CHERYL ROGOWSKI planted her seeds of change in the black soil of Orange County, N.Y., in 1994. Her parents, first-generation Polish-Americans, built the W. Rogowski Farm, starting in the 1950's. Like most farmers in the area, they dedicated their land to the wholesale onion business. "We sold 500 tons of onions every year," Ms. Rogowski said, "and never met any of the people who bought them."

Fred R. Conrad/ The New York Times

"What I know about farming is this: It's not enough to just drive the tractor anymore."  Cheryl Rogowski

Fred R. Conrad/ The New York Times

"Like a baby, a farm need as much nuturing as it can get."  Eve Kaplan-Walbrecht

In 11 years, starting with a crop of chili peppers seeded in her bedroom and planted in a remote field, Ms. Rogowski has transformed Rogowski Farm, raising 250 varieties of produce and forming intimate connections to its customers and employees. For her innovations, she won a $500,000 "genius award" last year from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the first given to a full-time farmer.

"What I know about farming is this: It's not enough to just drive the tractor anymore," she said.

Ms. Rogowski, 43, is one of thousands of women who have changed the face of American farming. Though American farms have steadily declined in jobs and capital for years, the number of farms operated by women has more than doubled since 1978, from just over 100,000 to almost 250,000 today, according to the United States Department of Agriculture.

Almost 15 percent of American farms are now run primarily by women - a sea change from 1978, when the figure was 5 percent. On organic farms, according to the Organic Farming Research Foundation, the number is 22 percent.

The concentration is especially high in the Northeast, where a small farm near an urban area can now survive solely through farmers' markets, restaurants, farm memberships (in which customers pay in advance for a season's worth of produce) and other direct outlets.

"Farming has changed, and farmers now have to do things they are traditionally really bad at: marketing, educating consumers, collective action, communication," Ms. Rogowski said. "And it can't be a coincidence that women are traditionally good at those things."

To expand her farm's business and its reach in its community, Ms. Rogowski arranged for weekly deliveries of produce to centers for the elderly, mentored immigrant farmers from Mexico and Guatemala, started a catering business that uses local produce, sells vegetables at eight weekly farmers' markets and is an activist for land use reform.

"Women farmers aren't a special-interest group," she said. "Our issues are the same as all American farmers - we all want to keep our farms, and we have to make money from them. But women have come up with a lot of the new ways of doing it."

Women's work has always been integral to American farming, but women were seldom considered farmers. Now, networks of female farmers are thriving in Vermont, Pennsylvania, Maine, Montana and Iowa. And a national conference for women in sustainable agriculture, the first of its kind, is scheduled for October in Burlington, Vt. At the Rodale Institute in Pennsylvania, an organic agricultural training center, all of this year's farm interns are women, which is also a first, said Jeff Moyer, the farm manager.

All of the women interviewed for this article said they had experienced little resistance from their male colleagues. "I can do every job on this farm that my dad or brother could do - operate the forklift, bag onions, haul manure," Ms. Rogowski said. "And the farmers around here, not to mention the guys who work for me, all know that."

Annie Farrell, 54, was a single mother when she started farming in Bovina, N.Y., in the 1970's. "It was a man's world back then," she said. A longtime supplier to New York City chefs, she was one of the first local growers to produce organic vegetables of restaurant quality. "The kind of farming I wanted to do takes finesse and patience, and the men didn't seem too impressed."

The rise of small-scale "market farming" has brought many women back to farming. "Small tractors have become the fastest growing segment in the agricultural equipment industry," said Barry Nelson, a spokesman for John Deere. "We have more women buying tractors than ever before, and more small farms that need just one piece of heavy equipment. It's a lot easier to get started than it used to be."

Even so, according to the Department of Agriculture, women are far more likely than men to be farming on inherited land. Betsey Ryder's farm, in Brewster, N.Y., has been in her family since 1795.

Today, Ryder Farm's motto is: "Where the Ladies Drive the Tractors."

"When I was growing up, family farms didn't seem like they had a financial future," Ms. Ryder, 49, said.

Summary: Thousands of women are changing the face of American farming, particularly in the Northeast.


For Ivan G. Seidenberg, chief executive of Verizon Communications, 2005 was a very good year. As head of the telecommunications giant, Mr. Seidenberg received $19.4 million in salary, bonus, restricted stock and other compensation, 48 percent more than in the previous year.

Others with a stake in Verizon did not fare so well. Shareholders watched their stock fall 26 percent, bondholders lost value as credit agencies downgraded the company's debt and pensions for 50,000 managers were frozen at year-end. When Verizon closed the books last year, it reported an earnings decline of 5.5 percent.

And yet, according to the committee of Verizon's board that determines his compensation, Mr. Seidenberg earned his pay last year as the company exceeded "challenging" performance benchmarks. Mr. Seidenberg's package was competitive with that of other companies in Verizon's industry, shareholders were told, and was devised with the help of an "outside consultant" who reports to the committee.

The independence of this "outside consultant" is open to question. Although neither Verizon officials nor its directors identify its compensation consultant, people briefed on the relationship say it is Hewitt Associates of Lincolnshire, Ill., a provider of employee benefits management and consulting services with $2.8 billion in revenue last year.

Hewitt does much more for Verizon than advise it on compensation matters. Verizon is one of Hewitt's biggest customers in the far more profitable businesses of running the company's employee benefit plans, providing actuarial services to its pension plans and advising it on human resources management. According to a former executive of the firm who declined to be identified out of concern about affecting his business, Hewitt has received more than half a billion dollars in revenue from Verizon and its predecessor companies since 1997.

In other words, the very firm that helps Verizon's directors decide what to pay its executives has a long and lucrative relationship with the company, maintained at the behest of the executives whose pay it recommends.

This is the secretive, prosperous and often conflicted world of compensation consultants, who are charged with helping corporate boards determine executive pay that is appropriate and fair, and who are often cited as the unbiased advisers whenever shareholders criticize a company's pay as excessive.

It is a world where consulting fees can reach $950 an hour, rivaling those of the nation's top lawyers. And it has grown into a substantial industry where there is little disclosure about how executive pay is determined.

Marc C. Reed, executive vice president for human resources at Verizon, declined to identify the company's compensation consultant, noting that the Securities and Exchange Commission did not require it. "We understand the potential perception issue," he said in an e-mail message, "but we think it's important to honor the confidentiality of our advisers, and we have always ensured there have been no conflicts of interest."

Suzanne Zagata-Meraz, a spokeswoman for Hewitt, said in a statement: "Hewitt Associates has strict policies in place to ensure the independence and objectivity of all our consultants, including executive compensation consultants. In addition, Hewitt adheres to strict confidentiality requirements and a strong Hewitt code of conduct."

Because much of what goes on in compensation consulting stays in the hushed confines of corporate boardrooms, the roles of these advisers in determining executive pay have been hidden from investors' view. Nevertheless, corporate governance experts say, the conflicts bedeviling some of the large consulting firms help explain why in good times or bad, executive pay in America reaches dizzying heights each year.

Warren E. Buffett, the chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway and an accomplished investor, has noted the troubling contributions that compensation consultants have made to executive pay in recent years.

"Too often, executive compensation in the U.S. is ridiculously out of line with performance," he wrote in his most recent annual report. "The upshot is that a mediocre-or-worse C.E.O.  aided by his handpicked V.P. of human relations and a consultant from the ever-accommodating firm of Ratchet, Ratchet & Bingo  all too often receives gobs of money from an ill-designed compensation arrangement."

How Much Is Too Much?

Summary: The secretive and often conflicted world of compensation consultants has grown into a big industry.


Sunday, October 31th 1999, 2:11AM

Remember when you first heard "That Song" while watching the movie "Titanic?" Who would have thought that it would go on? And on. And on.

But nearly two years after the great ship cinematically plunged to the bottom of the Atlantic,"My Heart Will Go On" continues to be as much a part of Celine Dion as her French-Canadian accent.

Dion put a halt to her career several months ago when her husband-manager, Rene Angelil, was diagnosed with cancer. In the process, she had to cancel an engagement at Caesars.

Every one understood, wished her well and said a few prayers. Now, Angelil seems to be on the road to recovery. And Dion is back doing what she does best.

Her first East Coast gig since Angelil's illness was the other night at Caesars, a $200-per-tush payback to the casino for the lost summer dates.

Normally, this space doesn't review shows that are in Atlantic City for only a short while. But because this is a comeback of sorts for Dion, a fresh peek was in order.

How did she look? How did she sound? Was she still on firm footing on a stage?

The answers: Yes, yes and a resounding yes. Dion has developed into a formidable stage presence - she obviously enjoyed the opportunity to sing a love song or two to her husband who sat in the middle of the audience.

Her voice was lush and robust. And the crowd didn't seem to mind her several asides to Angelil - including a rather curious anecdote of how she had caddied for him a week before when he had played golf with Phil Mickelson and "for the first time I felt that I was the boss."

Perhaps there was something lost in the translation.

But when it came to the music, nothing was missing. Knowing full well that "Titanic" still spawns a tidal wave of emotions, Dion's show opened with an orchestral overture of "My Heart Will Go On," while a hue of blue, white, sepia and burnish-purple lights flashed on the stage.

Then from the back recesses of the large stage, Dion suddenly appeared in a striking white pantsuit to sing "Let's Talk About Love" with a chorus of local kids.

"Declaration of Love," "Because You Loved Me," "To Love You More" and "Tell Him" - an ingenious duet with Barbra Streisand via the magic of TV video - were lovely. But the star pushed the envelope of sentimentality to the limit by singing "I'm Your Angel" directly to Angelil.

By the time she boogied into the Bee Gees' "Stayin' Alive" from "Saturday Night Fever," she had succeeded in coaxing almost every member of the audience onto his or her feet and dance in the aisles.

But as flashy as her handlers had made the show, this was more about the state of the artist. And the fact is, Dion's interpretation of a lyric is right up there with Streisand, Barbara Cook and Billie Holiday.

