BRAINTREE — Arline and Ashley Urquhart are barely scraping by. Arline, 42, makes a little more than $10 an hour managing the liquor department at the Walgreens in Downtown Crossing. Ashley, 19, makes $8 an hour, plus a few dollars a day in tips, at Dunkin’ Donuts in Dorchester.

The mother and daughter, who share a two-bedroom, rent-subsidized apartment and get free health insurance from the state, sometimes subsist on ramen noodles and protein shakes when the grocery money runs out.

The new minimum wage law enacted Thursday — pushing the hourly rate in Massachusetts from $8 to $11 dollars over the next few years — gives the state the highest base pay in the nation. But while it will help workers such as the Urquharts, it is still not considered enough for an individual to live on.

In Massachusetts, the hourly rate a full-time worker needs to pay for food, housing, transportation, and other regular expenses is at least $11.31 an hour, according to the Living Wage Calculator developed by an MIT professor. In Boston and Braintree, where the Urquharts live, it’s $12.65 an hour.

The pay raise Arline and Ashley Urquhart will get from the new law means they’ll be able to afford fresh fruit and lower-fat hamburger meat. They might be able to buy a real couch to replace the blanket-covered bench in the living room that serves as a sofa now. They won’t worry as much about the 10-cent increase in bus fare. Ashley could buy a decent pair of shoes; Arline would have the $30 she needs to apply to Quincy College.

In other words, a higher minimum wage will make their lives a little more stable, a little less stressful. But not necessarily comfortable.

“It’s still not enough to survive,” said Arline, who pops ibuprofen to relieve the back pain she said is caused by lifting heavy liquor boxes at Walgreens, where she recently had to decrease her hours. “A couple of dollars wouldn’t really make the biggest difference. It really wouldn’t.” (Walgreen and Dunkin’ Donuts declined to comment.)

Arline pays 30 percent of her income to live in a subsidized apartment at a Braintree housing complex, about $430 a month when she was working full time; her daughter has to contribute 30 percent of half of her income. Through MassHealth, the state’s Medicaid program, they get free health coverage, an average value of $550 a month per person.

More than 600,000 Massachusetts workers, 1 in 5 in the state, stand to get a bump in pay from the minimum wage increase, according to the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center — 85 percent of them above the age of 20. The new law requires employers to pay workers no less than $11 an hour by 2017.

Still, the minimum wage increase won’t do much to address ever-widening income inequality. Boston has the fourth-largest gap between rich and poor among the country’s 50 largest cities, according to the Brookings Institution. In Boston, the top 5 percent of households earned more than $222,000 a year, 15 times more than the lowest 20 percent, which had incomes of less than $14,600 a year.

In addition, Massachusetts’ minimum wage is not tied to inflation, which means as the prices of groceries, rent, and electricity rise, workers will fall further behind, advocates said. The Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center estimates that by 2017, $11 will be worth $10.32 in today’s dollars.

As the plight of low-wage workers gets more attention, the push to raise the minimum wage has gained momentum. The Senate recently voted down a bill that would have raised the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10 an hour. But a handful of states, including California, have moved to lift their minimum wages above $10 an hour, and $15 an hour was just passed in Seattle.

The next step, workers’ advocates say, is shifting the conversation from a minimum wage to a living one. Across the country, fast food and other low-paid workers have demonstrated for $15 an hour, an amount that organizers in Massachusetts say is needed to meet the basic needs of working families.

“The economic glass of a low-wage earner earning $8 to $9 an hour is pretty empty, so to move up to $11 an hour is like getting the glass around 40 percent filled toward a living wage,” said Lew Finfer, co-chair of Raise Up Massachusetts, which had been pushing for a minimum wage increase indexed to inflation. “We know we’re not finished creating the opportunity and dignity that people need.”

The bump to $11 would give full-time workers making between $8 and $10 an hour an extra $6,000 and $2,000 a year, respectively, before taxes, said MIT professor Amy Glasmeier, who developed the Living Wage Calculator. That’s not trivial.

“To somebody who’s making $22,000 a year, if you added $2,000 a year to their lives,” she said, “it could keep them from potentially losing their job because they can’t get there because they can’t fix their car.”

But those who oppose the higher minimum wage say it will hurt opportunity by forcing employers to reduce hours, hire fewer people — especially teens and college students — and possibly even move out of state. That, they say, will hurt the economy overall.

Erin Calvo-Bacci, owner of a chocolate manufacturing business in Swampscott and the Chocolate Truffle shop in Reading, said she already is dealing with higher chocolate prices and smaller profit margins, so increased labor costs will be a serious blow.

Passing along higher costs by raising prices for distributors such as Whole Foods Market and TJX Cos. isn’t really an option, she said. That could lead them to replace her products with cheaper ones, said Calvo-Bacci, who had to sell her home in Wakefield in 2010 to keep the business running.

“There’s this big push to raise up the American families, but they’re doing it on the backs of American family businesses in Massachusetts,” she said. “Now we have to look long and hard at: Can we afford to stay in Massachusetts?”

Meanwhile, Arline and Ashley Urquhart, the mother and daughter roommates in Braintree, bring home less than $1,500 a month between them — plus a little extra when Arline sings in a cover band.

They are trying to get more hours and are eager for the minimum wage increases to kick in, which they say could allow them to put some money in their empty savings account. But they don’t expect it to lift them out of a world where every penny counts.

“I’m already making $10,” Arline said, “and it’s just nothing to live on.”

Summary: The state’s new $11 minimum wage –the highest in the nation -- will make low-wage workers’ lives a little more stable, and less stressful. But not necessarily comfortable.


When the American architect Louis Kahn collapsed from a heart attack in the toilets of New York's Penn Station in 1974, he left behind a lot of loose ends. There were three children, by three different women, who lived within a few miles of each other but would only meet after his death. There was his dwindling practice, which he left $500,000 in debt. And, tucked away in his sketchbooks, was a complete set of drawings for an unrealised project – one that would lie dormant in his archive for almost 40 years.

Some of these drawings will be on display in Britain for the first time next week, in a captivating retrospective of the architect's work at the Design Museum in London. The show unpicks the career of this late-flowering master, who only completed his first building in his 50s, but whose projects have proved to be some of the most influential of the 20th century. From the sun-baked Salk Institute for Biological Studies in California, where a plaza open to the Pacific is framed by rows of study rooms, to the cosmic courtyards of the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad, his buildings have the power of ancient ruins, their massive, monolithic forms possessing a timeless, otherworldly air.

Some of these sketches, scribbled in pencil and charcoal with a scruffy energy, depict a box, from which extends a long, tapering, indistinct landscape. Others feature a strangely geometric comet leaving a misty trail of trees in its wake. Others still show a truncated triangle capped with what could be an all-seeing eye, much like the sinister Great Seal on the back of one-dollar bills.

It was US president (and freemason) Franklin Delano Roosevelt who introduced this masonic symbol – which was on the reverse of the official eagle seal of the United States – to the banknote in 1935. Although we don't know for certain if this was in Kahn's mind, it provides an appropriate connection, since these drawings are Kahn's designs for a Roosevelt memorial park. Four decades after it was first commissioned, the triangular park, one of Kahn's last works, has been made a reality.

Unlike the axial avenues, the classical tempiettos and the manicured lawns favoured in Washington DC, New York's presidential memorials have tended to take the form of vast pieces of transport infrastructure. John F Kennedy got an airport, George Washington a bridge, Abraham Lincoln a tunnel. But the FDR Four Freedoms Park bucks the trend. The four-acre site extends like a stony arrowhead from the southern tip of Roosevelt Island, parting the fast-moving currents of the East river. Standing on its tip feels like being at the prow of a ship: seals bask on the rocks in front, while the waters to the west are framed by the cliff face of Manhattan, and to the east by the jumble of Queens.

Tall granite blocks line the edge of this open-topped deck, which is reached via a narrowing lawn that slopes gently downwards , bordered by lime trees. It is a composition of elemental simplicity but with immense spatial power: it's a bit like being all alone in a room at the very end of the earth, with the entire world focused behind you to a single point. "I had this thought that a memorial should be a room and a garden, that's all I had," said Kahn in 1973. "The garden is somehow a personal kind of control of nature. And the room was the beginning of architecture."

From this basic pairing, Kahn developed a finely nuanced landscape that draws its impact from strong shifts in perspective and an almost stage-set theatricality. You enter from the north, past the crumbling gothic ruins of an old smallpox hospital, to be greeted by an imposing set of steps. Nothing of the park is revealed until you walk up them. Then the lawn and trees appear to shoot off into the distance, squeezed towards a bronze head of FDR at the end of the island, contained within a spacious granite box. Inscribed on the back of this is Roosevelt's famous speech, in which he set out the four freedoms everyone in the world should enjoy: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear. Delivered in 1941, its purpose was to persuade Americans to enter the second world war.

The park has the feel of an ancient temple precinct, but with the unusual sensation that the land is falling away from you as you head towards the sacred shrine, rather than rising towards a hallowed mount. Look back – across an oasis of sunbathing bodies and dreaming couples on a hot summer's day – and the perspective has the opposite effect. The view is dramatically compressed: the triangular lawn now seems square, while the hospital ruins provide an eerie backdrop, poking up behind a line of copper beech trees.

As the climax of this composition, the granite room is intended to be a place of contemplation, reminiscent of the Pacific-facing plaza of the Salk Institute. Furnished with two simple benches and open to the waters at the southern tip, it is what Kahn called "a space of inspired use", represented in his sketches by a man playing the violin. The 12ft-high pillars that line each side, weighing 36 tonnes apiece, sit an inch apart, their polished sides amplifying the views they thinly frame. Put your ear to the gap and, seashell like, you can hear the roar of the river.

