you've heard the saying, there goes the neighborhood. Well, imagine watching folks move into the beautiful home right across the street. The problem is, they didn't pay a cent for it. The $2.5 million...

you've heard the saying, there goes the neighborhood. Well, imagine watching folks move into the beautiful home right across the street. The problem is, they didn't pay a cent for it. The $2.5 million mansion we're talking about. And when neighbors called police, a rude awakening. They couldn't get them to leave. Dan harris takes us to the neighborhood. Reporter: Boca raton, florida. A city synonymous with conspicuous consumption, designer clothing, designer tocks and bombastic boats. Welcome to the aptly named golden harbor drive, where everybody's backyard is right on the water. Rocking the infinity pool. Pretty good look. It is a tony enclave that not long ago played reluctant host to a strange and uninvited guest. This is it right here. Shortly before christmas mike avirom noticed something odd transpiring at a house on his block. This is a sweet house. It's a $2.5 million, 7,500 square foot mansion. The previous owner had money problems, signed it over to the bank of america and moved out. Now, a stranger is moving in without paying a penny to the bank. And he's not alone. Guys pull up and move into this beautiful house and tell you they are establishing an embassy. An embassy for their mission. Reporter: A religious mission? They're going to have transient families coming in and out in accord with their ministry. Reporter: And your response to this was? I don't think that's going to fly. Reporter: It gets even weirder, quickly. The new occupant posts paperwork on the house, saying that nobody can enter without an invitation and two types of i.D. On the elaborate forms, the name of the man who now claims ownership, andre barbosa. Neighbors google him right away and up pops the facebook page of a 23-year-old brazilian, an aspiring hip hop artist who calls himself "loki boy" after the norse god of mischief. That's when neighbors call 911. They've changed the locks, they've put a no trespassing sign out and they're moving in. All right, I'm going to have an officer dispatched as soon as possible. We called the police on these right here. Squatters, they're just defiant. Reporter: The cops show up and speak to loki boy, who you can see right there on a neighbor's secell phone video. But here's where what seemed like a clear-cut trespassing gets truly crazy. Loki boy presents the police with this document, which stops them in their tracks. Loki boy is claiming something called "adverse possession." The notion is that someone can move onto a property, fix it up, take care of it and after a period of time, it's their property. Reporter: It is an obscure but very real law that is on the books in all 50 states. If loki boy stays for seven years, the mansion is his. So, this kid was pretty clever. Because he was using language that was very confusing for you and your force. Absolutely. Reporter: Thus begins a bizarre stalemate with loki boy occupying the house day after day. Police, prosecutors and the bank are in a state of confusion and paralysis. In fact, at first, the bank denies even owning the house. Which is a lucky break for loki boy, who, meanwhile, is living large, working on a new rap video with the mansion as a backdrop. Was that frustrating for you? Very. Reporter: Lynn houston, a nervous next door neighbor, has had enough. I was going to do anything to get rid of him. Anything. Reporter: You were willing to buy that house -- yes. Reporter: You were going to take out a mortgage -- no. Reporter: Just pay cash? Yes. Reporter: Pay cash for this house to get this kid out? Yes. Neighbors outraged to find out a squatter -- Reporter: When he phone calls to the bank are not returned, she alerts the media. Hard to believe but true story out of florida. Reporter: The story goes national. This guy is making it his home for free. Reporter: Meanwhile, the nervous neighbor is convinced that the nightmare here on golden harbor drive is connected to something much larger. I believe there's somebody much more important, much higher, much w, behind him. Don't know who. Reporter: We decide to do some digging. Remember those weird documents loki boy posted on the front of the house? There is another name on there. james McBride. Who, as we learn, is the founder of a mysterious group called "divine province." We can take back all this property that has been taken from us. Reporter: Mcbride is an ex-con who has done time for cocaine importation and run-ins with the irs. He safes he hasn't paid federal income taxes in 26 years and claims he can teach you how to live like him. McBRIDE IS VERY SUSPICIOUS OF The media, but he agreed to speak exclusively with abc news. What is your connection to andre? He's a member of the divine province. Reporter: He says he didn't know in advance about loki boy's mansion takeover, but he now supports him fully. Report It's lawful to move into a house that's not yours and say, this is mine. Correct. Reporter: But there are many OTHER laws McBride feels he and his followers are not subject to. How? He shows me a seal he says was a gift from pope benedict himself. What can you do with this? It means I can now give orderers or issue decrees that the vatican and the roman must follow. Reporter: Yare you saying you have papal authority here in north america. In the globe. Reporter: In the globe? Correct. Reporter: You have primary control of the earth? Correct. Reporter: That seems like a lot of power. I understand. It is. And a lot of responsibility. Reporter: This may sound ridiculous, but the fbi is not laughing. There are an els mated 300,000 people in this country who share SOME VERSION of McBride's belief that american laws do not apply to them. Some of these people are using tactics like adverse possession to take over vacant homes. This one right here has been claimed by a guy named paul dellatore. We found examples all over south florida. All you have to do is file a little bit of paperwork and, bingo, this becomes your backyard. And it's not just florida. This is happening all over the country, with people moving into empty mansions would paying a dime. Why did you decide on this house? Why not? It's a beautiful house. Reporter: Meanwhile, back on golden harbor drive, fully aware of this situation now, nervous neighbor lynn houston o again takes action, hiring offduty cops to watch loki boy's mansion. Some people are sleeping, some people can't eat. Reporter: Just two days later, with media attention reaching a fever pitch, the cops mount a raid. Showed up here, opened the door, walked in, no one's here. Reporter: They haul away loki boy's stuff and change the locks. 51 days after it began, the nightmare on golden harbor drive ends with a whimper. Loki's house of cards has tumbled down. He has sneaked off quietly. The home is now back in the handles of its rightful owner, the bank. The neighbors, however, have not heard the last of loki boy. Days later, he officially releases this music video, where he is seen dancing with his mother against a backdrop of the mansion on golden harbor drive, which, by the way, has now been sold, legally. I think the whole neighborhood feels safer. I feel resolve. We'll sleep better tonight. Reporter: If anything good has come out of this ordeal, the neighbors say it's that they've grown much closer. They throw a victory celebration, complete with a surprise guest. Hey, loki, come on out.

This transcript has been automatically generated and may not be 100% accurate.

Summary: A man moved into a waterfront $2.5 mansion. When the cops came, they couldn't get him to leave.


Frankenweenie (87 min., PG) This dark stop-motion animated 3-D feature from Tim Burton will likely petrify under-10s, even as this tale about a sad boy who brings his dead dog back to life transfixes older kids. With an unusual film like this, parents really need to think about what their own children can handle on a big screen and in 3-D. When the dead animals are transformed, they emerge as monsters and terrorize the town. Adults react like a mob. No one is shown being hurt or killed, but the overall atmosphere is definitely one of old-style horror.

Hotel Transylvania (90 min., PG) An animated feature about a hostelry built by none other than Dracula. Its clientele are monsters. Kids under 8 may flinch at seeing vampires turn into bats, and to see the likes of Frankenstein’s monster, the Mummy, and the Fly, as well as blobs, skeletons, shrunken heads, and more. Some of the monsters lose heads or limbs while roughhousing and then reattach them. There are jokes about drinking blood. Though he’s sworn off violence, Dracula does have a temper, and his face goes scarily red while he seethes.

10 Years (100 min, PG-13) It’s 10th-reunion time for high school classmates Rosario Dawson and Channing Tatum. The reunion-goers really booze it up. A few smoke pot. One of the women turns out to be an unwed mother twice over. The script includes fairly strong cussing for a PG-13. A bullying theme has an uncomfortable ring of truth to it.

House at the End of the Street (100 min., PG-13) This ghost story starring Jennifer Lawrence (“The Hunger Games”) includes violence and implications of insanity and abuse that make it a very problematic choice for middle schoolers. Adults smoke what appears to be crack.

Liberal Arts (97 min., unrated) Josh Radnor, who wrote and directed, plays a 35-year-old who returns to his old college to attend his favorite professor’s retirement celebration. The dialogue features occasional crude sexual language and profanity. One student attempts suicide. The one sexual situation involves mildly graphic sounds, but shows nothing.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower (103 min, PG-13) Stephen Chbosky adapted and directs this film made from his novel about high school and its discontents. Several scenes show teens drinking and using pot and LSD. A quick flashback strongly implies that a small child was molested by an older relative. Other scenes flash back to a violent car accident, and someone with wrists scarred by a suicide attempt. There are hospital scenes that portray mental illness. The dialogue includes homophobic slurs, crude sexual slang, and sexual innuendo.

Pitch Perfect (88 min., PG-13) Anna Kendrick stars in this film about college a cappella groups. Lighthearted patter about sexuality and women’s body parts makes the film too adult for a lot of middle schoolers. The dialogue features considerable crude language, some profanity, and lots of pure snarkiness. Ethnic stereotypes abound, used for comic effect. A long scene in the dorm shower implies nudity, but with little sexual innuendo. Projectile vomiting? Yup.

Taken 2 (97 min., PG-13) In the original, it was former agent Liam Neeson’s daughter (Maggie Grace) who was kidnapped. Now it’s the turn of Neeson and his ex-wife (Famke Janssen). The mayhem features much plaster-shattering gunplay, but with little blood. Neeson’s character kills several people with his bare hands, and the fights are intense. The dialogue includes occasional mild profanity. There are also references to sex slavery.

Trouble With the Curve (111 min., PG-13) Clint Eastwood plays an aging baseball scout, Gus. Amy Adams is his daughter, Mickey. The dialogue features a lot of crude, occasionally profane language, most of it well in PG-13 territory. Characters use some sexual slang and innuendo, also fairly mild, as well as toilet humor. When Mickey and Gus finally talk about their longtime estrangement, the scene feels very emotional and real.

