By Jason Notte The Street

NFL teams now have the power to stop television blackouts of their home games, but that doesn't mean they'll do so.

The NFL blackout policy dates back to an act of Congress in 1961 preventing home games from showing on TV stations that broadcast within a 75-mile radius of the stadium if tickets aren't sold out 72 hours before kickoff. At the end of June, six months after the Federal Communications Commission agreed to review the policy, the NFL took its first step away from those restrictions: It announced that teams would be allowed to broadcast games within their local coverage area even if only 85 percent of tickets are sold.

What's the catch? It's up to the teams' owners to decide if they want to adopt that 85 percent threshold. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers adopted the lower "sellout" mark in July and lowered ticket prices after blacking out 13 of their past 15 home games. The Buffalo Bills, Cincinnati Bengals and San Diego Chargers didn't feel quite as strongly and stuck to the 100 percent mark despite blacking out games in each of the past two seasons and trying to pry hundreds of millions in stadium construction and improvement costs out of their local governments.

This takes heat off the NFL just after it inked television deals with ESPN, ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox that will boost NFL revenue more than 60 percent by 2022 -- and places the heat right on the individual teams and their owners. By revising the blackout rule despite watching its blackout rate drop to 6.3 percent last year from 8 percent between 2001 and 2010, 31 percent in the 1990s, 40 percent in the 1980s and 50 percentin the 1970s, the NFL issued a subtle reminder that only some of the 31 teams who took public money to build their stadiums are denying fans access to the on-field action.

There are still going to be blackouts this year, but the NFL will get less of the blame despite not repealing the rule altogether. As the Arizona Cardinals and New Orleans Saints prepare to kick off the preseason with Sunday's Hall of Fame Game, we take a look around the league at the teams most likely to take their games off television this year. The eight teams listed here will have different reasons for pulling their game broadcasts out of local bars and living rooms, but they'll all resort to the same tactics to try to draw a packed house next time:

Number of television blackouts last year: 0 Number of blackouts in the past five years: 0

Half of Indiana just yelled something unsavory at the screen, but don't blame us. The Colts went 2-14 last year as former franchise quarterback and Super Bowl hero Peyton Manning sat out with an injury. Manning left for Denver this year and though No. 1 overall draft pick and new gunslinger Andrew Luck should generate some buzz, the Colts' front office isn't hedging its bets. The Colts said in early July they would require 100% attendance to avoid blackouts this season despite the NFL's reduced-capacity option. Never mind that local taxpayers picked up nearly 90 percent of four-year-old Lucas Oil Stadium's $720 million cost, according to the National Sports Fan Coalition advocacy group. The Colts want posteriors in the seats, even if it's to watch last-place football for an average $85 a ticket.

Number of television blackouts last year: 6 Number of blackouts in the past five years: 10

Perhaps the Bengals front office still thinks Carson Palmer is taking the snaps and throwing to Chad Ochocinco (or Johnson if the delusion is strong enough). How else do you explain this quote from Bengals president Mike Brown during training camp:

"What we want are sold-out houses. We want to see the stadium full. If you think back when they passed the sales to finance the stadiums [in 1996], they did it so people could come down to the stadiums and watch games. They didn't do it so people could stay at home and watch games on television. They could have done that without a new stadium. When I look around the league, most are staying with the old rule."

Um, Mike, maybe it's because you threatened to move the team back in 1995. Oh, and because you told them the stadium would create jobs and revenue, but ended up costing Hamilton County, Ohio, $540 million. That debt climbed as the recession deepened and expanded to a $30 million budget deficit this year alone. Add annual stadium costs to taxpayers that rose from $29.9 million in 2008 to $34.6 million in 2010 and sales tax revenue that's declined steadily since 2000 and you get crushing debt that eliminates funding for programs such as a juvenile court and rolls back the property tax cut promised as part of the stadium deal.

"Sold-out houses?" Brown's team made the playoffs last year and couldn't sell out more than two of its home games.

Number of television blackouts last year: 2 Number of blackouts in the past five years: 5

This team sold out 48 straight games through 2010 but started feeling the blackout bug that year as mainstays such as LaDanian Tomlinson and Antonio Cromartie left and team ownership sought a new stadium from San Diego or the next highest bidder.

As Los Angeles and Chula Vista lick their chops, the Spanos family that owns the team is all too happy to black out the fans who refuse to pack Qualcomm Stadium just to watch their team drift further into mediocrity.

"We're in one of the oldest stadiums in the league, and don't have opportunities that other teams have to increase revenue with things like a bigger naming rights deal or digital signage," executive vice president and CEO A.G. Spanos told the North County Times. "We rely heavily on ticket sales as a primary revenue stream. This market has shown an ability to sell out games over the last 10 years, and we need to take advantage of that."

Never mind that the Chargers haven't shown an ability to make the playoffs since 2009 or a will to commit to the San Diego market in nearly as long. Eighty-five percent capacity won't pay for their old, publicly funded stadium or do much for their efforts to cajole a new one out of the city.

Number of television blackouts last year: 3 Number of blackouts in the past five years: 6

Where to start with the Buffalo Bills?

One of the team's "home" games has been played in Toronto for each of the past four years. The team's 92-year-old owner, Ralph Wilson, says he can't guarantee the team's future in Buffalo, N.Y., after he dies. The team struggles to fill the 73,000-seat Ralph Wilson Stadium in the dead of winter while the Chicago Bears need to draw less than 62,000 to sell out Soldier Field in a far larger market. The team hasn't had a winning record since 1999, yet is asking the public to foot the bill for more than $200 million in stadium renovations.

The team declined the NFL's offer to lift blackouts at 85 percent capacity, largely because doing so would require it to pay $90,000 per home game into the league's anti-blackout revenue pool. The price to retain its disgruntled fan base or bring in new generations of fans is likely a bit higher.

Number of television blackouts last year: 0 Number of blackouts in the past five years: 7

The lack of blackouts in Jacksonville during the past two seasons has been a huge point of pride for the team and the community, which have pushed for sellouts for each game and made it part of the local fabric. The fact remains, though, that the Jacksonville economy still isn't great, the team hasn't made the playoffs since 2007 and was bad enough last year to warrant coach Jack Del Rio's firing, sponsors such as Anheuser-Busch are still buying up tickets to avoid blackouts and new owner Shahid Khan refuses to commit to a future in Jacksonville. He's even refused the NFL's new sellout option.

Jacksonville remains one of the league's least valuable franchises, as evidenced by its $760 million selling price last year, and still resorts to tarping off the upper reaches of EverBank Field to reduce capacity. Though whispers of a potential move to Los Angeles have been nothing more than that, one winning season in the past six makes it tough for fans to support a team with expendable income they don't have.

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Summary:
By Jason Notte
The Street
NFL teams now have the power to stop television blackouts of their home games, but that doesn't mean they'll do so.
The NFL ...


In a process-heavy city like San Francisco, the second most amazing thing about the Crissy Field Center is that it has traveled from conception to near-completion in just nine months.

The most amazing thing is the brisk-moving building's location: the eastern edge of Crissy Field, alongside the bay in a national park.

"To get something done this quickly is a great accomplishment, and a great relief," admitted Greg Moore, executive director of the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, which begins moving staff into its new center this week.

The center's home until this month was a former commissary from 1939 that sits on Mason Street across from Crissy Field's restored marsh. In addition to the educational programs that serve more than 8,000 mostly inner-city students, that building contained a cafe, gift shop and exhibition space.

Only the cafe will make the move to the new center, which occupies what had been a clearing used partly for overflow parking. The look is different too - instead of prim white stucco, the new building is a prefabricated structure clad in salvaged redwood planks alongside panels of recycled paper and bamboo fiber.

The reason for the move: to get out of the way of a much larger project.

The permanent home sits alongside Doyle Drive, where construction is starting on a $1.04 billion replacement of the 1.5-mile approach to the Golden Gate Bridge. The starting date moved forward this year from 2011 after receiving federal stimulus funds.

The conservancy looked at vacant buildings within the Presidio, but the tight timeline made a renovation project dubious. Also, the most promising buildings were on the edge of Crissy Field, which will be difficult to reach until Doyle Drive's completion, now scheduled for 2014.

By contrast, the grassy site on the end of Crissy Field is outside the construction zone. It's served by Muni - the mode of travel for many students - and is a short walk to the marsh where outdoor programs are held.

The conservancy raised the idea of a structure with the National Park Service, stressing it can be removed after the center returns to its original home.

"We were worried about proposing a new building, but everyone got into line and wanted to help," said Diane Ochi, project manager for the conservancy. "It didn't hurt that we run an education center and had this thing (the expedited Doyle Drive project) dropped on us."

As of last week, the modular buildings designed by the local firm Project FROG remained the centerpiece of a fenced-off construction site; a plaza that's part of the landscape design by CMG Landscape Architecture is in place, but not the plantings that will enfold it.

Still, the center's staff is scheduled to start unpacking boxes on Tuesday and begin working with students next week. The cafe should open next month.

Hassles aside, center director Christy Rocca has no complaints. There are two classrooms as well as an ecology lab and workshops for media and hands-on art.

"The location is absolutely stunning, and we were able to define the spaces specifically for the program that has evolved," Rocca said. The architectural emphasis on recycled materials and low energy use fits the urban ecology focus as well: "We have a building that will serve as a teaching tool itself."

It's already shown what is possible when few other options exist.

"This project certainly had an accelerated time frame," said Moore, comparing it to past efforts of the conservancy, which collaborates on improvement efforts throughout the 75,000-acre Golden Gate National Recreation Area. "That schedule put it in a league of its own."

The Crissy Field Center, which will include a cafe, is scheduled to hold a public open house on Feb. 6. It is located near the easternmost Crissy Field parking entrance off Mason Street. When Doyle Drive is rebuilt, the center plans to return to its former home.