"Consider the momentous event in architecture when the wall parted and the column became," Kahn would say mystically to his students, when he wasn't telling them to talk to bricks. Half wall, half colonnade, this monolithic enclosure can be seen, in Kahn's eyes anyway, as the beginnings of architecture itself. Surprisingly, though, this most monumental of architects never managed to realise a monument in his own lifetime. Although he penned memorials for such diverse subjects as Lenin, the Louisiana Purchase and the Six Million Jewish Martyrs, none came to fruition. Abandoned in the 1970s, when city funds were not forthcoming, the Four Freedoms Park plan was revived during a wave of Kahn appreciation, spurred on by My Architect, the biopic made by his son Nathaniel in 2003.

Much of the credit for its creation should go to Gina Pollara, the architect who co-curated an exhibition of Kahn's drawings in 2005 and became the project director, and to William vanden Heuvel, a former US diplomat who helped raise the required $53m. "There's sometimes a discrepancy over posthumous projects," says Pollara, standing at the edge of the granite deck where, sadly, a clumsy guard rail has had to be installed. "But this is completely Kahn's project – he had worked out every detail, down to 1/32 of an inch."

While the park project only occupies a small part of the Design Museum's show, it is a work of enormous personal significance for Kahn. Before he landed his first commission, for the Yale University Art Gallery at the age of 50, he had spent the early part of his career working on social housing, designing more than 2,500 apartments and houses as part of Roosevelt's New Deal. As the son of Estonian immigrants who had escaped profound poverty, Kahn was hugely impressed by Roosevelt and the New Deal, seeing himself as one of its beneficiaries.

As the waters of the East river swirl past, Pollara turns and walks back through the granite room to the garden. "This place stands as a memorial not only to FDR and the New Deal," she says, "but to Kahn himself."

• Louis Kahn: The Power of Architecture is at the Design Museum, London SE1, 9 July to 12 October.

Summary: Four decades after his death, New Yorkers are flocking to Louis Kahn's Four Freedoms Park. Was it all inspired by a masonic symbol on the back of a dollar bill, asks Olly Wainwright


07/20/2014 at 12:00 PM EDT

seemed to tease involvement with the hotly anticipated

adaptation on Saturday, posting a short video to

promoting the trailerâs Thursday release.

The atmospheric clip flashes a few subtly sexy images across the screen – a dark silhouette against a window, a finger tapping, hands pushing up a dress – as a slowed-down, husky version of "Crazy in Love" seems to play in the background.

So is Queen Bey on the soundtrack? (

, who plays Mia Grey,

s Roc Nation label.) Does she make a cameo? Time will tell.

as the mysterious Christian Grey and

as his lover Anastasia Steele, hits theaters on Valentineâs Day.

Watch Beyoncéâs Instagram video below.

Summary: The superstar posted an Instagram video promoting the film's upcoming trailer


We’ve heard of Google’s self-driving cars; now here come talking cars.

The U.S. Department of Transportation has moved forward with plans to potentially mandate talking-car technology. That may save over a thousand lives per year, according to a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration rule-making notice released Monday.

The vehicle-to-vehicle technology, which has cars automatically exchanging data with one another to warn drivers of a potential crash, could also prevent 592,000 crashes, according to a NHTSA report that includes “preliminary estimates of safety benefits.”

“By warning drivers of imminent danger, V2V technology has the potential to dramatically improve highway safety,” said David Friedman, the NHTSA’s administrator, in a statement. “V2V technology is ready to move toward implementation.”

The report specifically examined two talking-car technologies: one called Left Turn Assistant that “warns drivers not to turn left in front of another vehicle traveling in the opposite direction” and the second called Intersection Movement Assist, which lets drivers know if it’s not safe to enter an intersection due to a “high probability of a collision.”

Summary: Transportation Department moving ahead with plans to potentially mandate talking-car technology.


FORTUNE — Goodness knows, plenty workers have reason to complain these days. And yet, most every office has a couple people who take that right a little too liberally — they are, as a rule obtrusively upset.

They are what management expert Rob Cross calls “de-energizers:” “The people who just suck the life out of the room with the way they interact or tones they take.”

Life-sucking is, without doubt, counter-productive to a healthy workplace, and many a worker would probably prefer to avoid the negative effects of de-energizers. To do so, they might first have to buy into a system that leadership experts call the “informal network.” This network exists outside of the official corporate food chain. Instead, it is built on connections between people who, regardless of rank, are either key motivators, energy drainers, or somewhere in between. Cross claims it’s possible to actually map the energy flow through the informal network at an organization.

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If all this seems a little floofy to you, you’re not alone. Both Cross and Booz & Company senior partner Jon Katzenbach have worked with high-level managers who resist the concept that there is a workplace structure outside of the one they know and control. “If you ask people in the upper levels of an organization to identify the best motivators, they won’t pick them right,” Katzenbach says.

And yet, with a little digging, you can unearth these networks. “We can create diagrams and other visuals that show the connections amongst the people,” says Cross, who is a professor at University of Virginia’s McIntire School of Commerce. Those diagrams map who interacts with whom and how often. “Then we overlay the engagement scores and career satisfaction scores,” Cross continues, and you can pinpoint your motivating and de-energizing employees.

Why do this? There’s evidence that de-energizers truly hurt a company. In a 1994 paper published in The Journal of Vocational Behavior, researchers Lawrence Necowitz and Mary Roznowski found that people who have a baseline negative outlook about work tend to withdraw more from productive work behavior than their colleagues, regardless of how satisfied they feel about their jobs. “It may be that these individuals focus on the negative aspects of their jobs even under otherwise pleasant conditions,” the paper suggests.

They also tend to drag their colleagues down with them. In unpublished research that’s currently under peer review, Cross has found that “negative interactions that create stress have a significant effect on a range of measures of physical health in the workplace.” In other words, dealing with too much negativity can make people sick.

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Those negative interactions are also significantly more potent than positive ones. While there are far more energizers than de-energizers in organizations, “the de-energizers have more than twice the negative impact on measures of performance and employee well-being as the energizers have positively,” Cross says. Indeed, roughly 5% of employees account for 90% of people’s work-related misery, Cross argues.

So how do you stay out of their circle of negative energy? You shouldn’t try to fix their attitude, both Katzenbach and Cross agree. People who fundamentally resent their jobs will resist any effort to pull them up — their end goal isn’t necessarily to feel better.

But the opposite is also true. There are people at companies, Katzenbach says, who gain satisfaction from making others feel good about their work, even though management may never recognize their role.

Managers can make a difference by guiding the workplace environment. Most employees are neither top motivators nor powerful downers; they are somewhere between the two extremes yet highly influenced by both. The best way to get everyone’s spirits up is to position them closer to your active energizers — create opportunities for employees to learn from your best people. Positivity, Katzenbach says, “is a catching disease.”

These positive players behave in certain ways, according to Cross: “They tend to see possibilities in situations rather than constraints. They find ways to make sure that others feel part of a solution.” They can also teach these traits to people who would be willing to embrace them and generally tend to know the people they could most easily influence, Katzenbach says.

MORE: Can envy at work be good for you?

Of course, it takes a pretty in-tune manager to hire experts to pick through the informal network at a big company and then feed the best parts of it. Usually, Cross says, he works with the top layers of management at big companies. For those of us at the bottom of the corporate chain, we may be left to fend for ourselves.

But the lessons still apply. Simply put, offices everywhere might become much happier places if workers try to surround themselves with those who make them feel good about their jobs and themselves.

Summary: Research suggests that negative attitudes at work stand to contaminate a company's culture. But there are a few antidotes to this problem.


A detail from the Dawn Chorus birdsong films by Marcus Coates.

'This is Yellowhammer," says Marcus Coates excitedly, pointing at a video of a man with a paunch reading a newspaper over breakfast. Suddenly, the man's eyes dash from side to side. His chest twitches up and down, and he bursts into an orgy of twittering and tweeting. "He sat there singing for an hour and 10 minutes," says Coates. "Watch: his mannerisms are so bird-like."

Yellowhammer is one of a cast of characters Coates has created for an extremely odd video installation, to be shown at Baltic in Gateshead next month. Dawn Chorus, which recreates the sound of birdsong using human voices, is an ambitious project, with scientific as well as artistic goals - medical research charity the Wellcome Trust sponsored him, and the birdsong has been archived for researchers.

Coates will go to extreme lengths to get what he wants. For Dawn Chorus, he spent a week camping with a wildlife sound recordist, Geoff Sample. The pair lived in a motorhome in Northumberland, getting up at 3am to activate a 24-track digital recorder. They collected 576 hours of birdsong in all - robins, whitethroats, wrens, blackbirds, songthrushes, yellowhammers, greenfinches. Coates says he became obsessed with Sample's ability to tell birds apart - not just by species, but individually. "He'll say, 'Oh, that's that robin doing a bit of blackcap.' He knows birds by the way they start or finish a phrase. We had two robins - I can't tell them apart, but Geoff can."

On their final morning, they placed microphones around a patch of woodland, hoping to capture the song of 14 individual birds at dawn. Then, back in his Bristol studio, Coates slowed the recordings down by up to 16 times, making the birdsong sound like a conversation between the Clangers. He recruited a choir to sing, whine and groan along to these strange sounds while being filmed at dawn in their own "natural habitat" - in the bath, in a taxi, in the kitchen. When the film is speeded up, the "birdsong" comes to life, the subjects twittering away like real birds. Blue Tit is a woman lying in bed, fluttering her eyes and whistling through a puckered mouth. Linnet is an osteopath, nodding and blinking furiously and puffing up his chest in his consulting room.

Most of the subjects are amateur singers from Bristol, hand-picked at choir rehearsals. Chaffinch is Pearl Conway, 62, a nurse at the burns unit in Bristol's Frenchay Hospital and a member of a ladies' barbershop choir, the Avon Belles; she is pictured cheeping away in a hospital waiting room. "Some of the notes were tricky," she says, "but I gave it my best shot. It did go on: it lasted about an hour."

"It was quite meditative," says Blackbird, aka Piers Partridge (yes, that's his real name), a musician from Bristol who was filmed in his garden shed. "I found myself going deeper and deeper into the quality of the sound." Partridge found that he could predict where the "Clanger" sounds were going. "The blackbird had one or two favourite riffs, so I'd think, 'OK, here he goes.' I imagined myself as a blackbird on a spring morning, very early in a high place, having that freedom not to think but just to let the sound come out. With that came some interesting movements - I was cocking my head to look around. I felt really spaced out. When it finished I was miles away."

