IT would be a rare and perhaps foolish person who would serve on a co-op or condo board that wasn't protected by a directors and officers (D & O) insurance policy. But even savvy board members, insurance experts say, may be unaware of significant variations in coverage.

"Not all D & O policies are created equal," said Joel Meskin, vice president for community association products of McGowan & Company, an insurance brokerage based in Fairview Park, Ohio. "And since we want the best people to sit on co-op and condo boards, we have to make sure we're providing them with the best coverage possible."

Mr. Meskin said that co-ops and condos typically have two types of insurance: general liability coverage, which protects the co-op or condo association in the event someone is injured on the property, and D & O coverage, which protects board members and others against claims for "wrongful acts." While most D & O policies provide $1 million in coverage  with some buildings supplementing that with an umbrella policy for as much as $100 million  the scope of the coverage is at least as important as the amount.

Some D & O policies, Mr. Meskin said, do not provide board members with coverage for contractual claims made by third parties. In other words, he said, if a fuel-oil company successfully sues individual board members for breach of contract, policies that do not explicitly cover such claims will not provide protection.

It is also possible that a D & O policy will not provide coverage for things like libel, slander and invasion of privacy. "We're seeing increasing numbers of claims based on comments made in e-mails sent between board members," Mr. Meskin said.

Andrew Schutzman, president of AMS Risk Management and Consulting in Rockville Centre, N.Y., said that board members should also verify the type of coverage they have for fraud or other dishonesty. He said that while most policies do not provide coverage for damages awarded as a result of a board member's fraud or other dishonesty, there are differences among policies regarding paying for a defense.

"Providing a defense is the most important coverage you're going to get from a D & O policy," he said. He noted that with some policies, the insurance company will provide a defense until there is clear proof of fraud or dishonesty. But with others, the company can deny a defense based on an allegation of fraud.

"Boards have to make sure that their D & O policy will provide a defense until there is proof of fraud or dishonesty," he said.

Robert Mackoul, president of Mackoul & Associates in Long Beach, N.Y., said that in addition to the coverage provided by a D & O policy, boards should pay attention to who is covered.

"The better policies are going to cover past and present board members, the corporation or association, volunteers, committee members and even property managers," Mr. Mackoul said. "Narrowly drawn policies will cover only the board itself."

Boards, he said, should also be aware of limitations on claims. Some policies cover only claims for acts that occurred no more than a year or two in the past. "Quality D & O policies don't have such a limitation," he said, noting that such coverage is typically provided only if the board had no knowledge of potential claims when it bought the policy.

One indication that a board's D & O coverage is less than adequate, he said, is when the coverage is part of the building's general liability policy. "Imbedded D & O coverage is going to be inexpensive but not very comprehensive," he said, explaining that such coverage may cost as little as $100 or $200 a year. A separate but comprehensive policy, Mr. Mackoul said, costs $1,000 to $2,500, depending on building size.

"When you consider the stakes," he said, "that's money well spent."

Summary:
Insurance is crucial for members of co-op and condo boards, but there are wide variations in coverage. The most comprehensive policies can cost up to
$2,500.


Next year’s crop of Pac-12 college athletes will include officially-sanctioned gamers for the first time ever.

In an end-of-year announcement, the Pac-12 Conference said on Tuesday that it will be the first college athletic conference to host and televise eSports competitions during the 2016-2017 school year. Citing a “growing interest amongst Pac-12 students in competitive video gaming,” conference officials approved a plan to sanction eSports teams from each Pac-12 university to compete next year in head-to-head match-ups as well as a tournament with a conference championship at stake.

The conference plans to broadcast competitions on the Pac-12 Network, the conference’s cable and satellite TV network. The conference’s announcement stated that the nascent interest in eSports is related to various academic pursuits, including “computer science, visual and cinematic arts, engineering and others.”

“eSports is a natural fit for many of our universities located in the technology and media hubs of the country,” Pac-12 Commissioner Larry Scott said in a statement. Conference officials said they have not yet decided on which specific video game will be used as the basis of the competitions, or the event format, but those decisions will come soon.

A number of U.S. colleges and universities already have unofficial eSports teams that participate in collegiate competitions, including the Heroes of the Dorm competition, which the Pac-12’s own Arizona State University won this year.

The growth in popularity of eSports has been reflected in an increase in traditional media coverage, and televised competitions on the Pac-12 Network is just the latest example. ESPN, Disney’s DIS flagship sports network, has broadcast the Heroes of the Dorm competition on its ESPNU and ESPN2 networks, while also launching an eSports-specific vertical on ESPN.com. Meanwhile, Turner Broadcasting is launching an eSports league this year that will soon include regular televised coverage on its TBS network on Friday evenings.

Summary: Sanctioned video-gaming competitions will start during the next school year.


The Game wants to turn you into a hustling drug kingpin and street soldier -- and he can guarantee you won't get arrested too ... since it's all virtual in his new app "Block Wars."

Sources tell TMZ the rapper teamed with IM3 Gaming Studios to create a gritty mobile game set in Compton. The goal? Conquer one street at a time while competing with rival gangs to sell weed, guns, knives, buildings and cars. All in the name of fueling the economy, of course.

Game stars as the hood boss in his hometown, but there are plans to expand the game to include an East Coast vs. West Coast war.

Game's game is set to drop sometime this summer and it'll be free. In-app purchases -- for weapons, cars, goons, etc. -- will range from 99 cents to $99.

Summary: The Game wants to turn you into a hustling drug kingpin and street soldier -- and he can guarantee you won't get arrested too ... since it's all…


Anyone who has had to repeatedly charge their phone throughout the day knows that battery life is a key measure of a smartphone’s quality. The iPhone 5 has a decent battery life — except, perhaps, if you happen to have bought yours at the wrong time.

Some iPhone 5 devices sold between September 2012 and January 2013 have a battery problem leading to a shorter battery life, Apple said Friday. Users experiencing battery issues may have bought one in a series of iPhone 5 devices that were affected by charging problems.

“Apple has determined that a very small percentage of iPhone 5 devices may suddenly experience shorter battery life or need to be charged more frequently,” Apple said in a note.

Owners of the iPhone 5 who are having issues can input their phone’s serial number on Apple’s page and see if they qualify for a free battery replacement. The replacement is available in the U.S. and China as of Aug. 22, and in other countries as of Aug. 29.

Summary: Some iPhone 5 units have faulty batteries, check yours here


07/03/2015 AT 09:30 AM EDT

, who turns 53 on Friday, was a mega-movie star and an age-defying action hero (just check out the

trailer for proof), he was a teenager starring in his first film role, 1981's

Sporting a pair of jean short-shorts (it was the '80s, after all), no shirt and a shaggy hairdo, Cruise delivered his big monologue.

"Eight years old and I was into arson," he says in the scene. "No, I'm serious! I lit a whole pile of newspapers. You ever try to light a whole pile of wet newspapers? Jeez, it smokes like crazy. I got real scared, see. Do you wanna hear the wild part? It's like I'm a hero or something. They thought I saved the whole block. To this day, my mother thinks I'm a hero."

Cruise had a slightly more high-pitched tone, but other than that, he's barely aged a day!

Summary: Short shorts, no shirt and shaggy hair


At Oracle OpenWorld this week, company execs spent a good chunk of their stage time talking about security. Executive chairman Larry Ellison, for example, extolled the security virtues of Oracle’ s ORCL new M7 microprocessor, which he said bakes software security features from the latest release of its Oracle database right into the silicon.

Ellison mentioned several times that security problems arise because customers either do not enable the software’s security features or intentionally switch them off. That ability, however, will not be an option with the M7 since “we turn it on and you can’t turn it off,” he told show attendees.

The remarks come just weeks after Oracle, ORCL which had no comment on this story, released an eyebrow-raising set of 154 security fixes in a Critical Patch Update covering many of its key products. It is particularly important with this update that customers implement right away because the update includes “a number of fixes for very severe vulnerabilities,” according to a blog post about the update.

An IT consultant who works with federal agencies on Oracle implementations said this update was nothing short of a scandal because Oracle’s “entire product fleet was affected: pretty much every database, middleware web and app server. Everything,” said the specialist who requested anonymity because he works with the company’s customers.

Some of the vulnerabilities could give uncredentialed hackers the ability to remotely execute operations. In theory, that means a random-but-code-savvy Joe Shmoe with access to the Internet could run database queries on your business system, or even change data values. “That’s bad,” the consultant said.

The gnarly issue of patching software is not unique to Oracle, but because the company has made a point of calling its own products “unbreakable,” it pretty much put a bullseye on its own back. Hackers love a good challenge after all.

Gartner IT research director Lawrence Pingree said technology providers have to issue patches promptly to keep customers safer from data breaches. “It is quite well known in the security industry that one of the best ways to avoid a data breach is to simply make sure you are deploying patches quickly,” he said via email.

But, although patch updates are standard operating procedure, Oracle is in the spotlight because so many customers use the company’s databases and financial applications to run their businesses, which leaves little room for tolerance or error. We’re not talking about Candy Crush here.

It also doesn’t help that many corporate customers have come to resent Oracle’s technical support and maintenance fees. If you’re paying 22% of your license cost to stay supported, you have high expectations when it comes to security.

Meanwhile, it probably did not help Oracle’s relationships when in August Mary Ann Davidson, Oracle’s chief security officer, took to her blog to chastise corporate customers for performing their own security tests on company software. In the post she even noted that such tests could violate their licensing agreements. The blog was quickly pulled down and Oracle backed away from her claims.

Never ones to let a good crisis go to waste, tech companies are using these security woes to push customers to move to what they’re painting as cloud Nirvana. As Oracle CEO Mark Hurd stressed during his keynote, most enterprise applications are now 20 years old—that’s a lot of legacy code that needs to be maintained, bolstered, and updated. Oracle’s new pitch is for customers to move to the cloud—Oracle’s cloud of course. “We are fully patched, fully secured, fully encrypted,” Hurd noted.

