As protesters demanding for universal suffrage continue to occupy streets in various parts of Hong Kong, some in Taiwan are keeping a close eye on the event.

The slogan "Today Hong Kong, Tomorrow Taiwan" is used by Taiwanese campaigners who feel that Beijing's refusal to allow a free vote of the territory's government will be seen on the island should it come back under mainland control.

Beijing has offered Taiwan - which split ways with China in 1949 during a civil war - the "One Country, Two Systems" formula and hopes that the integration of once-colonial Hong Kong will convince the self-ruled island to return to Chinese rule. However, Beijing has never renounced the use of force to reunify Taiwan.

Read MoreBad idea, Beijing: Crackdown may kill golden goose

For the past week, rallies in support of Hong Kong's civil disobedience movement have sprouted across the country, with the largest turnout seen in Taipei's Liberty Square. Thousands turned up at the night rally Wednesday donning yellow ribbons and umbrellas - symbols of the "Occupy Central" protest.

Taiwan's President, Ma Ying-jeou, said Monday that Hong Kong's call for free elections had his full backing. The island's opposition Democratic Progressive Party also said that if China disregards its promises to Hong Kong, Taiwan will have to give "a second thought on the promises" made to them.

Political analysts say the protest which has caused a standstill in the heart of Hong Kong is a setback for Beijing's efforts to win over Taiwan.

Read MoreHong Kong power play: who's in control?

"What's going on in Hong Kong makes Taiwanese more wary of a reunification. They have longed rejected the 'One Country, Two Systems' model as certain elements like stationing the People's Liberation Army in Taiwan soil is an absolute 'No'," said James Tang, professor of Political Science at Singapore Management University.

Chinese President Xi Jinping has reiterated the model as the basic principle to resolving issues with Taiwan at a recent meeting with a faction that supports the island's reunification with China.

"It is ironic for Xi to be advocating this. The extremely limited democracy given to Hong Kong suggests that Taiwan will find it difficult to maintain its current system if comes under China," David Zweig, director of Center on China's transnational relations at the HK University of Science and Technology, told CNBC.

Ketty Chen, director of Research at The Association of Public Issues Studies believes Xi's statement indicates that Beijing is taking a harsher position towards Taiwan.

"The series of protests against the Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement are all reasons for Beijing to panic and come to the realization that the Taiwanese simply do not want to be part of China," wrote Dr Chen via email to CNBC. "Will this harsher stance work? I don't believe so. As we seen, after Xi made his statement, both leaders and politicians from political parties, and government in Taiwan have iterated the fact that 'One Country, Two System' will not be accepted by the Taiwanese."

Read MoreHow badly will the HK protests hurt tourism?

Summary: As protesters demanding for universal suffrage continue to occupy streets in Hong Kong, some in Taiwan are keeping a close eye on the event.


The new item is the chain's first ever chicken sandwich. Previously, the only chicken dish available had been the chicken dog, a hot dog made with chicken, apple and sage sausage.

Read MoreAmerica's most-loved fast food joint is...

The move follows a trademark filing of the term "chicken shack" in April by a subsidiary of the chain. This news sent the restaurant's stock surging, hitting an all-time high of $96.75 on May 22. Since then, its shares have sunk. Shares received a further pounding Tuesday after Morgan Stanley analysts downgraded the stock, sending it down nearly 10 percent.

Shake Shack's foray into a chicken sandwich comes as chicken chains Bojangles' and privately held Chick-fil-A posted strong growth with poultry-packed menus.

Summary: The secret's out.


The International Brotherhood of Teamsters and the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York have settled a quarter-century long matter.

Both entities agreed to a deal that, if approved by the presiding judge, would end the U.S. attorney's 25-year oversight of the Teamsters union. "We anticipate that [Judge Loretta Preska] will approve the agreement," James Hoffa, general president of the union, said Wednesday in a video.

Read More How the Paris attacks change our political conversation

The Teamsters union came under the U.S. attorney's oversight after it lost a lawsuit under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act in 1989.

Read MoreStagnant middle class incomes: The political fallout

"The proposed settlement agreement seeks to strike the appropriate balance, recognizing the significant progress that has been made in ridding the [Teamsters union] of the influence of organized crime and corruption, while providing an avenue for the union to demonstrate its ability to preserve these gains through its own independent disciplinary and electoral systems," the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York said Wednesday in a news release.

The settlement agreement was filed on Wednesday and will go through a three-week period of comment and judicial hearings.

Summary: The Teamsters union and U.S. prosecutors reached a settlement agreement that would end oversight of the union.


10/26/2015 AT 04:05 PM EDT

is back as FBI Agent Dale Cooper in Showtime's

The cast took to California's Mojave Desert to film the series reboot on Saturday, and MacLachlan donned a serious expression as he stood in character on a wooded porch.

An 18-episode revival of the

is slated to air in 2017.

The reboot was halted this year, when co-creator

, but the series is now back on track and boasting faces both new and old.

, reportedly landing a role as a pivotal new character.

has also signed on to the show.

Along with MacLachlan, Catherine E. Coulson was

as the log lady, Sheryl Lee as Laura Palmer, Dana Ashbrook as Bobby Briggs and Richard Beymer as Ben Horne.

Summary: MacLachlan was spotted in character as FBI Agent Dale Cooper on the set of the Twin Peaks reboot


Growth in both new orders and output in the sector fell since May, when the PMI reading was 52.2.

Read MoreECB to 'take it easy' after June's fireworks

It does, however, mark the twelfth month in a row of growth in the sector, with a reading over 50 marking expansion.

Manufacturing conditions in the euro zone were brightest in Spain and Ireland, where activity hit an 84-month high and 2-month high respectively. Meanwhile in the U.K., which is not part of the currency bloc, June's manufacturing PMI rose to 57.5 - the highest level since November 2013.

However activity continued to contract in France, the euro zone second-largest economy, where it fell to a six-month low of 48.2. France has been dubbed the "sick man of Europe" by some analysts, after economic growth ground to a halt in the first quarter.

IHS' Archer said France's PMI reading was "particularly disappointing and worrying".

"This reinforces concerns over the underlying state of the French economy and suggests that it is struggling markedly for growth after GDP (gross domestic product) was only flat in the first quarter," he added.

The PMI data is the latest sign that the region's recovery may be slowing. Two closely watched economic indicators—Markit's composite PMI (which includes both the manufacturing and services sectors) and the European Commission's Economic Sentiment Indicator—weakened in June.

Read MoreEuro zone inflation steady ahead of ECB meeting

The final composite figure—or any revision to the flash estimate released last month—is set for release later this week. It comes after the euro zone's economy grew by just 0.2 percent in the first three months of the year, quarter-on-quarter.

Archer said euro zone GDP was like to have edged up in the second quarter, growing at around 0.3 percent on the quarter, but "it is evident that the euro zone is currently clearly finding it hard to build appreciable growth momentum".

Summary: The euro zone's recovery fails to take hold as unemployment holds steady and manufacturing activity slides.


DuPont DD and Dow Chemical Co. DOW this morning announced a $130 billion mega-merger that will shake up the global chemical and agriculture markets. The deal is expected to close in the second half of next year, pending regulatory approvals.

Within two years after completing the all-stock merger, DowDuPont (which is what the two sides are calling it) would split the combined company into three independent, publicly traded entities via tax-free spin-offs. One of the new companies would be “pure-play agriculture,” another material sciences and another specialty products like nutrition and health.

Current DuPont CEO Ed Breen would lead advisory committees to spin out the agriculture and specialty products units, while Dow CEO Andrew Liveris would lead the material sciences advisory committee. While the two larger companies remain merged, Liveris would serve as executive chairman, while Breen would serve as CEO. A chief financial officer has not yet been named.

The companies did not specifically address layoffs in their joint announcement, but DuPont said in a subsequent statement that it expects around $650 million of “employee separation costs.” That would work out to around 10% of its global workforce — 6,300 people — being fired.

Dow Chemical, which employs more than 51,000 people, has not yet issued a similar statement.

Overall, the merger is expected to “deliver approximately $3 billion in cost synergies,” which does not include around $1 billion in expected upside from “growth synergies.”

The two companies did not mention any possible termination fees related to failing to secure regulatory approval, which may be a heightened concern given recent U.S. government opposition to big deals like Comcast-Time Warner Cable, Staples-Office Depot and General Electric-Electrolux.

In simultaneous news, Dow Chemical announced that it would become 100% owner of Dow Corning, which was originally a joint venture between Dow and Corning Inc. GLW .

Read more at Fortune on DowDuPont:

Summary: Two giants of American industry will become one... before becoming three.


04/25/2016 AT 11:05 AM EDT

Now these blondes know how to have fun!

of herself smiling from ear to ear with rumored boyfriend,

. The 30-year-old captioned the picture: "Blondes do have more fun #sundaze."

Though the equestrian-loving pair haven't officially confirmed their relationship, these two have been spending a lot of time together these past few weeks.

star shared a photo featuring her and Cook

and captioned it with a simple pink heart emoji.

Cuoco seems to be moving on with her life after filing for divorce from

in September, and she recently

that it "does not change the way that I look at love."

She added, "I cannot wait to be in love again."

Summary: The Big Bang Theory star captioned the picture: "Blondes do have more fun #sundaze"


When William Moritz dived into the rough Florida surf on the morning of April 16, 2016, his only thought was to save his 6-year-old daughter, who had been pulled into the ocean by the waves. Moritz, who was 28, drowned trying to reach his daughter, who was rescued by others after she came close enough to the shore to be pulled in.

Reading of Moritz’s selfless act, one every parent thinks they would emulate, reminded me of one of the most moving memorials I have ever seen. Tucked in the back of Postman’s Park in London, behind St. Botolph’s, Aldersgate church, and a short walk from the Museum of London, is the Memorial to Heroic Self Sacrifice.

The brainchild of the Victorian painter George Frederic Watts, the memorial consists of a 50-foot covered exterior gallery containing 54 ceramic tiles. Each white tile contains in royal blue a name, occupation, date and brief description of an English civilian (sometimes two) who gave his life trying to save others.

