Concord is a jaw-dropping $1.4 million, according to data compiled by Dolan. That’s nearly double the median sales price in 2005, the peak of the last housing boom.

Despite the hefty price tags, Dolan said multiple offers, sales above asking prices, and all-cash purchases are common these days. Dolan said one three-bedroom ranch home was recently put on the market at $699,000 — and quickly sold for $770,000.

“People have money,” said Dolan. “They’re coming out of Boston and Cambridge to Concord with money — and they’re spending that money.”

Summary: Concord appears untouched by the last recession. “We’re ultimately a wealthy town surrounded by a lot of other wealthy towns,” said a boutique owner.


Robin Williams, pictured in the 1995 film Jumanji, has died aged 63.

Marin County Sheriff’s Office Coroner Division has released an official statement regarding the investigation into the death of actor Robin Williams.

On August 11, 2014, at approximately 11:55am, Marin County Communications received a 9-1-1 telephone call reporting a male adult had been located unconscious and not breathing inside his residence in unincorporated Tiburon, CA. The Sheriff’s Office as well as the Tiburon Fire Department and Southern Marin Fire Protection District were dispatched to the incident with emergency personnel arriving on scene at 12:00pm. The male subject, pronounced deceased at 12:02pm has been identified as Robin McLaurin Williams, a 63 year old resident of unincorporated Tiburon, CA.

An investigation into the cause, manner and circumstances of the death is currently underway by the Investigations and Coroner Divisions of the Sheriff’s Office. Preliminary information developed during the investigation indicates Mr Williams was last seen alive at this residence, where he resides with his wife, at approximately 10:00pm on August 10, 2014. Mr Williams was located this morning shortly before the 9-1-1 call was placed to Marin County Communications. At this time, the Sheriff’s Office Coroner Division suspects the death to be a suicide due to asphyxia, but a comprehensive investigation must be completed must be completed before a final determination is made. A forensic examination is currently scheduled for August 12, 2014 with subsequent toxicology testing to be conducted.

Readers who are seeking assistance can call Lifeline on 13 11 14 or beyondblue on 1300 224 636.

Do you have any news photos or videos?


A late spring this year has lifted home-improvement retail sales out of the winter doldrums, and there could be more growth ahead.

Easing lending standards and a pickup in loan demand are potential tailwinds that can boost sales so Home Depot and Lowe’s in the coming months, meaning the retailers aren’t at the mercy of fickle Mother Nature.

Earlier Tuesday Home Depot HD reported better-than-expected profit and sales growth for the fiscal second quarter. Results were bolstered by strong sales of big-ticket items — results Chief Executive Frank Blake said support the view of “a continuing recovery in the U.S. home improvement market.”

Of course, pent-up demand after a harsh winter pushed some sales back into the spring months this year. But beyond that, credit conditions are a key factor. Because Home Depot is so closely tied to the housing market, it’s important that customers have available credit to purchase homes (which tends to lead to renovations), buy large items such as refrigerators, and for professionals to buy gear for their housing projects.

Home Depot’s Chief Financial Officer Carol Tome told analysts that approval rates for the company’s private credit cards have increased for both consumers and professionals. Average credit lines are about $5,800 for consumers and $6,900 for professionals — and Tome said that credit is often used as a financing tool for its customers to make big-ticket purchases.

Amid the strength of the housing market and greater access to credit, Home Depot reported second-quarter sales were strong for big-ticket purchases of appliances, windows, water heaters and flooring. Home Depot’s same-store sales at U.S. stores climbed 6.4% in the quarter. Rival Lowe’s LOW is projected to report an overall increase of 4.1% when it delivers its results on Wednesday, according to a survey by Consensus Metrix.

A recent Federal Reserve survey of senior loan officers highlights what Home Depot has also seen: a broad pickup in loan demand and easing lending standards for many loan categories. For example, 24% of those polled by the Fed say credit standards have somewhat eased for prime residential mortgage loans over the past three months. That’s an improvement from just 13% in the prior period.

Observers say that tight lending standards have been one of the biggest factors holding back the housing recovery, as banks are fearful about the litigation and fines they’ve faced as a result of the fallout from the financial crisis. And while credit conditions continue to improve, Home Depot indicated more can be done, particularly to help the Millennial generation.

“There is something like a third of people aged 18 to 36 living at home with their parents,” Tome said. “Something has gotta move on mortgage financing reform.”

Canaccord Genuity analyst Laura Champine said Tome has called for mortgage financing reform and advocated for greater homeownership among younger adults for a while. Tome, in an interview with Fortune, said Millennials “carrying around all that student debt are not qualifying for mortgages — that needs to change.”

The feds seem to be paying attention. The Wall Street Journal in May reported the Obama administration and federal regulators are reversing course on some of the biggest efforts to tighten mortgage-lending standards in the wake of the Great Recession. And while Millennials are stuck with some weak job prospects and muted income growth, some housing executives say first-time homebuyers are returning to the market.

But Home Depot and Lowe’s may be waiting a bit longer before they can count on meaningful demand from home-buying Millennials.

“The Millennial generation has a lot more student debt and is waiting longer to get married, and that is pushing out or slowing the rate of recovery,” said John Lloyd, global head of credit research at investment firm Janus Capital Group.

Summary: Sales could get a boost from improving lending standards, a pickup in loan demand.


Updated AUG 18, 2014 3:19p ET

GLENDALE, Ariz. -- George Gosbee just doesn't get it. No matter how many long-term commitments the Coyotes make, all anybody wants to talk about is their short-term exit strategy.

"I wish people would stop looking at the five-year out clause and start looking at all the long-term deals we're signing," the team's chairman and governor said in a lengthy interview with FOX Sports Arizona. "I'm not sure it will matter if I say it, but we're committed to this market for the long run and we keep proving it."

Wednesday's announcement of a nine-year, hybrid partnership agreement with Gila River Casinos that will pay in the neighborhood of $3.5 million per year was the latest example of a long-term Coyotes' commitment to the Valley. The Coyotes have also signed a number of other long-term agreements, including a television rights agreement with FOX Sports Arizona last year. Other long-term deals include City of Glendale (arena lease, 15 years), LEVY Restaurants (food and beverage, 15 years) and Ticketmaster (10 years).

Those deals, and increased revenue from suite sales and tickets, have allowed Gosbee to pull back a bit from his involvement with the operations of the club during Year 1 of IceArizona's ownership. It also allowed former CFO and co-owner Avik Dey to pull back from his day-to-day duties entirely.

But it's the combination of the Coyotes' local progress and the financial success of the NHL overall that has Gosbee thinking once inconceivable thoughts.

"As an ownership group, we're really comfortable with how the club is working on financial platforms," he said. "We've always had a three-year plan for achieving profitability here, but with how well the NHL is doing, we think that could fast-track our plan and we could get there even earlier."

“We've always had a three-year plan for achieving profitability here, but with how well the NHL is doing, we think that could fast-track our plan and we could get there even earlier.”

The NHL reported record revenues of $3.7 billion this past season, and the new CBA, approved in January of 2013, removed revenue sharing restrictions for attendance benchmarks, business growth and market size. Based on various reports, that could mean anywhere from $15 million to $20 million in revenue sharing per club from the 2013-14 season.