Summary: "To get something done this quickly is a great accomplishment, and a great relief," admitted Greg Moore, executive director of the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, which begins moving staff into its new center this week.  In addition to the educational programs that serve more than 8,000 mostly inner-city students, that building contained a cafe, gift shop and exhibition space.  The look is different too - instead of prim white stucco, the new building is a prefabricated structure clad in salvaged redwood planks alongside panels of recycled paper and bamboo fiber.  The permanent home sits alongside Doyle Drive, where construction is starting on a $1.04 billion replacement of the 1.5-mile approach to the Golden Gate Bridge.  The architectural emphasis on recycled materials and low energy use fits the urban ecology focus as well: "We have a building that will serve as a teaching tool itself."


NEW ORLEANS - Ray Lewis may get all the attention, but the real turning point in the Ravens' season was when linebacker Terrell Suggs came back from a torn Achilles tendon in Week 7. The 2011 Defensive Player of the Year had been expected to be out a lot longer.

"Terrell's passion and fire to come back was amazing," defensive tackle Haloti Ngata said. "I think it made Ray Lewis want to come back from his triceps injury. I think it trickled down throughout the whole team.

"I don't know if people understood how significant Terrell is to our team, and him coming back definitely helped our defense."

Suggs, who had 14 sacks in 2011, didn't have the burst at first. But after recording 23 tackles and two sacks in eight regular-season games, Suggs has 19 tackles, two sacks and a forced fumble in three playoff wins.

"It's crazy," Ravens defensive end Pernell McPhee said. "You could look at him when he first came back and be like, 'Oh yeah, he's not the same Suggs.' But then, as the season kept going, he kept getting better at things and better at his technique.

"And then the playoffs hit, and he just got explosive."

Suggs is more likely to break into song or crack jokes than to talk about himself and his impact, but the five-time Pro Bowler got serious for a minute Wednesday.

"I don't know if I'm even close to normal right now," he said. "It's the tasks. It's the goal. All of that is bigger than how you feel.

"I guarantee you, come Sunday, when the clock reads 0:00 in the fourth quarter, if the score reads how I expect it to read and how I want it to read, I promise you I won't feel any pain."

Suggs, 30, said he knew this team was on the brink of being special this season, with quarterback Joe Flacco's development, and thus didn't listen when doctors said he might be out the whole season.

"I just refused to accept that," he said.

Suggs also refuses to be quiet, even when teammates sometimes ask him to. He is constantly screaming at teammates and opposing players during practices and games, often quoting obscure lines from Will Ferrell movies or "The Departed."

"He'll be rambling on about some movie he just watched, then quickly he'll yell that the ball is going to the right or left," linebacker Paul Kruger said. "He is great at watching film and picking up tendencies, and that's why Ray and he do such a good job at getting everybody ready."

Suggs insists there is a method to his madness.

"Guys will tell you that I'm constantly talking, even at the snap of the ball, something," he said. "They know what to listen for, and they know when to tune me out. I'm pretty much just trying to make sure we're all on the same page, especially the guys on the line."

Suggs said he and his teammates have no problem having fun and staying loose, while playing violently. He'll be singing again at practice Friday.

"I'm taking requests," he said. "Hit me on my twitter,@untouchablejay4. We're going to be us. Were always going to be us."

Vic Tafur is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: vtafur@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @VicTafur

Summary: Terrell Suggs' return lifted Ravens  NEW ORLEANS - Ray Lewis may get all the attention, but the real turning point in the Ravens' season was when linebacker Terrell Suggs came back from a torn Achilles tendon in Week 7.  "Terrell's passion and fire to come back was amazing," defensive tackle Haloti Ngata said.  [...] after recording 23 tackles and two sacks in eight regular-season games, Suggs has 19 tackles, two sacks and a forced fumble in three playoff wins.  Suggs, 30, said he knew this team was on the brink of being special this season, with quarterback Joe Flacco's development, and thus didn't listen when doctors said he might be out the whole season.  Suggs said he and his teammates have no problem having fun and staying loose, while playing violently.


A day after the Walt Disney Co. disclosed that it was ending apparel production in Bangladesh, that country’s garment manufacturers expressed alarm that other Western corporations might follow Disney’s lead. They feared that could bring about a potential mass exodus that would devastate Bangladesh’s economy and threaten the livelihoods of millions of people.

Mohammad Fazlul Azim, a member of the Bangladesh Parliament and an influential garment factory owner, implored brands not to leave Bangladesh, noting that many factories do comply with safety standards.

‘‘The whole nation should not be made to suffer,’’ he said. ‘‘This industry is very important to us. Fourteen million families depend on this.’’

Factory owners in Bangladesh as well as apparel retailers in the West have faced intense pressure from governments, consumers, and labor groups to improve workplace safety there after a building containing five garment factories collapsed last week outside the nation’s capital, killing more than 430 people.

Several Western retailers indicated Thursday that they were considering new plans to ensure factory safety, efforts that would require investing in, rather than abandoning, their operations in Bangladesh. Few have made financial commitments to upgrade unsafe factory buildings or to endorse tougher and deeper inspections, however. So far, pledging money for relief efforts has been the most common response by big retailers.

Officials from two nongovernment organizations who attended a meeting in Germany on Monday aimed at improving factory safety in Bangladesh said Thursday that they were confident that several major retailers would soon join a broad plan to ensure fire and building safety in Bangladesh factories. But, so far, that plan has been embraced by just PVH, the parent company of Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein, and the Tchibo Group, a German retailer.

If a few more retail giants sign on, labor groups are likely to turn up the pressure on others to join the effort or face protests, several officials said. Some companies have taken steps on their own. In October, Gap announced a $22 million fire and building safety plan with its suppliers in Bangladesh, without identifying which factories it was using there or how many factories would be improved under the plan. And three weeks ago, Walmart pledged $1.8 million to train 2,000 Bangladesh factory managers about fire safety.

Summary: A day after the Walt Disney Co. disclosed that it was ending apparel production in Bangladesh, that country’s garment manufacturers expressed alarm that other Western corporations might follow Disney’s lead. They feared that could bring about a potential mass exodus that would devastate Bangladesh’s economy and threaten the livelihoods of millions of people. Mohammad Fazlul Azim, a member of the Bangladesh Parliament and an influential garment factory owner, implored brands not to leave Bangladesh, noting that many factories do comply with safety standards. Factory owners in Bangladesh as well as Western apparel retailers have faced intense pressure from governments, consumers and labor groups to improve workplace safety there after a building containing five garment factories collapsed last week outside the nation’s capital, killing more than 430 people.


One nice feature is that you can store profiles for different bikes, assigning them a name and icon, and custom screens for different activities. When you start recording a ride you then select which bike you’re on and which screen you’d like to use. For instance, when riding to work you may have a “commute” screen that tells you the time of day (am I late?), the temperature (all cycle commuters love discussing the weather) and distance travelled. For weekend rides on your mountain bike you may prioritise altitude climbed, average speed and gradient, and for fast road rides you could be more concerned with heart rate, cadence and maximum speed. You can show up to 10 of the huge list of available metrics on each screen, although if you use fewer they’re larger and easier to read at a glance.

Garmin has put as much thought into the hardware as the software. You delve through the menus via a touchscreen which, unlike the iPhone, works with gloves on. Neither mud nor rain seem to bother it, within reason - it's "water resistant" not "waterproof".

The 510 is larger than both the 200 and traditional bike computers, but not unwieldy, and the mounts are fantastic. In the box you get a couple which easily attach to a top tube or handlebar with rubber loops and one hard plastic one that mounts to standard-sized bars and juts forward an inch or two. All of them are far simpler than the type of thing you normally get with bike accessories, grip more securely and don’t rattle. I recently rode the famously lumpy cobbles of Flanders and it stayed secure throughout.

One clever feature is completely hidden from sight: support for GLONASS, the Soviet Union's answer to the US military's GPS. A wider range of satellites means it finds a signal faster and can hold on to it when GPS satellites are scarce.

In terms of battery life, Garmin say “up to 20 hours”. I've managed a little less than that in real use, although it can vary depending on whether or not you're using the Bluetooth connection to your phone or the backlight. It can certainly handle a week of commuting back and forth and a longer weekend ride before you need to charge it.

The most interesting feature, which Garmin are really selling the device on, is that it can link-up to a smartphone via Bluetooth. This means you can upload rides without using a computer, get up-to-date weather reports on the device and also live-stream your rides through Garmin’s Connect website. The advert above shows how this works if you’re a pro-cyclist on the Garmin team with time to kill, but it can also be fun for us mere mortals to let friends and family track us during long sportives. It would also work as a reassuring safety measure for worried parents or partners. You'll need to install an app on your phone and have a free Garmin Connect account to get it working, but there are iOS and Android options and it's all pleasingly straightforward - gone are the early days of GPS computers where a PhD in computer science was a prerequisite for getting them to work smoothly.

Admittedly, the core features of the Edge 510 can be had for free in one of a host of apps such as Strava, but dedicated devices are far more polished: you get a huge battery life, as opposed to the couple of hours you can eke out of a smartphone, the great mounts and an easy to use interface, all wrapped up in a package that won't come to any harm in the rain. You also have the heart rate sensor which can be a genuinely useful training tool.

Spending £250 on a bike computer may be a hard pill to swallow for many, but if you want the extra features then it's worth every penny; and if you don't, the Edge 200 offers all the basics for less than half the price.

Summary: Garmin’s new GPS bike computer connects to your smartphone via Bluetooth and   lets friends and family track your rides live online. Matthew Sparkes   takes one for a spin.


View from the mezzanine of the Winspear Opera House in Dallas. Photograph: Iwan Baan

When the mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves and her fellow American baritone Thomas Hampson take to the stage at the Winspear Opera House in Dallas tomorrow night, they will be marking the attempt by the British-based architecture firm Foster + Partners to design an opera theatre for the 21st century.

The singers will stand before a capacity audience of 2,300 in Lord Foster's purpose-built oval design, the first opera house by his firm. With the project, the architects hope to break down elitist barriers and entice a younger, more diverse crowd.

The Winspear is the centrepiece of a $354m (£222m) art project, the AT&T Performing Arts Centre, that covers 19 blocks of central Dallas and was opened this week with events that featured Bruce Willis, singer Patti LuPone and Foster. It is billed as the most ambitious arts centre in the US since New York's Lincoln Centre, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary.

