Australians are used to heat. But not like this.

Adelaide was the hottest city in the world on Thursday as temperatures there peaked at 44.2°C. Authorities scheduled blackouts to prevent a meltdown of a power grid strained by energy-hungry air conditioners for the fourth consecutive day, and one Twitter user posted a image of a 51.5°C thermometer reading from the dashboard of her car.

Anyone for a game of Crazy Hot Dashboard Thermometer readings? This is from the Adelaide CBD today #heatwave http://t.co/L4W4rroddu— Caroline Miller (@carolinemiller0) January 14, 2014

In the island state of Tasmania, tar is melting on the roads. In Melbourne, Victoria, play at the Australian Open tennis championship was halted as the mercury headed towards 43.4°C. A ball boy and a player collapsed and water bottles melted on court.

“Ours is the sort of business you can use to track temperature and sales of frozen yoghurt are probably triple what they were during the peak pre-Christmas period,” says Dean Jones, owner a fro-yo store in Eastland Shopping Centre, where thousands of Melbournites are seeking sanctuary from the heat. “We’ve already had a power outages,” adds Jones. “The lights are flickering on and off because they’re so hot.”

Beyond the discomforts and inconveniences of Australia’s latest extreme weather event is the promise that vast swathes of bushland – and the homes, towns and farms of the people who live there – will go up in flames. The last time a heatwave of this magnitude struck Australia’s southeast, it preempted Black Saturday — the 2009 megafire that razed more than 2,000 homes and killed 173 people, making it the worst natural disaster in the nation’s history. Tens of thousands of firefighters have been put on standby and were bracing for hellish conditions Friday as high winds and lightning strikes combined with the searing heat to create extreme wildfire conditions.

“These next four days promise to be among the most significant that we have faced in Victoria since Black Saturday,” acting state Premier Peter Ryan told reporters earlier this week.

That promise is already making good. A massive 13,000 hectare blaze that has already claimed a life charged towards three towns in the Gippsland area east of Melbourne Friday morning, and dozens more fires are burning not just in Victoria but across South Australia and New South Wales.

Even without fire, the heat can be deadly, especially for elderly Australians. Heatwaves are the most significant medical emergency in Australia’s southeast, thought to be responsible for the annual deaths of more than 1,000 people aged 65 and over. The heatwave that preempted Black Saturday claimed 374 lives — more than double the number who perished from the smoke or flames.

All this hot air begs a question: is global warming at fault?

“There are a bunch of factors that cause heatwaves,” Professor Mick Raupach, director of the Australian National University’s Climate Change Institute, tells TIME. “ “But what climate change does is build up extra energy in the atmosphere that load the dice and puts the weather on steroids, so heatwaves become longer, hotter and more widespread. They are going up in all three important metrics.”

Things could heat up much more in Australia’s southeast unless significant reductions in the emissions of heat-trapping gases take place in the immediate future.

“If the trend in global warming continues, we’re going to see average global temperatures increasing by 4°C to 5°C by the turn of the century,” says Dr Sarah Perkins, a research fellow at the University of New South Wales currently working with the Climate Council on a heatwave report. “The changes we are seeing now coincide with an increase in average global temperatures of 1°C. So it’s quite scary to think what would happen with a 5°C increase.

“If we don’t change our ways, heatwaves in Australia won’t be considered events,” she says. “They’ll be normal.”

Summary: Temperatures are reaching insane levels -- up to 111°F (44.2°C) -- leading to power blackouts, melted roads, halted tennis matches of international importance, and scariest of all, the heat is sparking raging wildfires


07/09/2014 at 08:30 AM EDT

has chastised a British newspaper over a "completely fabricated" article claiming his fiancée's mother disapproves of the impending marriage for religious reasons.

In a statement, Clooney said Wednesday that the claims about his future mother-in-law, Baria Alamuddin, were untrue and irresponsible.

in April. Beirut-born Alamuddin comes from a Druse family – adherents of a monotheistic religion based mainly in Lebanon, Syria and Israel.

cited unnamed "friends" as saying Amal Alamuddin risked being "cast out of the community" because she was not marrying a Druse man. The newspaper said "several women have been murdered" for not abiding by strict Druse rules.

that "none of the story is true. Amal's mother is not Druse. She has not been to Beirut since Amal and I have been dating, and she is in no way against the marriage."

Indeed, Clooney's future mother-in-law is elated about the upcoming nuptials between her daughter and the actor, a source close to the family tells PEOPLE.

"Baria is very happy and in seventh heaven," the source says.

Clooney added that "to exploit religious differences where none exist is at the very least negligent and more appropriately dangerous."

"We have family members all over the world, and the idea that someone would inflame any part of that world for the sole reason of selling papers should be criminal," he said.

did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

from 1989 to 1993. This will be the first marriage for 36-year-old Alamuddin.

The Druse are a close-knit community and rarely marry outside their sect. But some Druse have welcomed Clooney.

Walid Jumblatt, political leader of the sect in Lebanon, told the Associated Press recently that he hoped the couple would soon visit the Druse heartland.

Clooney will bring us "great publicity," Jumblatt said. "He can make a movie about the Druse sect."

Summary: The actor released a statement refuting the Daily Mail's claims that Amal Alamuddin's mother disapproves of the engagement for religious reasons


Mary Sibande photographed with her work in the Momo Gallery in Johannesburg by Chris Saunders.

Nothing in Mary Sibande's background suggested she would one day be one of South Africa's most interesting artists. Brought up by her grandparents in the township of Barberton, Mpumalanga, she went to a school at which art wasn't even taught. And then Nelson Mandela was released. "I was 11 at the time. We'd been brought up with the attitude that things were the way they were and we should just deal with it. If our mothers questioned things, they were thrown in jail. But suddenly we were able to question things. Part of what I'm doing is celebrating questioning."

In the new South Africa, black children could go to white schools, which Sibande promptly did. "I guess that's where my aspirations came from. I wanted to be like them. I wanted to blend in. But I couldn't because of my skin colour."

In her fourth year at university – she went to study fashion but ended up in fine art – her grandmother started talking to her about being a maid. "I knew this, but it didn't stick. You think it's normal. All the women in my family were maids. And here I am, born in 1982, and my destiny is totally different and I have this freedom to be what I want to be. But my grandmother, she spoke about all the things she wished she could have been."

It was this that gave Sibande the idea for "Sophie", an idealised maid dressed in Victorian crinolines. She had a mannequin cast from her own body and shot it in different poses. "With her eyes closed. That, for me, illustrated the idea of aspiring and wishing." The photographs were then blown up as billboards and exhibited around Johannesburg during the World Cup.

"I was playing with the idea of the dead queen. As soon as she dies, she's replaced with another one so the throne is forever occupied. I was looking at this relay of maids from one generation to another. My mother had to pass it on. But things are changing in South Africa so I didn't inherit it. Instead, I felt this need to celebrate these women."

People were confused by the pictures. "They wondered if they were adverts, because they used the same language as advertising. And why, if she's a maid, was she wearing such a big dress. There was an amazing reaction from people."

Sibande has had a residency at the Smithsonian in Washington and exhibited in Europe, but being an artist in South Africa is different and challenging, she says, though also exciting . "The market is just emerging here. It's growing. And we can grow with it. It's a beautiful space. I wouldn't want to be anywhere else."

Three South African artists she admires

Dineo Bopape, who uses video, collage and installation.

Lawrence Lemaoana, a rugby player turned artist, who explores ideas of masculinity.

Summary: Mary Sibande's ancestors could only be maids. Now she uses their uniforms in her art, writes Carole Cadwalladr


July 24, 2014: A giraffe named Bingo escaped from a circus in Mexico, causing panic as it ran down a street toward oncoming cars.

A giraffe has caused traffic chaos in Mexico yesterday after animal rights activists allegedly stormed a circus troupe and opened the animal's cage – letting it run free.

In video uploaded to LiveLeak, the giraffe can be seen making a mad dash for freedom down a busy road as stunned motorists are forced to make quick manoeuvres to avoid crashing into the galloping creature.

Barley Circus, who housed the giraffe, has accused animal rights activists of opening the animal's pen.

"The giraffe is always let outside in the morning, and the keeper went back inside for a moment to get food for the giraffe," the circus's spokesperson Isaac Vertiz told AP.

"In the meantime, within five minutes, somebody went in and opened the pen and let her out."

Mr Vertiz said that someone also spray-painted circus trailers and tried to break into circus cars. He said that while he has no proof, he believes animal rights activists to be behind it.

It's the latest in an ongoing push by Mexican animal rights activists to ban circus animals.

Activists claim they are fighting the kinds of abuses that came to light in March when environmental inspectors raided a small circus in the southern state of Yucatan and seized a black bear that had its lower jaw and upper teeth ripped out or cut off to keep it from biting.

But those in the circus world have slammed the crackdown, saying they are closely regulated and inspected.

Author: Natasha Lee, Approving editor: Nick Pearson

Do you have any news photos or videos?

Summary: A giraffe has caused traffic chaos in Mexico after animal rights activists allegedly stormed a circus troupe and opened the animal's cage – letting it run free.


Updated AUG 24, 2014 9:12p ET

Floyd Mayweather Jr. finally fired back at 50 Cent on Saturday following several days of criticism. It all started when 50 told Floyd he would donate $750,000 to the charity of Mayweather’s choice if the champ could read a single page of a Harry Potter book without struggling. An old audio recording from a radio show later surfaced that featured Mayweather struggling to read some promos for the station.

What does Money Mayweather have to say about all this? He posted the photo you see below on Instagram, which shows two paychecks he received from recent fights. Most of us will never see that many zeros on a check in our lives.

“Read this $72,276,000.00,” Mayweather wrote. “God bless.”

Summary: Floyd Mayweather responds to 50 Cent in typical 'Money' fashion


The number of Massachusetts single-family homes sold in June rose a “modest” 3.7 percent in June on a year-to-year comparison basis, the first such increase since January, the Warren Group reported Tuesday.

Meanwhile, in a separate report, the Massachusetts Association of Realtors noted that local condo prices were at an “all-time high.”

Over the past several months, the low number of local homes for sale have generally kept sales volumes low and pushed prices higher.