The charisma she exudes makes her instantly likeable and she seems to be genuinely interested in her audience's well-being. When she accepts a bouquet of flowers from a fan, for instance, she does so with affection and meaningful eye contact.

Dion's sense of commitment is no less an attribute. Few people would have complained had Dion not so speedily honored her promise to return. She certainly doesn't need the money. But there is pride and duty accompanying the enormous talent in this songbird from the North.

And when finally, inevitably - resplendent in a silvery gown with an immensely long train - she belts out her signature piece, you can (almost) forget the schmaltz and the soap opera lyrics.

You really wish she could go on Â and on Â and on.

* The Coasters, The Drifters and The Platters end a weekend at Harrah's with two shows at 7 & 10 p.m. Call the box office at (609) 441-5165 for ticket prices and availability.

* Three Dog Night ends its weekend engagement at Resorts tonight at 8 and tomorrow night at 7:30. Tickets for the Aussie group are $25. Call (609) 344-6000.

* There's boxing on the bill at Bally's on Saturday night when a pair of heavyweights Hasim Rashman and Oleg Maskaev battle in the Boardwalk Convention Hall arena. Card begins at 8 p.m. and tickets are scaled from $25 to $100. Call (609) 340-1709.

* Harrah's is still on a nostalgia kick as Jay Black and the Americans take center stage at the Broadway-By-the-Bay Theater. The lads are there from Tuesday through next Sunday. Call (609) 441-5165 for times and tickets.

* Much of the same is taking place across town at Resorts where Four of a Kind Four Aces, Four Lads, The Duprees and The New Cordettes pitches its tent from Wednesday through next Sunday. Tickets for this show are $25. Call (609) 344-6000.

* Divas on Ice glides into the Etess Arena at the Taj Mahal for one show only on Saturday night. Though it's billed as a family show, the tickets are a bit pricey: $55 to $125. Call (609) 449-1000.

Summary: Remember when you first heard "That Song"while watching the movie "Titanic?"Who would have thought that it would go on? And on. And on. But nearly two years after the great ship cinematically plunged to the bottom of the Atlantic,"My Heart Will Go On"continues to be as much a part of Celine Dion as her French-Canadian accent. Dion put a halt to her career several months ago when her husband-manager, Rene Angelil, was


Sunday, October 22th 2006, 2:33AM

(Dates are subject to change)

At Boardwalk Hall (609) 348-7000

Oct. 27: The Stones roll out their "Bigger Bang Tour" for an 8 p.m. concert sponsored by the Borgata. Tickets are priced at $60, $99, $250 and $450.

Oct. 27: If the Stones are too pricey, try "Zappa Plays Zappa," a tour de Frank starring the late rocker's son Dweezil in the Event Center at 8 p.m.; $35-$65.

Oct. 27: John Legend, the Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter, comes to the Music Box at 9 p.m.; $60.

Oct. 28: Metal-grunge group Alice in Chains is at the Event Center at 8 p.m.; $49.50-$59.50.

Tonight-Oct. 26: The legendary Fifth ÂDimension goes up, up and away at the Grand Theater at 7 p.m. (the Oct. 23 performance is at 3 p.m.); $25.

Oct. 27: Paul Stanley with Big City Rock headlines a heavy metal gig in the House of Blues at 9 p.m.; $32-$52.

Oct. 27: Taj Mahal and Jonah Smith play the Club Harlem Ballroom at 9 p.m.; $29-$25.

Oct. 28: Alice Cooper and Wednesday 13 rock the House at 7 p.m.; $32-$52.

At Trump Plaza (609) 441-6000

Oct. 27-28: The Polish Prince is back and the Imperial Ballroom has him: ÂBobby Vinton performs Friday at 10 p.m. and Saturday at 9 p.m.; $50.50.

At Trump Taj Mahal (609) 449-5150

Oct. 28: WKTU's "Freestyle '06" with TKA/K7, Judy Torres, Corina, Nayobe, Coro and Sweet Sensation headlines the Etess Arena at 7 p.m.; $40-$95.

Tonight: Brooklyn's own Cyndi Lauper travels north for some fun in the Fox Theater at 7 p.m.; $38.50-$49.50.

Oct. 27: Reclusive singer Olivia Newton-John comes out to play in the Fox at 9 p.m.; $66-$82.50.

Oct. 28: Howie Mandel is the Fox headliner at 10 p.m.; sold out.

Oct. 27: Loretta Lynn and Randy ÂTravis, veteran country stars, perform at 8 p.m.; $27.50.

Oct. 28: Boxing - Mike Oliver takes on Adam Carrera in a 12-round battle for the USBA Super Bantamweight Championship. Card begins at 7:30; $25-$75.

Oct. 25-29: Funny lady Kathy Griffin is in the spotlight for shows on Wed., Thurs. and Fri. at 7:30, Sat. at 8 and next Sun. at 7; $35.

Summary: UPCOMING EVENTS (Dates are subject to change) WEEK OF OCT. 22-28 ATLANTIC CITY At Boardwalk Hall (609) 348-7000 Oct. 27: The Stones roll out their "Bigger Bang Tour"for an 8 p.m. concert sponsored by the Borgata. Tickets are priced at $60, $99, $250 and $450. At Borgata (609) 677-1000 Oct. 27: If the Stones are too pricey, try "Zappa Plays Zappa,"a tour de Frank starring the late rocker's son Dweezil in the


By TIMOTHY J. BURGER DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU

Friday, March 24th 2000, 2:12AM

WASHINGTON - Seeking to end a bitter four-month holy war in the halls of Congress, Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) yesterday named the first-ever Catholic priest to serve as the House chaplain.

Hastert tapped the Rev. Daniel Coughlin, 65, of the Archdiocese of Chicago, after the speaker's controversial first pick - a Presbyterian minister - backed out under pressure.

Catholic groups and Democrats had angrily questioned whether anti-Catholic bias was behind the GOP's original choice. In November, Hastert had picked the Rev. Charles Wright, even though a Catholic priest, the Rev. Timothy O'Brien, got several more votes from Hastert's 18-member advisory panel.

The issue grew in prominence after GOP presidential candidate George W. Bush campaigned at Bob Jones University, which considers the Catholic Church a cult.

"I am a patient man," Hastert said on the House floor yesterday. "But even I did not easily take in stride carelessly tossed accusations of bigotry."

Hastert allies put out the word yesterday that the speaker hadn't pressured Wright to withdraw his name during a secret meeting Tuesday when Wright offered to step aside.

But the speaker apparently didn't need to lean on the cleric because House Commerce Committee Chairman Tom Bliley (R-Va.) had already played the bad cop.

Bliley, who headed the committee Hastert assigned to suggest a successor to retiring Chaplain James Ford, had already urged Wright to pull out, according to a knowledgeable GOP source. A source said the request came in a letter several days ago.

"I'm happy that this seems to be getting to a point of being behind us," said Rep. Joseph Crowley (D-Queens), a Catholic. "The process could have been a lot better."

The controversy festered for months, but Hastert, a Protestant, moved swiftly yesterday to put it behind the GOP in an election year that will see 30 million Catholic voters help decide whether Republicans keep their narrow House majority.

Republicans blame House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt (D-Mo.) for a quiet crusade to convince voters that the House GOP is anti-Catholic.

Gephardt insisted on the House floor yesterday, "I have never said and I never believed that there was a bias involved in the making of this selection."

But Hastert signaled that the tension with Gephardt may endure. "Where I come from, such slander is an ugly business," the speaker said.

The Catholic League at first harshly criticized the GOP leaders for caving in to evangelical Christians at odds with Catholics on many issues.

But yesterday, the New York-based group offered grudging praise, saying, "We commend House Speaker Dennis Hastert for bringing this chapter to an end."


In the age of fertility treatments, twins are more common than ever. But a pair of babies born to a woman in the village of Mathurapur Chakiya in West Champaran, India, on July 29, really beat the odds.

That's because their mother, Rinku Devi, 28, has two uteruses and conceived her kids, both boys, at different times, something that experts claim has a one-in-50-million chance of happening.

The medical condition of having two uteruses in one body is known as uterus didelphys and reportedly affects less than 100 women around the world, according to India Today.

Doctors say uterus didelphys represents a uterine malformation, where the uterus is present as a paired organ. In most cases, the women are not even aware of the condition. Chances of miscarriage, premature labor and underweight babies are high in such pregnancies.

Dr. Singh, who delivered the babies by Caesarean section, said both Devi and the babies were doing fine, something that, again, isn't that common.

"It's very rare," she said. "In most cases, the babies die."

The surgery took about an hour and the boys, whose names have not been announced, weighed 3 pounds, 3 ounces and 4 pounds, 4 ounces, respectively, according to Barcroft Media.

Although Devi will have twice as much work handling two babies, Dr. Singh says they can't be officially called "twins" since one of the brothers was actually in utero three weeks longer.

"It means Rinku conceived at different times," she said, adding that unlike some other women born with a similar condition, she did not have two vaginas.

In fact, Devi only found out about her unusual condition when she was in labor, even though she had delivered her first baby four years ago.

"Since she carried only one child in one uterus at that time, it was not detected by doctors then," Dipti said.

Naturally, having this sprung on her while going through childbirth was intense to say the least.

"I got to know about having two uteruses when I was already in labor pain," she said to Metro.co.uk. "I didn’t know how to react. I was in pain and quite scared. I had not heard of anything like this before."

Neither had her family and they were understandably freaked out by the diagnosis.

"They were initially worried when I told them about my condition but they heaved a sigh a relief after the delivery," she said.

However, Dr. Serena Chen, the director of the Reproductive Endocrine and Infertility department at St. Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston, New Jersey, is skeptical that the babies were conceived three weeks apart.

"The chance that a healthy fertile woman has a double uterus is about one in 3000," she told HuffPost Weird News. "It is extremely unlikely that these babies were conceived a month apart. And the statement that the doctors discovered that the babies were conceived a month apart during labor makes no sense."