Each NHL team will also receive an additional $5 million this season due to the success of the league's Stadium Series and the first payment of the 12-year, approximately $4.8 billion (US dollars using the current exchange rate) Rogers TV deal. Combine that with the NHL's current 10-year, $2 billion deal signed with NBC in 2011 and the NHL's TV rights money nearly matches the NBA's.

Reports vary on what the annually escalating Rogers TV deal will pay each U.S. club (Canadian teams get a larger share of the pie). Forbes reported last November that each team will receive an average of about $9 million to $15 million annually over the life of the deal (adjusting the Forbes figures for the current exchange rate). That's on top of the revenue coming from the deal with NBC.

Gosbee wouldn't confirm those numbers, but he admitted the amounts from Rogers are "a lot more than we had budgeted for."

The biggest indicator of IceArizona's commitment to the Valley -- and proof of its economic viability -- will of course be putting a winning product on the ice.

The Western Conference got better during the frenzied free agency period, and a strong argument can be made that the Coyotes got worse at the forward position -- a long-standing weakness that has been a product primarily of poor drafting and tight purse strings.

The team's decision to infuse youth into the lineup for the upcoming season came as a surprise to some within and outside the organization who expected the ownership group to be spend more freely in free agency. But a number of factors influenced the decision.

-- The Coyotes missed the playoffs the past two seasons, and the internal view was that the veteran mix had grown stale and needed more youth and speed.

-- The amount of money being thrown around in free agency seemed rash and potentially damaging in the long-term to a team that still needs to watch its bottom line and was still reeling from the failed Mike Ribeiro experiment -- its first foray into the major free-agent market under the new ownership group.

-- Finally, the team is not yet profitable; ownership has only been in place for one year.

"The goal is to become more competitive on the ice, and that comes partly with more dollars," Gosbee said. "The key is to get the franchise profitable, and that's not going to happen overnight.

"Again, we think we might get there earlier than planned. If it happens faster than we thought it would, great, but if it doesn't that doesn't concern us. Not everything is going according to plan, and we still have some areas like attendance and parking that need our attention, but we feel very comfortable with where we are in the process."

Follow Craig Morgan on Twitter

Summary: Local successes and record NHL profits have Coyotes eyeing financial fast track.


For most people in Britain, "Africa" is represented by a series of visual metaphors that might range from images of wildlife and nature reserves to the spears and hair styles of the Masai. The current BBC logo in which young Masai men leap in the air screams "Africa!" in much the same way as a line-up of Bollywood dancers is a statement about the identity of Indians. We interpret what we see in a way that is conditioned and determined by a specific visual history, a fact that is all too often forgotten or ignored when we look at real people in our current presentations and explorations of "diversity".

The importance of the Tate's new exhibition Seeing Africa is what it tells us about how our view of Africa has been an inheritance of 19th-century colonialism, dominated by biological determinism, by repressed and perverse sexuality, and by paintings and sculptures that ignored the realities of the place and time in favour of a romanticised and polemical vision. By uncovering the main elements underlying the vision brought back to Europe from travels in central Africa by some important European artists, the Tate display makes a link between this visual history and contemporary ways of seeing Africa and Africans - in other words, how our imagery of "the other" is conditioned by our experience of the visual representations.

The display is a selection of paintings and sculptures loaned by Freddie Booker, an African-American collector, and Simon Carson, a British collector, and it is on course to reawaken an intense controversy about relationships between representation and meaning, or seeing and political power. Some of the images in the display are the lesser-known work of prominent artists. Some are by obscure figures about whom little is known. What these artists have in common is a specific way of seeing and portraying their subjects.

At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, major European artists, such as Picasso, were rediscovering "the primitive", building into their approach the perspectives and characteristics of non-European artefacts, such as central African or Polynesian sculptures. On the other side of the coin was a larger group of European artists, mostly French and Belgian, whose work - rooted in their travels or lives in colonial Africa - is represented in the Seeing Africa display, and whose style was more or less unaffected by any hint of an African aesthetic.

The work of this latter group serves to highlight the genius of the likes of Picasso and Modigliani, who allowed an African aesthetic to influence their own style and way of seeing the world. Instead, the work of the larger group was unremittingly conventional post-impressionist, with the most obvious influences being such artists as Renoir and Manet. In the circumstances, it is not remarkable that most of these artists never drew much attention or have been more or less forgotten.

The overwhelming bulk of this "Africaniste" work came from artists who travelled or settled in the Congo or French Equatorial Africa, and the colonial history of these sites determined the nature of these artists' relationship with Africa and Africans. For most of the travelling European artists, the people they saw were simply part of a vista of African flora and fauna. Some, such as Floris Jespers, André Hallet and Arthur Dupagne, fell in love with the continent and died there, but the distinguishing feature of their work was an obsessive and overwhelming sexual vision of African bodies.

Outside of the world of art historians and curators, what now makes this group of Africanistes interesting is the fact that their work offers a detailed visual guide to the traumas and psychological complexities of race and racial science in the 19th and 20th centuries. This is a compendium of attitudes and beliefs that were the background to the imperial division of the continent into a patchwork of colonial states as agreed among the European powers at the Berlin conference of 1884-85. Even more fascinating is the way that these representations of Africa and Africans constitute a sort of dialogue between the colonising gaze and the development of attitudes and beliefs in Europe about the essential nature of the African continent and its people.

The colonial context of the work is crucial. Until 1908, the entire Congo region was the personal fiefdom of King Leopold II of Belgium. He opened it to reckless exploitation by European companies, using forced labour to collect and export rubber and ivory. The brutality of the system was legendary. Campaigners - one was Roger Casement - exposed such punishments as chopping off the limbs of African labourers. So drastic were the effects of this labour regime that an official Belgian commission reported in 1917 that the population of the territory had been "reduced by half" since the start of European occupation in the 1880s. Seizure of territory and the brutal and forcible exploitation of African labour also took place in French Equatorial Africa.

These are the conditions for looking at the images that the Africanistes produced. The main artists of the genre visited or travelled in Central Africa during the most intense periods of colonial exploitation, and their work habitually became the subject of major exhibitions in Europe. Raymond Tellier, for instance, received a gold medal at the Paris Exhibition International of 1937 for his "Sudanese" fresco. In 1954, Arthur Dupagne's work received a permanent exhibition at the Museum of Central Africa in Brussels. On the other hand, the most revealing aspect of these artists' approach was the fact that their style was not at all influenced or affected by African perspectives. Instead, the work is about the visual expression of a psychological confrontation which was part of the colonial experience.

The work that crowns the Tate display, and offers the clearest illustration of Africaniste concerns, is a painting by the Belgian artist Fernand Allard L'Olivier. The source of the image is Manet's Olympia, a nude posed on a sofa attended by a black maidservant. In Manet's painting, the nude is facing outwards, smiling. In L'Olivier's painting, the woman lies on her back, her eyes closed. Beside her is a black man playing the violin. The image suggests a repressed sexuality, redolent of strange fantasies. This is a theme that emerges in a more explicit form in most of the Africanistes' imagery, which displays a pervasive fascination with the physicality of black bodies. One of the more disturbing paintings, by Clément Serneels, is of a pubescent girl caught in an awkwardly pornographic posture. In another frankly homoerotic painting by René Le Suisse, a young man strikes a classical pose, his right hand caressing his buttocks.