In Massachusetts, the spring is generally strongest season for residential real estate activity, in part because many consumers are reluctant to shop for a new home during the winter. And because it typically takes six weeks or so for a home sale to close, June results for completed sales can give an indication of the strength or weakness of the spring market.

In June, 5,795 single-family Massachusetts homes were sold, up from 5,589 a year earlier, the Warren Group said in its Tuesday report. That was the highest number of sales for the month of June since 2006 when there were 6,152 transactions, the Warren Group said.

The median sales price of single-family homes statewide increased by 2.8 percent to $359,900 in June compared with $350,000 in June 2013. (According to the firm’s numbers, the median sales price for a single-family in May 2014 was $340,000.) Year-over-year median sales prices have increased each month since October 2012, the Warren Group said.

As for Bay State condo sales, 2,429 condos were sold in June versus 2,187 sold in June 2013, an increase of about 11 percent, the Warren Group said.

The median selling price of a Massachusetts condo was $325,000 in June, up 1.6 percent from a year ago.

A recent Globe story noted that condos are no longer viewed as a “second choice” among local buyers, and demand for condos is high.

“These numbers are a reflection of sales made during the spring market,” Warren Group chief executive Timothy M. Warren Jr. said in a statement. “Mortgage interest rates are lower than they were last summer, and demand remains high as home buyers seem to be overcoming the problems with low inventory. We could see more gains in sales volume in the big months of July and August.”

The Massachusetts Association of Realtors, which also issued a monthly report on the local housing market Tuesday, uses a slightly different method to calculate results. The association saw a slight decline in the number of single-family homes for sale.

“Low inventory once again affected the market in June resulting in a lower number of sales and higher prices,” association president Peter Ruffini said in a statement. “However, we’re hopeful that the influx of new properties added to the market in June will help prices to start leveling off, giving more people the opportunity to buy.”

Also out Tuesday was a third real estate report, this one from S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices. The indices track repeat home sales around the United States, including sales in the local market.

According to Case-Shiller, home values in the Boston market declined 0.5 percent on a seasonally adjusted basis from April to May. But between May 2013 and May 2014, Boston-area home values were up 8.2 percent.

Summary: The number of Massachusetts single-family homes sold in June rose a “modest” 3.7 percent in June on a year-to-year comparison basis, the first such increase since January, Warren Group reported Tuesday.


The critics on Twitter are having a field day with PayPal’s full-page “We the people…” swipe at Apple in Sunday’s New York Times (attached).

Equating Apple Pay with the easily phished passwords of topless Hollywood celebrities might be viewed, as Pando’s Michael Carney put it, as “an opportunistic and masterful example of reframing the narrative.”

But that’s not the way the twittersphere saw it.

. Those last two tweets, in case you don’t recognize Keith Rabois’ name, come from a former PayPal executive vice president.

It’s taken a few days for the implications of Apple Pay to sink in — not just for PayPal, but for rest of the merchant payment ecosystem: The credit card companies, the issuing banks, he kiosk manufacturers, the store owners, the customers.

The effect on PayPal may be the easiest to see. It was conspicuously absent from the list of partners Apple announced last week, casting doubt on what was apparently its long term value proposition: That it would someday cash in on its position as the Internet’s first successful e-payment service.

“While PayPal digital wallet/point-of-sale accounts for almost no revenue today,” wrote Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster the next day, “the hope of this segment becoming a larger portion of its business has had a positive effect on eBay’s multiple in the past.”

That’s less likely with Apple in the e-payment business, Munster concluded, lowering his price target for Ebay (which owns PayPal) to $55 from $63.

What Apple Pay means for the rest of the players — merchants, banks, credit card companies, etc. — is harder to sort out. Asymco’s Horace Dediu took a crack at it Sunday in Critical Path #122: Where the Money Is.

One takeaway from Dediu’s podcast: His conviction that Apple Pay will turn out to be one of Apple’s stickiest and most profitable services, with margins approaching 100%.

See also: Apple Pay: What the analysts are saying

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

Summary: The implications of Apple's new mobile payment system are starting to sink in.


Dusk, and I am stumbling around in a dark wood behind the sculptor Miroslaw Balka. We emerge from the pine trees on to a track where a line of rough standing stones, each about the size of a man, marks the original perimeter of the death camp at Treblinka, deep in the Polish countryside. We are the only ones here.

We had driven across a landscape pretty with willows, occasional farms and villages. There were wayside shrines to the Virgin, storks nesting on platforms set on telegraph poles. The occasional prostitute touted for business beside the main road. Balka, who next month becomes the 10th artist to take on Tate Modern's Turbine Hall for the annual Unilever commission, has been coming to Treblinka for more than a decade. He says he always finds something new; the gravity and reserve of the monument has got into his work.

At least 700,000 people – possibly over 1 million – were murdered at Treblinka in a single year. When the camp was fully operational, 5,000 could be "processed" in two or three hours. The Germans closed the camp and razed it to the ground in 1943. Concrete blocks, laid out like railway sleepers, mark the route of the trains into the fake station. Lengths of the track have been acquired by Holocaust museums around the world. A raised slab marks the ramp where the trains were unloaded. Beyond, there are circles of thousands of stones, rough chunks of rock planted in concrete. Each stands for a town, a community or an individual. A low rectangle of basalt and black molten slag lies in a shallow depression, marking a cremation pyre.

At last light, Balka starts filming an apple tree, laden with ripening fruit. He says he treats his handheld camera like a vacuum cleaner, "cleaning the space, taking it home and emptying the bag". This incongruous tree makes him think of Adam and Eve and the garden; but whatever we talk about feels hollow. This is a place for silence.

In the last few years, Balka has filmed a herd of deer wandering through Birkenau, a moon wobbling in the sky over Seville, a sunny day at Treblinka, the camera wheeling over the landscape and sky. (The deer film is titled Bambi, after the Disney animation released in 1942, when the Final Solution was taking place.) He has made about 80 short videos now, each a few minutes long at most, and will be showing some of them at Modern Art Oxford in December.

One recent sculpture remade, in skeletal form, the ridiculous zoo the camp commander had built at Treblinka. It was a prison for local fauna – captive foxes, doves, caged nightingales and squirrels. Bałka has also built a version of the Himmelstrasse, the "road to heaven" along which the naked new arrivals were whipped towards the gas chambers, between fences camouflaged with pine branches, so that no one could see what lay beyond. Last winter, Bałka installed his walkway, in plain plywood, in the basement of London's White Cube gallery. You careened around the edge of the gallery, walking to an unseen destination.

After the Germans left, locals came to Treblinka to dig for gold teeth, lost possessions, anything of value. You look at the neighbouring farms and houses, Balka says on the drive back to Warsaw, and wonder where the money came from to do some of them up.

Pine needles and plaster birds

The next day I go to Balka's studio in Otwock, a spa town close to Warsaw, where he grew up. Until the second world war, most of the population was Jewish, and they all ended up at Treblinka. Balka tells me about a local Jewish cemetery, an abandoned place with bones poking out of the sandy soil. A visiting American curator picked one up to take home as a souvenir, before Bałka stopped her. He still sounds aghast at the thought of it.

Balka's studio is in the little house where he spent much of his childhood. The whole place was smoke-damaged following a fire in the early 1990s; afterwards, Balka exhibited the scorched and blackened drawings that survived. As a student in the 1980s, he had to make do with whatever materials he could get his hands on, and the habit has stayed with him: the studio is crammed with piles of floorboards and dismantled staircases, abandoned projects, a homemade version of a Rietveld modernist chair. There are bags filled with pine needles collected from the Christmas trees he decorates each year. The first sculpture I ever saw of Balka's, in a show of new European sculpture in 1990, included a rough little wooden trap on the floor, with pine needles and dust swept into it.

More work fills a brick outhouse in the garden: satisfying little heads the size of a fist, something that looks like a ruined teddy bear, plaster birds. Balka stopped making figurative work in 1989. He says he could easily have been seduced by his own talents, and that figures would have just got in the way; he wanted to avoid illustration. But the symbolism in his work is impossible to ignore, with its columns of soap, walls coated with ash, rusted walls perforated with little faucets. Some of Balka's sculptures incorporate sweat and urine; others have heating elements inserted, so that they are the temperature of the human body when exhibited. (In 1998, he created a monument to the 852 victims of the 1994 sinking of the MS Estonia; it is heated to a constant 37 degrees.)

Balka's father, now in his 80s and still working, also has a tiny workshop here; he engraves headstones. The artist's grandfather, another stonemason, lived with the family, too. He was incontinent and the house reeked of urine (to this day, the toilet is in an outhouse). Balka's father doesn't think much of his son's work, even though Miroslaw has been showing internationally since 1990.

In the garden, there is a cage big enough for a man, with a galvanised bucket standing on its floor. This must make the neighbours wonder. And on the porch there is an old plastic tub, like a squalid crib, full of clay that Balka pilfered, dollop by dollop, from the Warsaw Fine Arts Academy when he was a student in the mid-1980s. He is still waiting to use it. For years, Balka has worked in these rooms filled with memories. Nothing appears to have changed in the family home for 30 years.

We drive to Balka's new house a few miles away. The interior is white, with polished concrete floors, like an art gallery. His new studio – a high, white, echoing space – is virtually empty. Conspicuously, there is no evidence of what he is planning for the Turbine Hall next month. Balka has seen all but one of the previous 10 Unilever projects – everything but Anish Kapoor's Marsyas – and says that each commission makes it feel harder for the next artist. But he won't tell me what he's going to do.

Changing the subject, he shows me a delicate hand, woven from jute. It feels warm to the touch, and has been made with great tenderness. Balka's mother sold homegrown vegetables in the local market, and the jute sacking was an easily available material. Rummaging through more old work, he reappears wearing a white papier-mache cap with stiff white rabbit ears. He is tall and boyish, and suddenly looks both goofy and vulnerable.

A sense of the absurd

The lesson of the memorial at Treblinka is that the stones still the visitor, and avoid the expressionistic cliches of "Holocaust art". You are aware of being at a precise spot on the Earth's surface, aware of the co-ordinates of presence and history. I ask Balka whether he feels a responsibility to refer to the Holocaust in his work. He tells me he has felt stronger since broaching the subject. It is everywhere in Poland, he says, and still not much talked about. His parents never discussed it. But his work is not about the Holocaust, he insists: "It is about being."