The complex includes a 10-storey theatre designed by another celebrity architect, Rem Koolhaas, and a smaller performance hall to open in 2011. The scale of the master plan is testimony to the wealth of Dallas – a communications and engineering hub – as well as the philanthropy of its many billionaires. The scheme has been funded privately, with more than 100 individuals donating $1m and Ross Perot, the former presidential candidate and Dallas resident, giving $10m.

Foster + Partners' team of architects, led by Spencer de Grey, went on a "grand tour" of opera houses before they began, concluding that the horseshoe shape found in London's Covent Garden, Munich and the Mariinsky in St Petersburg offers the most intimate experience, bringing the stage closer to the auditorium.

They also studied Peter Brook's theatre in Paris, Bouffes du Nord, borrowing from that the idea of overlapping the geometries of the stage and auditorium, further heightening the feeling of intimacy.

They reduced the number of seats from 3,300 in Dallas's old opera house to 2,200 – slightly more than Covent Garden but substantially fewer than New York's Metropolitan Opera – mainly to enhance the dramatic experience, but also partly in recognition that in this age, seats have to be larger. "People want wider seats, as basically they have bigger bottoms," de Grey said. "It's a very compact space. People can't believe it has so many seats in such a small area."

The theatre itself is swathed in 43,000 sq ft (13,110 sq m)of glass panels coloured in a rich, blood red: an inverted allusion to the deep red often found in the interior upholstery of opera houses and plastering it on the outside as a beacon. The architects avoided a grand entrance through a neo-classical portico; instead, the theatre is surrounded by a circular shade-giving canopy and a huge glass wall that can be raised in temperate times to open up the entire structure to the outside. "We have tried to prevent this being an elitist building. We wanted to create a democratic one, so that it's not an act of courage to go through the front door."

The Foster partnership hopes the Winspear will be used as a communal facility following in the footsteps of the firm's design for the Sage in Gateshead and the Great Court of the British Museum in London. But the centre has attracted some criticism. The architecture critic of the LA Times has deemed the multivenue arts complex out of date, saying the opera house and adjacent venues seem detached from one another and from the city.

Summary: $350m arts centre funded entirely by private donations


Mundane yet mesmeric ... Stephen Shore's photograph of an alley in Presidio, Texas (1975)

It is 35 years since the term "new topographics" was coined by William Jenkins, curator of a group show of American landscape photography held at George Eastman House in Rochester, New York. The show consisted of 168 rigorously formal, black-and-white prints of streets, warehouses, city centres, industrial sites and suburban houses. Taken collectively, they seemed to posit an aesthetic of the banal.

"What I remember most clearly was that nobody liked it," Frank Gohlke, one of the participating photographers told the LA Times when the exhibition was restaged last year at the LA County Museum of Art. "I think it wouldn't be too strong to say that it was a vigorously hated show."

The exhibition's clunky subtitle was "Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape", which gave some clue as to the deeper unifying theme. What Jenkins had identified in the work of US photographers such as Gohlke, Robert Adams, Stephen Shore, Lewis Baltz and Nicholas Nixon was an interest in the created landscapes of 70s urban America. Their stark, beautifully printed images of this mundane but oddly fascinating topography was both a reflection of the increasingly suburbanised world around them, and a reaction to the tyranny of idealised landscape photography that elevated the natural and the elemental. In one way, they were photographing against the tradition of nature photography that the likes of Ansel Adams and Edward Weston had created.

Adams, who is now perhaps the most well-known chronicler of America's disappearing wildernesses, pointed his camera at eerily empty streets, pristine trailer parks, rows of standardised tract houses, the steady creep of suburban development in all its regulated uniformity. Baltz made stark photographs of the walls of office buildings and warehouses on industrial sites in Orange County. Nixon concentrated on innercity development: skyscrapers that dwarfed period buildings, freeways, gridded streets and the palpable unreality of certain American cities in which pedestrians seem like interlopers.

Jenkins also included American work by Bernd and Hilla Becher in the show. The Bechers' stark images of Pennsylvania salt mines and giant coal breakers were as coolly architectural as their images of German cooling towers and industrial plants. The suggestion was that there was something determinedly European about this new American gaze.

Only one photographer, Shore, shot in colour. It seemed to heighten the sense of detachment in his photographs of anonymous intersections and streets. Shore was influenced by Ed Ruscha, the conceptualist of Californian cool, who, in the 60s, had made a series of artist's books with self-explanatory titles such as Twentysix Gasoline Stations, Some Los Angeles Apartments, Every Building on the Sunset Strip. The show also nodded obliquely at the later work of Walker Evans, who had photographed the vernacular iconography of America in road signs, billboards, motels and shop fronts.

Evans's images now carry the romantic undertow of an almost vanished America. The work of the photographers in the New Topographics exhibition, now collected in an austerely beautiful book of the same name by Steidl, still looks, for the most part, contemporary – and still seems troubling in its matter-of-factness, its almost dull reflection of the uniform and banal. A friend of mine who works in publishing dismissed the book outright, saying: "If I were to commission a bunch of authors to write essays on boredom, I would not expect the result to be a bunch of boring essays. Nor would I give it a pretentious postmodern title." Outside the rarefied world of art photography, many would, I suspect, agree.

The influence of the New Topographics movement, however, has been pervasive. You can detect it in the work of Andreas Gursky, Paul Graham and Candida Höfer. Indeed, Donovan Wylie's clinical approach to photographing the empty Maze prison in Northern Ireland, currently shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse prize, could easily have been a contemporary addendum to the Steidl book.

The New Topograhics exhibition in 1975 was not just the moment when the apparently banal became accepted as a legitimate photographic subject, but when a certain strand of theoretically driven photography began to permeate the wider contemporary art world. Looking back, one can see how these images of the "man-altered landscape" carried a political message and reflected, unconsciously or otherwise, the growing unease about how the natural landscape was being eroded by industrial development and the spread of cities.

Back then, Jenkins seemed to have anticipated what the public reaction to the show would be. University students were on hand at George Eastman House to interview visitors for their reactions, most of which were negative or dismissive. One man was surprised to find his own truck in one of Adams's photographs, and had this to say: "At first they're really stark nothing, but then you really look at them and it's just the way things are. This is interesting, it really is."

Shot in black-and-white on an old 35mm camera, Giacomo Brunelli's photographs of animals – domestic and wild, dead and alive – are by turns dramatic and ghostly. He prowls the fields and streets near his London home for his prey and the results are often surprising; occasionally shocking. The Animals is on show at the Photofusion Gallery in London until 26 March 2010.

Summary: William Jenkins's 1975 exhibition rewrote the rules of landscape photography. Does it have the same impact today?


Martin Sharp, the artist, filmmaker, designer and cartoonist, has died, aged 71. Much loved for his tenacious embodiment of the bohemian freedom of the 1960s, Sharp came to symbolise the era: he was a living connection to the group of expats who had made a ripple in the waters of swinging London, an artist who created psychedelic posters, magazine and album covers.

In the early 1960s, Sharp studied at the National Art School and for a brief time in the architecture department of Sydney University. A naturally gifted cartoonist, Sharp was also adept at causing controversy: a 1964 cartoon for University of NSW student magazine Tharunka resulted in the prosecution of its editors for obscenity.

In 1962, Sharp began work on Oz, an underground magazine he co-founded with Richard Neville and Richard Walsh. As its art director, Sharp created its trademark anti-establishment look and also contributed to the magazine – his satirical poem The Word Flashed Around The Arms, and a cover showing Neville and two friends pretending to urinate into a Tom Bass fountain, ultimately brought about the magazine’s demise. Prosecuted for obscenity, Neville and Walsh were sentenced to six months’ jail with hard labour and Sharp to four months. All three were released on bail pending an appeal, and were eventually acquitted.

Although Sharp initially spent just two years in London with Neville from 1967, the Oz, relaunched in the UK in 1967, became an iconic underground magazine of the late '60s. While in London, Sharp lived in a large palatial house in Chelsea, a home for the suburb’s bohemian art and rock scene. Sharp co-wrote the lyrics to Cream’s classic Tales of Brave Ulysses with housemate Eric Clapton and designed covers for the band’s Disraeli Gears and Wheels of Fire. Back in Sydney in 1970, Sharp established The Yellow House in Kings Cross, part share-house, part-alternative gallery, where exhibitions of paintings, sculptures, installations and happenings by Sharp and others were staged.

Sharp’s redesign of Luna Park in 1979 cemented his reputation as one of Australia’s leading pop artists, mixing psychedelic colours and icons with imagery derived from vaudeville and silent cinema. Sharp’s obsession with hippie-era vaudeville revivalist Tiny Tim, an unlikely participant in Woodstock and purveyor of novelty tunes, resulted in a decade-long effort to make Street of Dreams, a film about Tim and Luna Park, which was eventually screened at the Sydney Film Festival in 1988.

Another of Sharp’s obsessions was Arthur Stace, an ex-alcoholic who obsessively chalked the word Eternity onto Sydney’s footpaths during the 1950s and '60s. The word in its unmistakable rendering appeared in numerous Sharp paintings and prints and helped make Stace and his strange mission a part of Sydney official history. Sharpe continued to work as a painter during the '80s and '90s, but his output became sporadic. He was honoured with a number of recent survey exhibitions and retrospectives staged in various museums around the country.

Much of Sharp’s work was in commercial or semi-commercial contexts but this didn’t detract from their appeal: his posters for Nimrod Theatre are classic late 20th century pop art. Sharp was an iconoclast and, according to some who knew him, a wilful and obstinate dreamer, given to free association ramblings. A former enthusiast of LSD and nicotine, it was the smoking that finally did him in – he died of emphysema. The curious cultural collisions of Sharp’s work were produced by a time that will never come again but will live on through his work. Sharp stared into the universe and it winked back.

Summary: Psychedelic and pop art iconoclast, Sharp was an artist who stared into the universe and it winked back


WASHINGTON — The US economy is showing more strength than at any time since the Great Recession began six years ago.