Elsewhere the paintings reflect a decorative, romanticised view of the African landscape in which the natives are posed in blocks of light and colour, as though the view from the Paris Left Bank had suddenly been transposed to the African interior. On the other hand, as if unnoticed by the artists, the works are full of reminders about the violent and oppressive environment in which they are situated. In one of Dupagne's neo-classical sculptures, for instance, a black man is cutting sugar cane with a machete. The figure has a vigorous and muscular beauty, until the downward stroke of the machete reminds you of the mutilation of African labourers in King Leopold's Congo.

Another illuminating group of images is Paul Daxhelet's watercolours under the title Tribal Scenes, where black dancers whirl and prance like a series of sketches for jazz dance performances, an insight into the way that notions of "blackness" and black physicality have been constructed and propagated in Europe. Daxhelet's black bodies caught in various dramatic poses do not look like Africans dancing: instead, they give the impression of images created in the European dance theatre, part of the Jazz Age decor that swept in from the United States between the wars.

These works pose complex questions about representation, about the interplay between artist, subject and viewer, and about the role of the artist in a fragile social and political environment. As a result, the Tate display becomes not only a lesson in the visual history of colonial Africa, but also the starting point of a debate about the political consequences of our visual lexicon.

· Seeing Africa runs from today to October 29 in the Goodison Room at Tate Britain as part of the BP British Art Displays series. It is curated by Mike Phillips, curator of cross-cultural programmes, and Chris Stephens, head of displays.

Summary: The first Europeans went to exploit the continent and were soon followed by artists excited by the 'primitive'. But, as a new exhibition shows, the images they produced bear the stamp of colonialism with a paint brush, writes Mike Phillips.


Apple chief executive Tim Cook took to the stage on the company’s campus in Cupertino, Calif., to roll out the latest updates to Apple’s product lineup ahead of the holiday shopping season. Last month, the company made its splashier reveal — updated and larger iPhones, a new Apple Pay mobile payment system, and a few details of its latest attempt to create a category-killing device, the Apple Watch.

Thursday’s event was a much tamer affair, with updates on much of the rest of the Apple lineup — tablets, desktops, and software. The highlights:

Apple’s iPads -- the larger iPad Air and the smaller iPad mini -- didn’t change in size, though they did slim down. The iPad Air 2, the new top-of-the-line iPad, is 18 percent thinner than its predecessor. Its camera gains all the features introduced last month with the iPhone 6 -- burst mode, time lapse, and slow-motion video. The 2 and the iPad Mini 3 also add a new color to the line -- gold, to go along with silver and space gray, to mimic the iPhone lineup. The new devices also gain Apple’s fingerprint identification technology, Touch ID, to verify the owner’s identity and enable purchases in Apple’s online stores and on online stores that join Apple’s new mobile payment system.

The iPad Air 2 starts at $499 with Wi-Fi access to data only; the cell-equipped versions are $130 more, starting at $$629. The iPad Mini 3 starts at $249 for Wi-Fi only, with cell-equipped versions also $130 more. Customers can pre-order the devices starting Friday, and Apple says they will begin to ship by “the end of next week.”

Cook announced a launch date for Apple’s new mobile payment system -- four days from now, Monday, Oct. 18. Cook said 500 additional banks have signed up to support the system, as well as the three major credit-card companies -- Visa, Mastercard, and American Express. The service will be available on the new iPhones and iPads after users download a new version of Apple’s mobile operating system, iOS 8.1, which will be made available for free to all users on Monday.

Apple unveiled a thinner iPad Thursday with a faster processor and a better camera.

The new operating system for Apple’s desktops and laptops, OS X Yosemite, was previewed in June and has been available to a million of the company’s public beta testers for the past few months. The software will be available as a free download to all users starting later today.

OS X Yosemite brings even more of the look and feel of the company’s “flatter” mobile operating system to the bigger screen. Switching between and sharing documents among Apple devices is made easier. Apple is playing catch-up with Google Drive by introducing iCloud Drive to allow documents to be shared in the cloud; by early next year, it will retire its clunky iPhoto program and replace it with Photos, which also stores all images in iCloud (for a price). The 8.1 update to iOS also gives users who are beta testers access to the early version of the new iCloud Photo system. OS X Yosemite also allows families to share purchases, so that books or movies purchased by one person can be read or viewed by all.

Apple’s laptop lineup remained unchanged, but its top-of-the line consumer desktop, the iMac, was buffed up at the high end; its biggest model, the 27-inch screen, now can be equipped with Retina display, which Apple says has seven times more pixels than an HDTV for a sharper, crisper display. Its low-end computer, the Mac Mini, also was updated with faster processors, Wi-Fi, and new connections.

The 27-inch Retina iMac will cost $2,499, and ships later today. The Mac Mini drops $100 in price, to $499, and also is available today.

Summary: Apple unveils new iPads and operating system updates at its event in Cupertino, Calif.


A venerable VC firm keeps poaching from its high-profile portfolio company

Venture capital firm Greylock Partners is soon going to have to rename itself LinkedOut Partners.

Greylock was one of the business-focused social network’s earliest investors, leading a $10 million Series B round in late 2004. When LinkedIn LNKD went public this past summer, Greylock held around a 15% position.

But Greylock’s relationship to LinkedIn now goes well beyond investor/investee. The VC firm has been on a hiring binge this year, almost all of which has involved former LinkedIn employees.

Earlier this week, Greylock hired Adam Nash, VP of product management at LinkedIn, as its newest entrepreneur-in-residence. This comes less than a month after Greylock added Josh Elman, who managed product development for LinkedIn Jobs in 2004 and 2005, as a principal. And two months after former LinkedIn chief scientist joined as “data scientist-in-residence.”

Or maybe a more appropriate name would be Hoffman Ventures, after LinkedIn founder and current chairman Reid Hoffman, who joined Greylock as a partner in 2009 and is largely responsible for recruiting so many of his former colleagues. And the “sphere of Reid” extends beyond LinkedIn. For example, the firm hired ex-Mozilla CEO John Lilly as a partner earlier this year. One of his board members at Mozilla was Reid Hoffman.

So if you’re wondering you Greylock will hire next, just view Hoffman’s bio. Or, better yet, his LinkedIn account…

Sign up for my daily email newsletter on deals and deal-makers: GetTermSheet.com

Summary: A venerable VC firm keeps poaching from its high-profile portfolio company Venture capital firm Greylock Partners is soon going to have to rename itself LinkedOut Partners. Greylock was one of the business-focused social network's earliest investors, leading a $10 million Series B round in late 2004. When LinkedIn  went public this past summer, Greylock held around…


The optimists would call it another iteration of the Good Cop-Bad Cop strategy that the U.S. and European Union have sometimes tries to use to contain Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ambitions in Ukraine.

But the reality is much harsher. As Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President François Hollande fly into Moscow for peace talks Friday, the weakness of their hand is clear: the only thing collapsing faster than the front line in Ukraine’s disputed eastern provinces is its economy, and Europe’s major powers are in no rush to prop up either.

Neither France nor Germany wants to send arms to Kyiv to help it defend itself, and neither wants to send money to prop up an administration that has done little to tackle endemic corruption since it came to power last year.

