04/06/2016 AT 05:20 PM EDT

The fans aren't the only ones who will be mourning Sookie's (

Yanic Truesdale, who played the world's sassiest concierge, Michel Gerard – and is returning for the show's

– says that his former co-star's absence in definitely felt on set. And of anyone, he would know: As Lorelai (Lauren Graham)'s two co-workers at the Dragonfly Inn, Truesdale and McCarthy frequently appeared together on screen and remain friends today.

"She's a friend, we see each other a lot and I love her to death," Trusedale told PEOPLE. "There's nothing I would like more than having her back on set, but it's completely out of my control. Her schedule is her schedule."

He goes on to share how the absence will impact the cast.

"There's a member of the family missing. She's very much loved and adored, by the fans, the co-stars and by me."

Melissa McCarthy and Yanic Truesdale

The same sentiment, Truesdale says, is felt over the absence of Edward Herrmann, who

Despite the the two missing cast members, Truesdale is excited for

– something he says he's been hearing about since the finale aired.

"For me, the show's ending was never satisfying," he said. "Amy never got a chance to wrap the story with her own voice."

But it wasn't until the

reunion last year at the ATX Festival that he realized that it could be a reality – and how much the show still meant to people. Fans camped out in front of their hotel, waiting to talk to them (so the cast was forced check out in the back alley, through the kitchen). People flew in from all over the world, from Argentina to Australia, to attend the event. Multiple venue changes were necessary to deal with the demand for tickets.

"It just reaffirmed to us how special and how very much still alive the show was," Truesdale said. "I left the festival thinking there was something going but that we don't know and they couldn't share at that moment," he said.

A few months later, rumors – with "specific details" broke, making Truesdale think that this could be the real deal. It wasn't long before he got the call to return to the show. And getting back into the show has been "surreal."

"The first day is a little like going back to an old relationship," he said. "You're checking how the person has changed and getting reacquainted."

As for his own character, Truesdale says audiences will get to see even more Michel in the revival, and even learn a bit more about his life

"For seven seasons, we got to know him very little personally," he said. "We never got to see him in his personal life and who he is, what's life like. And we will now, and I'm happy about that."

If you can't wait until

hits the small screen to get your dose of Truesdale, his new series,

, for YouTube Red, premieres at the Tribeca Film Festival later this month.

Summary: Michel will miss Sookie just much as the rest of us.


Even after a tough week for the hardy Duggars clan, Jim Bob and wife Michelle are still finding ways to stay positive.

The Duggar parents will be holding a memorial service for their unborn child on Wednesday, Dec. 14, whom they named, appropriately, Jubilee Shalom Duggar.

"This is life, and I understand that we are going through something that many others have," Jim Bob told People. "You think about the what-ifs, but God gives us strength to go on.

"We won't be able to see this child's life and the phases that we've seen for our other children, but we know we will see this child in heaven one day. We are thankful for each child, and we are blessed to have the children we have here and the ones we will meet someday in heaven."

Following last Thursday's devastating news, Michelle felt lightheaded and was ordered to stay in the hospital for observation, a family spokesperson told People.

"Our doctor said it was wise to let this miscarriage happen naturally," Michelle, 45, said. "And so that is what we are going to do.

"I am resting and I have felt good physically, which is strange."

In 2009, the family faced another precarious situation when their youngest daughter Josie was born premature at just 25 weeks.

"She is a miracle baby and all of us, we are so lucky to have her," Michelle said at the time.

The couple, who already have 19 biological children between the ages of 2 and 23, have faith that this recent tragedy is not without reason, however.

"As our whole family is grieving, we also know that God promises to work all things for good in our lives," Jim Bob wrote in a letter that he shared with People. "Our prayer is that Jubilee's passing will help us all realize that this life is short, and our relationship with Jesus is the most important thing.

"He gives us peace in our hearts as He guides us through whatever we might face."

Summary: Even after a tough week for the hardy Duggars clan, Jim Bob and wife Michelle are still finding ways to stay positive. The Duggar parents will be holding a memorial service for their unborn child, whom they named Jubilee Shalom Duggar, on Wednesday.


Islamic State Twitter accounts are once again under attack, following the horrific Orlando terrorist attack last weekend.

More than 250 Twitter accounts allegedly associated with ISIS, or ISIL, have been hacked by a team of hackers led by a person who goes by the handle “WauchulaGhost.” While many of those accounts had been hacked before the Orlando nightclub shooting, they’ve now been thrust into the spotlight after WauchulaGhost replaced their jihad-related content with pro-lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) content.

Indeed, several of the accounts now display the LGBT community’s signature rainbow flag as their cover image and include several tweets in support of the 49 people killed in a gay nightclub last week.

“You had all those innocent lives lost,” the hacker known as WauchulaGhost told CNNMoney in an interview published on Thursday. “I just felt there’s something I could do against the Islamic State to defend those people.”

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As the number of ISIS attacks grows, activist hackers, or hacktivists, have increasingly targeted the militant group. Over the last several months, in fact, Anonymous, a hacking collective, has been credited with hacking thousands of ISIS-related accounts or those who owned by alleged ISIS sympathizers. Ghost Security Group, another collective, has also taken it upon itself to hack ISIS and other militant groups across social media, e-mail, and other services.

Meanwhile, social media companies, including Twitter TWTR and Facebook FB , have been doing their part in the fight against ISIS. Twitter, alone, says that it has removed more than 125,000 ISIS-related accounts since the middle of last year, and will continue to do so in the coming months and years.

Initially, WauchulaGhost hacked the ISIS accounts to poke fun at the militants and their followers, and replaced their accounts with depictions of pornography. Following the Orlando attack, however, he, along with a few others, decided to support the LGBT community through their hacktivism.

For more on the Orlando terrorist attack, watch:

Whether attempts at removing ISIS accounts or, in WauchulaGhost’s own words, “humiliating” ISIS sympathizers, is actually working is unknown. In the past, ISIS has called those launching a cyberwar on the group “idiots,” and the attacks have continued. Ultimately, the goal for both hackers and government agencies infiltrating ISIS is to disrupt their communication online and hinder their ability to communicate their message.

Looking ahead, WauchulaGhost told CNNMoney that he plans to hold on to the hacked Twitter accounts and continue to post gay-pride messages. He’ll also refrain from posting pornography, which he says, some of his supporters didn’t think was appropriate. After his pro-LGBT tweets, he promises to move on to something else on the accounts he controls.

Twitter, which has suspended all but three of the accounts he hacked, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Summary: And the Islamic State is not happy.


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How do those polished Parisians do it? How do they look laid-back —and perfect— all the time? The secret formula is one part pared-down basics, one part chic scarf, and one part continental je ne sais quoi. While geography may hinder the dream of becoming a cool French girl, we can certainly help you with

. Watch stylist Lindsay Albanese break down 3 simple ways to wear a scarf like a French girl, and you'll be well on your way to nailing sartorial insouciance.

Summary: Look like all the stylish French women in this chic scarf, which you can buy for an amazing price!


Roger Waters of Pink Floyd called it “the lunatic in my head”. He was describing the endless stream of internal thoughts and sensations – the inner voice – that we try to weave into a coherent story called “my life”. The trouble is, this chattering narrator often gets things wrong, mixing biased reporting with snap judgments and old insecurities with unwarranted dread.

For instance, your first thought may be blandly factual. “I just had dinner with my in-laws” or “I have a project due on Monday.” But within seconds that innocent thought has morphed into “My in-laws hate me” or “My job is going down the tubes” or “What waistline?! I look like a walrus!”

The mind gets stuck in ruts – taking shortcuts and jumping to conclusions – because shortcuts and familiar patterns makes life more manageable. “Mary had a little ___.” Lamb, right? The word popped into your head automatically, which is how so many of our mental constructs come to be.

Our problems begin when we accept as fact these unexamined, automatic thoughts, based on biases, old hurts, or assumption, all of them ramped up with a Technicolor intensity. The enhanced production values come along in part because the brain region that makes these judgments, and the region that processes sensory inputs, are adjacent – which makes it all too easy for a trumped-up worry or pointless regret to take on the look and feel of an entirely realistic scenario: “I’m going to get sacked! I’ll be homeless and sleeping over a heating grate! I can feel the snow drifting down my collar!”

Anxieties, fears and regrets don’t have to control our behaviour or mood. We’re the thinker, not the thought

This blend of cognitive and sensory processing is an evolutionary adaptation that served us well when snakes and lions were daily threats. Our ancient ancestors needed to feel danger viscerally, getting the “Watch out!” message in a way that led immediately to the endocrine system’s fuel-injection process: the freeze-or-fight-or-flight response. But coping with today’s abstract anxieties and resolving yesterday’s wounds – easily exaggerated and sustained in an endless loop by that lunatic in our head – is not helped by vivid imagery.

So what’s the answer? Research shows that it’s counterproductive to try to silence the voice (tell yourself not to think about a pink elephant and see what happens) or to “fix” the negative thoughts, or to forcibly replace them with “happy” ones. What works is to develop the emotional agility that gets beyond rigid “autopilot” responses and puts more of our genuine selves in charge.

We do this by showing up “the lunatic” and accepting the negative thoughts – the anxieties, fears, regrets – for what they are: thoughts. They’re not directives, and they’re not “us”. By acknowledging that they’re here to stay, we make peace with them, which creates a distance from them – a recognition that they don’t have to control our behaviour or our mood. They’re more like clouds passing by, or options presented by our “staff”. We’re the ones – the thinker rather than the thought – who get to choose the actions that will best serve the life we want to live and the things we truly value.