Chen says in order to "truly know" the conception dates the doctors would have needed document that at the very early stages of pregnancy.

"Even then, many twins are discordant -- of different sizes," she said. "Size does not always equal gestational age, especially when more than one baby is involved."

The doctor says once ovulation occurs and pregnancy is established, the hormone progesterone suppresses ovulation such that releasing an egg one month later is extremely unlikely.

She says the most likely scenario is still quite unusual.

"It's possible this woman released one egg from each ovary during the same month," Chen said. "The twins may be different sizes because of individual factors.

"Perhaps one uterus is smaller than the other, has less of a blood supply and so affected the growth of the smaller twin. She has a previous pregnancy so the uterus that carried the previous pregnancy is probably much larger."

Still, double pregancies like Devi's are exceptionally rare, but, even so, there have been very few cases of "double pregnancies" across the world in recent years.

Last year, Angie Cromer, 3, a nurse from Murray, Utah, suffered from the same condition and delivered a boy and a girl. Like Devi's sons, they were not twins because they were conceived at different times.

In 2009, Sarah Reinfelder, 21, from Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, gave birth to two premature babies through a similar condition and she says Devi has her work cut out for her.

"My advice to her would be to get them on a routine as soon as possible," Reinfelder told HuffPost Weird News. "Try to keep them together -- especially naps -- so you can have little breaks. Even so, I'll be praying for her."

Chris "The Dutchess" Walton has entered with Guinness World Records book with record-setting fingernails to 19 feet, 9 inches long.

Chris "The Dutchess" Walton has entered with Guinness World Records book with record-setting fingernails to 19 feet, 9 inches long.


Last week, talk show host Stephen Colbert announced he was running in the GOP primary in South Carolina, and gave control of his very real Super PAC to fellow talk show host Jon Stewart.

Colbert then announced on his show Monday that he's unable to run as a candidate in South Carolina because the state does not allow write-ins in the primary. So he urged his supporters to instead vote for a surrogate candidate: Herman Cain. Why? Because though Cain is officially out of the race, his name remains on the ballot.

Tuesday, Stewart's pro-Colbert PAC released a commercial in South Carolina that urged voters to cast their ballot ... for Cain. None of this came as a shock to Cain, because the businessman is in on the joke.

"On Stephen Colbert’s endorsement of himself as Herman Cain, I find it very clever and humorous, as it should be," Cain told Fox411. "Anyone who finds what Mr. Colbert is doing offensive, should simply lighten up. To be perfectly clear, I will not be assuming Stephen Colbert's identity. We are very different when it comes to the color of our – hair."

Kathy Hoekstra, Cain’s Director of Media Relations, said they were given a heads up that something was happening a few days ago.

"Colbert’s people got in touch with us late last week and Mr. Cain will be taping a segment with Mr. Colbert on Friday in South Carolina,” Hoekstra laughed. “The endorsement of course comes as a pleasant surprise.

Colbert outlined his plan in detail on his Comedy Central show 'The Colbert Report.'

“Because Cain and I are so similar, I think that if this Saturday Herman Cain were to get a significant number of votes, that would be a sign that voters are hungry for a Stephen Colbert campaign,” Colbert said. “Anyone who shares my values can show it by voting for Herman Cain. Independents, Democrats, college kids, viewers of my show, people who attended my rally, my Twitter followers, my good friends on Reddit. Young people of the Internet, stand up and shout! Because you are legally eligible to go down to the polls and tell the world how much you love Herman Cain.”

Hoekstra told Fox411 that Cain, who has yet to endorse one of the remaining Republican candidates and is currently on a cross-country tour behaving as if he is still a candidate, is hoping to bring some much needed levity to the campaign trail.

“Mr. Cain did say that he thinks this campaign needs a sense of humor. When he was on ‘Real Time With Bill Maher’ they agreed that America needs to lighten up,” Hoekstra said. “I know he is looking forward to meeting Mr. Colbert and recording a segment with Colbert.”

Summary: Herman Cain says he's in on Stephen Colbert's S.C. primary prank, tells detractors to 'lighten up'


ROME | Fri Aug 28, 2009 11:38am EDT

ROME (Reuters) - Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is launching legal actions against media in Italy and abroad, including Britain, France and Spain, for libel in their coverage of his private life, his lawyer said on Friday.

His lawyer Niccolo Ghedini told Reuters that he and his colleagues abroad had already filed lawsuits against newspapers in Italy, France and Spain and had instructed lawyers in Britain to study possible cases of libel there.

"We have instructed our colleagues to evaluate, according to the laws in their countries, the most serious cases of real, true defamation," Ghedini said in a telephone interview.

He said lawyers acting for Berlusconi had sued the French weekly Nouvel Observateur for a story headlined "Sex, Power and Lies" and Spain's El Pais for publishing photos of guests at the billionaire premier's Sardinian villa cavorting naked.

In Italy they have sued La Repubblica, a tireless critic of the conservative leader, for repeating the Nouvel Observateur story and for defaming Berlusconi by repeating daily its "10 Questions" about his private life and political aspirations.

Ghedini declined to list which other publications could face lawsuits, especially in Britain where papers have taken a special interest in the scandals over Berlusconi's relationship with a teenage girl, prostitutes and divorce from his second wife.

Berlusconi, owner of Italy's largest private broadcaster Mediaset, has accused his television competitor Rupert Murdoch of mounting a personal attack on him via the London newspaper The Times, owned by Murdoch's News Corp.

Ghedini said British papers "have indeed been aggressive, but I have not looked at this article by article, I have left that to my colleagues. I have enough to do here in Italy."

The lawyer said the 72-year-old Italian leader, who has been elected prime minister three times and still enjoys high ratings in polls despite a deep recession and all the scandals, "expects to come in for harsh criticism like any other politician."

But he said La Repubblica had an "intolerable" campaign against the premier "which brings Italy into discredit, because all foreign papers repeat these offenses as if they were true."

"If you say to someone 'You are sick and have a sexual addiction' and ask how they intend to get cured, you are taking it for granted that this person is ill," said the lawyer, giving an example of one of the allegations made against Berlusconi.

His estranged wife, Veronica Lario, said earlier this year that she wanted a divorce because of, among other things, his relationships with young women.

Berlusconi denies anything "spicy" in his relationship with Naples teenager Noemi Letizia which angered his wife and says he did not know that an escort who slept at his Rome apartment, and secretly recorded conversations with him, was a prostitute.

These episodes have earned him reprimands from the powerful Roman Catholic church and hopes of a rapprochement were dashed when his presence at a ceremony for repentance was called off on Friday, as was a dinner with Pope Benedict's deputy.

Berlusconi's family newspaper Il Giornale fueled the spat by digging up a sex scandal involving the editor of a Catholic paper which has criticized Berlusconi for his lifestyle.

The head of Italy's main opposition Democratic Party, Dario Franceschini, called Berlusconi's attacks on his critics in the media "a sign of fear and weakness."

(Writing by Stephen Brown; Editing by Angus MacSwan)


OSLO, Aug. 22 - The Norwegian police were scouring the country on Sunday for "The Scream" - Edvard Munch's masterpiece of existential angst and one of the world's most famous paintings - after armed robbers grabbed it and another painting off the wall of a crowded museum and sped off in a black station wagon.

The painting, which features a haunted-looking stick of a man howling on a bridge under a sunset, is an icon of the modern Expressionist school of painting and has been replicated humorously on coffee mugs, T-shirts and shower curtains the world over. The other stolen painting, "Madonna," is perhaps the second best-known image by the artist.

" 'The Scream' is in a league by itself," said Franck Giraud, a New York art dealer and a former head of modern art at Christie's. "It's almost impossible to value, but if it were for sale today, it could sell for over $100 million and become the most expensive painting in the world."

Art experts said that given the fame of both "The Scream" and "Madonna," it would be nearly impossible to sell them to a collector. They speculated instead that the thieves would demand some form of ransom. That is what happened in 1994, when another version of "The Scream" was stolen and later recovered.

In the theft on Sunday, two robbers, wearing dark ski hats over their faces, burst into the Munch Museum in Oslo at 11:10 a.m. and threatened unarmed guards with pistols, the police said.

Speaking in Norwegian, one of the men held two guards at gunpoint, ordering them to the floor, while the other used a wire cutter to clip the framed paintings free of the wall, museum officials said. Witnesses described the thieves as clumsy, even dropping the paintings on the way out. A silent alarm alerted the police.

"One of the guards, a woman, had to be sent to the hospital because she was in such shock, but no one was physically injured and the police were here in under a minute," said a museum spokeswoman, Jorun Christoffersen. "There happened to be a police patrol right in the neighborhood, but it all happened so fast that the thieves were gone."

Two hours later, less than a mile away, the police found shattered wooden frames and glass from the stolen works - a discovery that caused art experts to fear that the two treasures might already have been damaged.

"They are very fragile, I'm afraid," said the director of the Munch Museum, Gunnar Sorensen, said in an interview. He said "The Scream" in particular, painted in tempera on cardboard measuring about 33 inches by 25 inches, could be irreparably damaged if bent. The slightly larger "Madonna," another ghostly composition, was painted in oil on canvas and is more likely to survive intact without its protective frame, he said.

The getaway car, an Audi station wagon, was found in northern Oslo. Witnesses said it had been driven by a third man, also masked. The police said they were examining the car and the discarded frames for fingerprints or DNA evidence.

The version of "The Scream" stolen in 1994 had been hanging in the National Gallery, also in Oslo, when burglars entered through a window before opening time.

Three months later - after the government refused to pay a $1 million ransom demand - four Norwegian men were arrested in an elaborate sting operation in which British undercover agents from Scotland Yard posed as representatives of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and offered to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to secure the painting and return it to the National Gallery in Oslo, said Leif A. Lier, the lead detective on the case and a former assistant police chief in Oslo.

"The important thing was that we got the picture back," said Mr. Lier, who today is a private detective. That alternate version of "The Scream" can still be seen in the National Gallery.