Most of the incidents memorialized occurred from the 1870s through 1900, with a handful from the early decades of the 20th century and one from 2007, the first memorial tile added in 78 years.

Often forgotten by the growing city around it, Watts’s memorial is very much a high-Victorian monument, reflective of a time when progress, culture and community were celebrated as the foundations of a nation. It is earnest, inspiring and heartbreaking.

We need such an American monument to heroic self-sacrifice today. We live in an ever-crasser popular culture, fed by a cult of celebrity and riches, one where politicians on both sides of the aisle from the president on down eagerly fan the flames of racial, class, ethnic and religious separatism. It is all too easy to think that the glue holding America together is rapidly dissolving, and that the family is little more than an inconvenience in a society almost totally oriented around the individual.

Bill Moritz ’s sacrifice reminds us that there is still so much more to American society and the American family. Just as we will never forget the sacrifices of the 343 New York Fire Department personnel and 71 law enforcement officers on the morning of 9/11 who died carrying out their duties, and the brave passengers of Flight 93, so should we honor the many extraordinary people, like 24-year-old Welles Crowther, the “man in the red bandana,” who could have saved themselves that morning, but lost their lives helping others.

Just as we should memorialize Jon Blunk, John Larimer, Matt McQuinn and Alex Teves, who shielded their girlfriends’ bodies with their own in the July 20, 2012, Aurora, Colo., theater massacre.

And 8-year-old Tyler Doohan, who saved six people from a trailer fire in Penfield, N.Y., on Jan. 20, 2014, but died when he went back into the flames to try to rescue his disabled uncle.

And recent high-school graduate Rebecca Townsend, who was killed on July 2, 2015, while pushing a friend to safety out of the path of an oncoming car.

And Thomas Vander Woude, who drowned on Sept. 8, 2008, while saving his disabled son, who had fallen into a septic tank.

And Sanford Harling III, the 12-year-old who died on Feb. 5, 2016, after rushing into his burning house to try to save his father, who had already escaped.

And Jonathan Robertson Sr. , who died on Dec. 7, 2014, from the burns he received when he ran through flames carrying his 10-year-old son to safety.

And Benjamin Brooks, who drowned on Aug. 1, 2015, saving his son in a river in Washington state.

And Elizabeth Perez, a pregnant mother who died on Jan. 8, 2016, trying to save her toddler from their burning home.

The list goes on and on, the ultimate, final act from sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, friends and strangers. The split-second decision, the unthinking reaction, the overriding instinct to save a life.

Their sacrifices rip us out of our self-preoccupation, interrupting the incessant digital numbing of our senses and emotions. These acts of supreme bravery show us the true value of life, and we should as a society honor them, not forget them as quickly as the news Web pages refresh.

Whether it is a bricks-and-mortar monument somewhere or a digital page of remembrance, whether it would be located in a public park or on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol, an American Memorial to Heroic Self Sacrifice would be an honorable endeavor in an increasingly unserious time.

Mr. Auslin is a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., and a columnist for WSJ.com.

Summary: Michael Auslin writes that the U.S. needs a memorial site for ordinary Americans who died saving others, similar to the Memorial to Heroic Self Sacrifice in London’s Postman's Park.


Retailers are "making sure that when they communicate directly with shoppers, that they have that perception of value versus spamming," said Giovanni DeMeo, vice president of global marketing and analytics for Interactions Marketing.

(Read more: 5 major problems retailers must fix in 2014)

According to a recent study by Cisco Consulting Services, 52 percent of shoppers are more willing to share their information if they feel like they get good value in exchange. That could be an email with a product they like to buy or an app that triggers coupons when walking in a certain section of the store.

A separate IBM survey in 2013 of more than 30,000 global shoppers found that the number of shoppers willing to share their current location via GPS nearly doubled compared with the previous year, to 36 percent. Twenty-two percent said they would give out their cellphone number to receive text messages from retailers.

There are a number of factors that influence how open certain people are to sharing information, and they don't always come down to age, DeMeo said. Some reasons include how frequently people buy online and where they live. That's because people residing outside of major metropolitan areas are more comfortable shopping on the Web, so they can avoid driving long distances to get products.

(Read more: Showrooming left in the dust as shoppers go online)

"A lot of it now is about shoppers taking control and retailers are giving shoppers that perception of control," DeMeo said. "Those who are exposed to it more and more are becoming much more desensitized to it."

DeMeo said that much of the creep factor associated with targeted promotions has waned, because retailers are becoming smarter with how they communicate, and customers are getting more accustomed to it. Still, according to Experian Marketing Services, only 30 percent of brands personalize emails sent to their subscribers.

But it's a trend that's likely to pick up. According to Experian's 2013 Email Market Study, retailers with both a retail website and physical stores saw a 37 percent increase in unique open rates for emails with personalized subject lines, compared with emails sent during the same time period with nonpersonalized subject lines.

Summary: In order to reap the benefits of more customized promotions, shoppers have to part ways with some personal information.


Lee Vinsel and Andrew Russell are professors studying technology at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken. But, perhaps surprisingly given their specialty, they say recent conversations about technology have placed too much emphasis on “innovation,” at the expense of something just as important—maintenance.

Starting with a conference this weekend and a lengthy essay at Aeon, they’re working to emphasize the work done, not by the Elon Musks and Bill Gateses of the world, but by the engineers, cleaners, and repairmen who keep things running.

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Of course, innovation has huge benefits, for both companies and society. Businesses like Apple APPL , Google GOOG , and Amazon AMZN have thrived by overturning old ways of doing things. And many of their innovations make life better for everyone, both in day-to-day practical terms, and by growing the economy as a whole.

But Vinsel and Russel argue that, particularly in the last twenty years, talk about innovation has become increasingly counterproductive. One key example is America’s ongoing infrastructure crisis, which they say can be blamed partly on a culture that celebrates investment in innovation over upkeep. Only a wave of train crashes, subway meltdowns, and poisoned water reminiscent of the developing world has pushed infrastructure maintenance back into public debate in the U.S.

Companies, too, can be harmed by an overemphasis on innovation. Externally, the failure of things like transportation systems can inflict significant direct costs. And employees can’t be productive without ‘maintenance’ work backing them up, from housekeeping to education.

The same principle applies inside the office. Even fairly early-stage companies need their internal ‘maintainers’—skilled, smart people who keep customers happy and systems running. If that work is devalued, innovative ideas can’t live up to their potential.

Vinsel and Russell write that shifting the tech conversation towards maintenance makes it easier to grapple with a host of other issues—from income inequality to racial justice to disaster preparedness.

For more on the ups and downs of innovation, watch our video.

But they also make an even more radical claim. Though we increasingly treat innovation “as if it were an inherently desirable value, like love, fraternity, courage, beauty, dignity, or responsibility,” they argue that change isn’t actually good in and of itself.

“Crack cocaine, for example, was a highly innovative product in the 1980s,” they write, “which involved a great deal of entrepreneurship (called ‘dealing’) and generated lots of revenue.”

Crack cocaine, of course, came with some serious downside risk. And so does today’s most ominous consequence of the business world’s mania for innovation: An IPO boom that’s teetering precariously on the edge.

Summary: Experts say overvaluing innovation can hurt society—and that applies to companies, too.


Wallace E. Johnson, co-founder of the Holiday Inns hotel chain, with Kemmons Wilson Jr., died of a heart attack Wednesday in Memphis, where he lived. He was 86 years old.

Mr. Johnson had already become a millionaire in construction when he joined forces with Mr. Wilson, a Memphis businessman, in 1953 to start the company that became the largest hotel and gambling casino operator in the world.

In the 1960's the partners went into two other ambitious ventures that did not pan out. They sought to build a chain of convalescent homes for the elderly, Medicenters of America, and they formed the Alodex Corporation to erect single-family homes. Medicenters never really got off the ground and Alodex suffered huge losses and was liquidated in 1976.

But the partners prospered with Holiday Inns, which became a benchmark for hotel chains not only in the United States but overseas. Eventually they turned over active direction of the business to others and Mr. Johnson retired in 1979, becoming vice president emeritus, while Mr. Wilson stayed on until 1979. Picking Cotton at 7

In spite of his accumulated wealth, Mr. Johnson often referred to himself as ''a poor little old peckerwood boy from Mississippi.''

He was born in Edinburg, Miss., the son of a sawmill laborer who earned 50 cents a day. He started picking cotton when he was 7 years old and by the age of 16 he was an itinerant carpenter; two years later he had saved up $1,800 and began building houses on his own.

His first job, in 1919, was for a railroad agent for whom he agreed to build a home for $9,000. But he had not reckoned on the work involved in installing an intricate French mantelpiece, and he wound up $400 in debt.

He went back to high school and when he graduated three years later he was hired by one of his creditors to manage a lumber yard for $100 a month, a handsome salary in that time and place. Success in Construction

He took a correspondence course in architecture but before he could get back into contracting the Depression struck, so he went to Arkansas to work in a building-supply house. When the Federal Housing Administration began financing single-family home construction in the mid-1930's, he jumped into the field and soon became a major builder in the Memphis area.

During and after World War II he built low-cost housing, earning a reputation for constructing small houses quickly and efficiently, selling them with low down payments. He quickly became a millionaire.

Mr. Johnson is survived by his wife, the former Alma McCool, whom he married in 1924.

photo of Wallace E. Johnson (AP)

Summary: LEAD: Wallace E. Johnson, co-founder of the Holiday Inns hotel chain, with Kemmons Wilson Jr., died of a heart attack Wednesday in Memphis, where he lived. He was 86 years old.


Sam Smith suggesting he might be the first openly gay man to win an Oscar ... pissed off screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, who's now calling out Smith.

Not long after Smith won Best Original Song for the "Spectre" theme ... Black, who is openly gay, tweeted a reminder that HE won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay in 2009 for "Milk."

He also claims Smith is infatuated with his fiance, olympic diver Tom Daley.

Hey @SamSmithWorld, if you have no idea who I am, it may be time to stop texting my fiancé. Here's a start: https://t.co/8hGTRtIaMK

The "first" argument might seem kinda petty -- especially since Smith didn't state he was first as fact -- but Black tells TMZ, "I think knowing our collective LGBTQ history is important. That's all. We stand on the shoulders of countless brave men and women. We should honor that."

