Lisa Messenger will always remember the day she decided to change her life.

It was 8 November 2004, when, faced with a future that was "spiralling out of control", she seriously contemplated suicide.

"My life was an absolute train smash," she says. "I drank way too much. I partied hard. I alienated my whole family."

But that rock-bottom moment proved to be the wake-up call she needed. Lisa gave up drinking the next day.

"I made a conscious choice to pick myself up out of the gutter," she says.

Over the next several years, Lisa says she focused on her personal growth and development, using her savings to take self-help classes all over the world and eventually, in 2009, writing a book about what she learned called "Happiness Is".

Armed with renewed ambition, energy and purpose, Lisa began to turn her fledgling marketing agency into an empire.

Lisa is the founder of Sydney-based Messenger Group, with its publishing and marketing divisions. Today, the Messenger brand encompasses 18 different offshoots, and she has set up a multimedia business, Collective Hub.

"I haven't been trained in any of this," Lisa says. "But everything I've done in my whole life has kind of led to this point."

Lisa, who was born in a small town in New South Wales, was never sure of her career path. After school, she worked as a horse-riding instructor in Shropshire, England, where she says she learned to work confidently with other people.

After moving back to Sydney, she worked in event management for various brands, including Cirque Du Soleil and The Wiggles.

In 2001 she founded Messenger Marketing, an ambitious venture she admits to "bumbling" her way through.

"I had no idea what I was doing. I was having a lot of fun," she says.

"I think this is the thing when people start out. You've got this hunger and this passion so you kind of do everything for nothing."

For the first few years, Lisa had a meagre turnover of about 50,000 Australian dollars ($38,600; £29,700) a year. She struggled financially but loved the work, though she was still waiting for her big break.

"I kind of always had this deep knowing that I was destined for something bigger," she says.

The turning point came in 2013, when Lisa says she walked into the office and told her three employees that she wanted to start a magazine.

She wanted to interview the interesting people she had met through the years and compile conversations with them into a lifestyle publication for entrepreneurs.

The result was a monthly magazine, Collective Hub, which currently has a circulation of 50,000 across 37 countries, but is growing, according to the company's sales figures. Sir Richard Branson, Anne Hathaway, Maria Sharapova and Debbie Harry, of rock group Blondie, are just some of the stars who have graced the cover.

Lisa, who is the publication's editor-in-chief, was not put off by the declining market and the thousands of other print magazines already on stands in Australia.

"Naivety can be kind of a good thing," Lisa says. She decided to make what could have been a stoic, masculine business magazine look like the kind of publication that was selling.

"The flip there was, let's make a business magazine look like a fashion and design magazine, so it was kind of messing with people's chi," Lisa says. "What happened was when we went into news agencies we were sitting - and still are - next to Marie Claire and Vogue and Harper's Bazaar and Vanity Fair."

Lisa also says she had to do more than ask for the A$5,000 or A$10,000 that magazines might normally receive from advertisers. She went and asked for A$50,000 or A$100,000 at once, offering speaking engagements and sponsorship opportunities in return.

"I thought much bigger," she says, "which kind of goes against everything."

Lisa's company has now grown to 25 full-time staff and 80 freelancers around the world. She says her "daring" approach to business and entrepreneurship hasn't changed over the last decade.

"I am purposefully counterintuitive," she says. "Every single industry that we go into or idea that we come up with I continuously flip it completely on its head."

It's a message she promotes in the range of books she has published through her company, including Daring and Disruptive: Unleashing the Entrepreneur, and Money and Mindfulness: Living in Abundance.

Megan Dalla-Camina, strategist and author of the book Lead Like a Woman, says Lisa has a reputation in the Australian business community for being fearless.

"She does what she wants," Dalla-Camina says. "She doesn't actually believe, I don't think, that there are any barriers. She's very bold in how she operates.

Lisa's latest venture is a collaboration between Collective Hub and Torrens University, which will offer a graduate certificate in collective entrepreneurship. She says she hopes to immerse students in the world of entrepreneurs.

"Not everyone's cut out for the entrepreneurial path. So I wanted to kind of hold their hand and support them through that," she says.

As for the future, Lisa says she likes to stay in the present and test opportunities as they arise. It's all part of her signature fearlessness.

"Most people will write a 300-page business plan and they'll tick every box and cross everything off," she says. "I'm much more about the 'fail fast' mentality. Go to market, test, iterate, morph, pivot, change. That way we are just continuously testing, testing, testing."

Any other way would be boring.

"Business should be fun," she adds. "It should be heaps and heaps of fun. Off the charts."

Summary: Lisa Messenger explains how she turned her life around to set up the Sydney-based multimedia business, the Messenger Group.


Tasmania Premier Will Hodgman's proposed addition of a "reasonableness test" to freedom of speech provisions under the state's Anti-Discrimination Act has sparked widespread community reaction.

"People, in my view, should be able to freely express their point of view reasonably and in accordance with their views," he told parliament on Wednesday, in a move later commended by the Catholic Archbishop of Hobart.

But there was opposition from the state's Greens and gay and lesbian rights advocate Rodney Croome said such a change would allow hatred to be stirred up ahead of a proposed federal marriage-equality plebiscite.

Summary: Community groups have spoken in favour and against proposed changes to Tasmania's freedom of speech provisions.


A man who set up a tanning bed business out of his Adelaide garage has become the first person in Australia to be convicted of operating an illegal solarium.

Jake Martin-Herde, 28, pleaded guilty to two counts of offering and providing cosmetic tanning for a fee to the public following an investigation by SA's Environmental Protection Authority.

The Adelaide Magistrates Court was told Martin-Herde had set up three tanning beds and a waiting area in his garage and had advertised the "Sharelarium" business extensively on social media.

The commercial use of tanning beds was outlawed in SA in December 2014 and has also been made illegal in other states.

Chief Magistrate Mary-Louise Hribal on Wednesday fined Martin-Herde $2100 and ordered him to pay $900 in court fees.

Martin-Herde had faced a maximum fine of $10,000 for each of his two charges but received a lighter penalty which included a discount for an early guilty plea.

Prosecutor Kathleen Moloney said Martin-Herde had attempted to circumvent the law using a "sham shareholder agreement" where customers purchased a share in one of the beds rather than paying directly for the service.

Ms Moloney said research had shown outlawing solariums could prevent one in six melanoma diagnoses among young people in Australia.

Defence lawyer Gilbert Aitken said Martin-Herde had been "stupidly" misled into believing he was acting within the law by using the shareholder agreement.

He said his client had pleaded guilty once advised he had broken the law and had gone to no efforts to cover up the business.

"The bottom line is this was not secret," Mr Aitken said.

"It was out there. It was advertised."

Ms Hribal accepted that Martin-Herde had been misled, saying he should be given the opportunity to move on with his new career as a joint sealer in Sydney.

EPA chief Tony Circelli said he believed Martin-Herde's conviction would deter other potential tanning bed operators.

"This activity is illegal because of its potential to have serious health problems (for) people who are frequently exposed to the radiation that is emitted from sunbeds," he said in a statement.

Summary: A 28-year-old man who set up an illegal tanning business in Adelaide has been fined more than $2000 in the first prosecution of its kind in Australia.


Sick of sharing Justin Bieber with your sister?

Well, meet Chicago Bulls small forward Doug McDermott.

He's 6'8". He's rich. And he's down to hook up!

Check out this clip of Doug in Bev Hills -- raving about the Kardashian family ... and Kendall in particular.

In fact, the guy hit TMZ Sports with the task of "hooking it up" ... so, here ya go!!!

Ball's in her court now.

Summary: Dear Kendall Jenner ...  Sick of sharing Justin Bieber with your sister? Well, meet Chicago Bulls small forward Doug McDermott.  He's 6'8".…


Somerset county council has given plaques to the villages of Rodney Stoke, near Cheddar, Aisholt, near Taunton, and to Stocklinch, near Ilminster. The plaques read: "Thankful Village, for those who served in WWI and returned home safely."

Fred Faulkner, 77, a Stocklinch resident, said that he could now lay flowers in memory of his uncle, who fought in the First World War.

He said: "We've waited a long time to have a war memorial plaque in the village and I'm sure all the residents will turn out to leave flowers this weekend.

"My uncle returned safely with the rest of the men who left the village to go to war. He should be hailed a hero in the same way as those who died.

"It's an amazing story that in 42 parishes all the men who left for war also returned. We don't want it to become a forgotten tale."

Stocklinch sent 19 young men into combat. All returned home in 1918.

The phrase Thankful Village was coined by the writer Arthur Mee who travelled around the country compiling King's England - a 1930s guide to the counties in England. He noticed 42 villages featured no war memorials.

Alan Gloak, the chairman of Somerset county council, said: "It is essential that we remember the horrors of the First World War, the huge sacrifices that were made and be eternally grateful for those sacrifices."

The war claimed almost a million British lives, with every town and village sending men to fight. Around 20,000 died on the first day of the Somme alone.

Summary: The contribution of soldiers from three of the luckiest villages in England - which saw all their men return safely from the First World War - has finally been recognised.


Australia's peak disability group has slammed the High Court's rejection of an appeal by an Ipswich woman wanting to be the nation's first deaf juror.

Gaye Lyons was told in 2012 she had to be excused from jury duty because there was no provision in Queensland's Jury Act to swear in an Auslan interpreter or for the interpreter to be in the jury room.

Ms Lyons, who is profoundly deaf, took the case to the High Court after the state's Civil and Administrative Tribunal, Supreme Court and Court of Appeal, all upheld the decision.

The High Court also followed suit on Wednesday in a judgment she described as a "smack in the face" for deaf Australians.

Disabled Persons Organisations Australia have also registered their disappointment and said they would continue to fight for people with disabilities to be treated equally in the justice system.

"Australians who are deaf or have disability have the right to participate in civic duties, including serving on juries," said DPO Australia's Ngila Bevan.

She called on Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk and Attorney-General Yvette D'Ath to enact legislation to allow deaf jurors.