Mr. Lier said he was astounded that robbers a decade later could charge into the Munch Museum in broad daylight, with close to 80 people milling around in the galleries, and escape with two priceless works of art.

"Hasn't the city of Oslo learned anything about security in 10 years?" he asked. "I am shocked that once again it was so easy."

Summary: Edvard Munch's masterpiece, "The Scream," and another painting were grabbed off the wall of a crowded museum by armed robbers.


For WGBH radio host Brian O’Donovan , growing up in Ireland during the 1960s and ’70s, Christmas shone a like a warm beacon of light over those dark social and economic times.

The season still holds a special place in his heart. “I believe strongly that Christmastime gives us a license to be sentimental in ways we’d hold ourselves back from at other times of the year, and music is a great way to express that,” said O’Donovan, 55.

In 2003, he launched his own holiday concert, “A Christmas Celtic Sojourn.” Returning this year for its 11th season, O’Donovan and music director Seamus Egan will be joined by a world-class lineup of Celtic musicians, singers, and dancers.

To get us in the spirit, O’Donovan shared a list of his favorite holiday albums of all time.

1. Sarah McLachlan, “Wintersong” “I’ve always loved her singing. She takes a romantic approach to Christmas music. Christmas is a time for romance and being with the one you love and this is the perfect backdrop for a get-together.”

2. The Sweetback Sisters, “The Sweetback Sisters’ Country Christmas Sing-Along Spectacular” “This has become my favorite album of the last two years. [It] takes classic, mostly secular songs that are popular in America and does exactly what the name suggests. I challenge anybody out there to not sing along with every track.”

3. Nat King Cole, “Merry Christmas” “At Christmastime, we can feel nostalgic for an era, especially in the United States, when many of us weren’t even alive. I think Nat King Cole captures that distinctly American World War II and postwar-era Christmas nostalgia like no other.”

4. The Chieftains, “The Bells of Dublin” “I had to put an Irish or Celtic album on the list. It came out many years ago and really was one of the definitive albums that took Christmas music and gave it that distinct Irish flavor.”

5. The Roches, “We Three Kings” “They have a very distinct type of harmony and delivery in their regular music. When they applied it to Christmas music, they came out with very singable songs. ‘Star of Wonder’ is my favorite off of the album.”

A Christmas Celtic Sojourn with Brian O’Donovan comes to Cutler Majestic Theatre at Emerson College, Dec. 19-22. Tickets: $25-$85. www.wgbh.org/celtic

Summary: For WGBH radio host Brian O’Donovan, growing up in Ireland during the 1960s and ’70s, Christmas shone a like a warm beacon of light over those dark social and economic times.  “I believe strongly that Christmastime gives us a license to be sentimental in ways we’d hold ourselves back from at other times of the year, and music is a great way to express that,” said O’Donovan. In 2003, he launched his own holiday concert, “A Christmas Celtic Sojourn.” Returning this year for its 11th season, O’Donovan and music director Seamus Egan will be joined by a world-class lineup of Celtic musicians, singers, and dancers. To get us in the spirit, O’Donovan shared a list of his favorite holiday albums of all time.


04/29/2014 at 12:15 PM EDT

Carole King and Jessie Mueller

, based on Carole Kingâs life and music, was just

, including a best actress nod for the show's star, Jessie Mueller. Which isn't surprising – like

, this jukebox musical features popular hit tunes from the '60s and '70s that were written by King, who's either written or co-written 118 songs that have made the Billboard Hot 100 since 1960.

In fact, during the 1960s, when King was in her early 20s, she was already experiencing massive success writing hits for African-American singing sensations like the Drifters and the Shirelles. Later, in 1971, she experienced fame in a different way, when her solo album

hit the top of the charts and stayed there for 15 weeks, eventually selling more than 25 million copies worldwide.

One of the most fascinating takeaways audience members have from seeing this show is realizing just how many of their favorite tunes were penned by the prodigy. We've compiled a list of some of the ones we bet you probably never thought were written by a young white girl from Brooklyn.

Summary: The Broadway musical Beautiful, based on the singer's life and music, just picked up 8 Tony nominations


It seems that every few days we hear about another cyber-hacking case. Last week, reports of a Russian cybercrime group amassing 1.2 billion usernames and passwords ran above the fold in The New York Times. The news was pretty unnerving but it has since lost considerable steam as other news outlets noted that many of these credentials were actually counted in other big security breaches. Also, the fact that the source of the information, a company named Hold Security, was charging $120 a pop to tell companies whether their information was breached made the whole thing suspect.

So does that mean you have little to worry about? Not exactly.

Here’s what happened this week in my little universe. My reporting assistant, Kelly Hultgren, discovered that for the past three months her bank account had been debited every month to buy Experian credit monitoring services – ironic, I know – for someone who was clearly not her.

In other words, breaches are happening all around you. So here’s the remaining – crucial – question: What will it take for you to start doing the bare minimum? You can’t protect yourself completely. But you can make yourself much safer by doing these four things:

Change your username and passwords.

Some 25% of U.S. Internet users who use accounts or sites requiring a password have no more than three sets of credentials, according to an April survey from Harris Poll commissioned by LifeLock. That’s troubling because 56% of Americans use more than 10 sites and accounts. (Full disclosure: I partner with LifeLock on educational initiatives.) To make your life easier, it’s OK to use what security experts call a “throwaway” password on forums and blogs. But when it comes to your social networks, banks, brokerage firms and any place else you transact, you need to do better.

Passwords must be distinct and at least eight characters, including letters (caps and lower case), numbers and symbols – not forming a word found in the dictionary. A password manager ala Dashlane.com is very helpful. Or use this trick: Come up with a sentence that you can remember. Take the first letter of each word. Substitute symbols and numbers for some letters. Then attach the first letter of the website you’re on to the beginning (capital), and the last to the end (lower case). So, when you’re visiting Citibank, the sentence: My brother Oliver ate a big, grey seal becomes CMB0AABG$i.

This is the lesson of Kelly’s experience, but she’s far from alone. In 2012, the Department of Justice reported that existing account fraud was the most common type of I.D. theft – impacting 15.3 million people, half through their bank accounts. It also noted that bank account I.D. theft victims are twice as likely to report severe emotional distress as credit card I.D. theft victims. “With online banking becoming so ubiquitous, people view their statements online and engage in more and more transactions online, which all has inherent risk,” says Eva Casey Velasquez, president of Identity Theft Resource Center. Velasquez says use the increased interaction to your advantage by logging in (and reviewing) everyday or every other day, which offsets the risk you’re taking with having more accounts and more passwords.

And when you do review your statements, be it online or on paper, don’t just look at the big numbers, adds Bill Hardekopf, chief executive of LowCards.com. “You need to look at every single transaction. A lot of thieves will run a small transaction first to test drive your information. If it’s valid, then they’ll go further.” This was the case for my assistant, whose fraudulent charges were all less than $20. In fact, she waited a couple of days (after seeing the charges) to act. Her logic: If it’s Experian, it must be fine. You have to scrutinize everything, Hardekopf says. “If you see something from Experian, sure it looks more legitimate than Joe’s Garage and Liquor, but you have to ask yourself, did I sign up for this, when and where?”

Review your credit card statements and credit reports.

The same goes for your credit card statements. Roughly 25% of people have been a victims of credit card fraud – yet people review their credit card statements less than they do their bank accounts. According to a Harris Interactive study conducted for Experian’s ProtectMyID, nearly one in five own up to never checking them at all. Likewise, according to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, one-third of consumers have never pulled their reports. These are crimes where the best defense is a good offense. If your personal information is wrong in your report — or you see lines of credit you don’t recognize — raise the red flag. (You can get three free credit reports a year from annualcreditreport.com and a free TransUnion report once a week from creditkarma.com. )

Sign up for every possible notification.

Chances are you’re eligible for alert options for your cards (and possibly your credit reports). But you’ll likely have to look for them and opt into them yourself. You can elect to receive an email if your card is charged without the physical card being present, as Velasquez does, or even one every time your card is charged. “At this point, it’s on the consumer,” she says. “We need to get consumers to shift their thinking from annoyance — this is clogging my inbox — to no, this is important and it protects me.”

Are you guilty of throwing out your financial documents without thinking twice? Fifteen percent of U.S. adults do, according to Harris Interactive, and one-third store sensitive documents (e.g., bank statements, Social Security card, medical bills) in non-secure locations. Bad move. Dumpster diving is not a thing of the past.

Finally, it may put your mind at ease to know the difference between a data breach and I.D. theft. In one-third of cases, if your data is breached (aka stolen) you will be a victim of some kind of I.D. theft, according to Javelin Strategies. It can be a small theft – where someone uses your credit card – or a big one – where someone pretending to be you applies for a job or a loan. The latter is tough to unwind and the reason to take all of these precautions in the first place.

Summary: Start by checking your monthly credit card statements – line-by-line.


Marketing a mattress is, perhaps paradoxically, rather unsexy.

Typically, the mattress business is consistent — consumers always need to buy new ones or replacements — which explains why private equity firms are drawn to it. But a few years ago, amid the financial downturn and slowdown in housing sales, Sealy’s high-end Stearns & Foster line began to see its sales markedly decline. So in 2008 management decided it needed to find a way to spice up the stalwart brand. The turnaround required Sealy ZZ executives to do something they’d never done before: get in bed together (figuratively, of course).

With the help of IDEO, a high-profile design consultancy known for its work on Apple’s first mouse, Sealy management pushed previously independent teams to communicate and collaborate. Engineers from Sealy headquarters in Trinity, N.C., joined sales and marketing people on visits to retailers in New York, Atlanta, and Chicago. A Sealy marketing manager and engineer embedded themselves in IDEO’s Boston offices for eight weeks for a deep dive into revamping the product.

