"I'm not a fan of airports," says Richard Wilson, getting into the lift at the end of a low-ceilinged corridor, after traipsing through Heathrow's warren of tunnels and travelators. "They can be spectacularly dreary places. There's usually nothing to do, except shuffle around looking at ties."

A moment later, the lift doors open, and our view is filled with an eruption of aluminium. A twisting, tumbling swoosh of metal leaps from one side of the atrium to the other.

"I thought this might make the journey a bit more exciting," says the 60-year-old artist, jumping back on the heels of his Doc Marten boots, a wild mop of hair swishing behind his balding head, giving him the look of a punk professor caught mid-Eureka moment. "I wanted to stop passengers in their tracks and make them go 'Oh shit!'"

In front of us, filling the entrance to Heathrow's new Terminal 2, stretches his latest work, Slipstream, a monumental feat that has been showered with superlatives before it has even opened. It is the longest piece of permanent art as well as the largest privately funded sculpture in Europe, stretching to 80 metres and weighing 77 tonnes. "It's my most expensive too," grins Wilson – costing £2.5m to build.

It may be only a thousandth of the total budget of the terminal project, and an even tinier fraction of the airport's ongoing £11bn transformation, but it is hoped that this billowing cloud of aluminium will leave the biggest impression on the 20 million visitors who will pass beneath it every year, once the terminal is open from June.

Plunging from the ceiling in a dramatic twist, performing an improbable back-flip at the arrivals level before swooping up past the escalator in a daring barrel roll towards departures, this sinuous metal serpent traces the path of an air show stunt plane, frozen in time and space. "It's like the trail behind every football in Roy of the Rovers comics," says Wilson, sweeping his hands through the air after an imaginary ball. "Everything leaves an invisible trail and I wanted to make that tangible, expressing the velocity and acceleration of flight."

It is a dream that preoccupied the Italian futurist sculptors a century ago, drunk on the smell of engine oil, their striding figures buffeted with the thrill of the new machine age. With its hand-riveted, semi-buffed surface, Slipstream could almost be of that era, celebrating the early age of flight, not the carbon-fibre sweeps of today's stunt planes.

"I wanted it to have a romantic feel," says Wilson, "recalling Donald Campbell and his Bluebird machines and that spirit of awe-inspiring adventure." He intends the work to have the same "wow factor" he experienced as a boy when he was taken to the Natural History Museum and encountered the blue whale for the first time, gawping at the great beast held aloft in the middle of the room. "It wasn't because I loved whales, but because there was this vast mass suspended in the space. It looked impossible."

Staging the impossible is what Wilson has since built a career on, performing surreal spatial stunts with buildings, constructing tricks that inspire a sense of childlike awe. Feeding off the spectacular scale of American land art as a student in the 1970s, he first shot to prominence in the late 80s when he filled Matt's Gallery in east London with sump oil, drawing visitors into an inky black abyss. Hailed as a defining work of site-specific installation art, and snapped up by Charles Saatchi, who has since restaged the piece around the world, it set the artist on a trajectory of interfering with existing structures, subverting our expectations of how buildings should behave.

With the beguiling hand of an architectural alchemist, Wilson has sliced a great circle out of a concrete facade in Liverpool and set it spinning. He has scrunched up an entire stone corner of the London School of Economics into a rocky tumble, hanging precipitously above the street in Aldwych, and sliced a Thames dredger in half and anchored it outside the Millennium Dome. And, in an Italian Job moment of high farce, he has balanced a bus on the parapet of the De La Warr pavilion in Bexhill, and left it teetering in the breeze. In his dreamlike view of the world, bits of buildings are liberated to take on their own lives and attempt unexpected feats: floors can shift and windows can hover – and now, it seems, planes can spurt out shimmering aluminium vapour trails.

So how did he conjure his latest trick?

"Imagine if this whole space was filled with clay," he says, as we stand at the bottom of the terminal's covered court, an airy atrium equivalent in size to the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern – but which will see four times the number of annual visitors. "Then imagine that a stunt plane flew through it, spinning and cartwheeling to carve out a void through the clay, and then that void was filled with metal."

Knowing his previous work, it would be no surprise if this is how he had produced the metallic splurge. In fact he did, sort of, only on a smaller scale in his Bermondsey studio, heating up a model Spitfire on the end of a rod and plunging it at speed through an industrial vat of margarine, before casting its greasy flight path in plaster.

"It was a total mess," he says. "So we did it on the computer instead."

With the expertise of engineers Price and Myers, who have helped his projects to defy the laws of physics in the past, a digital model of a Zivko Edge 540 stunt plane was "thrown", not flown, along a path, encouraged to tumble and turn in unlikely ways.

"I've never had an idea like this where I can't actually show what it would look like," says Wilson. "I tried drawings, cardboard models, and rolling a model plane along inside a hamster ball, but the digital model was the only way of making it come alive."

Manufactured by specialist fabricators Commercial Systems International in Hull – a process that formed part of the city's Capital of Culture bid, and which might see Wilson return for a city-wide show in 2017 – the sculpture was designed like a steel bridge and transported to London in 23 separate chunks, shuttled across the runways by night. Within the shiny carcass, plywood sheets extend from a steel frame like slices in a loaf of bread, their profiles straddled by ribs and clad with a plywood skin, on to which the aluminium sheets are riveted, producing a carefully tailored surface.

Fixed on sliding bearings, each section of the sculpture spans 18 metres between the four steel columns, no mean feat given they were only designed to hold up the roof. The sculpture's ducks and dives were curtailed by the all-important way-finding strategy, carving rigid sight-lines through the building from entrances to exits, while its nose was cut short to prevent it blocking the departures screen. An original idea to have it shooting straight out of the hall towards the runway was also scuppered by budget limitations.

"Other artists might have thrown a tantrum at certain points," says Wilson, whose team was subcontracted to the builder as part of an elaborate procurement process. "But all my work deals with these existing situations, and the conflicts of multiple parties, so I've learned to compromise."

Hanging there with its streamlined folds of metal, like a wayward chunk ripped from a Frank Gehry building, Slipstream is a radical departure from the artist's previous work. Wilson's last encounter with an aircraft involved crushing a Cessna, then having it gradually unfurled back into shape while suspended in the Wapping Project space, like a crumpled letter retrieved from the bin. By contrast, the sculpted twists of Slipstream seem almost too well-behaved.

"I didn't want to upset the passengers," says Wilson, who is himself an uneasy flyer. "People can be nervous in airports, so the building shouldn't start to look unstable too."

The project was the brainchild of curator Mark Davy, who runs Futurecity, an organisation dedicated to "intervening early on in big capital projects and carving out a budget for art as part of the whole process, rather than seeing it as a bolt-on afterthought." Here at Heathrow, the money that would have been spent on landscaping, transforming this atrium with a big green canopy, was redirected towards making an artistic intervention, at no additional cost.

Heathrow hopes the work will "improve the passenger experience", which it no doubt will, but it also feels airport-ready, somewhat neutered of any greater power – the result of a brief to fill a space, which could be anywhere. It is a frequent outcome for site-specific work, which began in the late 1960s as a reaction to the growing commodification of art, but during the 80s and 90s was all too often a ready-made garnish for corporate lobbies and commercial piazzas – what American architect James Wines summed up as the "turd on the plaza".

Slipstream is no thoughtless turd, but in Wilson's hands, arriving at this terminal could have become a truly special and unsettling experience, the generic architecture of an undulating roof on soaring columns somehow corrupted or supercharged. Why didn't he choose to play more with the building?

"I've already done those party pieces," he says. "With work like that, people always expect you to do something more zany than the last piece, and it gets quite tiring."

He says he wants to do bigger work, and more of it, having seen his contemporaries, such as Anish Kapoor and Antony Gormley, rocket into the lucrative world of vast commissions and big gallery shows. He also cites Thomas Heatherwick and Olafur Eliasson as models, both of whom run big commercially successful offices staffed heavily by architects. "Other artists have great business brains," says Wilson, "but it's taken me until I'm 60 to start thinking about making money."

He is currently looking for a new studio, and hopes to start building a bigger team. "I've always pushed myself to work in unfamiliar territory, to keep things interesting," he says. "I like to keep people guessing."

Summary: Oliver Wainwright: Richard Wilson made his prototype for Heathrow's new mega-sculpture Slipstream using a model Spitfire, a stick and some margarine. But is his swooping epic too great a departure from his mischievous past?


FORTUNE — Even if you use a Galaxy phone, how much do you really know about the company that made it? Can you name Samsung’s chief executive officer? Or, for that matter, any of the conglomerate’s top leaders? Do you have any sense for what it’s like working for Samsung? Do you know how much money it makes or whether it gives any of that money away to charities? Probably not, finds a new survey from Harris Interactive.

The annual Harris Poll Reputation Quotient, published Tuesday, sheds some new light on consumers’ perceptions of smartphone king Samsung Electronics. The Korean company has seen a meteoric rise in smartphone sales and in consumer awareness of its brand. In 2011, respondents didn’t even mention Samsung when asked to name the most “visible” companies. In this most recent survey, Samsung not only made the list, it also topped Apple AAPL in categories like “products providing great value.” But the survey also found that, while Samsung’s reputation has significantly improved, there is a lot consumers don’t know about Samsung — beyond the smartphones, phablets and tablets they are increasingly purchasing and using. And that information gap, despite the company’s recent growth, could turn out to be a problem.

“It’s uncommon, going from completely unmentioned to one of the strongest,” says Robert Fronk, executive vice president at Harris Interactive. “But it’s a tenuous hold. When you are one-dimensional you tend to fall off quickly.”

MORE: Samsung’s road to global domination

Fronk suggests Samsung should work on developing its “softer side” — sharing its corporate and leadership story, not just focusing on products in its outreach to media and consumers. As a Korea-based, global conglomerate, it is at a disadvantage in the U.S., but it can overcome this challenge (just look to Toyota TM and Honda for examples of Asia-based companies that have become beloved brands in North America). And becoming a brand that’s known not just for specific products but for a broader corporate identity takes time.