For more on data security from industry leaders including Arlette Hart, the chief information security officer of the FBI, be sure to check out the Structure Conference next month.

Follow Barb Darrow on Twitter at @gigabarb. Read her Fortune coverage at fortune.com/barb-darrow or subscribe via her RSS feed.

And please subscribe to Data Sheet, Fortune’s daily newsletter on the business of technology.

Summary: Oracle execs tout security behind its new M7 chips and cloud weeks after the company issued 154 critical security patches.


Lady Gaga was vomited on during her South by Southwest Music Festival performance Thursday —but it was no accident.

The 27-year-old star was in the middle of playing the drums and belting out her track "Swine" when vomit painter Millie Brown intentionally opened fire onstage.

Brown, who was a planned act for the show, stuck her hands down her throat and threw up green liquid all over the pop star.

Not only did Gaga not mind being drenched in vomit, she continued performing the concert covered in the vile substance.

According to Billboard, Gaga told the audience that she hadn't been clean all week.

"I've been having such a good time, I didn't even shower!" she said at the beginning of the show.

"I've been drinking a lot and eating. Are you f---ing hungry? I've been having such a good time hearing music, I forgot to do everything this week!"

Hours before she took the stage, the "Born This Way" singer appeared on "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" enrobed in a dress entirely made of coffee filters.

She explained to Kimmel that her weight had something to do with her covered-up outfit choice.

"I just really wanted to be comfortable for the interview, that's why I wore it, because I'm really fat right now." Gaga said.

"I have been eating BBQ all week."

Summary: Lady Gaga was vomited on during her South by Southwest Music Festivalperformance Thursday —but it was no accident. The 27-year-old star was in the middle of playing the drums and belting out her track "Swine" when vomit painter Millie Brown intentionally opened fire onstage.


Want to take a photo of artwork that’s in a public place, then encourage others to freely use the photo without the artist’s consent? If you’re in Sweden, that’s not OK, according to a ruling against Wikimedia.

Wikimedia Sweden, part of the same organization that publishes Wikipedia, claimed Monday’s ruling undermines the “freedom of panorama” that allows people to capture and share the beauty of public spaces.

The Swedish visual copyright society (BUS) disagreed, saying the ruling was “important for visual artists who need payment for their work.”

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At the heart of the matter is Wikimedia Sweden’s location-based database of works of art that are permanently located in public places. Wikimedia argued that this database of images was noncommercial, and Swedish copyright law allows people to take pictures of public art and put them online.

The key question that the Swedish supreme court had to address was that of whether the artists behind those works should be able to restrict how those images are shared online. Yes, the court said, they should.

The court said the database had a commercial value and, while individuals can take photos of public artworks as they wish, this kind of operation was a different matter.

“This is about who decides over the artists’ works: the artists themselves or the big players on the Internet,” said BUS chairman Åsa Berndtsson. “The background to the legal dispute is that Wikimedia has refused to sign a licensing agreement with [BUS] for artists’ rights—an agreement that would cost just a few hundred euros a year. Rather than negotiating on payments to artists, Wikimedia has instead chosen to spend tens of thousands of euros on lawyers to avoid it.”

For more on copyright, watch:

“The Wikimedia Foundation respects artists’ rights to control their works, but artists who wish to control all images of their art have the option to place their works in private places,” Wikimedia said. “The public should be free to enjoy and share views of public monuments and landscapes.”

The ruling comes in the context of a wider European debate over the “freedom of panorama.” Different EU countries have different laws on the matter—in France, for example, photographers are supposed to ask permission from artists and architects before shooting their public artworks and buildings, while those in Germany and the U.K. can snap away as they please.

Jean-Marie Cavada, a French liberal member of the European Parliament, last year tried and failed to whip up a call for the freedom to be removed across the EU.

Meanwhile, the European Commission wants to harmonize copyright rules across the bloc, and is currently running a consultation on the freedom of panorama. The question now is whether that harmonization will mean extension or abolition.

Summary: Swedish artists' representatives claim victory after supreme court rules against Wikimedia over its database of public art photos.


Every presidential election cycle, social media seems to play a bigger and bigger role, allowing candidates to reach out directly to supporters and spar with one another outside of the traditional debate framework. This election, Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, and Ted Cruz have all made big waves on platforms like Twitter.

But what if some of that social media heat isn’t as real as it seems? TechRepublic claims that fake Twitter followers have been “everywhere” during the campaign, pointing to Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump as being particularly “aggressive” in their social media strategy. The outlet says it’s launching an ongoing investigation into whether campaigns are buying fake Twitter followers.

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That isn’t as simple as identifying which of the candidates’ followers are automated bots. Though the proliferation of bots and spam accounts is a business problem for Twitter, many automated accounts serve legitimate purposes, such as news aggregation. Those accounts might follow leading candidates on their own, rather than being bought through third-party providers. And malicious operators are getting better and better at disguising fake accounts, even nurturing them over months or years to give the appearance of legitimacy.

For some, buying fake Twitter twtr followers will sound like a minor infraction—it’s a common practice, for instance, in certain corners of the marketing world. But political tactics on social media can get insidious, and can also be the tip of a much larger iceberg of digital chicanery.

Consider the case of Andrés Sepúlveda, the Latin American political operative profiled this week by Bloomberg. Using custom software, Sepúlveda directed 30,000 Twitter bots to create false enthusiasm for candidates and spread rumors about the opposition. Sepúlveda says the tactics gave him “the power to make people believe almost anything.”

For more on social media in the election, watch our video:

But, as part of his package of services, Sepúlveda also frequently engaged in email hacking and data theft. He is now in prison for his actions. Meanwhile, the man who allegedly employed him says he has been approached by at least two U.S. presidential campaigns, including Donald Trump’s.

If the front lines of politics are now increasingly digital, it seems the battle is only getting dirtier.

Summary: An observer says fake social media followers are "everywhere" this election.


Editor’s Note: If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion in “The Startup Review” series, please see the details here.

Company Name: Web of Fate

20-word Description: Web of Fate is a semantic analysis engine that extracts meaning from historical, present and future events and draws connections among them.

CEO's Pitch: The Web of Fate semantic analysis engine can visualize and uncover hidden relationships among historical, present and future events allowing people to:

- Study the flow of events and decision paths chosen by historical figures.

- Take snapshots of the exact state of when a predictive event is made. So future generations can understand why certain choices were made.

- Identify trends, locate anomalies, detect threats and track multiple/alternate futures with FutureGraph.

Web of Fate also provides semantic web services, allowing users to integrate semantic and decision analysis into their own products and services.

Mashable's Take: On the one hand, Arizona-based Web of Fate, a public beta starting today, sees itself as a “semantic analysis engine.” Pay a visit to the service’s homepage, though, and you’ll see the phrases “social experiment,” “collective intelligence,” and “uncover hidden relationships among future events.” This mix of keywords might seem peculiar, yes? But look at the the site’s most outstanding and most active feature, its menu of predictions, and you’ll see it’s no great mystery. In fact, if you spend enough time digging beneath the surface, it proves to be a very interesting place to browse and perhaps even contribute to.

Leaving aside the service’s odd front page dressing (the ethereal graphic shown below the options tabs at the top of the page appears corporate and unnecessary), Web of Fate’s primary device — the column where predictions, goals, time capsules (a blank page at the moment), and quotes are all displayed in linear fashion — is something that’s admittedly entertaining to peruse.

It’s simple and intuitive to understand. Users write headlines for things they foresee happening in the future, be it a newsworthy event or a personal goal or whathaveyou, and those things show up for users to agree or disagree with, comment on, or challenge. It has clearly been influenced by the type of structure popularized by Digg. Only, this one has a focus on the days/weeks/months/years ahead, rather than the present.

The site’s features operate quite well. Links take you where you need to go. No major surprises. If you’d like, you can choose to see entries mapped out in a cloud-like visualization, where floating points of various sizes are all connected to to be viewed as a literal Web of links. Most users, however, will presumably stick to the site’s main components. And my sense is that registered users will be quite pleased with what they’re offered. Given enough members, this place could become a real hotbed for forecasters.

If nothing else, Web of Fate is well built to spark substantial discussion and debate about the course of world events. Keep in mind, though, there’s a good balance of serious topics and silly positions to make it a fun place to hang around.

Sponsored By: Sun Startup Essentials

Summary:
Editor’s Note: If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion in “The Startup Review” series, please see the details here. STARTUP DETAILS:
Company Name: Web of...


Nick Carter was arrested in Florida on Wednesday night ... TMZ has learned.

According to an eyewitness on the scene, cops took Nick into custody down in Key West at the Hog's Breath Saloon -- a pretty famous bar in the area. We're told Carter was involved in some kind of scuffle inside the bar, and eventually the cops showed up and busted the Backstreet Boy.

He was arrested at 8:13 PM and booked for misdemeanor battery. Interestingly, arrest docs list Nick's occupation as "None." Either he was really humble during his arrest ... or the Key West officers just aren't BSB fans.

4:30 AM PT -- The secret's out ... Nick's arrest report now says, "Singer" for his occupation.

Summary: Nick Carter was arrested in Florida on Wednesday night ... TMZ has learned. According to an eyewitness on the scene, cops took Nick into custody down…


ALBANY — Donald Trump took aim at the political establishment, criticizing Colorado for its lack of voting and his enemies, in the largest rally held in the Albany area by all five top presidential candidates in the last week.

“You saw what happened in Colorado,” he said. “It’s a fix. We thought we were having an election and a number of months ago, they decide to do it by you know what, right? They said we’ll do it by delegate. Aw, isn’t that nice? And the delegates were all there waiting. And, one of them tweeted out today and said today, by mistake, and then they withdrew it, something to the effect of ‘See, never Trump.’”

He told about 10,000 supporters who packed the Times Union Center, a sports and concert venue in downtown Albany: “I’m hundreds of delegates ahead but the system, folks, is rigged. It’s a rigged, disgusting, dirty system.”

