A Bedford biotech company is going a long way in the search for lifesaving drugs: 240 miles straight up.

Emerald BioSystems Inc. is part of team of researchers using the low-gravity atmosphere of the International Space Station to develop a more complete understanding of the intricate structure of proteins, which in turn would give drug makers more insight into treating diseases.

“Name a disease, and a protein is involved,” said Cory Gerdts, Emerald Bio’s instrument systems product manager. To create new drugs, “you have to understand what the proteins involved in causing that disease or curing that disease are doing.”

The experiment involves turning proteins into crystals, which allows scientists to make extremely detailed three-dimensional images of a protein’s structure.

Protein crystals are also cultivated in labs on terra firma, but gravity can cause liquids to settle or circulate in ways that prevent the formation of well-ordered crystals. That problem is largely eliminated in space, where the pull of gravity is much weaker. This “microgravity” environment should produce picture-perfect crystals.

And the more refined and well-ordered the crystal, the better scientists can determine which proteins affect which diseases. The ultimate goal is to use that information to develop more effective treatments with fewer side effects, or new drugs for untreated diseases.

Emerald Bio was founded in the 1990s by scientists at the University of Washington who came up with highly efficient ways to isolate and identify the structures of proteins. The company’s system mixes proteins with other chemicals that will cause them to turn into crystals, not unlike grains of salt. A crystal is then bombarded with X-rays to generate the 3-D image of its structure.

“The Holy Grail of protein crystallography isn’t just to get protein crystals,” Gerdts said. “It’s to get protein crystals that are extremely well-ordered.” That’s because precisely shaped crystals more accurately diffract the X-rays, producing a sharper image of the protein.

While it may sound like the stuff of science fiction, cultivating protein crystals has produced real-world progress.

Dr. Julie Robinson, space station program scientist at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, said a review of the agency’s protein crystallization research from the last decade shows promising results.

“There are definitely some proteins that you can get better crystals in space,” Robinson said.

Moreover, Robinson said, crystallization experiments by a Japanese space program isolated a protein that has led to a drug to treat muscular dystrophy. It is currently being tested on animals, prior to possible human trials.

Carl Carruthers, a researcher at Methodist Hospital Research Institute in Houston, developed the current crystal project after being involved in two prior experiments on the space station and finding the shuttle’s crystallization gear obsolete.

“I was not impressed with the equipment that they had,” Carruthers said.

Carruthers approached nearby NanoRacks, which for as little as $15,000 will help companies, researchers — even budding young scientists — launch experiments to the space station and bring them safely back to earth . The company has launched more than 80 payloads to the station, on unmanned rockets operated by Japan, Russia, and the European Space Agency, as well as the SpaceX Dragon. High school students in California and Israel have used NanoRacks to put experiments into orbit.

“We’re the first company in the world to own our own hardware on the space station and market it commercially,” said NanoRacks’ chief executive, Jeffrey Manber.

Carruthers suggested that NanoRacks launch Emerald Bio cards, to see whether the company’s crystal-forming techniques would work in space. Emerald Bio works with extremely small quantities of protein, injected onto plastic cards about the size of a microscope slide. Each card can hold 200 tiny measures of protein mixed with crystal-forming chemicals.

Carruthers selected five well-known proteins to be injected into 25 crystallization cards, for a total of 5,000 experiments.

A slightly different blend of chemicals is used in every chamber, to see which does the best job of encouraging the formation of crystals. The entire package was smaller than a shoebox.

To ensure that crystal formation would not start until the cards were in orbit, they were flash-frozen in liquid nitrogen to about 400 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.

At the space station, the cards were snapped into a rack owned by NanoRacks and the proteins allowed to thaw slowly and begin crystal formation. The package of cards will stay aloft until May, when it will be returned to Earth on a Russian Soyuz capsule.

Carruthers will then compare the crystals grown in space with a similar set that remained on Earth, to see whether they are are superior in quality.

The project has its skeptics.

“We were told in the 1980s that space-based materials processing would make the blind see, the lame walk, and raise the dead,” said aerospace analyst John E. Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a publication on national defense issues. “It never happened.”

Pike said Carruthers’ crystallization experiments would probably fare no better. “It gives the crew up there something to do besides look out the window,” he said.

But if the space-born crystals are superior, they could bring a big payoff by speeding the development of new drugs.

“If it does work, it’ll be a significant leap in the technology,” said Carruthers, who predicted that researchers seeking cures for cancer, HIV infection, and other deadly illnesses would be lining up to launch their own orbital protein experiments.

Summary: ABedford  biotech company is going a long way in the search for lifesaving drugs —-240 miles straight up. Emerald BioSystems Inc. is part of team of scientific researchers using the low-gravity atmosphere of the International Space Station to develop a more complete understanding of the intricate structure of proteins, which in turn would give drug-makers more insight into treating particular diseases.  “Name a disease, and a protein is involved,” said Cory Gerdts,  Emerald Bio’s instrument systems product manager. at Emerald Bio.  Specifically The experiment involves turning proteins into crystals, which allows scientists to make extremely detailed three-dimensional images of a protein’s structure. Protein crystals are also cultivated in labs on terra firma, but earth’s gravity can cause liquids to settle or circulate in ways that prevent the formation of well-ordered crystals. That problem is largely eliminated in space, where the pull of gravity is much weaker.


By Jonathan Moffie The Active Times

As we outsource more and more of our lives to the digital world, video games that get us off the couch and into the action have started to go mainstream in a big way.

First the Nintendo Wii had us waving our arms around madly, and then, in 2010, Sony unveiled the PlayStation Move and Microsoft introduced its motion sensing Kinect system for Xbox.

"Exergames" -- yes, fitness video games now fall into their own hybrid category—have come a long way since the days of the Power Pad, and have since proved to be a highly effective way to introduce physical activity into what was once considered the most sedentary of hobbies.

They have been found to improve hand-eye coordination, balance, stability and cardio. A recent study in The Journal of Pediatrics recommends using exergames to improve children’s health, and at least one popular game, Dance Dance Revolution, is becoming a regular part of physical education programs around the country.

But savvy video game makers know that exergames aren’t just fun for kids. Games like Zumba Fitness and UFC Personal Trainer attempt to make working out more engaging and accessible to a wide range of people. Tie-ins like The Biggest Loser Challenge bring celebrity trainers into your living room: imagine having Jillian Michaels on hand to whip you into shape.

Exergames don’t have to be virtual gyms to get your heart pumping. Cardio is almost a byproduct of Kinect Adventures, for example; and when you play any number of sports games you’ll find yourself simulating the actual thing -- at least well enough to break a sweat.

With new games coming out every year for the Wii, Xbox Kinect and PlayStation Move, we decided to sort through some of the best -- recent classics and new and state of the art -- to pick 11 games that are sure to get you moving.

This game brings Jillian Michaels from the hit NBC show "The Biggest Loser" right into your living room to help you get in shape with over 125 exercises. The Biggest Loser also provides a diet plan to help keep you on track while you try to lose weight. While not as intimidating in avatar form, Jillian Michaels still goads you to shed pounds with scary motivational quotes such as, "I don’t care if you both die on this floor -- you better die looking good." Xbox 360, Wii; from $19.31 on Amazon

The original Dance Central set itself apart by teaching you real dance moves that you could theoretically be proud to show off at a nightclub. This latest edition includes a soundtrack featuring over forty new tracks, from disco-era throwbacks to recent hits. In this game you mirror the moves of your on-screen dance instructor, so if you’re perfecting the moves, then you’re definitely getting a solid workout. Xbox 360; $37.46 on Amazon.

You know something’s popular when it's known worldwide by an abbreviation. Starting as a hit arcade game, DDR is the pioneering rhythm and dance video game that sparked its own fitness initiative in schools and is recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records as “The Most Widely Used Video Game in Schools." All major platforms; $42.95 with mat controller on Amazon

This game is best enjoyed with friends. Just Dance 4 allows for up to four players to compete against each other in a dance-off, and on-screen lyrics can turn this game into a karaoke party. Reviewers say that performing the game's wacky dance moves gives a moderate workout. All major platforms; $19.99 on Amazon

Kinect Adventures is a "throw in" game when you buy Microsoft’s Kinect. It’s meant for the whole family and was designed to show off the full body movement that makes Kinect unique. With games called River Rush and 20,000 Leagues, Kinect Adventures takes your family through obstacle courses and whitewater rafting. The game is fast-paced and you’re always on the move. Xbox 360; Free with Kinect Sensor ($97.65 on Amazon)

Kinect Sports was Microsoft's way of competing with the once wildly popular Wii Sports. This latest edition has 13 mini-games including football, golf, baseball, skiing, tennis, darts, soccer, bowling, beach volleyball, table tennis, boxing, basketball, and track & field. When playing Kinect Sports, you can't get away with lazy controller movements like you can with the Wii and PlayStation Move. The full range of movement that Kinect demands makes this the best workout of the Sports collection games. Xbox 360; $33.30 on Amazon

The first edition of this game was bundled with PlayStation Move, Sony's own entry into the motion sensing video game market. You can compete in 11 different sports including tennis, archery, skiing, beach volleyball and boxing. The game is designed for a wide-range of sports fans and the sport you prefer determines the workout you’ll get—boxing against a friend is going to burn calories at a much faster rate than bowling, for example. PlayStation Move; $14.62 on Amazon

Testosterone-fueled men are the once-marginalized fitness video game audience that Microsoft and UFC had in mind when making this game. This game was originally designed for the full body movements of Kinect, but is now available for Wii and PlayStation Move. Game testers have noted that UFC Personal Trainer has a difficult time tracking body movement, sometimes making for a sub-par workout. The main upside, though, is the ability to compete with a friend standing next to you, or over the Internet. All major platforms; from $14.48 on Amazon

Wii Fit U is set to hit stores in December of this year. It will come with a balance board that can measure your weight and optimal balance, the Wii gamepad that allows you to play without a TV screen, and the new Fit Meter that will track your exercises both in and out of the house. With the Wii balance board already called, “the best-selling bathroom scale in the world,” Nintendo is trying to incorporate Wii Fit U and exercise throughout your day. Wii; $59.99 at Best Buy

Nintendo revamped Your Shape Fitness for 2013 to try and compete with Nike+ Kinect Training. The game helps you customize your burn by offering 125 different exercises and 200 different workouts. You will also receive diet advice and recipes for healthy meals from your on-screen personal trainer, and multiplayer mode lets your family workout together. Wii; $38.99 on Amazon

Critics agree that Zumba Fitness offers a great cardio workout. Celebrity Zumba instructors work you through choreographed routines that, for the unacquainted, can be difficult to learn. But help is included: the game’s online community enables you to find actual Zumba classes near where you live. Wii, Xbox 360; from $28.98 on Amazon

More Stories from The Active Times: -- Best Discount Fitness Clothing -- 11 Stretches You Should Never Do Before a Workout -- 12 Top Headphones for Working Out -- 6 Worthless Exercises You Probably Do

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Summary:
By Jonathan Moffie
The Active Times
As we outsource more and more of our lives to the digital world, video games that get us off the couch and into th...