“Apple built its reputation over time,” says Fronk. “Eventually people made the jump from loving their iPods to loving and respecting Apple.”

Of course, Apple has a network of its own retail stores where customers can interact with Apple employees and get first-person look at the company’s style — down to its detail-oriented approach and minimalistic design. Samsung has opened up a handful of “Galaxy Studios,” where consumers can play around with its devices, though they are ultimately directed to nearby carrier stores to actually make purchases. The company has also made efforts to build its presence in the Silicon Valley, where many members of the tech media reside.

Why should Samsung care about showing more of its “corporate face?” Every company fumbles sometimes (just ask Apple). And when Samsung does, customers who can connect a face to the name may be just a tad more forgiving.

Summary: Millions of people are familiar with Samsung-made smartphones or TVs. But their knowledge of the Korean electronics giant often stops there, according to a new survey from market research firm Harris Interactive.


Pier pressure ... The Crates, a 'recycled museum' in New York

On Pier 54, which juts out over the Hudson in downtown Manhattan (and is where the Titanic would have docked if it had made it to New York), a colossal "nomadic museum" is being assembled from shipping containers stacked in a colourful checkerboard pattern. As the Gates are being dismantled in Central Park, the Crates have become the new talk of the town.

The recycled museum, which opens for three months on March 5, has been specially commissioned by the Canadian photographer Gregory Colbert to house 200 of his photographs. Colbert - who sells his large, sepia-tinted images for up to $350,000 each to clients such as Donna Karan - has spent the past 13 years shooting himself, Bushmen and Buddhist monks communing with elephants, whales and cheetahs. He plans to produce "a gigantic bestiary" thatwill tour the world like a makeshift Noah's Ark.

Designed by Shigeru Ban, the crates form an impressive 45,000 sq ft cathedral - two soccer pitches long, with an imposing nave created from 64 towering cardboard-tube columns. (The Tokyo architect, who was a finalist in the competition to replace the World Trade Centre and is a pioneer of sustainable building, calls cardboard "improved wood".)

I meet Colbert, 44, at the noisy construction site opposite the meatpacking district. He has a greying ponytail, wears a Gucci trenchcoat and has recently returned from a lengthy field trip to the Antarctic, where he photographed emperor penguins from a Russian icebreaker. His pictures, he tells me, are designed to capture the "magical alchemy" between man and animals.

In a large transparent tent, his assistants are ironing endless squares of a strange fabric. "When I was in Sri Lanka working with a herd of elephants," explains Colbert, who spends half the year in exotic locations, "there was this whole shipment of tea bags that had been damaged by humidity - over a million of them. So I bought them all and we dried them, removed all the tea and glued the million pieces together." The assistants are covering the tea bags in beeswax and turning them into an enormous screen.

A film, narrated by Laurence Fishburne, will be screened at the altar end of the museum and shows Colbert "dancing with whales" and romping with elephants. "A sperm whale did try to eat me once," Colbert says casually, "and I was tossed by an elephant, though I've never had a life insurance policy." There is a slight pause before he adds: "And now that I've said this on record, I won't have much chance of getting one."

Summary: Art: On Pier 54, which juts out over the Hudson in downtown Manhattan a colossal "nomadic museum" is being assembled from shipping containers   stacked in a colourful checkerboard pattern.


Jennifer Cramblett (right) and her partner Amanda Zinkon (left). (Facebook)

A white woman in the US is suing a sperm bank, alleging the firm mistakenly gave her vials from an African-American donor.

She says it has made it difficult for her and her same-sex partner to raise their now two-year-old daughter in an all-white community.

Jennifer Cramblett from Ohio alleges in the lawsuit filed on Monday in Cook County Circuit Court that Midwest Sperm Bank, based in Illinois, sent her the vials of an African-American donor's sperm in 2011 instead of those of a white donor she and her white partner had ordered.

After searching through pages of comprehensive histories for their top three donors, the lawsuit claims, Cramblett and her partner, Amanda Zinkon, chose donor No. 380, who was also white.

Their doctor in Ohio received vials from donor No. 330, who is African-American, the lawsuit said.

Cramblett, 36, learned of the mistake in April 2012, when she was pregnant and ordering more vials so that the couple could have another child with sperm from the same donor.

Cramblett is suing Midwest Sperm Bank for wrongful birth and breach of warranty, citing the emotional and economic losses she has suffered.

A lawyer for Midwest Sperm Bank said the company would not comment on pending litigation.

"On August 21, 2012, Jennifer gave birth to Payton, a beautiful, obviously mixed-race baby girl," the lawsuit states.

"Jennifer bonded with Payton easily and she and Amanda love her very much. Even so, Jennifer lives each day with fears, anxieties and uncertainty about her future and Payton's future."

Raising a mixed-race daughter has been stressful in Cramblett and Zinkon's small, all-white community, according to the suit.

Cramblett was raised around people with stereotypical attitudes about non-whites, the lawsuit states, and did not know African-Americans until she attended college at the University of Akron.

"Because of this background and upbringing, Jennifer acknowledges her limited cultural competency relative to African-Americans and steep learning curve, particularly in small, homogenous Uniontown, which she regards as too racially intolerant," the lawsuit states.

Part of that learning curve has included getting her daughter's hair cut, which according to the suit requires Cramblett to travel to a black neighbourhood, "where she is obviously different in appearance, and not overtly welcome."

She fears that her "all-white and unconsciously insensitive family," who has never been able to fully embrace Jennifer's homosexuality, could have a negative effect on her daughter, according to the lawsuit.

"Jennifer's stress and anxiety intensify when she envisions Payton entering an all-white school."

The lawsuit alleges that the error occurred because the sperm bank keeps handwritten instead of electronic records, which allowed the donor numbers to be misread.

A month after Cramblett said she learned of the mistake, according to the lawsuit, the sperm bank sent her a typed letter of apology along with a refund check for the six vials of incorrect sperm that were sent to her in September 2011.

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Summary: A white woman is suing a sperm bank in the US after it sent her vials from a black donor, resulting in the birth of a mixed-race baby.


For Apple, Greater China has been one of its fastest growing markets for iPhone sales, so the company wants to more than double its presence there.

Timothy Cook, Apple’s chief executive, said in an interview with Sina, the Chinese media outlet, on Thursday that Apple planned to open 25 retail stores in Greater China over the next two years, adding to the 15 stores it operates in the region.

Cook essentially reiterated what he said earlier in the week about Apple’s worldwide expansion in a call with analysts after the company released quarterly earnings results. But his comments to Chinese news outlets add emphasis to the company’s determination to expand in that market.

Many of the new stores he spoke of in the analysts’ call will be in the region that includes mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, which shows that Apple is hoping most of its growth will come from there.

Cook also told Sina that it was only a matter of time until most of Apple’s sales come from Greater China. Over the last quarter, about 14 percent of Apple’s sales came from the region.

For Apple, becoming big in China is no easy feat. The Asian handset-makers Xiaomi, Samsung, Lenovo, Yulong, and Huawei dominate the Chinese market. Apple is next. Apple also faces a particularly tough competitor in Xiaomi, which quickly rose to the top of the Chinese smartphone market with its business model of selling phones nearly at cost, and making money from software and Internet services.

However, there is lots of potential for Apple to become much bigger in China. In its third fiscal quarter, Apple’s revenue in China grew 28 percent compared with the same quarter a year ago. And this year, Apple began selling iPhones on China Mobile, the largest phone carrier in the world with about 800 million subscribers.

When reached for comment, an Apple spokeswoman said she had not received an English transcript of Cook’s interview with Sina.

Summary: For Apple, Greater China has been one of its fastest growing markets for iPhone sales, so the company wants to more than double its presence there. Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, said in an interview with Sina, the Chinese media outlet, on Thursday that Apple planned to open 25 retail stores in Greater China over the next two years, adding to the 15 stores it operates in the region.


FORTUNE — If you don’t have 23 minutes to watch the video of Mary Meeker’s state-of-the-Internet report at AllThingsD 2013 — or if you just want a chance to study more closely slides that she showed for an average of 14 seconds each — here are the 10 that pertained to Apple AAPL .

They covered everything from the iPhone’s market share to Steve Jobs’ Syrian ancestry.

Click on any slide to enlarge it.

You can get Meeker’s full set of 117 slides from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, where the former Morgan Stanley PC/Internet analyst (and Katy Huberty’s mentor) now works as a venture capitalist.

See also: Mary Meeker’s conventional wisdom.

Summary: Apple figured prominently in the Queen of the Net's 2013 presentation of industry trends.


A 5-year-old boy under observation in a New York hospital over concerns he had Ebola has tested negative for the disease.

The boy was experiencing a 39.44C fever after returning from Guinea on Saturday, ABC News reported.

He remains under isolation as a precaution and is under observation at Bellevue Hospital.

The negative test comes after the city faced its first positive diagnosis last week.

Dr Craig Spencer worked in Guinea recently with Médecins Sans Frontières and fell ill upon his return to the United States.

He is being treated at the same hospital as the five-year-old boy.

Do you have any news photos or videos?

Summary: A 5-year-old boy is under observation in a New York hospital over concerns he has Ebola-like symptoms.


Santander Bank NA has agreed to provide $1.3 million in grants to low- and moderate-income neighborhoods in Providence to settle a lawsuit the city filed against the bank earlier this year, alleging lending discrimination.

The city on Monday dropped its suit against the Spanish bank, which has its US headquarters in Boston. The bank agreed to contribute between $350,000 and $500,000 to each of three Providence organizations.

The money will be used for financial literacy classes, mixed-use development projects, and helping lower-income residents with closing costs and down payments on homes.

“This is a big step in the right direction,” said Mayor Angel Taveras of Providence. “This is a step to engaging them further.”

The lawsuit, filed in May, accused Santander of curtailing mortgage lending to black and Hispanic residents while aggressively pursuing white borrowers, a practice known as redlining. City officials said applications to the bank for prime loans from minority neighborhoods fell by more than 60 percent in recent years.

At the time, Santander denied the allegations.

“Santander Bank and the City of Providence look forward to working together as partners to strengthen the community,” the bank said in a statement.