Won’t Back Down (119 min., PG) A teacher (Viola Davis) and a mom (Maggie Gyllenhaal) join forces to take over a failing Pittsburgh elementary school. The mom and her boyfriend have some steamy kisses.

Dredd 3D (98 min., R) Karl Urban plays the the title character, who originated in a British comic-book series. There is so much bloody, point-blank, high-caliber gun death that the film is not for under-17s. Children and innocent families are shown at risk and dying in deafening and graphic shoot-outs. The bad guys are selling a new drug called Slo-Mo that creates a slow-motion high. The movie includes strong profanity and graphic sexual fantasies.

End of Watch (109 min., R) Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Pena play Los Angeles cops. The point-blank gun violence and gut punches feel so realistic that the film can be hard to watch at times. The partners encounter scenes in which very small children are put at risk. They also see many dead bodies stashed inside homes used by drug dealers, and they find undocumented workers locked in cages, seemingly enslaved by human traffickers. The dialogue includes graphic sexual slang and steaming profanity. Various characters use drugs and some engage in semi-explicit sexual situations.

Looper (118 min., R) The futuristic film’s title refers to “looping,” a form of time-travel crime-fighting. In addition to graphic, body-shattering violence and occasional torture, the film shows partially nude prostitutes and includes some strong profanity.

The Master (137 min., R) It’s 1950, Philip Seymour Hoffman plays the head of a religious cult, and Joaquin Phoenix is one of his disciples. Paul Thomas Anderson’s first movie since “There Will Be Blood” includes sudden outbursts of nonlethal physical violence, very strong profanity, very heavy drinking, a couple of graphically implied sexual situations, and female nudity.

Summary: Capsules of recent movie releases, with an emphasis on suitability of content for various age groups.


It was never comfortable to look at the photographs taken by Corinne Day, who has died aged 48 from a brain tumour. Her documentary work was plain, and plaintive. Her fashion shots, even her recent, formally glamorous sequences for Vogue, have a sense that the girls, the gowns, the gorgeous locations are transient, and likely fake anyway. And the promise that Day had perceived in a Polaroid image of a 14-year-old aspirant model – Kate Moss – was her potential for wistfulness. "In photos," Day said, "we're usually laughing and happy and having a good time. We don't normally see the other side, when we're not having such a good time." It was always visible through Day's lens.

Day told interviewers that her "nan" had brought her up – her portrait of her grandmother shows tough tenderness – in Ickenham, west London. She claimed her mother had run a brothel, hence, perhaps, Day's unimpressed attitude towards sex, while her tearaway father had become respectable and successfully pursued serious money, but was distant from her emotionally.

Day's first job after her failed schooldays was as a courier, catching planes around the world as casually as buses, surviving on snacks squirrelled away from inflight meals. She became a model because a photographer on a flight suggested it, but knew she was not a cover girl diva: melancholy already muted her face. Still, it was a better living – appearing in adverts in the US and Australia, and catalogues in Japan. There she met her lifetime partner Mark Szaszy, who taught her how to use his camera, which she did while modelling in Milan.

She shot what she knew: kids who wore couture on the catwalk and for the camera, but who dressed in old tat, dossed in cheap rooms and "couldn't afford to go out and do the things we would have liked to do". Fashion employed progressively younger models from the early 1960s, and by the late 80s 16-year-olds were commonplace: the sad contrast intensified between their reality and the affluent arrogance they were paid to project. Day knew her pictures were original, and Phil Bicker, the art director of The Face, recognised that her teen strays suited his magazine, and commissioned a fashion shoot. Day went round the London agencies looking for a model who reflected her images from Milan, and found her in a snap of a scraggy-haired Croydon schoolgirl, Moss.

Their first great success, the Face cover sequence The 3rd Summer of Love, was published in July 1990, with Moss, barely 16, in bits of quality ready-to-wear and Portobello market finds – and, in the two most famed images, nothing but headgear, despite the chill of Camber Sands, in East Sussex, where the shoot took place. Moss's half-combative, half-pathetic attitudes are suffused with laughter. Moss's agency, though, disliked Day's refusal to retouch the pictures. As a model, she explained, she had hated being made "into someone I wasn't. I wanted to go in the opposite direction." (She was protective enough of Moss to share a flat with her for three years.)

With the stylist Melanie Ward, Day took the aesthetic further, wrapping shaggy, sometimes druggy, youngsters dragged off the street in mismatched vintage clothes: this became the "waif look", the visual equivalent of Seattle's grunge music. Day shot Moss almost unadorned for a Vogue cover in 1993, did collections for the magazine and supermodel sittings – at first this was an ambition achieved, but she later said: "They're stale, just about sex and glamour, when there are other elements of beauty." However, she felt no thrill, not even a rebel's excitement at the outraged response to her heroin chic Underexposed Vogue sequence, with Moss in saggy tights, looking as if she were in rehab. By then, many of Day's London friends really were in rehab, or should have been. In 1991, she had taken up with a group based around a heavy rock band, Pusherman. They were into cannabis, ketamine and heroin (although Day did not always join them; drugs clouded the camera vision she valued – she was "a photography junkie" ); they were badly off in that recessionary era.

For almost a decade, Day, influenc- ed by the documentary art of Nan Goldin, photographed their messy lives, particularly that of Tara St Hill, an impoverished, sick, single mother, shown in sex and pregnancy, in tears and tinsel, and at parties, or wasted in her Stoke Newington squat: "What I found interesting was to capture people's most intimate moments. And sometimes intimacy is sad."

Day was included in the imagery – "the camera becomes a part of your life". When she collapsed in New York in 1996, she told Szaszy, who had called the medics, not to forget her camera as he joined her in the ambulance to Bellevue hospital. His hands shook as he took the shots she requested – of her in a bed just after being told she had a brain tumour, in a lift on the way to the operating theatre for its removal – yet she felt having those moments pictured gave her control. A hundred of these images were collected in Diary, published in 2001 and much admired for its hard, but never cruel, candour.

She and Szaszy left drugs behind, and she made a pact with fashion and its finance, mellowing her visuals, even working with Moss again for Vogue. Later she accepted a National Portrait Gallery commission for a sequence of nine close-ups of Moss. Just as on Camber Sands, they chatted, so that Day could capture Moss's animation.

Day's photographs, fashion and not, were exhibited at the Victoria & Albert, Science and Design museums, Tate Modern, the Saatchi Gallery, and the Photographers' Gallery, and Szaszy spent a devoted decade making a documentary of her at work, which was shown on BBC Four in 2004.

Her tumour returned two years ago. To pay for specialised chemotherapy in a clinic in Arizona, her friends raised more than £100,000 through a Save the Day campaign, by selling limited-edition photographic prints, including a set featuring Moss, some signed by the model. Day completed the treatment last year, but it did not arrest the disease.

She is survived by Szaszy.

• Corinne Day, photographer, born 19 February 1962; died 27 August 2010

Summary: Photographer whose  unadorned, plaintive images exposed a darker side of fashion


The web is only about 15 years old, but already the conversation about it runs along tired old lines. Elites vs the people, amateurs vs professionals, hierarchy vs democracy - and on and on. For a medium supposedly defined by its transparency and openness, the critical discourse is surprisingly restricted.

And never more so when we talk about the fate of the critic. To my mind, critics speaking on this subject usually recall the forced confessions of Stalin's Russia: "The internet is a brave new medium and only a fool would cavil and carp at the magnificent opportunities it affords hitherto repressed masses of people. Certain regressive elements might speak of lost aesthetic standards, of the critic's knowledge and authority, and also of the unpleasant tendency of some to abuse and malign others from behind the mask of anonymity. But such is the price of progress, comrades."

I had my own collision with the inexorable march of history at the New Republic magazine, where I had worked for nearly 10 years, first as a staff writer, then as TV critic, and finally as a senior editor. By the time the magazine gave me my own culture blog, in May 2006 - ominously titled Lee Siegel On Culture - I had had pretty extensive experience as an online critic. I had published in Newsweek.com, worked as the art critic for Slate.com, and for three years written a weekly online TV column for the New Republic. I am not what you would call a nice critic, so I was no stranger to sometimes apoplectic online responses - mostly anonymous. (I had received plenty of furious printed responses, too, though these were published under the correspondent's own name.) But the situation on my blog at the New Republic was something new. Unlike any other magazine, newspaper, website or blog that I have ever heard of, the New Republic decided not to filter or edit the online comments.

What followed was a curious set of revelations. The most intelligent respondents to my writing, no matter how vehemently they disagreed with me, wrote under their own names. On several occasions, I dropped into the comments section and made equally heated rejoinders, also under my own name. I found those exchanges exhilarating. But what I also found was that, in almost every instance, the passion or stridency of my challengers was reduced the minute I acknowledged them. I began to feel like a politician whose authority is in question until he mixes with voters in diners, stores and bars, or visits the TV talk shows to clown around and show his "human side".

And I began to feel that perhaps the almost total delegitimisation of political figures in the US - a process hastened by our current idiotic and criminal regime - was now being visited upon cultural figures, and in particular upon critics. It was no accident, after all, that the blogosphere really took off in the years since Bush became president, especially after the start of the Iraq war. The feeling now - post-Judith Miller's resignation from the New York Times over her inaccurate reports about Iraq's WMD - is that if it appears in the mainstream media, it's bullshit; whereas if it's on the internet, it's the truth.

I discovered something else in my adventures and misadventures online (more about the latter in a minute). The most impassioned, as well as the most hysterical and abusive respondents, were usually defenders of conventional taste. Strange, I know. The web is supposed to be the great outlet for dissent, but I was screechingly condemned when, for example, I suggested that Daily Show host Jon Stewart was too sarcastic to be funny, and that he pandered to his demographic. There were so many negative responses to that column that the New Republic's server broke down. True, Stewart (who later graciously had me on his show) represents the advanced guard of cultural opposition to Bush and co. But he is also the darling of the mostly liberal media, whose ingratiating opposition to Bush was never exactly heroic.