As for the shot about Daley ... Black wouldn't elaborate. We've reached out to Smith, but no word back.

Fun fact: Elton John also won an Oscar, long before Black, in 1994.

Apologies for the mix up @DLanceBlack I'll be sure to check out your films now x Belated Congrats on the Oscar x

Summary: Sam Smith suggesting he might be the first openly gay man to win an Oscar ... pissed off screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, who's now calling out…


Friends do your health so many favors. They protect your health as much as quitting smoking and a great deal more than exercising, according to a large 2010 review in the journal PLOS One. More research has shown that socially isolated people are more than twice as likely to die from heart disease as those with a solid social circle.

“Strong social relationships support mental health, and that ties into better immune function, reduced stress and less cardiovascular activation,” says Dr. Debra Umberson, a sociologist at the University of Texas, Austin. Umberson says emotional support is just one of a dozen ways friends may safeguard your health and extend your life.

MORE Here’s How Hugs Can Prevent the Flu

Unfortunately, though, many of us don’t have enough of them. According to data from the General Social Survey (GSS), the number of Americans who say they have no close friends has roughly tripled in recent decades. “Zero” is also the most common response when people are asked how many confidants they have, the GSS data show. And adult men seem to be especially bad at keeping and cultivating friendships.

That may seem strange in the era of Facebook, Twitter and boundless digital connectivity. But the “friends” orbiting at the farthest reaches of your digital galaxy aren’t the ones that matter when it comes to your health and happiness.

The vital friendships—the pals you hug and laugh and lament with—are the ones who have the greatest impact on your health and happiness. You need between three and five of them for optimal wellbeing, suggests research from Dr. Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Oxford.

Dunbar’s name comes up a lot when you start digging into the subject of friendship. From his early work studying the brains and social circles of primates, he recognized that the size of a human’s social network might be limited by the size of a certain part of the human brain called the neocortex, a critical site for higher brain functions. After some complicated study, he came up with a figure now known as “Dunbar’s number.”

That number—usually cited as 150, but actually a range between 100 and 200—is the approximate size of a person’s social circle, or the perpetually changing group of friends and family members that you would invite to a large party. While you may have far fewer than 150 of these people in your life, your brain really can’t hold a close connection with more than 150, Dunbar’s research shows. Within that group, he says your closest 15 relationships—including family members or “kin”—seem to be most crucial when it comes to your mental and physical health.

But that’s not to say a brother or sister offers you the same benefits as a close friend, Dunbar says. While your kin are more likely to be there for you when you need help, your good friends tend to fire up your nervous system and trigger the release of feel-good neuropeptides called endorphins. Whether you’re laughing with your pal or feeling him or her touch your shoulder in sympathy, the resulting rush of endorphins seems to “tune” up your immune system, protecting you from disease, Dunbar explains.

So yes, for the sake of your health, you need friends—ideally the really close kind you see face-to-face on a regular basis. But even one very good friend can improve your life in profound ways, says Dr. Mark Vernon, a philosopher, psychotherapist and author of The Meaning of Friendship.

Despite their value in terms of your health and wellbeing, don’t think of them as your personal social doctors. Vernon warns against turning your friends into what he calls “service providers”—that’s not what friendship should be about, he says, even if your pals are good for you.

In the end, Vernon says Ralph Waldo Emerson may have offered the best advice when it comes to making and keeping close pals: “The only way to have a friend is to be one.”

Read next: 5 Types of Friends That Everyone Has

Listen to the most important stories of the day.

Summary: Maybe just a handful, though quality trumps quantity.


On Wednesday, Hillary Clinton will reportedly propose a new “exit tax” to target corporate inversions that help companies dodge taxes by moving overseas.

Current rules allow corporations to reincorporate abroad by merging with a foreign company and allocating more than 20% of shares to foreign shareholders, effectively lowering the U.S. company’s tax bill. Foreign earnings aren’t taxed until they’re brought into the U.S., so many companies tend to hold cash abroad and invest in a foreign country to avoid taxes. Experts estimate that corporations are holding over $2 trillion abroad.

Clinton’s exit tax would tax the company’s foreign earnings at the time of the inversion deal, the Associated Press reports, and she plans to use the revenue it would generate to create more manufacturing jobs in the U.S.

Clinton has been criticized throughout her campaign, particularly by rival candidate Bernie Sanders, for having close ties to Wall Street, which some believe will encourage her to be more lenient when it comes to financial regulation. She published a New York Times op-ed on Monday, entitled “How I’d Reign in Wall Street,” in which she pledged to be strict on the matter.

She writes that her plan proposes a risk fee on the largest banks, strengthened oversight, and harsher penalties for rule-breakers, both individuals and institutions.

Clinton addressed the issue of corporate inversions at a campaign event in Colorado last month, during which she said, “I want the Treasury Department to do everything it can to stop that kind of behavior and call it for what it is: gaming the tax system.”

Summary: She wants to stop people from "gaming the tax system."


Oscar Isaac in Ex Machina

05/26/2016 AT 10:00 PM EDT

can now add "viral sensation" to his already impressive résumé.

The internet already went wild for the scene in the 2015 film

where Isaac's character Nathan busts some moves to Oliver Cheatham's "Get Down Saturday Night" with his "girlfriend" Kyoko.

As if that clip wasn't mesmerizing enough already,

discovered that Isaac's dance fits perfectly to any song from The Bee Gee's "Staying Alive" to Sugarhill Gang's "Rapper's Delight." The account takes song requests then brings them to life, and almost every resulting video is perfection.

oops i did it again - britney spears pic.twitter.com/ewnqRhSVHz

one dance - drake pic.twitter.com/hmsQnX5HmR

never gonna give you up - rick astley pic.twitter.com/7J4qaCqz2M

you belong with me - taylor swift pic.twitter.com/uYPeVXrqIo

rapper's delight - sugarhill gang pic.twitter.com/HY9BGi9jb2

all star - smash mouth pic.twitter.com/9ATuQzidw0

Stayin' Alive - Bee Gees pic.twitter.com/oaCrJ18Xzu

Jump in the Line - Harry Belafonte pic.twitter.com/HfQjS4hocw

the sound of silence - simon & garfunkel pic.twitter.com/bJxxGwFA2M

Is there a song you simply need to see Isaac dance to? Send your suggestions to

and watch him "tear up the f------ dancefloor."

Summary: Watch Oscar Isaac get down to everything from Smash Mouth to Drake


As expected, Facebook bots are coming.

After opening up its chat app Messenger to businesses last year, Facebook is now letting them build bots for the service, said co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday at the company’s annual developer conference F8 in San Francisco. Brands and companies will be able to build small artificial intelligence software programs that interact with Messenger users.

“Last year, Messenger was the fastest growing app, ahead of even Facebook, which was second,” boasted Zuckerberg, inciting a laugh from the audience. The Messenger app now has 900 million monthly active users, up from 800 million in January, the social network revealed last week. Currently, more than one billion messages are sent between businesses and users via the app, Facebook’s top brass added on Tuesday.

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Over the last few months, Facebook has announced a string of partnerships with a handful of companies, including Uber, Lyft, and KLM Royal Dutch Airlines. Now, the social media brand counts more than 40 partners for Messenger, such as CNN, eBay, Walmart, Spring, the NBA, JackThreads, Zulily, Spotify, Zynga, and 1-800-Flowers, among others.

Through Messenger’s Send/Receive software tool, now available to developers, businesses can build bots that not only send and receive text, but also images, emoji, and other rich content such as product carousels to let users browser merchandise options from a retailer, for example.

For more from Facebook F8, watch:

“I can guarantee you’re going to spend a lot more money than you think,” quipped Facebook Messenger’s chief, David Marcus, said after an on-stage demo of shopping service Spring’s bot.

Other tools Facebook is releasing include a discovery engine, a customer matching feature powered by Twilio for enabling businesses to respond via Messenger to customers with phone numbers on record, and a bot engine for training them, powered by Wit.ai, a startup Facebook acquired last year.

Read More: Mark Zuckerberg Has Harsh Words For Trump

To ensure users don’t get overwhelmed by spammy bots, Facebook is adding user controls, including the ability to block bots from which consumers don’t want to hear.

Rumors of Facebook’s chat bot store first appeared in January when a software kit for building bots in Messenger surfaced.

Though it’s been greatly anticipated, Facebook is far from the first to introduce a chat bot store for its messaging app.

Last week, Kik unveiled one, and Telegram has had one since last year. On the enterprise side, workplace chat service Slack has had bots integrated into the communication hub for a while, while Microsoft MSFT recently unveiled a set of software tools to let developers built bots for its own services, like Skype and Cortana.

Summary: But Facebook says it knows you don't want spammy bots, either.


As family entertainment with a religious flavor, "The Ark" may win fans. But as musical theater, it largely fails. This story of Noah and his family's adventures as they wait for the floodwaters to recede is a kind of extended sitcom, with the confined quarters of the ship setting up the familiar suburban scenarios of a meddling mother-in-law and neglected wives.

In the show, which opened on Monday at the 37 Arts Theater, Noah's solipsistic son Ham (D. B. Bonds in black leather) is upset that his father is too busy saving life on earth to pay attention to his son's emotional needs. Ham's brothers and their wives are equally one-dimensional and loopy. Japheth's wife, Sariah (Jacquelyn Piro), is a former Miss East of Eden, desperate for the attention of her distracted husband; she tries to tone up her charms with a bouncy aerobics routine. (The show's creators find anachronism to be endlessly hilarious, though their pop culture references are often so dated as to be themselves anachronistic.) The music is loud and simple enough to appeal to children but lacks distinction, while the lyrics are repetitive and banal. And though the performers all have competent voices, they oversell the songs. Most lean heavily on shtick, particularly Adrian Zmed, a television and film actor who has performed in Las Vegas and gives Noah a slouchy, lounge-lizard style.