Roundabout 1932, Andre CitroÃ«n, whose company was at the time drowning in debt, contracted the renowned British engine designer Harry Ricardo to create diesel-powered versions of CitroÃ«n motor cars, specifically the Traction Avantâs predecessor, the Rosalie. Prototypes showed great promise, but it was too late. In December 1934, CitroÃ«n fell into bankruptcy, and Michelin, its cautious primary shareholder, killed the oil-burning Rosalie. (Photo: PSA Peugeot CitroÃ«n)

Summary: From the 1900 Worldâs Fair to the winnerâs circle at Le Mans, the progress of the humble diesel engine has been unrelenting.


Red Sox principal owner John W. Henry, who early Saturday signed a deal to buy The Boston Globe from the New York Times Co., prevailed over a half-dozen rival bidders for two main reasons: He was rooted in Boston and had plenty of cash.

Henry agreed to pay $70 million for the 141-year-old Globe, its websites, and affiliated properties, the Times Co. said. The deal followed weeks of negotiations that culminated in a marathon session Friday night, with Henry and his lawyers ensconced in his suite at Fenway Park, trading calls and messages with Times Co. officials as the Arizona Diamondbacks edged out the Red Sox.

While he has not yet unveiled his plans for the company, in response to questions from the Globe, Henry said Saturday night that he looked forward to helping the newspaper play its vital role in the city and region.

“Being a part of the leadership of the Globe provides an opportunity to play a significant role with others in this community’s present and future. . . .

“I became concerned a number of years ago about the continued viability of our newspapers in Boston. I sat with various publishers and, in studying the challenges newspapers face across the country, I became extremely interested in potential solutions. I’m not sure that anyone has successfully put forward a sustainable financial model for metros given the magnitude and consistency of revenue declines, but if I were going to bet on one it would be The Boston Globe.’’

Henry said he would provide more details in the coming days, including information about the team he is assembling for what he called “a community commitment and effort.”

In a statement, he addressed the issue of whether his ownership of the paper represents a conflict of interest.

“Now that I have a prospective role in Globe leadership, if I were foolish enough to try to influence Sox coverage by the Globe, I would only succeed in diminishing the value of both great institutions,” he said.

Henry is expected to visit the Globe on Monday, according to people briefed on his plans.

“We’re delighted to have found a buyer in John Henry, who has strong local roots and a deep appreciation of the importance of these publications to the Greater Boston community,” Times Co. chief executive Mark Thompson said in a statement.

In addition to the Globe, Henry will be acquiring the Worcester Telegram & Gazette and its website, the Globe’s direct mail business, and a 49 percent interest in the free Metro Boston newspaper. The deal is expected to close in 30 to 60 days.

For Henry, 63, who enjoyed fast success with the Red Sox, winning two World Series within five years of buying the team in 2002, it’s an entirely new challenge to be entering the news business. A mild-mannered billionaire who made his fortune in managing funds and trading commodities, he has built a sprawling sports empire that includes the Red Sox and New England Sports Network, as well as the Liverpool soccer club and Roush Fenway Racing, a NASCAR team.

In buying the Globe and its websites, BostonGlobe.com and Boston.com, Henry bested several other bidders, including members of the Taylor family, which sold the Globe to the Times Co. in 1993, and whose forebears actually owned the Red Sox for a period in the early 1900s. His bid amounted to a small fraction of the $1.1 billion the Times Co. paid for the Globe — reflecting the devastating impact of the digital revolution on the traditional newspaper business model.

Other bidders included the owners of the U-T San Diego newspaper and Revolution Capital, a Los Angeles private equity firm that owns a Tampa newspaper. A trio of well-known Boston businessmen — former advertising executive Jack Connors, construction magnate John Fish, and developer Steve Weiner — bid in the final round, and lawyer Shannon Liss-Riordan had submitted an offer that included taking over the Globe’s pension liability.

Some of the people involved in these bids, as well as their advisers, could resurface as John Henry mulls taking on investors or creating a board to oversee the Globe. While he is paying cash for the company, it’s likely that he would consider taking on minority partners in order to reduce his own stake and include other locals in his plans, according to people briefed on the matter.

Connors, Fish, and Weiner, may be in talks to join Henry, according to the people familiar with the plans who were not authorized to speak on the record. Other possible investors include Henry’s Red Sox partner Tom Werner and Boston Celtics co-owner Steve Pagliuca.

A Brookline resident, Henry is a relative newcomer to Boston, here for just a decade. But friends say he is now rooted here, and has established a stable of close associates, including wealthy investors who might be persuaded to join him in the Globe venture.

Known for his numbers savvy in investments and sports, Henry and his colleagues spent the past several weeks digging into the details of the Globe’s facilities, finances, and businesses. He toured the Globe’s printing operation, dressed in blue jeans, looking on with interest as the newspapers were compiled and moved across the room on machines. He has taken a particular interest in the Globe’s Boston.com website and has quizzed executives about the terms and duration of union contracts.

People involved in the process say Henry is formulating ideas on how to boost the Globe’s advertising revenues — the area of greatest challenge for newspapers across the country. He may seek a buyer for the Worcester T&G, and he, like other bidders, is considering the possibility of selling the Globe’s plant on Morrissey Boulevard, according to people familiar with his plans.

The Times Co. bought the Worcester T&G for $295 million in 1999. The newspaper’s publisher, Bruce Gaultney, declined to comment Saturday night.

Public officials and business people across Boston expressed optimism about the deal Saturday, even as the marriage of a newspaper to a sports team it covers spurred debate in journalism circles and among Globe readers about the importance of unfettered coverage.

Henry has yet to fully address issues of news coverage beyond his statement, but Globe editor Brian McGrory had said after the agreement was reached that, “We have no plans whatsoever to change our Red Sox coverage specifically, or our sports coverage in general, nor will we be asked.’’

The shoe was on the other foot in recent years when the Times Co. owned 17.5 percent of the Red Sox, something the Globe disclosed in virtually every story or column mentioning the team.

It was the Times Co.’s success in its Red Sox investment that led, in part, to its deal to sell the newspaper and its affiliates to the Sox owner. The Globe’s parent tripled its $75 million investment in the Red Sox and, along the way, developed a strong relationship with Henry.

His was not the highest bid for the Globe, according to people involved in the process. But his offer was appealing to the Times Co. because it was cash, unencumbered by financing issues or a bevy of investment partners. One executive working for the Times Co. said the key was who was best able to get the financing together and close the deal relatively quickly.

Henry also was not the highest bidder for the Red Sox, according to press reports at the time.

Though the Times Co. is selling the Globe for far less than what it paid for the paper when the business was highly profitable and the Globe fetched a record price, it likely at least broke even on the investment, according to several former Globe executives familiar with the finances. That’s because the Times Co. was able to withdraw a large stream of cash from the Globe during its high-earning years in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Globe publisher Christopher Mayer thanked the Times Co. for its stewardship in a note to the staff Saturday and said he looked forward to working with Henry.

“I have no doubt that we will turn our full attention to moving our business forward and fulfilling our enduring mission: to be a voice for New England through our award-winning journalism across all mediums and platforms,’’ Mayer said.

In a statement, the Globe’s largest union, the Boston Newspaper Guild, representing more than 500 reporters, photographers, and other employees, congratulated Henry for his purchase of the Globe: “We welcome the opportunity to collaborate and innovate with him and his team. We look forward to a bright future as we strengthen and grow the reach and impact of the Globe in the communities it serves.”

Summary: Red Sox principal owner John W. Henry, who early Saturday signed a deal to buy The Boston Globe from The New York Times Co., prevailed over a half-dozen rival bidders for two main reasons: He was rooted in Boston and had plenty of cash. Henry agreed to pay $70 million for the 141-year-old Globe, its websites, and affiliated properties, the Times Co. said. The deal followed weeks of negotiations that culminated in a marathon session Friday night, with Henry and his lawyers ensconced in his suite at Fenway Park, trading calls and messages with Times Co. officials as the Arizona Diamondbacks edged out the Red Sox. While he has not yet unveiled his plans for the company, Henry released a statement that stressed the newspaper’s “essential” role and lauded its “award-winning journalism.”


'One man's trash is another's man treasure," says Martin Kaltwasser, screwdriver and saw in hand. The German architect and conceptual artist is rushing to complete the Jellyfish theatre, which stands in a south London playground, 10 minutes' walk from the Globe theatre on the banks of the Thames. To say that this building is junk would be disparaging. And yet junk, of a sort, it is.

The Jellyfish theatre, which opens next week, is being built from the detritus of markets, timberyards and building sites; from redundant school furniture, hand-me-down front doors, recycled nails and pretty much anything that local residents and businesses have contributed – prompted by a public appeal by the Red Room film and theatre company. As work progresses, ever more planks of wood and stuff that would otherwise be "landfill" have been piled up in this playground in Southwark.

Dreamed up two years ago by Red Room's artistic director, Topher Campbell, and its producer, Bryan Savery, the Jellyfish theatre looks, most of all, like a shrine to the humble timber pallet. Until a few weeks ago, these hundreds of pallets were being used to stack fruit and vegetables in Covent Garden market. Cheap, strong and hugely adaptable, they also happen to have a distinctly architectural look, especially when flipped on their sides and turned into walls. Some will be left as they are, others clad with sheets of plywood to keep the rain out and to usher in the darkness needed inside an auditorium.