Coates, 38, is getting something of a reputation as a one-off. His work has been described as quintessentially British, focused on the boundary between the human and the animal. For his best-known piece, Journey to the Lower World (2005), he dressed as a stag and performed a shamanic ritual for the residents of a condemned tower block in Liverpool. Next month he will dress as a badger for a similar ritual at the Hayward Gallery in London. His 40-minute film A Guide to the British Non-Passerines (2001) has him mimicking 97 bird species, and for a photographic project, Goshawk, he strapped himself 20ft up a tree in an attempt to become a rare bird of prey.

Coates' projects seem half-jokey, half-serious; he talks with intense passion about each of them, but is quick to point out their ridiculous elements. This seems to be part of the experiment: it's as much about discomfort and the surreal as about animal metamorphosis. His ideas evoke a child-like desire to "become" an animal or a bird and, strange as they are, they are oddly moving.

He trained as a painter at the Royal Academy of Art, and says he has been fascinated by British birds and wildlife since childhood. "I grew up in Harpenden, in suburbia, so wildlife was always this exotic thing because it was so limited. There was a tiny wood next to our house and my brother and I would see these birds and go home and draw them. We'd always think we'd seen a honey buzzard and it would turn out to be a crow. I thought for a long time being an artist was about making art, but in fact it's about representing what you are passionate about."

Coates' installation should sound like the original dawn chorus: the screens playing the music will be placed in exactly the same positions as the microphones in the wood where the birdsong was recorded. Coates says he hopes to apply the method again: he recently went to Japan to experiment with Japanese birds and singers. But the Baltic exhibition, he feels, is quintessentially British, because of our attachment to wildlife. "It's outside the human lifestyle because we get up too late," he says. "I wanted to create something you could experience again and again"

· Dawn Chorus by Marcus Coates is at Baltic, Gateshead, from February 14 to March 18; and at The Festival of Birds at St George's, Bristol, on March 24.

To watch a clip of Dawn Chorus and hear the original recordings, go to www.guardian.co.uk/arts

Summary: People were filmed at dawn in their 'natural habitats' - and made to warble and tweet like birds. Why? Viv Groskop finds out.


Il Progresso, the Italian-language daily newspaper that for 100 years has helped waves of immigrants stay in touch with current affairs in Italy while chronicling their lives in the United States, has been sold to a group of Italian investors for $1 million.

The new publisher and principal stockholder, Piero Pirri Ardizzone, said he planned to move the newspaper's editorial and business offices from Emerson, N.J., back into New York City, probably to Manhattan or Queens. The reason, he said, is to be closer to the Italian-American community that he intends the paper to continue to serve.

In an interview earlier this week at the paper's offices in Emerson, Mr. Pirri Ardizzone said he planned to convert the paper into a tabloid with some articles in English as well as Italian in an effort to attract a ''second generation that loves Italy but doesn't read Italian.'' Bought From Pope Foundation

The paper, which has a circulation of about 60,000 concentrated in the New York metropolitan area, was purchased from the Generoso Pope Foundation, run by the Pope family that has owned Il Progresso for more than 50 years. Fortune K. Pope, the publisher and editor until the sale was completed last month, did not return telephone calls seeking information about the transaction.

Mr. Pirri Ardizzone, who is also the publisher in Sicily of Il Giornale di Sicilia, and Andrea Mantineo, the editor of Il Progresso, said the paper had been losing about $200,000 a year because of declines in circulation and advertising revenues.

They said they would try to attract advertising from Italian companies, which generally have not used Il Progresso. That task will be easier than before because the other major stockholder is an Italian advertising agency, Societa Pubblicita Editorale.

Also investing in Il Progresso, they said, is Carlo Caracciolo, the publisher of the Italian weekly L'Espresso and the Rome daily La Repubblica. Hopes to Improve Coverage

Mr. Pirri Ardizzone said he hoped to add reporters and editors to improve Il Progresso's coverage, now drawn primarily from wire services and sources such as the Italian news agency ANSA.

He said he was trying to arrange a move into new offices in New York City before the newspaper's new computer and electronic editing system was delivered this summer. The paper had moved to its northern New Jersey offices in the mid-1960's.

The new publisher, whose Italian papers have strongly supported the ruling Christian Democratic party, disputed a suggestion in Italian newspapers that the purchase could have a political impact.

Pending legislation would allow Italian citizens living abroad to vote in national elections, but the fate of the bill is considered uncertain, and Mr. Pirri Ardizzone said that, in any case, Il Progresso would be politically neutral.


FORTUNE — This may be one of those milestones with no real meaning.

But according to Seeking Alpha, Google GOOG has overtaken Apple AAPL to become the world’s most valuable company in terms of how much it would cost to take it over.

The changing of guard was noted by a self-described contrarian named Ashraf Eassa. He’s using a standard measure called Enterprise Value that’s usually defined as follows:

EV = market cap + (debt + minority interest + preferred shares) – (total cash and cash equivalents).

It’s that last bit that pushed Google (with $58 billion in net cash on the books) past Apple ($141 billion).

Of course, it’s unlikely that anyone is about take over either company. And as Eassa points out in Apple: This Is Ridiculous, “there is absolutely no contest as to who the real ‘boss’ is” in terms of generating cash. (See chart.)

“I think this valuation gap is, frankly, absurd and worth exploiting,” he concludes. “I’m starting to believe that Google has run far ahead of itself and — despite how much I absolutely adore Google — think that the pair trade here is probably to short Google/buy Apple until Apple’s enterprise value is, once again, squarely ahead of Google’s.”

Summary: Google would cost more to acquire, but Apple has four times the free cash flow.


This was taken in the East End of London. It doesn’t matter exactly where. It was around 1961, but that doesn’t matter either. You’d never ask anyone when Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling. What’s exciting is the moment it captures.

There’s only one actual woman in the shot. Did I know her? Of course not. And I’ve no idea if she knew I was shooting her. The other woman is somebody else’s picture, a figment of some advertising agency’s imagination. As a photographer, you’ve always got somebody else’s work in your shot. Somebody designed every lamppost, cobblestone, shop window and road. And nature designed the trees.

I’d rather look like the woman with the scarf than the girl behind her, though. She’s real. She probably didn’t have too much to be happy about. Things were pretty hard back then. Everyone goes on about the swinging 60s. Well, it was great for a couple of thousand people living in London, but it wasn’t so good if you were a Welsh miner or a steelworker somewhere. Most of the people I was photographing back then weren’t wealthy. Many hadn’t made it yet. Michael Caine, Jean Shrimpton and David Hockney – they were all just beginning.

The shot’s a statement on the social climate at the time – and at any time really. I was living in the East End in the 60s, which was probably more of a nightmare than living there through the war. During the war, people seemed to have more of a good time – they’d drink, fuck and live like they might be dead by morning. Then came the 1950s, which were just dull and grey.

I didn’t notice I was in the shot until I blew the picture up. That’s dualism: you see something one way, the camera sees it differently, picking up things you didn’t catch. For me, a camera is like a paintbrush that I use to make images. That’s why photography lends itself to surrealism. And surrealism’s not what you hear people say it is on the news, like when somebody says: “There was water everywhere. It was so surreal.” That’s not surrealism – that’s stupidity.

I sort of remember the day. But there were lots of days like it. I’d spend maybe eight hours taking pictures round the East End. I wasn’t just mindlessly clicking away, though. I’d think about things: you have to. I’m not one of those photographers who doesn’t know what he’s doing, so takes hundreds of pictures in the hope there’s one good one. I do one click then move on. By the look of the picture, it was quite sunny – the reflection wouldn’t have been as strong otherwise. I prefer London in the rain, though. I just find it so beautiful.

I started shooting in the East End because it was where I was from. I lived there all through the blitz. When I was about three and a half, the flat next door was flattened, so we had to move from Leytonstone to East Ham. I was six and a half when the war ended and quite used to bombsites by then. I’ve never let myself be limited by my background, though. I lived with cannibals for a week and I lived with the Krays for two. That didn’t mean I became a gangster or ate people.

I still walk around the East End. It’s not just about taking pictures there. It’s part of my life. And I can’t think of any reason to stop doing what I do.

Studied: After national service in the RAF, worked as an assistant to fashion photographer John French

Influences: Picasso, Agnolo Bronzino, Henri Cartier-Bresson

Top tip: “My images are for you to look at. If you like them, you like them. If you don’t, there’s nothing I can do.”

Summary: ‘Living in the East End then was a nightmare. People had a better time during the war’


SPAIN, a country known for its late risers, was the first to show its haute couture at the World's Fair. Following a gala black‐tie dinner Monday night, the elegant Spanish Pavilion was turned into a private fashion show for the press and a sprinkling of Spanish dignitaries. Seven of the country's leading designers showed capsule collections on beautiful but serious‐faced models imported for the occasion. The audience of men and women responded with fiery applause.

Designers included in the over‐all presentation were Bastida, Berhanyer, Herrera y Ollero, Marbel Jr., Rovira, Ochagavia and Pertegaz. Free shows at 4 P.M. daily, except Sunday, will be: given through next Tuesday, starring a different designer each day. Next Wednesday, there will be a windup evening affair open to the public. It will include a fashion show, en

Balenciaga, often called the world's leading designer, was the only talent missing, although the hostesses wore suits designed by him. In the hot bed of rumor and counterrumor at the pavilion, it is said with awe that Balenciaga will show later this month.

Spain, now the new fashion discovery of Europe, proved one point: to bead or not to bead is never a question. Hand‐beaded dresses blinked like sparklers on the Fourth of July under the bright lights. Satin or organza coats that trailed to the floor shielded their brilliance. Black and white, as traditional as spicy paella, was the favored color combination.