MORE: Fortune’s 2012 Executive Dream Team

The upshot: Sealy learned that customers see a mattress as more than just a slab to sleep on. “They want it to reflect who they are,” says Dave Moret, who heads up research and development. A newly created core team, which tapped employees from throughout the company, worked with IDEO’s designers to, among other things, add a fleur-de-lis to the top quilt. It is more than just a pretty flourish: The motif reflects the heritage of Stearns & Foster, which began as a maker of horse-drawn carriage upholstery in the mid-1800s; the fleur-de-lis treatment was often used in carriage design.

And as other manufacturers were removing handles to cut costs, Sealy added more, for a total of eight, all intended to look like the ones people used to pull themselves up and into a carriage. Allen Platek, VP of new-product development, who has been with Sealy 16 years, says the revamp “was one of the most fun times of my career.”

You’d think such cross-functional work would be commonplace in corporations these days — it’s why we have jargon like “cross-functional,” right? — and Fortune certainly has found a growing number of C-suite collaborations as part of our Executive Dream Team series. But Platek says, “Prior to this, what we did was in silos. Sales did their thing, marketing did their promotions and ads, R&D developed innovation, and then it was all thrown to operations. We had a disjointed effort.” The divisions didn’t always trust one another or feel comfortable sharing ideas. In Sealy’s case, it took some hired help from outside to force the kumbaya moment. And it worked: Once Sealy put the post-makeover mattresses in stores, CMO Jodi Allen says, “consumers really gravitated toward them. Even though they were obviously going to put a sheet on the bed, the aesthetics were critical in the showroom.”

MORE: Your fantasy dream team

The Stearns & Foster reboot didn’t come cheap: For the 2009 relaunch, labor costs climbed 50%, and pricier coils pushed materials expenses up 20%.

The entry price of a Stearns was previously $1,000; after the relaunch it was $1,200. Today it’s at $1,400. Sticker shock hasn’t proved to be a problem for Sealy: Stearns mattresses, which went through another round of improvements last year, broke sales records for the line in the first two quarters of 2012.

But Sealy can’t rest on the success of its premium brand. Last year rival Serta became the market-share leader in the business for the first time in 30 years, grabbing 18.3% of sales (compared with Sealy’s 17.8%). Serta has had success with iComfort, its take on the trendy “gel memory foam” category that purports to improve spinal alignment.

Sealy’s solution? More relaunches — and more collaboration. Only this time Sealy executives don’t need prodding. “Everyone is very familiar with each other and willing to be very honest, to the point of having a public disagreement and working it out right there,” says Michael Hendrix, who leads IDEO’s Boston offices. Sounds like a winning formula for a good night’s sleep.

This story is from the September 24, 2012 issue of Fortune.

Summary: How the bedmaker's marketing, design, engineering, and sales teams joined forces with IDEO to build a prettier bed.


Artist and musician Jem Finer - former member of the Pogues and creator of Longplayer, a 1,000-year-long piece of music - has been the artist-in-residence at the department of astrophysics at Oxford University since October 2003. Many scientists were sceptical when he arrived: what would an artist do exactly? But they have come to see that he is asking serious questions about their work, and two public exhibitions have emerged out of his residency.

Finer has built a 10 metre wooden spiral tower supporting a huge dish: called The Centre of the Universe, it can be seen in the University parks this month. Part sculpture, part scientific instrument, this is a working radio telescope, receiving information from outer space. The invisible waves picked up by the antenna are "translated" into visual data in a garden shed next to the installation.

The technology makes strange, deep sounds. Finer is hoping to record a meteor shower: they sound, he says, "particularly beautiful".

Some of his work is more down to earth. As part of an exhibition called 2015: Dreams, Plans, Visions (opening at Modern Art Oxford on June 9), Finer asked various people - astrophysicists, schoolchildren, artists - to make a map of Oxford and a map of the universe. The maps are strung from the ceiling at head height in a maze. There are drawings, collages made with hair, abstract paintings and word diagrams. Often it is hard to tell the difference between someone's map of Oxford and their representation of the universe.

Finer's work draws connections between the enormous timescales involved in cosmology and the human scale of a personal relationship with an environment. But another of his successes has been in bringing people together: some of the people in the astrophysics department have formed a band, called the Big-Eyed Beans From Venus.

Summary: Visual arts: Many scientists were sceptical when Oxford University's astrophysics department appointed an artist-in-residence. But they have come to see he is asking serious questions about their work


Everyone talks about wanting bipartisan reform of our hideous tax code. But look at the frustrations that have befallen Rep. Dave Camp (R-Mich.), who has thrown his heart and soul into trying to get it done. Camp, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, has spent four years pushing for tax reform in various forums. “There’s no purgatory for me, because I’ve lived it on earth,” he quips, citing his service on the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles Commission and the bipartisan Super Committee, both of which accomplished … nothing.

Camp’s suffering continues with the Tax Reform Act of 2014, a project on which he and his Democratic partner from Montana, Sen. Max Baucus, spent years seeking a consensus to take away various tax goodies and in exchange produce lower overall rates and a simpler code. This hasn’t happened since the stars miraculously aligned in 1986, producing the Bradley-Gephardt reform bill. Baucus and Camp modeled their approach on that, including hosting bipartisan burgers-and-beers at watering holes and distributing copies of Showdown at Gucci Gulch, a book about the 1986 reforms.

MORE: Why I like Buffett’s tax strategy more than Apple’s

Why am I telling you about Camp and his travails? In order to put a human face on a dry, abstract topic. And to show you that although Washington is a mess, there are decent people there willing to do the right, bipartisan thing.

Alas, despite the burgers, beers, and books, we won’t get tax reform this year. Odds against it were always high. They became astronomical when Baucus, head of the Senate Finance Committee, gave up his seat in early February to become ambassador to China. You can understand why he did that: He’s 72, his term is up, and he wasn’t going to run for reelection.

For reasons you’ll soon see, private equity, giant financial institutions, and real estate interests, among others, attacked Camp’s bill, introduced on Feb. 26. There are things in the bill to annoy almost everyone, which is why I like much of it — and why it deserves serious consideration, which it isn’t getting.

Camp’s bill proposes sensible things like taxing at regular rates rather than at low capital gains rates the “carried interest” piece of investors’ profits that buyout fund and hedge fund managers take. It also would enact a special tax on too-big-to-fail financial institutions, end deductions for state and local taxes, and restrict real estate tax breaks. The alternative minimum tax would disappear (yay!), and Camp would reduce the value of deductions for advertising and circulation expenses, both of which might hurt Fortune but are perfectly fine to me in a context of overall reform.

MORE: How to get Americans to save more at tax time

Camp, 60, announced in late March that he’s not running for reelection. He didn’t say why, but under House Republicans’ rules, he wouldn’t be chair of Ways and Means in the next congressional session. That would greatly reduce his power to push through bipartisan reform. Nevertheless, Camp is soldiering on with his enterprise — which, understandably, he won’t concede is doomed. He is holding hearings, talking about how tax reform would spur growth, seeking consensus for change even as the impending November elections make doing anything substantive and bipartisan almost impossible.

Why keep going? “My main quality is persistence,” Camp says. He cites his days on the swimming team at Herbert H. Dow High School in Midland, Mich., where he grew up. He never won a race, he said, but his coach entered him in long-distance races because he would always finish. That prompted me to call his coach, Herb Scogg. “Dave was a grinder,” Scogg told me. “He might be a lap or even two laps behind, but he never quit.” Scogg also told me something Camp hadn’t mentioned: that in his sophomore year, Camp was elected Dow High’s most valuable swimmer “because of the example he set for the team.”

Camp and Baucus did a lot of good, bipartisan work. Sure, we’ll never see Baucus-Camp enshrined next to Bradley-Gephardt. But someday someone may build on Baucus-Camp. Which might just reduce the pain of Camp’s tax purgatory on earth.

Graphic note: The $700 million in excise tax would be $525 million net of corporate tax deduction. The current 25% maximum tax on carried interest consists of 20% capital gains, 3.8% Medicare, and 1.2% personal exemption phaseout.

This story is from the May 19, 2014 issue of Fortune.

Summary: Washington may be a big fat mess, but there are still a few good congressmen willing to cross party lines to do the right thing.


This post is in partnership with Time. The article below was originally published at Time.com.

Google GOOG is developing technology to allow users to integrate multiple screens to create giant television-like screens of variable shapes and sizes, sources familiar with the matter told the Wall Street Journal.

Former Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Mary Lou Jepsen is leading the project, which is being developed in secret and has not been disclosed to the public. Jepsen previously led the project to create a cheap laptop that could be distributed widely in the developing world, an effort that failed to meet the high hopes surrounding it.

The ability to combine small screens to create larger ones would disrupt a market where prices increase dramatically with size. A 32-inch screen can retail for less than $1,000. A 110-inch screen, the largest manufactured, requires a custom order and can reportedly cost more than $100,000.

Summary: The idea is to be able to seamlessly connect smaller screens.


FORTUNE — When Congress returns to session on Monday it will find itself in a familiar position: with its back against the wall.

This time, Congress will be racing against a clock that’s ticking off the seconds until the payments that doctors receive in exchange for treating Medicare patients are cut significantly. If it fails to pass legislation to stave off the reduction by March 31, the 685,000 doctors that participate in Medicare will see their reimbursements slashed by 24% starting April 1.

The cut is based on what’s known as the sustainable growth rate (SGR) — a formula that was instituted as part of a 1997 deficit reduction law designed to limit federal health care spending by tying physician pay to an economic growth target. Medicare expenditures triggered an automatic 5% cut for the first time in 2002, but since then, Congress has passed 16 stop-gap measures — sometimes retroactively — to kick the cuts that average about 5% a year further down the road. It passed five of these band-aids in 2010 alone.

“These cuts going into place and then being reversed is just an incredibly wasteful, disruptive approach to the really important problem of trying to manage Medicare costs and health care costs in general,” says Molly Cooke, president of the American College of Physicians.