Employers are hiring. Home prices, sales, and construction have surged. Corporate profits and stocks have hit records. And consumers have picked up their spending.

The economy has yet to fully recover from the most devastating crisis since the Great Depression. But it’s getting closer — a point President Obama highlighted in his State of the Union message on Tuesday night.

By the middle of this year, after years of steady but sluggish improvement, the United States is expected to have finally regained all the 8.7 million jobs lost during the recession, which officially ended 4½ years ago. Many economic forecasters say the economy should grow 3 percent or more this year. That would be its best performance since 2005.

And yet in some ways, the lopsided nature of the half-decade global recovery leaves Obama with little to celebrate. Much of the US labor force has gone without pay increases. Millions have struggled for more than six months to find work. Others have had to accept lower-paying jobs and diminished career prospects.

Forty percent of Americans identify themselves as lower or lower-middle class, according to a survey released Monday by the Pew Research Center. Just 25 percent of the country felt that way in 2008.

The world economy remains fragile. That was driven home this month by the turmoil in emerging economies that sent the US stock market falling after a stunning 2013 rally that rewrote record books.

If the economy does come close to 3 percent growth for 2014, it would mark a solid improvement from the 2.4 percent average annual growth during the recovery so far. On Thursday, the government will estimate economic growth for all of 2013.

Job growth has been remarkably steady in an uneven recovery. Employers have added at least 2.1 million jobs in each of the past three years, creating momentum that could help the economy gain speed in 2014. The unemployment rate has plunged from 7.9 percent to 6.7 percent over the past year.

Still, the benefits of more hiring have been muted so far, in part because much of it has been concentrated in the low-wage industries of hotels, restaurants, retailers, and temp workers. Also, millions of jobless Americans have stopped looking for work. Once people without jobs stop their searches, they’re no longer counted as unemployed. As a result, the unemployment rate can fall in a way that overstates the health of the economy.

Real estate is rebounding. Home prices have climbed 13.7 percent over the past 12 months, according to a Standard & Poor’s index released Tuesday. Sales of existing homes totaled 5.09 million last year, the best such performance since 2006, the National Association of Realtors said last week. Home industry experts say the gains should continue this year, though at a slower pace because higher mortgage rates and home prices will make buying less affordable for some.

The Conference Board said Tuesday that its consumer confidence index rose to 80.7 this month, well above last year’s average of 73.3.

Summary: WASHINGTON — The U.S. economy is showing more strength than at any time since the Great Recession began six years ago. Employers are hiring. Home prices, sales and construction have surged. Corporate profits and stocks have hit records. And consumers have picked up their spending. The economy has yet to fully recover from the most devastating crisis since the Great Depression. But it’s getting closer — a point President Barack Obama was expected to highlight in his State of the Union address Tuesday night. By the middle of this year, after years of steady but sluggish improvement, the United States is expected to have finally regained all the 8.7 million jobs lost during the recession, which officially ended 4½ years ago.


London's V&A Museum still has £16m to raise for the extension project. Photograph: Martin Argles for the Guardian

The V&A has been given planning permission for its £41m underground extension plan, which will result in a purpose-built space for temporary exhibitions.

Martin Roth, the museum's director, said the decision made by Kensington and Chelsea council was "a significant moment for the V&A". Paul Ruddock, chairman of trustees, said: "We are delighted to move a significant step closer to signalling this new era of the V&A's remarkable history which will transform the way we present temporary exhibitions and reinforce the museum as a world leader of art and design."

The V&A said £25m had been pledged to the project, which leaves £16m to be raised. If all goes to plan, building work will begin in 2013 and it will open to the public in 2016.

The new space has been designed by British architect Amanda Levete and her practice AL_A, and comes eight years after the V&A abandoned Daniel Libeskind's provocative Spiral extension, which resembled an uneven stack of cardboard boxes and brought outraged howls of protest.

There has been far less controversy over the AL_A design, which uses office space on the Exhibition Road side of the building. The plan is that visitors will walk into an open public courtyard that will be a space for installations, events and a cafe; while down below will be a new 1,500-sq-metre gallery space for big temporary exhibitions.

The project will also reveal the building's beautiful Victorian facades on the west side, which have been restored but are not on public view.

Levete said it was "a defining project" for AL_A. She added: "We're reimagining the dialogue between the V&A and Exhibition Road and, in doing so, creating a new public space in the cultural and learning heart of London. It's made particularly special by the V&A collections having inspired so much of our work."

Summary: New space designed by British architect Amanda Levete will give museum more room for temporary exhibitions


Ted Turner was back with his old flame last night. The megamogul celebrated the birthday of Frederique D'Arragon with a romantic dinner at the Rainbow Room. The couple spent the Memorial Day weekend together at Turner's Montana ranch, friends tell us. "They're very much in love," says one pal. Ted's head might well have been turned by Karen Rosenfeld, a 28-year-old upper East Side grad student. But the fifty-something D'Arragon seems to have logged the most time with Turner since he and wife, Jane Fonda, announced in January they were splitting. Before he married Fonda, Turner dated D'Arragon, an aristocratic French artist who crewed (and bunked) with Captain Outrageous on his yacht races. Word is D'Arragon's enduring friendship with Turner may have played a role in his breakup with Fonda - particularly after we reported in April 1999 that D'Arragon had painted portraits of Turner in the guise of leaders ranging from Julius Caesar and Napoleon. According to one friend, Turner summoned the globe-trotting D'Arragon from Tibet - where she'd gone to greet the millennium - when he and Fonda decided to announce their separation. "Ted wanted her to be with him when the news hit," says a friend. Within days, Turner and D'Arragon were weekending at his New Mexico ranch. Since then, we're told she's made the tour of his cattle spreads - all the way down to Argentina. She was at his side at the April 9 Atlanta Braves game, and, according to one source, even joined him for dinner with former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. "She's a fascinating and talented woman who's every bit Ted's match," says one who knows her. Janet's new tune Just because you pay for Janet Jackson, actress, it doesn't necessarily follow that you get Janet Jackson, singer. Sources tell us that the shapely songbird ruffled feathers over at Universal when she demanded an extra $1 million to record "Doesn't Really Matter" for the soundtrack of the upcoming "Nutty Professor II: The Klumps.

" Universal Studio executives assumed that for her $3 million acting fee, she'd throw in the tune. Jackson, who plays Eddie Murphy's love interest, refused to come across vocally until she got the extra dough, say industry insiders. A rep for Universal insists: "She wasn't paid extra for the song. She's been so cooperative in terms of everything to support the movie.

" Jackson's reps had no comment. Spielberg, 'Schindler' & Polanski Today, it's hard to imagine Steven Spielberg letting anybody else direct his Holocaust epic, "Schindler's List.

" But it turns out he was actually ready to hand over his most serious work to Roman Polanski. The scandal-tainted film maker, whose mother was killed at Auschwitz, says he turned down the project, which won seven Oscars. The infamous 66-year-old director, who as a child hid with Polish peasants during World War II, recalls telling Spielberg, "No, I have lived with those people. I have walked those sidewalks. I cannot turn it into a film, I cannot make it entertainment.

" Spielberg spokesman Marvin Levy tells us that, in the 10 years the director spent developing "Schindler," he also approached Martin Scorsese about directing. Lechers, beware It's a safe bet that the Hollywood execs who tried to seduce Bobbi Phillips in their offices didn't realize she could flip them across the room. The voluptuous martial arts expert, who was trained by Tae Bo master Billy Blanks, admits she has been offered roles in exchange for sex a number of times. "I had the head of a studio drop his pants and show me 'how turned-on I made him,' " says Phillips, whose UPN movie "Chameleon III" may spawn a series. "I said, 'I think there's a misunderstanding about why I'm here' and left. It's amazing what goes on in this town.

" Murray's fan Julia Stiles will have none of this bad-mouthing of Bill Murray. Yes, the hot new actress has seen the reports of scrapping between Murray and co-star Lucy Liu on the set of "Charlie's Angels.

" But Stiles, who appears with the funnyman in the modernized Manhattan version of "Hamlet," says Murray's a sweetheart. "I was so nervous in the beginning," the 19-year-old Stiles tells us. "But after the first rehearsal, he came up to me and said, 'Okay, here's my phone number, we've got to get together and rehearse.

' And I thought, 'He really thinks I'm terrible.

' But it turned out that he was just as nervous as I was about doing Shakespeare.

" Meanwhile, their "Hamlet" co-star Ethan Hawke is grateful that his wife, Uma Thurman, doesn't let him get away with any nonsense. "She's well versed in the pathology of men," he tells Paper magazine. "She's not a dumb woman, which is a drag for me!

" Surveillance RICHARD NIXON may start spinning in his grave. Decidedly un-Republican Sean (Puffy) Combs is looking at homes in the former President's post-Watergate retreat of Saddle River, N.

J. MAIRIAH CAREYis on the island of Capri cutting her next album in a mountaintop studio and spending her downtime with boyfriend Luis Miguel. KERI RUSSELL, despite her recent claim that there's "no one particularly special" in her life right now, just had a romantic getaway with "Felicity" co-star Scott Speedman. Our spy caught them holding hands at the luxe Amankila resort in Bali. FORMER POLICE commish Bill Bratton and his wife, Court TV anchor Rikki Kleiman, talked to students about crime and the media last week at Brooklyn's IS 240's "Stand Up For Class" program. It was co-sponsored by the Creative Coalition. Itemizing THE BOFFO box office of "Mission: Impossible 2" seems to have helped director John Woo and Tom Cruise's co-producer Paula Wagner get along. For months during the flick's production, Woo and Wagner would barely speak, a well-placed source tells us. "Paula had to have another producer act as a go-between to carry messages," says the source. "Mi2" publicist Pat Kingsley insists there was never a rift and that, in any case, Wagner and Woo are planning to collaborate on another project. HARVEY WEINSTEIN has been ribbing Tom Stoppard. Weinstein, whose Miramax is co-producing the playwright's "The Real Thing" on Broadway, teased him: "Do you recognize anybody onstage?

" - referring to Stephan Dillane, who wears Stoppard's mannerisms like a sweater. Weinstein says Stoppard replied, "No.