Kaltwasser and his wife and business partner Folke Köbberling are, in fact, building Britain's first fully functioning theatre made entirely from recycled and reclaimed materials. There are no fixed plans, few drawings; Kaltwasser orchestrates his fellow builders as Mike Leigh does his actors. The building has a strong, if very basic steel frame to keep its structure in check, and yet beyond this basic architectural necessity, all else is improvised: a pallet positioned here, a sheet of plywood there, some MDF on top.

This 120-seat theatre, which fully complies with local building, fire and safety regulations, will enjoy no more than a fleeting life, however. Campbell is busy rehearsing a pair of eco-themed plays that will run from 26 August to 9 October: Oikos (pronounced "ee-kos", the Greek root for economy and ecology) by Simon Wu, and Protozoa by Kay Adshead. After that, the Jellyfish will be dismantled, and its recycled components recycled yet again.

Both plays deal with people rebuilding their lives after political and environmental catastrophe. "They're our response to climate catastrophe," says Campbell, "a condition that might yet come about – partly through our collective greed, our insatiable desire to consume, to waste energy, materials, nature. I imagine how I'd cope if the sky fell in: I'd want to know I could find people who'd be able to create shelters to keep us safe, and allow us space to think about what we were all going to do."

He describes the collaboration as "total theatre": the playwrights have been fully involved with the idea, and reality, of the building, while Kaltwasser and Köbberling have, in turn, read their scripts. The building itself – the idea behind it, the way it's being built, the way it'll feel when completed – is very much a part of the plays. "This is true community theatre: we've been able to involve many different people, from local schoolchildren to office workers across the street."

"It's not just materials we got for free," adds Savery, "but the time and skill of unemployed architects, along with carpenters and people who've walked off the street during their lunch hours." By the end of last week, 81 volunteers had put in 4,200 hours between them over the nine weeks since work began. Eight hundred pallets and 750 square metres of plywood and other sheet material were donated.

"Projects like the 2012 London Olympics have promised public engagement," says Savery, "yet the entire Olympics site is walled and strictly out of bounds. We're a completely open stage, trying to prove that local people can create their own public projects. We found our own site by walking around, found Martin and Folke by asking around, asked Southwark if it was possible. And off we went. You can do it, too, without developers, quangos, huge professional teams – and with anyone taking part."

Well, not quite anyone. A hand-painted notice insists that no drugs or alcohol be brought on site. This is not some trippy 1960s-style architectural happening, but a serious, if good-natured, public building project.

Just nipping out to mow the roof

Building from found materials is, of course, nothing new. Humans (and animals) have always done this. The 1960s saw, however, a heady boom in self-build, initiated by all those alternative lifestyle movements. Self-build tended to fall into two schools: shelters shaped from found materials and other bric-a-brac; and buildings created by local communities with their own hands, to formal architectural designs.

The latter have included the self-build housing programmes initiated by architects like Walter Segal, the Swiss-born British architect who developed a system of prefabricated timber houses built by local people to his simple, elegant designs. In the 1970s, four such schemes were built in Lewisham, London, on sites unsuitable for conventional council houses. Segal's homes – clean, modern, environmentally sound and sometimes crowned with flowering turf roofs – are much sought-after today.

The alternative to Segal's style of self-build was the kind of free-spirited hippy homes that sprung up in self-consciously alternative communities, notably in California. Such shelters might be built from anything going. Their spirit lives on today in the guise of "benders". Hidden away in the English countryside, these simple shelters, made of coppiced hazel and willow covered in army-surplus canvas and other easily sourced natural materials, are part of a fine tradition of independent and ecologically savvy homemaking. Then there are the recent reports of the campsites on London's perimeters, filled with increasing numbers of commuters who can't afford the capital's house prices.

"It's definitely political," says Campbell of the Jellyfish project. "Martin and Folke see it as an architecture of resistance, against the ways people are so often just passive users of the buildings they're given by politicians, developers and their architects." He points to the Shard, designed by Renzo Piano, a mighty developer's tower rising close by, behind high guarded walls.

Kaltwasser (born in Munster in 1965) and Köbberling (from Kassell and four years younger) have been working together in Berlin, and more recently in Los Angeles, for the past 12 years. Kaltwasser received a conventional architectural education yet found himself a fish out of water in architects' offices. In 1989, he built his first house, from found materials, in central Berlin. He expected locals to hate it. They didn't. In fact, Kaltwasser found himself popular, and even cooked for by neighbours.

Better than a boring mall

Since then, he and Köbberling have built several remarkable buildings in the same vein. Two years ago, the Wysing Arts Centre, near Cambridge, commissioned Amphis, a large patchwork house assembled in just six weeks by 40 volunteers. Used, appropriately, for informal meetings and spontaneous events, it was made of materials thrown out by the University of Cambridge. The pair also cooked up a wholly unlikely urban interloper, the Werdplatz-palais, a social centre and soup kitchen built in 2008 in Zurich, cheek-by-jowl with the stock exchange.

When the three-month permit the authorities granted it expired, the structure was dismantled and recycled into a play space for local immigrant children, who also helped build it. At the end of 2008, that, too, was dismantled. "These buildings were short-lived," says Kaltwasser, "but it was great, in such a highly regulated city, to let people with so little economic and political power build for themselves and for their needs, rather than giving them more boring public places and shopping malls. Many people were sad when the buildings had to go."

So how did they come up with the name Jellyfish? "People find jellyfish a little disturbing," he says. "And yet they're fragile creatures. They need the clean waters we're making dirty. And they appear to come and go, just like that." And just like Kobberling and Kaltwasser's buildings, too.

• For more information on the Jellyfish theatre and its performances visit oikosproject.com

Summary: It is Britain's first fully functioning recycled theatre – made of old nails, pallets and discarded doors. As the Jellyfish opens, Jonathan Glancey examines the rise of 'junkitecture'


NEW YORK — Verizon Communications agreed Monday to buy full control of its enormous wireless unit in a $130 billion deal, betting the US market for phone and broadband services will be lucrative for years to come. In buying out its longtime partner, Vodafone, of Britain, the telecom giant is also striking a takeover more than a decade in the making, taking advantage of receptive debt markets and its strong stock.

And Vodafone Group will be flush with cash to reinvest in its own businesses and to buy competitors in Europe and emerging markets.

The roughly 100 million Verizon Wireless customers probably will not see any change in their services, at least at first. But the telecommunications industry is very much in flux as new competitors like SoftBank, of Japan, have entered the market, while new opportunities for wireless services have emerged. Verizon viewed gaining full control of its biggest business as essential to addressing those trends. In the most recent quarter, wireless services accounted for $20 billion of its nearly $30 billion in revenue.

Among its plans is bundling mobile broadband services with wired offerings like high-speed fiber-optic connections.

“There’s a big phase of growth in the US telecom market,” chief executive Lowell C. McAdam said. “The timing was perfect for us.”

The deal is enormous, with the price nearly equaling Verizon’s entire market value. Verizon agreed to pay $58.9 billion in cash plus $60.2 billion worth of its shares to Vodafone, the latter of which will be distributed to Vodafone shareholders. Verizon will sell its minority stake in Vodafone’s Italian business for $3.5 billion, as part of a series of smaller transactions tied to the deal. The amount it is paying is merely for 45 percent of Verizon Wireless, implying the wireless unit is being valued at nearly $290 billion.

Vittorio Colao, CEO of Vodafone, said the deal offered good value for his shareholders.

“It was a good move for both partners, and we were able to find the right price,” he said.

The deal comes at a critical time for the industry. The country’s wireless business has had a gradual slowdown in subscriber growth in the past few years; many people already have a cellphone. In the second quarter, the growth rate of the US wireless market was 2.2 percent — the first time below 2.5 percent, said Craig Moffett, an analyst for Moffett Research.

The carriers, including Verizon, have said newer devices like tablets would help improve growth. But Moffett said about 90 percent of the tablets people were buying connect only to Wi-Fi networks, not cellular service. For wireless carriers, other markets for potential growth include cars and home security systems. But it is unclear if those will provide much growth to the industry.

“The question is whether they are big enough to really move the needle,” Moffett said.

McAdam pointed to new data-hungry uses in sectors as disparate as health care and education. “I don’t think the wireless market is losing steam at all,” he said.

For Vodafone, the deal will provide a huge war chest that could help it reshape the European telecommunications industry, which has suffered lackluster earnings and growing international competition, leading regulators to push for carriers to invest in new high-speed data networks.

Executives had long discussed how to end the joint venture. Several options were floated over the years, McAdam said. But Vodafone hesitated about ending a lucrative partnership that paid it a multibillion-dollar dividend every year.

Still, progress appeared to emerge in the past three years. McAdam became Verizon’s CEO in 2010, forming what people briefed on the matter called a solid relationship with Colao.

About a year ago, McAdam said, he began seriously examining buying full control of Verizon Wireless. Both sides agreed status quo was not an option. The talks continued in fits and starts. Rumors — one was that Verizon and AT&T would team up to buy Vodafone, an idea never seriously considered — began to spread.

One big issue was making sure Verizon could afford the deal. Its bankers insisted the debt markets could support the sheer number of bonds expected to be issued. Verizon’s underwriters are expected to sell more than $40 billion worth of paper, making the company the biggest issuer of bonds around.

Verizon and its bankers also consulted ratings agencies, eager to preserve the company’s investment-grade credit rating.

The pieces fell into place in mid-July. McAdam agreed to meet Colao. “Things locked up in place like a Rubik’s Cube,” McAdam said.

Summary: Verizon Communications agreed Monday to buy out Vodafone’s 45 percent stake in its giant wireless unit in a $130 billion transaction, realigning the global telecommunications landscape in one of the biggest deals on record. The deal represents the end of a 14-year joint venture between the British and American companies and is the culmination of years of speculation that Vodafone would sell its stake in Verizon Wireless, the largest cellphone operator in the United States. Vodafone Group shareholders will receive 71 percent, or $84 billion, of the windfall profits in both cash and shares. That includes $60 billion of Verizon shares, which many Vodafone investors will probably look to offload, and a further $24 billion in cash. The payout to investors was larger than many analysts had been expecting.