The group also said it would support actions to take the High Court's decision to the United Nations committee which governs the rights of people with disabilities.

"Denial of this right ... means juries do not reflect the diversity within our communities,'' said Dwayne Cranfield, CEO of National Ethnic Disability Alliance.

"People who are deaf or who require Auslan interpretation to participate in court proceedings are being denied equal recognition before the law and this must change."

Summary: Disability groups have called on Queensland's government to enact legislation to allow deaf people to serve on juries in trials.


A bailout package for the Latrobe Valley is reportedly being developed by the federal government in preparation for the Hazelwood power station closure.

It is considering bringing forward capital works projects to help Gippsland cope with the coal-fired power station closure, News Corp reports.

French multinational energy company Engie in May told a senate committee in France it was considering closing or selling the power station and mine.

In late September, an Engie spokesman told AAP that "no decision has been made" over an imminent closure.

Up to 1000 jobs could be lost if the Hazelwood plant closes.

Summary: A Commonwealth bailout package for the Latrobe Valley is reportedly in the works amid speculation the Hazelwood coal-fired power station's closure is imminent.


American companies — led by giant biopharma and high-tech businesses — have stashed a staggering amount of money overseas to avoid paying taxes in the United States.

An estimated $2.4 trillion in profits from foreign sales sit in accounts outside of the country. But a big chunk of those riches could be sent home if President-elect Donald Trump makes good on his promise to cut the 35 percent US corporate tax rate, one of the highest in the world.

If that happens, what might US companies do with the windfall?

If you’re thinking more hiring or investment in domestic drug research, you might end up being disappointed.

Get Business Headlines in your inbox:

The Globe's latest business headlines delivered every morning, Monday through Friday.

For instance, Amgen Inc.’s chief financial officer last month told stock analysts that he had a good idea of how the biotech giant might spend some of the $34 billion it has parked abroad: “We’d look at certainly deploying cash . . . toward external opportunities,” said David W. Meline. That’s business-speak for buying other companies.

Drug makers like Amgen would stand to be among the largest beneficiaries of a lower corporate tax rate. Those with ties to the Boston area include Cambridge-based Biogen Inc., which had about $5 billion overseas as of Sept. 30, while Merck & Co. and Pfizer Inc., which run large research labs in the region, had $21 billion and $14 billion overseas, respectively, according to the research firm Evercore ISI.

None of the Boston-area companies would comment on how they plan to use repatriated money.

The new administration hopes to draw the overseas cash as part of a broader effort to reform the tax system and bankroll ambitious government infrastructure programs. Even at a reduced rate — which hasn’t yet been specified — taxes on this new money could raise tens of billions for the federal government.

That would amount to a stimulus plan, which has been embraced in general terms by Trump and some of his allies. The anticipation has helped fuel a stock market run-up since the Nov. 8 election.

The main boost to the economy would come from the inflow of corporate tax revenue that could fund an infrastructure bank to finance the construction of highways, bridges, airports, and other projects that Trump has said are top priorities.

But a secondary benefit is possible if companies use some of the newly repatriated cash to hire workers, build plants, buy equipment, or expand drug-research programs. It sounds great, but companies already are telegraphing that they’re more likely to do what Amgen is planning — acquire competitors — as well as repurchase their own stocks to drive up share prices, or to pay dividends to investors.

“There’ll be a lot of pressure [from Wall Street] to give the money back to shareholders” through dividends or stock buybacks, said Chuck Marr, director of federal tax policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington, D.C., think tank. “It could be embarrassing to the people who are predicting all this business investment in the United States.”

It wouldn’t be the first time. Marr pointed to 2004, when the George W. Bush administration granted a one-time tax “holiday” for companies to repatriate their cash hoards, temporarily lowering the corporate rate to 5.25 percent.

While the express aim was to create jobs and stir economic activity, he said, the estimated $350 billion infusion led to a flurry of stock buybacks and takeovers by companies, including some that eliminated jobs.

“It was a fire sale,” Marr said. “Across the board, it was considered a complete failure.”

Whether that scenario is repeated might hinge on how the new administration structures a repatriation plan. If it’s part of a broader tax reform that lowers the corporate rate permanently and is applied retroactively, companies might not be so inclined to view it as a temporary cash bonanza.

Businesses would also welcome a so-called territorial tax system under which the United States would not levy a tax on foreign profits that were already subject to taxes in the countries where the companies had recorded those sales.

“The international tax system that the US has relied on for the past three or four decades is broken,” giving companies incentives to keep cash offshore, said Mihir A. Desai, a professor of finance at Harvard Business School. “Crazy stuff is going on in the world because of taxes. It’s become so bad that the most important merger-and-acquisition transactions are driven by tax considerations.”

As an example, he cited a wave of tax “inversions” in which US-based corporations have acquired companies based in lower-tax countries, including Ireland and Switzerland, and then shifted their corporate addresses abroad for tax purposes. One prominent example was Minneapolis-based Medtronic Inc’s takeover of Covidien PLC, which had its management in Mansfield but its global headquarters in Ireland, a deal that let Medtronic become an Irish company.

“There’s a big pot of money out there,” said Desai, who predicted a tax overhaul would lead to some US hiring by biopharma companies and other businesses as well as investments that would spur economic activity. “We want a system that rewards companies for investing in the United States.”

One of the unintended consequences of the current system is that it creates incentives for US companies to invest in other countries. Biotech companies like Biogen and Sanofi Genzyme, which is also based in Cambridge, manufacture some drugs in Europe. Analysts say more medicines could be produced here under a reformed corporate tax system.

“All things being equal, companies might want to have manufacturing closer to home,” said Glen Giovannetti, global biotechnology practice leader at the consulting firm Ernst & Young in Boston. “If money comes back into the United States, it’s capital that’s now available to be spent here. They might decide to set up plants here rather than Europe.”

An estimated $2.4 trillion in profits from foreign sales sits in accounts outside the United States. On Sept. 30, biopharma cash overseas included:

■ Eli Lilly: $7 billion

Summary: US companies might bring back billions if Trump cuts corporate taxes, but they probably won’t use the money to create jobs or do more drug research.


ETROIT, April 2 - Kathleen Moltz, a pediatric endocrinologist at Children's Hospital of Michigan, said she and her partner, Dahlia Schwartz, talked it over for quite some time before deciding to sue the governor.

"We're not conflict seekers," Ms. Schwartz said. "We just want to live our lives quietly."

But at stake, they said, are the health benefits that Ms. Schwartz, as Dr. Moltz's domestic partner, receives from Wayne State University, which operates the hospital.

"It is not a small issue to us," said Ms. Schwartz. "I have a thyroid condition. And a main reason we moved to Michigan was so I would be able to stay at home with the children."

In November, Michigan voters, along with those in 12 other states, approved legislation to define marriage as an institution between a man and a woman. On March 16, Michigan's attorney general, Mike Cox, took that one step further, ruling that passage of the constitutional amendment meant that gay and lesbian state workers should be ineligible for health benefits for their partners in future contracts.

Michigan is not the only state in which a battle over the rights of same-sex partners is under way. But it has become the focus of attention with the filing of a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union in which 21 same-sex couples are asking the state courts to clarify whether the amendment's passage means the loss of their benefits.

"A lot hinges on what happens in the case in Michigan," said Jeremy Bishop, program director for National Pride at Work, the A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s constituency group for gay workers. "If the courts rule unfavorably for us, then I can well imagine the right wing taking the same argument to all 13 states that passed these amendments last year."

The argument over the definition of marriage, specifically whether it should apply to same-sex couples, has been simmering for years but heated up last year following the granting of gay marriages in Massachusetts, San Francisco and elsewhere.

Proponents of the amendments contend that they are simply trying to make clear and cement into state constitutions that a majority of Americans are opposed to defining a gay relationship as a marriage.

"Our belief is that it's only appropriate that marriage between one man and one woman be given special recognition, special incentives and special protection under the law," said Gary Glenn, president of the American Family Association of Michigan, a spearhead of the amendment's passage.

The first legal challenge to the amendments began in Michigan solely by chance, Mr. Glenn said, because a Kalamazoo city commissioner asked for an opinion from the attorney general about that city's workers.

"I do not believe that the voters of Michigan would have passed this amendment if they knew that it would mean taking away health benefits from same-sex partners," said Kari Moss, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan, which has filed suit against the governor in an effort to overturn the attorney general's interpretation.

Advocates for gay rights have argued since the amendment's passage in Michigan that proponents operated a kind of bait-and-switch on voters, pretending that they wanted only to strengthen the traditional concept of marriage when they were actually intending to roll back the rights that gay Americans have won over the decades.

"Personally, I think the conservative right wing has overstated their mandate, just like they did in the Terri Schiavo right-to-die case," said Dennis Patrick, a communications professor at Eastern Michigan University. He and his partner of seven years, Tom Patrick, are raising three adopted sons and two foster children. "Once people hear that benefits are being taken away, they don't like it. They say, hey, wait a second, that's not right."

Mr. Glenn disputes the contention that any bait-and-switch was involved. The key issue, before and after the election, was defining marriage, he said. As for benefits, his group believes that it is acceptable for benefits to continue to gay households, if structured in a way that does not define the relationship as a marriage.

"The point is recognition of what constitutes marriage," Mr. Glenn said, "not who gets benefits."

Summary: Advocates for gay rights argue that proponents of the amendment to ban same-sex marriage in Michigan operated a bait-and-switch on voters.


It was not exactly a journey to the center of the earth. But if it succeeded, it would take geologists through the earth's crust for the first time ever.

FROM THE DEPTHS Douglas Wilson examines core samples in the lab aboard the research ship Joides Resolution.

Last November, Douglas Wilson, a geophysicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, led a team of 120 scientists and crew members aboard the research ship Joides Resolution to a spot 500 miles off Costa Rica. Two miles beneath the surface of the Pacific Ocean, the location had the uninviting name Hole 1256D.

The venture was part of the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program, an international effort that is an outgrowth of Project Mohole, the ultimately fruitless effort in the 1950's and 60's to drill some seven miles through the earth's crust and down into its middle layer, the mantle.