He says later: "Much of what I do is about falling down, and about gravity." A sense of the absurd runs through his art, making it poignant rather than pompous. He tells me about another early sculpture that was recently returned to him by the Polish institution that owned it. They had been about to throw it away. "It included a little cloth body. They said it was riddled with clothes moths. The letter said that they'd gassed it three times to get rid of the insects." Gassed, he laughs.

• This article was amended on Thursday 17 September 2009. We said Polish artist Miroslaw Balka had filmed a herd of deer wandering through Dachau-Birkenau. This was incorrect. The images were filmed at Birkenau, a Nazi extermination camp in Poland (part of Auschwitz-Birkenau). Dachau was a concentration camp in Germany. This has been corrected.

• The Unilever Series: Mirosław Bałka is at Tate Modern, London SE1, from 13 October.

Summary: Miroslaw Balka is about to become the 10th artist to fill the Tate's Turbine Hall. The Pole takes Adrian Searle around the Nazi death camp that haunts his work


Homeland Sunday at 9 p.m., Showtime

OK, I was creeped out when Carrie (Claire Danes, above) considered drowning her baby, then didn’t. But I was completely skeeved out, and so was Carrie herself, given her disgusted look in the mirror, when she awkwardly put the moves on the innocent young med student Aayan Ibrahim last week. There are Quarrie shippers rooting for Carrie and Quinn, but I doubt there are any Carraay shippers out there. It’s harder and harder to be sympathetic toward her, despite her drive to derail terrorists and her illness; but then maybe that’s not the point of the show. She is an anti-hero, a woman for whom morality is secondary to her job.

The Birds Saturday at 5:45 p.m., TCM

Feed the birds, tuppence a bag? Nah. Alfred Hitchcock’s carefully paced thriller will change your mind, even with the very basic special effects of 1963. Indeed, I’m not sure that, if someone dared to remake “The Birds” with digital tricks, the movie would be any scarier. By the way, take in the controversial 2012 HBO movie “The Girl” at some point; it’s a very unflattering view of Hitchcock’s infatuation with star Tippi Hedren (above) behind the scenes of “The Birds.”

Shark Tank 9 p.m., ABC

Jimmy Kimmel appears to pitch . . . ABC.

The Good Wife Sunday 9:30 p.m., CBS

Diane’s hair will survive the apocalypse.

Boardwalk Empire Sunday at 9 p.m., HBO

You are not prohibited from watching the series finale.

Summary: OK, I was creeped out when Carrie considered drowning her baby, then didn’t. But I was completely skeeved out, and so was Carrie herself, given her disgusted look in the mirror, when she awkwardly put the moves on the innocent young med student Aayan Ibrahim last week.


This year’s sports deals were nearly as fascinating as what happened on the field. Who can forget the drama over the Los Angeles Clippers and its owner’s racist comments? Or how about LeBron James’ tortured decision about where to play? Throw in a few big Major League Baseball player contracts along with some gigantic television contracts, and you have yourself a championship season of wheeling and dealing.

“It’s been a really robust year,” said Vince Gennaro, the director of Columbia University’s sports management graduate program and president of the Society for American Baseball Research. “I think it shows the increasing value of sports as an asset and in terms of popularity among the fan base and advertisers.”

“We’re seeing sports as the galvanizing force that unites advertisers and fans,” he added.

Here’s a look at some of the biggest and most newsworthy sports business stories of 2014.

Summary: Some of the biggest deals in sports history happened in 2014. Here are six of them.


01/30/2015 AT 02:00 PM EST

has a full plate in addition to her looming Super Bowl halftime show on Sunday.

In the midst of her

, and addresses a big one – her rumored feud with

that her song "Bad Blood" was written about a female musician who was a "straight-up enemy."

, allegedly in response to Swift's quote, "Watch out for the Regina George in sheep's clothing."

Whether the jabs were intentional between the pop stars, they won't be ignored by Perry. She told

, "If somebody is trying to defame my character, you're going to hear about it."

But the girl fight isn't a priority for the "Dark Horse" singer, who takes the stage in front of the U. of Phoenix stadium for Sunday's big gridiron event. She'll be performing for her "broadest, widest audience ever," she told the magazine.

While no stranger to giant crowds and media scrutiny, Perry admitted that when it

To prep, she studied her show predecessors, including

. She also reached out to

"This is the biggest event of my career," she said. "I want the show to be

. It's like the exclamation point on the whole last cycle. This is the cherry on top to everything I've already done."

Summary: "If somebody is trying to defame my character, you're going to hear about it," the "Dark Horse" singer says


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

Intelligence agencies will have to delete extraneous data on private citizens and limit storage of data on foreigners to five years, the Obama administration is expected to announce Tuesday, as part of a new batch of modest restrictions on intelligence gathering efforts.

The reforms will also initiate regular White House reviews over surveillance programs targeting foreign leaders, The New York Times reports.President Barack Obama abruptly cancelled one such program targeting German Chancellor Angela Merkel in 2013, after leaked documents revealed that the National Security Agency had tapped her cell phone records.

However, the administration stopped short of addressing the scope of the NSA’s collection of “metadata” on cell phone records, which sparked a controversy after it was revealed that the program encompassed millions of Americans’ cell phone records.

Read more at The New York Times.

Summary: Modest reforms will also establish White House oversight over surveillance of foreign leaders


FORTUNE — Venture capitalist Ray Lane will speak later this month at The Commonwealth Club of California, on how cleantech investing remains viable in the face of recent failures and the (likely) disappearance of federal funding.

Here is part of the email marketing pitch:

As a managing partner at Kleiner Perkins, America’s premier venture capital firm, Lane has sponsored several start-ups in clean alternative energy. Some of his success stories include GreatPoint Energy (coal to gas conversion), Fisker Automotive (plug-in hybrid car), Th!nk NA (electric car), and Luca Technologies (biologically enhanced gas recovery from fossilized hydrocarbons).

Wow, impressive bio. So impressive that whoever wrote it neglected to mention that Lane isn’t actually a partner on KP’s new fund, or that he does serve as chairman of Hewlett-Packard HPQ — a role akin to quarterbacking the Cleveland Browns.

But those are just nit-picky omissions. The issue of “success stories,” however, is a bit more serious. At least for anyone who’s ever felt that dictionaries have value.

Here’s a quick rundown of four companies cited:

The Commonwealth Club has not yet announced who will be interviewing Lane on stage. If they’re in a pinch, I’m available…

Sign up for Dan’s daily email newsletter on deals and deal-makers: GetTermSheet.com

Summary: Untruth in Silicon Valley advertising.


Just when it was assumed there was nothing left to do with skyscrapers except build them ever taller, Norman Foster (and his many collaborators) reinvented the typology as a giant vegetable. Despite the nickname, there's a refined beauty to the building. Opened in 2004, it pure, complete geometry comes to a triumphant conclusion in the giant glass cloche on top. The funny shape is far from arbitrary, though. This is a model of energy efficiency. An innovative natural ventilation system draws fresh air (warm in winter, cool in summer) in and up through six shafts spiralling round the building. The triangulated structure, meanwhile, enables virtually clear floors of office space inside, with interesting views up and down the shafts. The top-floor circular bar and restaurant is the best view in London.

Not open to the public

The giant mobile phones and designer stubble of the 1980s City boom might seem antiquated, but Richard Rogers' radical office building, opened in 1986, still looks ahead of its time. The inside-out design never caught on, but in Lloyd's it made for a thrilling machine-like exterior – glass lifts, brushed steel cladding, exposed ducts and bespoke engineering details. The interior, meanwhile, is clear, simple and flexible. The central atrium is a glorious space, suffused with natural light and monastic calm, despite the buzzing activity of the resident insurance brokers. The inclusion of an 18th-century interior by Robert Adam on the 11th floor is a delightfully surreal touch.

Open by prior arrangement only, 020-7327 6586

Buckminster Fuller invented the geodesic dome – a lightweight shell made up of simple geometric elements – in the late 1940s, but it took another half-century before someone thought of covering a disused Cornish quarry with it. The invention of computers and lightweight materials helped. Using a hexagonal tubular-steel grid and pillows of transparent ETFE – a plastic that is 99% lighter than glass – Nicholas Grimshaw's collection of eight domes to mark the millennium lets the plants take centre stage.

Reconciling the abstraction of modernism with the historicism championed by John Ruskin, Richard MacCormac's powerful and sensual 1998 creation is mindful of the power of symbol and metaphor. The curved, protective walls, ringed by a small moat, enclose a space that's both church-like and ship-like. The Ruskin archive is housed in a building within the building, a double-height oak-framed box with panels of red plaster that "floats" between canal-like corridors running either side. Glass and slate panels in the floor evoke Ruskin's beloved Venice. For a small building, it's crammed with sensual delights.

Norman Foster's engineering-led problem-solving ability produced in 1978 an arts building that is simplicity itself. It is a 130m-long box, open at both ends, and that's about it. The genius lies in the double frame of tubular steel, a system of prefabricated elements assembled like a Meccano set on-site. Foster tucked away all the extra bits – toilets, services, etc – in the space between these inner and outer skins, creating a clear, open interior for exhibitions and educational space augmented by a flexible, external cladding system. Compared to lumbering buildings of the past, this opened up an era of space-age lightness – it literally weighs a fraction of conventional structures.

In an age of attention-grabbing icons, Catalan architect Enric Miralles instead crafted a building "sitting in and growing out of the land of Scotland". Now the fuss about the cost has died down, Miralles' 2004 creation has been recognised as an enduring work of art. Miralles created a free-associative language of national forms here, drawing on inspiration such as upturned fishing boats and Mackintosh's flower paintings.

What could have been an insignificant shed in Docklands sets a standard of civic virtue few other buildings measure up to. This 1988 building is postmodernism without the irony. The architectural language draws on everything from ancient Egypt onwards, but there's a purpose to these elements – the "jet engine" is an extraction fan, for example – and under the hand of philosopher-architect John Outram, they're combined into a complex, allusive narrative of storms, floods and nature.