One actor does transcend the kitsch: Annie Golden is tender and funny as Noah's wife, Eliza, with a lovely voice that she uses not like an American Idol but to reveal and deepen her character. Also delightful is the sound design by Ryan Powers, which surrounds the audience with thrillingly realistic roars, bleats and howls; when parrots screech overhead, it is hard not to duck. The towering set by Beowulf Boritt is like a giant jungle gym. Built from rough timbers with suspended bridges that encircle the theater, it locates the audience in the belly of the ark, where it is enlisted to play the animals. In "Dinner," the show's one witty number, the famished humans look hungrily at the crowd, dreaming of "lamb shanks, sausage franks, rabbit stew." When they step into the audience to salt a few small heads, the children squirm with delight.

For many in the audience, the theatrical merits of the show may matter less than its inspirational tone. Kevin Kelly, who began developing the book and lyrics 20 years ago, is a professor at Brigham Young University; his collaborator, Michael McLean, is a composer of Christian contemporary music, and both are practicing Mormons. Their primary aim, it seems, is to praise God and a particular set of family values.

"The Ark" continues at the 37 Arts Theater, 450 West 37th Street; (212) 307-4100.

Summary: Miriam Horn reviews family musical The Ark, with book and lyrics by Kevin Kelly and music by Michael McLean; Adrian Zmed and Annie Golden star; photo (M)


The boardwalk. Nathan’s Famous hot dogs. The Cyclone. The blue-gray waters of the Atlantic. Not too many places in America so readily evoke the evanescent pleasures of summer as the gloriously shabby environs of Coney Island. Running for nearly three miles along the southern coast of Brooklyn, “America’s Playground” (or “Sodom by the Sea,” as it was also once known) has been part of New York City lore for more than 150 years.

Packed from Memorial Day to Labor Day with sun worshipers, bathers, entertainers, people-watchers, pickpockets, partiers and other assorted characters — and with loners, Polar Bear Club members, beachcombers and birders the rest of the year — Coney Island has outlasted countless other amusement parks and summer destinations around the country, enduring boom times and years of decay and blight, alike, with a tough, unpretentious and welcoming spirit.

[MORE: See the gallery, “LIFE Goes Surfing.”]

Here, as summer 2013 gets into full swing and on the anniversary (June 26, 1920) of the opening of the legendary Cyclone roller coaster — beneath which, as all films buffs know, lived Alvy Singer’s family in Annie Hall — LIFE presents one of Margaret Bourke-White’s famous aerial photographs of Coney Island from the 1950s. It might not evince the white-sand glamour of the Côte d’Azur, or the laid-back, effortless beauty of a place like, say, Malibu, but in Bourke-White’s portrait of Coney Island one senses the energy positively pulsing from the place.

One gets the sense that, even at the beach, New Yorkers are constantly doing something.

[MORE: See the gallery, “Air America: Picturing the U.S. From Above.”]

Summary: As summer 2013 gets into full swing and on the anniversary (June 26, 1920) of the opening of the legendary Cyclone roller coaster, LIFE.com celebrates a tough, unpretentious, welcoming place.


There’s a certain vibe to a state or county fair that simply doesn’t exist anywhere else. The sights, sounds and—of course—the smells (grass crushed by thousands of footsteps; fried dough; the indeterminate, unmistakable mingled aroma of cattle, horses, poultry and people) call to mind the slowly shortening days and cooler, thrilling nights of late summer as surely as back-to-school sales and brawls at NFL training camps.

In 1938, LIFE magazine photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt went to a fair in West Virginia, and, true to form, “Eisie” came back with marvelous portraits of the fairgoers as well as wonderfully atmospheric shots of the displays, attractions and the fairgrounds themselves. But, above and beyond Eisenstaedt’s photographs, LIFE took pains to point out that in the late 1930s, even in the country’s rural bastions, “city slickers” were finding ways to entertain themselves. In fact, in the magazine’s description of the fair and its visitors, one can hear faint echoes of contemporary conversations about “authentic” versus “ironic” Americana.

As LIFE put it in an article in the September 26, 1938, issue of the magazine:

The first Greenbrier Valley Fair was held just 80 years ago. The few hundred farmers who attended gaped at the wonderful Howe sewing machine and admired a stalwart yearling who grew up to become Traveller, the big gray horse who carried General Lee through the Civil War. Today, the Greenbrier Valley Fair is one of the best-known in the South. This year . . . 100,000 paid admission to the fairgrounds near Lewisburg, W. Va. They watched the trotters race and went around looking at entries in contests for the best buckwheat, the best bread, the best begonias, the best “article made of sealing wax.”

But their major preoccupation was bodies—human bodies, animal bodies, bodies that looked half-human, half-animal. The “girlie” shows, which were hot and smutty, drew smaller audiences than the freaks from crowds made up of farmers, breeders and hillbillies. Only a few city people were present, although some urban sophisticates have discovered the county fair and are beginning to make America’s great harvest-time diversion a city-folk fad.

Liz Ronk, who edited this gallery, is the Photo Editor for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter @lizabethronk.

Summary: In 1938, Alfred Eisenstaedt went to a fair in West Virginia, and -- true to form -- came back with marvelous portraits of fairgoers, performers, attractions and the fairgrounds themselves.


Doctors have access to all sorts of historical patient records, which help them make diagnoses and referrals. Now they are gaining access to a technology platform that analyzes all of that data to learn if the patient’s physiological symptoms are likely to be associated with―and possibly exacerbated by―a simultaneous mental health condition.

In the medical world, this is called comorbidity. For New York-based startup Quartet Health, it might soon be called a goldmine.

Quartet was launched in early 2014 by Arun Gupta, who at the time was working as a healthcare-focused private equity investor. What he saw was that behavioral health issues kept coming up at some of his firm’s portfolio companies, and that the discipline was rarely being addressed by applying basic technologies. At the same time, Gupta also was serving as an advisor to Palantir Technologies, a secretive Silicon Valley company known for applying big data analytics to seemingly intractable problems.

So Gupta got to work on a system that would leverage big data to help physicians identify comorbidity risks, connect patients with relevant mental health professionals and then coordinate care between the two providers.

“Some people close to me went through big issues in this space, and I think almost everyone has at least one loved one who has had similar struggles,” Gupta explains. “It doesn’t get talked about too much in society but, as I began developing this idea and getting out to market, I was surprised to see how receptive both medical professionals and investors were to it.

The New York-based startup soon raised $7 million in first-round venture capital funding, led by Oak HC/FT. Individual investors included Carl Byers, the former chief financial officer of Athenahealth ATHN .

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That financing came at around the same time that Congress finally got around to proposing final rules for the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act, which had originally been passed in 2008 to make insurers (including Medicaid) provide the same benefits to mental health that they do to physical health. The bill was originally championed by then-Congressman Patrick Kennedy, who later joined the Quartet board of directors. Moreover, increased incentives based on outcome have led both insurers and providers to seek out more holistic treatment approaches.

“It’s crazy to think that we effectively had a separate structure for mental health in this country, where you could see a cardiologist 365 days per year, but not 1% of that on the mental health side because of benefits caps,” Gupta says. “Not only was that bad medicine, but it was bad business.” For instance, Gupta says that the data shows that if a cardiologist is able to identify a behavioral health risk in one of his patients and get that patient assessed and treated, then that patient will end up with far fewer visits to the cardiologist, thus saving the overall system money.

Quartet says that it provides service to over a million patients, in terms of those covered by health systems and insurers that contract with the company, and that it expects to raise a new round of financing later this year.

It does not disclose data on how many of that million-plus have directly utilized the Quartet platform, but Gupta points out the indirect participation in the form of blind data aggregation (i.e., the more patients, the more accurate the comorbidity identification). The company also has over 100 employees, most of whom are engineers and data scientists who come from the consumer technology space.

One weakness, Gupta acknowledges, is a supply issue when it comes to psychiatrists―a group he also says have been more resistant to Quartet than have primary care physicians and psychologists. “This is really a broader society issue, in that there is an overall shortage of certain types of behavioral health professionals, which means the people out there already have jammed schedules,” he says. “But what we’ve shown is that we can wrap a lot of services around the primary care, including curbside consults through telemedicine, self-care, online cognitive therapy, peer support, and other things beyond just facilitating a referral. In this way, technology can help use the scarcer resources more judiciously without sacrificing care.”

Summary: Quartet Health wants to make mental health parity a reality.


Without innovations like iView and News24, the ABC would be less relevant and in decline, says outgoing managing director Mark Scott.

Related: Mark Scott lets fly at $350m cut to ABC funding by Abbott government

“There’s no doubt, if we’d just sat where we were and been a traditional, old-style, linear broadcaster on radio and television, we’d still be held with great affection by the Australian people, but we wouldn’t be as relevant, we wouldn’t be as compelling, and I don’t think our future would be as healthy as it is today,” Scott said in an exit interview with Paul Barry on Media Watch on Monday.

Scott rejected criticism that the ABC had become too big and was a significant competitor to struggling commercial media companies such as News Corp Australia and Fairfax Media.

The ABC, which has a budget of $1bn, is worth funding because it is a public good, he said.

“The problems that particularly newspaper companies are facing, they’ve got nothing to do with the ABC or public broadcasters,” Scott said, pointing to the US where the lack of a strong public broadcaster had not helped the newspaper industry.

Scott said newspapers were losing their advertising to Apple, Google and Facebook and not to the ABC.

“And when it comes to paywalls, newspapers are being challenged about getting people to pay for their content, but it’s not because there’s a public broadcaster in the market, it’s because there are hundreds of millions of free websites that are offering content without charging for it, including so many different news and news services.

Scott said critics who claimed the ABC was biased were ill-informed because the ABC practiced professional journalism and its staff were bound by standards so their personal opinion was irrelevant.

Related: ABC boss Mark Scott questions whether Australia still needs SBS

“We do a different style of journalism to the journalism that I think increasingly you see in News [Corp] papers and increasingly you see with different columnists as well,” Scott said.

Scott conceded the ABC had been a little narrow in the range of topics covered but had made changes to ensure it covered issues which were important to the broader community like electricity prices.

“I think we’re not the least bit complacent about it, and I think the answer in truth, Paul, is that we do very well most of the time, but we’re probably not as good as we’d always like to be.”

Scott warned that if the government did not renew the targeted funding for the news division in the budget, another round of redundancies and program cuts would follow.