This is the path suggested by Viktor Frankl in his moving analysis of the Holocaust, Man’s Search for Meaning: “Between stimulus and response there is a space… In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

Susan David will give a masterclass at Conway Hall in London on 11 April (conwayhall.org.uk). Her book Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life (Penguin Life, £14.99, or £11.99 at bookshop.theguardian.com) is out now

Summary: Don’t let negative thoughts control your self-image. It’s your actions that really define you, says Susan David


My sister, Sandy, and I were surrounded by family-oriented men when we were growing up in suburban New Jersey. There was my father, Chester, an extremely hard-working upholsterer and slipcover cutter; my Uncle Breeze, who taught me how to box ("Quit jumping around like a grasshopper"); my Uncle William, who raised five kids (four boys and a girl) in Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, and later in East Orange, N.J.; and my Uncle Robert, who was an Essex County probation officer.

There were grandfathers who took us to baseball games, and older cousins, and a crew of boisterous characters with names like Moe, Bubby and Earl Love, who worked for my father in his upholstery shops and were as close to my sister and me as blood relatives.

Many of those men are gone now, and the rest are old. Collectively they had a profound influence on how my sister and I viewed the world, and how we've led our lives.

These thoughts came to mind as I was checking out yet another killing of a black child, this time the stabbing death in Brooklyn of a 15-year-old named Christopher Rose. He was walking toward a subway station on Saturday with a group of three friends, one of whom had an iPod. The desire for someone else's iPod (or cellphone or sneakers), in the twisted thinking of the "Lord of the Flies" street culture, is reason enough to murder somebody.

On Saturday it was Christopher Rose's turn to be sacrificed on this altar of madness. As many as a dozen teenagers closed in on Christopher and his friends, beating them and stealing the iPod and other valuables. One of the teens stabbed Christopher twice in the chest.

The attack occurred in the late afternoon on a busy street. When the attackers fled, like a school of sharks receding after a kill, they left behind only grief where a promising youngster once had been.

It was a nightmare that Christopher's father, Errol Rose, had tried for years to ward off. Mr. Rose, who is 53, had always feared that "this current of evil" -- the street violence that has taken so many black youngsters -- would someday claim his son.

Crime has eased in the past several years, but the toll on the young in many black communities is still horrific. And I can't think of this continuing slaughter of black youngsters without also thinking about the mass flight of black men from their family responsibilities, especially the obligation to look after their children.

Most black people are not poor, and most are law-abiding. But the vacuum left by this exodus of black men from the family scene has nevertheless been devastating, and its destructive effects are felt by entire communities.

Mr. Rose was so concerned about Christopher's safety that he had moved to a small town in Pennsylvania. But he would bring the boy back to Brooklyn to visit relatives on most weekends.

"I was trying to hide him away from all this violence," Mr. Rose said yesterday. "I knew that someday, somehow, somebody was going to approach him and try to hurt him."

There are plenty of youngsters who grow up fine without a father in the home. But that's not a good argument in favor of fatherlessness. Most of the youngsters getting into trouble and preying on others come from fatherless homes, as Mr. Rose pointed out. "There's no one out there," he said, "to tell them: 'Hello! Wake up. You guys have to stop doing what you're doing."'

Kids who grow up without a father never experience that special sense of security and the enhanced feeling of belonging that come from having a father in the home. So they seek it elsewhere. They don't get that sweet feeling of triumph that comes from a father's approval, or the warmth of the old man's hug, or the wisdom to be drawn from his discipline.

I don't have the statistics to prove it, but black kids would be tremendously better off if the cultural winds changed and more fathers felt the need to come home.

For me, it's an easy call: Moms are crucial. Dads, too.

Mr. Rose said he hoped his son's death would help focus attention on the problems associated with children who grow up without fathers. "There's a crisis as far as the men are concerned," he said. "They've tended to neglect a lot of things. So we've been failing these kids, and I'd like to help turn that around."

Op-Ed Columnist E-mail: bobherb@nytimes.com; David Brooks is on vacation.

Summary: Bob Herbert Op-Ed column says vacuum left by exodus of black men from family scene has been devastating, and its destructive effects are felt by entire communities; cites continuing slaughter of youngsters in many black communities, even as crime eases elsewhere; holds most youngsters getting into trouble and preying on others come from fatherless homes (M)


Tom Darden, the founder and CEO of the $2.2 billion private equity fund Cherokee Investment Partners, made his mark by acquiring and cleaning up hundreds of environmentally contaminated sites. Today he is also an early stage investor in clean technology, having put his own money into dozens of companies in areas ranging from smart grid to renewable energy, and prefab green buildings. More recently he’s backed a new approach to fusion, a potentially abundant and carbon-free form of energy that would operate at a much lower temperatures than big government projects around the world, which require temperatures of 100 million degrees centigrade and more.

This new technology, called Low Energy Nuclear Reaction (LENR) is related but very different from the cold fusion technology that in 1989 researchers Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann claimed to have licked when they revealed to the world a simple tabletop machine designed to achieve a fusion reaction at room temperature. Their experiment was eventually debunked and since then the term cold fusion has become almost synonymous with scientific chicanery.

What does Darden, a no-nonsense, investor with a sharp eye on the bottom line and a successful track record, see in this new, risky technology? Fortune’s Brian Dumaine spoke to him to find out.

Q: How did you get involved with low-temperature fusion?

A: Well, I thought the issue was moot after scientists failed to replicate the Fleischman and Pons initial cold fusion experiments. I was literally unaware that people were working on this in labs. I’ve made about 35 clean technology investments, and I thought that if someone’s doing this I should have heard about it. Then three years ago I started to hear about progress being made in the field and I said, “Damn, you have to be kidding, it doesn’t make sense.”

As it turns out, many of those early efforts to replicate cold fusion did not correctly load the test reactors or attempt to properly measure heat. The scientists trying to replicate the work of Fleischman and Pons were mainly looking for nuclear signals, like radiation, which generally are not present. They missed that heat was the main by-product. In addition, I learned that there have been nearly 50 reported positive test results, including experiments at Oak Ridge, Los Alamos, EPRI, and SRI.

Q: The conventional wisdom is that LENR violates the laws of physics.

A: That’s right. To create fusion energy you have to break the bonds in atoms and that takes a tremendous amount of force. That’s why the big government fusion projects have to use massive lasers or extreme heat—millions degrees centigrade—to break the bonds. Breaking those bonds at much lower temperatures is inconsistent with the laws of physics, as they’re now known.

Q: What changed your mind?

A: Scientists get locked into paradigms until the paradigm shifts. Then everyone happily shifts to the new truth and no one apologizes for being so stupid before. Low temperature fusion could be consistent with existing theories, we just don’t know how. It’s like when physicists say that according to the laws of aerodynamics bumblebees can’t fly but they do.

Q: So you licensed the technology of Andrea Rossi, an Italian scientist and entrepreneur who’s been having some success with cold fusion.

A: That’s right. Rossi’s was one of the first investments we made. We’ve been seeing the creation of isotopes and energy releases at relatively low temperatures—1,000 degrees centigrade, which could be a sign that fusion has occurred. We have sponsored tests and more research for Rossi’s work. A group of Swedish scientists tested the technology, and they got good results. A number of other people say they are also getting positive results but these haven’t been confirmed. A Russian scientist, for example claims to have replicated Rossi’s work in Switzerland and got excess heat. That’s a good sign.

A: Yes, In fact, Rossi was awarded an important U.S. patent recently, which is part of what we licensed, covering the use of nickel, platinum or palladium powders, as well as other components, in his heat-producing device. This is one of very few LENR-related patents to date.

But let me make one thing very clear. We don’t know for sure yet whether it will be commercially feasible. We’ve invested more than $10 million so far in Rossi’s and other LENAR technology and we’ll spend substantially more than that before we know for certain because we want to crush all the tests. (Recently, we have been joined by Woodford Investment Management in the U.K., which has made a much larger investment into our international LENR activities—so we are well funded.)

Cold fusion has such a checkered past and is so filled with hypesters and people with a gold rush, get-rich-quick mentality. We need to be calm, prudent and not exaggerate. I don’t want to say that cold fusion is real until we can absolutely prove it in ten different ways and then persuade our worst critics to join our camp.

Q: If it does work, what are the implications?

A: I’m doing this for the environment. If cold fusion works, it would address air pollution including carbon. It could be a game changer.

Summary: A prominent North Carolina investor is backing a new kind of fusion that operates at much lower temperatures than thought possible, which would make it easier to commercialize. So far the early results show promise.


" kids are following in the footsteps of orgy-lovin, sex-crazed, swingers -- TMZ has learned -- because the mansion they just moved in to was previously used for PORN!

Sources tell TMZ, the new digs currently housing the top 9 finalists on ‘Idol’ is the same place Playboy TV shot season 2 of its racy sex show "Swing."

For those you who haven’t seen it ... "Swing" is a show about couples who move into a house with the sole purpose of “living out their erotic curiosities” through swinging ... i.e one big fat excuse for banging each other as often as possible.

As for the specs -- the former sex den is a 10-bdrm, 16-bath, 16,000 sq. ft swingers dream ... now housing the squeaky clean -- soon to be Disney World attraction -- "Idol" finalists.

Note to the contestants -- bleach is your friend.