Critics worth their salt earn their reputations by taking on established taste, whether it appears in stuffy form, or - less obviously - as a kind of adversarial posturing. It amused and then exasperated me that, week after week, I was vilified online as arrogant, elitist, someone who was threatened by dissent, when, week after week, I was taking on the judgments of the New York Times, the New Yorker and other mainstream institutions. My blogospheric challengers almost always wrote in the lingo of the subdued commercial herd: "Siegel needs to take his head out of his ass" was a frequent sentiment. I had encountered the same attitudes in high school.

The real danger confronting criticism on the web is that, in the name of "anti-elitism" and "the voice of the people", real dissent (which looks elitist because it is rare) will be drowned out by posturing mobs. So the question is not whither the authority of the critic, but whither the power of resistance that the best criticism represents? And what happens when established critics who take on established taste start trying to please their detractors, in order to save themselves?

My respondents seemed to identify criticism with the act of passing judgment. But for a true critic, judgment is the burden you start out with. The challenge, even in a short review, is to distil judgment into wit, humour, irony, history, anecdote - into a style that is the only justification for passing judgment. No one reads literary critic James Wood, my former colleague at the New Republic, merely for his verdicts. You read him for the way he embeds dazzling intuitions in breathtaking imagery - for the way his criticism emerges from the chrysalis of his style, before your very eyes.

Kenneth Tynan once quipped that the critic knows the way, but the artist knows how to drive the car. In fact, any critic worth reading knows that the way he drives to his judgment matters more than his judgment. But the responses of the crowd that I encountered on the web always boiled down to either we don't agree with you, or we do agree with you. Having an opinion, agreeing or disagreeing, is quick and easy; reading or writing criticism is a type of patience, just as art is a type of patience.

Tired of being labelled an elitist, weary of being bullied, but most of all angry at being insulted as a "douchebag", "asshole", "fraud" and, finally, "paedophile", I implored my editors to edit or delete the worst attacks. Delighted by the ruckus and all the online traffic, they refused. So, after attacking what I described as my readers' "thuggish anonymity" under my own name, on my blog and in print, and after enraging the entire blogosphere by coining the term "blogofascism" to describe the quality of the discourse I was experiencing, I decided to get silly. I decided to give thuggish anonymity a taste of thuggish anonymity.

I called myself "sprezzatura", a term invented during the Italian Renaissance that connotes a "deceptive simplicity". Whenever Lee Siegel was being libelled, I celebrated him. To those who objected in obscene terms to my views on Jon Stewart, I replied: "Siegel is brave, brilliant, and wittier than Stewart will ever be. Take that, you bunch of immature, abusive sheep." Whenever my attackers ganged up, I excoriated them. I was back in the schoolyard, so I did what I had done as a bullied, bookish boy. I fought back with artifice and words. I drove everyone nuts. Of course, I got a bloody nose.

Crossing over to the other side, to the anonymous world of the hitherto silenced and repressed, had a peculiar effect on me. I found that I could not bear to allow my alias's words to go unacknowledged as mine. My foolish pride, as the song goes, which gave birth to sprezzatura, also could not take a back seat to sprezzatura. So I did nothing to hide my style, even repeating phrases I had used when writing under my own name. It was through these reckless telltale tics that some enterprising commenters worked out who I really was.

Though I appeared as sprezzatura on a mere five occasions - and several times mocked myself, in one instance enthusing that "Lee Siegel was being burned in effigy in front of the Pakistani embassy" - I was made out to be a serial deceiver. I was called a hypocrite, naturally, once my cover was blown, though the way I see it, an advocate of gun control who shoots an armed assailant is hardly a hypocrite. To my mind, I had simply been practising the type of criticism the champions of the web claim to have unleashed. I was challenging smug, complacent, monolithic opinion, even if to other people it looked like the "wisdom of crowds". An understandably terrified New Republic suspended me for a few months before warily publishing me again. But my punishment hardly came as a surprise. As the truly dissenting bloggers out there might agree - and of course they exist - dissent is never in season. I hope those stubbornly contrary bloggers will persist, and use the internet to reform its worst aspects. I certainly intend to keep using the web, in the hope that it will develop into something less herdlike and banal. It will be quite a scrimmage. Technology may change, but humankind doesn't, and as a critic once said - before his hegemony was happily abolished - humankind cannot bear much reality.

· Lee Siegel's Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob is published in the UK by Serpent's Tail

Summary: US critic Lee Siegel got into trouble for posting flattering replies to his own blog under a false name. Here he reveals why he has no regrets


After three days of record-setting cold weather, the so-called Polar Vortex began to move away from the United States and toward Canada Wednesday, allowing much of the U.S. to start thawing out Thursday.

Temperatures across much of the country will return to more normal winter ranges on Thursday, remaining below freezing in many places but a far cry from the sub-zero temperatures that closed schools and cancelled thousands of flights. After two days of temperatures in the single digits or even negative territory, the forecast for the northeast calls for temperatures in the 40s by the weekend.

The thaw is a welcome reprieve from winter weather that shattered records and caused problems in many states. Minnesota’s Twin Cities, Minneapolis and St. Paul, spent 62 consecutive hours below zero, according to the Weather Channel. Chicago was in a sub-zero freeze for 37 hours, including 29 hours with temperatures in the negative double-digits. More than 7,000 flights were canceled on Monday and Tuesday as ground crews dealt with sluggish fuel lines and de-icing solution that froze. On Tuesday, all 50 states had temperatures below freezing, including Hawaii, where the top of the Mauna Kea volcano reached 25 degrees.

According to counts by NBC News and the Weather Channel, the bitter cold has been blamed for at least 17 deaths across the country.

Summary: After record-setting chill, winter weather returns to normal for much of the U.S.


Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel lent his support to VA Secretary Eric Shinseki amid an ongoing veterans’ health care scandal, but said in an interview Friday that someone needs to be held accountable for the poor treatment of military veterans.

“Anytime there is an issue or a problem or a veteran doesn’t get service, or certainly if a veteran dies because he or she doesn’t get service, or anytime there’s an issue, there’s no higher responsibility our country has than to these people who serve and sacrifice,” Hagel said during an interview with Charlie Rose on CBS This Morning.

But Hagel stopped short of calling on Shinseki to resign over reports that at least 40 military veterans died while waiting for treatment at a VA health center.

“I support Secretary Shinseki,” Hagel said. “ This is an individual who has the responsibility, as he has said, to be accountable. The President said yesterday that there has to be accountability. There does have to be accountability on — right up and down the line. But I think we’ve got to fix the problem. That’s the real focus here.”

Watch the full interview at CBS This Morning.

Summary: But the Secretary of Defense says anyone responsible for poorly caring for sick, wounded veterans must be held accountable


Francis Bacon's Study for Head of Lucian Freud was bought by renowned children's author Roald Dahl in 1967. Photograph: ITV / Rex Features

A logjam of giant names in the arts comes together in one small canvas to be auctioned next month: Lucian Freud, painted by Francis Bacon, and owned by the late Roald Dahl.

Dahl died in 1990, Bacon in 1992, and Freud in 2011. Although they later fell out, the young Bacon and Freud were close friends, who painted one another's portraits – and Dahl was a great admirer and friend of Bacon's.

The renowned children's author bought this Study for Head of Lucian Freud in 1967, the year it was painted, for £2,850 with the proceeds from one of his most famous books, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It will be sold next month at Christie's estimated at up to £12m.

Bacon's only other painting of Freud was made in 1951. Freud's even tinier portrait of Bacon, also in 1951, is one of the 20th century's missing masterpieces. The disastrously pocket sized picture, painted in oils on a copper etching plate, was immediately bought by the Tate, but stolen from a touring British Council exhibition in Berlin in 1988. In 2001 Freud issued a personal appeal, on a poster he designed himself, for its return in time for a retrospective of his work, but it has never resurfaced.

Dahl, whose work has at least as many dark shadows as Bacon's, said he found the artist emotionally exciting.

"I can see no other valid way of assessing a painting's worth. No paintings stir and excite me quite as much as those of Francis Bacon. I know there are some people who are not moved by them at all, and to those unfortunates I would say 'jolly bad luck, I can't help you'."

Francis Outred, Christie's expert, said he saw many similarities between the work of Bacon and Dahl.

"Even though these two creative geniuses worked in different fields, they shared a keen sense of the macabre, which can be seen in both of their work: where Bacon used his rapid, impulsive brush marks to create an intimate and startlingly animated portrait, Dahl used his pen to create unforgettable stories that sear the imagination with provocative and affecting images."

"Both were enigmatic outsiders who were hard to pin down and liked to work in small, claustrophobic spaces. Both also aroused controversy and fascination in their public and private lives."

At one point Dahl owned five works by Bacon, but sold them all except the Freud, which has remained in the family collection until now. It is being sold to invest in the philanthropic work he began, including one for seriously ill children, and the Roald Dahl museum and story centre, which attracts 70,000 visitors a year to the Buckinghamshire museum of Great Missenden, near his home and famous writing hut in the last 36 years of his life, where Bacon was also a regular visitor.

Summary: Children's author bought Study for Head of Lucian Freud in 1967 for £2,850 – it is estimated it could get up to £12m at auction


A former associate dean of MIT’s Sloan School of Management and his son have pleaded guilty to securities fraud and obstruction of justice after allegedly losing $140 million of investors’ money in hedge funds.

Gabriel Bitran, a 69-year-old Newton resident, and his son Marco allegedly attracted investors from 2005 through 2011 by promising to invest using a complex mathematical trading model developed by Gabriel Bitran at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They brought in $500 million, but in reality invested much of the money in other hedge funds, according US Attorney Carmen M. Ortiz in Boston.