Elio Berhanyer, the young shepherd boy, so the story goes, who made a success in Madrid with his couture designs, and now has moderatepriced adaptations at Bergdorf Goodman, had some of

Manuel Pertegaz, a popular designer with American store buyers, quietly stole the show. His designs were in good taste, but never boring, and his natural Spanish flair was always under control. Feather‐light coats of petaled organza covered little sleeveless dresses of matching silk. Giant matching hats were frivolous and pretty, and lace as Spanish as gracias was made into one of the youngest dresses imaginable.

Herrera y Ollero showed an outstanding white satin evening dress with a matador jacket richly hemmed in gold. Their designs will be available on special order at Bonwit Teller after May 7.

Although some tailored coats and suits were shown, most designers stressed evening clothes—an indication that in Spain life really does begin after dark.

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Summary: private fashion show presented there


FORTUNE — A question posed by the $2.15 billion bid to buy the bankrupt Los Angeles Dodgers (the most money ever paid for a sports franchise): Is the team really worth that much? Thanks to increasingly lucrative TV contracts, it very well could be. As the graph below of team sales since 2003 demonstrates, a larger audience drastically ups the franchise’s price. Angels owner Arte Moreno knows this all too well. He spent more signing slugger Albert Pujols than it cost to buy the team in 2003.

This story is from the April 30, 2012 issue of Fortune.

Summary: According to the new rules of moneyball, the best team doesn't always win the fight for the most lucrative franchise.


Sunday MBA provides ideas on running better businesses and succeeding in the modern workplace, this week from Harvard Business Review and Dorie Clark, a marketing strategist and the author of “Reinventing You: Define Your Brand, Imagine Your Future.’’

The night before a conference, I found myself in a bar just south of Greenwich Village. I had good conversations with four interesting people with whom I’ll probably keep in touch. But when I walked out the door an hour later, I was thrilled with my revelation: I’m never doing that again.

I’ve always hated socializing in noisy environments where you have to scream to be heard. As an introvert, I find it overwhelming — and that means I’m not at my best when connecting. Many people find networking in general to be stressful or distasteful. But I’ve come to realize that networking is downright enjoyable when you match it to your strengths and interests, rather than forcing yourself to attend what the business world presents as archetypal “networking events.” Here are tips to embrace networking in your own way:

If you’re game for any kind of networking, you don’t have to think about which types of events to attend; as long as it’s the right crowd, you can make the connections you need. But if you prefer “minimally stimulating environments,” as many introverts do, boozy harbor cruises or swanky after parties may not be right for you. Instead, I try to increase my networking environment by creating my own events. I’m planning to bring together “interest groups” of colleagues whom I think would enjoy each other’s company for dinner parties.

I’m definitely not a morning person. Early in my career, I dutifully signed up to attend 500-person networking breakfasts, because “that’s what you do” as a businessperson. I eventually realized the shock of waking up at 6 a.m. to get downtown was making my entire day less productive, so I swore them off. For introverts, networking requires a little more cognitive effort: you have to psych yourself up to be “on.” I don’t need to have the additional burden of doing it when I’m tired.

Every networking event should be subjected to a cost-benefit analysis: if you weren’t here, what would you be doing, instead? Running the numbers is particularly important for introverts, because even if the alternative isn’t something overtly productive like writing a new business proposal, the cost side of the equation can be steep: You may be exhausting yourself emotionally for hours or days afterward. Ask yourself who is likely to attend, and whether they’re your target audience. Then follow up by asking how likely it is that you’ll actually get to connect with them. If it’s an intimate dinner, I’ll almost always say yes; if it’s a raucous roofdeck gathering, I’ll probably sneak out the back.

Athletes understand they need time for muscle recovery, so they follow up intense training days with time off. Introverts should do the same. As I write this, I’m in the midst of a writing day, where my only “meeting” is with a repairman. The day before, on the other hand, I had three in-person meetings and two conference calls.

Alternating between social and quiet time enables me to be at my best when I do interact with people. Even if a networking opportunity appears interesting, I’m likely to decline if it’s on the heels of several busy days; I’ve come to understand I won’t be able to tap its full potential because I’ll feel emotionally run down.

Finding the type of gatherings that work for you will make your networking much more successful — and more enjoyable. There’s a reason so many events take place in noisy bars: some people love that. For those of us without that predilection, we need to start saying no to torturing ourselves in the belief that it’ll ultimately be good for us. Instead, we have to reclaim networking and do it our own way.

Summary: Networking can be downright enjoyable when you match it to your strengths and interests, rather than forcing yourself to attend what the business world presents as archetypal “networking events.”


The Leadership Insider network is an online community where the most thoughtful and influential people in business contribute answers to timely questions about careers and leadership. Today’s answer to the question “What’s the best mistake you ever made?” is written by David DeWolf, CEO and President of 3Pillar Global.

Yes, it’s possible to succeed without failure. Some folks possess natural intuition that breeds success. Others either get lucky or they are in the right place at the right time. But sustaining a track record of success is nearly impossible without taking smart risks and learning from ideas that fail.

In 2008, 3Pillar, the software product innovation and development services company that I founded in 2006, was just starting to build momentum. I had been fortunate – my deep knowledge and natural passion for product innovation combined with a void in the market to fuel the growth of a company I never intended to start, inspired me get the business off the ground.

Leveraging the advice that we often gave to others, we launched a series of products. We began to hire dedicated staff and used the proceeds of our services business to fuel product development.

And then it happened. The services business began to suffer. Our lack of attention sabotaged our core business. Our resources were being divided between two causes. Our business development began to suffer.

After investing significant resources in this new effort, we were forced to make a decision. It became apparent that it would be nearly impossible to “ride two horses.” Were we willing to disrupt our core business and pivot the company or would we stick with our original strategy?

Ultimately, we shut this new division down. But I’d consider this adventure anything but a failure. A smart failure, yes. A total failure, no.

Failures turn smart when you take the time to digest lessons and turn them into fuel for your business. I ask myself the following questions every time I “fail.”

In this instance, I learned that focus is a critical component of business success and that focus was more about saying ‘no’ to things that might distract you.

What good came out of my failure?

Our ]failures taught us several things about innovation and product development that we applied to our business. It also taught us that true product innovators are passionate about building products and highlighting this aspect of who we were helped us to recruit top-notch talent.

How do I keep lessons learned?

In order to maintain the benefits of our smart failures, we adopted our processes and messaging to leverage our learning. Those lessons are still embedded in how we execute and how we message to this day. And we’re a better company for it.

Ultimately, by asking these questions and analyzing our “failure,” the company grew from 15 employees at that time to over 600 today. The focus we possess as a business, and the lessons that we learned fueled our growth and we’re still reaping the rewards.

I have applied this process in many situations, and continue to do so. The lesson not only improved our business, it taught me how to deal with failure.

The ability to take risks and turn mistakes into smart failures is a key competitive differentiator for businesses and leaders. It is especially relevant in today’s digital economy, where failure is cheap and innovation comes at a premium. Start embracing failure. Start turning your experiences into lessons learned, or fuel, for your future success.

Read all answers to the Leadership Insider question: What’s the best mistake you ever made?

How to make the most of your mistakes by Tough Mudder CEO Will Dean

Summary: Starting a new business is never easy, but turning your experiences into lessons learned can fuel your success.


A golden retriever with rather slow reflexes, this dog has become an Internet sensation thanks to a humorous video uploaded by his owner. During the course of many weeks, Fritz's owner tossed all sorts of treats at the dog, and none of them landed in his mouth. A steak, a donut and even a hot dog all bounced off Fritz's body and fell astray.

Here's the video, which includes a nice use of slow-mo:

For those worrying that Fritz eats like an obese human, fear not. His owner had this to say in the video's comments section:

"I definitely don't let him eat all this. I intercept the food and he gets a little. Plus, he only gets a food tossed to him about once a week. The rest of the time he eats healthy dog food and exercises to maintain his manly physique."

As for bad eyesight, it seems that's out of the question too:

"It’s funny, he shows no other signs of bad eyesight. He’s much better with a tennis ball. I think he might get overly excited with the food and he commits too soon!"

Hopefully Fritz learns from his mistakes, otherwise it appears as though he'll be eating dog food and french fries for the rest of his life.

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Summary:
Poor Fritz.
A golden retriever with rather slow reflexes, this dog has become an Internet sensation thanks to a humorous video uploaded by his owner. ...


The Deutsche Grammophon box set, “Pierre Boulez — 20th Century,” has 44 CDs.

A variety of unflattering nicknames became attached to Pierre Boulez during his tenure as music director of the New York Philharmonic in the 1970s. “The Iceberg,” referring to his detached mien, both to the musicians and in his conducting of standard repertoire. “The French Correction,” a backhanded compliment to the legendary precision of his ear, yet also a dig at his demanding rehearsal standards.

Perhaps the most telling epithet was “The Twentieth Century Limited” (the name of a legendary New York-Chicago train). The implication was doubly damning: Boulez was out of his element in most material older than his own era, and the modern music he did conduct well was so restricted in its allure that it made for a laughably incomplete credential for leading a major orchestra. No one disputed his command of complex scores, but that skill somehow just made him seem more, well, limited.

What a difference four decades or so make. When Boulez turned 90 on March 26, he did so as perhaps the world’s most complete musician, and without doubt one of its very greatest conductors. The old stereotype has been almost perfectly inverted: Boulez is now lionized not only for his mastery of modern and contemporary works, but for the ability to elicit fresh sonic and structural details in works stretching back to the 19th century.

I kept thinking about the “Twentieth Century Limited” label as I immersed myself in a 44-CD box of Boulez’s recordings of 20th-century music, recently issued by Deutsche Grammophon to commemorate his nine decades. Milestone occasions like this often generate a flood of product: Last year Sony collected Boulez’s complete recordings for Columbia Records, mostly from the 1960s and ’70s, into an imposing 67-CD set that ranges from Handel to Boulez’s own compositions.

The compilation from Deutsche Grammophon, packaged in a sleek, modernist-friendly cube, comprises recordings made largely over the last 25 years. Confined to the 20th century, it is in obvious ways more restricted. You miss Boulez’s pioneering Mahler set — available in a separate box — and his often revelatory accounts of Berlioz and Bruckner.