Providence’s lawsuit triggered national news media attention because of concerns that banks had tightened their lending practices following the financial crisis and made it more difficult for minorities to borrow money.

Redlining was more common in the past. In 1992, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston published a landmark study that found systemic racial discrimination in mortgage lending by the region’s banks. The study led to federal and state investigations into dozens of banks.

Shawmut Bank, which vanished in the bank mergers of the 1990s, paid a $960,000 settlement related to its lending practices at the time. Regulators also tightened their oversight of bank lending.

In the past decade, more complaints about the opposite problem have surfaced: Housing specialists accused banks of flooding minority communities with subprime mortgages, or loans that came with easy terms but very high interest rates. Such lending practices eventually triggered a cascade of foreclosures and the US financial crisis.

Summary: Santander Bank NA has agreed to provide $1.3 million in grants to low- and moderate-income neighborhoods in Providence to settle a lending discrimination lawsuit that the city had filed against the bank earlier this year.


Last Updated Nov 21, 2014 1:30 PM EST

The socially isolated, violence-obsessed man who carried out the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School had severe mental and emotional problems that went largely ignored by schools and possibly his parents, according to a report released Friday.

The Office of Child Advocate, which investigates all child deaths in the state, concluded that "weaknesses and lapses in the educational and healthcare systems' response and untreated mental illness played in Adam Lanza's deterioration."

The agency released its report nearly two years after Lanza killed his mother then shot his way through the Newtown school, gunning down 20 children and six educators before committing suicide.

The report notes that Lanza suffered from "significant developmental challenges from earliest childhood" and his preoccupation with violence appeared to go unaddressed by the school system and even his parents.

Authorities found violence-lanced writings and an arsenal of weapons in the Newtown home where he lived his mother, Nancy Lanza, and spent long hours playing shooter video games.

The authors of the 114-page report noted that although numerous mental health issues were not properly addressed and recommendations regarding Lanza's care went unheeded, they could not say whether more effective treatment could have prevented the tragedy.

"This report raises, but cannot definitively answer, the question as to whether better access to effective mental health and educational services would have prevented the tragic events at Sandy Hook," they wrote.

At different stages of his childhood, Lanza was diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder, anxiety, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and Asperger syndrome. The report says that Lanza resisted taking medication for his anxiety and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder - a decision that was apparently supported by his mother. Lanza also apparently disagreed with his Asperger's diagnosis.

The report concluded that the school system cared about Lanza's success but also "unwittingly enabled Mrs. Lanza's preference to accommodate and appease" him.

Adam Lanza apparently cut off contact with his father in 2010 and "did not respond to numerous emails Mr. Lanza sent between 2010 and 2012 seeking to spend time with him." Lanza's parents separated in 2001 when he was nine years old.

The report also asks whether a family that was not white or as affluent as the Lanzas would have been given the same leeway to manage treatment for their troubled child.

"Is the community more reluctant to intervene and more likely to provide deference to the parental judgment and decision-making of white, affluent parents than those caregivers who are poor or minority?" the report said.

The authors of the report also noted that Lanza's parents and the school tended to view him as "intellectually gifted" even though psychological testing indicated his cognitive abilities were average.

Documents released by police in December 2013 included descriptions of sporadic treatment for his mental health troubles. At one point, experts at the Yale Child Studies Center prescribed antidepressant/anti-anxiety medication, but his mother discontinued the treatment after her son was unable to raise his arm after taking the medicine and never scheduled follow-up visits, police reports said.

The Yale Child Study Center, which evaluated Lanza at age 14, recommended that Lanza receive "extensive special education supports, ongoing expert consultation, and rigorous therapeutic supports embedded into (his) daily life."

Those recommendations, the report said, went largely unheeded.

A Connecticut judge last year ordered Newtown school officials to give Lanza's records the Office of Child Advocate for its investigation. The governor's Sandy Hook Advisory Commission has been waiting for the office's report before releasing its recommendations on what the state can do to prevent and respond to future incidents.

© 2014 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Summary: New information released about the background of the socially isolated, violence-obsessed man who carried out the 2012 massacre


Despite all the tongue wagging over Google co-founder Sergey Brin occasionally choosing to doff his Google Glass(es) in public, it would be tough to find a big business that isn’t studying the technology, especially for applications in field service, manufacturing and logistics.

After all, there could be roughly 130 million devices around our wrists or on our bodies by then. Wearables adoption could rival that of tablet computers. Why not use these “consumer” gadgets to corporate advantage?

The answer to that question isn’t solely tied to how quickly these gadgets mature, of course.

As with other emerging technologies, the pace of adoption will be gated just as much by human resources and corporate security policies as by how quickly features become available. I debated the ethical considerations with Mike Heembrock, vice president and executive specialist with Chubb Group of Insurance Companies. “This is new territory in many cases,” he said. No kidding.

Heembrock’s team is studying how wearables could impact everything from worker’s compensation claims to data breach policy coverage. “You have to weigh the potential for misuse against the value of the initiative,” he said.

Most applications Chubb is studying are still conceptual, but Heembrock cites real evidence of how the technology could help with safety. An example he offers: some real estate companies are starting to supply gadgets to agents who are showing property by themselves to strangers, so they can “call” for help if they’re attacked or find themselves in a threatening situation. The technology can also offer witness.

A use case such as this one sounds logical and beneficial, but here’s the real question: should wearing that device be required or voluntary? The answer makes a difference to both employee and employer. Here are three primary questions to ponder:

How is your company dealing with wearable ethics and security? Send feedback to datasheet@heatherclancy.com.

This item first appeared in the Nov. 25 edition of Data Sheet, Fortune’s daily newsletter on the business of technology. Sign up here.

For more about potential field applications of wearable technology, read: “‘Search: How do I punch this rivet hole?’” by Erin Griffith.

Summary: As consumer fitness gadgets, smart watches and smart eyeglasses show up in offices, factories and repair trucks, questions around privacy, security and reliability will become paramount.


Europe’s elected elite want to break up Google. The technology giant, known for its web search engine but offering many other products and services, can too easily promote its own wares, they say. Yet leading experts and academics say it’s not going to happen, calling it a nuclear option that would have made more sense in larger, prior corporate scandals.

The European Parliament in late October called on Internet companies operating in the region to “unbundle” its search engines from its other commercial properties. Although no companies were named, the motion was aimed squarely at Google GOOG , the leading search engine by a long shot in Europe with an estimated 90 percent market share.

The non-binding resolution had no legal weight, but sent the strongest signal yet to the European Commission to take action after almost four-years worth of unsuccessful negotiations to settle an ongoing antitrust probe into the company’s business practices. The company has been accused of anti-competitiveness including claims it deliberate buried search results of rival sites and services. The recent motion sought to “prevent any abuse in the marketing of interlinked services by operators of search engines.”

Newly-elected EU competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager said in November that she would “need some time” to review the case, which has been kept open by her predecessor Joaquín Almunia, and talk to complainants before moving forward.

So now what? There are several paths forward, experts say.

“What’s most likely to happen, and what will hopefully happen, is a continuation of the resolution for which Almunia set the framework before he left office,” says David Balto, a former U.S. Justice Department antitrust lawyer.

Politics and pressure behind the scenes from Google’s competitors—including Microsoft MSFT —have dragged the case out “to draw as much blood as possible,” Balto argues. Shortly after the parliament’s vote, one unnamed senior EU official told Reuters that the 28-member state bloc had been used as a “battleground” by American companies. After three rounds of settlement negotiations, Balto says Google’s efforts to address the matter have resulted in better competition in the region.

One question is whether the Commission has enough evidence to support moving from seeking a settlement to conducting an infringement procedure. Florian Wagner-von Papp, director of the University College London’s Institute of Global Law, tells Fortune that he wishes the EC would “put up or shut up.” Antitrust officials should either charge the search giant with flouting European antitrust law, he says, or drop the case altogether. The alternative? More settlement negotiations and “political mud-slinging” by Google’s supporters and opponents.

By charging Google with antitrust offenses, the Commission can take any measures it deems necessary to end that infringement. Could that really include a break-up of Google? In theory, yes—the European Commission’s antitrust division has the right to force a company operating in the region to restructure. But Wagner-von Papp is willing to make a big bet that it won’t happen. “The Commission has to date never imposed a structural remedy in an infringement decision,” he says.

Still, a move toward an infringement decision could leave Google facing fines of up to 10 percent of its annual global sales for the affected years, a staggering amount totaling billions of dollars. The reality has been more conservative. The biggest antitrust fine in the region’s history—levied against Intel years ago but later upped by Europe’s top court—barely broke 4 percent.

Splitting up Google by unbundling its search business from its advertising business would leave the company without a way to make money from its search results, Wagner-von Papp says. Such a move is “nonsense,” he says. “The search engine can be free for users only because Google gets its revenue from advertisers and can channel consumers to their vertical search results,” he says, “much like newspapers can be free if it sells ad space for a high price.”

Balto agrees, calling it an “extreme proposal” that few people take seriously. “Google relies on a lot of synergies among products and advertising revenue that works across products to do what they do,” he says. Consumers would actually suffer if Google’s search business was unbundled from its advertising services.

Politics remain a sore point for those involved. The European Parliament’s involvement was unusual without any prior committee inquiry, Brussels-based antitrust solicitor Matthew Hall says, and the parties on each side of Google are pushing for their own resolution to the case.

During his tenure as Europe’s antitrust chief, Almunia made it clear that he would not be swayed by politics. It’s not yet clear which path Vestager plans to take or which cards she will play to get there. Vestager will “decide on how to take the ongoing antitrust investigations into Google’s business practices forward once she has heard what those most directly affected by the practices in question have to say,” a spokesperson for the European Commission says.

Balto is optimistic. “There are good signs that Vestager will not be swayed,” he says. “I don’t think the delay will lead to a rush to judgment.”

Summary: Parliamentarians want Google to split its search business from its other services. Experts say that won't happen.


Dennis Simpson's five-bedroom, seven-bathroom home in San Diego, California

02/19/2015 AT 07:15 AM EST

One thing you can say about Paul and Gina Schwendel is that they certainly appreciate luxurious rental homes.