Summary: The "American Idol" kids are following in the footsteps of orgy-lovin, sex-crazed, swingers -- TMZ has learned -- because the mansion they just moved in…


Singing since the age of three, Tamar has been within inches of stardom. Growing up, she was part of the girl group Girls Tyme with Beyoncé and Kelly Rowland, but left before they formed Destiny's Child in order to finish school. During her senior year of high school, Tamar performed for President Bill Clinton at the Kennedy Center. She toured with R&B star Tamia after graduating from USC with a degree in music business. In 2006, Tamar wrote a Grammy-nominated song with Prince called "Beautiful, Loved and Blessed," and she currently stars as Diana Ross in the touring cast of Motown: The Musical. After so much opportunity, Tamar was heavily encouraged to audition for The Voice and she hopes to make her dreams come true.

Summary: Meet Tamar Davis on NBC.com.


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Six Delta Air Lines (DAL) flight attendants have sued the carrier for distributing smaller profit-sharing paychecks to former Northwest Airlines employees than to other workers, the Associated Press reported Wednesday. The flight attendants, who filed the discrimination claim in a Minneapolis federal court, had been members of unions that were eliminated after Delta and Northwest employees voted them down. The Association of Flight Attendants-CWA is disputing the election that eliminated the unions. But Delta said it can't adjust the smaller profit-sharing checks for ex-Northwest attendants until the dispute is settled, according to the AP. Delta acquired Northwest for $2.8 billion in 2008, creating the world's largest airline at the time. It became No. 2 after the United-Continental (UAL) merger last year.


We are, it seems, long past the moment when there’s nothing worth doing unless we’re on the phone — photographing it, uploading it, texting it, tweeting it.

On June 7, a New Jersey man fell 40 feet to his death while trying to photograph the sunset in Maine’s Acadia National Park. In 2007, 56-year-old Faith Wise fell into the water at the same park and drowned.

“She was holding [her] cellphone in the air,” Park Ranger Ed Pontbriand said, “trying to get her friend to listen to the waves.”

Last Christmas Day, 33-year-old Joshua Burwell walked right off a cliff and fell 60 feet to his death in California. “He wasn’t watching where he was walking,” Bill Bender of San Diego Lifeguards told NBC News. “He was looking down at the device in his hands.”

In 2009, Deborah Matis-Engle was sentenced to six years in prison for texting while driving — more specifically, she was paying bills online — and smashing into another vehicle, which burst into flames and killed the driver inside.

Just months after the crash, while awaiting trial, the California Highway Patrol spotted Matis-Engle texting while driving on two separate occasions.

“This collision had absolutely no impact on her,” the prosecutor said.

How has it become unbearable to drive, walk, climb subway stairs, ride a bicycle, wait for a green light or push a baby stroller without being on our phones?

In one of the more ironic cellphone deaths in recent memory, a 32-year-old female driver died while updating her Facebook profile. She’d apparently been listening to Pharrell Williams’ song “Happy” on the radio.

“The happy song makes me HAPPY,” she wrote before crashing. Emergency responders discovered that she’d also been taking selfies shortly before the accident. Wikipedia has recorded 54 known deaths since 2014 that were caused by attempted selfies.

According to the CDC, over eight people are killed and 1,161 are injured each day in the US by distracted driving. Texting while driving is now the leading cause of teenage deaths in this country. Anecdotally, emergency rooms are seeing an uptick of injuries to “petextrians” — people who text while walking and have, say, run into a 300-pound bear (California, 2012), fallen into a fountain at the mall (Pennsylvania, 2011) or fallen onto train tracks (Pennsylvania, 2012).

Just two weeks ago, a teenage girl jumped onto the tracks at Bergen Street to retrieve her cellphone. She was run over by the train and nearly died, but once EMS got her on a stretcher, the photos said it all: She was texting and calling, as enraptured as ever with the device that almost got her killed.

“I saw her in the tracks trying to pick something up,” the train’s operator told the Post. “And then I heard her hit. I heard the thump. I didn’t know if she was alive or dead.”

According to a 2012 Time magazine study, 84 percent of people around the world said they couldn’t go a single day without their cellphones. Clearly, they mean it.

How did we get here? How has it become unbearable to drive, walk, climb subway stairs, ride a bicycle, wait for a green light or push a baby stroller without being on our phones?

We’ve all seen otherwise sane-looking, well-put-together professionals crossing major city streets without once looking up from their phones, and the narcissism is staggering: The onus for their own personal safety is suddenly on everyone else. Anyone who’s ever tried to catch a train at rush hour knows the excruciating agony of trying to work around a commuter who’s slowed down, immune to all else but the phone.

“We’re seeing an uptick in people getting hit by cars and bikes at low speed,” Dr. Dara Kass of Bellevue told WPIX in February. She cited a SUNY study estimating 10 percent of all ER visits are cellphone-related. “We wonder if they’re distracted when they’re entering the crosswalk.”

There’s yet to be a definitive study on the ways cellphones are rewiring our brains, but there’s all kinds of data proving our dependence. According to the Time magazine study, 50 percent of American adults admitted to sleeping with their cellphone, holding it like a security blanket.

Collectively, Americans check their phones 8 billion times a day. For the average person, that shakes out to 46 times a day. A July 2015 Gallup poll found that 41 percent of Americans check their phones a few times an hour. A Baylor University study found that the average female college student spends 10 hours per day on the phone.

“That’s astounding,” said Baylor’s lead researcher, James Roberts, Ph.D. “As cellphone functions increase, addictions to this seemingly indispensable piece of technology becomes an increasingly realistic possibility.”

Aside from research that shows our brains release dopamine and serotonin — those feel-good chemicals triggered by drugs, sex, and now text message alerts and likes on Instagram — there’s another, bleaker aspect to our dependence: an inability to tolerate our own thoughts, or to register that there are others around us.

The cellphone has become the equivalent of an adult pacifier, and users increasingly have the self-control of toddlers: When did it become acceptable to play music, video games or movies without headphones? When did the three-dimensional natural world, or the human being across from you at the dinner table, become less appealing than a screen?

In a widely circulated clip from 2013, comic Louis CK explained it best. “You need to build an ability to just be yourself and not be doing something,” he said. “That’s what the phone is taking away, is the ability to just sit there. That’s being a person. Because underneath everything in your life there is that thing, that empty — that forever empty, that knowledge that it’s all for nothing and that you’re alone. It’s down there . . . That’s why we text and drive. Everybody’s murdering each other with their cars, but people are willing to risk taking a life and ruining their own because they don’t want to be alone for a second.”

We’re also minimizing the power of daydreaming. A UC Santa Barbara study found that people who engaged in abstract thought did 41 percent better in creative thinking exercises. People who reported positive daydreaming were the least depressed, and no matter the culture, those who daydream have a tendency to achieve their long-term goals.

Perhaps that’s why creative people often say they get their best ideas in the shower: It’s the only place you can’t use your phone. During an online summit of the world’s leading productivity experts, psychologist Scott Kaufman reported that according to one study, 72 percent of people had their best ideas while showering.

“You want to make sure that you make time and room for solitude,” Kaufman said. “That can take a lot of forms, like taking a daily stroll to reconfigure your brain.”

A few years after Steve Jobs died, reporter Nick Bilton revealed that the Apple co-founder wouldn’t let his own children use the iPad. “We limit how much technology our kids use at home,” Jobs told Bilton, who reported that most parents in Silicon Valley do the same.

“We have seen the dangers of technology firsthand,” then-Wired editor Chris Anderson said. “I’ve seen it in myself. I don’t want to see that happen to my kids.”

While there’s not yet been a longitudinal study of the effect of screen time on children and teenagers — the technology is both too young and rapidly evolving — we can see the mutations in society. Increasingly, people live double lives: one in the real world, one online. Finstagram is the tonic to Instagram — the latter is where teenagers post their perfect photos, the enviable, fake life they actively curate — while finstas are their secret, real accounts where they’re allowed to be less than perfect.

“My rinsta” — or real Instagram — “is the filtered me,” one 19-year-old girl told Elle last July. “My finsta [is] so genuine . . . it also shows me sad, scared, drunk or embarrassed.”

Adults are no less immune. Last October, The Post reported on the prevalence of secret, double lives online, sparked by the death of a beautiful young doctor named Kiersten Rickenback Cerveny.

On her Facebook page, Cerveny had it all: a handsome husband, three beautiful children, a thriving practice, vacations in Whistler and Turks and Caicos, a $1.2 million home in suburban New York.

All the while, she was dissatisfied enough to party downtown with two men, who took her to an apartment and left her to die of a drug and alcohol overdose in a dingy vestibule.

Cerveny’s husband, a family friend told The Post, was “utterly distraught” — he, along with everyone else in their lives, had no idea.

There’s something remarkably sad about cultivating our own lives online — lives we wish we had, think we want, hope other people will envy. How much of that now motivates our decision-making — where to eat, what to buy, where to travel? How much of that explains why we’d rather record an experience than live it?

Tellingly, it’s people who perform for a living who seem to hate it the most. In May, Adele berated an audience member who was holding her cellphone in the air, trying to capture the moment.

“Can you stop filming me with that video camera?” Adele asked. “Because I’m really here in real life. You can enjoy it in real life.”

It’s a gratifying moment — one that was shared, online, by a fellow fan who’d captured it on their phone.

Summary: We are, it seems, long past the moment when there’s nothing worth doing unless we’re on the phone — photographing it, uploading it, texting it, tweeting it. And it’s killing us. On June 7, a New Je…


Heather Maddan, Chronicle Staff Writer

obit photo of Laurel Brush

obit photo of Laurel Brush

Marin County artist Laurel Burch dead at 61 of rare bone disease

Marin County artist Laurel Burch, whose iconic designs adorn products recognized around the globe, parlayed her vivid and passionate inner life into a multimillion-dollar art business. But her fragile body, afflicted with a rare genetic bone disease, gave out on her this month.