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Despite the impending need for an eleventh-hour legislative action, permanently ending the automatic spending cuts has bipartisan support. Physicians and medical industry groups were hoping that this would be the year when they’d see the repeal of the annual reductions based on the SGR formula. Talks looked promising in early February, when lawmakers introduced a bill that would give doctors serving Medicare patients a 0.5% reimbursement increase annually for five years. But that rare bipartisan effort came crashing down when House Republicans decided to pay for the bill — which will cost $138 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office — by delaying Obamacare’s individual mandate for five years. With largely Republican support, the House passed a bill linking the two issues on March 14.

The Democrat-controlled Senate is unlikely to take up the bill, and the Obama administration has already said that the President will veto it if it reaches his desk. That means that starting next Monday, Congress has seven days to come up with a new bipartisan solution to keep the 24% cut from going into effect.

Lost in the partisan wrangling and political grandstanding is the fact that repealing the SGR cuts is needed to ensure the health security for elderly Americans and to support the physicians who care for them.

In 2012, 9,500 physicians who had previously accepted Medicare opted out of the system, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. While that’s a small portion of the hundreds of thousands of doctors who still participate in the program, the 2012 drop-out rate represents a significant uptick from the 3,700 physicians who left the Medicare system in 2009.

The constant threat of cuts to Medicare reimbursement rates, which already lag behind inflation, is widely believed to be pushing physicians out of the program. And if Medicare payments are slashed by 24% in the coming weeks, even more physicians could drop out.

“Should this [cut] ever happen, the fear is that the natural business tendency is to not be able to maintain your practice,” says Reid Blackwelder, president of the American Academy of Family Physicians. The AAFP asked family physicians in 2010 how a 25% cut to reimbursement rates would affect their practices. Just under two-thirds of respondents said they may be forced to stop accepting new Medicare patients; 73% said they would have to limit the number of Medicare appointments they make.

All the while, the number of Americans who qualify for Medicare coverage continues to grow, from 44.1 million in 2007 to 49.4 million in 2012, according to data compiled by The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.

The 24% cut to Medicare payments — should it go through — could also put more pressure on the nation’s ongoing physician shortage. The American Association of Medical Colleges estimates that the U.S. will face a shortage of 46,000 primary care doctors by 2020, which is equal to one-quarter of all physicians practicing in that category today.

MORE: Why women (still) don’t get hired for jobs involving math

Medical students are turned off by a career as a primary care physician because of the lower pay. Family doctors earn $185,000 annually on average, compared to the $336,000 that a general surgeon makes or the $266,000 that an OB/GYN brings in, according to physician search firm Merritt Hawkins. Primary care physicians also receive lower reimbursement rates from insurance companies compared to specialists, Cooke says.

“There’s a workforce imbalance that’s resulted in a shortage that’s completely incontrovertible in physicians who are the first point of contact for people — general internists, pediatricians, family physicians,” says Cooke. “Those physicians are the most vulnerable to the kinds of economic disruption that the SGR looming crisis, then patch, then looming crisis, then patch create because they operate on such low margins.”

All of this is happening, of course, alongside the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, which emphasizes the role of primary care. A 24% cut to Medicare reimbursement rates could put a major kink in the system. “If, all of the sudden, patients with Medicare stop seeing their family physician because they don’t have access, they’re going to end up in the ER and in hospitals,” Blackwelder says. “That will result in horrible outcomes for patients and increased costs for the health care system.”

Summary: Next week, Congress will be racing against the clock to put a band-aid on an automatic measure that will significantly cut what doctors receive for treating Medicare patients.


Oil prices took another tumble Monday, not because of any new problems with the global economy or Saudi Arabia turning up the oil taps, but because the self-styled Smartest Guys In The Room said it should.

Analysts at Goldman Sachs slashed their forecasts for the crude price next year to around $5 a barrel below the market’s expectations. That pushed the price of the benchmark futures contract down by over a dollar to $79.53, its lowest level in nearly three years (although it rebounded a little later). Goldman’s team of analysts, led by Damien Courvalin, think it can go as low as $75 by the first quarter of 2015, and after a bounce in the spring, return to that level for the whole of the second half. They then see it averaging around $80/bbl through 2016.

Goldman’s new estimates are the latest evidence of broader shift in the way people look at the market for the world’s most important commodity. For most of the last forty years, the price of oil has effectively been in the power of Saudi Arabia, which had a large amount of spare production capacity that it could start up or shut down to keep supply and demand in balance.

But the reality for the next few years, many people (including Goldman) now think, is that U.S. shale oil will be the ‘swing producer’. Saudi’s spare capacity has shrunk, while billions have been sunk into shale projects that can survive on an oil price of $80 or less. If the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries decides, as it has done in the past, to target a price of $100/bbl, it will find that U.S. production just increases further, bringing the price down to $80, at which level it wouldn’t make sense to invest in shale.

“While we still expect that O.P.E.C. will remain a swing producer, we have greater confidence in the scale and sustainability of U.S. shale oil production. This implies that the global cost curve has shifted lower and that cost deflation is sustainable,” Goldman said.

That assumption has some far-reaching consequences. For one thing, it means that market forces would have more influence in pricing the lifeblood of any industrial economy, at the expense of the cartel of overwhelmingly autocratic producers that is O.P.E.C..

That’s going to be a shock to countries that need high prices to make sure that their budgets balance. For Venezuela, which has run a staggering budget deficit of 14% of gross domestic product even with prices over $110/bbl, that means an almost certain crunch.

Yields on Venezuela’s sovereign debt have shot up as the oil price has fallen, on increased fears that the country would default. Those fears receded at the end of last week after PdVSA, the state oil company, promised it would repay $3 billion of its own bonds that fall due Tuesday. But its benchmark bond due in 2027 still trades at less than 60c on the dollar, suggesting a high risk of default.

Lower oil prices are also having an impact on Russia, which isn’t an OPEC member but which is just as dependent on high oil prices to balance its budget. Finance Minister Anton Siluanov told parliament last week that budget assumptions for 2016 and 2017 would have to be thoroughly because the original draft had assumed average prices of $100/bbl- a “different economic reality.”

Siluanov has already said that many of the government’s planned increases in defense spending will have to be pushed back if the situation doesn’t improve. Next year’s budget is only being spared because the government will draw down some $10 billion in reserves from its rainy-day fund.

Summary: Wall Street gurus see crude falling to $75 a barrel next year before returning to $80 in the medium-term. That's going to be hard on producer countries who have gotten used to a price of $100 in recent years.


The exclusive world of luxury vacation rentals just keeps getting bigger.

Since the launch of its stand-alone site Luxury Rentals from HomeAway in Oct. 2013, HomeAway has become the industry leader in rentals of castles, villas, and estates. In one year its luxury portfolio has grown from 800 properties to more than 4,500 high-end listings in 40 countries. But those pricey digs only comprise less than one percent of HomeAway’s vast inventory of more than 1 million active vacation rentals. To put it in perspective: HomeAway’s nearest competitor TripAdvisor TRIP lags behind with roughly 500,000 listings.

HomeAway AWAY had $346.5 million in revenue in 2013. Though it doesn’t break out segmented sales figures, the company projects income this year will be $450 million, a 30% increase, as vacationers are opting for a home away from home instead of hotel stays. And a recent report from MMGY Global reveals that 20% of wealthy travelers say they are planning to take even more vacations than they did last year. According to the report, “travelers who earn $250,000 or more annually took an average of 6.2 leisure trips in 2013.”

Luxury Rentals is just one of dozens of rental sites in a highly competitive niche market that HomeAway CEO Brian Sharples says is steadily growing. And the reason more wealthy people are renting out their second homes? They’re paying down mortgages during a slow recovery. “The biggest driver is that far more rentals are available now. We went through this cycle where there was a tremendous amount of overbuilding in vacation markets around the world and then the economy took a dive. People built big grand houses that are very expensive to maintain. Now you can go online and rent a six bedroom villa on a beach or on an island somewhere, and at a price that’s not that wacky considering what you get,” Sharples told Fortune.

HomeAway has been on an acquisition tear since it was founded in 2005, buying 21 companies, most of them outside of the U.S as it expands its global reach. Its portfolio of 14 brands include VRBO and VacationRentals.com as well as international versions of HomeAway.com. Earlier this year the company acquired Glad to Have You, a tech startup that created a mobile app for HomeAway users, which Sharples says puts everything renters need right into their pockets. “It shows you how the stereo systems works, saves the lock codes for the house, gives you local restaurant recommendations, and more.”

For last year’s launch into luxury, HomeAway sought the expertise of a third party to hand pick the properties that would truly qualify as “exceptional.” In the past, Sharples says, any homeowner who wanted to list a rental property as luxury could do so by checking a box. “One person’s idea of luxury could be very different from everyone else,” he admits.

To better curate properties, HomeAway partnered with the experts at travel newsletter Andrew Harper to evaluate listings, which must meet certain criteria on price, location, and amenities to qualify as luxury. For anyone willing to plop down $57,000 per night for the use of Musha Cay, it’s helpful to know what you’re getting.

But don’t expect any discounts. The average daily rate for luxury rentals on HomeAway is $1,800, while non-luxury rates average $225 per night. Just because there’s an abundance of properties on the market doesn’t mean homeowners are cutting prices anytime soon.

Summary: The slow economic recovery means more luxury rentals are hitting the market.


Virgin America, the low-cost airline backed by Richard Branson’s Virgin Group, raised roughly $307 million in its initial public offering on Thursday, according to Reuters.

The airline, which began service in 2007, priced its shares at $23 each after previously setting an expected range of $21 to $24 per share. The IPO values Virgin America at a shade under $1 billion after the airline sold 13.3 million shares.

Shares are expected to start trading Friday on Nasdaq, under the symbol “VA.”

As Time noted, Virgin America is consistently rated as a top domestic airline in public opinion polls, but the airline has also historically struggled financially with more than $670 million in losses over its first five years in existence. Things have improved recently, though, as dropping prices for jet-fuel helped the airline record third-quarter profits of $41.6 million, up 24% year-over-year.