Not open to the public

Taking its cues from the language of pop culture as much as high art, this small but influential work, built from off-the-shelf materials, speaks of a more playful and relaxed alternative to the prevailing perfectionist modernist mainstream. You could call it postmodernism, but its designers, Fashion Architecture Taste, wouldn't. The cartoony "house" shape on the facade, with regimented windows above, signify the building's live-work function like an advertising billboard, and while the exterior gives little indication of the spatial richness inside, it says plenty about the designers' personality, and their belief that architecture should have personality too.

Not open to the public

Strutting into Birmingham's Bullring like a catwalk model at a working men's club, Future Systems' freeform design reinvented the department store and revitalised the whole city. The exterior is thrillingly eye-catching – a curvaceous, figure-hugging blue number studded with aluminium discs, like giant sequins. But the 2003 building also caters to modern retail demands – there are virtually no windows so as to maximise display space inside. The central atrium, meanwhile, clad in sci-fi white plastic, with a ground-floor cafe, provides the perfect space for people-watching.

Architecture plays second fiddle to nature in this harmonious ensemble. Built in the most sparsely inhabited part of England, where the night sky has minimum light pollution, this strange wooden ship of an observatory does all it can to reduce its impact on the landscape. Opened in 2008, it is powered by solar panels and a wind turbine and its workings are low-tech. A place to consider the cosmos and our place in it.

Summary: Recent building projects range from the ambitious and flashy to quirky and understated


At 9.02 this morning, Radio 4 seemed to have been taken over by aliens. The words "Are you still on? Sorry I've lost you" followed by a hearty yawn were followed by a random selection of presenters' voices seemingly talking over one another. Only when the voices started to stutter did it become apparent that this wasn't a mistake.

In fact it was a sound installation by Christian Marclay, famous for his 24-hour film The Clock, the first of five three-minute "audio interventions" produced for Radio 4 by Artangel, famous for facilitating ambitious works outside galleries, including Jeremy Deller's restaging of the battle of Orgreave and Roger Hiorns's Siezure, which saw the interior of a house in London encrusted with blue crystals.

Tomorrow at the same time, straight after the Today programme, Ruth Ewan will get her turn on the airwaves, followed by Peter Strickland, Susan Hiller and Mark Wallinger.

In a piece in the Telegraph today about the initiative, Artangel's Michael Morris says that the works mark a drive by Radio 4 controller Gwyneth Williams to allow artists a platform on the station, not just to discuss their work but to make it. So expect similar interventions in future. Will you welcome them?

Summary: After the 9am news bulletin, Radio 4 appeared to broadcast three minutes of gibberish. Did you twig that it was art?


For many Americans, Gap Inc.’s GPS namesake stores were once a go-to shopping destination for t-shirts and jeans.

But now the Gap brand is in a deep funk that only seems to be worsening because of fashion miscues and nimble rivals that have eaten into its business.

On Monday, Gap’s parent company provided the latest evidence of the chain’s struggles by reporting that comparable sales fell 10% last quarter. It was the fifth straight quarterly decline, and the worst performance since late 2011.

In April, the last month of the quarter, same store sales fell 15%. Part of the slowdown can be blamed on this year’s early Easter, which pulled some sales from April to March. But the poor results also show how deeply rooted Gap’s problems are. Wall Street analysts had expected a drop of only 7.2% last month, according to Consensus Matrix.

What’s more, some of Gap’s rivals avoided the big drop in April sales. For example, L Brands LB , parent of Victoria’s Secret, reported only a minimal decline, suggesting that Gap can’t really use Easter’s timing as an excuse.

Earlier this year, Gap Inc CEO Art Peck, a company veteran who took the helm in February, shook up the brand’s top management, hiring a new president and letting star creative director Rebekka Bay, a former H&M executive, go. In February, he said that fixing Gap was his “No. 1 priority,” with a particular focus on improving its women’s wear.

Fixing Gap’s problems won’t be easy or quick for Peck. Gap has long since bought merchandise for the spring and summer seasons, so the influence of the brand’s new leaders won’t be felt until the fall.

Gap has also created its own problems in other ways. The retailer was slower than its sister brands, which include Old Navy and Banana Republic, to speed up its supply chain, handcuffing it when it comes to responding to fashion hits or misses and reacting to what rivals H&M and Uniqlo do. In response, Peck is trying to shorten the production calendar at Gap.

Last quarter, Gap Inc failed to get relief from Banana Republic, whose comparable sales were similarly weak last quarter in falling 8%. On the bright side for the company, its biggest brand, Old Navy continues to do well, with comparable sales rising 3% for the full quarter. The company will release full quarterly financial results, including its profit, on May 21.

Peck, who was president of Gap North America from February 2011 to November 2012, has pointed to his own experience as evidence that the Gap brand can rise again. Gap had struggled for a few years, closed 200 stores, but then had a massive home run in 2013 with bright-colored jeans.

One thing is clear: Gap Inc. cannot afford to have its $6.2 billion-a-year namesake brand falter for very long. It generates 38% of the parent company’s sales and is expanding overseas.

“None of us are satisfied with the performance that we’re seeing at Gap,” Peck told investors in February. “2015 is going to be a year of hard work and getting back on track.”

The holiday season — still several months off — can’t come soon enough for Peck.

For more about Gap, watch this Fortune video:

Summary: The fashion retailer reported another quarter of weak sales at its namesake brand, suggesting Gap's turnaround could take longer than expected.


WILLIAM SHOCKLEY is at it again. For those possessed of short memory or a subnormal ability to hold a grudge, Shockley is the Nobel Prize laureate who last year made a deposit in a sperm bank dedicated to the proposition that all men should not be created equal. Believing that humankind has a duty to work against ''excessive reproduction of the genetically disadvantaged,'' Shockley, the brilliant Stanford professor who invented the transistor, opened a sperm bank account so that women would be able to bear children who will offset the ''backward evolution'' he fears is upon us.

The quoted phrases come from remarks Shockley made this spring at a meeting of the Association for Educational Communication and Technology. He wasn't talking about sperm banks, but his master-race ideas and the notion of sperm pressed into service for such a purpose set me to thinking that women have missed the boat on this one.

Instead of looking down their noses at what is billed as high-class sperm, women should be hard at work setting up the First National Egg Bank. There they could lay in a Fort Knox-worth of first-rate eggs from the finest females in the world. Then, when an average woman wanted to have a baby but felt guilty about the humdrum quality of her own ova, she would have somewhere to go for help.

There would be problems, of course. Finding all those tiny egg cartons, for one thing. Furthermore, the Federal Reserve Board requires banks to keep a certain percentage of assets inactive - sterile deposits, these are called. Someone would have to convince the Fed that such deposits run counter to the purpose of an egg bank.

One of nature's curve balls would give the bank's trustees an even more serious problem: Men can donate sperm well into old age, but woman produce eggs for only a limited number of years. What if a woman didn't prove her superiority until her egg days were over, like Grandma Moses? The bank would have to maintain one vault for eggs of women who had proved themselves and another for the eggs of those who might. At such time as it was decided that a woman had made her mark on the world, her eggs could be reclassified from ''potential' to ''actualized'' and moved to the proper vault.

Conversely, the bank would have to devise procedures for taking eggs off the market if a woman let down the side. Take Fran,coise Sagan, for example. She wrote a stunning novel while still in her teens and followed it up with several other respectable works. But this spring her new novel is the object of a big plagiarism suit that has caused a major scandal in France. Who would have thought that the plagiarism gene, normally so recessive, would have worked its way to the surface in her case? Extreme care would have to be taken against the possibility of such disappointments.

All of which leads to what will be the First National Egg Bank's toughest chore: setting the criteria for determining who is a suitable donor. Shockley had it easy. His bank cares only about brains. My feeling is that as long as women are getting into this business, they ought to try to do better than that. Beauty, imagination, generosity, the ability to balance a checkbook - all of these genes should be sought.

As for judging whether a woman possesses these qualities, the trustees should be severe. In developing a race of thoroughbreds, excellence is more important than fairness.

The career achievements of a potential egg donor will be somewhat easier to assess. Prospects could be evaluated on the basis of formulas developed by actuaries at the Harvard Business School. In the case of writers, for example, published pages could be multiplied by the number of copies published, and the total divided by the number of trees it would take to print that amount of material. If a sufficient number of trees had been killed on a writer's behalf, she would be eligible to deposit in the ''actualized'' rather than the ''potential'' vault.

Like all banking institutions, the First National Egg Bank must make plans with an eye toward the future. From the beginning the bank should strive for diversification. Because high-achieving women are not held in equal esteem by all segments of society, the bank should offer a variety of eggs. In the first few years, when cash will ebb more than flow, movie-star eggs could be an especially lucrative line.

Multinational marketing efforts would also enhance diversification. The people of Iceland, for example, live with the threat of volcanic eruption. Perhaps Icelandic women could be persuaded to store their eggs in America as insurance against the day when their country is engulfed by lava. (The bank would charge fees for keeping such eggs in trust.) Similar business could come from Californians worried about earthquakes and nations fearful of the neutron bomb, that awe-inspiring device that obliterates human life but leaves everything else intact.

Taking a cue from nature, the egg bank should also plan for the day when it can merge with sperm banks in order to become a one-stop institution meeting all family needs. Perhaps it could market its products through mail-order catalogues, the way seed companies do. Relieved of the need to have sex, mediocre couples who want children could while away cold winter nights debating the merits of endless hybrids. John Kenneth Galbraith and Jacqueline Bisset. Donna Summer and Dave Winfield, the Rockefellers and the du Ponts....

O, for the brave new world that has such creatures in it. There are just a couple of problems. One was noted by George Bernard Shaw when he turned down a woman who insisted she wanted to have a child by him. Shaw said he couldn't possibly do such a thing because of his fear that the fruit of their union would have his looks and her mind.

Then there's the snag that geneticists call ''regression to the mean.'' According to this principle, the mating of two outstanding anythings tends to produce offspring that slide back toward middling rather than progress toward something even more outstanding.

Finally there is a basic flaw that occurs to everyone who thinks long enough about breeding for genius: Assuming we want to produce a race of Shockleys, it is not Dr. Shockley's seed we need but his father's. (Beyond this, how can we be sure he didn't get his abilities from his mother?)