Ms. Burch died Sept. 13 at her home in Novato. She was 61.

"She was just absolutely passionate and driven to create beauty in the world and to share her art," Aarin Burch said of her mother, who was known for her cloisonne jewelry and colorful paintings. "She had this huge heart and gave endlessly."

Despite facing numerous hardships in life - leaving a troubled home in her early teens, raising two children on her own, and dealing with the congenital disorder osteopetrosis, which left her bedridden or needing to use a wheelchair periodically - Ms. Burch persevered, said family members.

"She was in her twenties when she fell down some stairs and broke her femur and had to have major surgery," said her husband, Rick Sara. "It wasn't long before she cut the cast off herself and flew to China to talk to them about making jewelry."

It was one of the dozens of breaks and fractures she would endure throughout her life - including a cracked rib from a seemingly harmless hug from a fan.

Ms. Burch was born Dec. 31, 1945, in the San Fernando Valley. At 14, she left a tumultuous home life and lived with nuns, her husband said.

Ms. Burch moved from Southern California to San Francisco at 20 and began making necklaces out of old coins, bones and beads to support her infant daughter. When people took notice, her business was born.

She created Laurel Burch Artworks and, as its chief executive officer, built a multimillion-dollar company. In addition to jewelry-making, the self-taught folk painter put brush to canvas, creating vivid imagery that has been reproduced on coffee mugs, tote bags, pillows, blankets and thousands of other products.

"She was a woman in a man's business world and would go to board meetings and state her vision, and they probably thought she was crazy," Aarin Burch said. "But she was so fierce and committed to her passion, which was creating art and treasures."

Ms. Burch once said, "I live within the vivid colors of my imagination, soaring with rainbow-feathered birds, racing the desert winds on horseback, wrapped in ancient tribal jewels, dancing with mythical tigers in steamy jungles."

That sense of adventure seemed to inform her real-world parenting of Aarin and her brother, Jay, Sara said.

"Jay and Aarin said they never knew what would happen next," Sara said with a laugh. "She'd tell them, 'You're not going to school for the next few days. I'm going to take you to Egypt with me.' "

Sara, the company's archivist, said e-mails arrive from all over the world from people who are touched by Ms. Burch's work.

"Her body of work - it's about relationships and people and animals, and those stories come through even on products," he said.

Jay Burch, who has taken over as president of Laurel Burch Artworks, said his mother's death does not mean the end of the company.

"It's a family business," he said. "She was dying, but (she knew) her work will continue. I think that gave her a lot of peace."

In addition to her husband and children Jay of San Francisco and Aarin of Emeryville, she is survived by her father, Russell Harte of the San Fernando Valley.

The family is planning a public service. Information will be posted at www.laurelburch.com.

Summary: Marin County artist Laurel Burch, whose iconic designs adorn products recognized around the globe, parlayed her vivid and passionate inner life into a multimillion-dollar art business.  Despite facing numerous hardships in life - leaving a troubled home in her early teens, raising two children on her own, and dealing with the congenital disorder osteopetrosis, which left her bedridden or needing to use a wheelchair periodically - Ms. Burch persevered, said family members.  Ms. Burch moved from Southern California to San Francisco at 20 and began making necklaces out of old coins, bones and beads to support her infant daughter.  In addition to jewelry-making, the self-taught folk painter put brush to canvas, creating vivid imagery that has been reproduced on coffee mugs, tote bags, pillows, blankets and thousands of other products.  Ms. Burch once said, "I live within the vivid colors of my imagination, soaring with rainbow-feathered birds, racing the desert winds on horseback, wrapped in ancient tribal jewels, dancing with mythical tigers in steamy jungles."  Jay Burch, who has taken over as president of Laurel Burch Artworks, said his mother's death does not mean the end of the company.


“Stop, stop, stop,” Nissan engineer Tetsuya Iijima repeats quietly, with only a slight touch of worry in his voice, as the self-driving car that he and a group of journalists are riding in creeps slightly into a busy intersection in Sunnyvale, Calif. on Thursday afternoon.

The light-gray autonomous all-electric LEAF, made by Nissan, rolled to a stop short of being in any real danger—to the relief of the worried journalists inside. Using a combination of 12 cameras, four side-panel laser scanners, a trunk full of computing power and access to detailed mapping data, the self-piloted car can mostly drive itself. Iijima, Nissan’s general manager for automated driving tech, was able to sit with his hands off the wheel—at least mostly—during our short ride.

The ride was a look not-so-far into the future of driving, as envisioned by one of a handful of companies racing to develop autonomous car technology. “We’re going to the freeway next,” Iijima announces calmly as the car heads toward Highway 237. The passengers appear noticeably concerned.

The test drive was the first public one of Nissan’s self-driving electric LEAF in the U.S. using this particular combination of sensors. The company showed off the configuration for the first time in Tokyo a couple months ago. It’s “immature” technology right now, says Iijima.

Nissan brought its self-driving car to Silicon Valley to start testing it on U.S. roads. The company’s Silicon Valley Research center, which hosted a media event unveiling the technology and other projects on Thursday, is critical for Nissan’s research into artificial intelligence and connected cars.

Despite the LEAF’s success in chauffeuring a Fortune reporter, Nissan plans to move towards self-driving cars in a much more cautious, methodical manner than companies like Google GOOG . As with its electric cars, Nissan is focused on bringing self-driving features to the mass market.

The company plans to commercially introduce self-driving features—like autonomous driving in traffic jams and hands-free lane changing—when the cost is low enough and safe enough for its bulk mainstream car lineup. Currently the sensor and computing technology used for the self-driving Nissan LEAF we rode in, costs many times more than ones Nissan would use on its commercial Nissan LEAFs.

We’re not building autonomous technology to be “beta-tested” “on a few vehicles,” said Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn during the event on Thursday. Instead, Nissan and its partner, French automaker Renault, plan to add incremental autonomous features to ten vehicle models over the next four years. This is not about “replacing the driver” but about “empowering the driver,” Ghosn says.

Self-driving cars are the hottest technology in Silicon Valley these days. At the Consumer Electronics Show this week, automakers like Ford F , Toyota TM , Volkswagen, and GM GM , all showed off their latest technologies. Like with Nissan, many of these car companies have research centers in Silicon Valley that seek to attract the most talented Bay Area engineers and partner with the leading tech players.

WATCH: Tesla’s autonomous driving tech:

Meanwhile, Valley tech giants like Google, as well electric car upstart Tesla TSLA , are building their own self-driving car technologies. Tesla premiered autonomous lane changing and driving on its latest Model S cars with an over-the-air software update a couple months ago. That technology attracted considerable attention, as well as some worry about reckless driving.

Unlike Tesla’s approach for its pricy six-figure cars, Nissan and Renault are heavily focused on creating this technology for mainstream $30,000-priced cars. Ghosn referred to the $100,000 electric car as “a niche.” The ten vehicles that will get autonomous features will be “mainstream, mass-market cars at affordable prices,” the partners said in a press release.

Nissan took the same approach with its electric cars, which it introduced years ago. The company has sold almost 300,000 of them, including about 200,000 of its reasonably-priced LEAF model.

Nissan and Renault don’t want to just move into autonomous vehicles in a step-by-step manner to make sure the technology is reliable and safe. The companies also want to make sure that both the consumer and the regulators are comfortable with the idea of self-driving cars.

Nissan will be able to make a fully self-driving car by 2020, said Ghosn. But whether regulators will let you drive the car is a bigger question, he said.

Summary: The electric car maker plans to add autonomous features to at least 10 of its cars over the next four years.


Forget partitioned apartments, Craigslist roommates and Ikea furniture.

Increasingly, New Yorkers are turning to slick, luxurious communal-living setups. In the dormlike buildings, adults well out of college share kitchens, living rooms and bathrooms, and everything from toilet paper to coffee to a cleaning service is included in the rent.

“All the little stuff that you would have to go out for and plan and think about, you don’t have to think about,” says James Jackson, 27, a Web developer who lives in a new communal building in South Williamsburg, Brooklyn, operated by the co-living company Common.

Common’s Williamsburg property is its third and largest. It operates two other buildings in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and has space for 100 residents across the three properties. Since launching in October, the company has received 6,000 tenant applications.

Once accepted — Common doesn’t perform a credit check but requires some sort of financial information as well as an interview — residents can show up empty-handed. Bedrooms are fully furnished, and even sheets and towels are part of the deal. Rent starts at $1,800 per room and includes all utilities and Wi-Fi.

The setup is similar at the new WeLive, an extension of co-working giant WeWork. It opened on Wall Street in May and will eventually be able to accommodate 600 residents.

Even couples are buying in. Australians Jordan Brown, 27, and Madeleine Kent, 24, share an apartment at Common with another couple because renting their own apartment as foreigners proved too complicated and costly.

“We just turned up with two suitcases, and that was it!” says Kent of Common living.

Some say it’s too easy.

“[They’re] giving you this perfect, manicured space, almost like a Pleasantville,” says Manhattan therapist Michael Brustein. “But what happens when people get married or leave . . . How do [they] make [their] own community?”

But the new residents at WeLive and Common are embracing the ease.

Brown and his longtime girlfriend Kent were initially skeptical about living with another couple who were strangers.

“Moving in not knowing who we were going to live with was a bit nerve-wracking,” says Kent, a digital marketer who just moved to New York from Australia. Brown had been living in the East Village with roommates.

Luckily, the couple gets along swimmingly with their roommates, husband-and-wife Martin Wilson, 30, and Sophie Wilkinson, 29, who also both happen to be Australian.

“It works,” says Brown, an investment banker. “It doesn’t feel crowded at all.”