Last year, Virgin America posted its first-ever profitable year with over $10 million in profits on revenue of $1.4 billion.

Barclays, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank Securities served as underwriters for the IPO.

Virgin America is known for its leather seats, cocktail lounge-style lighting and on board Wi-Fi. The airline’s main hub is San Francisco with flights to 20 destinations including Mexico.

Summary: The low-cost airline, which posted its first profitable year in 2013, will start trading Friday on Nasdaq.


12/25/2014 AT 05:05 PM EST

There's nothing like a surprise from

The troubled star Tweeted "Merry Christmas!" Thursday along with a photo of her newly dyed brown hair.

Less than two months ago the actress

after she successfully petitioned to be

It seems her locks aren't the only new thing in her life. On Dec. 17, Bynes Tweeted to her nearly 4 million followers that she plans on transferring to the University of Southern California.

"The campus is sick," she Tweeted shortly after.

The 28-year-old actress has been in the spotlight for erratic behavior numerous times throughout the year. Bynes seemed to be getting her life back together after spending time in treatment in 2013, but things spiraled out of control after her

I took a USC campus tour yesterday it was sick! I plan on transferring from FIDM.

Summary: The troubled actress showed off her newly dyed locks in a holiday Tweet


FORTUNE — A company announces plans to kill a once-popular product. Executives lay the blame on slumping sales and changing priorities. Such decisions are a routine part of doing business. They also require ample forethought to avoid alienating customers, violating contracts, and racking up extra costs.

Google’s GOOG announcement last week that it would shutter Reader, a service for creating a feed of blog posts and news articles, is a prime example. To minimize the impact on users, Google said it would wait more than three months before pulling the plug. During that time, users can find an alternative service. Those who want to export their data from Reader can do so.

Fans still went online to criticize Google’s decision and ask that it be rolled back. But the company’s outreach at least gave it some cover.

In deciding the fate of their products, companies generally follow a standard process. Analyzing important metrics like revenue, profit, and customer engagement against specific goals is routine. “Product life cycle analysis” or, more informally, “kill analysis” are just some of the names for the job. The point is to come up with a dispassionate, unbiased recommendation about how to proceed.

MORE: The tech IPO drought is only getting worse

Calculating how much a product costs a company can be complex. Any attempt must factor in employee salaries across a number of departments like sales and customer support. Bandwidth costs can be sizeable for an online product. So can upgrades, fixing bugs, and making products compatible with new technology such as the latest tablets. Basing decisions on emotions and internal corporate politics is dangerous. But it is all too common. A founder may feel an attachment to a product and resist shutting it down. Product managers may fear that admitting failure will hurt their careers.

“Without a doubt, when you have products that are the babies of the founder — that come with an emotional attachment — those are the ones you really have to come in having done your homework about why you’re making the decision,” says Chris Brown, vice president of product management for Apartments.com, an online apartment rental listing service that is owned by online classified giant, Classified Ventures.

In most cases, “life cycle” reviews show that sustaining a product is fine. In others, the analysis may conclude that the company needs to ramp up investment for new or improved features.

Products deemed outright failures are, in fact, relatively easy to deal with. Big money losers have few defenders. Things get more complicated with products that have gained some customers but are nonetheless stagnant or in decline. Many executives dislike sacrificing short-term revenue, even if it is for the long-term good of the company. “Boy is it tough to tell a CEO that you want to take revenue off of the table,” says Brown, who has shut down a number of products and features over the years.

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A shift in corporate strategy is another common rationale. A product that was once central to a business may no longer be after a few years. Weighing the competitive landscape and market needs is also important. “If we’re doing something that’s so far removed from our strategy as a business, we better have a good reason,” says Kirsten Butzow, an instructor with Pragmatic Marketing, an executive training and consulting firm in Scottsdale, Ariz.

One option is to pull back investment and let the product die a slow, natural death while using any profits to fund other projects. But leaving a product limping along can also confuse customers and distract employees who could be working on the next big thing.

Pulling the plug more quickly is the other alternative. Quick is a relative term, however, because of all the necessary considerations. Companies may have agreed in customer contracts to supply a product for years into the future. Regulatory issues may also apply. Lawyers need to get involved early in the process and, if it’s a key product, so should the marketing team and finance to make billing changes and adjust employee sales goals.

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Giving customers ample notice is critical. A software company, for example, may promise to continue to support its products for a year, but that it will no longer upgrade them. Losing customers is always a possibility. To minimize defections, a company can offer customers free upgrades to any successor product and help them make the switch. If getting out the business completely, a company can suggest alternatives.

Of course, companies don’t necessary have to shut down unwanted products and can instead try to sell them to another business. The corporate world is littered with examples. EBay MSFT , for example, agreed to acquire Skype, the online calling service, in 2005 for $2.6 billion. After failing to do much with the acquisition, eBay decided in 2009 to unload most of its stake in Skype to a group of investors that later resold the business to Microsoft MSFT .

Butzow, who has shut down and sold a number of products over the years while an executive at various technology companies like Fujitsu and Pearson, says, “Just because something is not working for your business doesn’t mean it’s not highly applicable to another.”

Summary: There's a right way to ax your products - and many wrong ones.


An Alaska Airlines employee is getting big accolades for helping a Delta passenger make it home.

The employee in question dipped into her own pocket to pay for Miriam Thomas to get home after Delta canceled her ticket just as she was about to get on a plane to return home after a business trip, local news station News1130 reported:

“I went back through security, back to the customer service desk and that’s when it started to get crazy. The Alaska Airlines people were trying to figure out why Delta had cancelled my flight, Delta was trying to figure out what had happened. I was just standing at the desk with my bags seriously hoping I can get on some flight that day.”

She says after an hour of standing at the desk, she found out what happened. “When they had the mechanical maintenance and we ended up in Seattle and had to spend the night in a hotel there, they used the rest of the value of my entire ticket on that rescheduled flight that morning so there was no more money for me to fly home. They didn’t tell me that.”

Eventually, an Alaska Airlines employee named Judy paid for Thomas’ new flight, saying she was “paying it forward.” Judy may have also earned her company a new customer for life — Thomas said she was now “an Alaska Airlines convert.”

Summary: Sometimes, incredible things happen off the runway


04/07/2015 AT 08:15 AM EDT

Jon Snow: Good warrior, bad dinner guest.

found out the hard way in this sketch from

Monday, in which the host brings

character to a dinner party only to find out that he's not very good at making small talk, unless it's about how winter is coming.

Though Meyers's late-night antics frequently take a seat to those of his fellow

graduate Jimmy Fallon, this skit (with a cameo from

's John Lutz!) proves that he can come up with absurdist sketches just as well as Fallon.

"The snow will fall 100 feet deep. The ice wind'll howl out the North, the sun hides its face for years and little children will all be born and die in the darkness," Snow/Harington intones gravely to a group of Meyers's dinner guests. "So much for global warming," Lutz responds weakly, before Snow/Harington continues on with detailed descriptions of just what the White Walkers and ice spiders will do to all of us.

(Honestly, before the weather picked up, this past winter had us so thoroughly demoralized, we'd've believed Al Roker if he told us giant ice spiders were next.)

returns to HBO this Sunday.

Summary: All he wants to talk about is winter, and how it's coming


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Summary: Act 5: Stacey Castor's daughter Ashley Wallace recalls her mother giving her a suspicious drink.


On rare occasions, a commencement speaker can jolt graduates to attention with a personal, even uncomfortable truth from their working lives. Here are seven speakers who departed from the usual bromides about “believing in yourself,” and mined their own lives for failure, doubts and blind spots that marked their ascent to the top of their fields.

Jimmy Iovine, University of Southern California, 2013

Music producer Jimmy Iovine observed that the successes he had achieved as a music producer didn’t amount to anything when he made the switch to selling Beats headphones. “So who believed that Dr. Dre and I could sell hardware,” he wondered aloud. “No one,” he answered in a speech that underscored the transient nature of success. “I learned even at 50, I had to be a beginner again.”

“Please remember this: Your diploma does not represent the end of your education, but the beginning of your continuing education,” he added.

Sheryl Sandberg, Barnard College, 2011

Two years before Sheryl Sandberg published Lean In, the Facebook COO was already sewing the seeds of the movement in an address to Barnard’s graduating class.

“Ask a woman why she did well on something, and she’ll say, ‘I got lucky. All of these great people helped me. I worked really hard.’ Ask a man and he’ll say or think, ‘What a dumb question. I’m awesome.’ So women need to take a page from men and own their own success.”

Jeff Bezos, Princeton University, 2010

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos related a hard bit of advice from his grandfather: “Jeff, one day you’ll understand that it’s harder to be kind than clever.” Bezos warned that the gift of creativity was a double-edged sword that could lead to complacency and worse, a know-it-all attitude, a lesson that he candidly admits he learned the hard way.

“Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy — they’re given after all. Choices can be hard. You can seduce yourself with your gifts if you’re not careful, and if you do, it’ll probably be to the detriment of your choices.”

Carl Icahn, Drexel University, 2008

Corporate raider Carl Icahn cut through the uplifting sentiments of commencement addresses with a stern assessment of the nation’s business elite, holding up the average American CEO as the precise opposite of a role model.

“With exceptions, we have terrible management in this country,” he said. “The system is dysfunctional. I can tell you how bad our boards are, with exceptions of course. I sit on a lot of boards. I don’t have to watch Saturday Night Live anymore; I just go to the board meetings.”

Bill Gates, Harvard University, 2007

Bill Gates highlighted a blind spot in his education that persisted for decades. “I knew nothing about the millions of people living in unspeakable poverty and disease in developing countries,” he told Harvard’s graduates, recounting how he was stunned when he first encountered the death tolls from curable diseases that had ravaged the world’s poorest communities.

“You have awareness of global inequity, which we did not have. And with that awareness, you likely also have an informed conscience that will torment you if you abandon these people whose lives you could change with very little effort.”