For Shockley, improving mankind seems to be a simple matter of mixing the proper ingredients at the moment of conception. But what happens to this perfect child after it enters the world? Doesn't upbringing count for anything?

If we are really looking to develop a class of superior beings, perhaps we should do what one of the Bloomsbury Group suggested long ago - abitrarily choose every ten-thousandth child born and lavish upon it the best of everything that human beings can give each other.

That notion has a certain fairness about it, but I worry about the 9,999 other children. Chances are pretty good that Mozart and Madame Curie would have been among them. When all is said and done, maybe the best we can do is to keep on groping in the dark.


MEXICO CITY, Feb. 26— Shafik Jorge Handal, the secretary general of El Salvador's Communist Party, has denied the authenticity of documents made public by the State Department in which he describes promised arms shipments from Soviet bloc countries to Salvadoran guerrillas.

The documents, reportedly captured during a raid on a rebel hideout in San Salvador in November, were said by American officials to contain reports by Mr. Handal of his meetings with government and party officials in the Soviet Union, Cuba, Vietnam, Ethiopia, East Germany, Bulgaria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Nicaragua.

These and other documents said to have been seized from El Salvador's People's Revolutionary Army last month have become the principal support for the Reagan Administration's charges of Soviet bloc interference in El Salvador's civil war.

In a statement dated Feb. 9 that was made available here today by Salvadoran opposition groups, Mr. Handal ''categorically'' denied all reports that he had reached an agreement with Socialist bloc governments on arms shipments to El Salvador. 'Eventual Military Aggression'

''There is no doubt that this is a maneuver to justify the growing supply of U.S. arms and military personnel to the genocidal Christian Democrat-military junta and to prepare the ground for an eventual military aggression in Central America,'' the Communist leader said.

He said that the Salvadoran people have been seeking democracy for 50 years, but ''time and again, the reactionary military tyranny, invariably aided by successive U.S. Governments, has responded with massacres and repression.''

''The military dictatorship, the oligarchy and the Government of the United States have thus pushed the Salvadoran people toward the armed struggle,'' Mr. Handal added.

He went on to say, ''No one can honestly be surprised that this people has now taken up arms to exercise its right to selfdetermination.'' Rebel Victory Predicted

''Nevertheless, other explanations are now being found in supposed conspiracies of the Soviet Union and other Socialist countries with the Salvadoran Communist Party,'' he said.

Saying the rebels ''will triumph today or tomorrow,'' he urged American officials to think of future relations between the United States and a revolutionary regime in El Salvador.

''In our case,'' he said, ''in no way do we want a future of hostile relations with the United States, with whose people we feel much sympathy and among whom so many of our compatriots live and work. On the contrary, we favor friendly and constructive relations based on mutual respect and coexistence. But the U.S. Government, it seems, prefers to work today to poison those future relations.'' U.S. Declines Comment Special to the New York Times

WASHINGTON, Feb. 26 - William J. Dyess, a State Department spokesman, said today that he ''would not dignify with any comment'' the statement attributed to Mr. Handal.

Illustrations: photo of soldiers in San Salvador


ALBANY, March 3— The State Senate has given final passage to a bill that would protect public and private libraries from having to disclose information on borrowers and the books they read.

The bill would allow these disclosures if a borrower gave his consent or if a court ordered a library to turn over the data. The libraries would not be prohibited, however, from giving out general information on the kinds of books being borrowed. Publishing houses use such facts to help determine what types of books appeal to the public.

The bill will now be sent to Governor Carey, who is expected to approve it. The bill's sponsors said the legislation was inititated in response to attempts by certain groups, such as the Moral Majority, to gain access to library records containing the names or other identifying details about persons or organizations who have borrowed library materials. Political Use Cited

''These groups have sought disclosure for use in the political arena,'' Richard A. Givens, chairman of the New York County Lawyers' Association Committee on State Legislation, wrote in support of the measure. ''This bill appears to be an appropriate response to the threat of misuse of library records for political ends.''

Assemblyman Steven Sanders, Democrat of Manhattan and a sponsor of the legislation in his house, said eight other states had similar restraints on disclosures. Libraries in New York do not have legal authority to withhold the information, the sponsors said.

While there have been no reported instances in which libraries in the state had been asked to provide such material, he said, the American Library Association has received numerous reports from around the country about such attempts.

The Republican-led Senate approved a bill today to redraw the state's Congressional district lines but delayed action on its reapportionment plan for the Legislature. The move was the latest round in the disagreement between Democrats and Republicans over how to redraw the state's political boundaries to conform with the 1980 census.

Democratic leaders dismissed the Senate's action concerning Congressional lines on the ground that the Republicans themselves had failed to agree on lines for the Legislature.

The bill, which was passed by a vote of 33 to 18, stands no chance of winning approval in the Assembly, with its Democratic majority. The vote comes just days before a Federal District Court is scheduled to hear arguments on a suit brought last month by the Black and Puerto Rican Legislative Caucus in an attempt to force the Legislature to approve a reapportionment plan.

The Assembly today approved a bill that would help a 63-year-old widow from Calverton, L.I., regain custody of a 6-year-old foster child she raised from infancy.

The Suffolk County Department of Social Services had rejected the woman's application for adoption on the grounds that she was too old to care for the child through maturity, was single and did not have adequate income. The child was subsequently placed with another foster family. The legislation would require the department to reconsider the application.


W hile Pentagon officials have been busy submitting to lie detector tests in the effort to stem disclosures of state secrets, one longkept secret recently slipped onto the public record by way of an open Congressional hearing. Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Richard D. DeLauer told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the Stealth bomber would be ready for operations in 1991.

This debut date of the radar-evading plane is important not only to Soviet military strategists, but also to domestic opponents of the B-1 bomber who have been maintaining that spending $20 billion for 100 of those aircraft is unnecessary because the Stealth will be flying soon enough.

Pentagon and Senate officials tried to lock the hangar door by striking the Stealth date from the published record of the hearing. But the word is out all over town, another Washington secret reduced to anecdote.

T here's no doctrine of sanctuary at Foggy Bottom. State Department workers were surprised to see Federal marshals quietly enter the agency headquarters recently to track down an elusive worker. The hunters moved through the corridors as if on the trail of the Libyan Hit Squad.

Actually, their mission involved merely a badly worn affair of the heart. The quarry was a man sought by his ex-wife in an alimony and divorce proceeding. After following tips to several blind alleys at the labyrinthine agency, the G-men struck home and had the man summoned from a meeting. He was talked into going downtown to the D.C. jail. A writ of ne exeat was served, instructing the diplomatic worker not to leave the country before he gets this domestic affair in order. No Small Wonder

W ashington is a busy place for male chauvinsts, and lately some of the baser practitioners can be seen lounging in the early spring sunshine of the Mall, eying female joggers on their lunch hour. They would, however, be more enlightened to turn away to a place nearby, the lobby of the National Museum of American History, where Wonder Woman herself is on display. Or at least numerous depictions of her, plus her Wonder Woman TV costume, plus a fascinating array of exhibits and information devoted to the cartoon character who is a focus of Women's History Week that begins today.

Wonder Woman was created 40 years ago by William Moulton Marston, a psychologist who, according to Smithsonian historians, also invented the lie detector test. The exhibit experts relate that he became concerned that wartime comic books offered superheroes aimed strictly at little boys, but nothing to inspire girls. So he sketched a superheroine ''as lovely as Aphrodite, as wise as Athena, with the speed of Mercury and the strength of Hercules.''

The exhibit was prepared with the help of the Wonder Woman Foundation, a new organization that plans to award grants to ''outstanding women 40 years of age and older.'' The display shows how the character began as a symbol of magical strength and enlightened sisterhood. But after Mr. Marston's death, the comic strip played up Steve Trevor and other love interests for Wonder Woman in the 1950's and stopped featuring events from women's history in favor of tidbits about courtship and marriage customs. The display is humble by supershow standards, a mere two display cases, but it seems to have something for everyone, even the Steve Trevor types lounging out on the Mall. Unappealing Prospects

F ederal workers being laid off because of budget cuts are appealing to the Merit Systems Protection Board and discovering that the board can no longer afford to send out officers to hear their cases. Instead, citing its own budget problems, the board has decreed that workers with grievances must henceforth travel at their own expense to board field offices, and must pay to get a printed transcript of the proceedings.

Both regulations are new, and the National Treasury Employees Union has begun a lawsuit, charging that ''insurmountable'' due-process burdens have been created by the Government. The union cited the case of two office workers for the Internal Revenue Service in Chicago being told to travel with their witnesses to Detroit for a hearing and to foot the bill.

The merit board pleads that it is suffering from its own 16 percent spending cut levied by budget officials, even as it is swamped with work, both from those appealing layoffs and the 11,000 air traffic controllers who lost their jobs after striking last year. Francis X. Clines Warren Weaver Jr.

Summary: Stealth Debut   W hile Pentagon officials have been busy submitting to lie detector tests in the effort to stem disclosures of state secrets, one longkept secret recently slipped onto the public record by way of an open Congressional hearing. Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Richard D. DeLauer told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the Stealth bomber would be ready for operations in 1991.   This debut date of the radar-evading plane is important not only to Soviet military strategists, but also to domestic opponents of the B-1 bomber who have been maintaining that spending $20 billion for 100 of those aircraft is unnecessary because the Stealth will be flying soon enough.   Pentagon and Senate officials tried to lock the hangar door by striking the Stealth date from the published record of the hearing.  But the word is out all over town, another Washington secret reduced to anecdote.


LONDON, May 24— On Friday morning, the major British newspapers reported with surprising unanimity that the task force in the South Atlantic was planning ''hit-and-run raids'' on various parts of the Falkland Islands, rather than any full-scale invasion.

But only hours after the papers were on the streets of London, British marines and paratroopers were storming ashore in San Carlos Bay, in precisely the kind of frontal assault that the papers had said was not in the cards.

What had happened? The answer is clouded in the mists of official secrecy and the arcane briefing system under which British journalists reporting on the Government work, complicated by the distaste the Defense Ministry has often shown for the press.