The Wilson team's goal was narrower: using a 10-inch-wide drill, they wanted to reach the bottom of the oceanic crust, a granitelike layer known as gabbro, nearly a mile beneath the seafloor.

If they did, it would be a first. While marine geologists had previously pieced together the crust's architecture from rock samples collected around the world, they had never harvested all its layers together from one spot. So they had never been able to confirm their theories of how oceanic crust is formed.

Dr. Wilson, a wiry, bearded 49-year-old scientist, first zeroed in on the area around Hole 1256D while doing some geological detective work in the 1990's.

According to a hypothesis proposed in 1992 by Dr. G. Michael Purdy of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, the upper layers of the ocean's crust are thinner in places where the new crust forms rapidly.

When new crust forms, it locks in the direction of the earth's magnetic North Pole. Several times every million years, the North Pole and the South Pole flip back and forth. The North Pole becomes the South Pole and vice versa.

Using a device called a magnetometer, Dr. Wilson was essentially able to see stripes of north and south magnetization on the seafloor near Hole 1256D. Because scientists have an established record of when the earth's polarity flipped, they can use these magnetic stripes to help figure out the age of the seafloor and how quickly it formed.

Dr. Wilson calculated that the crust around Hole 1256D was formed some 15 million years ago. Lava erupted from the East Pacific Rise, a long narrow volcanic ridge, and spread out onto the seafloor to harden and form new crust at a rate close to 8.5 inches a year, much faster than at any place on earth today.

On that basis, Dr. Wilson figured that Hole 1256D promised the best chance of reaching gabbro.

"This would basically be the only place on the planet that you could do this," said his longtime colleague Jeff Alt, who is a geochemist at the University of Michigan and was co-chief scientist on the expedition.

Geologists use ultrasound waves to map the earth's crust, bouncing them through layers of rock and reading the patterns that emerge from the boundaries between layers. On the basis of previous measurements, Dr. Wilson estimated that his team would have to drill down 1,397 meters, seven-eighths of a mile below the seafloor, to reach gabbro. That is not terribly deep compared with, say, oil drills, but the team would be cutting through solid rock, not sandy soil.

"The conditions were poor and getting worse," Dr. Wilson said in a telephone interview. On a good day, the drill team hauled up 15-foot-long cores filled with charcoal-black rocks about the size of a man's palm. But through much of November, each time they lowered their drill to bite into the bedrock, the cores came up nearly empty.

Then in early December, 1,372 meters down into the hole, the drill bit broke. As the team spent the next week fishing pieces of it from the hole, anxiety on the ship rose. It had taken more than 10 years to plan the trip, they had missed their Thanksgiving dinners and were about to miss all of December's festivities, and each day on the ship cost about $60,000.

"We knew we had a little more than two weeks of drilling left," Dr. Wilson said, "and we were not at all confident that two weeks was enough to sample gabbro."

On the evening of Dec. 12, with only one week of drilling left, a lab partner of Dr. Wilson turned to him, pointed to a little white stripe in a slate-gray rock, and said, "Hey, this is interesting." Dr. Wilson agreed.

The next morning, another core was swung aboard. It was mostly filled with the usual black rock, but again its bottom was white and this time slightly more granular. That afternoon, Core No. 214 was brought up. At a depth of 1,407 meters below the seafloor, just 10 meters deeper than Dr. Wilson had predicted, the Joides Resolution team reached gabbro. Whoops and yee-haws erupted on deck.

Dr. Wilson's team reported its finding on April 20 in the online version of the journal Science, adding that capturing gabbro as part of a continuous sample of oceanic crust would have two distinct benefits: helping to refine the models of how the crust was formed and calibrating the tools used to see inside the earth.

Preliminary studies of the rocks taken from the drill hole also suggest that the transition between each layer of the earth's crust is controlled not only by changes in rock type and the size of crystals inside the rocks, as previously thought, but also by changes in the rock's porosity. Finally, the researchers confirmed for the first time that gabbroic rock was closer to the ocean floor in places where new crust was formed at a rapid rate.

Dr. Purdy, who is now director of Lamont-Doherty, called Dr. Wilson's achievement "extremely important and fundamental" to understanding the earth's structure. But he said it also demonstrated how little scientists knew about the planet.

"Right now if we're getting excited about knowing only what's 1.4 kilometers beneath the surface, then that's telling you that we don't know much about the deep earth structure," Dr. Purdy said in an interview.

Dr. Wilson is the first to point out that 1256D is just one hole and that there are many more details about ocean crust formation to figure out. He plans to return next year.

Summary: Douglas Wilson led a team of scientists hoping to reach the bottom of the oceanic crust, nearly a mile beneath the seafloor.


PAINESVILLE, Ohio -- A family in northeast Ohio says burglars have stolen their Christmas.

Whoever broke into the home of John Velardo and his family in Painesville Friday afternoon took two televisions, an Xbox game system, a laptop - and at least $300 in freshly purchased Christmas gifts.

A neighbor says she saw two men putting a big-screen TV into a blue-green SUV or van on Friday but thought someone from the family was home and allowed the television to be taken.

Summary: Associated Press PAINESVILLE, Ohio -- A family in northeast Ohio says burglars have stolen their Christmas.


On Friday night, short-track speedskater Apolo Anton Ohno ended his

with his third Olympic medal. This time, it was a bronze, in the 5,000-meter relay – his having been disqualified from the 500-meter finals, where he had won gold in Torino.

The American team helped Ohno, 27, make history as he added to his distinction of being the most decorated U.S. Winter Games athlete of all time. "It was really a team effort," a grateful Ohno said after the race. "Without these guys, I wouldn't be able to skate individually."

And individually, Ohno has credited his intense and disciplined training for his successful outcomes, including his come-from-behind bronze in the 1,000-meter on Feb. 20, which earned him his seventh medal, surpassing Bonnie Blair's previous record of six career medals. Smiling broadly, Ohno said, "We've left no stone unturned in my preparation and there really is no better feeling in the world than knowing I came 100 percent all that I can be â¦ I have no regrets."

But how exactly did Ohno prepare for the Games to achieve such amazing results? By getting lean, getting disciplined and getting smart, says Ohno's longtime trainer John Schaeffer, a fitness expert and nutritionist who has worked with professional boxers, mixed martial artists, football players and other athletes.

"Our biggest challenge was to get his weight down," Schaeffer says. "At the beginning of this [training] cycle, he was almost 159 lbs. He's racing right now at about 142 lbs. And we went from about 10 percent body fat to two percent. Obviously we're going to lose a little muscle because he's so small to begin with, but he's stronger and faster than he's ever been in his life at a much lighter weight."

How did that happen? Through strict routine and discipline. Ohno invited the Pennsylvania-based Schaeffer to live with him in Park City, Utah, as they prepared for the Games. "With me being there, I cooked all his meals," Schaeffer says, "and I still do, even here. I kind of took care of everything because all I wanted him to do was train. I said, 'Apolo, when I come out, we're going to set this up just like I do a professional fight camp,' so we set up a structure."

In other words, "at 5 o'clock, phone's off, computer's off," Schaeffer says. "We'd spend an hour studying tapes of competition. We had quiet time, where it was just relaxation. We had bedtime, therapy time, we just structured everything to a tee, and then we had goals we had to reach weight-wise every week."

Ohno would start to lose about a pound a week. "We were doing not only lifting, dry-land training and pliometrics, but we were also doing treadmill intervals," Schaeffer says. "We logged about 800-900 miles on interval training on a treadmill. That built his anaerobic endurance."

For his dietary intake, "I modified that on a day-by-day, workout-to-workout, meal-by-meal basis," Schaeffer says. "As I saw what was going on with him on a three-hour basis, I adjusted his menu and training constantly. Every nutrient he consumed had to have a function and a role. According to his energy expenditures, we modified his diet. According to his recovery needs, we modified his diet."

But you don't have to sacrifice taste. "If you talk to Apolo, he'll tell you the meals I make are actually pleasant!" Schaeffer says. "I use spices, most of our protein sources came predominantly from wild salmon and fishes like that, we'd incorporate organic chicken but not much. We usually stayed with fish because the essential fatty acids are so much better in fish than chicken. When we consumed eggs, we consumed the whole egg rather than just the egg whites. The other things consisted of predominantly vegetables and fruits."

was a huge thing for him," Schaeffer admits of the time Ohno spent to become a mirror ball trophy winner in 2007. "I tried to keep him in shape but to be honest, we train so intense and so structured, when he went on the show, he really got out of shape! People think, well, you've got to get in really good shape to dance,' but they don't realize that the level these guys train, right now, he may be the best-conditioned person on the planet. But he actually developed a little excess body fat from being on

Ohno agrees. With his performances on

, "It's more how you carry yourself and owning a certain routine, whether you feel good or not," Ohno says. "I think that can help translate quite a bit into short track. But the physical aspect, there is not really much that transfers over, unfortunately!"

Summary: The short track speedskater's trainer explains the 27-year-old's diet and workout regime


shares her decision to file for divorce from husband Jesse James and adopt son Louis as a single mom, James tells PEOPLE he has a "huge hole" in his heart, but understands:

"My whole life has been full of hard decisions.

"The decision to let my wife end our marriage, and continue the adoption of Louis on her own, has been the hardest. The love I have for Louis cannot be put to words. Not having him around to love and to hold has left a huge hole in my heart.

"Sandy is the love of my life, but considering the pain and devastation I have caused her, it would be selfish to not let her go. Right now it is time for me to beat this addiction that has taken two of the things I love the most in life.

"I have always taken great pride in proving people wrong. That time has come once again to show that I am not what everyone says I am. I know in my heart that I can be the best father possible to my four children, and the mate Sandy deserves, and realize that this is an incredible mountain to climb. But I believe that the steps I have taken in the last 30 days are the foundation for making this happen. The lifelong commitment I am making is what being a real husband and father is all about.