That means that the only way they can influence Russia to stop supporting the separatists’ war is by threatening further sanctions, a policy hamstrung by internal divisions within the E.U.. Leaked documents suggest that the next round of “restrictive measures” planned by the E.U. only adds a few mid-ranking officials and state-owned companies to the sanctions list–hardly an effective deterrent to a full-scale offensive that began with an artillery bombardment of the city of Mariupol at the end of January.

White House press spokesman Josh Evans admitted at a press conference Thursday that sanctions “(haven’t) resulted in the kind of decision-making we’d like to see from the Putin regime.”

Although U.S. diplomats say the Merkel-Hollande trip has the U.S.’s blessing, the differences in approach is unmistakeable. Both a Republican-controlled Congress and President Barack Obama’s nominee for Defense Secretary, Ashton Carter, are more than open to sending weapons to Ukraine to rebalance the military conflict and impose a higher cost in human lives on Russia for its support for the rebels.

“We need to support the Ukrainians in defending themselves,” Carter said at his nomination hearing earlier this week.

Secretary of State John Kerry, meanwhile, said that “We want a diplomatic solution but we cannot close our eyes to tanks crossing the border from Russia…into Ukraine.”

Merkel is bitterly opposed to military escalation, something she impressed upon Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko at a meeting in Kyiv lasting several hours Thursday.

Merkel’s spokesman, Steffen Seibert, said she and Hollande would base their talks with Putin Friday on the nine-point memorandum that was the basis for the now-defunct ceasefire in September last year, albeit in a context that gave the separatists more local powers. However, that would still require them to give up ground they have conquered since then, at a time when they are still advancing. It would also, of course, leave Russia in possession of Crimea, which it annexed last year.

Meanwhile, the hryvnia, Ukraine’s currency, lost nearly half its value against the dollar Thursday as the central bank was forced to stop supporting it, having nearly exhausted its foreign reserves.

Ukraine’s economy shrunk by 6.7% last year, due largely to the loss of Crimea and the devastation of the Donetsk region, home to much of the country’s industry. It’s forecast to shrink another 4% this year, and the International Monetary Fund reckons it needs at least $15 billion to avoid bankruptcy. That funding gap makes a nonsense of the IMF’s existing $17 billion program.

By contrast, Russia’s economy and financial markets are starting to sense that the worst may be over for them, encouraged by the rebound in crude oil prices and by an enthusiastic reception from foreign investors for a $150 million stock offering by supermarket chain OAO Magnit earlier in the week. Domestic political support for Putin has also stayed strong, despite the face that inflation rose to 15.9% in January, its highest level in 16 years.

The ruble has stabilized over the last week, and the benchmark RTS stock index was up 2.4% Friday as hopes for a favorable deal rose.

Summary: Ukraine is losing militarily and collapsing economically, and the West's response is more divided than ever--as a desperate Franco-German peace initiative shows.


Vinnie Malhotra, senior vice president for development and acquisitions for CNN Worldwide, has a full slate of documentary features and shorts coming up. Among them are Kirby Dick’s controversial film about campus sexual assault, “The Hunting Ground,” and Sacha Jenkins’s “Fresh Dressed,” about fashion in New York hip-hop culture. See which docs have most inspired him over the decades.

The Thin Blue Line (1988)

“One of the most respected works of investigative filmmaking,” says Malhotra about Errol Morris’s documentary. “It manages to prove the innocence of the wrongfully accused Randall Adams for the murder of a police officer. This is the first documentary I can remember which uses dramatic reenactments to drive pivotal story points.”

D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus emulate Robert Drew’s “Primary” (1960) in this chronicle of Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign. “During my time at ABC News this was considered a bible for those covering presidential contests,” Malhotra recalls in an e-mail. “It achieves a level of access to the inner circle of a candidate in real time unlike anything since. A young George Stephanopoulos and the eccentric James Carville (with hair!) keep you entertained throughout. It’s the greatest political film I have ever seen, and influenced my decision to become a journalist and cover politics.”

Malhotra ranks Steve James’s documentary as his favorite. “The perfect confluence of film, sports, and social commentary, it’s the first ‘sports doc’ to transcend the world of sports.” James tells a heartbreaking story of race and class by following the plight of two inner-city Chicago teenagers as they use basketball to reach for something more in their lives. It inspired the ESPN documentary series “30 for 30” and most sports films since.

Manda Bala (Send a Bullet) (2007)

“Jason Kohn’s crime saga documentary electrifies from start to finish,” Malhotra says. “It re-creates the world of vibrant color, music, and drama that is the heart of Brazil, allowing a front row seat to the business of kidnapping and ransom and corruption at the highest levels.”

Malhotra recommends Charles Ferguson’s documentary for those still bewildered by the 2008 economic collapse. “It masterfully lays out a story of criminality in which the villains escape real punishment, and the average man is left to twist in the wind. It’s an example of the power of a documentarian who digs deeper than the 24-hour news cycle.”

Hell and Back Again (2011)

“The documentaries detailing the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have done more to illustrate the toll on Americans than any other genre,” Malhotra asserts. “Of these, photographer-filmmaker Danfung Dennis’s story of Marine Sergeant Nathan Harris has especially been seared into my memory. It eloquently dips back and forth from the war zone to the home front to show Harris’s hardship in returning from combat to ‘real’ life.”

Summary: Vinnie Malhotra, senior vice president for development and acquisitions for CNN Worldwide, has a full slate of documentary features and shorts coming up. Among them is Kirby Dick’s controversial film about campus sexual assault, “The Hunting Ground.” Meanwhile, you can check out these docs that have most inspired him.


The announcement of the new Lincoln Continental has gotten a lot of attention—including sfrom executives at Bentley, who are accusing Ford of stealing the design for the new luxury car.

“Do you want us to send the product tooling,” Bentley Chief Designer Luc Donckerwolke wrote on the Facebook page of Lincoln styling chief David Woodhouse. The spat was reported by Bloomberg.

The new Continental is being unveiled at this month’s New York auto show. Donckerwolke seems to think it’s a knockoff of the Bentley Flying Spur, which sells for more than $200,000.

A Ford executive fired back, defending the new car’s originality.

“There’s no way that we’ve copied anybody’s design,” Global Marketing Chief Stephen Odell said. “Our Continental has its own character, its own architecture and its own aspects as a car.”

Summary: The design of the new Lincoln has Bentley executives' feathers ruffled


Margaret Holgate's screen-printed scarves were sold by Liberty and Mary Quant in London

My friend Margaret Holgate, who has died aged 97, was a talented designer and an exceptional colourist with a wide range of enthusiasms.

Daughter of David and Ella Greenfield, she was born in Caernarfon, Gwynedd, and went to Newport College of Art and then to the Royal College of Art, London. In 1944 she became a member of the Voluntary Service Overseas, in Egypt, with the task of delivering Egyptian cotton to Crete. Her eight months in charge of a heavy truck resulted in a driving style of great panache, which on occasion could unnerve her passengers.

In 1944 she married Jim Holgate, a beekeeper, and they eventually settled in the Cotswold village of Oakridge Lynch near Stroud, where Jim ran the Two Rivers Honey Farm and Margaret split her time between selling honey and screen-printing scarves, which were sold by Liberty and Mary Quant in London. Margaret was accepted into the Gloucestershire Guild of Craftsmen.