" Asked if he's mimicking his character's creator, Dillane wisely tells us: "No. I don't even know any writers.


President Obama told students at a town hall at the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur that he regrets “not having spent more time with my mother,” in an emotional scene during his four-country tour through Asia.

“I realized that there was a stretch of time from when I was, let’s say 20 until I was 30 where I was so busy with my own life that I didn’t always reach out and communicate with her and ask her how she was doing and tell her about things,” Obama said. “You know, I was nice and I’d call and I’d write once in a while, but this goes to what I was saying earlier about what you remember in the end, I think, is the people you love.”

Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, passed away in 1995 from uterine cancer, just weeks before her 53rd birthday. Four months earlier, Obama had published Dreams from My Father; a year later, he won his first election, the Illinois state Senate seat.

Dunham moved the family around the world while Obama was growing up, a stark contrast to the deep family roots he later built in Chicago with his own wife and children. She divorced Barack Obama Sr., married Lolo Soetoro, and moved the family from Hawaii to Indonesia when Obama was only six. That marriage ended in divorce.

Obama told the students in Kuala Lumpur that he regretted the space that grew between them as he sought independence.

“I realized that I didn’t every single day or at least more often, spend time with her or find out what she was thinking because she had been such an important part of my life,” Obama said.

“Now that’s natural as young people. You know, As you grow up you become independent. But for those of you who have not called their parents lately, I would just say that that is something that I regret.”

Disrupt With Karen Finney, 4/27/14, 6:19 PM ET

President Obama shares a personal moment during a town hall with students in Malaysia.

Summary: President Obama told university students in Kuala Lumpur that he regrets “not having spent more time with my mother," who passed away in 1995.


A few days ago in Wyoming, swirling clouds came together in a kind of half-tornado. Instead of spinning down to the ground, it ended suddenly in a flat mass that spat out heavy rains and hail. It was a “supercell,” and this time-lapse video shows exactly how it was formed.

Supercells are sometimes called “rotating thunderstorms”—they’re one of the most severe types of thunderstorms in the world. Their spinning, which is clearly visible in the video, sets them apart. Horizontal wind starts the air spinning, then an updraft angles the spin upwards. Then the updraft gets caught up in the spinning column to turn the whole cloud mass into a slightly less dangerous version of a tornado.

Thankfully, Basehunters, a group of weather-chasers, got close enough to shoot the video so we didn’t have to.

Summary: Also known as a "cloud superstorm"


American DG Energy Inc., a Waltham-based company that provides energy services to customers in such industries as hospitality, housing, and health care, has signed an agreement to be the exclusive distributor of products made by Tecogen Inc. in China, Hong Kong, and Japan.

While American DG Energy and Tecogen are separate companies, John Hatsopoulos serves as chief executive of both.

John Hatsopoulos, 80, and his older brother George are local technology legends. Their first public company, Thermo Electron Inc. of Waltham, was based on George’s research developing a device for the direct conversion of heat to electricity while attending the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1950s.

During a telephone interview, John Hatsopoulos discussed American DG Energy’s business model and its plans for Asia.

“There is tremendous interest in our technology in China and to a lesser degree in Japan,” Hatsopoulos said.

The American DG Energy business model is to own, install, and operate a miniature utility on the site of a hotel or a hospital. That utility will deliver the facility’s energy needs such as hot water and electricity at lower prices and with less environmental impact than energy provided by a traditional utility, the company claims.

The facility is charged for the energy it uses but not for the equipment, its installation, and its operating costs. As a result, American DG Energy describes itself as a provider of “on-site utility energy solutions.”

In many cases, American DG Energy will use equipment made by Tecogen to assemble the components of a customer’s on-site utility. Tecogen’s product line includes cogeneration systems and chiller systems.

In a statement, Hatsopoulos said: “We have begun to receive inquiries from China and Japan. It is time to bring our on-site utility energy business model with highly efficient, low emissions technology to the largest economies in Asia. We believe these markets have experienced significant growth in our core hospitality, housing, and health care markets. Plus, high energy costs coupled with increasing environmental concerns make this a good potential region.”

Summary: American DG Energy Inc., a Waltham-based provider of energy services, will be the exclusive distributor of products made by Tecogen Inc. in parts of Asia.


On Thursday, Russia and China vetoed a draft UN. Security Council resolution calling for the Syrian conflict to be referred to the International Criminal Court in the Hague. It was the fourth time that Syria’s allies in the Security Council were able to block resolutions referring to the crisis in Syria.

In a wide-ranging conversation in Damascus, briefly interrupted by the sound of mortar fire, TIME’s Aryn Baker sat down with Syria’s Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal al-Mekdad in the days prior to the the Security Council meeting to discuss war crimes accusations, the upcoming presidential election, and why Syria’s President Bashar Assad thinks he is winning the war. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.

TIME: President Bashar Assad has said that the war is at a turning point, and that all military operations will be over by the end of the year. Is the Syrian government winning?

Faisal Mekdad: In Syria it is not a matter of winning or losing. We are fighting against terrorism. The battle is not ending yet, but our army is in control. Secondly, we have created a [program for] reconciliation. And we are really optimistic that if we continue succeeding with these reconciliations, [we will have] a real victory against terrorism.

TIME: You describe internationally recognized terror groups, but there also Syrians fighting this battle who are not radicals.

FM: Who are these? If you mean the so-called Free Syrian Army, this is almost finished. It is illogical to say there are moderate armed groups. Everybody who carries arms to kill people, to kill soldiers, to kill leaders, to control areas, is a terrorist.

TIME: The opposition groups say they are fighting for the rights of Syria’s people for democracy and freedom.

FM: If they are dissatisfied with any of the government’s polices, they should go to demand their rights and call for reform. And I assure you that President Assad has done this. But they reject anything less than the departure of the leadership. And we cannot accept this. Who will replace the leadership?

TIME: There is a resolution pending in the Security Council to refer Syria to the International Criminal Court for war crimes, like the use of barrel bombs and torture.

FM: What is the ICC? You believe in this farce?

TIME: The Syrian government is using extreme tactics, tactics that could be war crimes.

FM: We are not all angels. But the western countries, including France and the UK, have made the Syrian armed opposition out to be a multitude of angels. And these “angels” have proven themselves to be terrorists. The Syrian government is protecting its own people, is combatting terrorism. When terrorists attack our people, do you expect us to respond by throwing flowers?

TIME: You are not just killing fighters; civilians are dying too.

FM: We are not killing civilians . We are targeting terrorists. The responsible party for all this suffering is these terrorists and their masters outside Syria. Those who are killing Syrians want an Islamic state. We cannot allow this to happen.

TIME: The army has also used siege and starvation tactics to force ceasefires, as in the city of Homs.

FM: I think this is a legend, the story of the siege. These people had been in Homs for two and a half years. And they still had all the weapons to fight, and to kill others. So if all kinds of weapons can enter into old Homs how is it possible that a loaf of bread could not?

TIME: You speak of the foreign fighters and foreign influence on the rebels. At the same time you are fighting with support from Iran and [the Lebanon-based Shi’ite militia] Hizballah.

FM: Look, sovereign governments usually receive support to defend their country against terrorism and against foreign interference. You see tens of thousands of American troops in Afghanistan. Sovereign governments have the right to invite all their friends to help them at difficult times.

TIME: Has Syria shipped out or destroyed almost all of its chemical weapons program?

FM: Yes. More than 93 percent of chemical materials have been sent outside of Syria. The rest is something like 40-50 km away, and we are now undertaking security measures to move them outside Syria. Because we don’t want terrorists to target convoys carrying these materials.

TIME: After the failure of Geneva 2 [an international peace conference that took place in January between the Syrian government and opposition leaders, designed to bring opposing sides to a political resolution], do you think there will be a Geneva 3?

FM: I don’t accept that Geneva 2 collapsed. We exercised all flexibility. Frankly speaking the other party came with one agenda point, which is the stepping down of the leadership of Syria. We did not go there to give up power.

TIME: The Geneva communiqué, which you agreed to, calls for transition of power.

FM: That is right, but how can we hand over government before stopping terrorism? And to whom? If we hand over the government, it will go immediately to Jabhat al Nusra and these terrorist groups, not the so-called coalition [National Coalition Of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces]. We are not seeking power, we seek to keep Syria away from being a haven for terrorists.

TIME: The destruction of Syria is immense. Many of your pipelines, electricity systems, hospitals and schools have been decimated. Your Prime Minister estimated it would cost $30 billion to rebuild.

FM: More than $30 billion. We admit that this was disastrous. In all parts of Syria, wherever you find terrorist groups, you find disaster. It will take a lot of resources to rebuild the country, but what is very important is to immediately rebuild the social fabric of Syria, which is more important than materialistic things. I think Syrians will prove once again that they are one people.

TIME: That is President Assad’s campaign slogan: ‘Together we will rebuild.’ He is looking past the election to reconstruction.

FM: Yes. This is the message of the president and the other candidates: to stop killing and to stop terrorism in Syria. To stop foreign interference in Syria, and then to think together on how to rebuild the country. And this is what is there on the slogans being made for the election campaign for Assad and others.

TIME: Elections are planned for June 3. How can there be an election when 9 million are displaced and half the country is out of government control?

FM: I am not saying that the present circumstances are the best for elections, absolutely not. The most important thing is that for the first time we have a multiparty election, and Syrians are happy with this exercise. So with the purpose of not creating a vacuum of leadership in Syria, the elections should be held without any delay.

TIME: There are nearly 3 million refugees. Will they be able to vote?

FM: We have three conditions for Syrians to vote: a valid passport, a valid exit visa and a valid residence permit in their respective country.

TIME: So that means refugees can’t vote.

FM: They can vote. They can come to Syria and vote, and then go out again.

The sound of a distant incoming mortar briefly interrupts the interview.

TIME: That sounded like a mortar round.

FM: It happens almost every day, [rebel mortar attacks] against civilians, and this is exactly what the Syrian army is trying to stop. A few weeks ago a bomb in a school killed 29 children.