About a dozen protesters were ejected after Trump explained that he paid for the space and there was room for protesters outside. About 200 protesters, including Bernie Sanders supporters, Planned Parenthood activists and veterans, held placards and chanted, “Donald Trump must go.”

At times, they exchanged words with supporters who were in line nearby, but violence appeared to be limited to one interaction inside, when a black protester clashed with about six white men, one of whom made contact with the young protester’s face. It wasn’t immediately clear whether the protester was shoved or hit, but he did not appear to be seriously hurt.

Outside, one woman chanted “White power” before explaining that she was responding sarcastically to protesters who said a vote for Trump was a vote for white power. Another supporter gave protesters a Nazi salute outside and one indoors held a sign reading “We don’t need another Jewish revolution.”

Trump was introduced by Jennifer Crisafulli, who was fired on “The Apprentice” and lost a job in real life after being criticized for comments about “two old Jewish fat ladies” who she said were “jaded old bags.”

Trump took aim at his competitors, including “lyin’ Ted Cruz,” for telling voters Ben Carson pulled out before he had and for what he said about “New York values.”

“When we took the worst attack in the history of our nation and we were strong and we were sharp and we were loving and we had heart and rebuilt downtown Manhattan,” he said. “Thousands and thousands of people were killed and the police departments and the fire department and everybody was so amazing. That’s what New York values really is.”

Trump also said that Hillary Clinton would get away with emailing state secrets on her personal server, because “she is being protected by the Democrats.”

Summary: ALBANY — Donald Trump took aim at the political establishment, criticizing Colorado for its lack of voting and his enemies, in the largest rally held in the Albany area by all five top presidential…


Here’s a belated Christmas present for everyone who loves Taylor Swift’s most recent album 1989 — that is, all people who have two ears and a heart.

It’s a lovely acoustic mashup of “Blank Space” and “Style” that Tay-Tay herself says she’s “obsessed with.” She posted her approval on Twitter:

The video comes from Nashville-based musicians Louisa Wendorff and Devin Dawson, who take the two songs and put a stripped-down, folky spin on them. In fact, these covers evoke Swift’s acoustic country roots rather than her new 80’s-inspired pop sound.

Give it a listen — because if Tay endorses it, then you know it’s great.

Read next: Listen to Taylor Swift’s 1989 in 3 Minutes

Listen to the most important stories of the day.

Summary: Listen to a beautiful, acoustic version of two '1989' tracks


San Francisco is to have a second chance to vote on whether to tax soda after city officials this week added the measure to a November ballot that could expand the hotly-debated levy deeper into the Bay Area.

The move follows the city’s legal victory last month against the soda industry, which tried to halt its effort to introduce warnings on advertisements for beverages with added sugar noting that they contribute to obesity, diabetes and tooth decay.

It will be the first U.S. city to introduce the labeling, due to come into effect next month. A vote in favor of a San Francisco soda tax could add further strength to national moves to deter consumption of the sugary drinks, which have parallels with efforts to reduce tobacco consumption.

The ballot initiative comes almost two years after an earlier measure was unsuccessful and raises the prospect the tax will spread beyond nearby Berkeley, California, to much of the Bay Area’s northern region, which economists say could heighten the policy’s effectiveness.

Covering a broader area could alleviate a key concern about the success of soda taxes: that they can be undermined by cross-border shopping. In Berkeley, some research has suggested businesses did not fully pass along the tax for fear of losing customers to stores in neighboring cities.

The addition of the levy to the ballot on Tuesday came the day after Philadelphia’s mayor signed a sweet beverage levy, making the city the largest in the nation with an ounce-based tax on sweet drinks.

An increasing number of U.S. government officials and nutritionists have proposed excise taxes on sugary beverages as a way to combat rising rates of obesity, diabetes and other health epidemics.

In a statement, the California Beverage Association said it was “misleading to single out any single food, beverage or ingredient” in addressing these complex problems.

Two Berkeley neighbors—Oakland and Albany, Calif.—will also vote in November on a soda tax. If the measures there and in San Francisco are successful, the sugary beverage tax would expand to a population of over 1.4 million in the Bay Area.

Should the taxes be approved in San Francisco and Oakland, two large cities with vastly different demographics, the cause could gain significant nationwide momentum, said Larry Tramutola, a California political strategist who is organizing both cities’ campaigns.

“What this is going to say is this is more of a national issue,” Tramutola said. “There’s a very good chance both of these pass, and if they do it blows a major hole in the industry defensive.”

Early evidence from Berkeley and Mexico, which implemented a nationwide tax in 2014, shows that costs are passed on to varying degrees. If the costs do not cause retail price hikes, consumption may fall by less than health advocates hope.

Similar measures are being considered elsewhere in the United States and in other countries.

Interviews with over a dozen economists, researchers and grocers suggest that municipal taxes like that of Philadelphia may be vulnerable to cross-border shopping. When it comes to soda taxes, the bigger the area, the more the measure reduces consumption, some said.

“You’re more likely to have higher pass-through if a larger chunk of your business is affected,” said Jennifer Falbe, a researcher with the University of California-Berkeley’s School of Public Health who found 47 percent of the tax was passed on to the city’s consumers in the first few months after implementation.

That is less than in Mexico, where researchers have found a similar tax was passed on and hurt demand.

Others questioned the extent to which people cross borders for small-ticket items like soda. If neighboring Oakland and Albany pass the tax, that question could be less relevant for Berkeley.

“Imagine all the counties in the Bay Area passed soda taxes. How many people are really going to Gilroy to buy sodas?” said Jeffrey Grogger, a University of Chicago economist who has studied Mexico’s soda tax, referring to a city over 70 miles away.

Summary: A similar measure failed two years ago.


-- famous for her backside -- had emergency surgery on her other money-maker yesterday -- replacing a breast implant that was creating a serious health crisis ... TMZ has learned.

Vida posted a pic of her exposed chest Tuesday morning ... showing her right breast covered by a large gauze pad. The problem was scar tissue forming around a gel implant.

Vida tells us back in 2011 she replaced saline implants with fancy new gel ones -- 450cc (or a full C cup). When she recently started having back pain and trouble breathing ... docs told her scar tissue had formed and had to be removed, along with the implant itself.

Vida got a new left implant during her 24 hour hospital stay -- but she's home now, doing something she never gets to do ... PIG OUT!!!

The fitness fanatic confesses she's been eating "everything in sight" ... especially pizza. Docs have cleared her to start working out again in a month.

Boob job lesson of the day: Vida says, "If I could do it over again, I wouldn't have. It's just more problems in the end."

Summary: Model Vida Guerra -- famous for her backside -- had emergency surgery on her other money-maker yesterday -- replacing a breast implant that was creating a…


One of the two police officers injured in Sunday's fatal attack on

is in "very, very critical condition," Baton Rogue Sheriff Sid Gautreaux said Monday.

Speaking of Deputy Nicholas Tullier, 41, Gautreaux said at a news conference, "His vitals have gone up and down, that is all I can say.

"At this point, we are just praying for him. It is in God's hands. He is not in good shape at all."

Gautreaux said head trauma is the biggest concern of both surgeons who worked on Tullier, an 18-year veteran,

The other injured deputy, 51-year-old Brent Simmons, sustained non-life-threatening injuries, authorities have said. But Gautreaux said Simmons "is going into his second surgery today."

"He now has a titanium rod in his arm," Gautreaux said.

who responded Sunday to calls of a suspicious person with a rifle on Airline Highway.

When those officers arrived, a shooter, later identified as 29-year-old

, opened fire on them, authorities have said.

"The actions of the officers in the Baton Rouge community were nothing short of heroic," Louisiana Gov. Jon Bell Edwards said. "They ran towards danger to protect the public. They ran towards danger to render aid to other officers."

He added, "These were good men. We all know the story but it bears repeating now. No greater love hath any man than to lay down his life for another."

Gautreaux said one of the fallen officers, deputy Brad Garafola, 45, rushed to help a an officer who had been shot when the shooter engaged him in gunfire.

"My deputy went down fighting," Gautreaux said, adding that when Garafola was fatally shot, "He was laying down in a prone position, and he was firing."

Baton Rouge Police Chief Carl Dabadie lauded the two Baton Rouge officers fatally shot in the attack.

He described officer Matthew Gerald, 41, as "a devoted husband and father of two" who served in two branches of the military and served three tours in Iraq.

"His sense of service drew him to the force," Dabadie said of the rookie. "He is a hero for everything he has done."

, 32, a 10-year veteran and married father of a 4-month-old son, as "a loving and devoted husband."

Dabadie read a statement from Jackson's wife, Trenisha Jackson, which read, in part:

"He loved his family and he loved his fellow officers. He loved his job and his city. Knowing this gives me a measure of peace and comfort. He died doing what he loved – protecting and serving a city that he loved."

Baton Rouge Police Chief Carl Dabadie

Travis Spradling / The Advocate / AP

Officials said during the news conference that the shooting was a pre-meditated attack targeting law enforcement.

"Our preliminary investigation shows that he definitely ambushed those officers," Louisiana State Police spokesman J.B. Slaton said. "We are still trying to find out what his motive was, and that's going to be part of our investigation. But we believe he was targeting those officers."

The shooter was a former Marine who maintained

under the pseudonym "Cosmo Setepenra." On a website called "Convos with Cosmo," as well as social media accounts and YouTube videos, he spoke about injustices toward black people and his belief in the need for violent retaliation.

In a recent YouTube video, posted July 10, he praised the killing of the Dallas officers and said, "It's justice."

Dabadie said he believes the shooter would have kept killing had he not been killed himself.

"This guy was going to another location and he was not going to stop here. I have no doubt he was heading to [police] headquarters," he said.

(The shooting took place less than 1 mile from police headquarters.)

The shooter was killed by a SWAT team sniper from 100 yards away, authorities said.