But the new set makes the vitally important point that a great deal of this music — running chronologically from Debussy through Birtwistle and, again, Boulez himself — is now our standard repertoire. To claim authority over this immense segment of music is no limitation, but an overwhelming achievement. Of course, this development would in part have happened on its own, simply because of the passage of time. But it’s also due in no small measure to Boulez’s tireless advocacy for this music in recordings and at the center of concert programs — what he once called “the endless task” of educating audiences about the music of their own era.

Significant, too, are the changes in Boulez’s conducting over the course of his career, differences made especially apparent by comparisons between this set and the Sony box. Take, for example, Debussy’s orchestral works, of which Boulez’s early Columbia recordings were revolutionary for their textural clarity. In retrospect, it seems almost too much of a good thing, all those details achieved in a hard-edged style at the expense of overall atmosphere. In the DG set, the lucidity is still there, but couched in sound so elegant and refined — courtesy of the Cleveland Orchestra in stellar form — that the music seems weightless and almost giddy, even in the final paroxysms of “La Mer.”

Something similar happens with Webern. The older set was a landmark in the recorded interpretation of the composer’s music, bristling with the sense of fresh discovery, even danger. In the more recent versions — many with the Berlin Philharmonic — there is a timbral depth and opulence that transforms the music’s forbidding ambiance into something akin to a guilty pleasure. It’s odd indeed to say that Webern’s scores can be caressed into sound, but that seems as good a description as any of what happens here.

Some of the evolution is due to Boulez’s progression as a conductor, and some, of course, to the rise in orchestral playing standards over the last few decades. But heard in the valedictory context of this collection, I’d like to think that it also has to do with changed historical circumstances. If the earlier recordings were an effort to get us to listen differently to this music, these versions are more like a victory lap.

Not everything here is a win. Many recent Boulez recordings have lost a quantum of rhythmic sharpness; some major works by Bartok and Stravinsky seem tame and soft-edged in comparison to the earlier benchmarks. Sometimes it is impossible to choose between competing goods, as is the case with the two versions of Messiaen’s “Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum.” For all of Boulez’s involvement with Schoenberg, surprisingly little of that composer’s music is here; what there is, including a luxurious “Pelleas et Melisande” and a crystalline reading of the opera “Moses und Aron,” is glorious. As for Boulez’s own mysteriously involving works, you will either respond to them or not, but it is difficult to imagine their shimmering surfaces emerging more beautifully than under their creator’s direction.

Sadly, it looks increasingly as though Boulez’s conducting career may be at an end. Reportedly in ill health, he has canceled recent engagements and does not seem to have attended any of the recent 90th-birthday tributes. But even if he never takes the podium again, he’s bequeathed to us an immense gift: a gateway to the music of our time. The century has never seemed so limitless.

Summary: A new 44-CD box set from Deutsche Grammophon celebrates the achievements and assesses the strengths of conductor-composer Pierre Boulez, who turned 90 on March 26.


04/21/2015 AT 07:45 AM EDT

didn't seem real before, it sure does now.

Stewart announced Monday night that Aug. 6 will be his final broadcast of

before new host Trevor Noah takes over,

Stewart didn't provide too many details about the final show's agenda (maybe Feist can do

of "One for My Baby, and One More for the Road"), but he did mention that there would be

coming into his hosting slot. Shortly after the relatively unknown comic was announced as Stewart's replacement, Twitter users uncovered a series of jokes that were either offensive and controversial or just plain unfunny, depending on whom you asked.

came to Noah's defense in the wake of the outcry.

Summary: A contest will be held to allow fans to attend Stewart's final taping of the show


THE Schwann Record & Tape Guide remains an invaluable source of information for anyone interested in music in general and recorded music in particular. A monthly guide published in Boston and distributed at most record stores, the Schwann provides not only information as to what records are avaialable in this country, but also annual statistics that allow one to assess trends of taste in both music and recorded formats.

For instance, in statistics recently released by Schwann, the trend toward digital recordings is underscored by the fact that during 1980 157 digital listings were added to the catalogue, of which 132 were of classical music, traditionally the trend-setter in the introduction of new technologies. Altogether, audiophile recordings - mostly digital but also especially mastered and direct-to-disk recordings - now number 501 listings in the catalogue, up from 167 in 1978.

Conversely, no-longer-fashionable technological modes show a decline. While new classical cassette listings were up from 533 in 1979 to 768 in 1980, those for classical eight-track cartridges declined from 73 in 1978 to 10 in 1979 to just 1 last year. Quadraphonic listings showed a similarly sharp drop-off, from 139 in 1978 to 17 in 1980.

Mozart was the most popular composer of the year, with 112 new listings, followed by Beethoven with 102 and Bach with 96. In the last four years, Mozart and Beethoven have alternated in the top two spots, with Bach in third place every year, Tchaikovsky in sixth and Schumann in eighth. Other composers in the 1980 top 10 were Schubert, Brahms, Haydn, Handel and Ravel.

Brahms's Symphony No. 4 was the most recorded single piece last year, with seven new listings, followed by a four-way tie of works with six new recordings: Brahms's Symphony No. 1, Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor, Ravel's ''Bolero'' (a partial result of the film, ''10'') and Schubert's ''Unfinished'' Symphony. The most recorded classical artist for the second consecutive year was Neville Marriner, with 28 listings, followed closely by Herbert von Karajan with 27 and Daniel Barenboim with 26. Zubin Mehta was a strong sixth, with 18.

Altogether, the Schwann catalogue listed 701 record labels, which the company considers to be ''generally available through retail shops in the United States.'' This has provoked some controversy, because the fragmentation of the record market in recent years has led to a proliferation of smaller labels and specialty distribution networks, and often the decision to include or not to include such a label in Schwann can have a considerable impact on the label's business. Ads Cause Consternation

The Schwann catalogue may be the record collector's bible, but that bible has not been available at major New York retail stores for a couple of months. The reason is an informal boycott partly inspired by Ben Karol, owner of the King Karol chain. King Karol, the Sam Goody stores, Record Hunter and others have refused to order the catalogues.

The stores canceled their orders when Schwann began running advertisements in its December issue for mail-order firms that offer recordings at considerable discounts. ''We have been getting Schwann since the first issue,' Mr. Karol explained. ''They had a longstanding rule that they would not take any retail ads, and mailorders are considered retail. It's obvious how bad we look if a customer buys a record from us and then finds out we don't have the lowest price.''

Leonard Levine of ABC Leisure magazines and publisher of the Schwann catalogues, declined to comment on the situation. But Mr. Karol said he had had discussions with Mr. Levine, and that vague assurances had been made.

''It seems to be impossible for Schwann to continue in business if they pursue this policy,'' Mr. Karol said. ''But it's not entirely their fault. Schwann is a very, very important ingredient in the record industry. We probably couldn't live without a monthly catalogue. But the record companies do not support Schwann by taking out enough ads, and so they were almost forced into this.'' Jersey Symphony Change?

The board of directors of the troubled New Jersey Symphony will meet today to consider a staff proposal for a reconstitution of the board that could lead to more active and widespread fund-raising. The symphony was crippled this concert season by a strike until Dec. 22, and has been unable to resume operations since because of a lack of funds.

''The meeting will be to suggest emendations in the charter that wiil allow us to establish a new board,'' said John L. Heyer, the symphony's executive director.

Mr. Heyer added that though some board members were loyal and devoted supporters of the orchestta, others had contributed minimally or not even attended board meetings for years. ''Obviously, the direction the symphony has taken has not proven to be successful enough,'' he said.

There will be no attempt to force out people who have worked hard but who are not themselves wealthy. Instead, the reconstitution plan would enable the board to expand both in terms of adding ''wealthy people with clout'' -in the words of Casimer Kossakowksi of the orchestra players' committee -and also to broaden the board's representation in the community at large.

''There is a definite desire to see the symphony survive,'' Mr. Heyer said. ''The problem is that the state of New Jersey so often lacks a focus for its artistic sense of self.'' A New Met Market Aide

Patrick Veitch, director of marketing of the Metropolitan Opera, has been named to a five-year contract as general manager of the Australian Opera, starting April 1. His replacement at the Met will be Marcia Lazer, who has been associate director of marketing. The Australian Opera, whose music director is Richard Bonynge, is the national Australian company, and offers 250 performances a year of some 25 operas. There is a seven-month season in the new Sydney Opera House, plus a two-month Melbourne season and an annual tour to Canberra, Brisbane and Adelaide. Here and There

The Sonneck Society, which is devoted to American music, and the University of Illinois Press have announced a new quarterly journal entitled American Music. ... The premiere of Leonard Bernstein's ''Mass'' in Vienna on Monday marked the first time that a work by an American-born composer had ever been presented at the Vienna State Opera. ... On March 13 the Albany Symphony will offer the first performance since 1944 of Roy Harris's ''Gettysburg'' Symphony.


PEKING, Saturday, June 27— China has postponed until next year plans to solicit bids from foreign oil companies to search for oil in the South China Sea, Willard C. Butcher, chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank, disclosed here today.

Mr. Butcher said officials of China's Ministry of Petroleum told him that unresolved problems, including questions of double taxation and contract arbitration, had forced another delay until early next year.

It was the third delay disclosed so far this year.

''I wouldn't be suprised to see this slip beyond the first quarter of 1982,'' he said. ''This kind of problem-solving often requires a certain amount of patience.'' Bidding Postponed

Some three dozen American and other foreign oil companies have been waiting for the bidding to begin as a go-ahead for South China Sea exploratory drilling. These companies completed seismic exploration of the area last year and turned the results over to the Chinese for analysis.

The oil companies had hoped to complete bidding procedures this spring. Chinese officials put off the process until August, then pushed the date back to November.