TIME: And a Syrian barrel bomb attack killed 17 children in Aleppo.

FM: No, the government never targets schools. I don’t think barrel bombs target schools.

TIME: Barrel bombs don’t target, they land.

FM: I have not heard of such a thing.

Summary: Faisal al-Mekdad tells TIME the government of President Bashar al-Assad remains defiant. "When terrorists attack our people, do you expect us to respond by throwing flowers?"


Amy Schulman is Polaris’s first female partner. She will also teach at Harvard.

The Boston venture capital firm Polaris Partners has hired Amy Schulman, who recently stepped down as general counsel of the drug giant Pfizer Inc., as a venture partner working with early-stage companies in the Polaris health care and life sciences portfolio.

Schulman, 53, is moving from New York to the Boston area. She will serve on the boards of several portfolio companies and as chief executive of a Polaris-based startup, Arsia Therapeutics of Cambridge, cofounded in April by Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Robert Langer and Polaris partner Alan Crane.

Schulman will also teach part time as a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School.

After working in Big Pharma, the entrepreneurial world will be a welcome change, Schulman said. “The dynamism, the accountability, the speed of decision making was very seductive to me,” she said.

Schulman will be the first female partner at Polaris, which has offices in the Seaport district and in Waltham, San Francisco, and Dublin. Only about 4 percent of senior partners at US venture firms are women, according to a Fortune magazine analysis earlier this year.

The dearth of women is “something you can’t help but notice when you look at the numbers,” Schulman said. “The commitment I have to women and promoting women and diversity in the workplace [is] very well established and it’s shared by Polaris.”

Schulman, who also served as business unit lead for Pfizer’s consumer health care group, said she was excited to be working with the team at Polaris and in the booming Boston-area life sciences industry.

“Luckily, I’m not a Yankees fan, so rooting for the Red Sox won’t be hard for me,” she said.

Summary: Boston venture capital firm Polaris Partners has hired Amy Schulman, who recently stepped down as general counsel of drug giant Pfizer Inc., as a venture partner working with early-stage companies in the Polaris health care and life sciences portfolio.


CalicoDuke of York's, London WC2

Oliver Twist Lyric Hammersmith, London W6

The Skin of Our TeethYoung Vic, London SE1

It's hard to decide what's more irritating in Michael Hastings's new play: the facetious dialogue or the skittering structure which denies the play a focus. What's saddest is that it takes a fascinating true life as its subject, and wastes it.

It's 20 years since Tom and Viv , Hastings's play about T.S. Eliot's first, disturbed wife, was staged. Now he has lit on another troubled attendant on a Modernist writer. In his account, Lucia Joyce, while working with her father James Joyce in Paris, was fascinated by her parents' sexual relationship, and obsessed by her father's secretary, Samuel Beckett, with whom she constructed a fantasy marriage. Prone to setting things on fire, and given to roaring abuse, she was possibly a schizophrenic, possibly a Tourette's sufferer. She spent her life in and out of psychiatric care.

Muddling fact and fiction, Hastings has concocted a mixture of the banal and the unfathomable. You'll not find it hard to recognise Joyce (a bluff Dermot Crowley): he's the wordy one who asks his daughter's companion: 'Did you spreadleg and cocktumble my cloud girl?'

You'll spot Beckett (a shrivelled Daniel Weyman): he doesn't like saying more than a few words at a time. And there's no difficulty in realising that Romola Garai's Lucia is in need of help. In an arresting rather than illuminating performance she behaves like Alice in Wonderland trapped in the shrinking room: stooped, gangling, clumsy, with fixed eyes, widespread arms and nervous plucking of her garments. This is madness by numbers: the only mystery is that she's allowed to roll around the floor saying 'piss' for so long.

So far, so clear. But not necessarily true. A meticulous book about Lucia Joyce by Carol Loeb Shloss gives a similar account of the combustible Joyce household but shows a different Lucia: a talented modern dancer, glittering in mermaid scales, and posing in substantial knickers as a figure on a Greek vase. One psychiatric report speculated that it was turning from dance that drove her mad. Hastings barely touches on her gifts: in one bleak episode he shows Lucia dancing for her daddy and falling over. By stripping her of talent he diminishes his play's expressiveness (what would Calico have been like had it had dance as well as incessant verbiage?), and pushes Lucia towards victimhood, someone defined by her thwarted relationships and her (there's a tiny hint of incest here) dependence on her parents.

Edward Hall's production is overwhelmed by the effort of keeping together the tumult of scenes. Only Imelda Staunton as Nora Barnacle - striding, frowning and eventually crumpling - gives any sense of interior life. Calico has piggybacked its way into the West End on its characters' famous names; it should hike out of there quickly.

There have been few more revealing dramatisations of Dickens than Neil Bartlett's hallucinogenic, realistic adaptation of Oliver Twist. Narrated by the Artful Dodger, freezing from time to time into tableaux, the play captures Dickens's cartoonish shapes and his violent switches of moods, his bleeding heart and his shrewdness, the glare and the gloom of his foggy London.The keynote is a self-conscious theatricality.

Rae Smith's design puts a stage within a stage: bright bulbs hanging above a set that seems to have been tacked together out of ancient wooden packing-cases. Paule Constable's transformative lighting flashes on figures that might have come straight from the pen of Cruikshank. The chalk-white cheeks, lantern jaws, ingrained smuts and grime, stooped shoulders, sunken chests, over-long trailing limbs - all these belong to Dickens's shadowy thief world; Mr Bumble - his waistcoat stretched to popping point over a belly that looks like a pregnancy - is the preening embodiment of a well-fed exploiter.

Though the action is severely cut, the words are Dickens's own, and spoken with a relish that conjures up the writer's meaty prose. They are tellingly interwoven with Gerard McBurney's music, which draws on contemporary music hall song.

Jordan Metcalfe's Oliver is first a convincing, not-too-sweet waif and later a smug little prison visitor, beaming in his Sunday suit at a deranged Fagin. And Michael Feast's Fagin is magnificent: fluttering and screeching, he looks sometimes like a pirate, sometimes like the villain in a melodrama, and most often like a magician who can send his child followers to sleep with an insinuating whisper. As he gathered the little ones to him, on the day that Marc Dutroux went on trial in Belgium, the air at the Lyric froze.

Thornton Wilder's 1942 play The Skin of Our Teeth is propelled by one gag: that of seeing the history of the universe through the eyes of small-town America. Thus a pinny-and-slippers suburban couple turnto each other to inquire: 'Have you milked the mammoth?'

The play begins in the Ice Age, takes in the Flood, and ends with a postwar sequence in which people lament the difficulty of making a good peace. The message is that history repeats itself but people pick themselves up and go on. It was hugely popular on Broadway and in postwar Britain, and what with the climate-change and postwar prattle, it's easy enough to pick out down-homey morals for today, alongside the formal innovations: the cast are continually bursting out of character to wrangle about their lines; as the couple's pet dinosaur scuttles in to warm himself at the radiator you can see a Thurber cartoon in the offing.

David Lan's bravura production delivers more than the play promises. The big effects - stage cracking in two, the cast disappearing into a cleft of the ocean - are staged with full-on Young Vic panache. David Troughton is an impressive pater familias - booming, bullying and vulnerable and Indira Varma is a velvet-voiced triumph as the vamp maid.

Summary: Theatre: The writer of Tom and Viv fails to do justice to Joyce's daughter, but Dickens gets his due.


09/16/2014 AT 12:15 PM EDT

Adrian Peterson, the Minnesota Vikings player who was

with felony injury to his 4-year-old son following a discipline punishment, is accused of injuring another of his children earlier by a form of discipline.

The NFL star's attorney, however, swiftly knocked down the second complaint.

"The allegation of another investigation into Adrian Peterson is simply not true," Rusty Hardin said in a statement to PEOPLE. "This is not a new allegation, it's one that is unsubstantiated and was shopped around to authorities in two states over a year ago and nothing came of it. An adult witness adamantly insists Adrian did nothing inappropriate with his son. There is no ongoing or new investigation."

Citing a series of text messages between Peterson and the unnamed mother of the second child,

reports that the alleged injury to the 4-year-old boy occurred in June 2013 while that child was visiting Peterson at his Texas home.

The TV station reviewed photos of a head wound that left a scar above the boy's right eye, and a source provided this text exchange.

Mother: "What happened to his head?"

Peterson: "Hit his head on the carseat."

Mother: "How does this happen, he got a whooping in the car"

Peterson: "I felt so bad. But he did it his self."

According to the station, Peterson explained that he was disciplining his son for cursing to a sibling.

Peterson faces up to two years in jail and a $10,000 fine after he was charged with the May injury to the other child, a 4-year-old boy who Peterson

was being disciplined "the way I was disciplined as a child." He expressed regret for his actions in that incident.

"I am someone that disciplined his child and did not intend to cause him any injury," he said. "No one can understand the hurt that I feel for my son and for the harm I caused him. My goal is always to teach my son right from wrong and that's what I tried to do that day."

Summary: The claim, made over a year ago, is "simply not true," says the NFL star's attorney


As global managing director of McKinsey, Dominic Barton talks regularly with the CEOs of the world’s largest companies and leaders of nations worldwide—they’re clients of the elite management consulting firm, which serves some 90% of the Fortune 100 as well as nonprofits and governments. Barton thus gets an unparalleled inside view of what global leaders are doing—and how the world’s business climate is changing. McKinsey itself is a leadership factory, whose alumni have become CEOs of American Express, AT&T, Boeing, IBM, and dozens of others. Barton, 52, talked recently with Fortune about the trends of most concern to leaders now, how infotech is forever changing their jobs, and much else. Edited excerpts:

What are your clients’ worries right now? They’re pretty consistent around the world. The big one now is geopolitics. Whether you’re in Russia, China, anywhere, the assumed stability that was there for the past 20 or so years—it’s not there. The second is technology, which is moving two to three times faster than management. Most CEOs I talk to are excited and paranoid at the same time. Related to that is cybersecurity: The amount of time and effort to protect systems and look at vulnerabilities is big.