Zygmunt Januszewski at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts in 2010. Photograph: Peter Hirth/Camera Press

The Polish artist and illustrator Zygmunt Januszewski, who has died aged 57 after suffering from cancer, opened a window in the Guardian to an unfamiliar but enticing landscape. In 1991, as the result of partnership with several European newspapers, the Guardian began publishing their articles translated into English and found illustrators to complement the writing. Zygmunt's drawings held a great appeal from the time I first saw them in the smudgy pages of the Warsaw daily newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza. I loved the quality of the drawing, the imagination and the insight that they gave into the soul of a formerly oppressed nation; Poland's transition to democracy had begun two years earlier.

The work that Zygmunt did for the Guardian, inhabited by fantastical characters portrayed with a witty and bizarre sense of humour, brought a quite different dimension to the pages. It illuminated articles on fascism by Umberto Eco, or the politically convoluted career of the Austrian writer Peter Handke, or the difficulties facing central Europe, swinging between east and west. But I had the sense that his strange men brandishing flags, or his ramshackle machines built of words, were engaged in a struggle with separation, isolation, self-definition or alienation.

Zygmunt was born and educated in Warsaw. He studied in the graphics faculty of the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts (1976-1981), where his diploma work was a set of illustrations for Gabriel García Márquez's novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. In 2002 he returned to the academy, now as a teacher of illustration.

A flourishing career was marked by international success – the many publications to carry his illustrations included Süddeutsche Zeitung, Die Zeit, Die Welt, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Le Monde and the Viennese paper Der Standard. From 1982 onwards, his work appeared in more than 100 exhibitions in Poland and across Europe, and his work is held in permanent collections not only in Poland and German-speaking Europe, but also in Finland, France and Japan.

Two Guardian Review covers brought Zygmunt particular recognition. In 2003 he won second prize in the Victoria and Albert Museum illustration awards for Witness, heralding an article by Timothy Garton Ash on the border between fact and fiction. The following year he received an award by the Society of Publication Designers, New York, for Cruel Harvest, introducing a critique by Jonathan Raban of the failure of imagination evident in the invasion of Iraq.

That cover pointed to the emptiness of the western triumph with a missile and its blown-apart master, sharing between them the colours of the stars and stripes. In a 1999 interview, Zygmunt put his liking for starting from reality down to sensing that he had no direct influence on it: "My drawings are for me the only reality I can shape and change. The other thing is the fact that I am not in the place I want to be. I start drawing and then I feel I am in my element. I catapult myself into my self-created world hoping that the reality I have created is strong enough to survive in."

Posters for theatre and opera productions provided another natural outlet for his striking images. He also produced cartoons and prints, created installations and wrote poetry.

A couple of times Zygmunt came to Britain and I had the pleasure of showing him something of the Sussex countryside near my home. At Berwick church he particularly admired the murals by the Bloomsbury artists Duncan Grant, and Vanessa and Quentin Bell.

Zygmunt liked to emphasise the idea of the British as islanders, separate and cussed. He would send messages referring to "you on the island" or to events on "the island". It grew into an ideal metaphor for the relationship between us and the cultures of mainland Europe. Artists such as Zygmunt wave their flags and catch our eye, compelling readers everywhere to recognise universal concerns.

He is survived by his wife, Dorota, and son, Maciek.

• Zygmunt Januszewski, artist, born 17 February 1956; died 12 September 2013

Summary: Polish artist and illustrator who worked for the Guardian and several other European newspapers


Creativity and innovation are topics some LinkedIn Influencers weighed in on over the past week. Here is what some of them had to say.

Tim Brown, chief executive officer at IDEO

Brown, head of the California-based design and ideas firm, hears this a lot from clients: ‘I’m not a creative person’. “It’s an offhand comment, meant as an excuse for not being able to come up with innovative ideas on their own, but behind it lies a fear of failure — of being judged by others,” wrote Brown in his post The Secret to Innovation: Think Like a Kid.

Who is to blame for this feeling? “While it’s tempting to blame oppressive corporate culture for this crisis of creative confidence, its roots can often be traced to the classroom,” Brown wrote. Young children at play are uninhibited in their creativity, he wrote. “Toddlers will belt out off-key tunes at the top of their lungs, dance with abandon down the aisles of a supermarket, or colour on walls and floors, never questioning their ability.”

But between the toddler years and later school years, something changes. “Maybe because of a remark by a parent, teacher, or peer, or maybe because of their own insecurities — many kids lose confidence in their creative instincts,” Brown wrote. Inspiring teenagers and young adults, then, must be addressed, Brown argued.

“The world is full of complex, thorny challenges that require innovative solutions. It’s critical that young people start flexing their creative muscles today so they can take the lead in addressing those challenges in the future,” he wrote. They, and those already in the corporate world , need to learn to think like kids again.

Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, chairman and managing director at Biocon Limited

India is particularly handicapped when it come to innovation, wrote India-based biotech executive Mazumdar-Shaw, in her post Can India Create the Next Apple or Google?

“Real innovation has an inherent element of high risk, which Indians are averse to,” she wrote. “As a result, you do not see people in India investing in real innovation. Investors in India prefer predictable, imitative business models and me-too products, where they have the visibility of assured returns…. business models that are truly innovative, first of its kind, and thus untested, find no takers among the investor community here.”

What could be done to turn that around? For starters, more venture financing, explained Mazumdar-Shaw.

“What India needs is a national innovation ecosystem that puts in place a financing cycle: academia generate ideas, especially those based on science and technology, which are incubated to proof of concept through government-sponsored seed and incubation funding and then taken to market through business intervention backed by venture funding,” she wrote. “In today’s knowledge-driven economy, innovation is the primary driver of progress. India’s ability to generate wealth and create social good will come to naught unless we monetize innovative ideas by unshackling our entrepreneurial spirit.”

Vivek Wadhwa, fellow at Arthur & Toni Rembe Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University, vice president of innovation and research at Singularity University

“China produces more than one million engineering graduates a year—which is seven times as many as America. China has already invested tens of billions of dollars in research… (and) its government is focused on building an innovation economy,” wrote Wadhwa in his post Chinese Can Innovate — but China Can’t.

With all of that, “you would think China is destined to become the innovation capital of the world,” he wrote. “But the innovation is not happening.”

The reason why may be simple: “Innovation comes from creative people who challenge authority and take risks — who exchange ideas and experiment at the fringe” he wrote. “This is not possible in China.”

Incentives and rewards for innovation are based on quantity, not innovation quality, he wrote. That can be seen from the way engineering degrees are awarded to the way patents and academic publications are handled.

And while Chinese companies “can take Western products, adapt them to local needs and develop nifty new features” there is still “the negative effect of copying and stealing technology. It creates a disincentive to innovate. Why experiment and risk failure when you can duplicate something that works?” wrote Wadhwa. “You see this on a large scale with Chinese cars, technology companies and consumer products. They are all knock-offs of Western products.”

Wadhwa argues that less government involvement is key to innovation in China. That would help unleash the talents of the Chinese students he has taught in China, he wrote.

Follow BBC Capital on Twitter @BBC_Capital or join the conversation about this or any other Capital story on Facebook: BBC Capital on Facebook.

Summary: Creativity and innovation are key to success. Experts and executives weigh in on how to foster these illusive qualities in India, China and beyond.


UPDATED 05/16/2014 at 02:35 PM EDT • Originally published 05/16/2014 at 01:55 PM EDT

Barbara Walters' final cohost appearance on The View

, the woman-powered talk show she created for ABC in 1997, Friday morning.

"I may be available for supermarket openings and charity auctions," she joked at the hour's close before going on to mention her interviews of the powerful and famous on her specials and then on to her many years as the unmistakeable head of the table on

, on which she'll remain executive producer.

This had been billed, somewhat delicately, as Walters's

, but her summing up sounded very much like a pronounced "I'm outta here!"

It was a quiet sendoff compared to Thursday's show, which brought back

and Debbie Matenopoulos. This was something I had not expected to see in my lifetime.

My guess is the big ammo is being reserved for Friday night's two-hour special,

The highlight of the finale – which included visits from Michael Douglas and Hillary Clinton, both with warm memories to share and new projects to plug – came when

welcomed a long and varied

, including Diane Sawyer, Connie Chung and Kathie Lee Gifford. They lined up single file like fans at a book-signing as Walters waited to to bestow kisses.

"This is my legacy," said Walters, gesturing to them all. "

That legacy also includes Oprah, of course, who is Barbara Walters multiplied exponentially.

Oprah introduced a clip from

in which Walters discussed her miserable time as the first female co-anchor with the inhospitable Harry Reasoner. But that failure drove Walters on to her greatest achievement – and the thing that saved her career, she said: Her long, long string of interview specials, which allowed her to develop (and institutionalize) a gauzy but shrewd technique that lured anyone with serious power or celebrity down to the pop-culture river and immersed them and baptized them.

The finale also included a very funny segment of Walters in an interview with former

star Cheri Oteri doing her impeccable Walters impersonation.

Launching into a celebrity-peppered anecdote, Oteri-Walters remembered the time "I was in a hot tub with Burt Bacharach, Henry Kissinger, the Captain and Tennille and that irrepressible funny man, Shecky Greene. We drank mai tais and speculated about the Vietnam Warâ¦â

And on from there. She was more like the real Walters than the real Walters is.

Walters is and was, just as she has always said of her interview subjects, a fascinating personality, and there's plenty to be said about such a long and prosperous career. But the most fitting way to end here (and she would agree) is to insert a last plug for her special,

, Friday on ABC, 9 p.m. ET/PT.

Barbara Walters in 1968 and 2014

Photo Illustration by Tiffany Hagler-Geard; Photos Provided by Getty

Summary: See which famous faces stopped by to wish the veteran anchor farewell


06/12/2014 at 03:15 PM EDT

is putting the brakes on buzz that she has a new man in her life.

pro Maksim Chmerkovskiy, addressed her love life on Twitter today.