"I ask that you please do not judge Sandy for the things I have done. She has done no wrong. She played no part in any of this. She has been an amazing wife, mother, and best friend, for the over 6 years we have been together."

Summary: Sandra Bullock's husband talks about ending the marriage, adopting Louis and letting go


, Los Angeles Times' annual celebration of the Southern California culinary scene, today announces more juicy details of its Labor Day weekend extravaganza. Each of THE TASTE's five events reflects The Times' award-winning coverage of the Southland's best chefs, restaurants and food trends. Named BizBash's top food, wine and hospitality event in 2011, THE TASTE is again cooking up a locally-focused, internationally-flavored menu of offerings with Thomas Keller (Bouchon, The French Laundry), Nancy Silverton (Mozza, La Brea Bakery), Ludo Lefebvre (LudoBites), Susan Feniger (STREET), Roxana Jullapat (Cooks County), Nyesha Arrington (Wilshire), Jason Kim (Forage), Bricia Lopez (Guelaguetza), Kris Yenbamroong (Night + Market), Ricardo Zarate (Picca, Mo-Chica), Judy Han (Mendocino Farms, Blue Cow), Alie Ward and Georgia Hardstark (Cooking Channel) and many more.

The weekend kicks off with

on Saturday, hosted by Times Food Editor Russ Parsons and Chef Ray Garcia (FIG). The event will include cooking demos, a conversation with local farmers and a challenge between chefs David LeFevre (Manhattan Beach Post) and Garcia to create a winning dish using a basket full of local produce. At Saturday evening's

, guests will sample drinks by mixologist Alex Day and watch as top bartenders match jiggers and muddlers in a mix-off, which will be judged by Times Food & Nightlife Writer Jessica Gelt, Times Restaurant Critic Jonathan Gold and mixologist Julian Cox (Rivera, Playa).

On Sunday afternoon, Gold and chef, author and host of KCRW's “Good Food” Evan Kleiman will host

, which will focus on authentic dishes from around the world. Chefs Ludo Lefebvre, Susan Feniger, Kris Yenbamroong and Ricardo Zarate will present a variety of cooking demos. Sunday evening's

, hosted by Times Deputy Food Editor Betty Hallock and The Beer Chicks, Hallie Beaune and Christina Perozzi, will feature pairings of chefs' signature dishes with craft beer, custom cocktails and fine wine. The Cooking Channel's Alie & Georgia will also be on hand for a special beer cocktail demo.

Rounding out the holiday weekend will be the

hosted by Times Test Kitchen Director Noelle Carter and Chef Zoe Nathan (Milo & Olive, Huckleberry). The event will bring together world-renowned chefs like Thomas Keller and Nancy Silverton, local firehouse gourmets, and backyard burger champs to share their common love of good food and cooking.

THE TASTE will be held at Paramount Pictures Studios Saturday, September 1 through Monday, September 3. Unlimited food and drink tastings from more than 40 of the area's top restaurants, cooking and mixology demonstrations, wine seminars and panel discussions will be featured at each event. Early-bird ticket pricing, $50 per event, ends August 6. Beginning August 7, tickets will be $65 in advance, $75 at the door. The full program schedule, list of participating restaurants and tickets are available now at

. A portion of ticket sales will benefit

Los Angeles Times' THE TASTE is produced in association with Best Events. Sponsors include Cadillac, Target, The Taste of México Association and Stella Artois. Connect with Los Angeles Times' THE TASTE at

is the largest metropolitan daily newspaper in the country, with a readership of 1.9 million Monday through Saturday and 2.9 million on Sunday, more than 17 million unique latimes.com visitors monthly and a combined print and online local weekly audience of 4.4 million. The Pulitzer Prize-winning Times has been covering Southern California for more than 130 years.

(LATMG) businesses and affiliates include the

Los Angeles and reach approximately 5.1 million or 38% of all adults in the Southern California marketplace. LATMG also owns and operates

's west coast division and is part of

, one of the country's leading media companies with businesses in publishing, the Internet and broadcasting. Additional information is available at

Best Events is a full-service event production company created by Jeffrey Best to design, produce and create unique event environments that are at the intersection of commerce and art. For over 20 years, Best Events has been known to produce some of the most high-profile events in the entertainment, corporate and fashion arenas.

Hillary Manning | Los Angeles Times | 213.237.2664 |

Anna Wilhelmsen | Bullfrog & Baum | 323-651-1380 |

Summary: Los Angeles Times celebrates Southern California's best with a mix of tastings, cooking demos, competitions and panels at #tastela


Did you see the Patriots play Monday night?

The question inspired telling responses from the 49ers on Tuesday.

Before defensive tackle Ray McDonald said a word in response, he offered a wide smile.

"Yeah," McDonald said. "Uh-huh. They looked good. They looked real good, man. We've got to come out here really prepared for that up-tempo offense. He's slinging it."

He, of course, is New England quarterback Tom Brady, who headlined a 42-14 beat-down of previously 11-1 Houston on Monday night with 296 passing yards and four touchdowns. The Patriots led 21-0 with 11:04 left in the second quarter against a defense that arrived allowing an average of 18.4 points a game.

Running back Frank Gore expressed his admiration for the 49ers' next opponent.

Indeed, New England (10-3), which is averaging 40.6 points in its seven-game winning streak, is doing some serious balling.

And the 49ers clearly did some studying Monday night.

Cornerback Tarell Brown noted that New England has won 20 straight December home games. And McDonald said they average 25 seconds between plays, the quickest in the NFL, thanks to their no-huddle attack.

The Patriots, who lead the NFL in yards (425.7) and points per game (36.3), are playing so impressively that San Francisco (9-3-1) will arrive in Foxborough, Mass., on Sunday night in the unfamiliar role of underdog. The Patriots are six-point favorites.

Brown said he was fine without a bull's-eye on his uniform.

"Yeah, we enjoy being the underdog," he said. "Anytime you play football, you always have a chip on your shoulder. You always have something to prove every week."

Jacobs was 'distraction': In a brief statement Monday, the 49ers did not provide a reason for suspending running back Brandon Jacobs for the final three regular-season games. But some players did receive an explanation. Defensive tackle Ray McDonald said Jacobs had become a "distraction."

"From the coaching standpoint, they don't want any distractions on the team," McDonald said. "So, he was being a distraction. They felt he was being a distraction, so they felt they needed to do something about it."

Jacobs first expressed frustration over his lack of playing time in October in an interview with USA Today. He later took to Twitter (in November) and Instagram (last week) to express his displeasure.

There is no requirement for an NFL team to publicly provide a reason for suspending a player.

Dobbs on IR: Demarcus Dobbs, a reserve defensive tackle and special-teams standout, was placed on injured reserve with a knee injury he sustained in Sunday's win against the Dolphins. Dobbs, who had played 44 defensive snaps, led the team with 567 special-teams points entering last week's game, according to a grading system used by the coaching staff.

The 49ers' have two open spots on their 53-man roster because of Dobbs' injury and Jacobs' suspension. The team is expected to re-sign linebacker Eric Bakhtiari to fill Dobbs' spot, according to CBS Sports.

Briefly: Wide receiver Randy Moss, who played for the Patriots from 2007-10, said he wouldn't speak with the media this week. ... Reserve defensive tackle/fullback Will Tukuafu had a bag of ice around his left forearm.

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

Summary: Before defensive tackle Ray McDonald said a word in response, he offered a wide smile.  The Patriots, who lead the NFL in yards (425.7) and points per game (36.3), are playing so impressively that San Francisco (9-3-1) will arrive in Foxborough, Mass., on Sunday night in the unfamiliar role of underdog.  Jacobs was 'distraction': In a brief statement Monday, the 49ers did not provide a reason for suspending running back Brandon Jacobs for the final three regular-season games.  There is no requirement for an NFL team to publicly provide a reason for suspending a player.  Demarcus Dobbs, a reserve defensive tackle and special-teams standout, was placed on injured reserve with a knee injury he sustained in Sunday's win against the Dolphins.  Dobbs, who had played 44 defensive snaps, led the team with 567 special-teams points entering last week's game, according to a grading system used by the coaching staff.  Wide receiver Randy Moss, who played for the Patriots from 2007-10, said he wouldn't speak with the media this week. ...


“Ladies... ladies...” intoned the voice over the TD Garden sound system immediately after the lights went out. The following “... and gentlemen” arrived almost begrudgingly, as if acknowledging the latter group as a mere formality. New Kids on the Block know their audience. They would have to, a quarter-century after storming the hearts and cassette players of a generation of teenage girls. Sunday night’s sold-out show (they perform again Monday night) proved them reasonably good stewards of that adolescent affection.

The show was structured like a boy-band concert for grownups, divided into five “acts,” including an acoustic set and one presenting the singers as a 1970s-style vocal group, complete with matching suits, Motown-style choreography, and passable Delfonics cover. Most of the action took place on a hydraulics-equipped satellite in the center of the floor, and the sound seemed designed to overwhelm, especially on the clangorous “Block Party” and the cascade of loudness that became “Cover Girl.”

But grateful affability and a rapport with their audience were their strongest suits, and it carried them far. The strut of “Games” may have been silly, but it was a strut nonetheless, and they came together with some solid harmonies on the nearly apocalyptic ballad “Survive You.” Better yet was “Remix (I Like The),” its flirtatious danceability helped by a Donnie Wahlberg vocal that sounded like he was on the verge of hoarseness. And Joey McIntyre’s commitment on “Please Don’t Go Girl” was hard to doubt as he dropped to his knees, begging his fans not to leave after 25 years. They didn’t seem likely to.

Boyz II Men spent the bulk of their opening set with that bended-knee attitude, though their harmonies were largely swallowed by the venue, possibly as a result of being augmented by additional vocals on songs like “End Of The Road.” Although the vocals of followup group 98 Degrees were more balanced, their act hadn’t matured as well. Any chance of “Invisible Man” gaining any genuine pathos was undermined by the glad-handing choreography, which was totally at odds with the lyrics, a problem also present in the happy little fingersnaps of “The Hardest Thing.”