Problem is, they don't like paying for them, which is something that their current landlord Dennis Simpson has learned the hard way. In August, Simpson rented the couple his $4.4 million property – complete with five bedrooms, seven bathrooms, a pool and views to die for – in San Diego, California. The place went for $12,500 a month.

"They were real friendly, had four kids, drove nice cars and had cashier's checks," Simpson tells PEOPLE. "But I didn't do my due diligence."

By December, the Schwendels had "bounced" their first rent check, although they later "made good on it," Simpson tells PEOPLE. The next month, they only paid half the rent, citing a laundry list of problems with the property, then eventually stopped payment on that check. Simpson insists he was unaware of any problems with the new residence and spent the next week and half trying to get access to the property to repair them.

Once he did get inside, he says it quickly became evident that the couple had "manufactured" all the problems. "They were all very small things and that's when I realized, 'Uh oh, I've got a professional scammer here,' " says Simpson, who soon requested they vacate the property.

But that was only the start of it. Over the next few weeks, the Schwendels changed the locks on the residence, then filed a restraining order against Simpson, who by then had learned from attorneys and the couple's former landlords that they had reportedly pulled similar scams in 30 different high-end rental houses over the past decade.

"One of the landlords I spoke with just moaned and said, 'It was hell getting them out. They still owe us over $100,000,' " says Simpson.

Orange County, California, eviction attorney Steven Silverstein knows all about the couple. "I evicted them from a $13,000-a-month rental property in 2013," Silverstein tells PEOPLE. "It took us four months to get him out after they stopped paying rent, but we eventually got our money. He's what I'd call a 'professional tenant.' He flashes money, cars and goes from house to house and gets evicted. It really has shades of

PEOPLE reached out to the Schwendels through their attorney and a phone number linked to the Atlanta-based Evolution Healthcare that lists Paul as its CEO, but never received a response. Simpson has served the couple with a lawsuit, but has been told it could take another six months to get them out of the home. By then, the couple's unpaid rent will have reached a whopping $112,500.

Simpson admits he dropped the ball by not doing a background check on the couple after his realtor, who introduced him to the Schwendels, insisted that they would be "good" tenants. "I'm building two other houses and just didn't give this the attention I should have," he says. "Believe me, next time I'll do things differently."

around the globe in recent days, something the property owner never expected. "I even got a call from Dr. Phil, trying to get us to both go on his show," Simpson says with a laugh. "But I just can't see these people agreeing to go on national TV and expose their scam to the nation."

Summary: Dennis Simpson thought his tenants were a "nice" couple. And then ...


United Technologies UTX will explore spinning off its Sikorsky helicopter unit, in the first major move by the company’s new chief executive officer to overhaul the U.S. conglomerate’s portfolio of businesses.

The company’s board authorized the review, which also could include a sale of the maker of Black Hawk helicopters. Sikorsky had $7.5 billion in sales last year. The review is expected to finish before the end of the year.

Sikorsky’s fit with United Tech, which had $65 billion in overall sales last year, has been long debated on Wall Street. The potential split is the first major strategic move under Chief Executive Officer Greg Hayes, who was elevated in November after previously serving as finance chief.

The company’s portfolio review found that “while Sikorsky is a great helicopter company, it probably didn’t fit into the UTC portfolio,” Hayes told reporters.

Hayes said the company was very comfortable with its other businesses, which include Pratt & Whitney jet engines, Otis elevators and Carrier climate control systems. Splitting apart its aerospace and commercial building segments would not create much value, he said.

The new CEO is set to discuss the decision at United Tech’s highly anticipated investor day on Thursday in New York.

Sikorsky did not match up with the rest of the company on several fronts, Hayes said. Its margins of 10% lagged the target of at least 15% for UTC’s businesses.

While UTC wants to capitalize on growth in commercial aerospace and urbanization in emerging markets, Sikorsky is primarily a military contractor, with the U.S. Department of Defense representing two-third of sales.

United Tech shares have climbed 7% since Hayes was named CEO, compared to a 1% decline for the S&P 500 index.

The Sikorsky move comes as many diverse manufacturers such as General Electric GE have taken hard looks at their businesses to determine best strategic fits.

While the focus is on spinning off Sikorsky, Hayes said acquisition interest might come from companies in the United States, or Europe.

A standalone Sikorsky could be an attractive takeover target for Boeing BA or Textron Inc, RBC Capital Markets analyst Robert Stallard said in a recent research note.

Hayes said the company had spoken to government officials in Washington who believe a standalone Sikorsky would be a viable supplier.

Summary: First major move by new CEO to overhaul the U.S. conglomerate's portfolio of businesses.


SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg -- working to sidestep communicating through media -- took matters into his own hands by holding his second public question-and-answer session Friday to address users directly.

At the event, held at the social network’s Menlo Park, California-based headquarters, Zuckerberg discussed everything from parenting to pizza.

One woman asked Zuckerberg, ‘‘If you and I were married, how would we handle Facebook with our daughter?’’ He responded that it would depend on whether the daughter is 13 yet -- that’s Facebook’s required minimum age to become a user.

‘‘I would not allow my child under the age of 13 to use Facebook,’’ he said. After she was old enough, they would have a talk about bullying and other things to watch out for on social media, he said.

That doesn’t mean Zuckerberg’s hypothetical children would be banned from technology. The CEO doesn’t have kids, but said when he does, he’ll reflect on how his adolescence was shaped by technology and how it turned out to be a good thing.

‘‘Society has a pretty overbearing attitude and we treat children as if they don’t know how to do stuff,’’ he said. ‘‘I would want my children to use technology because I think it’s one of the ways that you become literate and learn the skills that you need to for the modern world.’’

Zuckerberg was asked if he’d ever implement a ‘‘dislike’’ button, since there are some things that are inappropriate to ‘‘like.’’ He said Facebook decided against it since such a button could spread negativity.

‘‘A lot of times people share things on Facebook that are sad moments in their lives,’’ he said. ‘‘What’s the right way to make it so people can easily express a broader range of emotions? To empathize?

Don’t expect a new button any time soon, he said. But it makes sense to think about the issue so the company can figure out the right way to connote emotions.

Facebook spooked people this year when it published the results of a 2012 psychological experiment that altered the number of positive or negative posts in some members’ news feeds. The social network was forced to apologize.

Asked about the fallout, Zuckerberg said, ‘’We took that opportunity to go internally and reflect on whether we had a good process internally, and we tightened things up a bit.’’

Facebook won’t stop testing because that’s what improves its product, he said. Yet it shouldn’t do certain kinds of tests haphazardly: Mood testing, privacy testing, and testing on minors are particularly sensitive, and should either go through a different kind of review or not be done at all.

Zuckerberg was asked for his favorite pizza topping.

‘‘My view on this important issue is that if you’re going to be eating pizza, you might as well also have fried chicken on top of the pizza,’’ he said.

The CEO’s tone made it unclear whether he was actually a fan, or joking about gluttony. He then quickly asked for the next question.


SAN FRANCISCO — Would you pay to see some of the Internet’s most compelling video clips first? Vessel, a new service trying to change the way that short video pieces make money on the Internet and mobile devices, is betting on it.

Instead of free-for-all distribution supported solely by advertising, Vessel will charge $3 per month for exclusive early access to clips of musicians, sporting events, comedians, and many other forms of entertainment not available on YouTube or any other digital video service for at least three days. Chief executive Jason Kilar, formerly head of Hulu Plus, believes Vessel’s model will be able to pay video producers about $50 per 1,000 views of their clips on the site. That compares with just $2.20 per 1,000 views of ad-supported video at sites such as YouTube, Kilar says.

The extra money, in theory, will provide digital video producers with the means and incentive to create more compelling content that will prod more people to subscribe to Vessel. The same ‘‘virtuous cycle’’ has enabled Internet video service Netflix to finance more of its own original programming and pay more money to license entertainment while its audience has nearly tripled to 57 million customers from 20 million in the past four years.

‘‘We think this is going to be a really big deal, like the advent of cable and satellite television in the 1970s,’’ Kilar, 43, says of Vessel.

YouTube, which is owned by Google Inc., says Kilar’s estimates are wrong but declined to reveal its average payout per 1,000 views. Payments to YouTube partners have increased by at least 50 percent in each of the past three years, the company says. Research firm eMarketer Inc. estimated that YouTube’s total ad revenue last totaled $7.6 billion and about $4.6 billion was paid out to YouTube’s partners.

The concept, which has been in beta testing for two months, debuts Tuesday. Anyone who signs up with Vessel by 3 a.m. Friday will receive a one-year subscription for free.

Vessel’s ambitions sound like wishful thinking to Forrester Research analyst Jim Nail, who doubts many people will pay to watch a video that will be available for free within a few days.

‘‘That kind of restriction only works when you have content that people are really knocking down the doors to see,’’ Nail says. ‘‘It is going to totally come down to what kind of content that they can get. Unless they have the content that justifies paying $3 a month, nothing will save them.’’

Vessel so far has about 70,000 video clips separated into about 160 categories, including sports, comedy, music, video games, and food. Many clips are free and supported by ads, just like most video on YouTube.

Vessel’s subscription side features videos from about 130 contributors. They include Emmy Award-winning actor Alec Baldwin, who is showcasing ‘‘Love Ride,’’ a series featuring him dispensing relationship advice in the back seat of taxis, and the online comedy duo of Rhett McLaughlin and Link Neal, who have more than 3 million subscribers on their YouTube channel.

Machinima chief executive Chad Gutstein anticipates a large audience will pay for early access to the video gaming specialist’s clips because video game enthusiasts ‘‘are more engaged and more obsessed with what they are doing than anything I have ever experienced. They just want to be there first.’’

Before Vessel, Kilar spent five years running online television streaming service Hulu, which was launched in 2007 by a group of TV networks trying to counter YouTube’s popularity. By the time Kilar stepped down in 2013, Hulu’s premium Plus service had attracted about 6 million subscribers, though it never mounted much of a challenge to YouTube, where about 300 hours of video is posted per minute.