A fourth trend is the shift in economic power, with 2.2 billion new middle-class consumers in the next 15 years, and it’s moving to Asia and Africa. Do you have the right type of people in your top 100? Are you in those markets? Those are the four big ones we see everywhere.

Which companies have done a good job dealing with those challenges?

Look at Samsung. No one knew the brand in 1999. They were seen actually as a Japanese company [it is South Korean]. They certainly were not a high-end consumer electronics brand. In three years they said, “We’re going to change.” While achieving record profits, the chairman is pounding it out there to say, “We’re not moving fast enough.” And this was a chairman who at one point said to his organization, “Next year I want you to be willing to change everything except your spouse and your children.” It’s a mindset.

Lenovo—look at its organization model. It’s a global leadership team that makes decisions at a far faster rate than many of its Western peers. It’s part of the culture.

And everybody’s seeing their business model disrupted. If you were in the S&P 500 in 1935, your average lifetime as a big company would be 90 years. And I worry about that because McKinsey’s coming up to our 90th anniversary. In 2011 the average lifetime if you were in the S&P 500 was 18 years. So the churn rate of companies is going up. A lot of the changes are attacking your existing model, so you have to cannibalize yourself. You have to make business-model disruption part of your performance metric.

Computers are doing a lot of things that managers used to do, sometimes better than managers can do them. That trend will only accelerate. What happens to the role of the business leader? You need leaders to help the machines figure out what questions you’re focusing on. If you don’t understand the business issues or questions to ask, you can crunch all sorts of interesting things and it won’t deliver. There are also judgment calls that need to be made. Machines are getting smarter at analyzing masses of information, but in a world that’s more volatile, judgment is going to be at a premium.

This story is from the October 27, 2014 issue of Fortune.

Summary: McKinsey's Dominic Barton talks about the new geopolitics, cannibalization, and the global shift in economic power.


Even if pianist and composer Mark Shilansky’s press notes hadn’t mentioned the influence of Celtic music and bluegrass bands like the Punch Brothers, I‘d have thought “Fugue Mill” was an especially fresh and inventive jazz album, albeit with mandolin and fiddle. At least, the opening number, “RFD 7,” with its buoyant funk beat and stealth-duo improvisation for piano and violin (Sara Caswell) led me to think so. Same with the Brazilian groove of “AM.” Even a piece like “Reely,” with its suggestion of “Appalachian Spring,” is superb small-band jazz; guitarist Eric Byers’s occasional Metheny-like licks help to secure the link between jazz and country-Americana.

Shilansky’s incisive sequencing follows up “Reely” with the morbid traditional ballad “The False Bride” (sung by Shilansky’s Berklee colleague and wife, Kathleen Flynn), and Samuel Barber’s melancholy “Sure on This Shining Night” (with lyrics by James Agee). And “Dialogue #1” might be a classical chamber piece for piano, clarinet, and strings, if not for the improvised solos all around. So call “Fugue Mill,” what you will; to me it’s all jazz — except for, oddly, the countrypolitan take on the standard “Body and Soul.”

Summary: For all of its Celtic, bluegrass, Brazilian, and chamber-music influences, pianist and composer Mark Shilansky’s “Fugue Mill” amounts to fresh, inventive, and buoyant jazz.


Julianna Margulies and Chris Noth

11/16/2014 AT 04:00 PM EST

began as the story of a woman who stood in her husband's shadow – but after five-and-a-half seasons of

, Alicia Florrick and her husband have switched roles.

) has attended many public events to support her husband Peter (

) as district attorney and governor, but now that she is running for district attorney herself, she's the one asking for a show of support.

And PEOPLE has some exclusive images from Sunday night's episode, which features Alicia and Peter's first public appearance together since she launched her campaign.

Julianna Margulies and Chris Noth

"Alicia needs to shore up her support among police and firefighters – not due to anything she did wrong, but because Peter, as governor, has been messing with their pensions,"

tells PEOPLE. "But as she participates in this photo op, Alicia also deals with her own private knowledge that the opposition has compromising photos at their disposal."

And even though the estranged couple is all smiles for the cameras in these shots, that doesn't mean things are going well behind the scenes.

"The real fireworks start in the town car as they drive away," says King, who created the hit CBS drama with his wife Michelle. "Alicia confronts Peter with the photos and tells him they are as dangerous to her as they are to him."

airs Sundays at 9 p.m. ET on CBS.

Summary: "The real fireworks start in the town car as they drive away," the CBS drama's creator Robert King tells PEOPLE


New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton promised "an open process" in the department's investigation of Eric Garner's death after a confrontation with police officers last July, but is holding back his own opinion on the nature of Garner's death.

Last week, a grand jury declined to indict Daniel Pantaleo, the white New York City police officer who used an apparent chokehold on Garner, who was black, and who died after the July confrontation in the borough of Staten Island. The incident was captured on video.

"I don't think that anybody that watches that video is not disturbed what they saw; that policing involving use of force, it always looks awful," Bratton said in an interview on CBS' "Face the Nation" Sunday. "We have an expression, 'lawful but awful.' The criminal courts have decided, our district attorneys and grand jury has decided there were no criminal actions involved. We're now going to have to see if the actions the officers engaged in were in violation of our policies and procedures."

Now that the criminal investigation has concluded, the department is beginning an administrative investigation into Garner's death with a focus on whether there were a violation of policies, procedures, rules and regulations. Bratton predicted that the whole process would take three to fourth months based on past experience and the number of witnesses they have to interview, but believes it will conclude ahead of the Department of Justice's criminal civil rights investigation.

Asked whether he believed Pantaleo used excessive force, Bratton indicated he would make that final decision after the internal affairs investigation concludes.

"That process is an open process, and open trial. That trial judge will then make a finding and make that finding known to me. And I will make the final decision. I'm not free to comment at all on anything I observed or my feelings. I'm going to make the final decision for the NYPD," he said.

In the meantime, Bratton says there is "probably no department in America" that's doing more to address the tension between police and minority communities. There have been protests across the country in response to the grand jury decision not to indict Pantaleo, which came just a week after a grand jury in Missouri decided not to indict the white police officer who shot unarmed black teenager Michael Brown.

Bratton said there is a new inspector general setting up an office in New York, a federal monitor looking at violations of stop and frisk practices since the beginning of the decade, full retraining of 22,000 officers who work in the field, new smartphone technology for all officers within the year, and that a pilot program on body cameras for police has already begun.

He also disagreed with the head of the city's police union, who said that officers felt "thrown under the bus" by New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio's remarks that he and his wife, Chirlane, have had to have painful conversations with their teenage son Dante about his own interactions with police.

"This mayor, my mayor, Bill DeBlasio is probably one of the best I've ever worked with," Bratton said. "This is a mayor that has been very, very supportive of equipping the police to deal with many of the issues that this city is facing. He's a progressive. He certainly wants police to police constitutionally, compassionately, respectfully, which is why he's hired me because we are both of a shared mind on that issue."

He said that he has "great respect" for Patrick Lynch, the head of the union, but said the two "have a very strong difference of opinion on that comment."

Summary: NYPD Commissioner William Bratton promises "open process" in the investigation into the Eric Garner chokehold death


(Reuters) – Internet search company Google Inc has begun discussions with most of the world’s top automakers and has assembled a team of traditional and nontraditional suppliers to speed efforts to bring self-driving cars to market by 2020, a Google executive said on Wednesday.

“We’d be remiss not to talk to … the biggest auto manufacturers. They’ve got a lot to offer,” Chris Urmson, director of Google’s self-driving car project, said in an interview.

Those manufacturers, he said, include General Motors GM , Ford F , Toyota, Daimler AG andVolkswagen AG.

“For us to jump in and say that we can do this better, that’s arrogant,” Urmson said. Google has not determined whether it will build its own self-driving vehicles or function more as a provider of systems and software to established vehicle manufacturers.

Google’s self-driving prototype cars, he said, were built in Detroit by engineering and specialty manufacturing company Roush.

GM is open to working with Google on self-driving cars, Jon Lauckner, GM’s chief technology officer, said on Monday.

Urmson’s expectation that the first fully autonomous vehicles will be production-ready within five years mirrors the view expressed a day earlier by another Silicon Valley entrepreneur, Elon Musk, chief executive of Tesla Motors TSLA .

Musk, who spoke Tuesday at the Automotive News World Congress conference, said he expects the lack of clear federal regulations covering self-driving cars could delay their introduction until 2022 or 2023.

Urmson, however, said his Google colleagues “don’t see any particular regulatory hurdles.”

Google GOOG has been briefing the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the chief U.S. auto regulator, “from early on in our program,” Urmson said. “The worst thing we could do is surprise them.”

Urmson said Google is developing and refining self-driving systems and components with such auto parts suppliers as Continental AG, Robert Bosch, ZF and LG Electronics. Google’s prototype cars use microprocessors made by Nvidia Corp, a Silicon Valley chipmaker that also supplies Mercedes-Benz and other automakers.

Continental said it began discussions in 2012 about supplying parts for Google’s self-driving car. Google asked the German supplier to provide tires, some electronics and other components, according to Samir Salman, chief executive of Continental’s NAFTA region.

Google shortly will begin deploying a test fleet of fully functioning prototypes of its pod-like self-driving car, which dispenses with such familiar automotive parts as steering wheel, brakes and accelerator pedal. While each of the Google prototypes will have a “test driver” on board, the cars have no provision for human intervention in steering or braking.

Urmson suggested the no-frills look of the Google prototypes, a far cry from the opulent appearance of the self-driving F015 concept vehicle unveiled last week by Mercedes, does not necessarily reflect the final design for production.

He described the Google prototype as “a practical, near-term testing platform” that will evolve over time.

“Airliners today don’t look like the Wright brothers’ flyer” of 100 years ago, he said.

Urmson said self-driving cars represent a “transformative” moment in the evolution of transportation, an opportunity to extend motoring to blind, elderly and disabled persons who otherwise could not drive.

“You’re really changing the relationship you have with transportation. You’re changing what it means to get around.”

Regarding Google’s desire to partner with traditional automakers and suppliers, Urmson said Detroit is more innovative than is sometimes acknowledged. Automakers are “doing something incredibly complicated.”