As the financial crisis hit in the fall of 2008, several of the Bitrans’ hedge funds had “disastrous losses,” according to Ortiz’s office, resulting in investors losing 50 percent to 75 percent of their principal. Some of the money was invested with New York financier Bernard Madoff, who was convicted in 2009 of defrauding investors of billions of dollars and was sentenced to 150 years in prison.

Meanwhile, the Bitrans withdrew about $12 million of their own money from the hedge funds, prosecutors allege, while forcing customers to wait to redeem money from their GMB Capital Management, later renamed ClearStream Investments.

“The Bitrans thereby extracted much of the value of their own investments while leaving other investors to suffer more losses as the funds’ values declined precipitously,’’ Ortiz’s office said in a press release.

In addition, the US attorney said the Bitrans paid themselves millions of dollars in management fees.

The Bitrans falsely told investors they had delivered average annual returns of 16 percent to 23 percent for over eight years, prosecutors said. Father and son acknowledged to each other in e-mails, cited by the US attorney, that they had misled investors.

In July 2009, Gabriel Bitran said to his son in an e-mail, “We have mislead (sic) a lot of people with a range of statements that were incorrect simply to increase our income.’’

The pair previously settled similar civil charges with the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2012, agreeing to pay $4.8 million.

During the SEC’s investigation, the Bitrans made false statements to the examiners, according to the US attorney.

If the plea agreements are accepted by the judge in the criminal case, the Bitrans will be sentenced to two to five years in jail, as well as a period of up to three years of supervised release, and will have to repay $10 million of their gains.

Summary: A former associate dean of MIT’s Sloan School of Management and his son have pleaded guilty to  securities fraud after allegedly losing $140 million of investors’ money in hedge funds.


August 25, 2014: In what is what of his most well-known scenes from the film, Richard Attenborough's character John Hammond welcomes Doctors Grant and Sattler to his island, Jurassic Park.

British director and actor Richard Attenborough has died aged 90 after a long illness.

Lord Attenborough appeared in movies such as Brighton Rock, The Great Escape and Jurassic Park, in a career spanning six decades.

British actor Richard Attenborough. (AAP)

"His acting in "Brighton Rock" was brilliant, his directing of "Gandhi" was stunning - Richard Attenborough was one of the greats of cinema," British Prime Minister David Cameron wrote on Twitter.

The film Gandhi won two Oscars.

Lord Attenborough, known affectionately as "Dickie", was the brother of renowned naturalist Sir David Attenborough.

Richard Attenborough's brother, Sir David Attenborough. (AAP)

He leaves two children, Michael and Charlotte, after losing his eldest daughter Jane in the South Asian tsunami on Boxing Day in 2004.

The BBC reported Lord Attenborough had been in a nursing home with his wife for a number of years.

He had also been in a wheelchair since falling down stairs six years ago.

Attenborough won two Oscars for his film Gandhi. (AAP)

Lord Attenborough's son told BBC News he died at lunchtime on Sunday.

His family is expected to make a full statement tomorrow.

Attenborough directs American actress and journalist Candice Bergen during the making of 'Gandhi'. (AAP)

Attenborough starred in 1993 film Jurassic Park.

Attenborough plays Pinkie in the stage version of Graham Greene's book 'Brighton Rock'. (AAP)

Attenborough and his wife, actress Sheila Sim, arrive at the Odeon Leicester Square for the premiere of 'Anne of the Thousand Days', 23rd February 1970. (AAP)

Attenborough plays Pinkie in the stage version of Graham Greene's book 'Brighton Rock' in 1943. He played the same role in the subsequent film version. (AAP)

Attenborough, left, and his camera crew prepare to shoot a scene with actor Ben Kingsley as Mahatma Gandhi in 1982. (AAP)

Attenborough and wife Sheila Sim attend The Great British Movie Event in aid of the National Film and Television School, at the Old Billingsgate on June 17, 2008 in London, England. (AAP)

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Summary: British actor and film director Richard Attenborough has died at the age of 90.


Time Warner Cable early Wednesday morning experienced service outages, an issues the cable-and-Internet company is moving quickly to resolve.

“We’re working to restore services to all areas as quickly as possible,” Time Warner’s online customer care team said in a tweet. The verified Twitter account said further Tweets would be delayed while the issue was being addressed. A Twitter handle owned by the parent company hasn’t yet addressed the issue.

The company said its services became disrupted early Wednesday during “routine network maintenance,” according to an e-mailed statement to Bloomberg. The company told Bloomberg that as of 6 a.m., services were largely restored as updates brought customers back online.

Time Warner Cable has more than 14 million customers and is among the largest providers of video, high-speed data and voice services in the U.S. Many of the company’s residential and business customers are located in five geographic clusters–New York, the Carolinas, southern California, Texas, and the Midwest (which includes Ohio, Kentucky and Wisconsin). The company earlier this year agreed to be acquired by larger rival Comcast CMCSA in an all-stock deal worth $45 billion.

Summary: Company says it's working to restore services to all areas as quickly as possible.


FORTUNE — Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg was the keynote speaker this afternoon at Harvard Business School’s Class Day, which precedes commencement. Days after a tumultuous May 18 initial public offering, the social network has come under a barrage of questions and criticisms which could have made the event, well, awkward.

Not a lot. It was a hot and sticky 90 minutes under a blue, cloud-splattered sky on Baker Lawn on the HBS campus. The day’s event was overshadowed by the heartbreaking death of second-year student Nathan Bihlmaier, 31, known as “Nate.” Bihlmaier disappeared Sunday night in Portland, Maine, after a night celebrating with friends. His body was recovered Tuesday in Portland harbor. He left behind a pregnant wife. “Some things in life are just hard,” said graduate Luke Marklin, Section F, in his welcoming remarks.

MORE: Who really won in Facebook’s IPO mess

Sandberg, who wore a dress bluer even than the sky, began her remarks: “Today was supposed to be a day of unbridled celebration, and I know that’s no longer true.” Then she cut to her prepared remarks, which centered on career advice (“When you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, don’t ask what seat, just take it”) as well as her struggles as a woman in the workplace. For example, she cited the fact that women today occupy only about 15% of C-level positions in corporate America, and the number’s been stuck there for more than a decade.

Sandberg made no reference to Facebook’s FB struggles aside for one slightly humorous oblique mention at the end: “As you and your classmates spread out across the globe and walk across this stage tomorrow, I wish for you four things: First, that you keep in touch, via Facebook. This is critical to your future success. And we’re public now. So can you click on an ad or two while you’re there?”

Summary: Speaking at Harvard Business School's Class Day, Facebook's COO barely addressed the controversy over the company's IPO.


Turner Prize 2006 Tate Britain, London SW1, until 14 Jan

USA Today Royal Academy, London W1, until 4 Nov

As a competition, the Turner Prize makes no sense and never has. Its anomalies are plainly absurd. By far the most shocking - that the judges cannot possibly see all the shows nominated, never mind shortlisted - has been confirmed by one of this year's panel, Lynn Barber, in a splendidly frank article for last Sunday's Observer

But as a show, the Turner has its merits, one being that Tate Britain must put on what amounts to a group exhibition of four artists under 50 who might not otherwise get such decent space in the gallery. Except this is becoming less true by the year. One of the current shortlistees, Phil Collins, has already hogged the place for months with a typically interminable video while another, Rebecca Warren, was among the better artists in the 2006 Tate Triennial. And by a neat coincidence, they represent the good-bad ratio this year.

My problem with Collins is simple. I can't see any merit in his work. His video of a dance marathon in Ramallah, in which the contestants grow weary but the misery just continues, strikes me as a dumbly simplistic metaphor. Now he is showing 11-hour-long interviews with people who have got hitched, divorced and so forth on reality TV. The one I saw featured a Turkish woman talking about her life's misfortunes with remarkable equanimity (and not a little flirtatiousness) to the presenter Collins hired to do the work.

The screens are split, she confiding on one, he soothingly encouraging on the other, his face palpably aching with concern. Collins occasionally appears behind him, busy with the technicalities, which is presumably the point: the manipulations of telly exposed. And if this sounds fatuously obvious, believe me, you won't give that screen a second look.

Exploitation is the game - who's zooming who, and so forth: chestnuts even for the tabloids. Collins adds nothing while taking what he can. At Tate Britain, he has established a production company to research a British edition of this 'programme' about programmes - explain how telly ruined your life and then he can flog your experiences, too, at the next biennale.

Mark Titchner is more interesting, but has made better work than the half-baked installations here. A metal pulpit and something like a vast standard lamp dangling with quasi-Oriental talismans are rigged up to some phoney machines, all knobs and dials and mysterious phials, that resemble those contraptions Scientologists use to 'record' engrams. The pulpit is ringed about with script - 'Injury to one is injury to all': ex cathedra statements (unattributed) being generally the stuff of Titchner's art. The suggestion, you will guess, is that mental energy, faith, prayer or whatever might spark those machines into life. The absurdity, such as it is, being that these boxes are patently defunct.

Titchner plays about with belief systems, period typefaces, slogans that could be scissored from rock lyrics, religion or philosophy. In his other installation, 1960s op-art spirals whirl around (the windmills of your mind) and TVs flash up dates from a Liberty human rights audit, though, naturally, there's no clue to their significance. Which is very much how it goes with Titchner's mini-show. Objects and ideas remain decoupled; appearances are all. It's a deliberate (or, worse, clueless) pile-up.

Rebecca Warren, by contrast, knows exactly what she's doing. Her unfired clay sculptures look half-modelled, half-thrown and ostentatiously inchoate, as if they didn't want to be defined as figures. Foolish and ungainly, with their hints of anatomy - a nipple, a plump tummy - they can hardly stand up for being tall as a Giacometti yet heavy as a Rodin. And what looks like a back may turn out to be a front; their comic aim is to confound.