Crop-spraying forced the Holgates to move the honey farm to west Wales and they chose the small town of Aberaeron. I first met Margaret in 1962 when we were both involved in establishing the Aberaeron Art Society, and later again through the Aberaeron Civic Society, which aimed to protect the architectural heritage of the town. Margaret helped to ensure that the stone walls of the harbour were not defaced with concrete.

Margaret, steeped in the craft traditions, spotted the fine quality of Welsh farm cupboards and chests and placed these with modern furniture, adventurous colours and pieces of art in the interiors of the houses which she occupied in Aberaeron and then in London.

After her move to London in 1969, Margaret became a regular student at the Camden Institute, where she learned to make jewellery. She became a member of the Highgate Society and sold jewellery with great success at their Christmas craft fair.

Her other abiding interest, apart from travel, was food. She was the best cook I have known, with great knowledge of wine and French cuisine, and her presentation of meals was as considered as a painting. A skilled hostess and organiser of parties, she maintained an elegance, a careful choice of scarf and jewellery still evident at the time of my last visit.

Jim died in 1986. Margaret's younger daughter, Louisa, died in 2013. She is survived by her daughter Sarah and four grandchildren.

Summary: Other lives: Talented designer with a great eye for colour who was accepted into the Gloucestershire Guild of Craftsmen


FORTUNE – The press may have come to know Sheila Bair’s new book as a juicy tell-all tale of all that’s wrong with Wall Street, but the former Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation chairwoman on Monday clarified the tone of her book, Bull By The Horns: Fighting to Save Main Street From Wall Street and Wall Street From Itself.

“Blunt and honest I like – tell all, I don’t like,” said Bair during an interview with Fortune executive editor Stephanie Mehta at its annual Most Powerful Women Summit in Laguna Niguel. “I did take people to task but only when I thought there was a good reason for it.”

Her book takes aim at bankers she blames for the 2007 financial crisis. Bair also criticizes regulators – notably, U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who was head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York during the crisis. She called him the “bailouter in chief” and questioned whether his efforts to flush the big banks with billions of dollars were really a veiled attempt to rescue Citigroup C .

Read a full transcript of this interview

Admittedly, it turns out Bair wanted to say a little more, but readers (and perhaps Geithner) may never know exactly what. She said she actually held back: “I took 30,000 words out,” she said about her 365-page book.

What Bair didn’t leave out were the challenges of doing her job in the world of government and high finance so largely dominated by men. She described being left out of important meetings. And on Monday, she stressed the need to have more women working in “government at all levels.”

“There are some women who maybe aren’t as tough regulators as they should be. But net-net it just seems to me like the women tend to focus more on the broader population. Maybe it’s our role as mothers, I don’t know. But we do seem to have a bigger identification of that.”

Read an excerpt of Bair’s book, Bull by the Horns

Bair was appointed to the FDIC in 2006 and served a five-year term. She’s a native of a rural town in Kansas called Independence – a place she described as mostly Republican “with a populist streak.” She sees herself that way as well.

Looking ahead, it’s probably not all that surprising that Bair has plenty of concerns over the future of Wall Street and the broader economy. She has high hopes for the newly-created Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection, although she said the “rules are still too long and complex.” Bair’s much bigger worry is that the level of capital that banks must hold in order to keep from ever going under isn’t sufficient. This isn’t to say banks shouldn’t take risks, Bair said, but capital requirements should be higher.

“If there’s one thing the regulators can and should do before they do anything else is to raise capital requirements,” Bair said. “You raise it for large financial institutions – bank and non-bank. Leverage was really a key driver of the crisis. It’s the reason why you ended up having to do bailouts.”

And as there seems to be no immediate end in sight for Europe’s ongoing debt crisis, raising capital requirements seems ever more important.

“You look at Europe now they’ve never re-capitalized their banks. The leverage is still astonishing out there, said Bair, now a senior advisor to the Pew Charitable Trusts and a columnist for Fortune.

She added: “The new capital rules only came out for comment in March. I’m already hearing pushback.”

And in terms of what the Fed has been doing to bolster America’s tepid recovery, Bair doesn’t think the central bank’s latest prescription to buy billions of dollars worth of bonds and help drive mortgage rates lower will help at all. After all, banks aren’t as quick to lend as they used to, and the appetite to borrowers amid economic uncertainties isn’t at all what it used to be during the credit boom years.

“I think the risks are quite profound,” Bair said, adding that it could very well lead to inflation or rapidly rising prices.

Summary: Sheila Bair has a new book on the insider's view of the financial crisis. She's no longer a bank regulator, but she has plenty of advice for those who are.


“Money is the mother’s milk of politics,” the late California politician Jesse Unruh famously said. Ironically, for female politicians, money doesn’t flow like it does for male candidates.

There are 104 women serving the 114th Congress. That’s an all-time record, but female members still account for only about 20% of the total body. And while a host of factors have contributed to keeping Congress unequal, money is a big one. Fundraising is the number one barrier that stops women from running for higher office, according to a study from Political Parity, a nonpartisan group working to increase the number Congresswomen and female governors. Another report, just released by The Sunlight Foundation and the Center for Responsive Politics, found that nearly 75% of the biggest donors in the 2014 midterm election were men.

Laura Cox Kaplan, regulatory affairs and public policy leader for accounting giant PwC, says her firm is trying clear away that blockade by changing the way its political action committee distributes money to politicians. In 2014, PwC’s PAC gave a total of $1.5 million to political candidates, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a D.C. group that tracks political donations. While that figure pales in comparison to Washington’s biggest donors, Kaplan is hoping that, by focusing more of that money on female politicians, it can start to improve the gender balance in Congress.

“Washington seems broken,” says Kaplan. “We have seen both at PwC and with our clients that diverse groups function better.” She believes that increasing women’s power in politics will help break down gridlock in government and actually prompt lawmakers to get more done.

PwC began by reaching out to female members of Congress, who told the firm that changing the timing of donations could make a difference. So, Kaplan says, “We want to get more money out the door in the first quarter.” The idea is that, by donating to women early, the PAC “can dissuade challengers to women who we think are doing a good job.”

Kaplan is also working to get PwC to look beyond its immediate self-interest when it comes to who gets donations. “Maybe there’s a great women candidate, but she’s not on a committee that’s relevant to us. Let’s move her up the list anyway,” says Kaplan. As an example, she mentions Tulsi Gabbard, a Democrat from Hawaii, elected to the House of Representatives in 2012. Kaplan points out that Gabbard serves on the House Armed Services Committee, not a committee that’s particularly important to PwC. (Kaplan is quick to point out that firm does not plan to pay special attention to one particular party. She notes that Elise Stefanik, a Republican from New York, is an equally apt example).

The company is also working to put more women in the political pipeline, says Kaplan, citing the PwC public policy internship program. Roughly half of the interns selected for the program, which introduces rising college seniors to legislators, political consultants and other governing movers and shakers, are female.

Kaplan acknowledges that, in the world of political giving, PwC is a small fry. Alone, she says, the company’s actions will likely have little effect. However, she believes that taking the first step is essential–and will hopefully inspire others to do the same. “It’s going to take time to move the needle,” she says. “I’m talking to my counterparts in corporate America, urging them to do the same thing.”

Summary: The Big Four accounting firm wants to use its PAC to help increase the number of women in Congress.