In response to a radio station Tweet that she was already dating someone new, J.Lo replied, "No I'm not. #rumors #nottrue" before playfully plugging her new album,

When a fan asked if it's not true she is dating someone new or simply that she's single, Lopez clarified further.

"No I'm not. (dating anyone new already.)"

Still, a Lopez pal says the singer and the

hunk might have a chance at taking their budding friendship to the next level. "I think they could [become a couple]," says the friend. "Who know what will happen?"

The singer, 44, has repeatedly said she is "one of those people who does not like to be alone," and those in her circle say

The mom of two is envisioning "a relationship with a guy who is older and has an established career," a source tells PEOPLE in this week's issue.

But for now, the busy star is promoting her album and performing at the

opening ceremonies today in Brazil.

@Qburgh No I'm not. #rumors #nottrue #AKAinstoresJune17 :)

@MySimple_Life No I'm not. (dating anyone new already.)

Summary: The newly single singer says buzz that she is dating again is "not true"


06/18/2014 at 08:30 AM EDT

Lena Dunham and Jack Antonoff

are more low-key than you might expect.

"One time we were at a dinner party where everyone was over 60 and, before we knew it, we realized that everyone at the table had gone outside to smoke pot and they didn't invite us. That basically says it all," Antonoff, who is the guitarist for the band Fun., tells

The musician, 30, says he and the

star, 28, aren't big partiers, and a recent spa weekend helped them to establish that they prefer to chill out.

"Everyone else was 56, and like, either coming off a divorce or trying to dry out. We were like, 'This is great! We love being here!' "

The mellow couple met on a blind date set up by Antonoff's sister and comedian Mike Birbiglia, and the first date went so well, the guitarist quickly told Dunham everything about himself, "because when you really like someone, you want them to know everything about you," he says.

Antonoff, who also fronts the band Bleachers, says he's not quite ready for marriage, but the idea of having kids intrigues him.

"It's hard to imagine when the right time is, because things are so crazy at the moment," he says. "It just seems like the most fun thing in the world. I've never met people who have kids who haven't looked me in the eye and been like, 'It's the greatest thing that's ever happened.' "

For more inspiring stories about real-life heroes and can't miss articles found only in PEOPLE

Summary: The Bleachers and Fun. musician says the pair prefer a spa to a party


After the 49ers drafted South Florida's Aaron Lynch in May, head coach Jim Harbaugh said the prospect needed "direction," a "good structure" and to be surrounded by men he "would have a chance to emulate."

Three months after Lynch's arrival in Santa Clara, it's evident Harbaugh has worked to provide that for the outside linebacker. Lynch said he became close with the head coach soon after he arrived.

"We don't really have to talk about football because he's more of a players' coach," Lynch said. He doesn't "talk just straight business all the time. He wants to know about your personal life, how you're doing, how your family's doing."

Lynch didn't divulge the specifics of those conversations, but did say Harbaugh's counsel helps explain his recent physical transformation.

Lynch, who's 6-foot-5, began his college career at Notre Dame as a 270-pound freshman All-American, but following his transfer to South Florida, he ended his three-year journey as a 246-pound enigma. With the Bulls, his sometimes listless play and mounting character concerns caused him to slip to the fifth round even with first-round talent.

Now at 276 pounds, Lynch credits some of his added bulk to Harbaugh's stuff-your-pockets-with-sirloin advice.

"We have these amazing chefs here that make whatever you want," Lynch said. "Like coach Harbaugh says, 'If you want two steaks, three steaks, take them home with you.' "

Lynch not only physically resembles his former self at Notre Dame, he also has flashed some of the ability that allowed him to pick up 5 1/2 sacks for the Irish his freshman season. Most memorably, Lynch bull-rushed 267-pound tight end Vance McDonald on his backside during a recent blocking drill.

Given his blend of talent - and some of the troubling signs surrounding him - Lynch is one of the most intriguing of the 49ers' 12 draft picks.

During the pre-draft process, he was peppered with questions from NFL teams about his weight loss and character issues. Shortly after he was drafted, South Florida's strength coach blasted the selection via Twitter, saying it called into question the 49ers' integrity and character. The coach later resigned.

Lynch has attributed his weight loss to his use of Adderall, which he was prescribed for attention deficit disorder. He knows questions remain, but said he's not focused on the outside perception of him.

"I really just came here not really trying to answer people's questions," Lynch said, "but more just do what the coaches are telling me to do."

Lynch had a severe hamstring injury in June and spent the first part of training camp on the physically unable to perform list. He has been brought along slowly and played only nine special-teams snaps in the preseason opener at Baltimore on Aug. 7.

He figures to make his defensive debut Sunday against the Broncos and, given his inexperience, his 2014 outlook is fuzzy. Can he help fill the void created when All-Pro Aldon Smith serves a yet-to-be-announced suspension?

At the moment, Harbaugh is simply pleased Lynch appears to be thriving in the early stages of his NFL career.

"I enjoy being around him," Harbaugh said. "I like the way he practices. He's continuing to learn how to be a professional football player."

Eric Branch is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: ebranch@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @Eric_Branch

Summary: After the 49ers drafted South Florida's Aaron Lynch in May, head coach Jim Harbaugh said the prospect needed "direction," a "good structure" and to be surrounded by men he "would have a chance to emulate."  Three months after Lynch's arrival in Santa Clara, it's evident Harbaugh has worked to provide that for the outside linebacker.  With the Bulls, his sometimes listless play and mounting character concerns caused him to slip to the fifth round even with first-round talent.  During the pre-draft process, he was peppered with questions from NFL teams about his weight loss and character issues.  Lynch had a severe hamstring injury in June and spent the first part of training camp on the physically unable to perform list.


Martha Coakley is bouncing around on the casino issue like a pair of dice on the craps table. Only by chance do you find out what she really thinks.

As attorney general, she has supported casinos — so much so that her office denied an antigambling group’s petition to repeal the 2011 law allowing them. When the Supreme Judicial Court in June ruled the group could put its initiative on the November ballot, Coakley said she was “pleased” by the decision and that it would be “healthy” for voters.

Now it seems Coakley, the Democratic gubernatorial front-runner, is doing her own end run on the ballot process.

Over the last week and during Wednesday’s and Thursday’s Democratic candidate debates, she began solidifying a new stance on gambling. Actually, it’s a position that Republican candidate Charlie Baker began trumpeting a month ago.

If the repeal effort succeeds, Coakley, like Baker, would consider legislation to allow a casino to be built in Springfield.

The final Globe poll before Tuesday’s primary shows Martha Coakley maintaining a strong lead over her opponents.

The logic: No one else besides a casino operator would bet $800 million on downtown Springfield. The real reasons: Candidates desperately want Western Massachusetts and labor votes.

During the debates, Coakley explained that the city of Springfield voted for a casino and was awarded a license, so the Commonwealth should allow them to have one.

“Let’s keep an open mind,” she said. “That’s nuanced looking at the issues, not saying yes or no in a knee-jerk way.”

Actually, I would like a yes or no answer, and so would her opponents in Tuesday’s primary, Steve Grossman and Don Berwick, who rightfully pounced on her during the debates.

“We cannot overturn the will of the people. It undermines democracy,” said Grossman, who supports casinos, but would veto legislation to legalize gambling if the repeal passes.

Berwick, who opposes casinos, perhaps best summarized the frustration of many a Democrat: “I do not understand your position. I’ve heard you say it over and over again. This is the lack of clarity that I think that is being called out, Martha, and it got you in trouble before.”

The reference, of course, is to Coakley’s lackluster run against Scott Brown in the 2010 US Senate race. Against the odds, she lost miserably to him in the general election after handily winning the primary.

Here’s what is so confusing about the idea to allow Springfield to go ahead with its casino plans even if the state law is repealed: It ignores the fact that Plainville, Everett, and Revere also voted for gambling. How come Springfield alone would get to gamble?

“There is nothing unique about Springfield,” said Joe Fernandes, the town administrator in Plainville, where a slots parlor is already under construction and would need to be shut down if the repeal passes. “Their people voted for it, our people voted it. Revere or Everett — they are all in the same boat. I don’t see why anyone should be treated differently.”

Coakley wouldn’t get on the phone to clarify her position, but Baker was willing to talk. He told me that a couple of months ago he walked the site in Springfield, where MGM plans to build a complex featuring a casino fronted by restaurants and shops. “It’s going to be a neighborhood,” said Baker. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”

Baker, who has been a one-casino guy from the get-go, said he has supported other ballot petitions, but in this case believes that Springfield should get another shot at becoming a gaming mecca. He would hold hearings and get the Legislature involved to make that happen. “It’s worth a conversation,” he said.

Now, I am as procasino as they come in the media, but gambling is such a contentious issue that everyone — not just those who will live with a casino in their back yard — should get to vote on it. The impact of a gambling complex won’t be confined within the borders of the community where it is built in. If state voters say no, we shouldn’t allow the neon lights to be turned on anywhere.

Scott Harshbarger, the former attorney general and a ringleader of the Repeal the Casino Deal movement, had harsh words for the two most serious candidates for governor.

“It’s really an outrageous insult to the people of Commonwealth, a total disrespect for the people’s right to vote,” he said. “It also shows, I suppose, the lesson that sadly we’re all going to learn that perfectly reasonable people start to do crazy things when the debate about casinos dominates the political landscape.”

Crazy makes sense in this case. It’s the only way to explain how these candidates are acting.

Summary: Martha Coakley is bouncing around on the casino issue like a pair of dice on the craps table. Only by chance do you know what she really thinks.


On a drizzly afternoon in mid-June, about 1,000 low-wage workers and their supporters marched down Boylston Street, trombones and drums creating a jubilant soundtrack. Adjunct professors walked alongside fast-food workers, religious leaders with retail staffers, construction union officials with waiters.

Home health aides waved signs that read, “Hold the burgers, hold the fries, make our wages supersize.”

The march was part of “Fight for $15,” a campaign to lift up low-wage workers that has spread across the country, spurring unprecedented collaboration between unions, worker centers, community organizations, and faith-based groups.

Propelled by public outrage over corporate greed and income inequality, the effort to improve the lives of the working poor is reshaping and reinvigorating the labor movement, cutting across lines of geography and self-interest that have divided these groups.