"The shot our SWAT team made was a hell of a shot," Dabadie said.

Baton Rouge Mayor Kip Holden said that authorities believe the shooter was in the city for several nights before the attack.

"So we're finding out somebody that was methodical and planning and really an outright murderer," he said.

Summary: "He definitely ambushed officers," a police spokesman said


Before you go, we thought you'd like these...

We've shared some things you should consider buying secondhand, like cars, textbooks and DVDs. If these products are in good condition, you won't sacrifice your health or safety by making a secondhand purchase.

However, there are several everyday items you should always buy new to avoid these risks.

EXPLORE MORE: What your old stamps are worth now

Garments like underwear and bathing suits should always be purchased unworn for health reasons. If you're on a tight budget, you can usually find a great deal at discount retailers like Costco or Wal-Mart -- but these items should never be previously used. We also recommend you avoid buying car seats and bike helmets secondhand for safety reasons.

Check out the slideshow below for a full guide of items you are way better off buying brand new.

Click through to see 12 items you should always buy new:

Budget Better: 12 things you should always buy new

Check out the best helmets on Amazon here

Check out the best car seats on Amazon here

Check out the best mattresses on Amazon here

Check out the best bathing suits at Nordstrom here

Check out the best lingerie at Nordstrom here

Check out the best cosmetics at Nordstrom here

7. Beauty & hair products

Check out the best hair products at Nordstrom here

Check out the best hats at Nordstrom here

Check out the best running shoes on Amazon here

Check out the best blenders on Amazon here

11. Laptops & other electronics

Check out the best laptops at Best Buy here

Check out the best tires on Amazon here

More from AOL.com: This is the largest and most expensive real estate project in the US Bill Gates says these are the cheapest things that make him the happiest The 10 best jobs for tech lovers

Summary: There are several everyday items you should avoid purchasing secondhand for health and safety reasons, like bike helmets and car seats.


Once a week, members of a Wellington, New Zealand, book club arrive at a cafe, grab a drink and shut off their cellphones. Then they sink into cozy chairs and read in silence for an hour.

The point of the club isn't to talk about literature, but to get away from pinging electronic devices and read, uninterrupted. The group calls itself the Slow Reading Club, and it is at the forefront of a movement populated by frazzled book lovers...

Summary: At least 30 minutes of uninterrupted reading with a book or e-book helps.


In an exclusive interview, Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan discusses the failed coup and the ongoing crackdown.

Turkey attempted coup, Turkey, Middle East

This series explores the dark and dramatic history of France's relationships with its former African colonies.

A Palestinian cameraman records the 2014 Israeli assault on Shujayea, including the final moments of his own life.

What is behind Venezuela's descent into chaos and the bitter ideological struggle dividing the nation?

Business & Economy, Politics, Venezuela

Summary: More than 50 people were killed, including the assailant, in an attack inside gay nightclub Pulse in Orlando, Florida.


For many of us, the most pressing question about exercise is: How little can I get away with? The answer, according to a sophisticated new study of interval training, may be very, very little. In this new experiment, in fact, 60 seconds of strenuous exertion proved to be as successful at improving health and fitness as three-quarters of an hour of moderate exercise.

Let me repeat that finding: One minute of arduous exercise was comparable in its physiological effects to 45 minutes of gentler sweating.

I have been writing for some time about the potential benefits of high-intensity interval training, a type of workout that consists of an extremely draining but brief burst of exercise — essentially, a sprint — followed by light exercise such as jogging or resting, then another sprint, more rest, and so on.

Athletes rely on intervals to improve their speed and power, but generally as part of a broader, weekly training program that also includes prolonged, less-intense workouts, such as long runs.

But in the past few years, exercise scientists and many of the rest of us have become intrigued by the idea of exercising exclusively with intervals, ditching long workouts altogether.

The allure of this approach is obvious. Interval sessions can be short, making them a boon for anyone who feels that he or she never has enough time to exercise.

Previously, I have written about a number of different interval programs, involving anywhere from 10 minutes of exhausting intervals in a single session to seven minutes, six, four and even fewer. Each program had scientific backing. But because of time and funding constraints, most studies of interval training have had limits, such as not including a control group, being of short duration or studying only health or fitness results, not both.

Consequently, fundamental questions have remained unanswered about just how well these very short, very intense workouts really stack up against traditional, endurance-style training.

So scientists at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, who had themselves conducted many of those earlier studies of interval training, decided recently to mount probably the most scientifically rigorous comparison to date of super-short and more-standard workouts.

They began by recruiting 25 out-of-shape young men and measuring their current aerobic fitness and, as a marker of general health, their body’s ability to use insulin properly to regulate blood sugar levels. The scientists also biopsied the men’s muscles to examine how well their muscles functioned at a cellular level.

Then the researchers randomly divided the men into three groups. (The scientists plan to study women in subsequent experiments.) One group was asked to change nothing about their current, virtually nonexistent exercise routines; they would be the controls.

A second group began a typical endurance-workout routine, consisting of riding at a moderate pace on a stationary bicycle at the lab for 45 minutes, with a two-minute warm-up and three-minute cool down.

The final group was assigned to interval training, using the most abbreviated workout yet to have shown benefits. Specifically, the volunteers warmed up for two minutes on stationary bicycles, then pedaled as hard as possible for 20 seconds; rode at a very slow pace for two minutes, sprinted all-out again for 20 seconds; recovered with slow riding for another two minutes; pedaled all-out for a final 20 seconds; then cooled down for three minutes. The entire workout lasted 10 minutes, with only one minute of that time being strenuous.

Both groups of exercising volunteers completed three sessions each week for 12 weeks, a period of time that is about twice as long as in most past studies of interval training.

By the end of the study, published in PLOS One, the endurance group had ridden for 27 hours, while the interval group had ridden for six hours, with only 36 minutes of that time being strenuous.

But when the scientists retested the men’s aerobic fitness, muscles and blood-sugar control now, they found that the exercisers showed virtually identical gains, whether they had completed the long endurance workouts or the short, grueling intervals. In both groups, endurance had increased by nearly 20 percent, insulin resistance likewise had improved significantly, and there were significant increases in the number and function of certain microscopic structures in the men’s muscles that are related to energy production and oxygen consumption.

There were no changes in health or fitness evident in the control group.

The upshot of these results is that three months of concerted endurance or interval exercise can notably — and almost identically — improve someone’s fitness and health.

Neither approach to exercise was, however, superior to the other, except that one was shorter — much, much shorter.

Is that reason enough for people who currently exercise moderately or not at all to begin interval training as their only workout?

“It depends on who you are and why you exercise,” said Martin Gibala, a professor of kinesiology at McMaster University who oversaw the new study.

“If you are an elite athlete, then obviously incorporating both endurance and interval training into an overall program maximizes performance. But if you are someone, like me, who just wants to boost health and fitness and you don’t have 45 minutes or an hour to work out, our data show that you can get big benefits from even a single minute of intense exercise.”

Interested in running? Sign up to receive practical tips, expert advice, exclusive content and a bit of motivation delivered to your inbox every week to help you on your running journey.

Summary: Sixty seconds of intense exercise provided the benefits of three-quarters of an hour of moderate cycling.


The corruption scandal around an economic-development fund in Malaysia is spilling beyond the country’s borders, as officials at a United Arab Emirates state investment vehicle raise questions about more than a billion dollars in money that they said is missing.

Abu Dhabi has long been a source of support for the fund, 1Malaysia Development Bhd., which was set up six years ago by Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak to develop new industries in the Southeast Asian country. Now, as 1MDB tries to fend off a cash crunch, its...

Summary: Officials at a United Arab Emirates state investment vehicle are raising questions about a payment of $1.4 billion from 1MDB that they said they never received.


Allyson Miller, founder of the Tea Party movement in Tuscon, said that the attack was "outrageous". She said critics were "jumping to this conclusion that it has to do with the hotly contested congressional race". "From what I've seen so far ... it's looking like that's not the case," she added.

During the campaign, a Sarah Palin website featured Miss Giffords' seat among 20 held by Democrats that should be targeted by Republicans. Each seat was marked on a map by crosshairs. The page was hastily taken down after the shooting. Mrs Palin, the former vice-presidential candidate, released a statement saying "my sincere condolences are offered to the family of Rep Gabrielle Giffords and the other victims of today's tragic shooting".

Tea Party officials said there was no record of Jared Loughner, the suspect in the shooting, attending any of their events.

DeAnn Hatch, a co-founder of the Tucson Tea Party, said that her group had not staged any meetings against the congresswoman and that to her knowledge none of her members had been at the event on Saturday.

"I want to strongly, strongly say we absolutely do not advocate violence," she said. "This is just a tragedy to no end."

John Boehner, the new Republican Speaker of the House, announced that normal House business would be suspended this week, including a symbolic vote on repealing the health care reform law. He said: "Public service is a high honour, but these tragic events remind us that [it] ... comes with a risk.

"This inhuman act should not and will not deter us from our calling to represent our constituents and to fulfil our oaths of office."

Summary: Although the motivations of the shooter were far from clear on Sunday, the Tea   Party movement was forced to mount a rearguard action against accusations   that its sometimes fiery opposition to President Barack Obama was linked to   the shooting.


Traditional British food has long had its detractors and its defenders. In a 1945 essay published in the Evening Standard, George Orwell, firmly in the latter camp, made a persuasive case on behalf of his national cuisine. Even he conceded, though, that the country’s best restaurants served foreign food. “It is a fact that restaurants which are distinctively English and which also sell good food are very hard to find,” Orwell lamented. While much has changed today, with chefs like Fergus Henderson and Jason Atherton giving modern relevance to once-tired British fare, many of the city’s top-rated establishments continue to embrace international cuisine, reflective of the capital’s cosmopolitan makeup.