Steve Jobs, Stanford University, 2005

Steve Jobs drew a remarkable connection between a calligraphy course that would shape the future of Apple.

“If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class,” he said, “and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do,”

“So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”

Summary: From Steve Jobs to Sheryl Sandberg


WASHINGTON, Sept. 1— The American rush to retirement is apparently beginning to subside. Under the pressure of inflation, the number of people claiming Social Security benefits for the first time, which has risen almost every year since the program was founded in the New Deal era, has begun to taper off.

By about 1985, this index of the rate at which elderly people are leaving the work force could begin to drop if the trend of the last decade continues. About 1.6 million people now retire each year.

The solvency of the Social Security fund has been a subject of considerable concern in Congress and the Reagan Administration. The system could be materially strengthened if more and more people decided to postpone retirement for a few years, continuing as contributors to the fund rather than drawing benefits from it. Retirement Rate Dropping

In an analysis of Social Security figures for the last 12 years, Dr. Harold L. Sheppard, associate director of the National Council on the Aging, calculated that the increase in the retirement rate had dropped from 8.4 percent in 1972-74 to 5.5 percent in 1975-77 to 2.7 percent in 1978-80.

Dr. Sheppard, who was Counselor on Aging for President Carter, predicted that a continuation of the decline could alleviate much of the financing problem the Social Security System faces over the next half-dozen years.

No breakdown was available to indicate how much of the dropoff in filing for Social Security benefits was attributable to fewer workers' taking early retirement, from 62 to 65, including those forced by inflation to remain on the job until 65 or later.

The retirement fund faces a shortage of $10 billion to $110 billion from 1982 through 1986, depending on the economy, and a longer, more serious deficit beginning about 2015, when the postwar ''baby boom'' generation begins to retire. Elderly Population Growing

The reduction in the retirement rate comes at a time when the number o f ret irees might be expected to expand because the size of the elderly p opulation is increasing dramatically.

The Census Bureau reported earlier this year that there were 25.5 million people in the country over 65 years old, 28 percent more than there had been 10 years before.

Officials of the Social Security Administration said that the apparent slowdown in retirement had been considered by actuaries in their calculation of the impending shortage of funds to pay benefits in the next five years. ''Workers nearing so-called retirement age must be having second thoughts about leaving the labor force comple tely,'' Dr. Sheppard said. ''Despite the automatic cost-of-living increase in Social Security benefits, other sources of retiremen t income, including private pensions, cannot be relied upon to ke ep up with actual and expected rises in the cost of living for such workers and their families.''

The trend analyzed by Dr. Sheppard indicates that economic pressures may be getting people to work longer, a goal of changes that Congress is contemplating in the Social Security law.


DETROIT, May 4— Work began on the new $600 million General Motors plant in the Poletown area today while Ralph Nader's volunteers, seeking to prevent the bulldozing of hundreds of houses, continued their lonely fight to check the project.

In a movement that has become nationally synonymous with the struggle between little people and corporate power, however, not all of the those seeking to preserve one of the city's oldest neighborhoods are still hopeful of victory.

''The neighborhood's gone already, the Mayor has seen to that,'' the Rev. Joseph Karasiewicz, pastor of the Church of the Immaculate Conception, said today. ''There's only a handful of people left. My hope now is to save the church.''

On the streets around the church, which has been a focal point for Polish-American Roman Catholics for more than 50 years, the silent desolation that precedes the wrecking crews has been spreading. Reaction of a Black Resident

''I don't mind moving anymore, I don't mind at all anymore,'' said Vera London, one of the many black Detroit residents who moved into Poletown as the area declined. ''I been moved so many times already, it really doesn't make much difference.''

Others were eager for the construction of that 465-acre plant, expecting 6,000 badly needed jobs to be created in Poletown. Norman Urbanski, whose father worked as a cutter grinder in the Dodge Brothers automobile plant that General Motors will now supplant, cannot wait for the change.

''The old Dodge plant was closed anyway, what good did it do?'' he said. ''I can't understand these people that want to stop progress.'' But Mr. Urbanski's house lies outside the swath of the wreckers, and he is eagerly looking forward to seeing the value of his property rise with the opening of the new plant.

On the other hand, Gene Stilp, head of the Poletown Support Team organized by Mr. Nader, the consumer advocate, sits among the Bingo tables in the basement of the Church of the Immaculate Conception and argues for fortitude and hope.

''Dates come and dates go,'' he said. ''You've just got to go day by day.'' Deadline for Church to Close

Immaculate Conception is organized as a national church under the Archdiocese of Detroit and was erected in the late 1920's to serve the then expanding Polish-American community whose fathers and sons had come to work for ''the Dodges.''

The church has been given until next Sunday to close and to turn its baptismal and marriage records over to the Archdiocese. But St. John the Evangelist, a church not tied to any nationality that is three blocks to the north, even closer to the southward-spreading cleared plant site, has been allowed to stay open until May 24.

Father Karasiewicz and Mr. Stilp believe that John Cardinal Dearden, the outgoing Archbishop of Detroit, wants their church closed before the new Archbishop is installed May 17. He is Bishop Edmund C. Szoka, a man of Polish ancestry, and the theory in the basement of Immaculate Coneption is that Monsignor Dearden wants the Polish church closed before a Polish Archbishop arrives.

''That is an interesting supposition but the fact of the matter, emotions aside, is one's ethnicity has nothing to do with it,'' the Rev. Patrick Halfpenny, spokesman for the Archdiocese, commented frostily. ''We are dealing with a point of law here, not a question of ethnicity.''

At the end of the working day, only Mr. Urbanski was around to watch the power shovels and bulldozers shut down. Mr. Urbanski remembered that, before the Dodge plant, an aluminum casting concern had its plant on the same site, and that before that, Hupmobile, long extinct as an automobile maker, occupied the site.

''Now General Motors is going to make Cadillacs there,'' he said. ''I guess that's progress, right?''


It has been quite a while since this column responded to inquiries from its readers, and we'll try to catch up with a few of them. As a rule, we cannot answer questions by personal letter or offer consultation on an individual basis. But from time to time we devote this space to answering questions of general interest.

Q. Looking over the specifications of loudspeakers in the $100-200 price range, I find that their bass response rarely reaches down lower than 40, 50 or in some cases even 60 Hz. This barely touches or altogether misses the bottom octave of the musical range. Is there any significance in this?-G.A.B., Queens Village, N.Y.

The very lowest bass is difficult and expensive to reproduce because it requires large quantities of air to be set in motion. One gains an idea of the considerable forces involved in generating deep tones when one considers the size of instruments like the kettledrum or contrabass as well as the vigorous physical effort needed to play them. To duplicate the sound of such instruments with speakers of limited size and heft poses inherent problems. While even a small speaker cone can be made to vibrate at low frequencies, the usually short length of its stroke does not allow it to pump a sufficient air volume to give those bass notes adequate strength. This accounts for the typically weak bass response of small speakers, despite recent improvements in this respect.

Yet as you listen to these bass-shy speakers you don't notice that the bottom notes are missing. You seem to hear what isn't there. The reason for this lucky paradox is an odd quirk of human perception. Even though it skips the fundamental bass frequency, the speaker does reproduce the higher overtones of the missing bass, and the ear - or the mind - infers the absent bass from its present harmonics. What we then hear in the mind's ear is a kind of phantom bass. A sonic Fata Morgana is created as the mind completes the tonal Gestalt of the music.

But this sort of trompe l'oreilleis not wholly satisfactory because in constructing the tonal phantom - i.e., in reconstructing the missing fundamental bass from its overtones - the ear alters both timbre and perceived loudness. This can easily be demonstrated by placing a speaker with full bass response alongside a speaker with limited lows and playing the same music on both them while switching back and forth between them. Even the speaker with the missing bottom octave will seem to be playing all the music. But the sound on the full-range speaker will seem far deeper and richer. In other words, the true sound is better than the sound reconstituted in the listener's head. Or, putting it metaphorically, the mental sizzle is no substitute for the substantive steak.

How is it then that even speakers whose response falls off drastically below 50 Hz still give musical pleasure to many listeners? Part of the answer lies in the fact that the lowest frequencies rarely occur in most musical scores. For example, the low E of the contrabass with a frequency of 40 Hz is heard only occasionally in the course of most compositions, and except for the pedal notes of a pipe organ or the deep thuds and rolls of the bass drum not much happens at the very bottom. Yet these frequencies, though infrequent, are not negligible. When rendered in their full magnificent force they provide a profound and compelling punctuation to the music and lend it a dramatic and satisfying aura of reality. That is part of the joy of owning an uncompromised sound system.

I am planning a cross-continent trip by car, and the long hours of driving will seem much shorter if I knew where on my radio dial I could find stations broadcasting classical music along the way. Is there a list of such stations?-H.K., Spray Beach, N.J.

The Concert Music Broadcasters Association publishes such a directory, organized by geographic region. It is obtainable for $3 from Station WFMT, 500 North Michigan Avenue, Chicago, Ill. 60611. According to this source, there are 53 commercial radio stations each broadcasting more than 20 hours of classical music per week. In addition, the many stations affiliated with National Public Radio also play several hours of classical music each day. For a list, write to Audience Services, NPR, 2025 M Street N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036.

Am I crazy or does the sound get fuzzy when the lid is up on my turntable?-R.J., Brewster, N.Y. I have no information about your first and only a wild surmise about your second question. My guess is that you like to play your music so loud that the open turntable lid catches the sound vibrations from the air like a sail catching the wind. The open and angled lid then reflects these air pulses down toward the tone arm, where the cartridge picks them up and superimposes them on the sound from the record. You then have a condition known as acoustic feedback, which can indeed make the sound fuzzy. Normally, such feedback is caused by vibrations traveling back from speaker to turntable through the floorboards. In that case, it can be filtered out by putting elastic shock mounts in or under the turntable base. In your case, the feedback is apparently airborne and the remedy even simpler. Just close the lid.