Each couple has their own bedroom and bathroom, and they share laundry, a living-dining-kitchen space with a flatscreen TV, and a small patio.

“It feels like we have our own apartment,” Kent says.

Each pair pays around $2,600 per month in rent. It’s significantly less than Wilkinson and Wilson were paying before for a rickety old place in Soho, and the savings have allowed them more money to travel.

Brown and Kent say the relatively small upfront cost — just first month’s rent and one month security — made it an affordable option. Traditional landlords wanted them to pay several months in advance because they’re foreign, and they would have had to buy furniture and pay a broker fee.

“You can’t bring your suitcase to New York and be like, ‘Yeahhhh!’ unless you have a ton of cash,” says Brown.

The couples will share wine and meals together, but when they need their space, they say, they have it.

“The bedroom is big, and we can [go] in there and hang out,” says Wilson, who works for the beauty brand Aesop. (Wilkinson works for Common.) “It hasn’t been a concern for Soph and I to spend time together.”

Common’s ease and convenience has won over Brown.

“It took four weeks to fix the oven at [my] old place,” he says. “And you never worry about toilet paper [here]. That’s one of the biggest perks: the toilet-paper perk.”

At an age when his peers are raising children, Jeremy Schrage, 44, doesn’t even do his own dishes.

The California native, who has lived in New York since 2013, moved into a studio with a kitchenette and bathroom at WeLive for $2,960 a month in May. He’d lived in short-term rentals and Airbnbs, but wanted something more social.

His new building’s communal features include a gym, a chef-caliber kitchen, a whiskey bar, and a laundry room with arcade games and an open keg free for the taking. A deck with two Jacuzzis is under construction.

Though he is older — WeLive’s average age is 30 — Schrage likes hanging out with his fellow residents.

He uses the building’s internal app to make plans with neighbors. “A guy said, ‘Hey, I am going to a rooftop party in the East Village at 3. Meet me in the lobby if you’re interested.’ About five of us got some drinks and beers,” he enthuses.

It’s not just socializing that’s easy. In the shared kitchen, “I can use all their cookware and then just put the dishes in the sink and walk away,” says Schrage, who works in tech and has few possessions.

“I bought a bean bag for my WeLive studio, but essentially I just have clothes,” he says.

At some point, he can see marrying and settling down, but, even then, he thinks he might continue to live communally.

“In [the] past, people lived in hunter-gatherer 150-person tribes,” he says. “People can live healthier and happier in this situation.”

After living in sublets and shares all over the city, Dominique Thompson, 27, an England native who works for an investment bank, moved into Common’s Williamsburg building in early May, looking for a sense of community.

“I want[ed] to live somewhere with people who want to integrate and network and connect and interact and collaborate and be social,” says Thompson, who pays $2,400 per month for a room in a five-bedroom duplex. (She has a six-month lease and would pay less if she had a longer lease.) The suitemates share 2½ bathrooms, a washer-dryer, a kitchen and dining area, and a living room. “We cook together, we go to bars. I ended up at a salsa class [with my roommate] last night,” she says.

That roommate, Jaime Lopez, 30, owns a software company and hails from the Canary Islands, a territory of Spain. He moved into Common in May because of its turn-key nature — “90 percent of the things in the kitchen were here,” he says.

Another of her four roommates, Edwina McGregor, 26, is only in the city from Australia for a few months to study user experience at General Assembly, an education startup. She chose Common because it offered the most flexibility for her short-term stay stateside.

Less than two months into their communal-living experiment, the three are enjoying it. They cook and play chess together and chat neighbors over “it” messaging service Slack.

And, despite the camaraderie and intimacy, Thompson says there haven’t been any hookups — yet.

“There’s still new people moving in, so we’ll see,” she says. “Only time will tell. I wouldn’t put that idea aside.”

Summary: Forget partitioned apartments, Craigslist roommates and Ikea furniture. Increasingly, New Yorkers are turning to slick, luxurious communal-living setups. In the dormlike buildings, adults well out …


PHOENIX - An Arizona mother was convicted of first-degree murder and child abuse Monday in the death of her 5-year-old daughter, who prosecutors said was beaten, neglected and confined to a closet before being dumped in a trash bin in 2011.

Authorities said 41-year-old Jerice Hunter kept her daughter Jhessye Shockley at the family's suburban Phoenix home and deprived her of food and water until she died. However, her body has not been found.

Hunter showed no emotion as the verdict was read, reports CBS affiliate KPHO.

Shirley Johnson, Hunter's mother, reportedly slumped over and cried, "Oh God! She's not dead, she's not dead," before she was quickly escorted out of the courtroom by security guards.

Credit: File,AP Photo/Glendale Police Department

After the verdict, the jury determined that four aggravating circumstances related to the child abuse charge had been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. As a result, prosecutors said Hunter could face at least 35 years and up to life in prison when she is sentenced on June 5.

The disappearance of Jhessye set off an intense search of landfills as officers picked through 9,500 tons of garbage over three months.

Suspicion quickly turned to Hunter after it was learned she served four years in prison in California on child abuse charges and was released on parole in 2010.

Hunter's lawyers emphasized Jhessye's body was never found, hoping to create doubt among the jury.

In her closing argument, Hunter's attorney Candice Shoemaker also said that neither Jhessye's teacher nor a Child Protective Services agent who investigated the family noticed any signs of abuse.

Police and prosecutors have said bloodstains on the carpet of a closet and testimony from Hunter's teenage daughter showed the mother neglected and beat Jhessye.

"Where is Jhessye's body? We don't know. She got away with that. Don't let her get away with murder," prosecutor Blaine Gadow told jurors during closing arguments.

Prosecutor Jeannette Gallagher said Hunter knowingly misled the community by reporting her daughter was missing when she was already dead.

In a news conference later, Johnson, Hunter's mother, said she believes her granddaughter is still alive and should not be taken off the national missing persons list.

Johnson claimed the media and police didn't do enough to spread the word and look for the child because she is black.

"Black lives matter just like everybody else. Don't stop looking for my grandbaby," she said.

Glendale police released a statement reiterating that their extensive search for the body involved more than 300 officers over three months. The department said it's pleased with the verdict.

"Our goal always remained the same - to obtain justice for Jhessye Shockley," said police Sgt. David Vidaure.

"I'm just grateful that we got justice," Lisa Vance, a cousin who raised the child until she was 4, told KPHO outside the courthouse. "She did this to baby Jhessye. Yes, she died and I was right all along. I'm just glad the world knows."

Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery added in a statement, "We never forgot Jhessye and may the memory of her suffering and the end of a life that came all too soon motivate continuous changes to our child welfare system to protect the most innocent and defenseless among us."

The Maricopa County Superior Court jury got the case early last week and deliberated for the equivalent of 2 1/2 days before reaching the verdict hours after a juror was dismissed because of a medical issue.

© 2015 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Summary: Prosecutors said 5-year-old Jhessye Shockley was beaten, neglected and confined to a closet before being dumped in a trash bin in 2011


Bobby Bonilla is about to add insult to injury.

The beleaguered Mets — hammered by Bernie Madoff’s fraud, free-agent flops and ballpark tumbleweeds — will soon start forking over $1.2 million annually for 25 years to the paunchy, 48-year-old ex-slugger who hasn’t picked up a bat in a decade.

Bonilla, a notorious malcontent who bombed on and off the field for the not-so-Amazin’s in the 1990s, will start collecting his nearly $30 million windfall on July 1. Thanks to a deferred deal he inked with the clueless club in 2000, he’ll collect seven-figure checks through 2035.

Not that Bobby Bo is short on dough. He pocketed some $50 million during his career, which included two stints in New York, and resides in an $8 million mansion in Greenwich, Conn.

Bonilla bought a couple of racehorses along the way and a fleet of luxury cars, including a Bentley and an antique Porsche. For open-air touring, there were four or five cus tom-made Harley-Davidson motorcycles, according to his ex-wife, Migdalia Bonilla.

The Bronx-born ballplayer has a pilot’s license, so he grabs the controls of his own Cessna or uses a time-share jet for his frequent jaunts to his family’s ancestral Puerto Rico or to Bradenton, Fla., where his 17-year-old son is a promising prep-school pitcher.

He sank about $2 million into fixing up the family’s stately white manse, tricking out the crib with high-tech gadgets.

“He wanted to redo it to be a ‘smart house,’ with a lot of technology,” said his ex, a high-school sweetheart Bonilla divorced in 2009 after 23 years of marriage.

For walking-around money, he holds a cushy $200,000-a-

year job as a “special assistant” at the MLB Players Association in Manhattan but doesn’t have to go into the office.

Asked what his duties entailed, a woman there said, “He just talks to the players.”

He also remains on the Baltimore Orioles’ payroll. That team’s $500,000-per-annum deferred payments began two months ago and extend until 2015. But he has to split that loot with the ex-wife.

Life will get even sweeter this summer thanks to the Mets, who are struggling to make payroll and hope to sell $200 million worth of the franchise to stay afloat.

Back in 1999, all they wanted was to get rid of Bonilla, who in between strikeouts fought with manager Bobby Valentine and who infamously played cards with fellow grumbler Rickey Henderson in the clubhouse while their teammates were losing the pennant in Atlanta.

But the Amazin’s still owed him $5.9 million for the next and final year of his bloated contract, so the two sides struck a deal: The Mets would put off paying until 2011 but would tack on 8 percent compounded interest, jacking the total tab to $29.8 million by the time it’s paid off.

Migdalia said she urged Robert, as she calls him, to accept the delayed deal.