Warren is also showing some new works - miscellanies of inconsequential objects presented with mock-solemnity, perhaps a skit on Beuys's vitrines. But she is beginning to overdo the art jokes. Admittedly, I relished a huge, claggy lump that looked like a great squash of Tiepolo angels, but she relies too much on send-ups of Picasso, Barry Flanagan et al. Her real strength lies in making new forms that have force of personality without ever quite resolving into people.

But the best artist here has the greatest visual intellect: German-born painter Tomma Abts. Abts makes small abstract pictures (not an oxymoron in her case) always of the identical size. Their colours are subtle, often mute. Their forms - zig-zagging, ribboning, geometric, curvaceous - are endlessly various. Sometimes, the surface is incised or embossed, as if the image wanted to break into three dimensions. Sometimes, she plays optical tricks with the flat plane (recessive shadows, impossible perspectives) that you can't exactly fathom. Abts's art is rich with metaphorical associations: a riffle of playing cards, a field of hoar frost, a gilded icon. She makes the point that no painting is ever entirely abstract. Yet her works have the initial aspect of patterns; patterns that don't quite click, seem to crumple or splinter, might even break out - but for the delicate poise of each picture.

That is surely their family trait, though each has its own persona. They may range from jeu d'esprits to condensed sonnets to tough little epigrams, but all are characterised by the reserved intelligence of their maker. If there must be a competition, then Abts is the winner.

Charles Saatchi, who long since decried the prize as passe, recently said that when it comes to British art, there's nothing in the shops. His latest purchases are all American and they are expertly displayed in the new wing of the Royal Academy.

If you have seen and disliked the Serpentine Gallery's Uncertain States of America, then don't be discouraged: USA Today is a much livelier show. Obviously it reflects Saatchi's taste for the slick, the gross and the wilfully bad to some degree, but it has peaks of originality and flair. The photograph on the posters, for instance, of a woman defiantly smoking a burning match is a far stronger portrait of US anxiety today than any of the mimsy ramblings at the Serpentine.

Look out in particular for Barnaby Furnas's excitable paintings - fireworks and shoot-outs triggering like controlled explosions across the canvas, every inch a graphic surprise. Or Kristin Baker's wrap-around paintings of the view through hurtling windscreens: a hybrid of Wyndham Lewis and James Rosenquist.

There is, as the times decree, a lot of political art, none of it very subtle. The Senate collapses, a heap of flimsy fabric; the US map is redrawn with Texas at the top; Moses's tablets rise like the Twin Towers in Manhattan. But a more mature artist like Adam Cvijanovic produces savage visions that go beyond propaganda: smalltown America rushing heavenwards in an apocalyptic updraft.

The most striking work is by a Chinese-American, Terence Koh, who has made 200 casts of his own sleeping - or sleep-deprived - head. These queer and wretched items are like lumps of black clinker, friable, ashy, shattered in parts, each lying in its own glass case. Massed together, these chambers of the mind rise like a cliff - 200 bad nights, each different and yet the same: a monument to the poor unconscious self.

Voxpop: What did some of the first visitors think of the Turner show?

Suzanne Wilson 48, tour guide

They were all very thought-provoking. Mark Titchner was my favourite. I liked how he used slogans. Phil Collins was interesting but his choice of Muslim subjects was a bit too PC, which means he'll probably win.

Steve Barber 53, sales executive

I liked it. Mark Titchner gets my vote, and I enjoyed Phil Collins as well. The first time I saw the Tomma Abts paintings, I didn't think very much of them but the more you look, the more interesting they get. They look almost like leather.

Kate Wiggs, 28, fine art student

I liked the combination of naive and modern in Titchner's work and that none of the technology really did anything. I was underwhelmed with Warren, though, and Tomma Abts's method of painting felt a bit unoriginal.

Phillip Peter, 24, graphic designer

I liked Titchner and Warren - aesthetically they worked well together. Tomma Abts was rubbish, all those really dull pre-Dadaist scribbles. And Phil Collins's documentaries are so common at the moment.

Lea Tunesi, 42, set designer

Tomma Abts was my favourite. Her paintings had a deep, meditative quality that appealed to me. The others didn't make much impression - I'd seen it all before. Still, it's a much better selection than last year.

· Turner Prize 2006 Tate Britain, London SW1, until 14 Jan USA Today Royal Academy, London W1, until 4 Nov

· To read Lynn Barber's report of her experience as a Turner Prize judge, go to observer.co.uk/review

Summary: The annual Turner lottery is upon us and by far the strongest nominee is Tomma Abts. Over at the Royal Academy, meanwhile, Saatchi's new Americans are looking good, too, reports Laura Cumming.


That’s her “bull” case. In her “bear” scenario, Apple falls to $150 per share in 2010.

Katy Huberty’s three scenarios for Apple AAPL — bear, base and bull — is the lead item in Morgan Stanley’s “Key Surprises for 2010,” a 15-company forecast issued to clients Wednesday.

Huberty is leaning heavily toward the bull, offering three paths by which Apple hits somewhere between $325 and $435 per share within the next 12 months:

The Street, she believes, is only giving Apple a 5% chance of surpassing that $325-plus target. She puts the odds at one in four.

Her other two scenarios are not so rosy:

Apple closed Wednesday at $195.03, up 0.86 points (0.44%) for the day.

[Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter @philiped]

Summary: That's her "bull" case. In her "bear" scenario, Apple falls to $150 per share in 2010. Katy Huberty's three scenarios for Apple -- bear, base and bull -- is the lead item in Morgan Stanley's "Key Surprises for 2010," a 15-company forecast issued to clients Wednesday. Huberty is leaning heavily toward the bull, offering three…


02/06/2015 AT 03:05 PM EST

When Samuel Forrest's son Leo was born Jan. 21, doctors informed him that Leo had Down Syndrome, which made no difference to Forrest.

"I looked at this guy and I said, he's beautiful – he's perfect and I'm absolutely keeping him," Forrest

But for Forrest, a native New Zealander living in Armenia, there was one thing he hadn't counted on. Leo's mother, Ruzan Badalyan, issued him an ultimatum there in the hospital room: It was her or Leo.

, "scores of babies are abandoned [in Armenia] each year, for reasons ranging from physical or intellectual disabilities and minor 'imperfections' â¦ health professionals estimate that 98 percent of all Down syndrome babies born in Armenia are abandoned, every year."

Forrest said, "[Badalyan] told me if I kept [Leo] then we would get a divorce." (Badalyan confirmed to ABC News that she had given birth to a child with Down syndrome and did leave the father and child, filing for divorce about a week after Leo was born. She declined further comment.)

Forrest hadn't been aware of the practice beforehand. "What happens when a baby like this is born here, they will tell you that you donât have to keep them," he said. "My wife had already decided, so all of this was done behind my back."

A freelance contractor, Forrest was unprepared to deal with the sudden costs of being essentially abandoned in a different country with a newborn son. He set up

to raise money to help him return to New Zealand with Leo.

Though his initial goal was set at $60,000, the page has raised nearly $300,000 at the time of this writing, some of which Forrest says will be used to "fund facilities and programs here in Armenia that will support future parents to keep their kids despite all disabilities." Another portion will go to the one orphanage in Armenia that regularly takes Down syndrome babies.

"After what I've been through with Leo, I'm not going to sit back and watch babies be sent to orphanages," Forrest said. "As a child with Down syndrome, that becomes somewhat of a label. If we can get around this label, we'll see that they're normal. They're a little different from us, but they're still normal."

Summary: Samuel Forrest's son Leo was born with Down syndrome, and his wife divorced him 10 days later


FORTUNE — The little things that used to make air travel seem so much more luxurious — the full-cabin meal service, the free booze, those precious few extra inches of legroom — have largely disappeared over the last couple of decades as rising fuel prices and general belt-tightening by airlines have eaten into the comforts passengers now consider extras.

But it turns out many modern air travelers are less concerned with physical comforts than with connectivity. In fact, some 90% of airline passengers would give up at least one other onboard convenience for one single in-flight amenity: Wi-Fi.

A survey conducted earlier this summer by technology giant Honeywell’s HON Aerospace division found that the vast majority of airline passengers think Wi-Fi should be available on every flight. And not just any Wi-Fi — those surveyed want the kind of stability and speed they’ve come to know in their homes and offices. The kind of Wi-Fi that supports Skype calls and chat services. The kind of Wi-fi that can stream three back-to-back episodes of Breaking Bad without freezing up.

But what’s more interesting is how passengers value their connectivity over other in-flight amenities. For its part, Honeywell — which, it should be noted, manufactures all kind of jetliner components including the kinds of communication equipment that enables in-flight Wi-Fi — conducted the survey to demonstrate a real passenger demand for better airborne online access. What it identified in the offing is a culture so concerned with connectivity we’re now largely willing to forgo all kinds of other comforts and conveniences — up to and including a working lavatory.

MORE: Stores are finally turning on to WiFi

While only a third of respondents (the roughly 3,000 passengers were mostly from the U.S. but also included some passengers from London and Singapore) said that Wi-Fi is the No. 1 amenity they need, roughly 80% (and nearly 90% of Americans) said Wi-Fi should always be available during flights. That’s especially true on long flights; 54% of Americans, 39% of Brits, and 30% of Singaporeans say they wouldn’t be able to go even five hours on a flight without connecting to the web.

But where the numbers get really interesting — and perhaps where they begin to plumb the collective psyche of a culture that’s virtually always plugged in — is when the survey asks respondents to value Wi-Fi in comparison to other traditional in-flight conveniences.

Nearly nine in 10 passengers would forgo at least one conventional airline amenity for a faster and more stable Wi-Fi connection. For roughly 60% of passengers, having no connection is worse than having a seat that doesn’t recline. The same number would rather have access to fast, stable Internet than to be able to sit in their preferred seat. One in three (one in four among Brits) would rather sit next to a crying baby for the duration of a flight than repeatedly lose the Wi-Fi connection. Seven in 10 would be more frustrated by a slow connection than by slow food or beverage service.