Since Kilar and another former Hulu executive Rich Tom started Vessel last year, the San Francisco startup has raised $77 million from two venture capital firms, Greylock Partners and Benchmark Capital, and Amazon.com Inc. chief executive Jeff Bezos.

Summary: A new service is trying to change the way that short video pieces make money on the Internet and mobile devices.


TPG Capital was sued on Thursday by its former head of public affairs, who accused the private equity giant of ignoring his warnings that the firm may have violated securities regulations and defrauded investors out of millions of dollars as a result.

The whistleblower lawsuit, almost without precedent in the tight-knit world of private equity, was filed by Adam Levine, who had been an assistant White House press secretary under President George Bush in 2002-2003 and then worked at TPG from 2008 until the end of 2014. Levine says he was asked to leave the firm by senior executives after he raised concerns about TPG’s conduct, according to his lawsuit.

TPG, which has $65 billion under management and has, according to the lawsuit, been considering an initial public offering, was not immediately available for comment.

You can read the full complaint here:

TPG, co-founded in 1992 by Chairman David Bonderman, sued Levine in January, accusing him of downloading confidential documents including an internal email about TPG’s billing process and leaking them to the media. Levine said in his lawsuit that allegations he breached confidentiality agreements were false.

Levine’s suit alleges that TPG, whose past deals have included the takeovers of Burger King, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and the biggest-ever leveraged buyout, the $32 billion takeover of Texas utility TXU, miss-billed expenses, was flouting compliance rules, and gave inaccurate information about its investment team.

According to the filing in the San Francisco/Oakland division of the U.S. District Court in Northern California, Levine said he raised concerns that TPG was engaged in practices that he believed “violated securities laws, rules and regulations,” but was brushed off by its executives.

The suit alleges that in response to some of Levine’s concerns, TPG partner and senior counsel, Clive Bode, said if San Francisco-based Levine were in the same room as him, he would “smack” Levine’s head into a wall and “knock some fucking sense” into him.

Bode also told Levine he would have “hunted” him down and “gutted like a carp” if Levine had sent one particular email to Bode, according to the lawsuit. That email detailing some of Levine’s concerns had gone to other executives. Bode allegedly also told Levine that he would “fucking kill you” if Levine brought “Bonderman into it.”

Bode could not be immediately reached for comment.

Contacted by the SEC Levine has contacted the U.S. Securities and Exchanges Commission to disclose the alleged violations of regulations at TPG, the suit claims. SEC spokeswoman Florence Harmon said the regulator declined to comment.

Levine is bringing claims under federal and state whistleblower laws, including the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reforms, which created a private cause of action for whistleblowers whose employers retaliate against them for lawfully providing information to the SEC. His suit does not specifically address TPG’s case against him, which was filed in Texas.

The suit also alleges that one TPG fundraiser misrepresented when TPG’s Chief Investment Officer Jonathan Coslet started his job to make it seem that his investment record was better than it was, and alleges that TPG billed its portfolio companies with expenses that should have been charged to the business itself.

It also claims the firm was planning to expand its public affairs department by billing consultants time to portfolio companies rather than to TPG, which Levine argued was in breach of SEC regulations.

Private equity funds typically raise capital from investors and use that to buy companies. They aim to improve the value of those companies and sell them some years later at a profit.

Coslet could not be immediately reached for comment.

Fort Worth, Texas-based TPG claimed in its lawsuit that Levine referred to himself as a “weapon of mass destruction” and someone who could “bring TPG down in ten days”. TPG is seeking an injunction requiring Levine to return any of its confidential documents and electronic devices.

Levine says he was prompted to bring his concerns to TPG management after he attended a speech in May 2014 by Andrew Bowden, a director at the SEC’s Office of Compliance Inspections and Examinations (OCIE). In the speech, Bowden said that private equity funds routinely hide fees and overcharge investors.

Bowden said that an examination of advisers by OCIE showed violations of law or material weaknesses in controls over 50 percent of the time regarding how expenses and fees are handled. One example he highlighted was expenses being shifted to the client without proper disclosure.

Levine claims that bad practices highlighted by Bowden, such as private equity funds pushing expenses onto portfolio companies – and therefore onto the investors in its funds – when those costs should have been incurred by the management company itself, were “commonplace” at TPG.

Levine claims in the lawsuit that he is entitled to up to $738,761 for non-cash compensation owed to him, as well as general damages to recompense him for emotional distress. He is also seeking punitive damages.

Summary: Adam Levine, the company's former head of public affairs, alleges in a lawsuit that the company was flouting compliance rules, and gave inaccurate information about its investment team.


, the reality star finally told the truth about her sobriety.

"I am an alcoholic," she told Dr. Phil McGraw in a segment that aired Tuesday, later adding, "I just want to do the right thing, and I want to be the strongest I can be."

Here are five more revelations from

A child star known for her work throughout the '70s, Richards, 50, said she started "drinking at night" while caring for her late mother, who died in 2002.

"I realized I had started to become a person I didn't like, and I couldn't stand the sight of myself," she told McGraw, 64.

Personal tragedies continued to be triggers throughout her life, from

of fiancé John J. Collett in 1991 to ex-husband Monty Brinson's current battle with cancer.

"There isn't a day that goes by that I don't think about him," she said of Collett, crying.

, Richards insisted she was still sober, despite her erratic behavior at

's house after she took one of Brinson's pain pills.

"It is not a slip, and it is not a relapse," Richards told concerned costar

. "Was it wrong? Yes ... I'm not going to sit here and let you destroy me."

Speaking to McGraw, Richards repeated that she "had not drank in over three years."

That, she admitted in Tuesday's interview, was a lie.

"I did have drinks a couple other times over the past few months. It was wine. I was ashamed to say anything at the reunion, embarrassed," she said. "I would have loved to say to the girls, 'You know what, you're right,' but the way they were coming at me, they didn't make it easy."

After she stormed out of the interview, angry at the attempted intervention, McGraw's crew also recorded her telling son Chad that she smokes pot "every once in a while."

Still, Richards maintained she did not drink at all while filming

From left to right: Yolanda H. Foster, Eileen Davidson, Kim Richards, Brandi Glanville, Andy Cohen, Kyle Richards, Lisa Vanderpump, Lisa Rinna

Evans Vestal Ward / Bravo

As of the reunion's taping, Richards and her sister Kyle, 46, remained estranged, arguing about what really happening when

, Richards said the family fight influenced her decision to drink a glass of vodka the night of her arrest.

"The bottom line is, it's the overall outcome of where today is with my relationships with the people I love the most, and that's what really started getting me upset," she explained.

Now, the sisters could be on their way to rebuilding their relationship.

"She actually texted me after my arrest, for the first time in five months," Richards said through tears. "She asked me if I was okay. I haven't spoken to her, but I'm sure some people are having a field day with this, and I don't really care."

McGraw pointed out that being under such public scrutiny was a catalyst for Richards' relapse, asking her if should walk away from

if she can't handle the pressure.

"If I can't, yes, I will," she said simply.

After her kids Kimberly, Brooke and Chad joined the session, the family discussed Richards' friendship with costar

– a sore subject for Kyle on the show.

McGraw suggested Glanville, 42, is an enabler.

"Toxic, probably," Chad said, turning to his mom. "She's a good friend for you, but you gotta be hanging around people who are supporting your sobriety."

"She's never drank in front of me unless we're at work, and all the girls are drinking," Richards responded.

Kim Richards (left) and Brandi Glanville

Evans Vestal Ward / Bravo / NBC / Getty

Richards said she wants to seek help but needed a center close to her home and a program no longer than 30 days. McGraw arranged for her to stay at Malibu Beach Sober Living, but she became anxious, walking out of the interview.

A day later, McGraw said, he got a call from her accepting his offer, but then she "went back and forth again with demands."

On Sunday, PEOPLE confirmed that

"We certainly hope that's true," McGraw told viewers, "and we wish her the best."

Summary: "I just want to do the right thing, and I want to be the strongest I can be," she said


05/17/2015 AT 11:15 PM EDT

proved they're so much more than just "pretty girls" when they performed their new hit song for the first time at the

in Las Vegas Sunday night.

From the moment they touched down on stage, the duo kept the crowd cheering with a fun, colorful performance.

Spears, 33, was in her element and Azalea, 24, who's come under fire lately for her live performances, spit some pretty perfect verses.

A triumphant Spears took to

page after the performance to share a photo of herself posing with Azalea on stage.

, an awesomely '80s homage to

, on Wednesday. It features Azalea as an alien who crashes her spaceship right into valley girl Spears' pool.

The two stars bonded while working on the song.

"She's super nice," Azalea, 24, told MTV in March. "She came to my house and had lunch and I didn't know what to expect, and we actually really got along. I've been texting her, annoying her with all my ideas for the video and she's been a really good sport about it, so I'm really excited."

Summary: The duo put on a wild performance on Spears' Vegas stage


WASHINGTON, Oct. 5— Press and civil liberties groups have been marshaling support for a last-ditch effort tomorrow to amend a Housepassed bill that would make it a crime to identify intelligence operatives working under secret cover overseas, even in an article exposing illegal activities by those operatives.

The Senate Judiciary Committee is almost certain to approve a version of the bill tomorrow despite widespread doubts by critics of its constitutionality. But the vote on an amendment designed to exempt legitimate exposes of intelligence abuses is likely to be close.

The bill has been propelled by revulsion against Philip Agee, a former Central Intelligence Agency agen t, and Louis Wolf, editor of the Covert Action Information Bulletin, who h ave published lists of undercover C.I.A. agents in an effort to disr upt agency operations. It passed the House by a vote of 354 to 56.

Advocates have said the bill concerns only such self-appointed ''counterspies'' as Mr. Wolf and Mr. Agee, not at press efforts to expose intelligence abuses. House Version is Broad

But the House version is worded so broadly that it might cover newspaper stories disclosing the C.I.A. connections of some of the Watergate burglars, the names of crime figures reportedly hired to assassinate President Fidel Castro of Cuba, and the millions of dollars the agency paid King Hussein of Jordan.