Mr. Butcher, who was in Peking to formally open a Chase representative office yesterday, said, however, that several unresolved issues forced further postponement. First, he said, that oil companies are worried that China's newly formulated tax laws will not allow them to use Chinese taxes as credits against their tax liabilities in the United States. A team of United States Treasury Department tax experts is due to arrive in Peking ''shortly'' to discuss this problem, he said.

Another problem is in arriving at specific arbitration procedure between foreign oil concerns and the Chinese Petroleum Ministry for determining exploration and production costs, which oil companies insist on recovering first from any new production.


CHICAGO, March 12— The 1982 elections start here Tuesday, as the Illinois primaries record the first effects that redistricting and recession will have on the politics of a year the Democrats no longer fear.

Redistricting has already guaranteed changes in Illinois's Congressional delegation, changes that will almost certainly help the Democrats. Moreover, the shifts here are part of a national trend that so far appears to have denied the Republicans the big reapportionment gains they once expected because of the 1980 census.

Representative Robert McClory, an Illinois Republican, has already announced his retirement because of the new district maps, and their use Tuesday will cause at least one more, and perhaps three more, of his Republican and Democratic colleagues to join him.

Even though the unemployment rate has reached 9.6 percent in Illinois, the recession is less of an issue in the primaries than it could be later this year. Democrats are not fighting Democrats about it, and the nervousness of Republican candidates on the subject is displayed more by efforts to place a little distance between themselves and President Reagan than in quarrels between candidates.

Key Elements in One District

But one Congressional district in Illinois combines those key elements of redistricting and recession. The House minority leader, Representative Robert H. Michel, represents the 18th District, but more than one-third of its voters are newly added. The balance is more Democratic than it was in Mr. Michel's old district, although on paper it still looks Republican.

After the Jan. 4 filing deadline passed without a Democrat's entering against Mr. Michel, Caterpillar Tractor announced new layoffs in Peoria and Decatur. In Peoria, the unemployment rate rose to 9.6 percent in January from 7.9 in December.

Two Democrats, Gerald A. Bradley, a State Representative whose own district was made less hospitable by reapportionment, and Douglas Stephens, a labor lawyer, began write-in campaigns for the oncedubious honor of opposing Mr. Michel.

Statewide, Gov. James R. Thompson, a Republican, faces only token opposition for renomination. And, of the 16 Republican-held governorships that will be contested this year throughout the country, as against 20 for the Democrats, Mr. Thompson's is of critical importance to his party. Several of his neighbors in the economically distressed Middle West are not running again, and this is a region where Democrats expect to make some gains. Stevenson Seeking Governorship

Governor Thompson will face a credible foe in former Senator Adlai E. Stevenson, who has no opposition for the Democratic nomination. Neither of the United States Senate seats from Illinois is among the 33 being contested nationally. Only a modest overall change is expected in the Senate after the upheaval of 1980, when the Republicans gained a majority.

It is already clear that this election year is unfolding in ways that most politicians did not expect last year. The Speaker of the House, Thomas P. O'Neill Jr. of Massachusetts, warned the Democratic National Committee last month that ''1980 was not a realigning election, but 1982 may be.''

Last year Republicans were talking about winning control of the House in 1982 for the first time since 1952, and becoming the nation's dominant political party. Neither side is talking that way any more, and political analysts say redistricting and recession are two key reasons. Shift of 17 House Seats

When the 1980 census results were announced 14 months ago, they required a shift of 17 House seats, largely from the Northeast and the Middle West to the South and the West. Republicans, with $1 million in national funds budgeted for redistricting, expected to gain 12 to 15 seats from redistricting, or about half the 26 seats they needed for a majority in the House.

Tom Hofeller, the new head of the redistricting operation at the Republican National Committee, says, ''The beginning view was overoptimistic.'' Republican analyses of the results state by state now add up to a gain of three to five seats for their party, while the Democratic National Committee believes redistricting will enable the Democrats to pick up seven seats.

Whichever side is more nearly correct, few Republicans today would quarrel with the judgment of Gene Eidenberg, director of the Democratic National Committee, who said, ''Redistricting is an arrow that's been taken from the Republican quiver.'' Democrats gained only in the sense of ''damage avoidance,'' he said, adding, ''We avoided being hurt badly.''

The process is still not complete. New York State, which lost five House seats in the 1980 census, more than any other state, has yet to approve a redistricting plan. The Democrats, who control the State Assembly, have a plan that would savage the Republicans. And the Republicans, who control the State Senate, have a plan that would return the favor. Neither side is negotiating, and it appears likely to be settled in court.

Legislators in such states as Ohio, Michigan and Florida are still not confronting the problem. Florida Situation Cited


CREAM of tartar, added to egg whites, helps them to foam when beaten. Bread bakes faster in a glass pan than in a metal one. Vinegar added to the water keeps poached eggs from spreading into feathery tails.

Most cooks are well-versed in these culinary tips, though few understand the underlying physical and chemical principles that make them work. Neither did Arthur E. Grosser when as a 6-year-old he got his first lesson in the physical chemistry of cooking. His mother taught him how to boil an egg, adding salt to the water ''to keep it from cracking.''

Now, at the age of 47 and armed with a Ph.D. in chemistry, Dr. Grosser knows that his mother did the right thing but for the wrong reason. Adding salt to the cooking water will not keep the egg from cracking, he notes, but it acts as first aid for a cracked egg, causing the leaking white to coagulate and seal the rift. Salt changes the electrical environment and breaks the weak bonds that hold liquid egg white protein in folded globules. The protein cooks faster because, once unfolded, it can re-form into the threedimensional structure of cooked (coagulated) egg white. A similar unfolding takes place if vinegar is added to the water when eggs are poached.

As Dr. Grosser got older and found himself cooking more, he began to wonder why recipes insisted on certain sequences, utensils, temperatures, times and unusual ways of combining ingredients. By understanding the chemistry and physics of cooking, he figured, he would not have to follow recipes to the letter but would know when and how he could modify them to suit his needs and equipment.

In baking, for example, glass pans let through infrared radiation, which adds heat to the food and speeds its cooking time. This helps to avoid a soggy crust when baking a pie, but for cookies, a metal pan that reflects radiant energy results in more uniform baking. Dr. Grosser said bread bakes well in a glass pan if the oven temperature is lowered 25 degrees.

In beating egg whites, he explained, cream of tartar, a weak acid, neutralizes the weakly alkaline egg protein. Then water molecules, which had been attracted to the electrical charge of the alkaline protein, drop away and the proteins are more easily coagulated to form a foam.

The chemical and physical interactions of foods with each other and with their environment have long concerned serious chemists, and many of their findings have been consciously applied by the food processing industry. Most cooks apply them too, but without realizing what is happening.

''Cooking is the oldest, most basic, and most universal application of physical and chemical forces to natural materials,'' Dr. Grosser said. ''Cooking is the closest that most people ever get to doing chemistry.''

Having succeeded, he says, in bringing ''tyrannical recipes to heel,'' the Brooklyn-born McGill University chemist has summarized his investigations into the why of cookery in a recently published book, ''The Cook Book Decoder, or Culinary Alchemy Explained'' (Beaufort Books, $13.95). Through explanation, simple kitchen experiments and illustrative recipes, Dr. Grosser demonstrates the following culinary principles, among many others.

On Mixing Oil and Water: An emulsifier is a chemical substance that allows oil to mix with water because it possesses the electrical properties of both. Oil molecules are nonpolar, which means they are neither positively nor negatively charged at the surface. But water is a polar molecule, positively charged at one end and negatively charged at the other. An emulsifier (for example, lecithin in egg yolk) is partly polar and partly nonpolar; its nonpolar end will dissolve in oil and its polar end is attractive to water, so it is able to keep the two substances mixed together.

Emulsifiers work best when they are highly concentrated. Thus, in making mayonnaise, oil is slowly beaten into the beaten egg yolk and in repairing a ''broken'' (failed) mayonnaise, the separated sauce is added bit by bit to a beaten yolk.

On Making Bread, Pie Crust, Etc.: Two of the proteins in wheat flour become difficult to handle when wet. Gliadin becomes gluey and glutenin becomes rubbery. But if the wetted proteins are forced together, as when the dough is kneaded, they join to form an elastic compound called gluten, which allows the dough to stretch and rise as the yeast releases carbon dioxide. In overkneaded dough, too much gluten develops and the bread turns out rubbery.

Fat inhibits rubberiness by coating the short strands of gluten, which keeps them from growing too long (hence the name ''shortening''). To prepare a flaky pie crust, just enough gluten is needed so that the dough can be rolled without tearing, but not so much as to make it rubbery. The use of shortening, minimum water and minimum handling keeps down gluten formation.

Flakiness comes from thin layers of insoluble fat in the dough, which is why cooks prepare it with cold fat, cold utensils and ice water and the dough is chilled before rolling. As the crust bakes, the thin layers of fat melt and release water and air, creating blisters of steam that separate the dough into flakes.

For muffins, egg protein provides the structure so that gluten is unneeded; it toughens the dough and traps gas in ''tunnels.'' Thus, muffin batter is mixed as little as possible.


AS the fur showings continued, the scene got livelier. The house of Alixandre, with Perry Ellis and Yves Saint Laurent (plus Jeffrey Banks for men's furs) on its design roster, could hardly avoid some fireworks.

Perry Ellis's standouts were enormous overcoats with belts in back. One made of cross fox with a red fox collar and cuffs was large enough to double as a bedspread. Other big coats belted loosely at the back were of natural furs such as fisher, mink, baum marten and silver fox.

In addition to big coats, there were some successful experiments in the Ellis collection. The most remarkable were made of sheared beaver in patterns like Scottish plaids. The colors were deep greens and blues, not at all garish. A similar idea was working the colors of the fur into widely spaced horizontal stripes. Even the woman who shies from dyed furs might like these. A group of l920's-style black fox coats and jackets had big and collars of white fox.

For those who prefer fitted silhouettes, there's a neat little jacket, tightly belted at the waist and then flared out in a peplum effect in back. The jacket, in sheared mink or raccoon, is collared and cuffed in fox. Most of the Ellis furs emerged accessoried with full-skin fox scarves and in one case, with a tiny, live poodle.