The result: a powerful grass-roots force.

Unions are offering expertise in collective bargaining and organizing, as well as deep pockets. Worker centers, which assist immigrant and low-wage workers, are tapping into ongoing relationships with struggling employees to identify needs and rally support. Community groups emphasize how better-paying jobs can help stabilize families, neighborhoods, and cities.

“We’ve seen a turnaround in terms of public sympathy for workers,” said Russ Davis, executive director of Massachusetts Jobs With Justice, a coalition of labor, community, and faith groups. “They know that it’s not good for the United States as a country, as a society, to have this vast increasing underclass of people.”

More demonstrations are planned in Boston this week, in observance of Labor Day, as home care, fast-food, and other low-wage workers push for higher wages and unionization.

For unions, which have seen membership dwindle to less than 7 percent of the US private sector workforce from 35 percent in 1980, it’s an opportunity to swell their ranks, said Janice Fine, a labor studies professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Getting access to low-wage workers is key, she said, not only because it provides opportunities for organizing but also because it revives the image of unions as fighting for all workers, instead of the narrow interests of a few.

“For unions to grow, the broader community needs to see unionization as a moral issue,” she said. “Championing the cause of low-wage workers sets unions back into the moral light they once had.”

But some in the business community say the movement is just a ploy by the Service Employees International Union to collect more dues.

“It would be wrong to allow the SEIU and its affiliates to hide behind an altruistic plea for higher wages when what they really want is a shortcut to refill their steadily dwindling membership ranks and coffers,” said Steve Caldeira, president of the International Franchise Association, a trade group in Washington

The Fight for $15 campaign was born in 2012, when fast-food workers demonstrated in New York with the help of the SEIU and other local coalitions. It grew into a phenomenon, with hundreds of demonstrations across the country, and worker campaigns joining forces across industries.

The movement is fueled by rising economic disparity. If pay had kept up with productivity gains since 1979, the majority of Massachusetts households would make at least $10,000 a year more than they do now, according to the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center , a left- leaning think tank in Boston. Instead, the gains went to the top earners.

Meanwhile, many high-paying jobs that were lost during the recession were replaced by lower-paying ones. Companies also employ more contract and part-time workers to cut their costs.

Massachusetts political leaders, including Boston Mayor Martin J. Walsh and US Senator Elizabeth Warren, both Democrats, have focused on income inequality, highlighting the cause of low-wage workers. Social media have spread word of protests, rallies, and boycotts, building broader support.

“Unless we come together, we’re not going to win,” said Roxana Rivera, New England district director of 32BJ Service Employees International Union, which recently held a rally for Logan Airport workers attended by more than 25 organizations.

“We hit rock bottom with the recession, in a sense,” she said. “That really made it very clear, as we came out of it, who was doing really well and who was not.”

In the past, community and faith-based groups concentrated on issues like housing, crime prevention, and schools. But as unions declined and wages stagnated, these organizations turned more of their attention to helping workers.

A few years ago, Community Labor United, a Boston advocacy group, had community organizers join union leaders to knock on Boston security guards’ doors to convince them to unionize, which they did, said executive director Darlene Lombos.Last year, the nonprofit got transit unions and riders groups across the state to join forces, resulting in a state funding increase and a cap on fare hikes.

Raise Up Massachusetts, a coalition of 100 labor, community, and faith groups, collected more than 368,000 signatures to get paid sick time and a minimum wage increase on the ballot this fall — all through volunteer efforts. The campaign helped push the Legislature this summer to approve the highest statewide minimum wage in the country, $11 an hour by 2017.

Other victories for low-wage workers have accumulated across the country. The Massachusetts Legislature also passed a domestic workers’ bill of rights to improve conditions for housekeepers and nannies. Seattle raised its minimum wage to $15 an hour. The National Labor Relations Board recently ruled McDonald’s can be considered a joint employer with its franchisees, which could hold the corporation responsible for wages and working conditions in all restaurants in the chain.

As the movement gains momentum, workers from different industries are becoming more united and vocal. Maureen Sullivan, once a full-time faculty member at Boston University, became an adjunct sociology professor at the school after she was laid off in 2012. With no benefits, and only one BU class to teach, Sullivan joined the Fight for $15 effort, helping to lead protesters down Boylston Street in June.

“Why am I identifying with fast-food workers?” she said. “We are the same.”

Summary: Propelled by public outrage over corporate greed and growing concerns over income inequality, an unprecedented collaboration among unions, worker centers, community organizations, and faith-based groups is working to improve the lives of the working poor.


Can Steve Jobs’ tablet do for magazines what the sneaker phone did for Sports Illustrated?

Joe Zeff, who ran Time Magazine‘s graphics department for a few years while I was there, is getting some attention for an idea he floated on his new Design Blog: publishers, he suggests, should lure readers to their struggling magazines by giving away free Apple AAPL iPads in return for paid subscriptions.

It’s a variation on the old Sports Illustrated sneaker-phone gimmick (see video below the fold), which worked 20 years ago because the phones were pretty cheap and the subscribers they attracted tended to become loyal readers.

But loyal readers are a dying breed in these of days of Google GOOG News and information overload, and publishers are desperately seeking new ideas that can resurrect their aging business models — including re-casting their print publications as iPad apps. (See the Sports Illustrated demo, also below the fold.)

A free iPad would certainly attract subscribers, but can magazines really afford to give away a tablet computer the way SI gave away sneaker phones? We ran the numbers, and the news is not good.

The best model for Zeff’s idea is the subsidized smartphone. AT&T T is happy to knock a few hundred dollars off the sticker price of an iPhone — or maybe even give it away — because they know that in return they’re going to get 24 monthly payments of at least $69.99, or nearly $1,680.

But magazines are not high ticket items. If Sports Illustrated were to trade a $499 iPad for a two-year subscription, as Zeff suggests, they’d be shelling out the equivalent of about $20.80 a month.

With discounts and special renewal offers, however, the average subscription price for a magazine like Sports Illustrated is about $60 per year (repeat: PER YEAR). At that rate, it would take Time Inc. TWX nearly eight and a half years per subscriber to work off its debt to Apple, by which time today’s iPad will probably look as primitive as 1991’s sneaker phone.

Meanwhile, Amazon AMZN is moving quickly to get as many of their tablet computers in readers’ hands before the iPad ships, offering selected customers free Kindle’s — at least free for one month — with a money-back guarantee “if you don’t love it” (and you can keep the Kindle).

Below: The old Sports Illustrated sneaker phone promo and the new tablet-ready edition.

[Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter @philiped]

Summary: Can Steve Jobs' tablet do for magazines what the sneaker phone did for Sports Illustrated? Joe Zeff, who ran Time Magazine's graphics department for a few years while I was there, is getting some attention for an idea he floated on his new Design Blog: publishers, he suggests, should lure readers to their struggling magazines…


FORTUNE — Self-driving cars may be closer than anybody realizes. Cadillac is rolling out high-tech options for two new models this year which provide — however brief — a glimpse into a future where computers take over from drivers.

An array of new sensors, warnings and automatic controls can already help drivers detect hazardous situations and avoid accidents, according to General Motors Co. GM engineers. Eventually, by bundling navigation and decision-making algorithms with such systems, GM believes a self-driving car is feasible. The automaker said the first version of a “semi-autonomous” car might be available by mid-decade and a more advanced version by the end of the decade.

While new advanced safety systems aren’t a panacea, they will no doubt provide a backup to drivers who doze off or whose attention wanders while using the phone, drinking coffee or scolding the children. “There still are issues that must be solved, specifically how to keep the driver’s attention engaged as more of the car’s functions become automatic,” says Alan Taub, who is retiring next month as head of GM research and development. “The autonomous car is quite real and closer to reality than many people think.”

MORE: The new normal in American cars

In January, Audi announced at the Consumer Electronics Show that it is “actively developing” and intends to offer “by mid- to late-decade” a system that will allow drivers in slow-moving heavy traffic, such as on the freeway, to switch to a semi-autonomous mode that will keep the car moving in its lane at a reasonable speed while preventing it from hitting another vehicle. The feature likely will appear first on Audi’s A8 flagship sedan.

Last year, Nevada became the first state in the U.S. to adapt its laws so that driverless cars may operate on its roads. Google GOOG has famously experimented with a self-driving car, as has the tiremaker, Continental.

In March, I was among several journalists invited to GM’s Milford, Michigan proving grounds for a briefing on autonomous driving, including demonstrations of several technologies and systems. By far the most dramatic was a “drive” behind the wheel of a specially outfitted Cadillac SRX to show the capability of its “Supercruise” semi-autonomous capability.

MORE: The cloud hanging over Mazda

With a GM engineer in the SRX front passenger seat, I accelerated to about 60 miles an hour and activated Supercruise. With my hands off the wheel, the car maintained the proper speed and didn’t stray from its lane. Soon a driver in another GM test car approached from the left and cut in front of my car, into my lane. My car slowed down, keeping a safe distance behind it. Once it left, the car sped up again.

Next the car cut into our lane from the right. Again, our car — using LIDAR, a sensing system that employs light waves — avoided the second car without any jarring or abrupt actions.

The two new Cadillacs, the large XTS and the compact ATS, will offer packages that include adaptive cruise control, which adjusts to the speed of vehicles ahead; backup warnings that tell when vehicles are approaching from the side; a warning indicator to tell if a vehicle is in the blind spot, lane departure warnings, braking assist and others. Similar technologies and features already are available on several models of Mercedes, Audi, BMW, and Lexus TM vehicles.

MORE: Volvo paves the way for production in China

A “safety seat alert,” transmitted via vibrations from the driver’s seat, indicating hazardous situation, such as lane departure on the right or left part of the seat will be a first for GM. Vibrations are transmitted via the driver’s backside. The system works in tandem with warning lights on the dashboard. GM said the vibration is more effective than a chime or buzzer, which some driver’s may not hear or find annoying.

In any event, late-night comedians will have fun with GM’s vibrating seat concept if it becomes popular.

Summary: An array of new sensors, warnings and automatic controls can already help drivers detect hazardous situations and avoid accidents. More advanced cars aren't that far away, the company says.