In London, a few traditional British stalwarts remain: The city’s oldest restaurants still devote themselves to ye olde steak and kidney pies, fish and chips, bubble and squeak and other off-puttingly named fare. They’ve been expertly turning out the same venerable dishes—or near enough—for more than a century, despite being overshadowed by this or that gastronomic wunderkind or bratty fusion upstart. Now, with the Brexit vote behind us and a tide of Britishness sweeping the nation, it seemed like a good time to drop in on London’s august culinary institutions. I went to four of the oldest, excluding pubs; though some are much older (a few date to the 1400s), beer, I reasoned, is their bread and butter.

Instead, I went in search of that fine English cooking Orwell so patriotically defended, served in dining rooms bearing the patina of a lost era. When I mentioned my mission to a barber in the trendy Shoreditch neighborhood, he laughed. “Yeah, the English cling to their British food,” he said, “but it’s comical since one of the most popular dishes here is chicken tikka masala.”

Though Rules has laid claim to the “oldest restaurant” moniker, Simpson’s Tavern, across from the Royal Exchange, precedes it by 41 years. “The main difference between a tavern and a restaurant is that in the past, the former offered only a set menu—tavern diners ate what was presented to them; restaurants offered you a choice—and patrons usually sat at communal tables,” explained food historian Annie Gray. Simpson’s no longer has fixed courses, but you’ll still find wood-paneled communal booths and a homey conviviality. I was seated next to an insurance underwriter named Jeff Alexander, who assured me that lunch here was a rite of passage in the insurance market. (The restaurant is open only for lunch.)

Classic English fare like smoked mackerel, pork belly with crackling and English mustard dressing, roasts and lamb shanks came up from the basement via dumbwaiters and was doled out by the no-nonsense staff, as were copious glasses of port and beer. I ordered a hearty beef and ale pie with mashed potatoes. After instructing me in the proper way to consume “stewed cheese” (a molten concoction served with white bread, Worcestershire sauce, mustard and cayenne pepper), Mr. Alexander thanked the staff by name, and left a cash tip. “They have been known in years past to chase you down the alley if you haven’t left enough cash,” he cautioned. I left a £5 note for the $26 meal and was off, utterly stuffed. simpsonstavern.co.uk

Thomas Rule, the son of a fishmonger, opened Rules in Covent Garden in 1798, and it has remained there ever since. The restaurant specializes in wild game and grass-fed Belted Galloway cattle, and prices aren’t cheap (entrees average about $39). It’s the sort of place that’s best experienced when someone else is paying. Over the years, the aesthetic hasn’t changed much: The two main dining rooms are chockablock with red velvet, dark wood, vintage prints and paintings and enough mounted taxidermy to put the Bates Motel to shame. ”We run along the lines of an English country house,” said managing director Ricky McMenemy. “In your home you gather clutter as the years go on.” So vividly does the décor recall an earlier age that ”Downton Abbey” “was happy to use us,” added Mr. McMenemy, referring to the period-drama’s decision to set several scenes at Rules. Not surprisingly, given Rules’ star turn, some locals grouse that the restaurant has become too touristy, a charge Mr. McMenemy refutes, estimating that only about 20% of its business comes from out-of-towners.

Regulars recommend you visit in mid-August to mid-December, during game-hunting season, when you’ll find uncommon birds like teal and snipe on the menu. But on a rainy day earlier this month, the steak and kidney pie in an airy pastry crust with tangy gravy (practically dainty compared with Simpson’s Tavern’s offering, yet double the price, at $19) hit the spot. rules.co.uk

Slightly more upscale than Simpson’s Tavern, another financial-district institution that’s only open for lunch, Sweetings doesn’t take advance bookings and seats most customers at one of the several counters around the restaurant. I arrived late in the lunch hour (lucky to get a seat, I was told, as bankers typically pack the place on weekdays) and struck up a conversation with an older gentlemen sitting next to me at the counter—Michael McMahon, a retired fruit and vegetable vendor who used to supply the restaurant but hadn’t eaten there in about 20 years. “This school-dinner-type operation is very popular in the City,” said Mr. McMahon. “That’s because most of the City boys come from what we call a public school [a ‘private school’ to Americans], where they sat for meals at a counter.”

The menu features an extensive variety of fresh fish and shellfish. I ordered the massive yet delicate skate wing, fried with herbs and a black butter sauce (about $28), supplementing it with classic English sides like samphire (called sea beans in the U.S.). When I asked my waitress, Lee Marshall, now in her 16th year at the restaurant, to explain another side dish, bubble and squeak, she said, “It’s what your mother would make with last night’s leftovers but we make fresh every day.” The Sweetings version is a crispy croquette of mashed potatoes and cabbage.

Angelo Rojo, a waiter with a thick Spanish accent who will soon celebrate 30 years at Sweetings, said not much about the place has changed. “But it’s Brexit now. I’m waiting to be deported!” he joked. “Or maybe I’ll go to Scotland.” sweetingsrestaurant.co.uk

Approaching its 275th anniversary next year, Wiltons, not far from Buckingham Palace, began as an oyster and shellfish stall in Haymarket and moved to its current location in 1984. “Today, Wiltons feels completely apart from the London dining scene, with its soft carpets, conspiratorial booths, even a carving trolley,” said Richard Godwin, author of “The Spirits: A Guide to Modern Cocktailing.” “The cooking is good, but it’s served with a certain upper-class disdain.”

After my $98 lunch of half a dozen of the largest briny oysters I’ve ever seen; crab with chopped egg and a piquant anchovy aioli; a small salad; and a plate of chewy smoked eel served with horseradish cream and lemon, I spoke with restaurant director Jason Phillips. He described the typical clientele as “aristos, heads of industry and a few celebrities, though the majority of celebrities…are CEOs and chairmen of boards.” Wiltons, he added, is “where deals are made.” I didn’t recognize any VIPs, but judging by the patrons’ suave attire, they seemed more aristo than tourist. As a family-owned restaurant, noted Mr. Phillips, Wiltons also caters to multigenerational diners: “A grandfather brings his son who brings his son, and passes the baton.” wiltons.co.uk

Summary: With British nationalism on the rise in England, we tasted our way through four of London’s oldest, most gustatorily patriotic restaurants—and learned to eat ‘stewed cheese’ along the way. Here’s your guide


Researchers had previously shown that colonoscopies, which look for and remove tumors and suspicious precancerous lumps in the intestines, could reduce the incidence of colorectal cancer. But they didn’t know for certain that the procedure would save lives. Now they have evidence that it does. A study published in the latest issue of The New England Journal of Medicine that tracked 2,600 patients for as long as two decades found that the test cut the death rate in half, a very substantial reduction.

That should reassure millions of Americans who have undergone colonoscopies that the test was worth the unpleasant preparations. And it ought to goad millions who are still ducking the tests to get over their squeamishness.

There are several ways to detect colorectal cancers and precancerous growths that are recommended by doctors and expert groups. Some patients send stool samples to a laboratory to look for tell-tale traces of blood, preferably on an annual basis. Others get sigmoidoscopies, which examine the lower part of the colon, or more often colonoscopies, which examine the whole colon and are thought to be more reliable.

If nothing is found by the colonoscopy, the patient need not return for 10 years. People with polyps snipped out are advised to get retested in three years.

Unfortunately, too few people get any of the recommended screenings. The Government Accountability Office found that only a quarter of all Medicare beneficiaries ages 65 to 75 had undergone any of the recommended screenings from 2005 to 2009. And the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Cancer Institute found that only 58.6 percent of men and women between the ages of 50 and 74 got screened in 2010, far short of the national goal of 70.5 percent.

There is little that can be done to make colonoscopies more pleasant. To the extent that cost is a barrier for some people (the procedure can cost hundreds or thousands of dollars), the new health care reforms will greatly expand the number of people who can get colonoscopies and other proven preventive services without paying anything out of pocket. That is more good news.

A version of this editorial appears in print on February 25, 2012, on page A18 of the New York edition with the headline: A Test in Time. Today's Paper|Subscribe

Summary: The evidence is in that colonoscopies do save lives. That should reassure millions of Americans to get over their squeamishness and get the cancer screening.


Jimmy Nelson spent his early days in Nigeria—his father was a geologist for Shell—and his adolescence at a Jesuit boarding school in northern England. He was 16 when he contracted cerebral malaria while visiting his parents in Africa, but when he returned to school he was “treated” with the wrong medicine. The next morning, his hair had fallen out. Two years later, tired of living like an outcast—he’d had enough of being judged by his appearance—he fled to where bald heads were not only accepted, but seemingly the norm. By then, he had also found photography.

Nelson landed in Tibet and began eking out a living by shooting editorial work, mainly in warzones and poverty-stricken corners of the world. Five years later, he had switched to commercial photography—advertising was a specialty—to support a wife and three kids. That was all well and good until five years ago, when the one-two punch of the global financial meltdown and the industry’s preference of digital photography over film put a dent in his ability to provide for his family.

Friends and colleagues began to offer advice. You have to go back to the source, they’d say. You have to go back to your passion.

Fast-forward to today. At 45, Nelson is about to release Before They Pass Away, a massive book—both physically and thematically—that’s the result of three-and-a-half years spent documenting vanishing cultures. In what is perhaps the most comprehensive contemporary look at some of the world’s last remaining tribes, the book chronicles Nelson’s experiences photographing 35 populations that have neither adapted to the modern world, nor shown a desire to join it.

Spending up to two weeks with each culture, Nelson would locate, meet, connect with and photograph these “last of the untouched.” After a guide or translator made an initial introduction, Nelson would step in to begin forming a bond and eventually get people to pose—in the jungle, on a mountaintop, in a river. Using the 4×5 plate camera, always in soft light, didn’t just slow him down and focus his concentration; it enabled him to directly confront his subjects. He would always be positioned lower than they were, and they would be seated or standing higher, above him, like icons. Getting them to remain still for a four-to-five-second shutter was a feat in itself. And stripping himself of his own modern-day arrogance and colonialist nature came with time.