The audience expected surprises from Saint Laurent and got them - especially with an effect that the program called ''technique'' used for fox. It produced a black-and-white speckled look, denser at the yoke or the hemline than in the body of the coat. The technique also produced narrowish stripes arranged horizontally and wide apart.

In a quieter mood, Saint Laurent did very good overcoats of fisher and sable and a perfect mink with high double-breasting and a flared skirt. The most amusing coats were short, made of Mongolian lamb dyed wine, navy or gray, with a white chevron inset acting as a yoke.

Jeffrey Banks continues with his tailored overcoats and bomber jackets in the his masculine furs: beaver, raccoon and nutria. Fe also does a substantial array of cloth coats lined with nutria or beaver, some fur collared. His flyer was ''varsity'' jackets. These were made of sheared beaver in white, gray or beige and had inset argyle patterns in bright colors.

Bill Blass, designing for Mohl, ignored wild color and concentrated instead on line. The Blass coats are either very big or very narrow. The big ones are of long-haired lynx, fox or fisher, made to look even more voluminous by very full sleeves set into deep armholes. The skinny coats had stand-out shoulders, low double-breasting and hemlines just a few inches above the shoes.

The designer has an interesting jacket: narrow and long with a leather drawstring set well below the hips. He also likes jackets bloused over drawsting hems. Other new ideas were a diagonal closure and another that was carved away under the collar before it continued into buttons. Instead of the extra bulk of lapping the fur for buttonholes, a number of the coats buttoned with loops. Remember beaver used with its natural striped shading? It's back in both a long coat and a jacket.

For the first half of the collection Oscar de la Renta did for Wagner, it seemed as though the designer, famous for his dramatic effects, had gone completely classic. A bevy of very nice greatcoats and bloused jackets paraded by, and except for paisley linings and a caped coat modeled on the British bobby's, it was all pretty sedate.

And then he released the sort of theatrics his audiences expect, and very successful they were: coats and shawls of sheared mink in patterns looking like antique Persian rugs. As many as six colors were worked into paisley whorls or Arabian Nights stripes with a wondefully velvety look.

Halston is a complete classicist. Designing for Ben Kahn, he gets the pick of the choicest furs such as Russian sable, a new mink called Smoky Topaz and a brand new naturally black Persian lamb - plus fisher, chinchilla and a lovely tawny broadtail lamb.

Halston's most interesting wear-with-everything coat is elegantly roomy, with a half-belt loosely buttoned at the back. He also likes bathrobe ties, very slender reefers and bubble jackets. And, of course, lots of the ponchos and shawls he is famous for.

Black seemed to be the favorite color; there were more black pelts shown here than in any other collection thus far.

Illustrations: photos of models wearing furs


06/24/2015 AT 04:25 PM EDT

A New Jersey elementary school teacher has been accused of having sex with a 15-year-old student.

Lauren H. Mitchell, 32, of Lyndhurst, New Jersey, was arrested for aggravated sexual assault and one count of endangering the welfare of a child on June 19.

Mitchell, a second-grade teacher at Dr. Lena Edwards Academic Charter School in Jersey City, allegedly had sex with a female student from her school.

School officials contacted authorities after several teachers "observed what they believed was inappropriate interactions" between Mitchell and the alleged victim on a class trip, a

Mitchell brought the 15-year-old girl to her Lyndhurst home, where they allegedly engaged in oral sex, reports

Bergen County prosecutors' special victims unit and the Lyndhurst Police Department carried out an investigation after the Hudson County prosecutorâs office shared the information.

Mitchell is being held in Bergen County Jail on $150,000 bail. She will be arraigned on July 7 and has yet to enter a plea.

Summary: Lauren H. Mitchell was arrested for aggravated sexual assault and one count of endangering the welfare of a child


Greece's international creditors have offered Athens a five-month, 12 billion euro ($A17.38 billion) extension of its bailout program but said it must seal a deal this weekend to avoid an IMF default next week.

Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande discussed financing plans on Friday with leftist Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras on the eve of a "decisive" meeting of eurozone finance ministers aimed at finding a deal to end the crisis.

The offer came after intensive talks in Brussels this week to end the standoff between Tsipras's anti-austerity government, which has baulked at further reforms-for-cash after five years of bailout-imposed economic hardship.

Creditors are ready to quickly disburse 1.8 billion euros in financial aid to help Athens meet a 1.5 billion euro IMF debt repayment on June 30 as long as the Greek parliament approves disputed reforms, according to proposals seen by AFP.

German finance minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said the chances for a bailout deal stand at about "50-50", with European markets fluctuating as Greece's fate remains in suspense.

German Chancellor Merkel and French President Hollande told Tsipras in brief talks on the sidelines of an EU summit that another emergency Eurogroup meeting of finance ministers on Saturday was now critical for an agreement.

"They reminded him that this meeting was crucial and decisive and that it was vital now to work towards a deal on a package that includes reforms, investment and financing," a source said.

Tsipras told Merkel and Hollande he could not understand their "harsh" stance.

"Alexis Tsipras informed the two leaders on the Greek proposal and stressed that the Greek side does not understand the persistence of institutions in such harsh measures," a Greek governmental source told AFP.

Eurozone finance minister talks on Thursday that had been supposed to produce a deal that EU leaders could rubber stamp at their summit next door broke down with no agreement.

Syriza party leader Tsipras was elected in January on an anti-austerity platform and has resisted ever since the creditors' demands for pensions cuts and VAT reforms in return for unlocking bailout funds

An extension to Greece's massive 240 billion-euro bailout to the end of November would be the third since December and allow more time for heavily indebted Athens to negotiate future financing from its European partners.

Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the head of the Eurogroup of finance ministers, said a deal had to be clinched on Saturday or there will not be enough time for it to get parliamentary approval.

"Tomorrow it really has to happen, for the simple reason that it has to go through parliament, first the Greek then of several member states," the Dutch finance minister told journalists in The Hague.

Under the creditor proposals, the immediate 1.8 billion euro disbursement - profits from Greek bonds held by the European Central Bank - would be paid "as soon as the Greek parliament has approved with a resolution the agreement with the (creditor) institutions and adopted a first set of legislative actions", the plans said.

The proposal by the three main creditors - the European Commission, ECB, and International Monetary Fund - said a "five-month extension of the current program ... would be feasible during which a total of 12 billion euros of financial support would be provided."

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Summary: The International Monetary Fund denies it has taken a "take it or leave it" stance on the new terms for releasing funds to Greece.


07/09/2015 AT 01:25 AM EDT

You know what a concert hall full of electronic dance music fans want? More electronic dance music. You know what is the opposite of that? Spandau Ballet's "True."

Presumably, the DJ who performs under the name Mashd N Kutcher knew that already when he pranked the crowd at the Good Life Festival, a Brisbane, Australia, dance music event. Performing on Monday, the DJ set his audience up for more electronic beats – and then pulled the rug out from under them with the 1983 hit.

The audience protested loudly over the trick, but since posting the video on Tuesday, it's been viewed more than a million times and made the rounds

Australian dance music lovers? Your loss is the Internet's gain.

Summary: DJ Mashd N Kutcher scored a viral hit with a video of him tricking the crowd at an Australian concert


Edward Albee will be the playwright in residence, the French film director Louis Malle will stage an opera, London's Royal Ballet will revive a Petipa work and the Paul Taylor Dance Company will present a world premiere — all at the Festival of Two Worlds at Spoleto, Italy, in the summer.

The festival's seventh season will begin June 19 and will continue through July 19.

Thomas Schippers; artistic director at Spoleto, will conduct Richard Strauss's “Der Rosenkavalier” on opening night in observance of the 100th anniversary of the composer's birth. Mr. Malle, representative of the New Wave in films, will be the stage director This is the first tine he will work outside the film medium

The Royal Ballet will give for the first time in its history the full‐length “Raymonda” by Glazounov in the original Petipa choreogaphy. Dame Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev will dance in it. Performances have been scheduled for July 12, 14, 15, 17 and 19.

The Taylor Company will present the premiere of “The Red Room,” based on Gunther Schuller's composition “Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee.” Mr. Taylor is the choreographer. “Seven Studies” will be given on a program with three other works.

Mr. Albee will write for the Seven O'Clock Theater. The group, established last season, will offer daily performances. Its director, Ivan Uttal, will stage the first production outside Sweden of Ingmar Bergman's “Wood Painting,” the play on which the motion picture “The Seventh Seal” was based.

On July 18, Mr. Schippers will conduct the annual outdoor concert on the Cathedral Sauare.

Included in the program is Beethoven's “Cantata on the Death of Emperor Joseph II,“ written when the composer was 19 and never performed during his life. It had its premiere in 1884 when the critic Eduard Hanslick called it to the attention of the music world. The manuscript was rediscovered two years ago.

Other events at the festival will include daily chamber music concerts arranged by Charles Wadsworth and concerts by the Princeton High School Choir, appearing with the Trieste Philharmonic, on June 26, 27 and 28.

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Summary: Plans


A pram abandoned at the scene of the shooting in Detroit.

One person has been killed and nine wounded after a shooting at a party on a basketball court in Detroit where several children were present.

Police said that one person is in a critical condition after the shooting and that they were searching for suspects, according to the Detroit Free Press.

All other victims sustained non-life-threatening injuries, according to the newspaper.

Assistant Police Chief Steve Dolunt told the Detroit Free Press that several children were present at the party in Detroit's west end, and it was lucky that no minors were injured.

He added that one person at the party may have been deliberately targeted.

"I think one individual was the target, the others just happened to be at this party," Dolunt said.

At least three of the shooting victims were female, the newspaper reported.

One person was detained for questioning but no one has been arrested in connection with the incident, Sergeant Cassandra Lewis, public information officer for Detroit Police, told the newspaper.

Detroit, a traditional auto-manufacturing town in the northeast state of Michigan, emerged from bankruptcy last year.

The city's sprawling west side is home to the majority of its residents.

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Summary: A person has been shot dead at a party on a US basketball court where children were present and nine people are wounded.