An extended version of the Scott interview can be seen online.

Summary: Outgoing managing director rejects claims the ABC should stay out of digital sphere, or that it poses a financial threat to commercial media organisations


Is that a tall, dark, and handsome man standing over there? Or a tall, dark and handsome man? The vexed question of commas, where to use them and where not to, was raised at Hay festival by the linguistics academic David Crystal.

Both of the above are correct, he said, but he criticised the Department for Education for not realising that, and for allowing exam boards to wrongly penalise children. He said the current guidance for schools “leaves a huge amount to be desired, especially in areas of punctuation.

“There is a tendency in the question setters of linguistic naivety; they are simply not aware of the complexity of some of the decisions they are asking the kids to make.”

Related: Six-year-olds need delight, not drilling – this grammar regime is a farce | Angela Moore

The comma and where to use it is a case in point. The debate over whether to put a comma before the “and” in a list has been around since the 18th century, Crystal said. In the 19th century “publishing houses decided they were going to sort it out and … made different decisions”.

Oxford University Press decided it should be in, and in such cases it is now called the Oxford comma or serial comma. They reasoned that each adjective before the noun was of equal importance, so should all have a comma. Cambridge University Press, however, decided it should be left out. This raises fierce debates, Crystal said, but both examples of usage were correct.

He said the Oxford comma had been banned in the latest guidance to teachers, so any child writing “tall, dark, and handsome” had to be marked incorrect. That meant Oxford comma fans (Crystal counted himself as one) were now using the wrong punctuation.

Related: Dear Ms Morgan: Sats tests are putting young children through hell

Crystal, honorary professor of linguistics at University of Wales, Bangor, was giving a talk about his latest book Making a Point: The Pernickety Story of English Punctuation. He admitted he rarely gets worked up about the things which infuriate lots of people – even the multiple use of exclamation marks!!!

He is professionally interested in the changing use of punctuation, including how full stops are not used anywhere near as many times as they were in the 19th century.

What really irritates him, he told the Hay audience, was what he called Radio 3 syndrome, when after a piece of music the presenter drops his or her voice at the end of a sentence. “That was Symphony No 3 in D major by [inaudible]. What?”

Or perhaps that should be: “What!”

Summary: Linguistics expert David Crystal tells Hay festival that school advisers are ‘not aware of complexity of decisions they are asking kids to make’


The eccentric copywriting style of the J. Peterman print catalog inspired a running gag on “Seinfeld.” The joke worked because it rang so true: how a product is described can make or break a sale.

That’s especially true in the world of e-commerce.

Virtually every retailer has its unique take on what works and what does not, to help ensure searches for specific items or categories draw as many visitors to their specific online storefront as possible. That means marketing teams basically are stuck managing multiple catalogs of descriptive content—including text, videos and images—depending on how many sales partners they use.

Enter Salsify, a Boston-based startup founded by several former executives from Endeca, the commerce software company bought by Oracle in December 2011. The company works with brands like Rubbermaid, Bosch and Reckitt Bensicker to make that process more disciplined. And, by extension, far more effective at driving transactions.

“We have built a platform that helps brands and retailers collaborate. It gives teams a place to collect, creative and manage the content, and then optimize it for each channel,” said Salsify co-founder and CEO Jason Purcell.

This week, the 45-person company disclosed a $16.6 million Series B round led by Venrock. Partner Mike Tyrrell has joined the company’s board as a result. He noted: “Salisfy is changing the way retailers and suppliers share key information, dramatically improving data quality and transforming the consumer’s online shopping experience.”

Existing venture firms Matrix Partners and North Bridge also participated in the new round along with individual investor Michael Skok. Total funding now stands at $24.6 million.

How well does Salsify work? Purcell estimates that brands typically will experience a 10% to 20% improvement in sales. One Salisfy’s clients, a medical equipment company, doubled its online business after adopting the system and making far more of its product line available through this channel, he said.

Salsify’s new funds will go primarily toward growing the company’s engineering and customer success teams.

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Summary: Salsify, which specializes in product catalog management, has raised another $16.6 million led by Venrock.


is begging for a lawsuit ... so says her stylist, who tells TMZ, she's on the brink of taking the actress to court after Beharie stiffed her on a HUGE styling bill.

Sharone Blades tells us ... Beharie hired her to style the actress for a Television Critics Association event Monday ... and agreed to pay $5,000.

Sharone says she did a bang-up job and Nicole loved her dress ... but has only forked over $2,000. Sharone says she confronted Nicole ... who countered by saying she didn't like the dress after all.

Sharone tells us, she's been trying to get Nicole to pay all week -- and she's now hired a lawyer to make her pay the hard way.

Summary: "Sleepy Hollow" star Nicole Beharie is begging for a lawsuit ... so says her stylist, who tells TMZ, she's on the brink of taking the actress to court…


A casual remark by an Apple blogger sets the agenda for a tech news cycle

Daring Fireball‘s John Gruber was writing a brief note about HP’s HPQ TouchPad tablet computer, unveiled Wednesday but not available before this summer, when he dropped the “3” bomb:

Summer feels like a long time away. If my theory is right, they’re not only going to be months behind the iPad 2, but if they slip until late summer, they might bump up against the release of the iPad 3.

The iPad 3? It was only that morning that the Wall Street Journal , citing the usual unnamed “people familiar with the matter,” reported that a thinner, lighter, faster iPad 2 with at least one camera had gone into production for release in April.

Apple AAPL rarely deviates from a 12-month update schedule for its major product lines (iPhones in summer, iPods in fall, MacBooks in the spring). What had Gruber, a blogger with unusually good sources within the company, been told?

Gruber quickly followed up with a longer post explaining that the iPad 3 remark was only a guess — not a thinly disguised “guess” that was actually based on something one of his Apple sources had told him — and that maybe the interim product would be more like an iPad 2.5 or an iPad 2 Pro.

But it was too late. The iPad 3 rumor spread through the blogosphere like a brush fire. By early evening, TechCrunch‘s MG Siegler had fueled the flames: He had been told by “a very good source” that Apple was assembling a “big fall surprise.” Moreover, he’d since heard that the new device is no iPad 2.5, but a full-fledged iPad 3.

“As of right now,” Seigler wrote, “the plan is apparently to release one iteration of the iPad in the next few weeks. And then blow the doors open with another new version in the fall.”

By Thursday morning, the story had moved to the top of Techmeme‘s news aggregator, with nearly three dozen follow-up stories trailing behind.

Not bad for a guess. Or was it a “guess”?

I have no inside information, but I’ve seen enough Apple rumors come and go to hold this one at arms length. It makes no sense for Apple to undercut the sales of the current iPad — never mind an iPad it hasn’t yet shipped — to be floating rumors about a new version two iPads from now.

If I had to put money on what next fall’s “big surprise” might be, I’d bet on some kind of iPod. Or maybe a new iteration of iTunes. Or some cloud-based service built around that North Carolina server farm that was supposed to come on line before the end of 2010 but has quietly fallen behind schedule.

[Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter @philiped]

Summary: A casual remark by an Apple blogger sets the agenda for a tech news cycle Daring Fireball's John Gruber was writing a brief note about HP's TouchPad tablet computer, unveiled Wednesday but not available before this summer, when he dropped the "3" bomb: Summer feels like a long time away. If my theory is right,…


Fans of long-cancelled WB series Gilmore Girls received a jolt this week upon learning of the possible revival of the fictional town of Stars Hollow and its favorite mother-daughter duo, Lorelei and Rory Gilmore.

Netflix NFLX is reportedly bringing the show and its beloved, pop culture reference-spewing characters back to life. According to Variety, the popular streaming service is working with the show’s creator and writer, Amy Sherman-Palladino, and her producer husband to revive Gilmore Girls with four new, 90-minute episodes.

Both Netflix and the show’s original producer, Warner Bros. TWX , have declined to comment on whether the reported revival is in the works, though series star Lauren Graham didn’t exactly put the rumors to rest.

If the reports turn out to be true, bringing back Gilmore Girls would only be the latest example of a long-gone television series returning from the dead, thanks a new platform looking to capitalize on sustained fan interest. One such example is David Lynch’s 1980’s cult drama Twin Peaks, which is being revived for a new run on cable channel Showtime more than 20 years after airing its last episode. For the most part, though, shows once thought dead are being revived by streaming media platforms hungry for exclusive content that comes ready-made with built-in fan bases.

Netflix has led the way with reviving cancelled television shows, even taking a cult movie (2001’s Wet Hot American Summer) and bringing back the star-studded original cast for a prequel series. Netflix also revived AMC’s The Killing for a fourth and final season that aired last year.

Here are some more once-cancelled television shows that have recently found new life on a streaming media platform:

Summary: Gilmore Girls is the latest long-dead show to be rescued by Netflix.


In 1951, atomic optimism was booming—even when it came to radioactive waste. In fact, entrepreneurs believed that the waste might pay off in the same way that coal tar and other industrial by-products had proved useful for the plastics and chemical industries. TIME reported that Stanford Research Institutes estimated they could sell crude radioactive waste from the Hanford plutonium plant in eastern Washington State at prices ranging from ten cents to a dollar a curie (a measure of radioactive decay). Every kilogram of plutonium the plant produced spilled out hundreds of thousands of gallons of radioactive waste. If the entrepreneurs were right, Hanford was a gold mine.

They were wrong. Instead, the former Hanford plutonium plant became the largest nuclear clean-up site in the western hemisphere. It costs taxpayers a billion dollars a year.

On the other hand, maybe they were right—just not the way they intended. Corporate contractors hired to clean up Hanford have made hundreds of millions of dollars in fees and surcharges, and, since little has been accomplished, the tab promises to mount for decades. Since 1991, the US Department of Energy has missed every target for remediation of Hanford’s deadly nuclear waste. Highly radioactive fluids are seeping toward the Columbia River watershed, while in the past two years 54 clean-up workers have fallen ill from mysterious toxic vapors. Last fall, seeking to finally get some action, Washington State sued the DOE to speed up the timeline and make the project safer—but, on Dec. 5, 2014, the U.S. Department of Justice rejected the request. The express schedule was too expensive, they said, despite the fact that the DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration is planning to spend a trillion dollars in 30 years to create a new generation of more accurate, deadly weapons. In fact, the DOE spends more money now in real dollars on nuclear weapons than it did at the height of the Cold War.