Microsoft’s stock has stagnated as investors have lost faith in the company’s plans for its future. After peaking at just under $60 a share in early 2000, Microsoft’s stock fell to about $22 later that year and has traded mostly between $25 and $40 a share in the 14 years since then. While revenue and earnings per share have more than tripled since then, the stock price has not followed suit. What Microsoft could do can be answered fairly simply: Take a page out of Facebook’s apparent strategy and buy best of breed next generation companies.

Microsoft can improve its prospects by dominating three areas: Operating systems, development tools and conferencing. It’s clear that development is shifting to virtualization and the cloud. Cloud IaaS is becoming the center of gravity for developers. According to The Cloud Market, Linux variants account for over 90% of the applications on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). The EC2 data indicates that a large number of developers prefer developing in Linux for the cloud.

MORE: Meet the best Android phone on the market

Microsoft MSFT is losing many customers by not having a more robust integration with Linux in its cloud. While Microsoft claims to be supportive of Linux, other cloud providers like Amazon AMZN , VMware (VMW), IBM IBM and Salesforce.com (CRM) are actually doing much more to support Linux. If one considers all devices, including smart phones and tablets (the Android Operating System is based on the Linux kernel), Linux’s unit share is about twice that of Microsoft Windows. I am not suggesting that Microsoft abandon Windows — it is still a great product with lots of legs, but I am suggesting that a dual OS strategy would give it an opportunity to:

A way to put a stake in the ground is to buy Linux provider, Red Hat RHT . With such an acquisition and its deep integration into Microsoft Azure, Microsoft would be well positioned as a leader in IaaS. In addition to Linux, Red Hat has a strong Open Stack player that could leverage open source application programming interfaces as a disruptive, strong alternative to Amazon Web Services (AWS). Such an acquisition would quickly become accretive as Microsoft’s reach into the Enterprise Linux workload could accelerate their short-term growth as a Cloud player and propel them into a dominant leadership position in the cloud.

MORE: Can St. Louis become the next tech hub?

According to W3Techs, PHP is being used by over 80% of all websites (other estimates have it as low as 50%). PHP’s growth continues to accelerate on the backs of the shift to mobile and the rapidly expanding footprint of popular apps like Drupal, Magento and WordPress. Like Linux, it is a dominant tool for the next generation of cloud-based web and mobile applications. Microsoft should recognize the need to be the major player in PHP and acquire the market leader, Zend. I’m not necessarily saying this because Zend is in my firm’s portfolio, but rather because I believe the ownership of Zend would re-ignite Microsoft’s sway with developers.

It also would better enable Microsoft to add features to its cloud offering that would optimize for those choosing to use PHP. This, along with a strong Linux position, would help Microsoft compete more favorably as a cloud provider. By having robust developer value creation strategies for both their traditional .NET base and PHP, Microsoft would be addressing the vast majority of web and mobile development and send a clear signal to the market that the next generation of applications should be built on Microsoft Azure.

The third suggested acquisition is a company called Double Robotics. Double offers a remotely controlled, robotic mobile teleconferencing system. A tablet is placed as the head of the robot and it displays the image of the person telecommuting. From anywhere in the world, it allows a user to have a physical presence in the office and speak to co-workers as if he or she were present. Skype is likely to come under attack from a variety of sources and getting out in front with a next generation product like Double would help Microsoft maintain share and increase revenue. Strong sales of this product could help increase Microsoft tablet sales. It would be important for Skype to continue to support the iPad as an option for the Double robot.

MORE: Tech stocks may have more room to fall

These three acquisitions, taken together, would show investors that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is changing the way the company operates by acquiring best of breed companies that position it to offer premier cloud services across all platforms, make its smart phones and tablets more competitive, increase its footprint in the server OS and be the innovator in teleconferencing.

Putting this in perspective, Facebook has a lower market cap, less funds and weaker cash flow than Microsoft.Yet Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg spent $16 billion on WhatsApp fully recognizing the additional customer dominance in social that this provides. The cost of these three companies should be less than $16 billion and yet could have an even larger impact for Microsoft. Such exciting and relevant acquisitions by Microsoft would also likely payback not only in revenue growth but immediately in stock price.

Mike Kwatinetz is a founding general partner at Azure Capital Partners, where he specializes in software and related infrastructure technologies. This post is from his blog, SoundbytesII .

Summary: By rethinking its acquisition strategy, the computer software and electronics company can be an innovator in growing sectors, such as cloud services, smart phones and teleconferencing.


P RICES are n ot the only thing falling in the stock market. Corporateearnings esti mates - the engine that typically pulls equity prices along - have also been heading downhill and prospects seem to favor afurther slide .

''We are entering a period when earnings predictability, along with the credibility of profit estimates by Wall Street, will go by the board for the next several months,'' Stewart J. Pillette, associate research director for Drexel Burnham Lambert Inc., said. ''Essentially, that's because the chaos in th e fixed-income market will leave the domestic economy staggering. I don't anticipate any growth at all in the economy through the firs t quarter of 1982.''

If business activity does, indeed, play out this zero-growth scenario, the prospect is for unit sales to flatten and for profit margins to deteriorate abruptly at many companies.

Securities analysts are paid to estimate profits and, so far at least, many of them have been lowering their forecasts only grudgingly.

In fact, one bank trust officer in Baltimore criticizes most large Wall Street brokerage firms for their reluctance to cut earnings forecasts sufficiently. He is James D. Hardesty, senior vice president of the Mercantile-Safe Deposit and Trust Company, which manages $3.4 billion for clients.

''With rare exceptions, profit projections at Wall Street firms are well above our in-house estimates,'' he said. ''What's the main reason for that? Generally, these earnings estimates come from corporate management and management is hesitant to bring forth bad news.''

Mr. Hardesty said that one barometer of how a company is doing is how available the company's treasurer is to comment on the earnings outlook. ''In the last three weeks, some treasurers have been very difficult to reach,'' he said.

Nevertheless, there is a pronounced downward bias to earnings revisions, according to Stanley Levine of the Institutional Brokers Estimate System, a unit of Lynch, Jones & Ryan, a Wall Street investment firm. Sixty-three brokerage firms, whose analysts cover some 2,200 stocks, report to this service.

Its latest tabulation, covering the period from mid-July to mid-August, shows a downgrading in 1981 forecasts for every sector of the stock market except consumer durables and nondurables and consumer services.

''As earnings estimates decline, the stock prices tend to decline more,'' Mr. Levine said. ''Our studies indicate that large earnings estimate changes tend on a monthly basis to be followed by stock price movements that are above average.''

As for individual companies, he said, the largest cuts in 1981 estimates in the latest report were for Hecla Mining, Centran, Eastmet, American Management Systems, Host International, R.G. Barry, Barber-Greene, Spectra-Physics, Clark Oil and Refining, and Pope & Talbot.

At the same time, analysts accorded the following companies the biggest increases for estimated profits: LTV, Essex Chemical, Republic Steel, Mohasco, the RTE Corporation, MCI Communications, Consolidated Oil and Gas, Deltona, Saga and Franklin Electric.

Mr. Hardesty of Mercantile-Safe Deposit thinks that 1981 profits on average will be ''virtually flat'' for companies in Standard & Poor's 500-stock index.