His experience in Ethiopia with the Banna is a good example. The tribesmen were high on khat, he recalls, and holding Kalashnikovs. His way of getting close was by getting small.

“You become inferior and you let them push you around; you do not show fear, but you show vulnerability and insecurity,” he says. After that, he would befriend who he felt was the most empathetic one, warm up to him, praise him, bank on his vanity. Once that tribesman had his picture taken, making him feel good and big and strong, everyone wanted their picture taken.

And on it went with, among others, the Samburu in Kenya and the Maasai in Tanzania, the Gauchos in Argentina and the Huaorani in Ecuador, the Nenets of Russia and the Tsaatan of Mongolia. Each location was picked for its geographic remoteness and each tribe selected for its authenticity, rather than its anthropologic vulnerability. (Three regions were purposefully not included: Australia, due to ingrained cultural problems between modern citizens and the aborigines; West Africa, since al-Qaeda-linked militants were running rampant in Mali; and North America where, Nelson says, the tribes haven’t fully retained their heritage the way others have.)

The idea of the book, meanwhile, isn’t just to show photography, but to create a discussion about the imbalance Nelson sees in the world.

“We’re out of context,” he says. That doesn’t mean we should reset to tribal living, but instead create a dialog with the last of the authentics to see where we went wrong; to learn from the purest source what they’re doing right and to take that with us into the future. Nelson doesn’t want them to end up as we have, and so he plans to revisit each tribe to start that conversation.

Jimmy Nelson is an Amsterdam-based photographer focused on disappearing cultures. See more of his project at BeforeThey.com.

Andrew Katz is a reporter with TIME covering international affairs. Follow him on Twitter @katz.

Summary: Photographer Jimmy Nelson spent three-and-a-half years documenting the vanishing cultures of the world. His new book, Before They Pass Away, serves as visual record of what is — and what was — as the world continues evolving in 2013.


“Sometimes I wish I’d never done it,” Mrs Hamdy told The Telegraph, in her only interview to mark the occasion.

Hers is a voice that has been rarely heard: the family of the young man, Mohammed Bouazizi, became unwilling celebrities in the weeks after his lingering death, but a nervous regime arrested Mrs Hamdy when the protests began.

By the time she was acquitted of all charges and released, President Zine el-Abedine Ben Ali had fallen, and media attention was focused on Egypt, Libya and Syria.

“I feel responsible for everything,” she went on. Her voice was shaky as she spoke of the traumatic consequences, five years that have transformed the Middle East but seemingly changed very little in poor, provincial towns like Sidi Bouzeid.

“Sometimes, I blame myself and say it is all because of me. I made history since I was the one who was there and my action contributed to it but look at us now. Meanwhile, Tunisians are suffering as always.”

Mohammed Bouazizi’s death triggered some deep nerve in the Arab world. Many myths were told about his own story and that of Mrs Hamdy, as there were about the nature of subsequent uprisings and downfalls, but there remains a basic truth underlying his experience and that of many others.

Demonstrators turn over a burned out car after reclaiming the side streets near Tahrir Square Photo: Julian Simmonds/The Telegraph

Corruption, stifling bureaucracy, and repressive police states were holding back a largely youthful population across the region, and their victims had little way to make their frustrations felt other than extreme actions.

Subsequent studies found that self-immolation had already become a common act in Tunisia, accounting already for 15 per cent of all burns cases in Tunis hospitals. Within six months, more than 100 Tunisians had followed suit, and scores more around the Arab world, from Morocco to Saudi Arabia and Iraq, had also set themselves on fire.

Still, not many observers could have imagined the chaos that would ensue, even when Mr Ben Ali gave way to weeks of protest and boarded a plane for Saudi Arabia with his wife and a large chunk of the country’s gold reserves.

Next Hosni Mubarak of Egypt went, after 18 days of telegenic demonstrations in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Then Col Muammar Gaddafi was forced out, after protests turned into civil war and then international war, with the West’s air forces joining in.

By the time he was bayoneted and shot in October 2011, Syria was in flames, and the West was starting to vacillate about its role, with effects that can still be seen today. Libya, Syria and much of Iraq remain failed states. Egypt is on the brink.

In the process a social uprising had turned into a conflict between Islamism, part peaceful, part violent, and secular governments and politicians; and then between religious sects, as Sunni and Shia turned on each other.

Despite Mrs Hamdy’s despair at the poverty that remains in Tunisia, the country is still seen as the sole success. It has had two general elections in the years since, with a moderate Islamist party, Ennahda, winning the first, before stepping into opposition in the face of an alliance between secular parties that included members of the former regime last year.

"When I look at the region and my country, I regret it all. Death everywhere and extremism blooming, and killing beautiful souls"

Much of that is down to a deal negotiated by Rached Ghannouchi, Ennahda’s head, who agreed to give up power despite the party’s electoral strength.

He told The Telegraph this week that he and his colleagues had decided to compromise after considering fundamental issues of what democracy meant.

“Majoritarian rule, 50 per cent of the vote, is not sufficient,” he said. He said he had always known, from the start of Tunisia’s political “transition”, that he would have to seek alliances, and in the first government Ennahda ruled alongside a centre-left secular party.

“We thought having a government with a majority would be enough,” he said. “Then we realised we needed more: we needed consensus.”

The difference between Tunisia and Egypt here is stark. While, as he points out, Egypt, Syria and Iraq are all more complex and difficult countries than Tunisia, the fact remains that Ennahda downplayed Islamist demands when the country drew up a constitution, the resulting document winning 94 per cent of the votes in the country’s constitutional assembly.

In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood, which won the presidency by 52 per cent to 48 per cent, tried to force through an Islamist constitution by decree. It was toppled by a coup seven months later.

Syria and Libya, meanwhile, appear not to know the meaning of the word consensus.

Mr Ghannouchi, perhaps oddly, is still optimistic about the future of democracy in the Arab world. “The year 2011 was a leap from tyranny in the Arab world,” he said. “History shows that the transition to democracy is not always linear – the transitions that took place in France and Britain took over 100 years.”

"My brother is a lover of life and he would have rejected both the stupid politicians and death-loving extremists"

Whether the Arab world can last that long is another question. Mr Bouazizi’s family, whose initial fame turned to hostility in their community, could not: his mother and one sister moved to Canada, while another, Samia, now works in Tunis. She is the first to say that her brother’s death has been hijacked by politics and ideology.

“His death is destiny and I accept it,” she said at a café in the city. “But if he were here he would be the first in the street to ask for more dignity.

“My brother created something that greedy people are trying to destroy in the region. My brother is a lover of life and he would have rejected both the stupid politicians and death-loving extremists. My brother died for dignity not for wealth or an ideology.”

At the end of all the wars, few may end up remembering either him or Mrs Hamdy. The two began at opposite sides, but both now seem telescoped out of proportion by a history that became perverse beyond all recognition.

“Mohammed Bouazizi and I are both victims,” Mrs Hamdy said. “He lost his life and my life is not the same any more.

“When I look at the region and my country, I regret it all. Death everywhere and extremism blooming, and killing beautiful souls.”

2011 Arab Spring: a timeline

Summary: Faida Hamdy confiscated a vegetable stall in Tunisia five years ago today.   Neither she nor the rest of the world could have imagined the consequences


The government (then Soviet) declared the area that lay within an 18-mile radius uninhabitable and resettled 116,000 residents with a pension, an apartment and sketchy information about the health risks that lay ahead. In the ensuing months and years, these first resettlers were followed by a few hundred thousand more, all displaced, most from the land where they’d grown up. But Hanna, who had been forced out in the first group, did not accept that fate.

Three months after being relocated, she returned with her husband, her mother-in-law and a handful of other members of their collective farm. When government officials objected, she responded, 'Shoot us and dig the grave; otherwise we’re staying.’

Hanna was among some 1,200 returnees, called 'self-settlers’, most over the age of 48, who made their way back in the first few years after the accident, in defiance of the authorities’ legitimate concerns. For despite the self-settlers’ deep love of their ancestral homes, it’s a fact that the soil, air and water here in what is now known as the Exclusion Zone, or Zone of Alienation, are among the most heavily contaminated on earth.

Today 230 or so self-settlers remain, scattered about in eerily silent villages that are ghostly but also somehow charming. About 80 per cent of the surviving self-settlers are women in their seventies and eighties, creating a unique world of babushkas, to use a Russian word that means 'grandmother’ but also refers to 'old countrywomen’.

Why would the babushkas choose to live on this deadly land? Are they unaware of the risks, crazy enough to ignore them, or both? These are reasonable questions for Westerners who might stand in a grocery-shop aisle debating whether to pay the extra £2 for organic almond butter. The babushkas see their lives, and the risks they run, decidedly differently.

Nadejda Gorbachenko, 80, lives a few metres away from the barbed wire of the Exclusion Zone. She often goes through a hole in the wire to collect mushrooms and berries for her own consumption. 'When I see police, I hide in the bushes. Nobody will stop me’. Photo: RENA EFFENDI/ INSITUTE

When Reactor No 4 blew up, roughly 30 per cent of the initial fall-out hit Ukraine and parts of western Russia, and 70 per cent landed downwind in Belarus. The gamma radiation was death-dealing: some 30 first responders were incapacitated immediately and expired within weeks. But the explosion’s long-term effect on the surrounding area was harder to quantify.

'Unlike the ground-zero fall-out from a nuclear bomb, which can be measured out “circularly” with a compass, radiation from a nuclear fire such as Chernobyl lays waste in a spotty, inconsistent manner,’ explains Anna Korolevska, the scientific director of the National Chernobyl Museum. Which villages got doused? Which did not? Dosimeter readings, which indicate accumulated radiation exposure, varied wildly, and sometimes the Soviet authorities took bribes to alter them.