But while screaming babies and slow beverage service are minor annoyances, plenty of passengers would subject themselves to actual physical discomfort in exchange for enhanced connectivity in the air. A quarter of passengers would give up a full six inches of legroom in exchange for the best Wi-Fi service possible. Still others — 13% of Americans, 17% of Brits, and 22% of Singaporeans — would give up their bathroom privileges. (The survey doesn’t specify if these are the same respondents who say they couldn’t make it through an unplugged five-hour flight.)

MORE: The Washington Post could do worse than to emulate Woolworth

What are passengers doing with in-flight Wi-Fi when they do have it? Between one quarter and one third use it strictly for professional purposes to ensure their airborne hours remain productive. The rest use it predominantly for personal reasons: sending and receiving personal email, logging into social networks, or streaming movies and TV shows.

But just because passengers aren’t working, per se, doesn’t mean they’re not getting anything done. In an anecdotal portion of the survey, passengers said they’ve conducted critical last-minute banking, made much-needed medical appointments at their destinations, and responded to important time-sensitive emails via in-flight Wi-Fi.

One survey respondent claims to have planned an entire wedding during a flight. Another used the idle in-flight hours to file for divorce.

Summary: The modern air traveler would forgo many conventional airline amenities -- including bathroom privileges -- for a stronger, faster in-flight Internet signal.


Updated MAR 02, 2015 7:25p ET

TEMPE, Ariz. -- Arizona State coach Todd Graham has addressed the improving of his team's special teams unit by shaking up the coaching staff.

Shawn Slocum was hired as associate head coach, special teams coordinator and outside linebackers coach, while senior associate head coach and defensive end specialist Paul Randolph has been re-assigned, the team announced Monday.

Randolph will take on the title of "associate athletics director of championship life" and work under the direction of Jean Boyd, ASU athletics director for student-athlete development.

Slocum, 50, comes with college experience from stints at USC, Ole Miss, Pittsburgh and multiple stops at Texas A&M, where his father, R.C. Slocum, is the school's all-time winningest coach.

Since 2006, Slocum has been with the NFL's Green Bay Packers. He had served as their special teams coordinator from 2009 through the end of the 2014 season.

"Shawn has 25 years of coaching experience to his credit, with almost all of that coming at the elite college level," Graham said in a statement. "Shawn comes from a football family and he has coached and recruited at the highest competitive level. Shawn's addition will further complement the fine staff that we already have in place."

Slocum was fired by the Packers after an NFL-worst special teams unit saw those issues pop up in an NFC Championship game loss to the Seattle Seahawks in January.

In a meeting with beat writers in February, Graham hinted at the possibility of an addition to the coaching staff, specifically regarding the special teams unit. His top priority this offseason focused on special team improvements, and he said at the time he was considering all his options.

"Glaringly, I've evaluated over the last three years, we've been one of the top three teams (in the Pac-12)," Graham said. "We've been one of the top offenses in the South. We've been one of the most unique and productive defenses in the South. We've been, out of the 12 schools, I would rank us eighth in special teams. We have got to get that better. That is my number one objective."

The hiring of Slocum makes it clear how the Sun Devils will move forward.

"I am looking forward to working with Coach Graham," Slocum said in a statement. "I have followed his teams and success for a long period of time. I'm very impressed with the success of the Sun Devil football program. I am looking forward to bringing my family to Tempe and the ASU community and to competing for national championships at ASU."

Graham expects his offense and defense to continue clicking with very little turnover from a year ago, but he expects special teams to play catch-up.

The expectation of running backs Kalen Ballage and De'Chavon 'Gump' Hayes handling the return duties clears up some questions. The return of kicker Zane Gonzalez, who has hit better than 80 percent of his field goals in two seasons, brings more stability to the unit.

Finding consistency in the coverage and punting aspects will be the biggest challenges for Slocum.

The Sun Devils will also adjust to a knew coaching staff structure. The addition of Slocum takes pressure off Graham -- not to mention defensive coordinator Keith Patterson, and assistant coach and recruiting coordintor Chip Long, who had special teams duties listed under their job descriptions a year ago.

Meanwhile, Randolph moves from the football staff to a role under the athletic department's administrative staff. Randolph served on Graham's staff at Rice, Tulsa and Pittsburgh before following him to ASU.

"Paul Randolph has been with me for my entire head coaching career and has helped our teams post five 10-win seasons in the past nine years," Graham said in a statement. "We couldn't have accomplished a record like that without people like Paul on the staff. Paul is perhaps the finest person I know and he stands for all of the principles that we teach to our players. Those qualities will serve him well as he pursues a career in college administration."

Follow Kevin Zimmerman on Twitter

Summary: The Arizona State football team hired former Green Bay Packers special teams coach Shawn Slocum to take over special teams duties for the Sun Devils.


03/02/2015 AT 12:10 PM EST

Things have a strange life cycle on the Internet. That's about the only explanation there is for why this video of Japanese viral star Hajime has been popping up again.

There's not much to the video: Hajime straps a bunch of Mentos to his body with tape and jumps in a bathtub full of

. It does not appear to be

or Coke Zero, and the experiment does not offer any conclusion, scientific or otherwise. In short, there's absolutely no redeeming value to it.

But the numbers don't lie: Hajime's original video, from July 2014, has 6.1 million views on YouTube.

from January, has 1.2 million views.

Personally, we really enjoy the lower-quality version; it's got a nice sordid feel to it thanks to the lower resolution. Seems like something we should've been watching in the back room of a Times Square shop in the late 1970s.

Summary: Watch the fizzy reaction


SUNNYVALE, Calif., June 2, 2003 HP and Opsware Inc. Join Forces to Deliver Enhanced Automation for HP’s Utility Data Center

SUNNYVALE, Calif., Feb. 13, 2006 Opsware Announces Worldwide Distribution Agreement with Cisco

These two headlines sound pretty similar—“Small company partners with giant company to reach a bigger market”—but they led to two very different outcomes. Our 2003 deal with HP HPQ didn’t generate a single dollar in revenue, whereas our 2006 agreement with Cisco CSCO drove tens of millions of dollars in sales and helped to make Opsware the uncatchable leader in data center software. Why did one succeed spectacularly while the other never took off?

As a startup with the best product, your challenge is often getting it in front of enough customers and getting them to buy. In theory, striking a deal to have an HP or an EMC EMC or a Vodafone VOD sell your product to their customers is the way to cover the market and exponentially increase sales velocity. In practice, however, most “David-Goliath” distribution deals turn out like our 2003 HP deal: great PR, but not much else. Here’s the way it typically plays out:

The temptation for some startups is try to “make it up in volume”—sign as many distribution partners as possible on the basis that none of them is likely to deliver much on their own. While that degree of over-coverage might feel temporarily reassuring, it only multiplies the challenges exponentially in practice. The only thing worse than having no partners is trying to manage multiple ineffective partners competing with each other in the market and drowning the company with their demands.

In my experience, one well-constructed, high-impact partnership is better than a hundred run-of-the-mill arrangements. Distribution partnerships take an enormous effort to make work. It’s just not realistic to have many of them, which is why picking the right one and constructing it intelligently is fundamental. At Opsware, we only had one significant distribution relationship over eight years, but it had a massively positive impact on the company.

Time to find a partner It was early 2005, and things were starting to go pretty well for three-year-old Opsware. We had just closed our $33 million acquisition of Rendition Networks, giving us a lightweight but powerful network automation software product that we christened Opsware NAS (Network Automation System). NAS would allow us to penetrate and rapidly deliver value to new accounts, then upsell them to our considerably heavier and more expensive Server Automation System. (Our average NAS deal size was $115k, took a month to sell and a couple of weeks to deploy, whereas SAS deals averaged $765k and could take a year to sell and six to twelve months to deploy.)

It made sense to market and sell NAS as aggressively as possible—but we faced a challenge: Our direct sales force was small, only covered US and UK, and had few relationships with network buyers. We needed a big partner with the buyer relationships and global coverage we lacked.

The right partner The right partner was obvious: Cisco. So was the product: NAS.

Thanks to our investment in strategic BD (see Part I and Part II of this series), we’d been calling on Cisco since the founding of Opsware, from the C-suite to mid-level data center managers. Now we finally had something to talk about. For all its pre-eminence in router and switch hardware, we knew from customers that Cisco’s management software capability was weak for its own devices and non-existent for, say, Juniper devices in the customer’s network. We had the market-leading, cross-platform product. Within days of closing the acquisition, we visited the Cisco SVP responsible for management software and offered him the solution his customers were demanding.

Mission clarity Before you can construct a high-impact deal, you have to be crystal-clear on what you want to achieve. We spent a substantial amount of time up front to achieve internal clarity and consensus across the company on what we wanted from a partnership. These were our main objectives:

In a seemingly endless series of meetings in Cisco’s blue-gray conference rooms over the spring and summer, we gained a good understanding of Cisco’s main objectives. They wanted:

All through the fall and early winter, we shuttled back and forth between Tasman Drive and Opsware’s office on Mathilda Avenue, alternately negotiating a deal structure with the Cisco software team and updating and strategizing with our sales and product organizations to make sure we were staying true to our objectives. Some issues, like source code, were extremely complex. Nonetheless, like a figure emerging from the fog, a compelling deal gradually took shape.

On February 13, 2006, a year after closing the Rendition acquisition, we announced a worldwide distribution agreement with Cisco. Cisco’s enterprise sales force would sell our NAS product, rechristened Cisco Network Compliance Manager, to their worldwide customer base. Opsware’s sales force would follow their Cisco counterparts, supporting their efforts to sell the network product and in the process building the relationships and laying the groundwork for a subsequent million-dollar-plus server software sale.