But, despite pruning their estimates bit by bit all year long, most brokerage-house analysts still appear relatively sanguine. Mr. Levine reported that, as of August, projections called for an average gain of 12.6 percent in profits for the 500-stock universe. This was down from the previous month's estimate of a 13.7 percent advance and well below an 18.7 percent projected gain last December.

High interest rates are cutting into bottom-line profits for corporate borrowers. Last week, Analog Devices Inc. cited higher interest costs as one reason for the 58 percent drop in its latest quarterly profits. As of Aug. 1, management said, interest expenses stood at $2.4 million, up from $1.6 million a year earlier.

An example of how rising rates can affect the outlook for an entire industry was cited by Mark Tavel, research director for the Value Line Investment Survey. ''A few months ago, when interest rates began to soften, we thought the mobile-home group would benefit,'' he said. ''But when rates went up again, that postponed any sales and earnings recovery. Our logic was right, but our timing was thrown off.''

As this year evolved, corporate profits bumped into obstacles other than soaring interest rates. Mr. Pillette of Drexel Burnham Lambert noted that currency translations make predicting earnings for multinational corporations difficult indeed. ''In the current climate, an analyst covering the multinationals has to predict the strength of t he dollar and he's notequipped to d o that,'' he said.

On this score, ethical drug companies, which depend on overseas sales for much of their volume, have been hit particularly hard since the dollar's re-emergence as a bastion of strength against other world currencies.

The problem reflects accounting practices. American-based multinational companies prepare thei r consoli dated financial statements in dollars, while foreign subsidia ries keep their books inlocal currencies. Since treasurers cannot add , say, French francs anddollars, they must translate - or convert - t he foreign numbers into dollars before they become part of the consol idated statement.

Some of the world's biggest companies (Value Line cites the Royal Dutch/Shell Transport Group as one example) this year are feeling the pinch of currency losses.

As a result of high interest rates, currency losses, prospects for a bumpy economy and other negatives, there is an ongoing search for industries that offer better-than-average predictability in profits.

''One group where you find reliable predictability consists of the independent telephone companies,'' said William G. Garrison, who heads Garrison Asset Management Inc., an investment advisory firm. ''These include Allied Telephone, Mid-Continent Telephone, United Telecommunications and Central Telephone and Utilities.''

Mr. Garrison said that these independents have shown annual earnings growth of between 7 and 11 percent for about the last six years. ''Even in a flat economy, you'll see regulatory rate increases for the companies,'' he said. ''Of course, the number of installed telephones would rise only modestly, but there would be continued growth in telephone usage.''

Exciting growth rates, of course, can produce exciting gains in stock prices. But the pendulum swings both ways. A prime example is the Intel Corporation, a leading producer of semiconductors. Its share price, adjusted for stock splits, rose from 87 1/2 cents in 1971 to a high of $49.50 in late 1980. Then came a slump that resulted in profits plunging to 27 cents a share in the first half of this year, from $1.13 a year earlier. Last week, Intel's stock traded below $27.

Illustrations: table on revised per-share earnings forecasts of 12 companies


An ambitious exhibition, the first major retrospective of Israeli artists, will fill the first floor and sculpture garden of the Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Avenue, near 91st Street, with 124 paintings, drawings and sculptures by 36 artists, from today through May 17. If the development of a society can be traced through its art, ''Artists of Israel: 1920-80'' promises to do the same for the growth of the Hebrew-speaking population of that country from 28 years before it attained nationhood to the present.

The show is organized somewhat chronologically, and explores the artists' styles in groups representing abrstract, expressionists, surrealist, minimalist, realist and conceptual art, and reflects political activities and international art trends as well as such Israeli institutions as the kibbutz. Among the artists represented are Yaacov Agam, Mordecai Ardon, Avigdor Arikha, Reuven Rubin, Moshe Castel, Anna Ticho and Igael Tumarkin, whose works have been borrowed from London's Tate Gallery, Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum and New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The show also has an audio-visual element in which artists are seen discussing their work. Along with the exhibition, starting next month there will be lectures, screenings of eight feature-length films directed by Israelis and other special events.

The museum is open from noon to 5 P.M., Mondays through Thursdays; from 11 A.M. to 6 P.M. Sundays; closed Fridays and Saturdays. Admission: $2; students and 6-to-16's, $1; over-65's, pay what you wish. Information: 860-1888. FROM FINLAND

No matter what language you may speak, chances are that you will be able to see a movie in it at some time in New York. Finnish films may be a bit harder to find, but if you go to Columbia University's Dodge Hall, Room 511, at 116th Street and Broadway, at 6 P.M. today, you will be able to close that gap. They are showing the third in a Thursday series of four recent Finnish films, with English subtitles.

Today's film is ''One Man's War,'' directed in 1973 by Risto Jarva. The story, in a gloomy Scandinavian mode, is about changes in Finnish society that have resulted in many Finns' going to work in Sweden. If this sounds too somber, try again next Thursday at 6, when ''The Year of the Hare,'' a more upbeat affair, will be shown. This, too, was directed by Mr. Jarva, who was killed in 1977 in a car crash, following the movie's opening. This adaptation of Arto Paasilinna's novel will be shown in the Altschul Auditorium of the School of International Affairs at Columbia, 118th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. Admission is free. Information: 280-3925. MUSICAL ROOTS

Orin Grossman is a pianist and head of the Fairfield University fine arts department in Connecticut. He is a classicist who not only has an affection for jazz, but also regards it as a peculiarly American ''art music'' that has done with popular music what European composers have done with their own folk tunes: elevated them to more sophisticated musical forms.

Mr. Grossman will put his fingers where his music is in a concert at 8 P.M. today in the Concert Hall of the Abraham Goodman House, 129 West 67th Street. He will present his credentials as classical pianist in the program's first half, with performances of Mozart, Ravel and Bartok, then will go on to works by Bix Beiderbecke, Thelonious Monk and George Gershwin. Admission: $6, $4; students and over-65's, $3. Box office: 362-8719; information: 242-3736. PHOTO ALBUM

If there ever was a popular art form, it surely must be the camera. The relentless shutter-clicking, in this instance photography that constitutes a happy photo album of American life, is apothesized in nearly 800 black-and-white and color snapshots that are the winners of the 42d annual Kodak International Newspaper Snapshot Awards.

They are on show in the Equitable Gallery, a broad expanse that is part of the lobby of 1285 Avenue of the Americas, at 51st Street. You will see people and places representing an enormous variety of scenes and places; children, oldsters, pets, vendors, beach bathers, athletes, loafers, workers and revelers. The contest was conducted by 152 newspapers, with the Eastman Kodak Company as sponsor. Open, free, from 10 A.M. to 4 P.M. Mondays through Fridays through next week.

Illustrations: Photo of Orin Grossman

Summary: WRAP-UP   An ambitious exhibition, the first major retrospective of Israeli artists, will fill the first floor and sculpture garden of the Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Avenue, near 91st Street, with 124 paintings, drawings and sculptures by 36 artists, from today through May 17. If the development of a society can be traced through its art, ''Artists of Israel: 1920-80'' promises to do the same for the growth of the Hebrew-speaking population of that country from 28 years before it attained nationhood to the present.   The show is organized somewhat chronologically, and explores the artists' styles in groups representing abrstract, expressionists, surrealist, minimalist, realist and conceptual art, and reflects political activities and international art trends as well as such Israeli institutions as the kibbutz. Among the artists represented are Yaacov Agam, Mordecai Ardon, Avigdor Arikha, Reuven Rubin, Moshe Castel, Anna Ticho and Igael Tumarkin, whose works have been borrowed from London's Tate Gallery, Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum and New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.