“You look at a car … and people forget just how much magic there is in that thing.”

Summary: Tech giant is hitting up the big automakers for help on its autonomous vehicles.


FORTUNE — David Sharpe doesn’t mind doing business in Haiti despite its reputation for being one of the world’s most dangerous countries. Back in the early 1990s, the ex-U.S. Marine was in Somalia during Black Hawk Down and the former Yugoslavia during some of the bloodiest fighting in Bosnia.

But now Sharpe, a 40-year-old executive with wireless provider Digicel Haiti, faces perhaps the toughest challenge of his life. As the country picks itself up from the 2010 earthquake that killed more than 250,000 people, he needs to convince its unbanked masses, many of whom are illiterate, to embrace the digital age with mobile financial services more sophisticated and advanced than anything available in North America or Europe.

How is the mission going so far? “We had a bumpy start, but Haitians love their mobile phones,” says Sharpe, sitting in his hilltop office overlooking the late-morning haze blanketing the capital Port-au-Prince. “They may not buy a meal, but they will top up their Digicel account,” adds Sharpe, whose crisp white shirt hangs loosely over his lanky frame.

Digicel has found the pulse of a market most wireless carriers would not touch with a 20-foot barge pole, accumulating 700,000 customers for its TchoTcho mobile wallet and a subscriber base of 4.5 million since 2006. “When we first arrived, only 5% of Haitians owned a mobile phone, today that number is more like 75%,” says Sharpe, whose company is a subsidiary of the $2.5-billion Digicel Group, owned by Irish billionaire Denis O’Brien.

MORE: When will car dealers get with the web?

Digicel’s achievements in Haiti are commendable, but not exactly surprising given the parent company specializes in doing business in some of the most difficult and hazardous corners of the world. It has operations in more than 30 countries across the Caribbean, Latin America, and the South Pacific, including El Salvador and Papua New Guinea.

Even so, few would have guessed that the poorest country of the Western Hemisphere — a nation of 10 million that for decades has toiled under an oppressive combination of natural disasters, dictators, and military coups — could end up being so lucrative for Digicel. The Haitian operation made an impressive $86-million profit on revenue of $439 million in 2012.

“Digicel has proven itself to be a strong and efficient operator with high margins,” says industry analyst Jacob Steinfeld with J.P. Morgan in New York. “They are usually at the forefront in terms of trends but will not pursue technologies or equipment that don’t make sense financially.”

The future looks even brighter, not least because Sharpe, head of the TchoTcho team, wants to more than double his customer base to 2 million by March 2014. The key to achieving that goal is an aggressive build-out of his agent network, mainly gas stations and grocery stores, which TchoTcho subscribers can use like bank machines.

“We’re a tremendous catalyst for change,” says Sharpe, whose boyish face belies a super-competitive streak. “Before we came along, Haitians had all this money in their pockets and under their mattresses. They lived day to day. Now they’re saving for the first time.”

Many observers, including the Washington-based U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), view Digicel’s mobile wallet as a game-changer that is dramatically accelerating economic development and helping transform a country that desperately needs some good news.

“The fact that a mobile wallet was launched at all in Haiti is a huge success,” says Steve Olive, deputy director of USAID’s Port-au-Prince office, who helped jumpstart the initiative along with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. “It’s making financial products available to people who were previously outside the banking system.”

MORE: On airlines, DOJ finally gets a backbone

The latest version of TchoTcho — which means “pocket money” in the local Creole dialect — was launched in 2011 in the wake of the devastation surrounding the 7.0-magnitude earthquake.

Domestic money transfers, payroll, and basic banking services were first to go live. It immediately became apparent that giving Haitians the ability to instantly transfer money from one mobile phone to another — anywhere in the country without a banking intermediary — was a killer app. Whereas before, people had to endure long bank lines and pay for expensive wire transfers to send cash from the city to family or a friend in the country, Haitians could now remit up to $25 with a few simple text commands for just 15 cents. (To boost adoption rates, Digicel allows customers to transfer up to $2.50 three times a day for free.)

Domestic transfers have become a huge hit for Digicel Haiti, with $960 million being sent and received each year on the TchoTcho platform.

The service has since expanded to include mobile bill-payment and point-of-sale purchases and will soon allow customers to receive international remittances on their handsets, bypassing middlemen such as Western Union.

But it’s the ability to distribute humanitarian aid that is perhaps TchoTcho’s biggest accomplishment of the last 12 months because it is has already changed tens of thousands of lives. The USAID’s Food for Peace and the UN’s CARMEN program for housing repair are among the early adopters, along with the Haitian government’s Ti Manman Cheri, which pays a monthly stipend to poor women who keep their children in school.

In all cases recipients are provided with a mobile phone and a TchoTcho account so they can automatically receive monthly e-vouchers that they redeem for groceries or other supplies, circumventing distribution centers, long lines, and risk of theft or misappropriation. “E-vouchers keep things much tighter because you can track how aid is spent,” says Karl O’Conner, a Dubliner in charge of special projects. “If you distribute cash, there are no guarantees.”

Will TchoTcho, Digicel Group’s most advanced mobile-wallet solution to date, be rolled out in other countries where it does business? And could it become the model for the automated distribution of social and humanitarian aid worldwide? “Haiti is an incubator,” says Sharpe. “What we learn here will be used in other countries.”

Says J.P. Morgan’s Steinfeld: “Once they introduce a successful service, Digicel Group will usually try to replicate it in other markets.”

In the meantime Sharpe, whose Haitian wife Paula last month gave birth to son Quentin, has to figure out how to expand his network of agent retailers by a factor of at least three. That’s what it will take if TchoTcho is to become as ubiquitous as the orange Digicel umbrellas that protect company reps selling airtime from the hot Port-au-Prince sun. Is that too big a mountain to climb in nine short months in a country with few sure bets?

“Digicel is a marketing machine,” says Sharpe. “We always find a way to get where we need to be.”

Summary: Digital wallet is helping lift the island nation out of poverty while generating impressive profits for wireless carrier Digicel Group.


The major players in Silicon Valley agree on at least one thing: Same-sex marriage bans should be struck down.

Apple, Google, Facebook and other tech giants are among a long list of companies that filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court Thursday urging the nine justices to overturn statewide bans on same-sex marriage. The Court will hear arguments on April 28 in a potentially landmark case expected to decide if statewide bans on gay marriage violate the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection under the law.

The brief argues that it’s overly cumbersome for corporations doing business at the national level to deal with individual states’ varying same-sex marriage laws.

“The patchwork of state laws applicable to same-sex marriage thus impairs our business interests and employer/employee relations,” the brief reads. “If the Court were to affirm the decision below, the costs and uncertainty imposed by inconsistent state marriage laws will only continue.”

Other companies included in the brief include Coca-Cola, Amazon and Xerox. Apple has been particularly outspoken on the issue of gay rights. Its CEO, Tim Cook, publicly said for the first time last year that he’s gay while reaffirming his company’s commitment to fairness in the realm of sexuality and gender.

Summary: Companies say it's too burdensome to deal with states' varying marriage laws


Why is Katy Huberty — writing for Morgan Stanley — so bullish on Apple right now? In a note to clients Thursday reiterating the stock’s “Best Buy” rating, she ticks off her reasons:

Long term, she writes, “Apple has the world’s most valuable technology platform, and is best positioned to capture more of their users’ time in areas such as health, cars and homes, as these platforms expand in the Internet of Things computing era.”

Summary: The stock is a "Best Buy" heading into Friday's Apple Watch launch and Monday's earnings report.


Manny Pacquiao worried about the punching power of Miguel Cotto.

He knew Juan Manuel Marquez was a slick counter puncher, and wondered how he'd fare against a fighter the calibre of Oscar De La Hoya.

He's got no such worries about Floyd Mayweather days out from boxing's richest fight on Saturday (Sunday AEST).

"I cannot say he is that difficult an opponent," Pacquiao said.

"My confidence right now is different than the other fights I had. I feel excited, this is it. I have to prove something."

Just hours after arriving in this boxing capital in a motor home from Los Angeles, Pacquiao oozed confidence at a rally attended by about 1000 people at the Mandalay Bay hotel.

The mostly Filipino crowd watched Pacquiao's latest music video and was entertained by dancers and singers before the fighter himself made a brief appearance.

"I know I'm going to win the fight in the ring," Pacquiao told the crowd. "So relax."

Oddsmakers aren't so convinced, with Pacquiao remaining about a 2-1 underdog for a fight expected to earn him more than $US100 million ($A125 million).

But Pacquiao didn't even have to break a sweat to win over the crowd that came to the hastily arranged pep rally in a convention area at the hotel.

"You're excited," Pacquiao said to the cheering crowd.

Mayweather was greeted by a much bigger crowd at the MGM Grand hotel, where Saturday's (Sunday AEST) welterweight title fight will play out.

The Southern University marching band entertained and a mariachi band played outside before Mayweather arrived 20 minutes early.

For many, it was their only chance to see the two fighters without reaching deep in their pockets. Tickets for the fight itself were being offered online starting at $US3800 ($A4800) and going over $US100,000 ($A124,700) near ringside, while even the $US10 ($A12) tickets for today’s weigh-in were being offered for $US100 ($A125) or more.

"Five years ago this was a $50 million fight for me and $20 million for him," said Mayweather, who is expected to make $180 million or more to $120 million for Pacquiao's camp.

With the real work already done, both fighters were going over game plans for a bout that was five years in the making.

Pacquiao said he had two or three different strategies for the fight, depending on whether Mayweather wants to try to win with his defence or comes out attacking.

"If he wants to fight me, good for me," Pacquiao said.

"If he's running and moving around the ring we're prepared for that, too."

Mayweather said that Pacquiao will be trying the same game plan that 47 others have failed to implement.

"Everybody's game plan is to come forward and throw lots of punches," Mayweather said.

"It hasn't worked in 19 years and 47 fights."

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Summary: Manny Pacquiao has no worries about Floyd Mayweather unlike the concerns he had about Miguel Cotto and Juan Manual Marquez.