Behind the headlines – a deal with teeth While the press and public endorsement by Cisco were valuable, what made this partnership work unusually well in practice was a smart deal structure designed to achieve both sides’ objectives:

Minimum revenue commitment: It took us almost nine months, but we persuaded Cisco to make a binding three-year quarterly revenue guarantee that totaled almost as much as we had paid to acquire Rendition. We helped our Cisco counterparts to understand that this would be a win-win: Guaranteeing several million dollars a quarter to Opsware would give Cisco huge motivation to drive sales. In turn, it would give us the assurance we needed to back off our own NAS sales efforts and do everything—including assigning some dedicated sales and product headcount—to make our partner successful.

Substantial revenue share: We secured a revenue share and pricing floors that made a Cisco NAS sale almost as financially attractive to us as if we had sold it directly—because Cisco could actually charge more for the software than we could.

Co-branding: The product was marketed as Cisco Network Compliance Manager, “built on Opsware automation technology”.

Channel-neutral compensation: To motivate Opsware’s sales people to support their Cisco sales counterparts instead of competing with them, we compensated them for every Cisco sale in their territory. While this cost us real money, it made sense because every Cisco sale opened the door for us to sell a much bigger, higher-margin product.

Acquisition insurance: We committed to give Cisco advance notification of any agreement to sell the company, and the opportunity to enter the bidding if they wanted to. (Note this is very different from a Right of First Refusal.)

Source code license: We gave Cisco a three-year license to view our source code and build on it, but came up with an innovative licensing approach that protected us fully and even generated millions in additional revenue. In any case, we bet they would never actually do anything with the code, and we were right.

Goliath delivers… Within nine months, Cisco was selling large network software deals into accounts like DHL, Costco, Sprint, USPS and Telstra, and a short time later, they were selling enough to exceed the quarterly minimum revenue guarantee to Opsware. The Cisco deal would go on to generate over 25% of our bookings. Cisco’s massive distribution power vaporized our NAS competitors. Just as important, every NAS sale opened the door for our SAS product in accounts we had never penetrated before, providing a major thrust to our high-margin server business.

Of course, there were many challenges along the way. Cisco people needed lots of training and support to sell the product. There were occasional conflicts over accounts that had to be arbitrated. We ran a separate weekly pipeline call with Cisco to track and drive their sales and direct our follow-on server sales calls. Product change and bug fix requests from Cisco had to be triaged and folded into our roadmap.

However, we were able to handle these demands with equanimity, because we had a couple of dedicated heads in sales and product management to handle them, and a large guaranteed revenue stream that helped the whole company to realize this was a deal worth supporting.

In summary Like Opsware’s 2003 HP deal, the vast majority of David-Goliath type distribution deals don’t deliver beyond PR[1].

On the other hand, like Opsware’s Cisco deal, the right distribution deal with the right partner can be truly transformative. In formulating your partner strategy, consider four golden rules:

Only a few startups invest in the ongoing BD effort to systematically cover the landscape of potential partners and create that game-changing partnership when the opportunity presents itself. For Opsware, that investment paid off three years after our start as a software company. Like the Loudcloud-EDS deal and the M&A campaign that followed, the Cisco partnership provides another example of the power of strategic business development.

John O’Farrell is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. John led the firm’s investments in Facebook, Twitter and Groupon, and works with portfolio companies on partnering, strategic transactions and global expansion. Prior to Andreessen Horowitz, John held Executive Vice President positions at Silver Spring Networks, Opsware and Excite@Home. Earlier in his career, John worked in the United States and Europe with US WEST, Booz Allen, Telecom Ireland, the EU Commission, Digital Equipment and Siemens. John has an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a Bachelor of Electronic Engineering from University College Dublin. He speaks English, German, French and Portuguese. John blogs at http://john.a16z.com/.

Note that our objective (and HP’s) for the HP deal was in fact PR, so it met its objective. It may well make sense to announce lots of lightweight “partnerships” to demonstrate integration and gain market credibility—just don’t expect them to generate revenue, and make sure the company understands that too.

Summary: Partnering with Goliath: A Tale of Two Announcements


05/01/2015 AT 02:30 PM EDT

Being a grown-up isn't all it's cracked up to be.

finds out from older sisters

in a sneak preview of Sunday's episode of

in February, and, in the clip, her sisters try to teach her about all of the responsibilities that come with being a homeowner.

Kim looks at a checklist as she tells Kylie that "there's things that you need to think about."

"Yeah, you need to take notes," Khloé chimes in.

Kim starts with earthquake insurance – "We live in California, that is a

" – before Khloé ticks flood and fire insurance off her fingers.

"Homeowners association fees ... could be like a thousand bucks a month!" Kim says.

As they continue listing the precautions Kylie will need to take (earthquake-proofing wall decorations, installing rattlesnake fencing, finding "a really good gardener," setting up electricity), the 17-year-old goes from being somewhat amused to visibly overwhelmed.

"Kim and Khloé have made me aware that it's a little tough to own a home and I really hope I'm not in over my head," Kylie says in a separate interview.

Kim hands Kylie her list and says momager

isn't going to do it all for her.

"There's a lot more we can add, but I think it's really important that you start to do those things and realize the responsibilities of having a house," Kim says.

Kylie might be starting to regret her

"the second" she turns 18 in August.

airs Sundays (9 p.m. ET) on E!

Summary: "I hope I'm not in over my head," Kylie says after being lectured by her older sisters


The Massachusetts medical-device industry maintained its position as the second-biggest cluster in the country, even as it lost 5 percent of its workforce, according to a new report.

The state continued to add companies, attract venture capital funding, and increase exports, said the analysis from the trade group Massachusetts Medical Device Industry Council.

“We are right behind California,” said Rajesh K. Misra, managing director of KPMG LLP in Boston, the accounting firm that conducted the analysis. “We are number two, and we’re holding that spot.”

Medical-device leaders will discuss the findings of the study at their annual conference Wednesday in Boston. The industry includes companies that develop stents, catheters, imaging machines, dental fillings, hip implants, pregnancy tests, and many other devices.

One of the bright spots for the industry is a solid increase in foreign sales. Medical-device exports from Massachusetts represented 19 percent of the state’s exports in 2014, up from 14 percent of exports in 2011, according to the study. Also, the number of medical-device companies grew 20 percent in that period, to 480 companies.

Medical devices account for less 1 percent of the 3.4 million jobs in Massachusetts. The study shows Massachusetts shed about 1,100 medical device jobs from 2008 to 2012, falling slightly behind the workforce in Minnesota as well as its perennial rival and national leader, California.

The state had about 22,000 jobs in the industry in 2012, or 6 percent of the medical device jobs in the country, according to Census data used in the report.

Tom Sommer, president of the industry group, also known as MassMEDIC, blamed the job losses on a medical-device tax implemented as part of the federal health care overhaul and new health care payment models that encourage providers and insurers to cut costly treatments and procedures. The industry is lobbying Congress to repeal the tax.

The controversial tax didn’t take effect until 2013, but Sommer said it had a chilling effect on industry jobs even before then, and it continues to pose a challenge. Nationally, the industry lost about 3 percent of its jobs from 2008 to 2012, the report said.

“Over the years, we have learned that companies are reducing headcount or putting expansion plans on the shelf for a while,” Sommer said. “They are reducing research and development. They are seeking lower costs.”

Mergers, acquisitions, and outsourcing also are likely to have contributed to the loss of jobs, Sommer added.

But state data show manufacturing jobs for medical devices are holding steady at around 11,000.

“These are high-wage jobs, and they’re the core of the economy,” said Barry Bluestone, a Northeastern University professor who has studied employment in life sciences. “We see real strength in medical devices.”

Summary: The Massachusetts medical-device industry maintained its position as second biggest cluster in the country.


PARIS, April 1— Behind the messages of sympathy from heads of state and government - perhaps even the ''shock'' expressed by the Chinese Prime Minister and the ''indignation'' of the Soviet leader, Leonid I. Brezhnev - a quieter, troubled strain can be sensed in the international reaction to the attempted assassination of President Reagan.

It could be summed up like this: There is a vulnerability in what is still generally reckoned the most powerful nation in the world; and, one way or another, much of the world feels vulnerable through it.

It is a strain that underlay the dismayed comments about the failure of the United States to curb the sale of handguns. London's Daily Express wrote: ''The sickness of America comes fully loaded with the safety catch off. It's almost as easy to buy a gun as a bar of candy, and every public figure in the country must walk in danger because of it.''

It underlay the low-keyed musing of a senior French official, who himself has some concern with presidential security, that the Secret Service might be stressing close-up body protection at the expense of advance precautions; as if the American Secret Service were in part French. It underlay the concern in a number of European newspapers that the shooting would reverse the revival of American self-confidence; as if American morale were more than a national affair. Giscard Has Warm Message

Messages of indignation and sympathy came from most governments, including the Soviet Union and China. The Queen of England, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Pope all expressed their sorrow.

One of the warmest statements came from President Valery Giscard d'Estaing. He told ABC News that he would send a personal letter to Mr. Reagan via the Concorde - a note of nationalism is not thought incompatible here with true emotion - ''as a token of my friendship and sympathy.''

''The courage and dignity of President Reagan, shown on television screens all over the world,'' he said, ''would have a positive effect on the world image of the United States.''

Not everyone was so sanguine. All over Europe, newspapers published boxes listing previous assassinations or assassination attempts. Television stations broadcast replays of the killing of President Kennedy in Dallas and of the attempts against President Ford. Le Monde took note of the procession of grotesque contrasts. A Fragility of Power

''America seems to oscillate continually in the irrational,'' it wrote, ''the exuberant details of Presidential appearances giving way suddenly to a panic all the more disturbing for being scrupulously displayed on television.''

''The lack of a continued United States effort to control violence means a fragility in its power,'' said Michel Crozier, a French sociologist who has lived in the United States and written extensively about it. ''We in Europe must be uneasy. It is a problem for the whole world. We are involved in American vulnerability; whether it is the impuissance of the Carter Presidency in the face of world events or the incidents of yesterday.''