“I made it very clear we can’t take [the lump-sum $5.9 million],” she said. “I said, ‘You’ll just end up spending it.’ “

Summary: (J.C. Rice)Bobby Bonilla is about to add insult to injury. The beleaguered Mets — hammered by Bernie Madoff’s fraud, free-agent flops and ballpark tumbleweeds — will soon start fo…


"It's kind of an escapism." That's what Kobe Bryant, who retires from basketball tonight, told 60 Minutes at age 22 when asked why he loved the sport. "You know, when I would get really upset, and I would get really down, I could always pick up a basketball and go to the playground and just shoot and just put myself in the scenario of being in a finals game. I would just completely get away from everything that's around me."

The interview with Charlie Rose, conducted in 2001, captures a young Kobe Bryant before his career was rocked in 2003 by allegations of sexual assault. The case was eventually dropped and a later civil suit filed against Bryant by the same accuser was settled out of court. This interview also pre-dates a high-profile 2013 legal dispute with his parents over sports memorabilia.

When Bryant spoke to 60 Minutes, he was just four-and-a-half years into his NBA career, and told Rose he had been passionate about basketball for as long as he could remember. At age 3, he watched his father, Joe Bryant, then an NBA player for the San Diego Clippers, on TV. "When he would play, I would play, too," he told Charlie. "I had a little hoop, you know, in the living room, and I'd play. Then they'd take a time out, then I'd take a time out, you know, sit down, have some water."

When Bryant was six, his family moved to Italy, where his dad continued to play professional ball. Bryant said the experience helped him mature and bond with his family. But when he returned to the U.S. and moved to Philadelphia at age 14, he had a big adjustment to make.

"Kids weren't speaking English. Everybody was speaking slang and I didn't understand one word," he told Rose. Fortunately, he had another way to make friends. "We played basketball during lunch and after school, and basketball's a universal language. So I was able to communicate that way," he said.

Bryant's passion for the game runs deep. When Rose asked him what he loves about basketball, he sounded rapturous about every aspect of the game - even the smell.

"The ball when it bounces, the sound that it makes, the smell of the basketball -- not one that's completely brand new or one that's too old. But one that's right in the middle. It's kind of worn down a little bit. It just smells -- it smells like NBA," he said. And that's not all. "The nets -- when you shoot the ball and it goes right through the net. That noise that it makes when it pops the net up -- the sneakers as they squeak on the wood. The strategies -- the competition, the camaraderie, the fans - and you can just go on and on and on."

Rose also asked Bryant about comparisons between him and legendary NBA star Michael Jordan. Bryant said he aspired to that level of greatness, but didn't take it for granted that he'd get there. "Michael to me was -- you know, what he was to a lot of kids," he explained. "He was Michael Jordan. You know, he was the NBA."

At 34, Kobe would become the youngest player in league history to reach 30,000 career points, and now, retiring at age 37, he's the lead scorer in Lakers franchise history. But at age 22, he was still a rising star with something to prove. "That one thing that you can expect from me is to go all out at all times," he told Rose. "Long as I can strap my [own] sneakers up and I can go out there and play, I'm going to give you guys 110 percent always, you know, till the day I retire."

© 2016 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Summary: As the NBA star hangs up his jersey, 60 Minutes looks back at a 2001 interview with the L.A. Lakers' Kobe Bryant


Climate change could create a refugee crisis far worse than the one currently unfolding in Europe, Elon Musk warned Thursday.

The Tesla CEO gave a speech in Berlin in which he said changes in Earth’s temperature could lead to depleted water and food supplies, thus forcing millions of people to leave their homes in search of resources, the Huffington Post reports.

“Today, the challenge is in terms of millions of people, but in the future, based on what the scientific consensus is, the problem will be in the hundreds of millions and much more severe,” Musk said.

The tech billionaire also commented on the Volkswagen scandal. He called the company’s practice of cheating on emissions tests “troubling,” but said the problem was small compared to the issue of carbon dioxide emissions overall.

Musk is at the helm of two separate environmentally friendly companies: Tesla, which sells a growing fleet of electric cars, and SolarCity, a solar power company.

Summary: Tech visionary warns that countries must do more to combat climate change


Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle

Morning commute traffic is backed up in both directions of Highway 101 near Peninsula Avenue in San Mateo, Calif. on Wednesday, July 13, 2016. Regional transit officials have gathered the necessary funding to begin work on a express lane project on the Bayshore Freeway through San Mateo County.

Morning commute traffic is backed up in both directions of Highway 101 near Peninsula Avenue in San Mateo, Calif. on Wednesday, July 13, 2016. Regional transit officials have gathered the necessary funding to

Northbound traffic on Highway 101 in San Mateo. Regional transit officials have gathered the funding to study an express lane project on the Bayshore Freeway through San Mateo County.

Northbound traffic on Highway 101 in San Mateo. Regional transit officials have gathered the funding to study an express lane project on the Bayshore Freeway through San Mateo County.

Officials try to untangle commute on Hwy. 101 on Peninsula

Any way you drive it — north or south, morning or evening — the commute on Highway 101 on the Peninsula is barely tolerable and has been getting worse as the economy, especially the tech industry, gets better. Transit is little relief with Caltrain packed and BART extending only as far as Millbrae. Even the much-maligned commuter shuttle buses crawl through traffic.

But a shuffling of federal funds, once committed to a series of projects that are languishing, promises to speed the 101 commute by adding express lanes — carpool lanes that single drivers can also use for a price — through San Mateo County to the San Francisco city line. Caltrans still needs to approve the idea.

Regional transportation officials endorsed the $8.9 million funding shift Tuesday. That won’t be nearly enough to build the lanes, but it will get the project started by paying for the planning, engineering and required environmental studies.

“This is a key kick-start to a very important project,” said Randy Rentschler, spokesman for the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, which voted to recommend the funds be redirected. “This is a way to get it going.”

Highway 101, historically a vital link between San Francisco and San Jose, has become increasingly important — and congested — with the growth of the tech industry. In recent years, the expansion of corporate campuses for big-name tech companies like Google, Facebook and Apple on the Peninsula, and the desire of many of their employees to live in San Francisco, have changed commute patterns. What was once a heavy commute northbound in the morning and southbound in the evening now crowds lanes and trains in both directions during both peak periods.

The growth of tech has also led to an extensive, and controversial, network of corporate shuttle buses that haul thousands of employees on 101 to and from their Silicon Valley jobs. But with no carpool lanes north of Whipple Avenue in Redwood City, those buses get stuck in the same slow traffic.

As commuters know, Bay Area traffic congestion is bad all over, and that’s discouraging tech companies from expanding, according to the Bay Area Council, which is working to speed transportation improvements throughout the region.

The problem is particularly concerning on the Peninsula stretch of 101, said Michael Cunningham, senior vice president for policy at the council, a lobbying group for Bay Area businesses.

“This is the fiery, hot center of our burning economy that’s driving the Bay Area and supporting California’s economic health,” he said. “And congestion is getting worse there, faster than anywhere else.”

No data are available to show how much the 101 commute has worsened, but studies do show that, at least in the evening, it is the least predictable or consistent commute, meaning drivers are never quite sure how long it will take to get home.

Cunningham said the council has been working with transportation leaders to push for carpool or express lanes on 101 into San Francisco. Caltrans has agreed, he said, to begin engineering and design work for the 101 lanes as environmental studies are being done. That should cut the time to complete the work from as much as 10 years to as little as five.

The Bay Area Council challenged transportation leaders to open the 101 express lanes in less than five years, he said.

“And we think they can do that by using every tool they have,” he said. “Even that’s not nearly as fast as we’d like to see it done or as soon as the economy requires, but it’s enough to convince employers that transportation officials are expediting things.”

Rentschler said the big challenge is finding the money to build the lanes. State and federal funds for transportation projects are declining, which puts more pressure on Bay Area counties and the region to pay for its own improvements while hoping the state comes up with a transportation funding plan.

“That’s going to be the frustrating part,” he said. “But at least we’re getting started.”

Details of how and where the lanes will be built have yet to be determined, but they’ll reach roughly 21 miles in each direction from Whipple Road in Redwood City to the San Francisco city limits south of Candlestick Point.

Engineers will consider a variety of options, including converting an unrestricted lane into a carpool lane, a move that would be unpopular with single-occupant drivers. Or they might combine and connect a series of short lanes between on- and off-ramps and by building on shoulders.

Michael Cabanatuan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: mcabanatuan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @ctuan

Summary: Any way you drive it — north or south, morning or evening — the commute on Highway 101 on the Peninsula is barely tolerable and has been getting worse as the economy, especially the tech industry, gets better.  Even the much-maligned commuter shuttle buses crawl through traffic.  [...] a shuffling of federal funds, once committed to a series of projects that are languishing, promises to speed the 101 commute by adding express lanes — carpool lanes that single drivers can also use for a price — through San Mateo County to the San Francisco city line.  In recent years, the expansion of corporate campuses for big-name tech companies like Google, Facebook and Apple on the Peninsula, and the desire of many of their employees to live in San Francisco, have changed commute patterns.  The growth of tech has also led to an extensive, and controversial, network of corporate shuttle buses that haul thousands of employees on 101 to and from their Silicon Valley jobs.  The problem is particularly concerning on the Peninsula stretch of 101, said Michael Cunningham, senior vice president for policy at the council, a lobbying group for Bay Area businesses.  No  data are available to show how much the 101 commute has worsened, but studies do show that, at least in the evening, it is the least predictable or consistent commute, meaning drivers are never quite sure how long it will take to get home.  State and federal funds for transportation projects are declining, which puts more pressure on Bay Area counties and the region to pay for its own improvements while hoping the state comes up with a transportation funding plan.  Details of how and where the lanes will be built have yet to be determined, but they’ll reach roughly 21 miles in each direction from Whipple Road in Redwood City to the San Francisco city limits south of Candlestick Point.