But some of the reporters whose articles were proved wrong last Friday think that the military intentionally misled them at a highlevel briefing Thursday night as part of an effort to mislead the Argentines. They feel used and uncomfortable about it.

''The Government are quite shameless about using us,'' said one of the most respected of the military correspondents, insisting on anonymity. ''It puts us in a frightfully difficult position. Naturally, one understands the need to protect the lives of the British troops, but this kind of deception can quickly lead down a very slippery slope indeed.''

The disquiet about Friday's articles is part of a larger pattern of dissatisfaction among the British press, and some of the public, over the way the Government is releasing information about the war in the South Atlantic.

With all the action taking place at sea and on islands 8,000 miles away, the newspapers and television are totally dependent on the Government. There are two dozen journalists aboard ships with the task force, but their dispatches must pass through military censorship on their way to London.

Today, in a continuation of the bitter tug of war that has developed between the press and the ministry, The Guardian published a front-page dispatch from the task force that had not gone through military censorship. Airport Reported Captured

The dispatch, containing an unconfirmed report that the Goose Green airstrip had been captured by the British, arrived by telex at the Guardian office in London, somehow circumventing the navy censors. The Defense Ministry, saying it was the first time such a thing had happened in the two-month operation, ordered an investigation.

Besides these censored dispatches, the only other source of information about the war is the Defense Ministry itself. The spokesman there, Ian McDonald, holds on-the-record briefings once or twice a day, explaining the latest action in the South Atlantic. But, to the great irritation of the British, his information about a particular incident sometimes comes hours after it has leaked out of Washington or has been announced in Buenos Aires.

In addition to Mr. McDonald's news conferences, there is a secret background briefing every Tuesday and Thursday for the two dozen or so British correspondents who regularly cover the Defense Ministry, a 10-story gray stone fortress on the north bank of the Thames. This briefing is open only to the regulars, and one of its ground rules is that they will, in print, not even acknowledge that it has taken place. Briefing Given by Top Official

The articles speculating about the attacks last Friday were based on a briefing Thursday by Sir Frank Cooper, the highest-ranking civil servant in the Defense Ministry, but none mentioned his name.

Instead, they used expressions like ''senior Whitehall sources'' as the basis for reports that were printed under such headlines as ''Full-Scale Invasion Unlikely; Phased Landings and Bombardments Expected.''

The reporters who regularly cover military affairs complain privately about having been misled, but none of them would make the complaint in public. One explained: ''Obviously we have to maintain good relations with the ministry. You certainly cannot cover a war if the people over there stop talking to you.''

Another of the reporters said that since the beginning of the Falkland crisis two months ago all other sources in the ministry had stopped seeing the press, privately or any other way. No Way of Checking

''That leaves us entirely dependent on the briefings, the public ones and the private ones,'' he said. ''And, as you can see from last week, we have no way of knowing - or checking - whether we are being lied to.''

British journalists have also been critical of the fact that news photographs from the naval task force have arrived in London weeks late, because, the ministry explained, there were not proper facilities aboard the ships there to transmit pictures, a practice that is routine in the business of international news gathering.

But just as the marines landed at San Carlos Bay, the task force suddenly gained the ability to send photographs. The first picture to be printed in London within hours - rather than weeks -after it was taken in the Falklands was one showing three British marines raising the Union Jack there after Friday's invasion. It was on most of the front pages Saturday.

Asked how it had gotten to London so rapidly, when other pictures over the past weeks had taken so long, a ministry spokesman said, ''Well, we knew there would be a lot of interest in this particular shot, so we gave it priority.''

Illustrations: photo of Royal Marines on East Falkland Island


A report on the MBTA by the special panel appointed by Governor Charlie Baker targets the transit authority’s pension fund among the agency’s numerous operating issues.

The report calls for new state legislation to commission an independent audit of the unfunded liability for both the pension and other retirement benefits.

The $1.6 billion T pension’s unfunded liablity was $757.4 million at the end of 2013, according to its annual report. The MBTA Police Fund’s unfunded liablity was $21.3 million, according to the panel’s report.

But the report said the T’s information leaves some doubts, saying, “the Panel has no way to confirm its accuracy.” It goes on to say, “The retirement fund’s continued refusal to submit to an independent audit strongly suggests that these figures are understated.”

The T pension fund is organized as a private trust, although it oversees the pensions of public workers and is partially funded by taxpayers. Because of its private status, it is not subject to public records law and releases only certain financial documentation to the public.

Steve Crawford, a spokesman for the MBTA pension fund, said in an e-mail that the fund is independently audited annually by KPMG, the same firm that audits the MBTA. He said the fund also “undergoes an independent annual actuarial review,” performed by Buck Consultants.

Typically, the pension fund’s annual report has contained only some elements of these audits. Prior to 2013, the fund omitted the “management’s discussion and analysis” section of its financials that auditors generally require. That section would have disclosed the problems the fund was having with a $25 million hedge fund investment in a firm that is now bankrupt.

Tim Buckley, spokesman for the governor, said the panel wants the T pension fund to undergo an audit that complies with the Governmental Accounting Standards Board.

Crawford, in a statement, said the T pension’s 2014 annual report, expected later this year, will contain its independent financial audit and actuarial report, according to the guidelines of the Government Financial Officers Assocation.

Summary: A report on the MBTA by the special panel appointed by Governor Charlie Baker targets the transit authority’s pension fund among numerous operating issues.


Rick Diamond/Getty Images for GMA

The 42d Boston Pops Fireworks Spectacular at the DCR Hatch Shell has unveiled its list of guests for the 2015 shindig.

Among those celebrating Keith Lockhart’s 20th year as conductor of the Pops and the annual party on the Charles River Esplanade will be Broadway star and pop crooner Michael Cavanaugh — who was hand-picked by Billy Joel for the lead role in the musical “Movin’ Out” — popular “American Idol” finalist Melinda Doolittle, gospel singer and “The Voice” finalist Michelle Brooks-Thompson, drum and bugle corps the Boston Crusaders, “America’s Got Talent” finalists Sons of Serendip, and the USO Show Troupe.

As always, the show will culminate with a massive fireworks display.

WBZ anchors David Wade and Lisa Hughes will host the live three-hour telecast from 8-11 p.m. The show will also air on WBZ NewsRadio 1030 AM beginning at 7 p.m. and on WCRB 99.5 FM starting at 8 p.m.. The show will also be webcast starting at 8 p.m. at www.bostonpopsjuly4th.org and www.cbsboston.com.

Said Lockhart in a statement accompanying the announcement: “There are few concerts that I’ve conducted that come close to the thrill of leading the Boston Pops Fireworks Spectacular for the Greater Boston community and visitors hailing from far and wide, all of whom gather together on the Esplanade to celebrate one of our nation’s most important holidays.”

The Springfield-based gospel singer, a contestant on season three of NBC’s “The Voice,” releases her EP on Monday.

• ‘Voice’ alum Michelle Brooks-Thompson readies debut album

Summary: The Boston Pops announced its special guests, including former “American Idol” contestant Melinda Doolittle, for its July Fourth Fireworks Spectacular.


Israeli drugmaker Teva Pharmaceuticals Industries Ltd. agreed Monday to buy the generic-drug business of Allergan Plc for about $40.5 billion in cash and stock, and ended its hostile bid for Mylan NV.

Teva will pay $33.75 billion in cash and $6.75 billion worth of shares at Monday’s price, or about 10 percent of the enlarged company, the Petach Tikva, Israel-based company said in a statement. Teva surged as much as 11 percent as trading resumed in Tel Aviv.

The deal bolsters Teva’s position as the world’s largest maker of generic drugs, and gives it greater negotiating power with governments and private-health insurers. It also allows the drugmaker to extricate itself from an increasingly antagonistic pursuit of Mylan, which is in the midst of trying to buy Perrigo Co.

“We’re looking at a fairly similar deal to the Mylan offer but without all the uncertainties attached to a hostile situation,” said Jonathan Kreizman, an analyst at Bank of Jerusalem. “Teva and Allergan have less overlap than Teva and Mylan.”

The acquisition extends a wave of mergers that has swept over the health-care industry. Announced pharmaceutical deals so far this year have topped $180 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That’s on pace to beat last year’s record of more than $200 billion.

Allergan, which makes the blockbuster wrinkle treatment Botox, said Sunday it would buy the biotech company Naurex Inc., which is developing a fast-acting antidepressant. The $560 million all-cash transaction is expected to close by year-end.

Teva expects the transaction, which both boards backed unanimously, to close in the first quarter of 2016 and boost earnings per share. Also today, the company raised its earnings per share estimate for 2015 to between $5.15 and $5.40, up from an earlier forecast of $5.05 to $5.35. Earnings per share were $1.43 in the second quarter, Teva said.

Teva had been pursuing a $40.1 billion deal to buy Mylan since April and solidify its role as the industry leader. Mylan rejected Teva’s advances.

Last week, Mylan’s independent foundation exercised an option to acquire shares that let it control half of the company in a move that rendered Teva’s attempt to win over a majority of its shareholders much more difficult. Abbott Laboratories, Mylan’s top shareholder, in June said it also backed Mylan’s plan to avoid being taken over by Teva.

Mylan is itself pursuing Dublin-based Perrigo, a campaign that may now get fresh impetus as pressure mounts to become bigger. Perrigo, which makes prescription and over-the-counter drugs, has thus far rebuffed Mylan’s $33 billion offer.

Barclays and Greenhill & Co. are serving as financial advisors to Teva. Sullivan & Cromwell LLP and Tulchinsky Stern Marciano Cohen Levitski & Co are its legal counsel.

Teva said it expects cost synergies and tax savings of about $1.4 billion per year, most of which should take place by the third anniversary of the deal’s close. The savings will come from efficiencies in operations, manufacturing, and sales and marketing, it said.

Allergan, based in Dublin and with operating headquarters in Parsippany, N.J., is itself the product of a recent merger. Actavis Plc agreed to buy Allergan for $66 billion in November 2014, after spending months locked in bitter conflict with Valeant Pharmaceuticals International Inc., a rival drugmaker that had started a hostile takeover effort that year. The deal was completed in March.