European governments were reasonably reassured that the injury to Mr. Reagan would not seriously affect efforts to discuss and decide on a joint American-European policy on several major issues.

''Look at the dollar on the Tokyo exchange,'' a French official said. ''It went up; and you could say that this shows a belief that people are confident that things will go on.'' An Anguished Expression

In Brussels, where officials from NATO were holding preliminary talks on the question of introducing medium-range missiles into Western Europe, the discussions were reported to have proceeded normally. In Bonn a German official said that his Government had been reassured that Mr. Reagan's indisposition would not interrupt work on the missile question.

One of the most anguished expressions came from Le Monde's foreign editor, Jacques Amalric, who served successively as correspondent in Washington and Moscow. Mr. Amalric, who was severely critical during his United States tour, has been critically pro-American ever since he served in Moscow.

But in a long article he drew a somber picture of a United States clinging to, and being dislodged from, a series of illusions. There was the hope of the Kennedy years, he wrote, brought to an end in Dallas; the hope of reconciliation promised by President Nixon and betrayed by Watergate; the hope of virtue offered by President Carter and betrayed by incompetence. Another Illusion Shattered

Finally, with President Reagan, he said: ''The United States thought of itself as regaining itself, reacting healthily, returning to its old values, its certainties. It was this illusion that John Hinckley's bullets have shattered for many Americans.''

Mr. Amalric's tone was genuinely troubled and had little resemblance to the easy anti-Americanism that was common in France in the 1960's. Indeed, most of the questioning about why yet another assassination attempt has taken place in the United States has been tentative and slow to judgment.

An official said: ''We have had assassination attempts in France, but they have represented organized political groups. They are not the work of individual aberrants as with you.'' He spoke not to condemn but to question, as if the question belonged to him as well. The Individual and the Society

Mr. Giscard d'Estaing, in his statement to ABC, asserted: ''This has nothing to do with the image of the American people in the world. We know that there are individuals who for various reasons are dedicated to violence. But they are individuals who do not describe the society of which they are members.''

Professor Crozier, whose writings about the United States have set themselves to adjust some of the stereotypes traditionally held here, was more hesitant.

''I am suspicious of the kind of relation so often made between individual and collective responsibility,'' he said. ''But it is not entirely false. We know that deranged people do indeed express the problems of a society. But I think that the conclusions that will be drawn will be exaggerated and that my countrymen will accept them too easily.''

It is perhaps a sign of how things have changed for Europe, its increased sense of military and economic frailty, that the expectable conclusions about the Reagan shooting are, in fact, being drawn more cautiously and less eagerly than they would have been a decade ago.


I really take exception to the tone of your Aug. 2 editorial ''The Reagan Paradox,'' and particularly to your incredible conclusion: ''What is no longer in doubt is that his economic remedies mask an assault on the very idea that free people can solve their collective problems through representative government.''

How desperately the average voter wishes his representative government could solve some particularly basic collective problems. For at least the past decade he has seen:

* A Government that has continuously debased the dollar through ''printing press'' financing and excessive economic ''stimulation'' during election years. (Remember the phrase ''Not worth a Continental''?)

* A Congress, incapable of exercising fiscal discipline, continuously appropriating funds far in excess of revenues, with Government deficits expanding geometrically - and with no end in sight.

* An income-tax system, driven by the twin engines of hyperinflated currency and fixed, progressively higher tax brackets, which remorselessly increases the tax burden without need for Congress to vote tax increases.

And how successfully have our elected representatives solved these very basic and collective problems through representative government in Washington? For 10 years they did nothing - hence the election of Ronald Reagan with a mandate from a public that is fed up with the failure of our representatives to recognize basic problems and act to remedy them.

That mandate is not against representative government - it is against poor representation. Above all it is for a change in direction: toward the basics and away from excessive taxation, irresponsibility and overregulation of the private sector.

This is a very healthy and long-overdue reaction to excesses in Washington over the past decade. The present debacle in New York City is living proof that any government that overextends itself in buying good will and votes from various interest groups ends up providing poor basic services to all its citizens.

The role of government in meeting large social needs is widely recognized. However, the public is also well aware of the old game of irresponsible politicians buying votes at public expense to keep themselves in office. This game ruined New York City and is rapidly undermining Washington.

The public is tired of footing the bill for this grand old game. This is no paradox, just common sense sharpened by overtaxation. THOMAS F. FINNEGAN, Fort Lee, N.J., Aug. 4, 1981

Summary: To the Editor:    I really take exception to the tone of your Aug. 2 editorial ''The Reagan Paradox,'' and particularly to your incredible conclusion: ''What is no longer in doubt is that his economic remedies mask an assault on the very idea that free people can solve their collective problems through representative government.''   How desperately the average voter wishes his representative government could solve some particularly basic collective problems.  For at least the past decade he has seen:   * A Government that has continuously debased the dollar through ''printing press'' financing and excessive economic ''stimulation'' during election years. (Remember the phrase ''Not worth a Continental''?)


THIRTEEN years ago, after he had finished the fourth part of his six-volume biography of Thomas Jefferson, Dumas Malone hired a graduate student from the University of Virginia as a part-time researcher. The last volume was published on July Fourth, the 155th anniversary of Jefferson's death, and now Steven H. Hochman, whose research job expanded to full time in 1973, is getting ready to leave Charlottesville for Plains, Ga., to take up his new duties as research assistant for former President Jimmy Carter.

''President Carter decided to get a trained historian as an assistant for his book rather than go with a ghost writer, and I was recommended by some historians at Princeton and the University of Virginia who knew I was finishing up with Mr. Malone,'' Mr. Hochman said. The 35-year-old Mr. Hochman has a master's degree in history from the University of Virginia and lacks only his dissertation for his Ph.D.

''I'm going to Plains initially for two weeks,'' he explained, ''and then we'll decide whether it'll be better for me to work in Plains, where President Carter will do most of his writing, or in Atlanta, where most of the research material is. We'll have to develop a system the way Mr. Malone and I did, but I don't think that will be any problem.''

Mr. Hochman plans to remain through the completion of the book, Mr. Carter's view of key moments in his Presidency, which will be published by Bantam Books. ''Bantam expects to have it out in the winter of 1982, but I think that may be optimistic,'' he said. ''We were years off with our estimates on the Jefferson biography. But then President Carter does not plan on doing a full-scale history of his Administration.''

In late April, after Mr. Hochman submitted his resume to Mr. Carter, he was invited to Atlanta for a half-hour interview with the former President. ''He asked very straightforward questions,'' the researcher said. ''What my relationship had been with Mr. Malone, what I did for him, what the operation entailed, what sort of things I had read about the Presidency, what my opinions were of the various memoirs and biographies. I thought the questions were very fair and the right ones.'' Two months later he was invited to stay overnight at Mr. Carter's house, where he was officially offered the job.

Meanwhile, Mr. Hochman's dissertation on Thomas Jefferson remains in abeyance. ''I had planned to complete it while working for Mr. Malone, but I never had time to finish it,'' he said. ''Now it looks like there's going to be another delay before I get to it.''

Sam Shepard, the sometime actor and author of more than 40 plays, is receiving quite a bit of attention from publishers. This month Bantam published ''Sam Shepard: Seven Plays,'' a 368-page paperback original, which includes ''Buried Child,'' the first Off Broadway play to receive a Pulitzer Prize for drama, as well as three plays never before published.

In addition, Performing Arts Journal Publications recently brought out ''American Dreams: The Imagination of Sam Shepard,'' edited by Bonnie Marranca. This first critical investigation of Mr. Shepard's plays consists of two dozen commentaries by directors, actors and such critics as Elizabeth Hardwick and Stanley Kauffman. Moreover, last May the same company published ''Hawk Moon,'' Mr. Shepard's only book of fiction, consisting of 58 stories, poems and monologues set in the familiar Shepard landscape of pick-up trucks, rock-androll and growing up in America.

Performing Arts Journal Publications began in 1979, an outgrowth of the three-year-old Performing Arts Journal, a three-times-a-year periodical started by Miss Marranca and her husband, Gautam Dasgupta, when they were doctoral candidates in theater at the City University of New York. Their book operation has since published volumes of plays, some of them foreign, and will soon publish a volume of plays by Steve Tesich, who won the Academy Award for the film ''Breaking Away.''

Oscar Dystel, who joined Bantam Books in 1954 and built it into the paperback-industry leader before he retired as chairman in January 1980, delivered the R.R. Bowker memorial lecture last November. During the lecture, recently published in a booklet by the Bowker Company, Mr. Dystel delivered himself of a number of observations and speculations about mass-market publishing - and at least one controversial prediction: that within the next five years, three to five mass-market paperback houses in this country and abroad would be pushed out from the shelter of their present corporate umbrellas because the growing need for capital to stay in the mass-market business has soured conglomerates on mass-market publishing.

''I do not believe in the primacy of systems and financial orientation in trade publishing,'' said Mr. Dystel. ''Men who understand only numbers probably should not lead trade-publishing operations.''

''Usually,'' he added, ''such people lack the necessary editorial and creative vision and the sensitivity to respect them in others. Because their skills are so totally transferable they can and do - and indeed they should -move easily from books to shoes to aerospace. Most numerical systems and administrative concepts are the same, no matter how great the variation in their size.''

He continued: ''Numbers are important, but numbers are not enough. Part of the myth attached to the conglomerate invasion of publishing in the 60's and 70's was based on the primacy of numbers, by the discovery of what looked like a hot new growth industry and by the dreams of easily increasing earnings per share with a fair amount of leveraging.''

But, in his opinion, it has not turned out that way. ''Odds are that many of these conglomerates would have done better investing in United States Treasury notes and their management knows it,'' he said.

Illustrations: photo of Sam Shepard