Summary: “Ladies... ladies...,” intoned the voice over the TD Garden soundsystem immediately after the lights went out. The following “... and gentlemen” arrived almost begrudgingly, as if acknowledging the latter group as a mere formality. The New Kids On The Block know their audience. They would have to, a quarter-century after storming the hearts and cassette players of a generation of teenage girls. Sunday night’s sold-out show (they perform again Monday night) proved them reasonably good stewards of that ad12126olescent affection. The show was structured like a boy-band concert for grownups, divided into five “acts,” including an acoustic set and one presenting the singers as a 1970s-style vocal group, complete with matching suits, Motown-style choreography and passable Delfonics cover.


Thoroughbred horse racing as we know it is facing a legal challenge in Australia that has rocked the multibillion dollar sport around the world.

Sydney Federal Court is deciding weather to lift a ban on artificial insemination. The Sydney Turf Club has a rule that calls for racehorses to be the offspring of two horses that have physically mated.

Bruce McHugh, the former Sydney Turf Club Chairman, is challenging the ban, claiming it's an illegal trade restraint. He argues the rule makes breeding costly and dangerous for the horses, thus keeping him from getting into the industry.

McHugh's lawyer claims international rules banning horses by artificial insemination are "outdated and designed to protect large-scale commercial stud farms who now have a license to print money."

Most minor breeders don't have big money at their disposal and can't afford the risk associated with transporting horses to stud for several months, however shipping semen is much more affordable.

So-called shuttle stallions are sent around the world to breed with mares, earning over $330,000 per mating session.

A lawyer from the Sydney Turf Club claims artificial insemination would lead to semen being stored for use long after the stud's death. So in a way, a great stallion would never die.

He also says keeping the rules the way they are would maintain the tradition that has made the sport so popular. He claims European soccer could make nets bigger to increase scoring, but tampering with tradition could destroy the sport.

Justice Alan Robertson will decide a verdict in the case.

ThePostGame brings you the most interesting sports stories on the web.

Follow us on Facebook and Twitter to read them first!

This text will be replaced

Summary:
Thoroughbred horse racing as we know it is facing a legal challenge in Australia that has rocked the multibillion dollar sport around the world.
Sydne...


THE campaign to decide who will square off against Hugo Chávez in Venezuela's October presidential election has, for the most part, been as dull as ditchwater. With all six contenders vowing to support the opposition Democratic Unity (MUD) alliance and unite behind the victor of the primaries scheduled for February 12th, mutual politeness has left many voters struggling to distinguish between one contender and another.

Only this week has the contest come into clearer focus. On January 24th Leopoldo López (pictured), the leader of the People's Will (VP) party and a former mayor in Caracas, announced he was ending his candidacy and would become the campaign manager for Henrique Capriles, the governor of the state of Miranda. Mr López had been running a distant third in the polls behind Mr Capriles and Pablo Pérez, the governor of Zulia state. He had not performed well in televised debates, and his advertisements were seen as quirky and self-obsessed. He also faced a daunting obstacle: Mr Chávez's government had banned him from holding public office because of dubious allegations of corruption. Even though the Inter-American Court of Human Rights had ordered the prohibition overturned, voters were put off by the risk that he might not become president if elected.

Once Mr López decided to throw in the towel, there was little doubt about who he would support. He and Mr Capriles were two of the founders of the centre-right Justice First (PJ) party in 2000, and were allies until Mr López left in 2007 after a split in the party. Both sides insist that Mr Capriles has not promised Mr López any job in a future government. They have stressed that they want to distance themselves from Venezuela's traditional machine politics, which helped generate the anti-party revolt that brought Mr Chávez, a former soldier, to power in 1999.

That has put Mr Pérez, of the social-democratic New Era (UNT) party, on the defensive. His supporters have tried to cast him as the left-wing opposition candidate, in contrast with the more centrist Mr Capriles—an argument that makes Mr Pérez look like a stronger rival to Mr Chávez, since he might be able to peel off disgruntled left-leaning supporters. But Mr Capriles has been careful to recruit smaller leftist parties, including Podemos, which until 2007 backed Mr Chávez.

Moreover, Mr Capriles and Mr López have implicitly countered that the distinction between them and Mr Pérez is not one of ideology but rather of their approach to politics. Because the two parties that dominated Venezuela before Mr Chávez's ascent, the centre-left Democratic Action AD and the Christian-democratic Copei, are both backing Mr Pérez, he is vulnerable to charges of representing the “old”, unwanted model of Venezuelan politics.

Mr Capriles was the clear front-runner even before Mr López dropped out. He now looks almost unstoppable. Mr Pérez's campaign manager sneered that his candidate's “steamroller advance” had forced Mr López and Mr Capriles into each other's arms. But he may be hard-pressed, in the remaining fortnight of campaigning, to turn such rhetoric into reality.

Summary: THE campaign to decide who will square off against Hugo Chávez in Venezuela's October presidential election has, for the most part, been as dull as ditchwater....


In the United States, we say the San Francisco 49ers will probably annihilate the Jacksonville Jaguars on Sunday at Wembley Stadium.

In Great Britain, however, where such matters are put in far more genteel terms, the Daily Mail explained to its readers Tuesday that the 49ers "are much fancied to beat the Jaguars this weekend."

The 49ers are favored by 16 1/2 points over the hapless Jaguars (0-7), which could explain why the British press gave scant coverage to the 49ers' arrival in London on Monday. A quick scan through the newspapers at Heathrow Airport revealed only a few paragraphs about the upcoming annihilation, um, game.

Another plausible explanation for the collective media yawn, of course, is that nobody gives a flip about an NFL game five days away when Arsenal and Chelsea both played real football Tuesday night.

By the way, Arsenal lost 2-1 to Dortmund (Germany) on a goal by Robert Lewandowski in the 82nd minute.

I don't know much about Champions League soccer, but I do know this about the passionate crowd at the Portman pub and restaurant in the Marble Arch area of London on Tuesday: They sure didn't fancy that bloody loss.

Summary: The 49ers are favored by 16 1/2 points over the hapless Jaguars (0-7), which could explain why the British press gave scant coverage to the 49ers' arrival in London on Monday.  Another plausible explanation for the collective media yawn, of course, is that nobody gives a flip about an NFL game five days away when Arsenal and Chelsea both played real football Tuesday night.


Whether you’re an over-qualified graduate or an older person job-hunting after redundancy it’s a battle to stay motivated and sell yourself as a great hire.

We went to Quora’s online forum for some advice where users had answered a question many of us have: What can I do to stop myself from going crazy while I look for employment? Here’s what some of them had to say.

After relocating to Hong Kong with his wife, Dave Cheng wrote about his experience of daily job-hunting while being a house-husband in a new city. He suggested developing a routine and sticking to it. After a couple of weeks of feeling “rudderless”

Cheng realized he needed to come up with a schedule and a few goals for each day. He wrote: “This helped tremendously. It also helped me land interviews.”

“By allocating specific chunks of time towards LinkedIn searches, emailing acquaintances, networking, spending time on job search sites, and other related activities, I was able to plan and execute better,” he wrote. “Most importantly, I felt like I was accomplishing something each day and not just waiting for headhunters and recruiters to call me back.”

Makiko Itoh however, warned it can be easy to become completely overwhelmed by the search. He wrote: “Some of these may sound insulting to even suggest, but I've been unemployed in the past and know how depressing it can be, and how low your spirits can sink sometimes. I've had to make myself do a lot of the things… to keep my sanity.”

“Try not to mindlessly hang around in front of a screen too much, whether it's a computer screen a TV, or a phone,” Itoh wrote. “Just use your computer as little as you need to do for your job search, or for acquiring skills, etc. Don't sit around surfing, or checking Facebook.”

Get social — and mind your health

Charles Johnson, an aerospace engineer had a practical suggestion many people might not think of straight away.

“If you live in a major metro area… join a few productivity/professional type meetup groups via meetup.com,” he wrote. “In Denver there was actually a meetup group of unemployed people who pooled their resources to help each other find a job.”

Johnson wrote: “You could also join groups where they host seminars or information sessions on particular subjects pertaining to your field. It is a very good way to network with people who are in the field as well. A vast majority of the time, the events are free to attend.”

Craig Inskip agreed and wrote: “In particular you must keep your mind and body healthy. Meditate and exercise would be an essential for me. Also maintain a healthy diet. With lots of thinking time, the mind can be the devils playground so be sure to keep it in check.”

Barbara Carleton added: “Spend some time keeping 'on top of things' in your chosen field. When you land that dream job you don't want to find that it has left you in the dust. Read, research, network with others in the field, etc.”

Ellen Vrana was more upbeat and took a different tack. She suggested job hunters use the opportunity of ‘no-ties’ to really broaden their horizons.

She wrote: “Unemployed, eh? So in other words, you are free! Go do something you would never do, get outside your comfort zone. Do it now.”

Don’t limit yourself. “Think of something crazy, outrageous, that you've always wanted to do in the back of your mind. And then go for it,” Vrana wrote. “Volunteer at a charity in Africa, go on a bus trip around South America — very cheap.”

Several Quora readers suggested using your extra time to get involved in volunteering.

Laura Parker wrote: “Volunteer: It made me feel a lot better about my situation to put things into perspective when I was unemployed. I remember crying to my mom about how bad I felt and how awful things were and how I faced rejection multiple times a week, but I went and helped some people with their resumes that were really in dire straits — had lost homes, had families to support, were in homeless shelters, talked about times when they lived out of their cars or ate out of garbage cans.”

While Martijn Sjoorda, a therapist, wrote: “Consider doing volunteer work for one or two days a week. It's fullfilling and keeps you connected to the real world. You never know who you might bump in to [who] can help you on your path.”

Quora respondents are required to use their true names under the site’s Real Names policy. To help ensure legitimacy and quality, Quora asks some individuals, such as doctors and lawyers, to confirm their expertise.

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: Staying focused during a prolonged job search can be challenging. What to do to keep yourself from going crazy while you hunt.