The Walt Disney Co., like other corporations that rank as their host towns’ biggest employers and taxpayers, often has a tendency to come off like the owner of a company town. That’s the case in Anaheim, the home of Disneyland, which hasn’t been known in recorded history to deny Disney much of anything.

Anaheim’s current mayor, Tom Tait, has been fighting hard to change that. His latest cause is an immense tax giveaway that will be the subject of a public hearing Tuesday night before the city council, and possibly a vote.

The issue is a 20-year city room tax rebate that Tait’s colleagues on the council are preparing to grant and the developers of two other proposed luxury hotels in the Disneyland vicinity—“a bizarre giveaway program to the influential and powerful,” as Tait labeled it in an op-ed this weekend in the Orange County Register. The rebate would be 70% of the city’s transient occupancy tax, which is 15% of room charges. Over 20 years, the city estimates, it would be writing checks to Disney totaling $267 million. The total for the three projects would be about $550 million. [UPDATE: The city council approved the tax giveaway Tuesday, 3-1.]

Tait is convinced that these projects are destined to go ahead even without the rebate. That’s especially true of Disney’s project, a 700-room four-diamond luxury hotel slated to replace a parking lot just north of the Disneyland Hotel within the resort district. The expected room rate will be $450 a night, which is within the range of what you’d pay for a room in midtown Manhattan (at the Trump International Hotel, say).

“If Disney is going to build the hotel anyway,” Tait told me, “this incentive is more like a gift.”

Tait, who was first elected mayor in 2010, has made a habit of opposing corporate handouts by his city. He opposed a deal cut last year to immunize Disneyland from any city ticket tax for 30 years, in return for the company’s investing at least $1 billion in the park through 2024. There isn’t a city ticket tax, as it happens, thanks to a 20-year guarantee that was to have expired this year. Tait objected at the time that the deal was a three-decade hamstringing of voters who might someday want to raise revenue with a ticket levy. “Down the road, people will rue this day,” he said then. “Other people will look at us and say that we gave away the people’s right to vote.”

His point now is that the city can’t afford to give up more to Disney and other hotel operators than it already does. “This will have a devastating financial effect on our city,” he says, “which means a devastating effect on our city services.” Anaheim’s annual budget runs to $300 million. Of that, Tait said in his op-ed, the city spends $90 million a year “in the resort district to support Disney and the other resort businesses.” All that means less money, not more, to “address funding public safety, providing transportation for seniors, creating transitional housing for working mothers, or creating after school programs for at-risk youth.”

Tait’s argument parallels those made by other critics of tax incentive programs, which include programs aimed at goosing real estate development and the film industry: There’s almost never any evidence that they yield a profit to the taxpayer and considerable evidence that they don’t. The recipients always assert that the handout is the key to their decision-making, but they would have to say that, wouldn’t they, or they wouldn’t get the money. Typically, the cost of the incentive more than offsets any gains from increased economic activity, or the money just ends up incentivizing a business to move from one town to the next one over to exploit a tax deal, or goes to projects that would happen anyway.

Disney calls its project a “new flagship hotel” and estimates it would “create thousands of jobs and benefit Anaheim with more than $750 million in additional tax revenue over the next four decades, while helping the city reach its stated goal of attracting more high-end visitors.”

But it says the rebate is an absolutely crucial factor in its hotel plans. “The proposal we are bringing before the city council,” Disneyland spokeswoman Lisa Haines told me, “will not be built without this incentive.”

It would be presumptuous to say Disney is bluffing in Anaheim, but it behooves us to ask if its position is plausible. To begin with, the economy is smiling these days upon Disneyland and the luxury hotel sector.

The park is benefiting from a new investment of more than $1 billion, including the creation of a Star Wars-themed expansion, and if we know anything about Disney, we know it’s an expert at squeezing every investment until it screams for mercy. The spike in interest and excitement in the park has enabled the company to jack up ticket prices to as much as $119 on “peak” days.

See the most-read stories in Business this hour >>

One great way to exploit a resort investment is through luxury room rates and food and beverage sales. Plainly, the company sees greater demand from high-end customers than can be filled through its existing four-diamond hotels, the Grand Californian and the Disneyland Hotel, and one has to ask how much it would be willing to leave on the table just because it’s been deprived of an additional 10.5% gimme (that’s 70% of the 15% room tax) on top of whatever the market allows it to charge for rooms.

The luxury hotel segment isn’t one that normally depends on tax incentives, according to Alan X. Reay, an expert in the California hotel market at Atlas Hospitality Group. Reay counts 102 four-diamond hotels in Southern California (four diamonds is AAA’s ranking for top-line hotels). Of those, only two were built with tax incentives: the JWMarriott and Ritz-Carlton at the L.A. Live district of Los Angeles. When they were launched in 2007, he says, it was hard to get developers to invest without a come-on.

Reay is skeptical that the same necessity exists for the new projects, especially Disney’s: “There no question that Disney would go ahead” even without the incentive, he says. It’s possible that Anaheim is giving too much away all at once by approving rebates for three luxury hotels at one stroke. Because there are so few comparable luxury hotels in the area, the city would be better advised to wait until it had a better idea of whether the luxury market really needed a tax rebate to grow.

“I see a good argument for an incentive to spur redevelopment in an area,” he says. But there’s no evidence that “Anaheim is losing business to other areas.”

Nor is it clear that Anaheim would do better with subsidized four-diamond hotels than with unsubsidized lesser hotels. Tait raised that very point in his op-ed. “Proponents of the luxury hotel program,” he wrote, “claim that our city’s general fund is better off keeping only 10% of the tax from a four diamond hotel than it would be by receiving the taxes from a three diamond equivalent. Then somehow, through the magic of luxury hotels, by gifting hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to corporations that don’t need it, benefits will trickle down to residents, who ultimately will pay less in taxes.” He had a word for that: “This is a fantasy.”

Keep up to date with Michael Hiltzik. Follow @hiltzikm on Twitter, see his Facebook page, or email michael.hiltzik@latimes.com.

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Stocks climb, pushing the Dow and S&P to all-time highs

AMC buys largest European theater chain in $1.2-billion deal

Lawsuit alleges nepotism, waste and assault at Hyperloop One — including a noose

7:15 a.m., July 13: This post has been updated with the result of the city council vote.


Microsoft Corp., the multinational technology company, is expected to release an earnings report for the fiscal quarter that ended in June.

General Assembly Boston is offering an introductory Web development and programming class. Attendees will learn about specific programming languages and what they need to get started as Web developers. Wednesday, 6:30 to 8 p.m., General Assembly Boston, 51 Melcher St., Boston. Free.

Meet other professionals from the tech community at Startup Institute’s Summer Open Doors Party. The evening features drinks and networking with alumni, current students, and hiring partners. Wednesday, 7 to 10 p.m., District Hall, 75 Northern Ave., Boston. Free.

McCarter & English LLP is hosting a program to help business professionals and entrepreneurs build the perfect elevator pitch. Attendees will learn the key elements to a strong pitch and how to deliver it in a compelling way. Thursday, 9:30 to 11:30 a.m., Cambridge Innovation Center, 1 Broadway, fifth floor, Cambridge. Free.

Come out to the Greater Boston Career Fair to talk to representatives from 60+ companies from different industries. Attendees are encouraged to bring resumes and dress in business professional attire. Thursday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Holiday Inn, Grand Ballroom, 30 Washington St., Somerville. Free.

Summary: Earnings report, networking and more notable events and things to know.


A federal appeals court on Wednesday affirmed a lower court’s finding that the predominantly white Long Island village of Garden City had discriminated against blacks and Hispanics when it made a zoning change that favored building townhouses or single-family homes over modestly priced apartments.

The decision by a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit came a little more than two years after Judge Arthur D. Spatt of Federal District Court in Central Islip ruled that the rezoning by Garden City, an affluent suburb around 20 miles east of Manhattan, “had both an adverse impact on minorities and tended to perpetuate segregation.” In its decision, the appeals court noted that village residents had used racial code words at public hearings amid their effort to exclude minorities.

As part of his decision, Judge Spratt gave the plaintiffs in the case 30 days to propose remedies Garden City should take.

Lawyers for the village did not immediately return messages seeking comment on Wednesday.

Summary: A federal appeals court affirmed a lower court’s finding that Garden City, N.Y., had discriminated against minorities with a move to favor single-family homes over modestly priced apartments.


Sometimes a parent’s property or income is used to guarantee a mortgage, adding to the tangle.

Whatever the detail of the transaction, solicitors say, there is the potential for them to sour.

“You wouldn’t think of coming to an arrangement with a non-family member without their being a contract,” said Sarah McLoughlin, a property lawyer with 23 years’ experience. “And yet when it’s a family member, the feeling is that ‘everything will be alright’.

“But families have a tendency to not be very nice to one another, in my experience.”

Up to four people can be on a Land Registry title, but many more than that could have contributed to a deposit or helped pay off a mortgage.

They can be left in a difficult legal position when the property is sold. But with values high and rising, all parties involved are increasingly likely to bring a claim, said Ms McLoughlin.

Earlier this month a London court ruled on an acrimonious case where a mother sought to evict her daughter from a one-bed flat worth £1m. The daughter claimed the flat had been given to her.

Ann Hermsen-Wilkinson, 72, won the case against Caroline Hermson, her daughter, aged 45, with the judge issuing a possession order.