Diversity in hiring is one hurdle. Another is funding for entrepreneurs of all backgrounds.

Through the first half of 2013, 13 percent of U.S. venture capital deals went to companies with at least one female founder, according to Seattle-based PitchBook, a private equity and venture capital research firm. That compares to 4 percent in 2004. So the trend is improving, but there is still progress to be made.

And although VC funds generally are larger than capital acquired through crowdfunding, the new platform is an option for entrepreneurs, both men and women.

Ringelmann of Indiegogo says 47 percent of their crowdfunding campaigns, which reach targeted goals for funding, are run by women.

"When gatekeepers have to figure out which ideas to fund and which to invest in, they rely on two things: Their forecast for the future and their limited networks," Ringelmann said.

And as for companies, large and small, bias also needs to be eliminated from the hiring process, she says. "It's making sure that they're going after all the young women out there that are interested in potentially joining their company," she said.

Broadly, few female students are graduating with related technology degrees. In 2012, while 57 percent of undergraduate degree recipients were women, only 18 percent of computer and information sciences undergraduate degree recipients were women, according to the nonprofit technology center.

"Switching the conversation to these unconscious biases is one way to change the dialogue," said Ashcraft of the nonprofit technology center. "We all share these biases, and we can all work together to address them."

Summary: Microsoft CEO's gaffe points to larger issues that face technology—too few women in tech roles and little capital that goes to women-founded start-ups.


"Our primary customer is still here domestically in the U.S., but because of our background and who we are and our brand in China, we will get Chinese customers who will want to buy our homes," said Tian, standing on an empty parking lot in Weehawken, New Jersey.

Two hundred condominium units are planned for the site, which boasts spectacular views of the Manhattan skyline. Landsea purchased the property from U.S. home builder Lennar, which will design and build the project in much the same fashion as its own new condo building, which neighbors the property.

Read MoreLower rates fail to fuel home buyers

"We have enjoyed our association with Landsea and expect to see great things from them as they continue their journey in the U.S.," said Bruce Gross, Lennar's chief financial officer.

Lennar has already enjoyed great business from Chinese buyers in its Southern California housing developments. Chinese parents are flocking to California especially, buying homes there so that their children can attend American high schools and universities. Lennar, and other U.S. builders, have even implemented Feng Shui design in some of their homes to accommodate the Asian buyer.

"China's investment is spiking now because there is a fear by many Chinese nationals that their capital is not secure in China itself, and so they are looking for other places to invest," said Ben Thypin, director of market analysis at Real Capital Analytics.

Chinese developers invested close to $3 billion in U.S. commercial real estate in 2013, two-thirds of it in the New York area, according to Real Capital Analytics. They are on track to do the same if not more this year.

Read MoreThe fall could see housing rise

"The reality is that these are very big companies. They're well-funded. The U.S. is, we think it's a good market, obviously we're in it. So we shouldn't be surprised that they've come," said Sam Zell, chairman of Equity Group Investments on CNBC's "Squawk Box" Wednesday.

Landsea is one of several Chinese companies breaking U.S. ground now or planning to, a surge reminiscent of previous foreign interest from Japan, Canada and Great Britain. The Chinese real estate market is overbuilt and overpriced, so investors are seeking new opportunities elsewhere. The U.S., which is still recovering from the worst housing crash in its history, is ripe for the picking.

"If the volume of these guys increases, they're going to be competing with each other," added Zell, who sees great opportunity in U.S. real estate right now.

Read MoreSam Zell: Stock market correction coming

Landsea is looking at expanding into the Washington, D.C., and Boston markets. It is already partnering with other U.S. companies in construction and management roles.

"We are trying to establish ourselves as a local domestic company," said Landsea's Tian.

Summary: Landsea, a China-based developer, is spending $1 billion to build housing in the New York City area, San Francisco and Los Angeles.


The companies that emerge from Hewlett-Packard's planned split will be leaner and more cost-effective as HP goes through every line item and examines every cost, CEO Meg Whitman told CNBC on Wednesday, a day after reporting quarterly revenue had fallen in almost every business segment over the year.

Whitman said the company has the opportunity to ask a question that few businesses get the opportunity to answer: "If I knew what I know now, how would I set up these two companies?"

Hewlett-Packard is in the process of separating its enterprise services and traditional computing business.

"We get to 'clean sheet' two new technology operations for both companies," she said in an interview on "Squawk on the Street." "Our fundamental IT is based on a manufacturing system because we used to be a manufacturer."

"We don't have to do it that way anymore, and we can really just build the entire new style of IT for both these companies," she said. "Those are the kinds of things that are going to make us more efficient and effective for the next decade."

Read More As cyberthreats increase, big money chases patches

Responding to concerns that the two companies will lose pricing power, Whitman said they will have supply chain agreements to make sure they have buying leverage with their biggest partners.

She added that other times it will be better to be smaller and more nimble so it can buy more commodities on the spot market and take advantage of deals that aren't tied up in enormous purchasing agreements.

In its earnings report Tuesday, Hewlett Packard said sales fell 2.5 percent in the fourth quarter to $28.41 billion, from $29.13 billion a year earlier. Analysts had expected $28.76 billion.

Profit declined 2.7 percent to $2.01 billion, or $1.06 cents a share, compared with $1.01 cents a share a year ago, in line with analysts' expectations.

"I've always said that turnarounds aren't linear,'' Whitman told analysts on a conference call. "We're right where we thought we'd be.''

Read More Apple's market cap hits $700B, doubles under Cook

On CNBC, Whitman noted that the fourth quarter marked the first reporting period that the company saw operating margin expansion in every single business since early 2011. She said that was a sign its cost discipline is in place.

The enterprise group and enterprise services, areas that Whitman had previously flagged as growth drivers, showed revenue declines of 4 percent and 7 percent respectively.

The company's personal computer division, its largest and most mature, grew by 4 percent after a 12 percent jump in the prior quarter. Much of the growth in PCs was driven by a Microsoft's decision to quit supporting older software.

Hewlett-Packard expects the segment will be in slow decline over time, but it stands to gain market share, Whitman said.

Reuters contributed to this story.

Summary: The companies that emerge from Hewlett-Packard's split will be leaner as HP goes through every line item and examines every cost, Meg Whitman says.


In addition, 10 game sets will include five real 20-euro notes, two 50-euro notes and one 100-euro note, while another 69 sets will carry five 10-euro notes and five 20-euro notes, the report said.

Hasbro, the game's manufacturer began rolling out the prize sets on Monday in France.

Read MoreVideo games spring back on strong console sales

"We wanted to do something unique," Florence Gaillard, brand manager at Hasbro France, told the Guardian.

"When we asked our French customers, they told us they wanted to find real money in their Monopoly boxes."

Hasbro has a less exciting plan for American players, so don't expect a real "money bag" anytime soon.

Instead, Hasbro will offer an 80th anniversary edition game that features a "vintage-style board" to go along with the variety of other formats available.

Click here to read the full report from The Guardian.

Summary: To commemorate the game's 80th anniversary, Monopoly's French manufacturers have replaced its fake notes with real money, according to The Guardian.


Last year, total whiskey volume rose 7.3 percent, with blended whiskey sales volume posting the greatest percentage gain. Blended whiskey sales volume jumped 42 percent from the prior period while that of Irish whiskey rose 9.1 percent. Bourbon and Tennessee whiskey were not far behind with a 7.4 percent gain. Continued interest in American whiskeys and new flavored whiskeys helped drive this growth.

Vodka volume ticked up just 1.6 percent while the flavored variety fell. Gin and rum volume both dropped year over year, while tequila volume rose 5 percent.

Read MoreAnheuser-Busch buys another craft brewer

"In the U.S. market, strong consumer interest in cocktails, along with continuing market access and modernization improvements, is providing the industry with a solid base for future growth," Distilled Spirits Council President and CEO Peter H. Cressy said in a statement.

Indeed, the popularity of cocktails are continuing to shift more consumers away from beer. The industry estimates it has taken 6.4 point of market share from beer since 2000, with each point of market share equaling about $650 million in supplier sales.

Summary: Boom times in American whiskey helped propel domestic spirits exports for a fifth straight year, a trade group says.


The downsides of ultra-loose monetary policy have returned to focus this month, following comments from the likes of BlackRock's Laurence Fink and European Central Bank (ECB) President Mario Draghi.

Speaking to CNBC over the weekend from the International Monetary Fund's Spring Meeting, Draghi said that the ECB's low interest rates and newly introduced quantitative easing program had hit savers and the funds in which they invested.

Earlier this year, the ECB became the latest major central banks to launch a bond-buying program, in a further bid to boost liquidity in the region. Other major central banks that had already instigated similar asset-purchase programs include the U.S. Federal Reserve, the U.K. Bank of England and the Bank of Japan.

"The pension funds, the insurance companies, they do certainly suffer from low interest rates," Draghi told CNBC from Washington D.C., before adding that other policy courses might also have hit savers.

"Our monetary policy stance has been designed according to our mandate, which is to assure price stability...that's the best service that we can make to the economy and to both consumers and savers. To run a different monetary policy stance would ultimately damage the savers too."

Benchmark interest rates in the euro zone, and other regions like the U.K. and the U.S., are at record lows. These rates set the level for all sorts of home loans and savings accounts. Thus, low interest rates might be good for mortgage holders, but they also mean that savers suffer low yields on their deposits.

Draghi's comments came after Fink, the founder and CEO of BlackRock, told CNBC on Thursday that central banks did not understand the "havoc" or the "huge pain" caused to insurance companies from low interest rates. He added that loose monetary policy across the region was deterring BlackRock's insurance companies in Europe from reinvesting in Germany and Switzerland.

On Monday, David Owen, the chief European economist at Jefferies International, told CNBC that low rates were part of the ECB's policy to generate a "risk culture," in which investors opted for riskier, but potentially higher-yielding assets.

Summary: The downsides of ultra-loose monetary policy have returned to focus this month, following comments from the likes of BlackRock's Laurence Fink.