If Earth does find itself in the line of fire of any large event, we are reasonably well protected from solar flares. The Earth’s magnetic field and atmosphere shield us from much of the high-energy particles and radiation they produce. But X-rays blasted out in solar flares can penetrate deep into a part of the upper atmosphere called the ionosphere, which can disrupt radio waves, causing radio blackouts.

Coronal mass ejections pose a much greater problem. These charged plasma clouds move through space at speeds approaching 75,000 miles per minute (120,000km per min), continuously producing energetic particles as they go. The Sun emits one coronal mass ejection per week during a solar minimum, but as many as three per day during a solar maximum. They can damage or destroy satellites outside the protection of Earth’s magnetic field and force commercial airlines to re-route flights away from the polar regions. And it can happen very quickly, says Daniel Baker, “just a few hours after the disturbance on the Sun, or sometimes even less.”

When a coronal mass ejection collides with the Earth, it rattles the Earth’s magnetic field and can cause a geomagnetic storm. As the storm moves over long electrical transmission lines it produces current down the line, generating heat that can overload and blowout high-voltage transformers, and bring cities – or entire regions – to a standstill. Just like what happened in Quebec in 1989.

Today’s space-weather forecasters know whether a solar storm will hit the Earth about one or two days in advance. “That’s state of the art,” says Yihua Zheng, a chief forecaster at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Space Weather Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Zheng and other forecasters use data gathered by a trio of orbiting spacecraft to identify the presence, direction and speed of coronal mass ejections. “Slower [coronal mass ejections] can take between three and five days to reach the Earth, but we care more about the faster ones,” she says, because they tend to be more dangerous.

Zheng is part of a group developing a computer technique, known as ensemble forecasting, to improve NASA’s ability to predict the path and impact of severe solar storms. Ensemble forecasting is already used by meteorologists to track severe weather, like hurricanes, on Earth, but this is the first time is will be used to make sense of space weather.

The technique will allow Zheng and her colleagues to produce as many as 100 computerized forecasts by varying the speed, direction and other parameters of coronal mass ejections in their models, instead of being restricted to one set of solar-storm conditions, as they are now. It would decrease the margin of error, which currently stands at seven or eight hours, and lead to more reliable forecasts. Zheng expects the ensemble forecasting method will be up and running no later than the end of this year – just in time to catch the next solar maximum.

Still, forecasters would be at a major advantage if they could predict a coronal mass ejection in advance, rather than chasing it down after it had erupted. Stathis Ilonidis, a graduate student in physics at Stanford University in California, is tracking the sound waves that travel through the Sun’s interior to predict where a sunspot will appear one or two days in advance. And as coronal mass ejections often come from sunspots, this information could be of enormous help to space weather forecasters.

By some quirk that physicists do not yet entirely understand, sound waves travel faster through sunspots than through the rest of the sun’s interior. Ilonidis measures how long it takes a sound wave to travel from one point on the Sun’s surface to a depth of 37,000 miles and back up to another point. On average, it takes a sound wave an hour to bounce from one point to another 93,000 miles away, but a sound wave passing through a sunspot may shave 12 to 16 seconds off its time. By repeating the process with millions of pairs of points, Ilonidis can chart out a map that identifies regions where travel time is significantly shorter than expected – locations where sunspots are likely to appear. "This is the first time that we can actually detect sunspots inside the sun," says Ilonidis.

Summary: Space weather scientists are creating new tools to predict solar storms that can cripple electricity grids. Good thing, too: the next surge is expected in 2013.


It will have taken five years, instead of the planned two, and cost €52m but there will be celebrations in Paris this summer when the celebrated Picasso Museum reopens after a massive renovation.

The transformation of the magnificent 17th-century Hôtel Salé, a baroque mansion in the Marais district, one of the oldest areas of the French capital, has been controversial because of the time it has taken and the considerable budget overspend.

However, the museum's president, Anne Baldassari, said during a tour of the site on Tuesday that the result would be worth the wait and "do justice to the extraordinary collection" of Picasso masterpieces.

As workers rushed to complete the new galleries and lay out the new garden, complete with massive pergola, everyone insisted the building would be ready for the Picasso collection to be installed at the end of May, ready for opening in June.

The modernisation of the Hôtel Salé was expected to cost around €30m (£25m) when the museum closed in 2009. Part of the overspend is due to the purchase of two neighbouring buildings to house offices, freeing up more space for exhibits.

The transformation will more than double the space for one of the world's most extensive collections of the Spanish artist's work, and allow more of the 5,000 paintings, drawings, sculptures, photographs, ceramics and archive documents in the museum's collection to be shown to the public. Until now, only a fraction could be shown at any one time.

The space open to the public has increased from 1,600 sq metres to 3,800, creating 37 permanent galleries, a 95-seat auditorium, a workshop for school groups, a terrace and a cafe. The garden is being redesigned and a roof garden, which will not be open to the public, is to be built.

Masterpieces on display will include not only Picasso's works, but paintings in his collection including ones by Matisse, Renoir and Cézanne. All the Picasso works have been cleaned, restored and reframed.

Museum officials hope the number of visitors each year will jump from 450,000 to 850,000.

The Picasso Museum first opened in Paris in 1985. Most of the exhibits were bequeathed to France by Picasso's heirs, according to his wishes, on his death in 1973. His widow, Jacqueline, donated a substantial number of works, and friends gave other legacies and donations. More than 1,000 exhibits have been bought by the museum since 1985.

The renovation work was constrained by the listing of the Hôtel Salé as a historic building, and by strict health and safety rules, including an overlooked notice of non-conformation to fire regulations dating back decades. "Everyone seems to have forgotten it, except the fire brigade," Baldassari said.

Architect Jean-François Bodin said the museum would be a synthesis of the traditional and modern. "The challenge of such a project was to develop the space while at the same time respecting a building that is listed," Bodin said.

During the renovations, the exhibits have been touring the world helping to raise €31m to partly finance the work. The French government has paid €19m.

French president François Hollande will inaugurate the new museum a few days before its official reopening on 21 June. As Picasso is reported to have said: "Give me a museum and I'll fill it."

Summary: The €52m transformation of the 17th-century Hôtel Salé has been undermined by delays and controversy over the cost


MARSHFIELD — The moment he dove through the waves off the coast of Nantucket on that August morning 16 years ago, Neil McGrath’s life changed forever.

The spot, where he had swum in deep water just a few hours earlier, had become deceptively shallow, and he hit his head on the packed sand, breaking his neck. McGrath, then a 22-year-old spending the summer surfing, soul-searching, and stocking shelves at Stop & Shop, was paralyzed from the chest down.

In a wheelchair ever since, with limited use of his arms, McGrath had a hard time finding permanent work. But recently, with the help of a program for disabled workers at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, McGrath, now 38, landed his first full-time job — answering phone calls about insurance claims and benefits for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts.

He no longer receives Social Security disability insurance, and, for the first time, can support his wife and two daughters, the youngest born just a few weeks ago. “Having this feeling of purpose and ability to provide, it’s just so uplifting,” he said.

Nationwide, less than 20 percent of disabled adults have jobs, compared with nearly 70 percent of people without disabilities, according to the US Department of Labor. But as workplaces allow more employees to work from home and technology gives people with limited mobility, vision impairment, and other disabilities an increasing ability to work, people like McGrath are finding opportunities to earn a steady paycheck.

Companies also are expanding diversity initiatives to include disabled workers, tapping programs that seek to connect employers and such workers.

Work Without Limits, the UMass Medical School initiative that helped McGrath find a job, was formed in 2009 in partnership with the state. Along with holding job training and career fairs, the program forms a network of employers that want to hire people with disabilities and educates them about what that entails.

Disabled people face many obstacles when it comes to finding work, said Kathy Petkauskos, senior program director at Work Without Limits. Transportation is one challenge. Navigating changes to benefits such as Social Security, food stamps, and public housing as they earn money is another. Perhaps the greatest is finding employers open to hiring the disabled.

Employers often balk because of concerns about the expense of accommodating workers with special needs, Petkauskos said, but the average cost is usually less than $500. Telecommuting and other flexible work arrangements are ways that employers can bring disabled workers onto their payrolls.

“The time is right to really turn up the dial in these flexible work environments,” she said. “It’s really kind of the next wave of diversity for these companies.”

In Massachusetts, 9 percent of people from age 18 to 64 have a disability, according to the US Census’s 2012 American Community Survey. The median income for disabled workers 16 and older in the state is $21,000, compared with $37,000 for people without disabilities; nearly a quarter of disabled workers live below the poverty line.

When McGrath returned to his parents’ home in Marshfield after 80 days in the hospital, he had no college degree and little work experience. He spent several years recovering — gaining some movement in his arms and legs, playing wheelchair rugby, and learning how to operate a handcycle. He got to the point where he could drive.

“It was a lot of dark, lonely times,” said McGrath, who had been studying jazz guitar before the accident. “It was very difficult coping with being on the cusp of adulthood and then suddenly being as dependent as a newborn baby.”

He went back to school part time, earning a degree in philosophy at Bridgewater State University, and found a few part-time administrative and tutoring jobs. One employer wouldn’t allow McGrath to adjust his schedule to deal with health issues related to sitting in his wheelchair for long stretches, so he left.

Then the recession took hold, and more than 200 job applications netted only a handful of interviews, including one call center manager who McGrath sensed was reluctant to hire him because of his disability.

McGrath earned a certificate in medical billing and applied for a job at Blue Cross but didn’t hear anything for months. Then he connected with Work Without Limits, which includes Blue Cross Blue Shield as one of its corporate sponsors. Soon he had an interview.

McGrath started work at Blue Cross in the fall and his experience has been markedly different than with earlier employers. An ergonomics specialist measured his wheelchair, and after that, every desk he sat at while training at the Quincy office fit him perfectly. All the doors, even on the bathrooms, can be opened with the push of a button.