Ms McLoughlin, a senior associate at BP Collins, who acted for Mrs Hermsen-Wilkinson, said the same situations involving trusting family members occur again and again.

“Generally parents want to help their children, and they don’t think that it might not work out like that,” Ms McLoughlin said.

- The impact of rate rises on your mortgage

Difficulties also arise where one family member helps pay another’s mortgage, without being named on the deeds. Here the likely difficulty would be in proving the financial contribution.

Another common situation arises where people live rent-free in a property belonging to other family members, said Ms McLoughlin.

The involvement of “new” family members – such as in-laws, step-parents or step-children – can intensify the dispute or trigger new disagreements.

One of the most commonly-asked questions, according to family solicitors, is how parents who help their children financially can ring-fence assets to prevent them falling into the control of their child’s partner or spouse.

Here, the type of contract agreed when they buy the property is vital, says Jeremy Raj, partner at Wedlake Bell.

A “joint tenancy” can become a problem where other people are involved financially. It means if one party dies, the other automatically inherits the whole property, including any share others may have contributed.

A “tenancy-in-common” means the couple each have a percentage share of the property, and if one dies, their will determines who gets what.

This arrangement also protects their share if the relationship breaks down or when the property is sold.

“It’s as simple as ticking the right box when you buy the property. Many people tick the wrong box or don’t even ask the other people who are involved,” Mr Raj said.

Children marrying can also protect parents’ interests through pre-nuptial agreements, laying out what share of any property belongs to other parties.

If these arrangements were not undertaken when a property was bought, it’s not too late, said Mr Raj.

“It’s easy to change a joint tenancy into a tenancy-in-common. You can do any of these things at a later date - so you can do a post-nup agreement, or a declaration of trust after the property is bought.”

Many families would baulk at having frank conversation about the need to ring-fence assets or plan for the eventuality of a divorce or other fall-out.

But is is best to deal with the legalities while everyone is still on good terms, Ms McLoughlin advised.

A “declaration of trust” sets out who owns what proportion of a property and what should happen if it is sold. It can also cover conditions of a loan: for example, the lender can specify that they want a share of the income if a property is subsequently let, or outline what should happen if the property loses its value.

Lenders can outline a repayment programme for any loan and set out conditions in which it should be repaid in full.

Such arrangements could protect parents or other older family members where a need for funds could emerge in later life – either to pay for care or supplement a dwindling pension, for example.

People who contribute to mortgage repayments on a property can use such a trust to secure an interest in the property as a result.

A private document or letter setting out what various parties agree to at the outset is better than nothing, and could prove a great help if disputes subsequently arise.

But, unsurprisingly, lawyers recommend a more formal process.

“It’s simple to sort out, but it’s a bit like a pre-nup,” said Ms McLoughlin. “You have to think of the problems that might occur to try and account for them on the way in, which can be difficult,”

You can ask the Land Registry to record that the property is being held “subject to a declaration of trust”.

Ensure everyone involved has a copy of the relevant documents. Ms McLoughlin says it’s not uncommon for documents to “mysteriously disappear” when they’re not in people’s interests.

“People do destroy documents. When families fall out, they can lose all their scruples.”

She cites another upcoming case involving a dispute between siblings, one of whom who has loaned money for a property to another who is now disputing the declaration of trust.

“A good document should clearly lay out the purpose of any money being loaned.,” she advised.

“A ‘he said, she said’ situation is disastrous in terms of litigation – because where’s the middle ground?”

Contemporaneous emails or bank statements can help where a dispute requires settling.

In another case of family in-fighting, a young woman who claimed she paid her parents’ mortgage was able to show regular payments leaving her account, making her a more credible witness.

“Going to court, in my book, is losing, partly because it costs so much money, but also because you’re letting someone else decide.”

The cost of engaging a solicitor to draw up the declaration of trust depends on the amount of work involved.

Mr Raj said in most cases the work would be limited to a few hours and cost hundreds of pounds.

More complex cases could involve fees in the thousands, he said.

Have you had a family fall-out over property? Let us know: olivia.rudgard@telegraph.co.uk

Summary: If you don't want the money you've tied up in property to fall into the wrong   hands, there are legal decisions you need to make early on


Congratulations, class of 2016! Your graduation is quite an accomplishment, and it’s a sure sign that you can get things done when you put your mind and heart to it. That perseverance will serve you well in your future — and whether you realize it or not, it could help you become a multimillionaire by the end of your career.

As you start your career, you may not have much experience or a big salary, but what you do have going for you is time. A little bit of money, consistently invested in decent stocks every paycheck throughout your career, can propel you to multimillionaire status. As a young graduate, you have a once-in-a-lifetime chance to get yourself started on the most straightforward path to millions — and you’ll get there all the easier if you start right now.

Your straightforward path to $2 million Because you’re young, compound interest can work for you over decades, providing an amazing lifetime return on your investments. The table below shows how much you need to save every month to wind up with $2 million by age 67, depending on the age you start and the average rate of return you earn along the way:

Three things should immediately pop out at you when you look at that table:

First, check out how quickly the monthly amount you have to sock away grows when you move farther down the table. That should show you how important it is for you to start saving now, while you’re still young enough for compounding to work its magic.

The longer you wait, the more expensive it will be for you to reach that $2 million mark. If you think it’s tough to come up with $173 per month now as a recent graduate, imagine trying to come up with nearly $2,100 per month at age 45 just to have a chance of winding up in the same place.

Read More: 5 Rock-Solid Dividend Secrets Any Retirees Can Use

Second, check out how quickly the monthly amount you have to save grows when you move farther to the right in the table. That should show you how important it is for you to invest in stocks for the long term returns they can provide. While there are no guarantees in investing and stock market returns can be incredibly volatile, over the long run, stocks have returned around 10% annually.

Even if you don’t think stocks will return as much in the future as they have in the past, it’s a lot easier to save a little bit more now when you’re young instead of having to sock away a whole lot more later. As a bonus, if you invest as though you’ll really only get 6% or 8% annual returns but stocks do wind up returning closer to 10%, you’ll hit multimillionaire status that much sooner.

Third, realize that the stock-focused potential returns in the top couple of rows of that table are really likely within your reach, even as a new hire. $173 per month is less than $6 per day, and even $447 per month is under $15 per day. If you’ve been living like a broke college student, then you’re already used to making your money stretch. Keep your other costs down as you set up your life as an independent adult, and you can free up the cash to invest to make yourself a multimillionaire.

Read More: Shark Tank Just Revealed a Trillion Dollar Idea

You don’t have to do it on your own Perhaps best of all, you don’t have to come up with all that cash entirely on your own. Your boss and Uncle Sam may very well be willing to chip in to help you along the way.

Here’s how Uncle Sam will help: Money you sock away in a qualified retirement account like a 401(k) or an IRA will compound for you tax-deferred. In a traditional style plan, you might even get a tax deduction on your contribution, while in a Roth style plan, you could take your money out completely tax free in retirement.

And here’s how your boss might help: If your boss offers a 401(k) or similar plan, it might come with a match. A match is additional money your boss kicks in above and beyond your contribution, as an incentive for you to participate. Matches vary by company, but a typical match is $0.50 for every $1 you sock away, up to some percentage of your salary.

In addition, you can make contributions to your employer-sponsored plan directly out of your paycheck. You’ll quickly find that you don’t miss money you never see, but that money still works on your behalf.

Read More: Kansas Man Turns $10,000 Into $8 Million

Between the tax benefits and possibility of an employer match for contributing to your retirement plan, you just might find you only need to sock away half of the amount out of your own pocket. So yes that means that if you:

…then you might be able to wind up a multimillionaire by sacrificing less than $100 a month out of your own pocket.

Want to be a multimillionaire? Start today The incredible opportunity that you have to become a multimillionaire with such a small investment is available to you only because you’re young. Take advantage of it now — preferably starting with your next paycheck — and no matter where you end up in life, you’ll be incredibly glad you did. Miss your chance by waiting too long, and it’s gone forever. So get started now, while the opportunity is still there for you.

Chuck Saletta has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. We Fools may not all hold the same opinions, but we all believe that considering a diverse range of insights makes us better investors. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

Summary: You could save $2 million by retirement with little effort.


This article first appeared in Motto.

Donald Trump supporters have found new ways to voice their views of presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

On Sunday, MTV News reporter Jamil Smith posted a photo on Instagram at the Republican National Convention of some pins for sale, as The Cut pointed out. While some were classic “Make America Great Again” pins, most took a very different tone. One pin has two shades of pink with stars and reads “Hot chicks for Trump.”

The most shocking pins, however, were crude and sexist attacks on Hillary Clinton. A blue and white pin says “KFC Hillary Special: 2 fat thighs 2 small breasts…left wing.”

Another declared “Life’s a bitch/Don’t vote for one”

This isn’t the first time the “KFC” pins have made an appearance at Republican gatherings. In November 2015, TIME reported that those pins were on sale at the Florida Republican Party’s Sunshine Summit.

The buttons for sale are part of a long tradition of sexist nastiness on political buttons and other merchandise. And Hillary Clinton is a frequent target. Online vendors are often blaring “The last time I saw a woman like Hillary someone dropped a house on her,” and more succinctly, “Trump that bitch.”

The Telegraph took note of similar merchandise, specifically targeting President Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky. One pin shows a photograph of Lewinsky with the caption “Vote Monica 2016. I got the ‘job’ done when Hillary couldn’t.” There was also a bumper sticker that said, “Hillary will go down faster than Bill’s pants.”

It’s time to make political apparel great again.

Summary: And that's saying something.