Even the narrower version, favored as a lesser of evils by press and civil liberties groups, would for the first time make it a crime in some cases to publish unclassified information lawfully obtained from public sources.

The legislation is part of a broad effort by the Administration and its allies in Congress to insulate the C.I.A.'s secrets from exposure and scrutiny. Agency officials say that such public exposure has undermined its effectiveness and discouraged foreign governments fromcooperating w ith it.

Press and civil liberties groups, on the other hand, have denounced the bill as an ''absolutely unprecedented and terribly dangerous'' invasion of press freedom, in the words of Floyd Abrams, a leading First Amendment lawyer.

They fear it would intimidate reporters and lead to more drastic forms of censorship of articles exposing and criticizing the kinds of intelligence abuses revealed in the 1970's.

Under the version of the bill passed by the House 12 days ago, if a reporter investigating the reported collaboration of two former agents, Edwin P. Wilson and Frank E. Terpil, with the Government of Libya were to learn that they were still secretly working for the C.I.A., it would apparently be a crime to report it. It could also be a crime to name a current or recently employed C.I.A. agent or informer. Narrowing of Bill Opposed

The Administration has have successfully opposed efforts to narrow the bill to foreclose any possible efforts to prosecute such reporting.

Although many scholars say that such narrowing would be necessary to prevent the courts from striking the measure down, the Justice Department has rejected the idea as posing an obstacle to possible prosecution of ''counterspies'' like Mr. Agee and Mr. Wolf.

The House rejected its Intelligence Committee's recommendation that journalists and others who publish agents' names be subject to prosecution only if they had specific ''intent to impair or impede the foreign intelligence activities of the United States by the fact of such identification or exposure.''

Instead, the House adopted Administration language making it a crime for anyone to identify a covert agent or informer ''in the course of a pattern of activities intended to identify and expose covert agents and with reason to believe that such activities would impair or impede'' intelligence activities. Approval by Senators

A bill similar to the House-passed version was approved by the Senate Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism in June and will be before the full Judiciary Committee tomorrow.

Press and civil liberties groups hope there may be enough votes to amend the bill by subsituting the ''intent'' language of the House Intelligence Committee version, which they interpret as foreclosing efforts to prosecute legitimate exposes of abuses.

Efforts to include explicit exceptions in the bill barring prosecutions based on articles that expose illegal activities or that are based on unclassified materials have already failed both in the House and in the Senate.

The Justice Department has pronounced itself ''confident'' that the bill is constitutional. More than 60 scholars have taken the opposite view.

Prof. Philip B. Kurland of University of Chicago Law School, a leading conservative constitutional expert, called the bill ''the clearest violation of the First Amendment attempted by Congress in this era.''

There has been little opposition to a provision that could be used only to prosecute Mr. Agee and other former officials who have violated oaths of confidentiality and used their access to classified information to betray former colleagues.

But the example of Mr. Wolf, who has never worked for an intelligence agency and compiles his lists of alleged agents' names from pu blicly available diplomatic materials, is more controversial.

Illustrations: photo of Phillip Agee photo of Louis Wolf


MONTREAL, Aug. 10— Gary Carter and Tim Wallach each drove in a run in the eighth inning tonight and led the Montreal Expos to a 3-1 victory over the Pittsburgh Pirates. A crowd of 37,275 attended the game at Olympic Stadium on the starting day of the second-half of the major league baseball season.

With one out in the bottom of the eighth and the score 1-1, Andre Dawson, who clouted his 14th homer with the bases empty in the first, hit a one-out double. Carter, who hit two homers in the National League victory in the All-Star Game yesterday and was named the most valuable player, followed with another double off the losing pitcher, Pascual Perez (2-3) that gave the Expos the lead, 2-1.

After Warren Cromartie was walked intentionally, Wallach hit a run-scoring single, making it 3-1. Bill Lee (2-2), who pitched four innings of one-hit relief, got the victory.

Three minor league umpires were used to work the game when three of the four National League umpires who were scheduled to work could not reach Montreal because of the Canadian air controllers' action in support of the American controllers' strike. Terry Dale, Jim Quick and Paul Runge could not make connections to join the fourth umpire, Dave Pallone, who had arrived here Saturday to work an exhibition game.

The only run the Pirates scored came in the third inning off Scott Sanderson, the Expos' starter. Tony Pena singled, went to second on Jim Bibby's sacrifice and scored on another single by Omar Moreno. Dodgers 4, Reds 0

LOS ANGELES - Jerry Reuss and Steve Howe combined and blanked Cincinnati on three singles as baseball returned to Dodger Stadium. Reuss (6-2) pitched six innings, allowed all three hits, walked two and struck out two for the Dodgers, who won the first-half championship of the National League West by one-half game over the Reds. The loss ended a seven-game winning streak the Reds had going when the baseball strike started June 12.

Ruess, who has a 1.76 earned run average, allowed only one runner to advance as far as second base. Howe earned his sixth save by holding the Reds hitless over the final three innings.

The Dodgers scored all of their runs in the second inning off the loser Frank Pastore (3-3). Ron Cey was hit by a pitch and went to second on a single by Pedro Guerrero. Both moved up a base on a wild pickoff throw by the Reds' catcher, Mike O'Berry.

Mike Scioscia followed with a run-scoring single, Bill Russell hit a sacrifice fly and after Reuss grounded out, Davey Lopes singled home Scioscia. Ken Landreaux singled Lopes to second and Dusty Baker singled him home.

The game was played before a crowd of 35,120, one of the smallest at Dodger Stadium this season and well below the pre-strike average of 46,238. However, the early starting time of 5:30 P.M., P.D.T., to accommodate network television, may have cut down the size of the crowd. Braves 3, Padres 2

SAN DIEGO (UPI) - The lure of free admission drew a record crowd of 52,608, who watched Atlanta's Rufino Linares hit a sacrifice fly in the top of the ninth to drive in Bruce Benedict with the deciding run.

The Padres' owner, Ray Kroc, announced after the baseball strike ended that he would open the gates free to the public the day play resumed. The previous record at San Diego was 51,549, set at the 1978 All-Star Game. The previous mark for a regular-season game was 50, 569, against St. Louis on April 24, 1976.

Benedict opened the ninth with a double and went to third on a fly by Rafael Ramirez. One out later, Linares delivered his game-winning fly ball.

Gene Garber (2-1) got the victory and John Urrea (2-1) took the loss. Astros 6, Giants 5

SAN FRANCISCO (UPI) - Denny Walling doubled with one out in the ninth for Houston to drive in two runs, breaking a 4-4 tie. Darrell Evans knocked in the Giants' final run with a double in the bottom of the ninth. Larry Herndon, whose first-inning double gave the Giants a 2-0 lead, homered after two were out in the eighth for a 4-4 tie, but the Astros won it on two walks, a sacrifice and Walling's pinch-hit double.

Joe Morgan homered in the third to give the Giants a 3-0 lead , but the Astros scored an unearned run in the fourth and another in the seventh to tie the score at 3-3. d


CAN leadership be culled from the grass roots? Can potential leaders be encouraged and trained to help improve life in local communities? Can a foundation identify such people and should it help them to acquire the knowledge and political influence they will need to overcome resistance from entrenched powers?

These questions are raised by a report on an unusual project for which the Ford Foundation spent $11.5 million from 1966 to 1977. Even within the foundation itself there had been some uneasiness about the project because it violated many notions on the ingredients of leadership and supported some rather unpredictable people.

Officially known as the Leadership Development Program (L.D.P.), the project ultimately provided fellowships for 700 men and women, many of them plucked from poverty in rural communities.

In 1965 Edward J. Meade Jr., then an officer of the Fund for the Advancement of Education, the foundation's long-since eliminated education branch, floated the idea of seeking out potential leaders in the same way as ''the left-handed pitcher, the fast baller, the kid with a little spark'' are discovered by baseball scouts.

Mr. Meade had been listening to John W. Gardner, then Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, who complained that ''anti-leadership vaccine'' was afflicting American institutions. An assessment of the extent to which Mr. Meade succeeded in creating an antidote to this vaccine, and the lessons to be drawn from this still little-known long-term experiment, are contained in a report, ''Left-Handed Fastballers,'' by David Nevin, a freelance writer who was commissioned by the foundation to review the program. (The study is available through the Ford Foundation, Office of Reports, 320 East 43d Street, New York, N.Y., 10017.)

''The L.D.P. was unique in many ways,'' says Mr. Nevin, ''but its most distinctive feature was that it limited itself to people without credentials: Almost the only thing certain to bar a candidate in any region was overqualification. Persons holding doctorates were soon eliminated from competition; grass-roots leaders were acceptable, established leaders were less so.'' The maximum amount for each fellowship was $15,000, including family support and traveling expenses.

Rufus Huffman was a 40-year-old sixth-grade teacher in Union Springs, Ala. Mr. Huffman, a black, had been roundly defeated in an election bid for tax assessor that enraged the county's white majority at a time when the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was not yet effective. The foundation's program gave Mr. Huffman a chance to broaden his leadership capacity. He spent time in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant section, worked with civil rights and human relations specialists, and sat in on conferences of school board members and school administrators after there had been riots in their communities.

When Mr. Huffman returned home at the end of his fellowship year, his school at first did not want him and he virtually had to fight his way back into his old classroom. In less than two years, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People made him Regional Education Director. In 1976, he easily won election as a county judge, an achievement Mr. Nevin describes as ''symbolic of one of the great bloodless revolutions of modern times - the transfer of power to the majority in many Southern jurisdictions long controlled by white minorities.''

The program's impact may in large part be attributable to the fact that, from New England to the Deep South, the project's representatives who picked the fellows were not New York-based foundation officials but were themselves steeped in the experience of rural poverty. They worked out of field offices in Maine, Georgia, New Mexico and Colorado.

The representatives included a Chicano, one of whose grandfathers had been a Jewish immigrant from Poland; a Mennonite from Kansas who worked in a hospital as conscientious objector in the Korean War, and an Ohio woman who had been a civil rights organizer in the South.

K.@Z. Chavis, who became the program's only black regional representative, had been a rural teacher, a principal, a paratrooper, a prizefighter, a motorcyclist and a pilot.