The most controversial of 1960s British pop artists brings his sexually charged art into the 21st century with a retrospective that may cause a few fireworks.• Royal Academy, London W1J from 13 November until 25 January.

Peder BalkeEerie northern landscapes freeze your senses in the art of this 19th-century Norwegian pioneer.• National Gallery, London WC2N from 12 November until 12 April.

The Serving LibraryThis playground of artistic and pop cultural ephemera reinveints the idea of the library for an age of instant information about everything.• Tate Liverpool, Liverpool L3 from 7 November until 8 February.

Gavin TurkA retrospective of Turk’s neon sculptures to light up the winter days.• New Art Centre, East Winterslow, Salisbury SP5 from 8 November until 8 February.

Remaking Picasso’s GuernicaPicasso’s great 1937 painting is still the most powerful denunciation of modern war. This exhibition documents an attempt to recreate it as a textile banner protesting the conflicts of today.• Pallant House Gallery, Chichester PO19 from 8 November until 15 February.

Bronzino, An Allegory with Venus and Cupid (about 1545)Allen Jones was not the first artist to make eerily cold images of sex and eroticism as this Renaissance masterpiece of perversity reveals. The goddess Venus is being made love to by her adolescent son, Cupid.• National Gallery, London WC2N.

Jonathan Jones wants UK museums to return their ‘cultural booty’

Australia is churning out stunning buildings year after year

Your animal artworks are seriously good

The people of Detroit still believe in their future

The world’s most extreme performance artists were photographed by Manuel Vason

Zaha Hadid is still getting flak for her Tokyo Olympic stadium designs

New Anthony Gormleys are going to crop up all over the UK

William Klein told us about his return to New York

Share your pencil drawings with us for our Share Your Art feature

Summary: Pop art’s most controversial figure explores fantasy and fetish at the Royal Academy, and we celebrate a masterpiece of peversity that’s more than 450 years old


NEW YORK — The year his Broadway hit “The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife” was up for the best-play Tony Award, Charles Busch figured he wasn’t going to win, and he was right. He lost to David Auburn’s “Proof” — but so did Tom Stoppard and August Wilson, which was some consolation. Awards night, Busch said, was magical.

What still gives him a twinge, though, is that the beloved aunt who raised him, who was never comfortable with his work as a drag performer, wasn’t there to savor his glittering, mainstream success as a playwright.

“The thing that breaks my heart — and I still get very emotional about it — is that she died just before ‘The Allergist’s Wife,’ ” Busch, 60, said on a recent afternoon at his duplex in Manhattan’s West Village. “She’s been dead now for 14 years, and yet when I watch the Oscars or the Emmys or the Tony Awards, when somebody brings their mother on the red carpet, I just get very choked up. That would’ve been the ultimate gift I could’ve given her to show my gratitude for everything she gave me. She would’ve come with me to the Tony Awards.”

“The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife,” which premiered off-Broadway at Manhattan Theatre Club in 2000 and transferred to Broadway that fall, was a career breakthrough for Busch, who until then was best known for downtown plays he wrote and starred in, like “Vampire Lesbians of Sodom” and “Psycho Beach Party.”

“The Allergist’s Wife,” aimed at a more conventional crowd, is also a play Busch has had to keep tweaking as topical and technological references that were up-to-the-minute in the original script become outdated. A Lyric Stage Company production directed by Larry Coen, running Friday through Dec. 20, will use a revised version.

Lyric Stage Company, 140 Clarendon St., 617-585-5678. http://www.lyricstage.com

“I’m never finished writing that damn play,” Busch said. “It was my first contemporary comedy, and everything changes so quickly.”

Set in a well-appointed apartment in a doorman building on the Upper West Side, the play centers on Marjorie Taub, a frustrated woman in late middle age who is unfulfilled by an existence crammed with volunteer work and cultural dilettantism. She has intellectual pretensions and creative ambitions but no career of her own; the allergist of the title is her husband, Ira, a do-gooder with a colossal ego. When Marjorie’s long-lost friend, Lee, appears, spinning tales of adventure, she’s a disruptive force in their settled lives, urging the couple to be more daring.

As he spoke about the play, Busch was about to set off on an adventure of his own: The next day he would leave for London, then Paris, with his cabaret show. In his scarlet-walled living room, which is both glamorous and cozy, family photos are clustered on a table near a couch. Talk of “The Allergist’s Wife” led to affectionate talk of his sisters; his mother, who died when he was 7; and his aunt, who took Busch in when he was 13 and troubled, he said, and “just developed me and cultivated me like I was one of her African violets.”

“I’m from this matriarchal family of very fascinating, very articulate, witty, emotionally complex women,” he said. “I guess some people might think I’m kind of flamboyant or something, but I’m Marilyn Munster in my family.” He laughed. “I’m the quiet one, observing.” And, he added, taking notes on “all those crazy, awful things that I heard them say in extremis.”

“I’m fascinated by the tensions a woman goes through, their frustrations and strivings. I grew up with it. I identify with it,” Busch said. “I kind of am Marjorie Taub in some ways. Tennessee Williams was Blanche DuBois. I mean, every writer is some of all their characters. In therapy at one point, I was recently carrying on with the shrink and I thought, ‘Oh my God. I’m just totally being Marjorie Taub.’ ”

Marjorie was a sort of spin-off of Miriam Passman, a character Busch had such success playing in a solo show in the mid-1990s that he wanted to write a full-length piece around her. But Busch, who still plays Miriam today, didn’t write Marjorie for himself to perform. Linda Lavin’s voice was the one he says he heard in his head. He wooed the actress for months — “I kind of stalked her and wrote her the most outrageous letters, comparing her to Bernhardt and Duse” — until she agreed to take the part in New York.

But whereas he envisioned Lee as a “slightly dumpy woman” with an interesting haircut and “primitive jewelry,” the producers cast Michele Lee — a move that, Busch said, “made it a sexier play.” It also set a template for subsequent productions, including Lyric Stage’s, which stars Marina Re as Marjorie, Joel Colodner as Ira, and Caroline Lawton as Lee.

“Our Lee is on the glamorous side,” Coen said.

Busch saw and is complimentary of Coen’s production of “The Divine Sister,” which he directed at SpeakEasy Stage Company and in Key West, Fla. But the playwright doesn’t see many productions of his work aside from those he’s personally involved in. He has a hard time liking them.

“Kind of rightly so,” Coen said. “People have an image, this kind of like ‘craaazy’ image, of how to do a Charles Busch play. Charles’s work walks that line where it has to be done with some intensity and sincerity and emotional honesty. I think when people produce the work of Charles Busch when he’s not involved, oftentimes they miss those points, and they kind of try to make it a romp. And it’s not a romp.”

Busch, whose tender emotions seemed, the other day, not very far from the surface, said he’s spent a lot of energy reevaluating his life recently — a product of turning 60, “a birthday I didn’t really care for very much.” When the topic of subsequent productions of his plays came up, it didn’t take long for him to liken his stance on them to his aunt’s refusal to see his drag performances.

“She and I had this strange kind of deal,” Busch said. “She said to me at one point, ‘I could go, but I’m so connected to you that I couldn’t just sit there objectively. The whole time I’d be a nervous wreck. And then I’d come backstage afterward, and if I didn’t like it or if I was disturbed, I’d have to sort of lie, and then you’d see that I was being withholding, and that would cast a shadow between us, and it’s best I just don’t go.’

“I thought that was remarkably wise. And it was painful in a certain sense, because her praise would have meant so much to me, but realistically, she was a complex lady, and I would have known immediately [if she was] withholding, and that would have bugged me. So I think it was best the way it was.”

Summary: “The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife,” which premiered off-Broadway at Manhattan Theatre Club in 2000 and transferred to Broadway that fall, was a career breakthrough for Charles Busch, who until then was best known for downtown plays he wrote and starred in, like “Vampire Lesbians of Sodom” and “Psycho Beach Party.”


Donna Douglas as Elly May Clampett

01/02/2015 AT 03:20 PM EST

Donna Douglas, the actress who played tomboyish Elly May Clampett on

, died Thursday in her native Louisiana, according to reports. She was 81.

Family members confirmed the death to

, telling the news station she died at her home in Zachary, Louisiana, with family members by her side.

Douglas earned nationwide fame as Elly May, and told the

in 2009 that she beat out 500 other actresses for the role in part because the character's story mirrored her humble beginnings as a poor farm girl with Southern roots. Her audition included her expertly milking a goat, per request.

"I had milked cows before," she said. "I figured they were equipped the same, so I just went on over and did it."

Douglas left farm life behind after entering beauty pageants, winning titles including Miss Baton Rogue and Miss New Orleans before moving to New York to pursue a career in entertainment.

She landed the role of Elly May in 1962 and remained on the show until it ended its run in 1971 – and she didn't mind that it typecast her.

"So many kinds of people relate to Elly May," the twice-divorced star told the AP after returning to her native Louisiana to spend her golden years engaged in activities including baling hay and picking blueberries. "So many people love her, and that means a lot to me."

Summary: The actress played critter-loving Elly May Clampett for nine years on the sitcom


Remember when the Internet stock bubble — one of the great periods of investment delirium — helped send the market’s leading measure of technology companies and other go-go businesses to a scary record high at the turn of the century?

Anyone who recalls that also remembers the epic plunge of the Nasdaq Composite index that followed, so fast and steep it seemed to blot out any hope for the future. Nearly 15 years later, we’re almost back to record territory.

The Nasdaq index has gained more than 4 percent so far this year and posted its ninth straight daily advance on Monday to close at 4,960.97. The index now stands less than 2 percent away from its record high of 5,048.62, set on March 10, 2000.

Just like old times? Well, yes and no.

Growth and innovation are certainly back in favor again. As was the case in 2000, there is lots of venture capital to fund developing companies and new enthusiasm for initial public stock offerings. Some younger companies are commanding jaw-dropping valuations, prompting renewed talk about investment bubbles.

But there are big differences, too. Even though the index is approaching its old high-water mark, it’s really much less expensive now because most of the companies it tracks do more business and earn bigger profits.