“In order to effectively serve our 2.8 million members, we need to have a workforce that is representative of the 2.8 million members,” said Jason Robart, chief human resources officer, noting that Blue Cross has had an increased focus on diversity in the past few years. “It’s good business sense to ensure that we have as diverse a population as possible.”

Since April, McGrath has worked from home in Marshfield. His desk is set up in the bedroom of his parents’ basement apartment, where he lives with his family — a “corner office” that looks out onto the yard. He types with his right thumb and left index finger, the keyboard resting on his lap, and answers calls wearing a headset.

It’s a small apartment, and his wife, Regina, who is home with the baby, sometimes dashes through the bedroom when he’s on break to reach the bathroom.

The new job can be overwhelming and exhausting, McGrath said, but he’s thrilled that he has finally started a career that can support his family.

“It’s a tremendous blessing,” he said. “No matter how much it changes our financial situation, it just really gives me the opportunity to fulfill my vocation. My vocation isn’t working at Blue Cross. My vocation is to be a husband and father.”

Summary: With the help of a program for disabled workers at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, Neil McGrath, in a wheelchair for 16 years, landed his first full-time job.


With her revealing second solo record, former Floetry vocalist Marsha Ambrosius creates a deeply personal paean to love in its many guises without succumbing to kitschy cliche. She explores the euphoria, carnality, and yearning of relationships with rare honesty. The disc, featuring some of Ambrosius’s most vivid vocal performances, is dominated by imaginatively produced reflections on the emotional highs that devotion and passion provide (“You & I,” “So Good,” “Spend All My Time”). Refreshingly, she unapologetically revels in the renewing pleasure of physical love. “Shoes” gleefully recounts (post-booty call) how good it feels to be very bad, while “69” samples 2 Live Crew, proving the singer can get as raw as she wants to be. While most of the album speaks with a fiercely individual voice, it stumbles when relying on curious appropriations: “Stronger” unwisely deconstructs Sade’s “Love Is Stronger Than Pride,” while “La La La La” echoes (steals from?) Minnie Ripperton’s “Lovin’ You.” This kind of shorthand is unnecessary amid songs of such detail and variety. (Out Tuesday)

Summary: Marsha Ambrosius conjures love in all its shades and hues on ‘Friends & Lovers,’ a deeply personal second solo album.


Investigators have had to abandon the MH17 crash site due to shelling. (AAP)

Shelling has forced international experts to abandon part of the crash scene of the downed Malaysia Airlines jet in east Ukraine as sniffer dogs working elsewhere on the vast site helped uncover the remains of more victims.

Seventy Dutch and Australian police investigators were back for a second day to scour the wreckage strewn over some 20 square kilometres but members from the probe team hurriedly left a village where some debris was lying after mortar fire nearby.

"We heard at a distance of approximately two kilometres incoming artillery from where we were and that was too close to continue," said Alexander Hug, deputy chief monitor with the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) mission in Ukraine.

"It was close enough to decide to leave. The artillery impact was very loud and the ground was shaking."

Government troops and rebels battling across the war-torn region had pledged to halt fighting around the rebel-held site of the MH17 site and Hug said the visit to the village of Petropavlivka had been agreed with both sides.

Closer to the main impact site, Dutch police experts said they managed to recover an unspecified number of remains after deploying two sniffer dogs to help comb through the fields of debris, over two weeks after the plane was shot down killing all 298 people on board.

The perilous security situation highlights the difficulties facing investigators as they try to recover remains and then puzzle together what happened, a grim task that those in charge say could take some three weeks.

The US accuses insurgents of blowing the airliner out of the sky with a surface-to-air missile likely supplied by Russia, while Moscow and the rebels have pointed the finger at the Ukrainian military.

More than 220 coffins have already been sent back to the Netherlands, but more body fragments remain lying out in the cornfields where the plane came down.

Prime Minister Tony Abbott has welcomed the experts gaining access after they were blocked by days of fighting but warned that the search operation would be "a long and slow process".

Across the rest of the region the violence that's claimed some 1150 lives since mid-April raged on.

Ukraine's military said its positions continued to come under heavy fire and that separatists had hit an army drone with a missile similar to the one they say downed MH17.

No new casualties were reported though since an ambush overnight on Thursday in a town 25km from the crash site left 14 people dead, including at least 10 soldiers.

The shooting down of the Malaysia Airlines plane refocused world attention on the conflict and pushed the US and European Union into imposing the toughest sanctions against Moscow since the Cold War.

In a telephone call with Russian leader Vladimir Putin on Friday, US President Barack Obama expressed his "deep concerns" about Moscow's increased support for the separatist fighters.

Some EU diplomats have warned that the sanctions could actually embolden Putin by convincing him he has nothing to lose by going all-in over the Ukraine crisis.

Stoking those fears, the Pentagon and NATO say Russia is continuing to reinforce its military presence along the border with Ukraine.

Do you have any news photos or videos?

Summary: Shelling about 2km from a village where international experts had been examining MH17 plane fragments has forced them to pull back to a safer distance.


With a string of domestic abuse cases bombarding the NFL recently, it’s no surprise that confidence in the pro sports league is flagging.

But despite NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell’s press conference on Friday, the league is performing at its worst in over two years in the eyes of the public, according to YouGov BrandIndex, a company that tracks brand awareness.

On a scale from 100 to -100, the NFL’s “Buzz Score” currently measures at -42, according to a report released Wednesday. That’s as of Sept. 22 when 10,000 responses were tabulated.

The company asked the following question: “If you’ve heard anything about the brand in the last two weeks, through advertising, news or word of mouth, was it positive or negative?”

On Sept. 8, the NFL “was at its highest consumer perception point of the year” with a score of 36. On that day, however, TMZ released the video of Ray Rice assaulting his then-fiancée in an elevator.

YouGov BrandIndex has been tracking perception of the NFL for the last two-and-a-half years.

Summary: Poor reading despite NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell's press conference.


FORTUNE — The International Monetary Fund isn’t known for its candor.

As a political institution with a multitude of sponsors with differing — or even competing — interests, it often puts forth policy recommendations in a swirl of circumlocution, or as Paul Krugman recently asserted, euphemism.

Krugman was referring to a recent IMF report in which the bank, using very imprecise language, seemed to support the idea that central banks should raise their target interest rates from the 1% to 2% norm of today closer to 4%, as many economists have argued. Those supporting higher target levels of inflation argue that:

MORE: Tech stocks may have more room to fall

But the IMF report doesn’t explicitly argue these points. Instead, it makes vague reference to the first idea and then moves on. Why is the IMF so reticent when other economists have been much more forceful arguing for higher inflation? Krugman believes it’s because the IMF serves the interest of the richest people on earth:

How did the 70s get framed as the ultimate bad time? For sure they weren’t good — but the really bad times for ordinary working families were the big recessions, which took place under Reagan, to some extent under Bush I, and above all after the financial crisis.

Krugman shows that even though real economic growth was somewhat slow in the 1970s, average families saw their real wages rise. On the other hand, financial assets like stocks and bonds didn’t perform so well during that period of high inflation. And who owns most financial assets?

“The 0.1 percent, who according to the Piketty-Saez database ‘only’ get about 4 percent of total wages but have more than 20 percent of the wealth and surely a larger share of financial assets,” Krugman writes.

Therefore, he argues, economists in institutions like the IMF can’t come out in favor of more inflation, because it would harm the wealthy masters of the universe who are the real forces behind institutions like the IMF.

But blaming class warfare for anti-inflation sentiment stems from the same lazy thinking that anti-inflation zealots partake in. After all, if it is in fact just as easy to anchor inflation at 4% as it is at 2% — as pro-inflation economists argue — then is there any logical reason why financial assets should perform worse in such an environment than real estate or other hard assets? Stock values are based on the discounted flows of future nominal earnings, and those values shouldn’t be depressed in an environment of higher but stable inflation.

Bond values will suffer during periods when inflation spikes, but if a central bank were able to maintain yearly 4% price increases in a stable and predictable way, interest rates (and coupon payments) could simply rise to reflect this new reality.

MORE: Income taxes: One thing to not get outraged over

There doesn’t seem to be any logical reason why the wealthiest 0.1% would be worse off in an environment of higher — yet stable — inflation than they would in the current world of persistently low inflation. Just because financial assets performed poorly in the 1970s doesn’t mean that that was due to higher inflation. In fact, aiming for higher inflation would enable central banks to combat recessions more effectively, and the 0.1% would benefit on the wings of higher overall growth.

That said, there sure are a lot of those in the 0.1% who are suspicious of governments targeting higher inflation. High inflation tends to occur in economies that are mismanaged. And a 4% target implicitly puts faith in the government’s ability to manage the economy, and the very wealthy, on average, are less trustful of government activism than other segments of the population.

But the cohort with the most to lose from higher inflation isn’t the wealthy, but the retired. In the U.S. alone, there are more than 45 million retired people living at least partially off social security. Those payments are indexed to inflation, but many retired Americans supplement that income with money they have saved throughout their working lives, and the purchasing power of retirement savings would be eroded substantially by higher inflation.

The 0.1% are a powerful political constituency, but they have the wherewithal to thrive in inflationary or deflationary environments, and they are likely more concerned about tax policies than whatever central banks are up to. But older people of lesser means do, in fact, have a lot to lose from inflation, and politicians the world over know very well that these people vote.

Summary: Economists have been arguing for higher inflation targets. But richest 0.1% are likely not to blame for the failure to implement such policies.


In 1818, the Handel and Haydn Society presented America’s first complete “Messiah.” In all, the society has now given Handel’s masterpiece 400 performances, the 400th coming this past Sunday. Some 19th-century editions were massive in scale; in 1857 the chorus numbered 600. From 1875 until the 1930s, the society offered a version based on Mozart’s arrangement of the work. More recently, the vocal and instrumental forces have been pared down; the performance artistic director Harry Christophers led Saturday afternoon at Symphony Hall had just 30 singers and a period-instrument orchestra of 29. This is not the only way to do “Messiah,” but in Christophers’s hands, it’s a very special one.