Most of the fellows were in their 20's and 30's. They shared an ability to take the initiative. Many had encountered hostility and the threat of violence. Edith Easterling, from Poor Bottom Hollow in Pike County, Ky., had worked in a warplane factory, seen her coal miner husband stricken with black lung disease, been a cook in a school kitchen and built her own folk school to uplift the poor.

What was the program's outcome? Though they were not pushed in that direction, the bulk of the fellows became involved in formal schooling. Many had been teachers and wanted to translate their skills into educational and community leadership. A few went on to graduate studies.

Some, like Sandra Swans, who came from the Northeast, felt that traditional schools ''stifle rather than develop,'' and she sought ways of dealing with this problem.

What has happened to the fellows? Some teachers went back to their classrooms. Others moved on to jobs with greater influence. A few had to settle for jobs that barely provided a living. But many became principals, and even school superintendents. A number today hold top positions in state education departments; one rose to Secretary of Corrections for New Mexico; others ended up as school board members and some achieved elective offices, including those of mayors. One alumnus of the program, Frank Kilgore, a Virginian, focused on strip mining, and has testified before Congress and state legislatures, and has become an influential figure in environmental protection.

Not everything worked out according to plan. Hopes that the fellows would create a lasting national network were not fulfilled. The very stress on maverick individualists may have stood in the way of broader reforms. However, many local services were vastly improved.

The fears of conservative critics that the program might spawn a disruptive radicalism turned out to be unwarranted. Instead, many fellows developed a sense of how systems work and how to make them work.

What does the leadership program suggest about the role of large foundations? The fact that the unorthodox program was conceived by the Fund for the Advancement of Education is significant. The fund, with its relative freedom from institutional constraints, had a history of initiating unconventional, high-risk ventures. Some failed; but others, such as the early discovery of television's educational uses, and the introduction of paraprofessional teacher aides over the opposition of school administrators and teachers' unions, helped to bring about lasting change.

As conservative political pressures built up, the fund was absorbed by the foundation in 1969. Today, foundations stand at another crossroads, as they are being asked to assume responsibility for some of the social and educational programs abandoned or reduced by the Federal Government.

This raises the question of whether using foundation funds to make up for Federal cutbacks will leave enough money and initiative for planting new seeds, launching trial balloons and subsidizing unorthodox programs that in the past have occasionally led to important social change.


RYE, N.Y.— The United States Postal Service is planning to move its Stamford, Conn., mail-processing center to Rye, but the decision doesn't sit well with any of those concerned - neither Stamford nor Rye, nor even the Postal Service itself.

Stamford is afraid it will lose jobs. Rye is afraid it will lose a sizable chunk of its commercial tax base because the Postal Service, as a Federal agency, pays no local taxes.

And the Postal Service would much prefer to stick with an 11-yearold plan to develop 13 acres of a 40-acre site in Stamford now owned by Standard Brands. But it says it has run out of time because of a series of lawsuits by opponents of that plan.

Noting the recent, rapid increase in the development of corporate headquarters in Stamford - with the millions of pieces of mail they generate each week - Jerry K. Lee, the Postmaster General for the Northeast Region, said, ''That's one of the hottest growth areas in the Northeastern part of the country.'' More Space Needed

''We have grown to the point where, operationally, we must have some additional space to process mail,'' he said. And it happens that a building containing 192,500 square feet is being vacated by the Avon Corporation at the juncture of Interstates 287 and 95 in Rye, presenting an ''opportunity we could not pass by,'' Mr. Lee said.

The space ''would allow us to install mechanization and automation and to process the mail with a greater degree of sortation, which would actually speed the mail in its delivery,'' Mr. Lee said.

Stamford, which now has one automatic letter-sorting machine, needs two or three, according to Mr. Lee. Each machine, he said, can sort mail by ZIP code into 277 bins, while a human is limited by the extent of his reach to 77 bins. Rye 'Outraged and Incensed'

''The City of Rye is outraged and incensed,'' said Frank Culross, the City Manager. The Avon property, he said, represents 10 percent of the city's commercial tax base and 1.8 percent of the total tax base.

A takeover of the site by the Postal Service would result in ''an immediate and very significant impact'' on the City of Rye and its taxpayers, he said. ''You're talking in terms of $280,000 in lost revenues a year,'' he said, or $60 for every city taxpayer. ''The school system would be the big loser.''

In addition, Mr. Culross said, Rye's residents stand to gain no jobs because the Postal Service has told its employees in Stamford that they would be given the first option to work in Rye, which is roughly 10 miles away.

There are 700 postal employees in Stamford but only 350 would be affected by the move. The offer to the employees to move has hardly soothed feelings in Stamford, however, where Mayor Louis A. Clapes says he is concerned about the possible loss of jobs and has been getting a lot of mail from postal employees complaining that, if they had to follow their jobs to Rye, the tax they would have to pay to New York State on their earnings would come to about $1,100 a year each, not to mention the increased cost of commuting. Hearing Due in June

Officials in both cities have joined Senators and Representatives from the area in pressing their case before the Postal Service Board of Governors. The board will consider in June whether the Postal Service may proceed with the purchase of the Avon building, at a cost of $9.65 million.

Two of the lawsuits against the development of the Standard Brands site in Stamford were brought by the Town of Greenwich, Conn. One of those suits -seeking visual and other buffers around the site - has been resolved. The second suit - seeking safeguards against flooding - is expected to be settled this week.

The plaintiffs in a third suit are the Connecticut Fund for the Environment, based in New Haven, and the Better Neighborhoods Association, representing some of the residents near the Standard Brands site.

The fund contends that the Stamford Environmental Protection Board must look into the the impact of the proposed project on air pollution, noise and traffic congestion. Standard Brands contends that the board has no such jurisdiction, that its authority extends only to wetlands. Trial Date Sought

Richard Tobin, a lawyer for Standard Brands, said he was trying to get the case scheduled for trial in Stamford Superior Court.Daniel Millstone, a lawyer for the fund, said his client ''stands ready to sit down'' with the other parties and that some sort of compromise might be possible. But Donald Blanchard, a lawyer for the neighbors, said that Standard Brands and the Robert Martin Company of Elmsford, N.Y., the developer of the 13-acre postal site, ''feel they have already given enough in the way of protection and buffers to the neighbors'' and that the neighbors had turned down an offer of a cash settlement.

Said Mr. Lee, the regional Postmaster General: ''We have combed the southern tip of Connecticut and we have been unable to locate a suitable site to build a total mail-processing facility.''

''If someone can find an alternative site we can use,'' he said, ''we would be most happy to look at it.''

Illustrations: Map of area affected by planned move


Manhattan's lofts keep presenting us with dimensions never before contemplated. Many of them, in neighborhoods not noted for evocations of joy and diversion, are now home to tenants who offer, after usual working hours, throbbing music and other enticing arts.

The Jazz Forum is a case in point. It's in an old cast-iron industrial building at 648 Broadway, at Bleecker Street (477-2655). The structure is not one of New York's beauty marks, and it makes entrance into the Forum, by way of a small elevator to the fifth floor, all the more surprising. The visitor enters an enormous expanse of floor, a well-lighted room punctuated by pillars. It is clean and neat, with small wooden tables that look out on the bandstand.

Jazz reverberates here seven nights a week in an acoustic condition that makes every note ring as true and clear as it is played. Mark Morganelli, the youthful trumpeter and proprietor, moved his establishment here a year ago from another home downtown. His new neighborhood, sandwiched in by the East Village scene (the Public Theater is a block away) and the Greenwich Village action to the west, is one that is becoming more lively after hours.

Tonight, Reggie Workman, the bassist, brings his group, Top Shelf, to play at 10 and 11:30 P.M. and 1 A.M. In this group are John Stubblefield, tenor saxophone; Virgil Jones, trumpet; Mickey Tucker, piano, and Charli Persip, who has been a drummer with Dizzy Gillespie. Every Wednesday, at 10 P.M. and midnight, Mr. Persip heads his own Superband at the same address.

Admission: $6, plus, for tonight, a $3 minimum at the tables, but not at the bar. Drinks, $1.50 up; snacks, $2.50 to $4. ART OF WAR

Walk down almost any street in SoHo and you will find, tucked away on those mean streets, some of the more striking eruptions of the creative-artistic mind. Try Mercer Street and stop at No. 31, north of Houston Street and several doors north of the fascinating Museum of Holography. This is the gallery of Ronald Feldman (226-3232), a typically spacious and well-lighted room.

The group show there is called ''War Games,'' and it represents the thoughts of 10 artists on this ultimate conflict. It is startling, and while some of the pieces are depressing or shocking, such as the large model of Adolf Hitler, with a knife-tear on his chest, and the memories of Hiroshima, it is, contrarily, fun in part.

The big eye-catcher is Chris Burden's ''The Tale of Two Cities,'' a vast diorama of countryside that fills an entire corner of the gallery. The artist has built two city states and placed them at war with each other, using 3,000 war toys, including many toy soldiers and cannons and airplanes. It is the most visual of visuals, and one can pass a good deal of time just taking in the scene. The other pieces include other soldier-figures, books of documentation and absorbing interpretations of the subject.

Open, free, through April 17, from 10 A.M. to 6 P.M. Tuesdays through Saturdays (and on some Mondays as well). THE WORLD OF YIDDISH

The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, 1048 Fifth Avenue, at 86th Street (LE 5-6700), is the world's largest repository of information and memorabilia of life of the Yiddish-speaking Jews. It is an organization founded more than a half-century ago in Vilna, Lithuania, and, after World War II, transplanted in New York.

Tonight at 8 o'clock, YIVO opens a two-day conference with a ''literary-theatrical'' program, ''A Yiddish Tapestry,'' in the Central Synagogue, at 123 East 55th Street. Yiddishists will enjoy an evening of Yiddish readings by David Rogow and Rita Karpinowitz of poetry, prose, humor and satire, including works by Sholom Aleichem, Chaim Grade, Isaac Bashevis Singer. Admission: $7.50.