BED REST By Rita Kashner. 266 pp. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co. $10.95. RHINE MAIDENS By Carolyn See. 272 pp. New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan. $13.95.

THE busy life of Beth Clahr, suburban supermom and nascent singer, seems to be functioning smoothly. In her mind she ticks off the morning's minutiae - lunch-box sandwiches, car pool, small son's fox costume. She has two rude children, a handful of Junior League friends and Gideon, a would-be lover who is always on the telephone saying things like ''You're high and sweet this morning.'' Though her husband, Richard (a character straight out of late-60's women's fiction, especially ''Diary of a Mad Housewife''), seems insensitive - in bed, he tells her she's ''ready'' when she isn't, and he is less than enthusiastic about singing lessons - Beth has apparently made her peace with his imperfections. She still winces, though, when she hears herself say, ''I want to be interesting for you, Rich. You're a dynamic man; I don't want you to wake up and find yourself married to a useless and boring woman who hasn't grown in twenty-five years.''

But this winning first novel takes a different turn from those housewifely consciousness-raisings with which we are familiar. Rather than leave the husband or take the lover, Beth - bright, appealing and seemingly well adjusted - chooses to bathe very carefully every day, make up her bed with clean sheets (she launders them daily) and lie there still as a stone figure on a crypt, singing ''Toora loora loora.'' These afternoon retreats become ''a funny kind of clandestine oasis in (her) day.'' Is this some monstrous retreat from a life that has become too complicated, a nay vote against contemporary woman's role juggling? Mrs. Kashner is a deft and subtle writer. Beth's life shifts before our eyes, ever so delicately, from one that runs smoothly to one that calls for difficult choices. The one-night-a-week choral singing becomes a potential, demanding career when Beth learns she has the talent to go the distance, to sing solo and give up the chorus, where singers must learn to merge their voices with the group. A fellow chorus member urgently wants to make love to her. A close friend has cancer, and Beth, initially frightened by a suspicious lump in her own breast, finds she is pregnant and must decide about an abortion. Overnight, her daughter turns, as daughters do, from an obnoxious child into a woman. None of these things is overwhelming in itself, but together they throw Beth off-balance. She has increasing numbers of Walter Mitty fantasies, and the tuna-fish/car-pool litany, which at first seemed purely functional, takes on an obsessive quality; now she must recite it, like the Lord's Prayer, during crises. She longs for the time when her mother bathed her, put her to bed, smoothed her hair and sang her a lullaby.

One of the most gratifying things about ''Bed Rest'' is that Beth negotiates her crisis, with its attendant painful early memories, without the help of a psychiatrist. She rides it out herself - an expression, possibly, of increasing female self-sufficiency - and when it is over, she is better and stronger, and finally able to make her choices.

''Bed Rest'' is a graceful and touching tour through a familiar landscape, made interesting by the author's intelligence, skill and light touch.

Though some mothers stroke their daughters' hair and tuck them in bed, Grace, the mother in ''Rhine Maidens,'' isn't one of them. She never says ''my word'' or knits a sweater. She can't stand her daughter, Garnet, a Brentwood matron who looks ''like someone had reached in her head and scooped out all her brains with a spoon,'' or Garnet's husband, Ian, the ''Jewish Jerk,'' or their decorator house, or their children, the ''disgusting little creeps.'' Grace lives and works in Coalinga, a small dreary California oil town full of other lonely women like herself.

Her problem is not unusual - life just didn't turn out the way it was supposed to. Once she had a tiny waist and auburn hair. She lived in Los Angeles in the 40's. She went tea-dancing at the Ambassador and met her first husband, a newspaperman who took her into his world of glamour and L.A. lights and then left her, supposedly to write his novel, saying, ''Dostoevski always said that wives and children killed more artists than cholera.'' Then there was Dick, with his rosebud mouth, who whispered to her from the bar, ''If I were a gopher I'd go for you'': enough for another marriage, another child and Coalinga, because Dick was ''in oil'' - though, more often, in a bar.

''Rhine Maidens'' is written in alternating sections, in the voices of Grace and her daughter. Both women describe a dreadful visit with each other and a sad meeting with Sandy, Grace's son and Garnet's half brother, who reveals that he is a homosexual druggie. To entertain Grace, Garnet takes her to a ''Green Energy'' seminar, where young men dressed as dollar bills seek to raise the audience's money-consciousness. Grace leaves with Ed, one of the few eligible males who has crossed her path. He has some money, and he very soon wants to marry her. It could be a satisfactory ending to a hard life that has left, as its residue, an angry bitterness.

Mother and daughter have nothing in common but a chance biological connection and an eerie penchant for losing husbands. Though Garnet's life is light-years from her mother's, it is only after Ian has left her that she understands that she must put her life together in her own way. She must stop endlessly trying to please an unpleasable mother, and maybe, she dreams, she can live the way Jane Fonda does.

Carolyn See is a skillful writer, and she makes us like both the irascible, vital Grace and the not very bright but somehow touching Garnet. A shrewd and funny observer, Miss See looks at that welltrodden territory, Southern California, from some new angles. I was interested in Grace's unusual nostalgia for the Los Angeles of 40 years ago, where she walked to work, to lunch and to Bullock's to shop, just as though L.A. were like any other city. Yet Grace's coming to terms with herself is the only part of the book that takes place outside California. Is it necessary to leave there to see oneself truly?


To the Business Editor: I would like to correct a statement about Nat Wartels in ''Tight Grip on a Rich Empire'' (Oct. 18). I was a Crown employee from September 1978 to August 1980, and during that time saw a lot of Nat and Crown.

While I'm sure Nat has stayed much the same through the years - genial, hard-working, interested in his company and employees - Crown has been going through a period from a small, family-run business to a growing, bottom-line oriented publisher.

The statement that no one has ever been fired from Crown is utterly false. I have witnessed the random firing as well as the wholesale ''restructuring'' of departments. No one with a real knowledge of Crown's recent history could say such as statement without blushing. JOANNE MURATORI New York, N.Y., Oct. 19, 1981


WHITE PLAINS— A deadline for legislative action that would have enabled Westchester County voters to accept or reject a proposed countywide public utility in the November election passed without action yesterday amid charges of political maneuvering. The proposed referendum might be completed in time for submission during village elections next March, according to one of its backers.

The proposed agency, approved in principle on July 20 by a unanimous vote of the Republican-controlled Board of Legislators, would have been authorized to purchase electricity from any source, including available hydroelectric power, for distribution through Consolidated Edison lines.

A similar proposal that would have required the more expensive condemnation of Con Edison property in Westchester was defeated in 1979. The utility favored the present proposal, although it balked at the wording of a proposed resolution last Monday.

The wording was changed and County Executive Alfred B. DelBello, a Democrat, asked Tuesday night that the legislators meet yesterday, the deadline for necessary political action, to approve the new version. But the lawmakers failed to convene, some arguing that the cost of the proposed agency remained unclear.