Unfortunately, the Justice ruling—to scrimp on radioactive waste management while the DOE spends lavishly on bombs—makes for business as usual in the history of Hanford.

It’s never been a matter of knowing the danger. In 1944, Hanford designers understood that the radioactive by-products issuing from plutonium production were deadly. Executives from DuPont, which built the Hanford plant for the Manhattan Project, called plutonium and its by-products “super poisonous” and worried about how to keep workers and surrounding populations safe.

At the same time, DuPont engineers were rushing to make plutonium for the first Trinity test in Nevada in 1945, and they did not pause to invent new solutions to store radioactive waste. Plant managers simply disposed of the high-tech, radioactive waste the way that humans had for millennia. They buried it. Millions of gallons of radioactive effluent went into trenches, ponds, holes drilled in the ground and the Columbia River. The most dangerous waste was conducted into underground single-walled tanks meant to last ten years. Knowing the tanks would corrode, as the high-level waste ate through metal, Hanford designers planned to come up with a permanent solution in the future. They were confident in their abilities. Had they not accomplished the impossible—building from scratch in less than three years a nuclear bomb?

But, as the years passed, no new answer surfaced to safely store nuclear waste. The Atomic Energy Commission, which was in charge of bomb production, left radioactive garbage to its private corporate contractors. For two decades, the AEC had no office to oversee waste management, nor any regulation. AEC officials didn’t know how much radioactive waste there was or where it was located. They also didn’t pay much fiscal attention to the problem. The AEC allocated to General Electric, which took over from DuPont in 1946, $200,000 a year for waste management, small change in nuclear-weapons accounting. In the same decade, the AEC handed over $1.5 million annually to subsidize the local school district in Richland, Wash., where plant workers lived.

Meanwhile, the temporary underground tanks remained long past their expiration date. In the early 1960s, the first tank sprang a leak. Dozens followed suit leaching into the ground a million gallons of high-level waste. From 1968 to 1986, Hanford managers built 28 new, double-walled tanks, designed to last from 20 to 50 years. What was the major design innovation after two decades of experience? An extra tank wall.

The explosion at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in 1986 tore the plutonium curtain of secrecy surrounding Hanford. The newly renamed Department of Energy was forced to release thousands of documents describing how plant managers had issued into the western interior millions of curies of radioactive waste as part of the daily operating order. In the early 1990s, TIME recounted stories of people living downwind who had thyroid disease and cancer, caused, they believed, by the plant’s emissions. In 1991, the DOE resolved to clean up the Hanford site.

The agency hired the same military contractors that had managed the site while it was being polluted. Their main task involved building a state-of-the-art waste-treatment plant to turn high-level waste into glass blocks for millennia of safe storage in salt caverns. But by 1999, eight years and several billion dollars later, the DOE had to admit that its contractors had accomplished little. Multiple times, the DOE set new deadlines or hired new contractors, but the goalposts were always moved. In 2015, after decades of effort, the waste treatment plant is still in the planning stages. High-level waste remains in tanks, some of which continue to leak.

What makes dealing with nuclear waste at Hanford so intractable? The Savannah River Plant in Georgia also made plutonium and has successfully built a treatment plant. So too have the Russians and French. Despite the Department of Justice’s ruling, money is not the main problem. The current contractor, Bechtel Corp, has spent billions of dollars, yet has made little progress. Speaking this week, representatives of the Washington State Department of Ecology said that they would argue their case in federal court in February, hoping to get the DOE to commit to their timeline to get the waste treatment plant up and running. Decades after the story began, it continues.

So perhaps it’s a matter of history. Since the ’40s, Hanford contractors had enjoyed a free hand to produce plutonium and pollute with little AEC/DOE oversight. And for six decades reports of radioactive discharges were denied. It is hard to fix a problem one cannot see—and that’s been, by any measure, an expensive lesson.

Kate Brown lives in Washington, DC and is Professor of History at UMBC. She is the author of several award-winning books, including Plutopia: Nuclear Families in Atomic Cities and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford 2013). Brown’s most recent book Dispatches from Dystopia: History of Places Not Yet Forgotten will appear in April 2015 with the University of Chicago Press.

Read a 1986 report on the safety of the American nuclear industry, here in the TIME Vault: Bracing for the Fallout

Read next: Tourists’ Trash Caused the Oddly-Colored Geysers at Yellowstone, Study Finds

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Summary: Dealing with nuclear waste at a plant in Washington State has proved an intractable problem. Why?


Renowned Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto is sharing his life’s work for the first time at the Casa Garriga i Nogués in Spain. The exhibit, titled Black Box, is a tour of 39 of his most prominent photographs taken in five series: Seascapes, Portraits, Theaters, Dioramas and Lightening Fields.

Sugimoto, who has been based in New York since the 1970s, has spent 40 years working with sculptures, architecture, installation and photography. His black-and-white still life’s, portraits and nature images combine beauty and technical virtuosity in an artful look at illusion, perception, representation, life and death. By rejecting digital technology for more traditional methods, Sugimoto’s work reinterprets the classic photographic tradition.

The exhibit also invites viewers to learn about Sugimoto’s current work, exploring how he continues to push the envelop on visual art.

Sugimoto’s work is featured in TIME’s current issue, illustrating an article on the origins of life on Earth and beyond. “Sugimoto is one of the great photographic masters of our age, so it’s an honor to include his work in our magazine,” says TIME senior photo editor Myles Little. “After reading Jeff Kluger’s article, I knew I needed to find an image with weight and majesty. Something awe-inspiring. As Sugimoto once described this project, ‘I see the spark of life itself, the lightning that struck the primordial ooze.’ When I found those images online, I knew they would be perfect.”

The exhibition runs from Feb. 19th to May 8th at the Casa Garriga i Nogués gallery in Barcelona.

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Summary: Renowned Japanese photographer is sharing his life's work for the first time


Alejandro G Iñárritu’s last film, the Oscar-winning Birdman, was an energising, disorientating and frankly exhausting rollercoaster ride – and that was a comedy about a bunch of narcissistic actors. Imagine then what the same director can do with a brutal western about a frontiersman who is mauled by a bear, and then treks for miles through hellishly harsh terrain, dodging vengeful natives and vicious soldiers along the way. It’s hardly surprising The Revenant won three major prizes at the Golden Globes on Sunday. Based on the ordeals of a real 19th-Century fur-trapper, Hugh Glass, and adapted from a novel about him by Michael Punke, Iñárritu’s revenge thriller is so intense and immersive that it makes you wince, shudder and duck for cover. Towards the end, though, it might make you check your watch a few times too.

The fight sequences make those in Iñárritu’s earlier films seem like playground scuffles

The opening minutes pack in more visceral shocks than most films do in their entirety. Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio) is guiding a hunting party through a remote forest when they are ambushed by Arikara warriors. The hunters make a desperate dash for their boat on the Missouri river, as arrows slice through the air around them, but most of them are killed in a heart-stopping, exquisitely choreographed sequence which should be on every future list of cinema’s greatest battle scenes. Glass then declares that the survivors should be safe if they abandon their boat, and hike back to their distant encampment. But the Arikara aren’t the only predators in the area. Alone in the misty woods, Glass points his rifle at two bear cubs, only to be clawed, bitten and generally mutilated by their furious and gigantic mother. It’s another astonishing set piece. Iñárritu is a master at depicting violent melees, whether a spat between an actor and a critic in Birdman or a fierce burst of dog-fighting in his 2000 debut, Amores Perros. But this latest seamless blend of live-action and CGI makes those earlier confrontations seem like playground scuffles.

Glass survives his grisly grizzly encounter, but only just. The expedition leader (Domhnall Gleeson) assumes that he will die from his deep wounds in a matter of hours, so he orders his men to continue their trek, leaving three of them behind to give Glass a decent burial when the time comes: the disgruntled Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy), the callow Bridger (Will Poulter), and Glass’s own son, Hawk (Forrest Goodluck). But Fitzgerald doesn’t fancy waiting around for another Arikara onslaught. He stabs Hawk, leaves Glass for dead and sets off through the wintry wilderness with the conflicted Bridger. Unfortunately for him, Glass stubbornly refuses to die, and he is soon stumbling after them.

With its gutsy scenes of backwoods endurance and its sublime mountain vistas, The Revenant is a cross between Werner Herzog’s gruelling travelogues (Aguirre Wrath of God, Rescue Dawn) and Terrence Malick’s spiritual reveries (The New World, The Tree of Life). This is no co-incidence. The film’s virtuoso cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki, has worked with Malick several times, as well as on such game-changing films as Children of Men, Gravity and Birdman, but he may well have excelled himself on The Revenant. If he doesn’t get another best cinematography Oscar to add to his collection, then Academy voters deserve a bear attack of their own.

Having just won a Golden Globe, DiCaprio is being tipped for Oscar glory, too, although that’s largely due to the reports of what he suffered during production. Shot outdoors in sub-zero Canada and Argentina, The Revenant compelled him to tumble down snowy hillsides, swim in frozen rivers, crawl along mossy forest floors and sink his teeth into raw bison liver.

DiCaprio’s character is essentially a woolly-bearded Terminator

It’s a committed, ferocious performance, and it would be no crime if it bagged DiCaprio an Oscar – but whether there is much range to his acting is another matter. The weakness of The Revenant is that it has the simplest of plots: one man walks, walks some more, and then does a bit more walking. And while a lot happens to him as he walks, nothing much actually changes. Glass doesn’t have to make any personal discoveries or difficult decisions on his travels. He doesn’t have to vary his strategy. He barely even says anything. He just keeps trudging on. Iñárritu tries to humanise him with artful flashbacks, hallucinations and memories of whispered slogans: “As long as you can still grab a breath, you fight.” But DiCaprio sticks to angry determination from start to finish. Instead of being an individual you can care about, Glass is essentially a woolly-bearded Terminator.