Last month, Actavis rebranded the combined company as Allergan. The combination created a health-care giant with projected annual sales of more than $20 billion this year. The generics business generated sales of $6.75 billion last year. Teva’s current head of generics, Siggi Olafsson, is a former Actavis executive.

Summary: The Israeli drugmaker Teva also said it would end its hostile bid for Mylan NV.


McDonald's, Popeyes, Domino's Pizza, and Dunkin' Brands are all part of a growing contingent on Main Street that is poised for growth this year. The franchising industry has become an integral part of the American economy, contributing 3.5 percent of U.S. GDP, or $472 billion. It's expected to create more jobs and grow faster than the rest of the private sector in 2014, according to research conducted by IHS Global Insight for the International Franchise Association Educational Foundation.

Overall, the number of franchise categories is expanding into nearly every nook and cranny in the marketplace. Here we profile entrepreneurs who have reaped millions by carving a toehold in novel market niches where they could leverage their skills and past experiences and capitalize on some big trends in the U.S. economy—from doggie day care and mosquito exterminators to shipping depots. Read on to learn lessons from eight franchise owners who have moved beyond—some well beyond—the million-dollar annual sales mark.

—By Maggie Overfelt, Special to CNBC.comPosted 17 May 2014

Sources: Getty Imges (TL, TR, BR) | McDonand's (BL)

Summary: Eight owners of unsung franchises generating more than $1 million in annual sales offer lessons learned on building a thriving franchise.


Stephen Colbert (left) and George Clooney

08/07/2015 AT 11:00 AM EDT

It doesn't get more A-list than this.

's first guest when the comedian takes over the

"George Clooney will be my first-ever #LSSC guest on September 8th! Could one of you let him know?" Colbert, 51, Tweeted on Friday.

Clooney, 54, currently has two movies in post-production:

premiere date comes just weeks before the actor celebrates his one-year

with his wife, acclaimed human rights lawyer

George Clooney will be my first-ever #LSSC guest on September 8th! Could one of you let him know?

Colbert, known for his faux Republican persona on Comedy Central's

, has been gradually teasing the tone of his new show,

at Donald Trump's presidential announcement in a promo and

premieres Sept. 8 at 11:35 p.m. ET on CBS.

Summary: "Could one of you let him know?" Stephen Colbert Tweeted on Friday


Trade group Airlines for America said in a statement that all U.S. carriers conduct tests to make sure their systems are secure.

United unveiled the approach in May just weeks before technological glitches grounded its entire fleet twice, underscoring the risks that airlines face. One incident locked the airline out of its reservations system, preventing customers from checking in, and another zapped functionality of the software United needed to dispatch its flight plan.

"We believe that this program will further bolster our security and allow us to continue to provide excellent service," United said on its website, declining additional comment.

Jordan Wiens, a researcher focused on cyber vulnerabilities, tweeted last week that he received United's top reward of 1 million miles for exposing a flaw that could have allowed hackers to seize control of one of the airline's websites.

Read MoreAirlines pocket $38B from extra fees

"It's really interesting that United did what they did," he said in an interview. "There actually aren't that many companies in any industry outside of technology that do bug bounties."

Wiens said it was normal for large companies such as United to have bugs in their websites.

Terms of the agreement prohibit Wiens from disclosing the bug he discovered. The terms also required that Wiens reveal the supposed problem to United without trying to exploit it, meaning he does not know how much information he could have accessed or manipulated.

Beyond the bounty, United said it tests systems internally and engages cybersecurity firms to keep its websites secure.

Summary: United has awarded millions of frequent flier miles to hackers who have uncovered gaps in the carrier's web security.


Donald Trump appears to have Mark Cuban's vote, at least in terms of how the billionaire real estate mogul is conducting his political campaign.

Cuban took to his Cyber Dust messaging app this week to congratulate Trump, referring to the Republican presidential candidate as "probably the best thing to happen to politics in a long, long time."

"I don't care what his actual positions are," Cuban wrote. "I don't care if he says the wrong thing. He says what's on his mind. He gives honest answers rather than prepared answers. This is more important than anything any candidate has done in years."

Cuban opined that politics in its current state is broken.

"Up until Trump announced his candidacy the conventional wisdom was that you had to be a professional politician in order to run," Cuban wrote. "You had to have a background that was politically scrubbed. In other words smart people who didn't live perfect lives could never run. Smart people who didn't want their familiar put under the media spotlight wouldn't run."

Read MoreMark Cuban puts asterisk on Donald Trump's billions

The Dallas Mavericks owner credited Trump with "changing the game" of politics, adding that Trump "deserves a lot of credit."

Trump issued a tweet to his more than 3 million Twitter followers, thanking Cuban for the "nice words." Trump added that he was rapidly becoming a Dallas Mavericks fan.

"I think people are tired of politics as usual," Cuban told ESPN Radio last week. "We're tired of everything being scripted, we're tired of every comment being politically correct. And, you know, even though Donald has to spend a lot of time pulling not just his foot but the toenails and the stuff that falls off his cuticles out of his mouth, at least it's refreshing to have somebody who is just gonna say what's on their mind and give an honest, if not insensitive, response to a question. To me, it's great."

So would Cuban vote for Trump?

"No, but I don't know that I'd vote for any of the other 14 candidates and I don't know that I'd vote for the Democratic candidates right now either," Cuban said.

This wasn't the first time Cuban wrote about Trump on Cyber Dust. Just a week ago, Cuban questioned how much Trump is actually worth shortly after Trump put out a press release stating his net worth exceeded $10 billion. At the time, Cuban told CNBC that he likes Trump and has met him in person.


"China's economy treaded water in the second quarter. Industrial production rose slightly, but investment remained weak. The underlying factor is the housing slump, which continues to weigh on the real economy," Moody's Analytics, which expects 6.8 percent growth, wrote in a note.

"Trade was a mild boost to growth, mostly thanks to lower imports. Stimulus measures will help boost growth, but the effect will be fully felt later in the year," it said.

Also on the data front, India is scheduled to report its closely watched consumer inflation index (CPI) for June on Monday. CPI is the main gauge used by the Reserve Bank of India to gauge movement in prices.

Elsewhere in the region, Singapore will also publish an advance GDP estimates for the second quarter on Tuesday, which is expected to show the show the economy grew 2.6 percent on year, according to Goldman Sachs.

Read MoreGDP may rain on Singapore's 50th birthday parade

"We expect weakness in the manufacturing sector to be cushioned by the resilient growth of the finance and insurance sector. Singapore is expected to post another quarter of trade surplus, partly on the back of weak imports. We expect private consumption to have remained robust in Q2," the bank wrote in a note.

Finally, the Bank of Japan will be back in the spotlight this week, with its two-day monetary policy meeting concluding on Wednesday.

While the central bank is not expected to reveal any new cards from up its sleeve at this point, commentary from BOJ Governor Haruhiko Kuroda will be watched for fresh clues about the direction of monetary policy.

-CNBC's Phillip Tutt contributed to this report

Summary: It's shaping up to be an eventful trading week, with a raft out key economic indicators out of China and yet another deadline looming for Greece.


The first Pirate Joe's store, which has become somewhat of a tourist attraction, is located across the street from a Safeway supermarket in an area just west of Vancouver's downtown district. The store sells some items that are not from Trader Joe's.

Hallatt said that the store experienced its slowest day last week, and he hopes going online will boost the business.

Read MoreGoodbye Target, hello Uniqlo! Canada's next player

He said he's spent "peanuts" putting the online website together. The businessman claims to have received more than 2,000 emails from people asking to have products shipped to locations across Canada, and he's also considering offering shipping to markets such as Japan. That said, not all the products sold in the Pirate's Joe store will be available for shipping—and liquor rules in Canada may limit the selling of such products, including Trader Joe's popular "Two Buck Chuck" wine.

Pirate Joe's gets the Trader Joe's brand products by going to U.S. locations near the border, particularly Washington state stores. The products are then resold with a hefty markup at the Pirate Joe's store. The weakening Canadian dollar has made it more expensive for the knockoff merchant to buy Trader Joe's products across the border.

"I can't see a business strategy around this," said David Ian Gray, a retail consultant at DIG360 Consulting in Vancouver. "It doesn't make any scalable business sense. His game now may be just to be annoying enough that he gets a lucrative buyout to go away."

Summary: Pirate Joe's, which sells Trader Joe's brand goods in Vancouver, is planning to add a second store and an online storefront.


"The European market place, particularly for equities, is following very much what the U.S. did a couple of years ago because obviously the U.S. monetary authority loaded up our system with accommodative capital...and now you are almost seeing a mirror image of that occurring here in Europe," Mike Thompson, the managing director and head of global markets intelligence at S&P Capital IQ, told CNBC last week.

Read MoreEurope's bulls run…but for how long?

The S&P 500 outperformed most advanced markets last year as the U.S. Federal Reserve begun dialing back its own quantitative easing (QE) program but has posted slim gains of just 0.7 percent year-to-date. Unthinkably, an article by Reuters last week quoted some analysts already speculating that the ECB might also "taper" the pace of its bond purchases, possibly even before the end of 2015 and way before initial expectations. This comes as business activity data has produced better-than-expected results and euro zone inflation figures have edged ever so slightly higher.

Buyers might also be a little wary of the price-to-earnings ratio - a popular calculation used by many market participants to gauge the value of a stock. The ratio for the Euro Stoxx 600 is now above the S&P 500 after years of it being the other way around, with a higher ratio meaning the more overvalued its likely to be.

Read MoreEurope's best stocks this quarter

If you are buying European stocks you are now part of a consensus trade. This should ring alarm bells but there are ways to ride out this bull run in style. Piers Curran, head of trading at Amplify Trading, told CNBC via email that he would favor cyclical stocks in this environment.

Martin Todd, co-manager of the Hermes Sourcecap European Alpha fund, detailed his five hidden "growth gems" in a research note last week. He named Spanish airport operator Aena, Zurich-based food business Aryzta, financial services firm Wirecard, Spanish manufacturer Gamesa and Telecom Italia as having "strong long-term growth potential."

Follow us on Twitter: @CNBCWorld

Summary: The money-printing has begun, equities are surging, buybacks are back and investors are piling in. But it won't be plain sailing for Europe.