That’s faint praise — the Nasdaq of 2000 traded at about 150 times annual earnings of the companies it represented. Think of today’s Nasdaq as expensive and probably overpriced at about 30 times profits, but it’s not completely nuts in the way it was 15 years ago.

The Nasdaq index plunged nearly 80 percent from its 2000 peak to a low reached in 2002. But its return to glory days has been more incremental — mostly achieved with average annual gains of about 24 percent over the past six years, including rebounds from the financial crisis and the Great Recession.

Over those six years, investors have been more inclined to pay for performance over promise, and the companies that delivered rose to prominence in the Nasdaq index.

“The current environment is still being very much influenced by 2008 and 2009,” said Michael Mufson, a managing partner at Redwood Investments in Newton who was running an emerging growth fund at Putnam Investments in 2000. “There is more of a demand for profitability and a return on investment capital. That’s opposed to 2000 and a decade of 20 percent annual returns” that preceded it.

The stocks driving the Nasdaq are far different from the 2000 movers. The index tracks 2,568 members, but the top five — Apple Inc., Microsoft Corp., Google Inc., Amazon.com Inc., and Facebook Inc. — account for nearly 24 percent of its total value. Apple alone represents more than 10 percent of the index.

In 2000, the top five included Microsoft at number one, followed by Cisco Systems Inc., Intel Corp., Oracle Corp., and Sun Microsystems Inc.

That shift says a lot about the way the world has changed in 15 years. The old list was dominated by companies that made hardware and software to support the world of desktop personal computers. Some of them helped build out the Internet’s infrastructure long ago.

The new index leaders are mostly known for the online services they provide to billions of increasingly mobile consumers. Apple may make hardware, but it is a consumer products company in a class by itself. Facebook has been a public company less than three years.

Look a little closer at the Nasdaq and you will uncover other changes. New industries have grown up over the past 15 years, none more than the life sciences business. Four biotech stocks, including Biogen Idec Inc. of Cambridge, are currently counted among the Nasdaq’s top 15 stocks today.

Rob Kaplan, now a professor at Harvard Business School, was overseeing investment banking at Goldman Sachs in 2000. He views innovation funded both by stock investors and venture capitalists as broader and deeper than the advances Wall Street put its money behind at the end of the 1990s.

“I think it’s more manifestly affecting everything we do,” Kaplan said. “This strikes me as more substantive than 2000. Individual companies may not survive, but what they do will.”

The Nasdaq index of 2000 wasn’t about innovation affecting everything. It was mainly about the Internet.

Mufson recalls how investors thought of the Internet itself as the place to put their money. But the real value was created by companies that figured out how to use the Web to connect with their customers.

The Nasdaq index may reach a new apex soon, perhaps by the anniversary of its old peak in two weeks. But it’s a more dramatically remade collection of stocks than the index that shot the lights out 15 years ago, and that’s good news.

Summary: The Nasdaq stock index reached dizzying heights in the midst of the dot-com boom in 2000, but plunged by nearly 80 percent over the next two years. Now the Nasdaq index is moving close to matching the old highs reached 15 years ago.


Also: HP’s Meg Whitman has no plans to break up the company; when to sell your company.

I used Google Glass: the future, with monthly updates [THE VERGE]

But the feature everyone is going to go crazy with — and the feature you probably most want to use — is Glass’ ability to take photos and video with a “you are there” view. I won’t lie, it’s amazingly powerful (and more than a little scary) to be able to just start recording video or snapping pictures with a couple of flicks of your finger or simple voice commands.

At one point during my time with Glass, we all went out to navigate to a nearby Starbucks — the camera crew I’d brought with me came along. As soon as we got inside however, the employees at Starbucks asked us to stop filming. Sure, no problem. But I kept the Glass’ video recorder going, all the way through my order and getting my coffee. Yes, you can see a light in the prism when the device is recording, but I got the impression that most people had no idea what they were looking at. The cashier seemed to be on the verge of asking me what I was wearing on my face, but the question never came. He certainly never asked me to stop filming.

A titan’s How-To on breaking the glass ceiling [THE NEW YORK TIMES]

And yet no one knows whether women will show up for Ms. Sandberg’s revolution, a top-down affair propelled by a fortune worth hundreds of millions on paper, or whether the social media executive can form a women’s network of her own. Only a single test “Lean In Circle” exists. With less than three weeks until launch — which will include a spread in Time magazine and splashy events like a book party at Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s home — organizers cannot say how many more groups may sprout up.

HP’s Whitman says ‘no plans to break up the company [COMPUTERWORLD]

“We have no plans to break up the company. I feel quite strongly that we are better and stronger together,” Whitman said on HP’s quarterly earnings call Thursday, responding to a question from an analyst about the company’s plans.

Rumors that HP might break itself up have persisted since former CEO Leo Apotheker said two years ago that HP might sell off its underperforming PC business. HP later replaced Apotheker and said it would keep the division.

Visual effects industry does a disappearing act [THE WALL STREET JOURNAL]

But there may not be much celebrating at the El Segundo, Calif., offices of Rhythm & Hues Studios Inc., the 26-year-old company that served as lead effects producer for the film. On Feb. 13, just eight days after “Pi” won four prizes at the annual Visual Effects Society Awards, Rhythm & Hues filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and earlier that week laid off 254 of its 718 employees in the Los Angeles area, according to court documents.

When to sell your company [MEDIUM]

Every business has natural growth limits. If someone offered you $10 million for your coffee shop that does $250,000 a year in sales, it’s pretty clear you should sell—from a purely financial perspective. Finances are only one perspective, but if you have many shareholders, it’s one you are obligated to take seriously.

In 2002, Google reportedly turned down a $3 billion offer from Yahoo!. That looks like a no-brainer in retrospect, because Google is such a behemoth. And it was probably clear to Larry and Sergey at the time that if they were successful, the company is worth many, many times more than that.

Don’t miss the latest tech news. Sign up now to get Today in Tech emailed every morning.

Summary: Also: HP's Meg Whitman has no plans to break up the company; when to sell your company. I used Google Glass: the future, with monthly updates [THE VERGE] But the feature everyone is going to go crazy with — and the feature you probably most want to use — is Glass’ ability to take photos…


Pedro Barusco, a former executive at Petrobras’ services division, said he had received payments as early as 1997 and in larger amounts starting in 2004. He said Workers’ Party treasurer

João Vaccari and Renato Duque, who previously ran the services unit, also benefited.

Barusco estimated Vaccari, treasurer for President Dilma Rousseff’s political party, had received between $150 million and $200 million between 2003 and 2014, based on the percentages of contracts he himself had received.

“I got a piece; they got a piece,” Barusco said. He has pledged to return $97 million to public coffers as part of a deal he reached with prosecutors. Barusco spoke at a time of escalating fallout from the scandal at Petroleo Brasileiro SA, as Petrobras is formally known, with dozens of lawmakers now implicated. Barusco said he did not know who ultimately ran the scheme and to his knowledge Former Petrobras CEO Maria das Graças Foster, who resigned along with other senior Petrobras management last month, was not involved.

Prosecutors started questioning Vaccari on Feb. 5 but he has not been charged with any crime. His lawyer and Workers’ Party leadership say the party only receives legal donations. Duque was briefly jailed last year and does not face criminal charges.

Forty people, including two other former Petrobras executives, have been charged in the southern city of Curitiba and 14 are currently in jail awaiting sentencing. Many of those charged lead the country’s top engineering firms and are charged with forming a cartel that funneled funds from Petrobras contracts to themselves and politicians. Barusco said he first remembered seeing the cartel active on contracts to build the Abreu e Lima and Comperj refineries. Petrobras shares fell 4 percent on Tuesday.

Defense lawyers told Reuters this week they expect to see the first verdicts on some cases in Curitiba in about a month, possibly before all witnesses are heard, as the focus of the case moves to the politicians being tried by the Supreme Court.

Rousseff, who was chairwoman of the company’s board when much of the graft took place, has denied any knowledge of corruption at Petrobras and urged a thorough investigation.

Summary: The former exec said the ruling political party received up to $200 million from contracts with the state-run oil company.


The classic style of the new uniforms New Balance designed for Liverpool Football Club is meant to be a throwback to the ‘80s.

And while for many Americans, the era’s fashion brings to mind bright colors, parachute pants, oversized shoulder pads, and big hair, New Balance hopes it reminds Reds fans of a dominant period for the UK team.

The designs weren’t simply new uniforms for a soccer team thousands of miles away from New Balance’s headquarters in Brighton. They are part of an expensive sponsorship deal New Balance hopes will help the company break into the $8 billion global market for soccer gear and apparel, a business dominated by two much larger competitors.

New Balance and the Liverpool club unveiled the jerseys at a press event at the team’s Anfield stadium on Friday.

The shirts, which Liverpool will wear during the 2015-2016 season, are classic red with a new checkerboard jacquard print. New Balance said the print was inspired by Liverpool fans who wave red-and-white flags and scarves during games, creating a mosaic effect in the stands. The shirt is tied to a New Balance advertising campaign, #HoldNothingBack, which New Balance said reflects the attitude of Liverpool fans.

“As we enter into a new era between New Balance and Liverpool Football Club, we want to celebrate the sacred bond between the club, the fans and the players,” said Richard Wright, general manager of New Balance football, in a statement. “We have worked closely with LFC throughout the design process and I believe the product team has captured this bond in the shirt textile design.”

The club’s principal owner, John Henry, also owns The Boston Globe.

New Balance Athletic Shoe Inc. launched its push into the worldwide soccer market in February. So far, the company has signed on to sponsor a half-dozen teams worldwide and nine prominent players. The Liverpool deal is said to be the club’s highest paying sponsorship ever, widely reported to be worth more than $450 million.

Still, analysts said New Balance will compete for a distant third position in the soccer apparel and gear market behind Nike Inc. and Adidas AG. The two powerhouses control a combined 65 percent of the soccer market.

The Liverpool jersey will go on sale May 14 and is available for preorder on the team’s site. Adult sizes are priced at about $75 each.

New Balance is expected to release its first soccer shoe over the summer.

Summary: New Balance and Liverpool Football Club on Friday unveiled a new set of jerseys the Brighton athletic company designed for the team under a new sponsorship deal.