Nadejda Tislenko, 71. When this widow met up with the reporter and photographer she immediately called a neighbour, saying, 'Hurry, quick, come over. There’s interesting people here, and they’re not missionaries!’ Photo: RENA EFFENDI/ INSITUTE

What is clear about nuclear contaminants (cesium, strontium, plutonium and others) is that they enter the food chain through the soil, that they spread via wind and fire and that their effects are cumulative and linked to, among other things, increases in foetal mortality and cancer.

In some cases, the contaminants stick around for thousands of years. After the accident, cows ingested grass tainted with radioactive iodine-131 (radioactive milk largely accounts for today’s sky-high thyroid-cancer rates in the area). As the 'invisible enemy’ enveloped the spring countryside, the babushkas may or may not have noticed that the birds fell silent and bees ceased flying, but they were alarmed when emergency workers made them dump their cows’ milk.

Maria Urupa, 77, was thinking about her cow when the soldiers arrived to evacuate her village of Paryshev. 'I planned to take my cow and hide in the basement,’ she says. Instead, she and her neighbours were relocated to a hurriedly constructed housing project outside Kiev, on land where many people had died in the 1930s during the Holodomor, the massive genocide-by-famine that the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin instigated in order to subjugate Ukraine and move peasant farmers on to state farming collectives or into factories.

Maria Urupa, 77, on her porch in Parishev village. When the authorities evacuated the village days after the accident, Maria’s first thought was to hide in the basement with her cow. On her return to Parishev after a few months, all the animals had been killed. Photo: RENA EFFENDI/ INSITUTE

According to recent estimates, between three and-a-half million and five million Ukrainians died during this period, and many of the babushkas lost their fathers. Some almost died themselves since, during the Holodomor, starving villagers sometimes resorted to cannibalism, slaughtering one child to save the rest. Three months after moving there, Maria and her family returned to their home in the Exclusion Zone.

When I meet her, she’s standing on her porch in sub-zero weather, looking healthy and stout, wearing a cotton housedress and a threadbare sweater. Maria recalls the day that Soviet troops, under orders from Stalin, marched on to the Urupa family farm.

'They took away two bulls, two pigs and all the potatoes,’ Maria says. 'My father was working for the church, which was not allowed then.’ When her father asked if he could keep a few potatoes, the soldiers threatened to kill him if he tried, saying, “Your soul will fly away, and we’ll wrap your guts around the telephone wire.”’

After Stalin came the Nazis, who slashed their way across Ukraine in the 1940s, raping and killing. About 10.5 million Ukrainians died during the Second World War. Having survived all that, the babushkas were not inclined to cut and run after the Chernobyl explosion created invisible threats in the air, soil and water.

Hanna, who as an infant was nearly eaten by her family during the Holodomor, says it succinctly: 'Starvation is what scares me. Not radiation.’Most of the babushkas share the belief that 'if you leave, you die’. They would rather risk exposure to radiation than the soul-crushing prospect of being separated from their homes. 'You can’t take me from my mother; you can’t take me from my motherland. Motherland is motherland,’ says Hanna.

Maria Vitosh, 86, says, 'A pigeon flies close to his nest. I would never leave my home.’ She receives a monthly government pension of 800 hryvnia (about £60). Her son lives in a neighbouring village and worked in Chernobyl for 12 years after the accident, planting trees. Photo: RENA EFFENDI/ INSITUTE

One refrain I heard often was, 'Those who left are worse off now. They are all dying of sadness. ’What sounds like faith may actually be fact. According to reports by the United Nations Development Programme and the United Nations Children’s Fund, many of those who were relocated after the accident now suffer from anxiety, depression and disrupted social networks, the traumas of displaced people everywhere.

And these conditions seem to have health effects as real as those caused by radiation. The journalist Alexander Anisimov, who spent his career studying the self-settler community, claimed that the women who returned to their ancestral homes in the zone outlived those who left by a decade.

No health studies have been done, but anecdotal evidence suggests that most of the babushkas die of strokes rather than any obvious radiation-related illnesses, and they have dealt better with the psychological trauma. Toxic levels of strontium and cesium in the soil are real, but so are the tug of the ancestral home and the health benefits of determining one’s own destiny.

East or West, pig fat or organic almond butter, few would deny that being happy helps you live longer. At first, of course, the main victims were those who were initially exposed to extreme doses of radiation. After the first responders were felled, the Soviets deployed robots to put out the fire, but radiation levels were so high the machines went berserk.

The government then sent in a phalanx of human beings, dubbed liquidators, the translation of a Russian word that can also mean 'cleaner’. Galina Konyushok, now 71, was called to duty as a liquidator almost immediately. She worked in a nearby bread factory at the time of the accident and was charged with driving to the town of Chernobyl every day to pick up wheat so the government could feed the people working the disaster.

Of course, the wheat itself was highly contaminated. Sitting today with three babushka neighbours in a kitchen bright with the reflection of the snow outside, Galina, who has thyroid cancer, looks strong and healthy. She lives in the town of Zirka, a few hundred yards outside the Exclusion Zone, whose boundary is demarcated by a chain-link and barbed-wire fence.

Although it would be a stretch to call the babushkas a sisterhood, a deep camaraderie connects these women who have spent their entire lives in the area. They help one another at slaughtering time. They visit each other’s homes (on foot; they do not have cars) to play cards and gamble. 'But not for money. I keep telling them, the more you play, the more your brain works,’ Galina says, laughing.

They joke about moving in together if heating-gas prices get too high (they are on fixed, modest government pensions), but emotional attachment to their homes runs too deep for that; home is the entire cosmos of the rural babushka.

They have electricity, but most villages in the zone have a single phone; nobody has running water. Those with a television might sit with needlework to watch a soap opera after the chickens are fed and the wood is chopped. When asked about the dearth of men, Galina responds, 'The men died, and the women stayed. I wish I had a husband to quarrel with!’

In a corner of Galina’s house, beneath a bright window, stands the bed where her husband died 17 years ago (after making her promise never to leave their home). Galina’s exquisite embroidery gives warmth and colour to the three-room house where she’s lived for 52 years and raised four children.

On a small table, a dozen or so medicines, an identification card and a blood-pressure machine tell a more sombre story. An ID reading 'disabled, first group’ indicates her liquidator status and her thyroid cancer. She waves away the medicines, as if to shoo off their significance, and shows me a piece of fabric embroidered with the message, 'Bring happiness and health to my motherland.’

Galina Konyushok, 71, formerly a 'liquidator’ of the Chernobyl nuclear accident, now lives alone in Zirka village. She knits and makes traditional folk patterns and images of Christ on Ukranian cotton fabric. Photo: RENA EFFENDI/ INSITUTE

'I’m not afraid of anything anymore. It’s difficult to be old, but I still want to live,’ she says. Findings about the long-term health effects of Chernobyl are controversial and contradictory. The World Health Organization (WHO) predicts that more than 4,000 deaths will eventually be linked to Chernobyl, and it reports that thyroid-cancer rates have shot up in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, largely among those contaminated in the weeks immediately following the accident.

However, WHO now considers the psychological impact to be at least as detrimental as the physical. Being depressed and unmotivated, pursuing an unhealthy lifestyle and clinging to a victim mind-set, it says, has proved to be the worst fall-out for the 'Chernobylites’. Other organisations, such as Greenpeace, contend that Chernobyl is responsible for tens of thousands of illnesses and deaths, even though these cannot yet be scientifically linked to the accident.

All agree it will be generations before the consequences of Chernobyl can be fully understood. For now, the women’s spirit shines amid the bleak dead zone. Flashing a glint of gold from her lone tooth, Hanna reveals she has saved another pig to slaughter.

'I only think of the good things in life,’ she tells me, rolling on to the balls of her feet. 'Come back tomorrow,’ she says, holding up a chunk of thick pig fat. 'We’re going to party.’

All ages are correct from the time of the interviews. Holly Morris is currently making a documentary, The Babushkas of Chernobyl. A version of this article appeared in MORE magazine

Summary: Decades after Chernobyl's nuclear disaster, despite the severely contaminated   ground, government objections and the deaths of many fellow 'self-settlers’,   a community of determined babushkas remains.


A photograph is only as accurate as its caption. The wrong one can lead to confusion—or worse—while a correct one may deepen the meaning of an action and our responses to it in unexpected ways.

A case in point is Joe Rosenthal’s classic World War II photograph, taken Feb. 23, 1945, of six U.S. Marines raising the American flag on Iwo Jima’s Mount Suribachi. After a review of evidence presented to a Marine Corps panel of retired officers and military historians—who relied on films, interviews, other photographs, clothing forensics, and facial-recognition software—the Pentagon announced last week that the man in the picture long thought to be Navy Pharmacist’s Mate 2nd Class John Bradley was, instead, Marine Pfc. Harold Schultz.

The assiduous research necessary for this change of names on a caption, after more than 70 years, might seem excessive or even wasteful. But the impulse to establish facts about the past says something about the value of a photograph as a historic and an emotional artifact—and about the sweeping role played by this particular one.

Shortly after publication, Rosenthal’s image—a pyramid of faceless bodies engaged in a collective struggle to display a national symbol—became among the most reproduced and consequential of the 20th century. Before the end of 1945, it appeared on a war-bonds poster and on a postage stamp, and had earned a Pulitzer Prize for Rosenthal. Less than a decade later, the photograph served as the model for the Marine Corps War Memorial, designed by sculptor Felix de Weldon and architect Horace Peaslee, and erected in 1954 at Arlington National Cemetery.

More recently, James Bradley and co-writer Ron Powers built their best-selling book “Flags of our Fathers” (2000) partly on the mistaken belief that Mr. Bradley’s father was one of the six in the photograph, which was featured on the cover. Now, Mr. Bradley is adding a new afterword to future editions of the book, the basis for the 2006 movie directed by Clint Eastwood.

Several ironies accompany this news.