NEW YORK — 7-Eleven expanded its delivery service to three cities Tuesday, but its most well-known item, the Slurpee, isn’t on the menu for now. Customers in Chicago, Los Angeles, and parts of New York can order other items like chicken wings, cold medicine, and paper towels. Orders are made through the app or website of DoorDash, the delivery company that 7-Eleven has partnered with in those cities. Stores in Washington and Boston will offer delivery in the coming months, the companies said. Slurpees, the slushy frozen treats, are ‘‘best when consumed immediately,’’ said spokeswoman Margaret Chabris. DoorDash is testing ways to get them delivered without melting. Alcohol is not delivered because of complicated state laws, but 7-Eleven is working on ways to do that in the future. In July, 7-Eleven teamed up with Postmates to offer deliveries in San Francisco and Austin, Texas. Postmates delivers Slurpees using insulated bags. DoorDasht charges a $4.99 to $6.99 and tipping is optional. There’s no minimum delivery amount and goods are delivered within 45 minutes. — ASSOCIATED PRESS

Summary: 7-Eleven expanded its home delivery service to three cities Tuesday, but its most well-known item, the Slurpee, isn’t on the menu for now.


Aug 24 (Reuters) - Cheniere Energy Inc, on track to be the first U.S. company to enable the export of liquefied natural gas (LNG), named two Icahn Capital LP managing directors to its board, days after activist investor Carl Icahn took a stake in the company.

Icahn reported an 8.2 percent stake in Cheniere earlier this month. He had said the stock was undervalued, and that he planned to talk to the company's management about operations, capital expenses among other issues.

Cheniere said on Monday it appointed Jonathan Christodoro and Samuel Merksamer to its board, increasing the size to 11.

"While Icahn has not specified what particular changes he plans to seek at Cheniere, the amicable agreement to add board members is certainly a better outcome than a proxy fight would have been," Raymond James analyst Luana Siegfried said.

Cheniere's Sabine Pass LNG terminal in Louisiana is expected start exports in mid-December, making it the first LNG export terminal in the lower 48 U.S. states.

LNG projects are subject to a tough approval process by the U.S. Energy Department, which gauges the possible impact of each project on the domestic gas market and on the environment.

Cheniere is building another LNG export terminal in Corpus Christi, Texas. It is also developing a $550-million terminal in Texas to ship processed condensate. That is slated to start in 2017.

Icahn can help bring "clarity" to what the company does with the excess cash flow it will start generating from 2017, said Seaport Global Securities analyst Sunil Sibal.

Cheniere's free cash flow - defined as cash that a company is able to generate after putting aside money to maintain or expand its asset base - has been negative for the past twenty quarters and was negative $4.59 billion as of June-end, according to Thomson Reuters data.

"Also capital spend for new projects by Cheniere could also be tightened, especially as we see global growth expectations being ratcheted down," Sibal said.

Asian firms, including Japanese utilities Tokyo Gas and Osaka Gas as well as India's Gail, are dialing back on their U.S. LNG commitments via stake sales after realizing they cannot handle the initial surge of volume due to low demand at home.

Christodoro, a manager director at Icahn Capital since 2012, also serves on the boards of companies including PayPal Holdings Inc, American Railcar Industries Inc, Hologic Inc and Herbalife Ltd.

Merksamer, who has been at Icahn Capital since 2008, serves as a director on the boards of Transocean Ltd, Hertz Global Holdings Inc and Navistar International Corp .

Icahn has previously agitated for change at energy companies including Chesapeake Energy Corp, Transocean Inc N> and CVR Energy Inc.

Cheniere's shares were marginally higher at $62.02 in afternoon trading, bouncing back after hitting a 52-week low earlier in the session amid a broad sell-off in the U.S. market.

(Reporting by Anannya Pramanick in Bengaluru; Editing by Savio D'Souza)

Summary: Aug 24- Cheniere Energy Inc, on track to be the first U.S. company to enable the export of liquefied natural gas, named two Icahn Capital LP managing directors to its board, days after activist investor Carl Icahn took a stake in the company. Cheniere said on Monday it appointed Jonathan Christodoro and Samuel Merksamer to its board, increasing the size to 11..


But it was Facebook that was the biggest mystery of FANG to Cramer. All of the other stocks have had colossal rallies after they reported, but Facebook hasn't even reported yet and has a history of selling off immediately after the quarter.

"The F in FANG could easily be left off, giving us ANG, which spells out, well, nothing unless you rearrange it into NAG," Cramer said.

However, to Cramer, FANG shows that the market is truly treacherous right now. Investors are selling everything that is not nailed to the floor, except FANG and a small handful of winners. That is a sign of desperation, not a sign of health.

"When you have a four-letter acronym that can represent pretty much the only stocks that are working in this market after five straight days of declines, that says be careful," Cramer added.

The truth is Cramer sees traders have both feet out the market door because of two sources of tension: the Chinese stock market crash and the upcoming Fed meeting on Wednesday.

And the worst of all sources of pain is anything related to commodities. Cramer fears that many investors have forgotten that during the great shale boom in the U.S. many oil-and-gas companies came public with tons of MLPs, which have now become toxic.

---------------------------------------------------------- Read more from Mad Money with Jim Cramer Cramer Remix: This stock has lost its mojo Cramer game plan: My great Fed-pectations in week ahead Cramer: Play the big trouble in not-so-little China ----------------------------------------------------------

"They're like Portuguese Men of War, little red things with 30-foot tentacles that can paralyze you if you aren't careful," Cramer said.

Rarely has Cramer ever seen the kind of a decline like the one he has seen in oil. Crude isn't coal, but it sure feels that way to him.

Ultimately, thin markets are bad markets, and this is the thinnest market Cramer has seen in ages. And the FANG alone cannot save the market from the bear. Cramer just wants to get past the Fed meeting and see what happens, and hopes that China just doesn't crash again on Monday night.

Summary: Jim Cramer's FANG is back, but it can't stave off the bears. He is seeing signs of desperation in the market, and is worried.


In addition, while the average monthly payment for those buying a new vehicle increased $14, the average monthly payment for those leasing actually fell $7 compared to the same time last year.

The numbers help explain why Experian found an all-time high of 31.46 percent of new vehicles financed in the first quarter were leased. Just five years ago, Experian says, the percentage of new vehicles leased was 24.05 percent.

"Leasing has become more popular because the price of vehicles continues to go up," Zabritski said. "Consumers are looking for lower monthly payments, which is why more of them are extending the terms of their loans."

In the first quarter, the average length of new vehicle loans hit an all-time high of five years and seven months, according to the report. Furthermore, a record 29.5 percent of those taking out a new vehicle loan stretched their loans out between six and seven years, according to Experian. The report also found an 18.6 percent increase in those new vehicle loans with terms between 73 and 84 months.

Read MoreHere's the car-market play for investors now

The primary factor driving the move to longer auto loans and more leasing is the rising cost of new cars, trucks and SUVs.

With the average vehicle transaction price (what's paid at a dealership) climbing above $31,000, according to numerous auto industry analysts, the amount consumers are financing has hit an all-time, Experian said. In fact, the report found the average amount financed for a new vehicle loan in the first quarter jumped more than $1,000 to a record high of $28,711.

Experian says the average amount financed for a used vehicle bought in the first quarter was $18,218, an increase of almost $300.

Read MoreMemorial Day auto sales start summer off strong

Despite the increase in new and used vehicle prices, the percentage of loans in delinquency or ending in default with the vehicle being repossessed has actually dropped in the last year.

"This is still a very healthy auto market with strong fundamentals," Zabritski said.

Summary: With new vehicle prices climbing to all-time highs, a record number of Americans are turning to leases to keep monthly payments low.


When we think of stop-motion animation, there are cultural touchstones that always come to mind. We smile picturing the jerky, fantastical monstrosities of effects legend Ray Harryhausen and his mentor and fellow pioneer, “King Kong” creator Willis O’Brien. Or the more contemporary, whimsical artistry of Tim Burton and “Shaun the Sheep” animators Aardman Studios. Or “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and the rest of Rankin/Bass’s enduringly quaint holiday fare.

We don’t tend to associate stop-motion with surrealism (unless you figure some animator had to be tripping to imagine an elf doing veneers and extractions). Yet identical-twin filmmakers Stephen and Timothy Quay have made a lengthy career out of esoterically mingling the two. Fans of their work include Christopher Nolan, who puts a “curated by” stamp on the three-film sampler “The Quay Brothers in 35mm.” The hourlong shorts package is supplemented by Nolan’s own “Quay,” a micro-documentary exploring the siblings’ creative process. And while it doesn’t add up to enough to make us as fascinated as Nolan, it may open some eyes to the discipline’s abstract possibilities.

Although born in the United States, the Quays, 68, studied and work in London. But their affinities lie still further east, as they draw much of their inspiration from the tone of Eastern European literature and art. This is evident throughout the survey, which opens with “In Absentia” (2000), a portrait of the psyche relayed through cryptic close-ups of splintered, semi-anthropomorphic pencil tips. “The Comb” (1991) tracks a skeletally decaying porcelain doll as it grabs a ladder to clamber into a live-action dreamer’s house of imagination. Then there’s “Street of Crocodiles” (1986), which adapts a story by noted 20th-century Polish stylist Bruno Schulz, and follows another sad-faced plaything through a darkly magical town square that’s all bizarre haberdasheries and dandelion snow.

This final short is the most accessible, but that’s not saying much. Even with the program’s brisk running time and the atmosphere of unease that permeates much of the material, this is viewing that certainly demands patience, if not indulgence. One suggestion for filling the lulls: trying to spot where the Quays and Nolan echo each other’s sensibilities. Those graphite close-ups? Shades of, we think, the fetishized tattoo imagery Nolan was contemporaneously capturing in “Memento.” And the cacophonic composition the brothers borrow for “In Absentia” recalls “The Dark Knight” and its ominously droning score. Nolan would tell us emphatically: It’s not just noise.

Summary: “The Quay Brothers in 35mm” review: We don’t tend to associate stop-motion with surrealism. Yet filmmakers Stephen and Timothy Quay have made a lengthy career out of mingling the two.