Despite the awe-inspiring scenery and the phenomenal action, the film’s one-note protagonist may leave you all-too conscious of the numbing 156-minute running time. And the various subplots don’t help, either: interludes with the Arikara tribespeople, the bedraggled hunting party and a rival French company are all surplus to requirements. The only really intriguing person in The Revenant is Hardy’s twitchy, self-justifying Fitzgerald, not least because he is the only one with a sense of humour. When he is talking about being scalped, or improvising threats and arguments to get his own way, you may well feel that a more complex, less predictable film would have focused on Fitzgerald and Bridger’s journey, rather than Glass’s. As it is, you’re bound to be impressed by what the actors went through, but you won’t be so bothered about the characters they play.

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Summary: The Revenant has the simplest of plots: one man walks, walks some more, and then does a bit more walking. And yet it makes for gripping cinema, writes Nicholas Barber.


THE lengthy reports issued last week by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States laid out in detail the intelligence and law-enforcement failures before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

While the conclusions were clear, the government-speak could be baffling.

The documents noted, in plain bureaucratese, that the director of Central Intelligence was given a ''tasking,'' while analysts' reports were ''caveated.'' The C.I.A. would conduct ''renditions.'' (More on that later.) And officials quoted in the reports sometimes calibrated words so carefully that they succeeded in saying nothing. One State Department official described an attempt to improve relations with Pakistan as moving from ''half engagement'' to ''limited engagement.''

Even the code names of programs and initiatives linked to the failed efforts to wipe out Al Qaeda revealed something of the bureaucratic soul. The air-strike plan ''Operation Infinite Reach'' was succeeded by a more ambitious strike program called ''Operation Infinite Resolve.'' That was eventually scrapped.

Among the terms in the reports are:

Rendition and disruption: To disrupt terrorist activity by catching terror suspects outside the United States and sending them to the United States or a third country for prosecution.

Pre-emption and Disruption: A practice used when terrorists could not be brought to justice in the United States or a third country. The United States would encourage foreign intelligence services to ''creatively'' use existing laws to investigate, detain and harass suspects.

Asset: A person, managed by an intelligence agency, who spies or helps conduct operations.

Proxy: A person, like a tribal fighter in Afghanistan, whose activities are supported by an intelligence agency.

Antiterrorism: Activities defending against terror attacks. After the 1996 bombing of an Air Force residential complex in Saudi Arabia, for example, the Department of Defense gave particular attention to security measures to protect its forces from such assaults.

Counterterrorism: Offensive activities, including gathering intelligence and disrupting networks, to prevent attacks.

Actionable intelligence: Information precise enough to allow military force or covert action to be taken against a target, like an Al Qaeda camp. One special operations commander fliply described actionable intelligence, one report noted, by saying: ''You give us the action, we'll give you the intelligence.''

Asymmetric threat: An attack by a group using unconventional weapons, like bombs on trains or planes aimed at buildings, as opposed to one by a nation-state using conventional weapons.

Footprint: Troop level, as in how many boots on the ground.

Roll back: To significantly damage or destroy, rather than just restrain, something, like Al Qaeda.

Summary: Lengthy reports issued by National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon US laid out in detail intelligence and law-enforcement failures before Sept 11, 2001 attacks; while conclusions are clear, government-speak can be baffling; some bureaucratic terms in reports noted (M)


Adidas-Salomon is near a deal to acquire Reebok International for about $4.4 billion, executives involved in the discussions said yesterday. The transaction would reshape the sports footwear and apparel industry.

The deal, which was being negotiated late last night and could be announced today, would give Nike its first formidable competitor in more than a decade. A combined Adidas-Reebok would control about 20 percent of the market, but would still remain behind Nike, which has about a third of the $145 billion worldwide market.

The transaction puts two of the world's best-known brands together and combines a star-studded stable of athlete and entertainment endorsers including the basketball player Allen Iverson (Reebok), the soccer player David Beckham (Adidas) and the rap artists Jay-Z (Reebok) and Missy Elliott (Adidas). The transaction would also bring together Reebok's other brands, like Rockport and Greg Norman's line of golf wear, with Adidas's other lines, including its Solomon ski franchise and its TaylorMade golf equipment and apparel business.

Driving the deal, analysts said, is Adidas-Salomon's chief executive, Erich Stamminger, who has been vocal about the German company's effort to build market share in the United States. John Horan, publisher of Sporting Goods Intelligence magazine, sees the $9 billion branded-shoe market in the United States rising 8 percent this year.

The combined company would likely have increased clout among retailers and an ability to command shelf space. The company would also be better positioned to bid on endorsement contracts and to wring discounts from the multitude of media outlets from which it buys advertising.

"The remaining entity clearly is strengthened in terms of competitive position versus Nike," said Stephen A. Greyser, a professor of sports marketing at Harvard Business School. "The combined company will have more globally than either of the two alone, not just because of size but because of geographic strength. The same goes for distribution, too."

Still, the transaction may raise questions among some investors because it comes at a time when consumers are moving toward fashion-related footwear. Indeed, Nike demonstrated that trend last year when it acquired Converse sneakers for its Chuck Taylors, which have become a retro-fashion staple.

Under the terms of the deal being negotiated, Adidas would pay about $59 a share for Reebok, the executives said. That represents about a one-third premium over Reebok's shares yesterday, which closed at $43.95, up $1.19. Adidas would also assume about $550 million in debt from Reebok, which is based in Canton, Mass. Adidas is based in northern Bavaria in the town of Herzogenaurach.

While the deal is expected to face some scrutiny by regulators in the United States and Europe, antitrust lawyers suggested that it would likely be approved because the marketplace would probably be defined very widely.

The deal's biggest beneficiary would be Paul Fireman, who brought Reebok to the United States from Britain in 1979. Reebok, which is credited with inventing track spikes, capitalized more than any other company on the fitness boom of the mid-1980's, particularly by catering to women, and its fortunes soared in that period.

It moved ahead of Nike as the athletic shoe industry leader in 1987 for a brief time. In 1987, the Reebok board decided it was time to let somebody else run the company and Mr. Fireman was elevated to the new position of chairman, with no responsibility for the day-to-day running of Reebok. He came back as chief executive in 1999, with the stock hovering around $7.

Adidas has made China a particular focus for its expansion, signing on as a sponsor of the 2008 Olympic games in Beijing. Acquiring Reebok would bring Yao Ming, the popular Houston Rockets center from Shanghai, into Adidas's stable of high-profile athletes. According to a recent survey Nike released to analysts, 52 percent of Chinese currently rate Nike as the "coolest" athletic brand compared with 38 percent for Adidas and 15 percent for Reebok.

Eric Dash contributed reporting for this article.

Summary: Adidas-Salomon is reportedly in late stages of talks to acquire Reebok International for about $4.4 billion in deal that would reshape sports footwear and apparel industry; reported price, about $59 a share, represents one-third premium over Reebok's share price; combined company would have about 20 percent of $145 billion worldwide market, compared with about a third for Nike, industry leader, which would face its first formidable competitor in more than decade (M)


In a survey released in April, Chubb Insurance found that companies ranked natural disasters alongside other worries like supply chain failures and data breaches as their top overseas business worries. Of the top 10 business concerns surveyed by Chubb, natural catastrophes ranked number 4.

Steve Hernandez, Chubb's worldwide loss control manager, said that sometimes businesses can get complacent about weather-related risks.

"There's a tendency of businesses to say 'if I made it through before…I can make it through others that occur,'" Hernandez said. "We would say the call to action is greater today than it ever has been."

Businesses and consumers along the Gulf Coast and in the Southeast are among the most vulnerable to natural disasters, Hernandez said, but cautioned that the risks are unpredictable enough that everyone across the country should be prepared.

At the micro level, this means stocking up on simple supplies like water, flashlights and first aid kits; Ryder is a partner of the American Red Cross, which is an emergency first responder. For businesses, power generators and backup facilities are key to riding out possible storms.

Additionally, companies can't necessarily rely on work-from-home solutions. Deloitte's report said telecommuting is impossible if there are mass power outages, or disruptions to the corporation's network. To get around that, the firm says companies might think about farming out work to offices outside the disaster zone, or set up makeshift offices.

Those steps are integral to preventing what Chubb's Hernandez says is the tendency of businesses and governments to "get caught by surprise" by severe weather.

"It may not be a hurricane-type event, it could just be a rain storm," he said.

--By CNBC's Javier E. David

Summary: With hurricane season just around the corner, extreme weather outbreaks may put disaster preparedness and recovery plans to the test.


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

A massive natural gas leak from a Los Angeles County storage facility is pouring millions of pounds of methane into the atmosphere, and California officials say it's shaping up to be major ecological disaster.

the Aliso Canyon leak was first detected more than two months ago and is releasing about 110,000 pounds of gas per hour. It's invisible to the naked eye, but the outlet recently obtained infrared video showing the dangerous gas billowing into the air.