What distinguishes the current Handel and Haydn “Messiah,” even from other intimate, period-instrument versions, is its organic unity and quiet devotion. On Saturday, drama was created without excess decibels. Enunciation was excellent; you hardly needed to look at your program to follow the text. Choruses were light and tripping: “For unto us a child is born” sparkled with sunlight; “All we like sheep” skipped and played; “And he shall purify” positively hopscotched; “His yoke is easy” begged the audience to get up and dance. The “Hallelujah” Chorus, for which most of the audience stood, was rich with timpani and trumpets. For “Glory to God in the highest,” trumpeters Jesse Levine and Paul Perfetti were dispatched to the second balcony, one on each side, to antiphonal effect.

The soloists excelled in conveying the message of Charles Jennens’s libretto; no one seemed interested in showing off. Bass Brindley Sherratt held his score by his side and glared at the audience like an Old Testament prophet. He sang with that kind of authority too, cutting through Levine and Perfetti with no difficulty in “And the trumpet shall sound.” Soprano Joélle Harvey, countertenor Tim Mead, and tenor Allan Clayton barely glanced at their scores, instead making lots of eye contact with the audience. Clayton caressed his opening “Comfort ye” recitative and the “Ev’ry valley shall be exalted” air that followed. Mead was gratifyingly full-voiced, and the lullaby he and Harvey shared, “He shall feed his flock,” was taken at a sensible tempo and didn’t put everyone to sleep, as it so often does. Harvey was nimble in her racing “Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion” and gleaming in “I know that my redeemer liveth.” Both this quartet and the chorus were direct and expressive in the way that period instruments are direct and expressive. Perhaps that’s the secret of Handel and Haydn’s current “Messiah.”

Summary: The performance of Handel’s “Messiah” that Handel and Haydn Society artistic director Harry Christophers led Saturday afternoon at Symphony Hall had just 30 singers and a period-instrument orchestra of 29. This is not the only way to do “Messiah,” but in Christophers’s hands, it’s a very special one.


One activist investor believes the uncertainty that’s paralyzing corporate leaders will lift after the election.

Hedge fund manager Bill Ackman gave a sunny prognosis on corporations and consumers Wednesday at the 6th Annual Value Investing Congress, a two-day confab for devotees of Warren Buffett, David Dodd, and Benjamin Graham.

“We are more bullish than most,” Ackman said, referring to his hedge fund Pershing Square Capital Management. On the corporate side, he said that American businesses used the credit crisis as an opportunity to improve supply chains and reduce bloated payrolls, allowing to them to enter 2010 “lean and efficient.”

Companies have seen record cash flow and profitability, and at the same time have been reluctant to raise dividends, he said, adding that this is the best capitalized corporate America he has seen since he has been an investor.

The lack of confidence that has seemingly paralyzed US businesses should lift once the elections are over in a few weeks, Ackman told the audience. As companies inevitably expand, they’ll hire again and help boost consumer confidence.

Ackman’s comments stood in stark contrast to other speakers with darker views on the economy, most notably Michael Lewitt, the author of The Death of Capital and the president of Harch Capital Management. Rather than focus on current bright spots, Lewitt argued that global markets are stuck in a boom and bust cycle due to pro-cyclical regulatory and monetary policies. Not only are current policies fueling speculative bubbles, they are destined to create another crash, he said.

But Ackman, who is best known for shorting the mortgage insurer MBIA MBI and trying to goose Target’s TGT stock price, was clearly the main event on the first day of the conference. The ballroom at the Marriott Marquis hotel in New York City filled to capacity just before the well-known hedge fund manager took the stage.

Instead of his usual fast-paced, chart-filled 100-slide power point presentation, Ackman’s talk was an extended question and answer session with the audience, moderated by Whitney Tilson, a longtime friend and conference organizer.

Ackman said his bullish view has manifested itself in his recent investment in JC Penney JCP , one of the most economically sensitive stocks that he’s invested in for some time.

Summary: One activist investor believes the uncertainty that's paralyzing corporate leaders will lift after the election. Hedge fund manager Bill Ackman gave a sunny prognosis on corporations and consumers Wednesday at the 6th Annual Value Investing Congress, a two-day confab for devotees of Warren Buffett, David Dodd, and Benjamin Graham. "We are more bullish than most," Ackman…


WASHINGTON, March 30— Following is a transcript of a White House statement by a Presidential aide, David R. Gergen, on the attack on President Reagan today.

The President was shot once in the left side this afternoon as he left the hotel.

The dicision is now being made whether or not to operate to remove the bullet.

The White House and the Vice President are in communication and the Vice President is now en route to Washington. He is expected to arrive in the city this afternoon.

Mrs. Reagan is currently with the President at the hospital.

For your background, we anticipate that additional press statements will be forthcoming from the hospital site.

I would like to add two notes. We have been informed by Jim Baker that the President walked into the hospital.

I would also like to inform you that in the building as of the moment are the Secretary of State, the Secretary of the Treasury, Secretary of Defense and the Attorney General as well as other assistants to the President. Mr. Gergen was then asked whether the Vice President would be acting as the President under any conditions. Mr. Gergen replied, "No."

Because of the delicacy of the situation, we wanted to inform you that the Vice President is on his way back to Washington. 'Condition Is Stable'

I would emphasize once again that the President's condition is stable and that we were informed by Jim Baker that he did walk into the hospital. He was then asked why further statements would come from the hospital.

Let me just emphasize this. The people at the hospital are obviously closer to this situation on a moment-to-moment basis than we are here.

We are obviously in very close communication with them and we will try to keep you informed here.

But the primary statements we expect will be coming from the hospital, because we feel that they are closer to the facts. He was then asked who was at the hospital with President Reagan.

Well, as of the moment, in addition to Mrs. Reagan, as I have informed you, Mike Deaver, as you know, and Dave Fisher were with the President at the time. Four people went up togehter.

Ed Meese, Jim Baker, Larry Speakes and Lyn Nofziger went together to the hospital - oh, I'm not sure of the time. Frankly, the time on these events has run together somewhat.

But we will try to keep you posted here as well as we can.

I think you all understand the delicacy of the situation.

I simply don't want to report facts that we're uncertain of, as of the moment.

This is really to confirm what has been said from the hospital already.

As soon as we get additional information we will obviously try to help you. I think if you will be patient, as the situation demands, we will try to get as much information for you as possible.

Basically, we wanted to let you know where we were as of the moment. We will try to let you have further information as we can. Thank you very much.

Summary: Following is a transcript of a White House statement by a Presidential aide, David R. Gergen, on the attack on President Reagan today.   The President was shot once in the left side this afternoon as he left the hotel.   His condition is stable.


Remember Benedict Evans? He’s the Andreessen Horowitz partner whose 13-minute slideshow “Mobile is eating the world” was featured here a few months ago.

No matter. Evans isn’t hard to find. He writes a weekly e-mail newsletter, co-hosts an influential podcast and tweets. A lot. 62,500 tweets since 2007. To 56,700 followers.

His connection with one of Silicon Valley’s premier venture capital firms (Facebook, Skype, Twitter, etc.) gives him access to data that’s not always publicly available. Like iOS and OS X device share data as seen by Baidu, China’s leading search engine.

Happily for the rest of us, he shares it.

Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter at @philiped. Read his Apple AAPL -0.95% coverage at fortune.com/ped or subscribe via his RSS feed.

Summary: Two tweets from Benedict Evans are worth a thousand words.


Activist investor and major Apple AAPL shareholder Carl Icahn said the iPhone maker’s stock should be trading at $216, far above its record high of $124.92 hit on Wednesday.

At $216 per share, Apple – already the world’s most valuable company – would be worth about $1.3 trillion, or about the size of South Korea’s gross domestic product.

The company is valued at just over $700 billion currently.

Icahn said Apple should be trading at 20 times earnings per share, which taken together with net cash of $22 per share works out to $216 per share.

“This is why we continue to own approximately 53 million shares worth $6.5 billion, and why we have not sold a single share,” Icahn said in a letter to his Twitter followers.

“Also, to the extent Apple introduces a TV in FY 2016 or FY 2017, we believe this 20X multiple is conservative,” he wrote.

Icahn, one of Apple’s top 10 investors, has long urged the company to buy back more shares and raise its dividend.

He said in October that Apple shares could double in value and urged the board to buy back more shares using its cash pile. At the time, the shares were trading at $100.

“…We look forward to the capital return program update in April, anticipating it will include a large increase to share repurchases,” Icahn wrote.

Apple had cash reserves of about $178 billion as of Dec. 27, enough to buy IBM IBM or the equivalent of $556 for every American.

Apple said last April it would return more than $130 billion to shareholders by the end of 2015.

According to StarMine’s intrinsic valuation model, Apple should be trading at $140.90. That implies a compounded annual earnings growth rate of 9.9 percent over the next 10 years.

Apple shares closed 2.3 percent higher at $124.88 on the Nasdaq on Wednesday. Up to Tuesday’s close, the stock had gained more than 22 percent since Oct. 9.

Summary: It's already the world's most valuable company.


A collection of delusional quotations, courtesy of Business Insider’s Jay Yarow

Touchscreen smartphones have finally taken their toll on the venerable BlackBerry. As the Asmyco chart at right shows, BlackBerry shipments (green line) hit a wall in early 2011 and have been headed south ever since.

Did Mike Lazaridis and Jim Basille, Research in Motion’s RIMM co-founders, underestimate the threat posed by Apple AAPL ?

You bet they did — loudly, repeatedly and at times incomprehensibly. A few sample quotes, take from Jay Yarow’s amusing collection at Business Insider:

You can flip through Yarow’s full list of RIM quotations here, or read them all in one page here.

Summary: A collection of delusional quotations, courtesy of Business Insider's Jay Yarow Touchscreen smartphones have finally taken their toll on the venerable BlackBerry. As the Asmyco chart at right shows, BlackBerry shipments (green line) hit a wall in early 2011 and have been headed south ever since. Did Mike Lazaridis and Jim Basille, Research in Motion's co-founders,…