Tomorrow and Monday, from 9:30 A.M. until 9 P.M., the conference will deal with ''A New Generation Looks at the Field of Yiddish.'' It will take place at the YIVO Institute. The conference will take up matters of ethnography, translation, teaching and linguistics. Admission is free.

For Entertainment Events, see page 52. For Sports Today, see page 20. Richard F. Shepard

Illustrations: photo of Charli Persip

Summary: FLIGHTS OF FANCY   Manhattan's lofts keep presenting us with dimensions never before contemplated. Many of them, in neighborhoods not noted for evocations of joy and diversion, are now home to tenants who offer, after usual working hours, throbbing music and other enticing arts.   The Jazz Forum is a case in point. It's in an old cast-iron industrial building at 648 Broadway, at Bleecker Street (477-2655).  The structure is not one of New York's beauty marks, and it makes entrance into the Forum, by way of a small elevator to the fifth floor, all the more surprising. The visitor enters an enormous expanse of floor, a well-lighted room punctuated by pillars. It is clean and neat, with small wooden tables that look out on the bandstand.


Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future

06/30/2015 AT 01:45 PM EDT

spans two very different time periods, but the soundtrack allows you to experience both even if you don't have a souped-up DeLorean. If you were one of those who went out and bought the soundtrack – and plenty did, because the album spent nineteen weeks on the

Top 100 – you got hits from both the 1950s and the 1980s.

And in case you've forgotten, here are the songs that appeared in the movie and helped define whatever era Marty McFly (

) happened to be cruising through.

It's not only the most iconic musical moment in

, it's also maybe one of the best scenes in the whole movie: Marty plays the Chuck Berry hit "Johnny B. Goode," three years before Chuck Berry wrote and recorded the tune in 1958. Thank this scene for introducing the phrase

to a more mainstream audience.

The soundtrack to our first-ever look at Hill Valley, "The Power of Love" was the first No. 1 hit for Huey Lewis & The News. When Marty's band auditions for his high school's battle of the bands, it's actually Lewis himself playing the judge who deems Marty's band to be "just too loud."

The one problem with "Power of Love," however? Its title made no reference to the movie it was associated with – and as Cyndi Lauper will tell you, this was

back in the day. Consequently, a second Huey Lewis song was added. This one plays over the movie's end credits and was later used as the theme song to the

Sung memorably by Marvin Berry (Harry Waters Jr.), "Earth Angel" was first recorded by L.A. doo-wop group The Penguins in 1954. It actually would have been a fairly current hit when the "back in time" scenes take place in 1955. It's been covered many times, but how many other versions feature a guy's hand slowly turning invisible as a result of a time paradox?

Also first recorded in 1954, "Mr. Sandman" provides the soundtrack for Marty's "through the looking glass" moment when he first realizes he's gone back in time thirty years. It's a good fit: What better way to suggested datedness than a song in which female singers mention Liberace in the context of being a viable romantic candidate?

Red the Bum is listening to this Eric Clapton song when Marty returns to 1985. You don't hear it for long, but it was enough to merit a spot on the soundtrack. For a lot of young

fans, it was this 1985 track that turned us on to Clapton's amazing catalog.

Proms today lack quality saxophone solos like this one – as do live bands, too, for the most part. This track provides the soundtrack for the amazingly awkward dancing of George McFly (

). The original version by Jimmy Forrest was released in 1952.

classic is playing in the diner scene, when Marty walks in, spots the jukebox and gets even further confirmation that no, it is not 1985 anymore. The song was a hit for James back in 1955.

What a romantic song to be playing during a scene in which Lorraine (

) shares a tender kiss with her time-traveling son from the future! This 1955 R&B tune features the lyrics "Forever my darling, my love will be true / Always and forever, I'll love just you." Good thing it turned out not to be the case for everyone involved. Listen to the full version

You only hear it for a second – it's one of the songs Marty's alarm clock radio plays – but it's a good track, and we're always happy to give

(of Fleetwood Mac fame) a shout-out.

Summary: Whether it's the '80s songs or the '50s songs, the film's soundtrack stands the test of time


07/10/2015 AT 07:30 PM EDT

It's been a summer of steady

reveals, thanks to director Paul Feig, who has been teasing the upcoming film – which will hit theaters next July – with sneak peeks on Twitter.

But on Friday, he showed off the coolest one yet – a shot of

in uniform standing in front of the film's iconic

And earlier in the week fans got a look at the

topped with a siren, megaphone and ghost-hunting ornaments.

Now finally, everything is coming together. All they need to do is strap on those rad

, and go ghost hunting.

Summary: Now Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Leslie Jones and Kate McKinnon just need to strap on the proton packs


Oreos are getting a skinny new look, and its maker says the new cookie is a "sophisticated" snack for grown-ups that isn't meant to be twisted or dunked.

Mondelez International Inc says it will add Oreo Thins to its permanent lineup in the US starting next week.

The cookies look like regular Oreos and have a similar cookie-to-filling ratio, except that they're slimmer.

That means four of the cookies contain 140 calories, compared with 160 calories for three regular Oreos.

And since they're for adults, Oreo says they weren't designed to be twisted open or dunked.

"If people want to do that, it's clearly up to them," said Janda Lukin, senior director of Oreo for North America at parent company Mondelez International.

In explaining what exactly made them more grown-up, she said that if regular Oreos are like pancakes, then Oreo Thins would be like crepes.

Although the original Oreos started in the US in 1912, Americans won't be the first to taste the Thins.

The slimmer cookies were rolled out last year in China to address the company's tumbling cookie sales in the country.

Lukin said the slimmer cookies helped win back "lapsed users" in China, or younger women who wanted something that wasn't quite as rich. In the first eight months, she said Oreo Thins generated $US40 million ($A53 million) in sales.

Mondelez CEO Irene Rosenfeld has noted the success of the Thins in China and says the company will make them available "around the world".

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Summary: Oreo Thins are being added to Mondelez International's permanent lineup as the company goes for a "grown-up" snack.


What thieves pick comes down to two attributes: "small box, big value," said Mark Turnage, chief executive of OpSec Security, which has monitored online sites for stolen items on behalf of clients. Commonly stolen items include razor blades, makeup, skincare products, baby formula, over-the-counter medications and tooth-whitening strips. Thieves also lift small gadgets such as disposable cellphones, digital cameras and electric shavers.

Gift-card buyers may be an unwitting link in the retail-theft chain, too. About three-quarters of retailers told the NRF they see thieves returning stolen merchandise to get store credit, which the thieves then sell on the secondary market. Shoppers would encounter those as secondhand gift cards, probably loaded with an odd dollar amount.

Even if you're not concerned about the long-term, broader effect of organized retail theft on your wallet—retailers may account for such losses when setting prices and determining discount promotions—there are plenty of reasons for shoppers to worry right now about whether they're buying stolen goods.

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Health and safety concerns are paramount for ingested goods—including over-the-counter meds and baby formula. "You have no idea what the storage conditions have been," said Turnage. Products may be expired, or have been stored at temperatures too high or low, making them less effective and unsafe to consume, he said.

There's also a slim chance of legal consequences for possessing stolen property. "Certainly, theoretically, someone who buys stolen property from an online vendor is just as liable as someone who buys it out of the back of a truck," said Stuart P. Green, a law professor at Rutgers University. Depending on how the local or state law is written, not knowing it was stolen isn't always a defense.

That said, the odds of being arrested are low. "As a matter of enforcement, it's bound to be harder to pursue people who are doing that," said Green, author of "Thirteen Ways to Steal a Bicycle: Theft Law in the Information Age." Law enforcement is more likely to go after the thieves themselves, as well as the websites facilitating the transaction.

Summary: Online bargains may be the result of theft, not deals. Why buyers should beware.


These are good days to be in the business of designing lab space.

With lab construction going on in Cambridge and Boston, there’s a lot of work for people who know how to make the most of that pricey space. Just ask Jeff Zynda, academic science practice leader at the architecture firm Perkins + Will, which he recently joined after 16 years at Payette Associates. Zynda has helped create nearly 6 million square feet of lab space, from Waltham to Russia. It’s specialized work, designing buildings equipped to support technical research that are also adaptable when the focus of that research changes.

In an industry driven by fickle funding streams, change is something that happens all the time.

Zynda remembers the business environment of a decade ago, when life sciences labs were the rage. Money was flowing for research on the Human Genome Project. That meant demand for rows and rows of wet-lab bench space. “Everyone thought the genome project would take decades,” he said. “It took 18 months.”

Now the focus is on the physical science — materials and engineering — disciplines with very different space needs. Ten years from now, he said, who knows what it will be.

But pricey lab buildings need to last many decades. The trick to surviving several science funding cycles is to plan for flexibility from the start.

“It’s about designing for adaptation over time, and taking out obstacles that would preclude different plausible futures,” he said. “That starts with planning and designing smart floor space.”

But the people who use lab space today are following one important trend that may be here to stay. Just like their colleagues in creative and technology fields, science workers are becoming more collaborative.

Zynda helps review grant applications for the National Institutes of Health, and he sees far more proposals coming from interdisciplinary teams of scientists than a decade ago.

“In the past, you’d design a bio building or a physics lab,” he said. “Now research is happening in a truly convergent way. New disciplines are being forged and they need new environments. It’s very exciting.”

Summary: Architect Jeff Zynda designs lab space and has watched the business evolve fast


The Nintendo franchise, which includes many elements of the fantasy genre, features a boy named Link who fights villains to rescue the titular princess and save a land called Hyrule. The Japanese company has released more than 20 'Zelda' titles on various platforms since the late 1980s.

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The series is far from becoming a done deal, as it is in the "early stages of development," the Journal wrote. Nintendo has allowed very few adaptations of its vast intellectual property in the past.

Netflix on Wednesday announced that it would roll out services in Japan this fall. The streaming company has expanded its original programming in recent years with popular shows like "House of Cards," "Orange is the New Black" and a resurrected "Arrested Development."

Read More4 ways to play the Netflix earnings beat

Read the Wall Street Journal report here.

Summary: Netflix has started to develop a live action series based on the popular "Legend of Zelda" games, the Wall Street Journal reported.