See photos of the Aliso Canyon facility and nearby neighborhoods:

Severe natural gas leak in Los Angeles County could be major disaster

Crews from SoCalGas and outside experts work on a relief well at the Aliso Canyon facility above the Porter Ranch area of Los Angeles, Wednesday, Dec. 9. 2015. Once the relief well is connected to the leaking well, SoCalGas will pump fluids and cement into the bottom of the leaking well to stop the flow of gas and permanently seal the well. (Dean Musgrove/Los Angeles Daily News via AP, Pool)

Crews from SoCalGas and outside experts work on a relief well at the Aliso Canyon facility above the Porter Ranch area of Los Angeles, Wednesday, Dec. 9. 2015. Once the relief well is connected to the leaking well, SoCalGas will pump fluids and cement into the bottom of the leaking well to stop the flow of gas and permanently seal the well. (Dean Musgrove/Los Angeles Daily News via AP, Pool)

Crews from SoCalGas and outside experts work on a relief well at the Aliso Canyon facility above the Porter Ranch area of Los Angeles, Wednesday, Dec. 9. 2015. Once the relief well is connected to the leaking well, SoCalGas will pump fluids and cement into the bottom of the leaking well to stop the flow of gas and permanently seal the well. (Dean Musgrove/Los Angeles Daily News via AP, Pool)

Matt Pakucko, president of Save Porter Ranch, right, speaks to a reporter after testifying to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors about an uncontrolled gas leak that has sickened residents in his Los Angeles neighborhood on Tuesday, Nov. 24, 2015. Other Porter Ranch residents in the background from left to right: Ethan Michaels, 8, Cameron Michaels, 11, Danielle Michaels, the boys' mother, Kyoko Hibino and Michelle Theriault. SoCalGas crews and technical experts are attempting to safely stop the flow of natural gas leaking from a storage well at the utilityâs Aliso Canyon facility near Northridge section of Los Angeles. Workers are trying to stop a leak from a massive underground natural gas well on the that has nearby residents concerned for their safety and annoyed by the unpleasant smell. (AP Photo/Brian Melley)

A neighborhood where many people have left their homes because of a massive natural-gas leak is seen in the Porter Ranch neighborhood of the of the San Fernando Valley region of Los Angeles, California, on December 22, 2015. Los Angeles City Attorney Mike Feuer announced that he will seek a court order on December 23 to speed up the relocation of families affected by the gas coming from the Aliso Canyon Storage Field since October 23. Los Angeles County officials have declared a state of emergency for Porter Ranch where more than 1,600 residents have been displaced. AFP PHOTO / DAVID MCNEW / AFP / DAVID MCNEW (Photo credit should read DAVID MCNEW/AFP/Getty Images)

Construction continues on one of many local gated communities as people continue to be affected by a massive natural-gas leak in the Porter Ranch neighborhood of the of the San Fernando Valley region of Los Angeles, California, on December 22, 2015. Los Angeles City Attorney Mike Feuer announced that he will seek a court order on December 23 to speed up the relocation of families affected by the gas coming from the Aliso Canyon Storage Field since October 23. Los Angeles County officials have declared a state of emergency for Porter Ranch where more than 1,600 residents have been displaced. AFP PHOTO / DAVID MCNEW / AFP / DAVID MCNEW (Photo credit should read DAVID MCNEW/AFP/Getty Images)

A sign indicates stepped up presence of Los Angeles police officers where many people have left their homes because of a massive natural-gas leak in the Porter Ranch neighborhood of the of the San Fernando Valley region of Los Angeles, California, on December 22, 2015. Los Angeles City Attorney Mike Feuer announced that he will seek a court order on December 23 to speed up the relocation of families affected by the gas coming from the Aliso Canyon Storage Field since October 23. Los Angeles County officials have declared a state of emergency for Porter Ranch where more than 1,600 residents have been displaced. AFP PHOTO / DAVID MCNEW / AFP / DAVID MCNEW (Photo credit should read DAVID MCNEW/AFP/Getty Images)

The boundary of Southern California Gas Company property, where Aliso Canyon Storage Field is located, is seen as people continue to be affected by a massive natural-gas leak in the Porter Ranch neighborhood of the of the San Fernando Valley region of Los Angeles, California, on December 22, 2015. Los Angeles City Attorney Mike Feuer announced that he will seek a court order on December 23 to speed up the relocation of families affected by the gas coming from the Aliso Canyon Storage Field since October 23. Los Angeles County officials have declared a state of emergency for Porter Ranch where more than 1,600 residents have been displaced. AFP PHOTO / DAVID MCNEW / AFP / DAVID MCNEW (Photo credit should read DAVID MCNEW/AFP/Getty Images)

LOS ANGELES, CALIF. -- TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 24, 2015: Porter Ranch residents Michelle Theriault, left, Danielle Michaels, center, and her son Cameron Michaels, 11, right, listen as Board of Supervisors address problems caused by Aliso Canyon natural gas leak during meeting in Los Angeles, Calif., on Nov. 24, 2015. The leak was reported on October 23 and has been sickening area resident for over a month. (Brian van der Brug /Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

LOS ANGELES, CALIF. -- TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 24, 2015: Save Porter Ranch's Matt Pakucko speaks to Board of Supervisors on Aliso Canyon natural gas leak during meeting in Los Angeles, Calif., on Nov. 24, 2015. The leak was reported on October 23 and has been sickening area resident for over a month. (Brian van der Brug /Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

Construction continues on one of many local gated communities as people continue to be affected by a massive natural-gas leak in the Porter Ranch neighborhood of the of the San Fernando Valley region of Los Angeles, California, on December 22, 2015. Los Angeles City Attorney Mike Feuer announced that he will seek a court order on December 23 to speed up the relocation of families affected by the gas coming from the Aliso Canyon Storage Field since October 23. Los Angeles County officials have declared a state of emergency for Porter Ranch where more than 1,600 residents have been displaced. AFP PHOTO / DAVID MCNEW / AFP / DAVID MCNEW (Photo credit should read DAVID MCNEW/AFP/Getty Images)

A truck enters the gates of Southern California Gas Company property where Aliso Canyon Storage Field near a neighborhood where many people have left their homes because of a massive natural-gas leak in the Porter Ranch neighborhood of the of the San Fernando Valley region of Los Angeles, California, on December 22, 2015. Los Angeles City Attorney Mike Feuer announced that he will seek a court order on December 23 to speed up the relocation of families affected by the gas coming from the Aliso Canyon Storage Field since October 23. Los Angeles County officials have declared a state of emergency for Porter Ranch where more than 1,600 residents have been displaced. AFP PHOTO / DAVID MCNEW / AFP / DAVID MCNEW (Photo credit should read DAVID MCNEW/AFP/Getty Images)

Trucks enter the gates of Southern California Gas Company property where Aliso Canyon Storage Field is located as people continue to be affected by a massive natural-gas leak in the Porter Ranch neighborhood of the of the San Fernando Valley region of Los Angeles, California, on December 22, 2015. Los Angeles City Attorney Mike Feuer announced that he will seek a court order on December 23 to speed up the relocation of families affected by the gas coming from the Aliso Canyon Storage Field since October 23. Los Angeles County officials have declared a state of emergency for Porter Ranch where more than 1,600 residents have been displaced. AFP PHOTO / DAVID MCNEW / AFP / DAVID MCNEW (Photo credit should read DAVID MCNEW/AFP/Getty Images)

A closure notice is posted on a gate at Porter Ranch Community School which is closing as students are moved to another facility in response to a massive natural-gas leak in the Porter Ranch neighborhood of the of the San Fernando Valley region of Los Angeles, California, December 22, 2015. Los Angeles City Attorney Mike Feuer announced that he will seek a court order December 23rd to speed up the relocation of families affected by the gas coming from the Aliso Canyon Storage Field since October 23rd. Los Angeles County officials have declared a state of emergency for Porter Ranch where more than 1,600 residents have been displaced. The Federal Aviation Administration has ordered a no-fly zone over the leak, and the Los Angeles Unified School District will relocate 1,870 students in kindergarten through eighth grade to schools farther away from the leak. AFP PHOTO / DAVID MCNEW / AFP / DAVID MCNEW (Photo credit should read DAVID MCNEW/AFP/Getty Images)

A caravan of trucks on a playground carries away the contents of Porter Ranch Community School which is closing as students are moved to another facility in response to a massive natural-gas leak in the Porter Ranch neighborhood of the of the San Fernando Valley region of Los Angeles, California, December 22, 2015. Los Angeles City Attorney Mike Feuer announced that he will seek a court order December 23rd to speed up the relocation of families affected by the gas coming from the Aliso Canyon Storage Field since October 23rd. Los Angeles County officials have declared a state of emergency for Porter Ranch where more than 1,600 residents have been displaced. The Federal Aviation Administration has ordered a no-fly zone over the leak, and the Los Angeles Unified School District will relocate 1,870 students in kindergarten through eighth grade to schools farther away from the leak. AFP PHOTO / DAVID MCNEW / AFP / DAVID MCNEW (Photo credit should read DAVID MCNEW/AFP/Getty Images)

Playground equipment sits idle in a neighborhood where many people have left their homes because of a massive natural-gas leak in the Porter Ranch neighborhood of the of the San Fernando Valley region of Los Angeles, California, on December 22, 2015. Los Angeles City Attorney Mike Feuer announced that he will seek a court order on December 23 to speed up the relocation of families affected by the gas coming from the Aliso Canyon Storage Field since October 23. Los Angeles County officials have declared a state of emergency for Porter Ranch where more than 1,600 residents have been displaced. AFP PHOTO / DAVID MCNEW / AFP / DAVID MCNEW (Photo credit should read DAVID MCNEW/AFP/Getty Images)

An Air Quality Management District air monitoring trailer stands on Porter Ranch Community School which is closing as students are moved to another facility in response to a massive natural-gas leak in the Porter Ranch neighborhood of the of the San Fernando Valley region of Los Angeles, California, December 22, 2015. Los Angeles City Attorney Mike Feuer announced that he will seek a court order December 23rd to speed up the relocation of families affected by the gas coming from the Aliso Canyon Storage Field since October 23rd. Los Angeles County officials have declared a state of emergency for Porter Ranch where more than 1,600 residents have been displaced. The Federal Aviation Administration has ordered a no-fly zone over the leak, and the Los Angeles Unified School District will relocate 1,870 students in kindergarten through eighth grade to schools farther away from the leak. AFP PHOTO / DAVID MCNEW / AFP / DAVID MCNEW (Photo credit should read DAVID MCNEW/AFP/Getty Images)

On top of being an explosive hazard, the methane is also a potent greenhouse gas that's reportedly affecting both the atmosphere and the well-being of many nearby residents.

Thousands have been forced to evacuate the area, and students there will have to move to different schools. And several lawsuits have already been filed by people who claim they've been harmed by the leak.

"I have felt the effects, as my husband has — the stomach, the vomiting, the headaches. But when my 17-month-old son has to be on a nebulizer and comes home with bloody noses, there's no excuse,"

A spokesperson for the storage facility's owner, Southern California Gas Co.,

the leak likely began when an underground well-casing failed, which allowed pressurized gas to push through to the surface.

So far, efforts to contain the gas leak have been unsuccessful, and state officials say it could take months before it's stopped.

Summary: The leak is releasing up to 110,000 pounds of gas per hour. An underground well-casing might have failed, pushing the pressurized gas to the surface.