There were two flag raisings on Iwo Jima that day. The first flag went up in the morning but was deemed too small and unimpressive to be seen from afar, and so was taken down. In the afternoon, a second and larger flag was raised. Rosenthal (1911-2006) happened to notice the assembly and clicked the shutter. (He vehemently refuted stories that his photograph was “staged.” Film of the second raising, taken by Marine Staff Sgt. Bill Genaust, later killed on Iwo Jima, backs up his claim.)

While John Bradley has been ousted from Rosenthal’s rendition of the event, he has been restored to an honored place as one of those who took part in the first flag raising, which could be regarded as the “original.” His role is diminished only in the sense that he did not appear in the iconic photo and so isn’t one of the sculpted figures on the War Memorial. (He was awarded the Navy Cross for pulling a Marine infantryman to safety while under fire at Iwo Jima.)

Neither Harold Schultz nor his family raised the issue of a possible inaccuracy. Instead, two retired Marines, Lt. Col. Matt Morgan and Sgt. Maj. John Dever, and a pair of amateur historians, Eric Krelle of Omaha, Neb., and Stephen Foley of Wexford, Ireland, were the sleuths who in the past few years had spurred the Marine Corps to revise the caption.

These details only increase the resonance of Rosenthal’s image, where the faces of the men are all but unrecognizable. None raised the flag for his own glorification but rather out of a common sense of duty. Their outstanding quality as individuals in the picture is their anonymity and united sense of purpose.

Schultz himself was so modest that, although he knew he was one of the six men depicted by Rosenthal, he died in 1995 without making a fuss to correct the record. (“The Unknown Flag Raiser of Iwo Jima,” a documentary on the reattribution and the detective work that led to it, will be broadcast Sunday on the Smithsonian Channel.)

Photographs are often misleading, whether because of their incomplete or partial view; or due to memory errors by participants, as seems to have happened with Mr. Bradley’s father; or because of myth-making by the photographer. Alfred Stieglitz’s account of taking “The Steerage” in 1907 was likely a wholesale fabrication, concocted to make him more of a prescient Modernist than he already was.

Facts can be hard or impossible to ascertain. Did Robert Capa genuinely document, or just re-create for propaganda value, the 1936 scene of a stricken Republican fighter during the Spanish Civil War? Questions about its origins remain unanswered. Each of the 486 frames in Abraham Zapruder’s 26.6-second movie has been subjected to decades of minute analysis on every side of the JFK assassination debate. The images have been used to support a dozen contradictory scenarios.

What’s encouraging is that some people care enough to research, as honestly as possible, the circumstances behind photographic images. The belief that they can still record the truth—or at least that discernible facts can be unearthed and fit into credible theories by a scientific sifting of evidence—has not passed away in the age of Photoshop. Certain photographs are monuments, too, and need to be treated as such.

Mr. Woodward is an arts critic in New York.

Summary: The impulse to correct a case of mistaken identity in an iconic image says something encouraging about its value as an artifact.


On paper China’s market shouldn’t hold much sway over your investments.

Chinese shares listed in Hong Kong or on U.S. exchanges account for just 5% of a typical foreign equity fund. But you know better.

Earlier this week, the global markets plunged after China’s Shanghai composite index sank by 7% on worse-than-expected economic news. Things got so bad that Chinese regulators temporarily halted trading in that nation’s stock market, sending ripples of fears around the world. In the U.S., the Dow Jones industrial average sank as much as 450 points before closing down 276 points on Monday.

The same thing happened last summer. In late August, China’s market crashed, and the echo sent U.S. equities down by double digits too.

Such is the pull of the world’s second-largest economy. Once the key driver of global growth, China’s GDP rate has declined from 9.5% in 2011 to 7.7% in 2013 to 6.8% last year. This year China’s GDP is likely to grow 6.3%, says the International Monetary Fund.

Yet before you panic, keep these three things in mind: First, the decelerating economy, like the boom that preceded it, is being engineered by China’s government. “The goal is to transition China from a fast-growing manufacturing economy to a slower-growing but more stable consumer economy,” says Danton Goei, co-manager of Davis Global.

Currently the portion of GDP generated by consumers is just 35% in China, vs. 65% in the U.S. “There’s a lot of room for China’s consumer economy to grow, but the transition will be tricky,” says Goei.

Even now, China’s economy is likely to outpace most developed nations over the next few years. And the Chinese market looks cheap, with a price/earnings ratio of 10, vs. over 17 for U.S. stocks. “I think we’re reaching maximum hate of China’s markets,” says Eric Moffett, manager of T. Rowe Price Asia Opportunities.

What to do: Even if you think China is a bargain, it’s a risky one to grab.

Better to dedicate a small slice of your portfolio to a diversified emerging-markets play. (Even then, you’ll need patience and a stomach for risk.) T. Rowe Price Emerging Markets Stock (PRMSX) holds more than 21% of its assets in China. That’s in line with the global market and slightly greater than the typical 18% weighting in emerging-market funds.

Summary: Three things to keep in mind before you panic.


Shares of Apple dropped below $90 on Thursday for the first time since 2014 as Wall Street worried about slow demand ahead of the anticipated launch of a new iPhone later this year.

A mainstay of many Wall Street portfolios, Apple fell to as low as $89.47 before recovering slightly to $90.13, a 2.55% loss.

Component suppliers in Taiwan will receive fewer orders from Apple in the second half of 2016 than in the same period last year, the Nikkei Asia Review reported on Thursday, citing sources. Apple typically launches its high-end phones in September.

“People are getting negative data points about component orders and production forecasts, and the features on the new iPhone do not seem to be a big change from the 6S,” said Rosenblatt Securities analyst Jun Zhang.

At its session low, Apple briefly relinquished its position as the world’s largest company by market capitalization to Alphabet Inc .

At current prices, Apple’s market value is about $494 billion, while Alphabet’s is about $457 billion, a difference of roughly $36.5 billion.

In the past year, Apple’s market capitalization has fallen by more than $200 billion – roughly the size of Verizon or Walmart.

Suppliers of iPhone components also fell, with Skyworks Solutions off 4.8%, Broadcom down 2.46% and Qorvo declining 1.9%.

Confidence in Cupertino, California-based Apple was shaken after it posted its first-ever quarterly decline in iPhone sales and first revenue drop in 13 years in April. Wall Street is worried about demand for Apple’s next iPhone.

Faced with lackluster sales of smartphones in the United States, Apple has bet on China as a major new growth engine. But progress there has been disappointing.

Revenue from China slumped 26% during the March quarter. Apple faces increasing competition from Chinese manufacturers like Xiaomi and Huawei selling phones priced below $200, Rosenblatt’s Zhang said.

Last week, Dialog Semiconductor, which sells chips used in iPhones and other smartphones, cut its revenue outlook due to ongoing softness in the smartphone market.

The recent sell-off has left Apple trading at about 10 times its expected 12-month earnings, cheap compared with its average of 17.5 over the past 10 years. It also has a dividend yield of about 2.46%.

“The market is saturated and they have no massive growth drivers outside of the iPhone,” said Pacific Crest analyst Andy Hargreaves, who still recommends buying the stock. “Generally speaking, I just think it’s a little too cheap.”

Additional reporting by Savio D’Souza and Rodrigo Campos

Summary: The company's market capitalization has fallen by more than $200 billion so far this year.


Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has long been far more outspoken than her colleagues on the Supreme Court, and she is mincing no words when it comes to a certain presumptive Republican nominee for President.

“I can’t imagine what this place would be — I can’t imagine what the country would be — with Donald Trump as our President,” Ginsburg said in an interview with the New York Times on Sunday.

She says her late husband Martin Ginsburg, who died in 2010, would have declared: “Now it’s time for us to move to New Zealand.”

Unsurprisingly, she hinted at whom she would be voting for in another interview with the Associated Press two days ago.

“It’s likely that the next President, whoever she will be, will have a few appointments to make,” she told the AP.

Ginsburg, one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People last year, also offered a ringing endorsement of Merrick Garland, President Obama’s nominee to the top court following Justice Antonin Scalia’s death earlier this year. She described him as a “superbright and very nice … superprepared” and qualified individual who would make “a great colleague.”

She lamented the Republican-majority Senate’s continued blocking of Garland from consideration, and its insistence that the next President, to be elected in November, should be the one to appoint a new Supreme Court Justice.

“That’s their job,” Ginsburg said, when asked whether the Senate should give the 63-year-old judge a fair hearing. “There’s nothing in the Constitution that says the President stops being President in his last year.”

In the meantime, Ginsburg said the court deadlocked between four liberal justices and four conservative ones “couldn’t have done better than it did.” She hailed, in particular, landmark decisions on affirmative action and abortion — the latter of which she filed a widely acclaimed concurrent brief on.

“I wanted to highlight the point that it was perverse to portray this [the Texas law struck down by the court] as protecting women’s health,” she told the Times. “Desperate women then would be driven to unsafe abortions.”

Read the full interview here.

Summary: The Supreme Court Justice 'can't imagine' life under Trump, she tells the NYT


Polish Olympic champion Adrian Zielinski has joined brother Tomasz in being sent home from Rio 2016 after testing positive for nandrolone.

Adrian Zielinski, who had moved up to -94kg after winning gold in the -85kg in London, failed a drugs test at the Polish Championships in July.

The Polish Weightlifting Federation said the 27-year-old has a legal right to have his B sample tested.

His 25-year-old brother Tomasz was sent home from Brazil on Tuesday.

Nandrolone is an anabolic steroid which can help athletes to train harder and aids recovery time.

The Court of Arbitration for Sport's anti-doping panel in Rio has already heard Tomasz Zielinski's case and banned him from the Games. The International Weightlifting Federation will now decide on any sanction.

His is the third case to be heard by the specially-convened anti-doping panel since the Games started.

It banned Bulgarian runner Silvia Danekova after she tested positive for blood booster EPO, and China's teenage swimmer Chen Xinyi has accepted a provisional suspension while a positive drug test is investigated.

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Summary: Olympic champion Adrian Zielinski joins brother Tomasz in being sent home from Rio 2016 after testing positive for nandrolone.