Another processed-food giant is slashing jobs and moving its headquarters to Chicago to get leaner and more nimble in the face of changing consumer tastes toward healthier foods.

ConAgra Foods, maker of familiar brands Reddi-wip, Slim Jim and Chef Boyardee, announced Thursday it would cut about 1,500 jobs and locate 700 jobs in a new corporate headquarters in the historic Merchandise Mart.

In doing so, the company follows in the footsteps of Kraft Heinz which, facing similar pressure to deliver greater profits, announced in August the layoffs of 2,500 workers, including 700 locally, and plans to relocate its Chicago-area offices to downtown Chicago.

For decades, ConAgra has been based in Omaha while maintaining a Chicago-area presence, most recently with a Naperville office that employs about 400 people. But hampered in recent years by a flagging private-label business and challenges selling processed foods to a more educated consumer, new CEO Sean Connolly seized upon an opportunity — sweetened by state incentives — to cut costs and reposition the company for the future.

Connolly, who called the cuts “difficult but necessary,” said in an interview Thursday that relocating the headquarters to Chicago was a strategic move to house the executive team and consolidated consumer foods departments under one roof instead of in separate states.

“I want to be with the business,” said Connolly, who lives in Winnetka. “And I expect my executives to be with the business too.”

For example, jobs supporting the frozen food brand Banquet are in Omaha while Chef Boyardee is supported by employees in Naperville. Going forward, the grocery, frozen and snack departments will be together at the Merchandise Mart.

The 1,500 job cuts represent about 30 percent of the company’s global office-based workforce. The restructuring is expected to result in about $300 million in savings over the next three years, ConAgra said.

The cuts will “unfold in an orderly fashion” over the next 12 months, Connolly said.

Of those 700 jobs in the new Chicago headquarters, 550 will be relocated from Naperville and Omaha, a company spokesman said.

ConAgra expects to eliminate about 60 jobs in Naperville and another 220 to 250 jobs there will move downtown, the spokesman said. It's unclear what will happen to the remainder; a spokesman said more planning was needed to iron out the details.

About 1,000 or so jobs will be cut from the Omaha offices, with another 300 positions relocated to the new Chicago office.

In a news conference Thursday, Omaha Mayor Jean Stothert said the cuts were “even worse” than expected, despite attempts by ConAgra executives to assure her they wouldn’t be so severe. About 1,200 jobs will remain in Nebraska.

A delighted Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel said he met with Connolly to discuss the relocation Aug. 10.

Thursday, Emanuel touted Chicago’s educated workforce, its transportation links, its business community and overall vibrancy as the keys to wooing an increasing number of corporate headquarters to the city.

Asked why, if Chicago was so attractive a proposition, ConAgra also had to be wooed by the governor with tax incentives, Emanuel said “that is a question for the state” but noted that Nebraska was also aggressively courting ConAgra to remain in Omaha. “Our incentives are the skill and knowledge of our workforce,” he said of Chicago.

Gov. Bruce Rauner earlier this year agreed to offer ConAgra tax credits through the Economic Development for a Growing Economy program, or EDGE, in return for a promise to bring at least 150 jobs to Illinois and to keep them here for at least 15 years, according to Illinois Commerce and Economic Opportunity spokeswoman Lyndsey Walters.

The governor has since ordered a halt to such incentives until the state’s budget impasse is resolved.

While ConAgra and the state have declined to detail the ultimate value of the tax credits, an estimate using Bureau of Labor Statistics salary data for management positions in the Chicago area of $111,980 suggests that ConAgra could be handed a reduction of at least $630,000 a year on its corporate tax bill if it employs the minimum of 150 new workers in Illinois.

Using the same salary estimates, the tax break could double to $1.26 million a year if ConAgra brings 300 workers into the state.

“That’s certainly appreciated,” Connolly said of the incentives. “You can’t fail to have appreciation in that, particularly with the state of things in Illinois.”

“We look forward to the opportunities created by ConAgra’s decision to invest in Illinois, and welcome them to their new home,” Rauner said in a statement.

In Naperville, there was disappointment with ConAgra’s decision, along with recognition that it might be a boon to Chicago and to Illinois overall.

“This certainly is not good news for Naperville,” said state Rep. Grant Wehrli, R-Naperville. “Shifting hundreds of jobs from one community to another creates winners and losers within our own state.”

Wehrli called on Rauner to work with the Naperville community to replace the hundreds of local jobs that will be lost. “I know the governor worked hard to bring these jobs to Chicago,” Wehrli said. “Now he needs to work equally hard to help us bring jobs back to Naperville.”

Naperville Mayor Steve Chirico said he was not pleased with ConAgra’s decision to leave the western suburb, but he is happy with the “big win for the state of Illinois.”

At the landmark Merchandise Mart along the Chicago River, ConAgra will lease about 168,000 square feet on the building’s 13th floor, adding its name to a directory of corporate tenants in the Art Deco building that includes Motorola Mobility, Yelp, Regus, Publicis and the 1871 startup incubator. The building’s owners, Vornado Realty Trust, have repurposed the mart as office space since the traditional trade show business moved online and to Las Vegas.

Like other large food conglomerates, ConAgra has struggled to adapt as consumers trend away from traditional processed, packaged foods toward healthier options.

In its first fiscal quarter that ended May 31, ConAgra reported a loss of $1.2 billion, or $2.88 a share, compared with a year-ago profit of $482.3 million, or $1.14 a share. Included in the quarter was a write-down tied to plans to sell its private-label business later this fall.

First-quarter sales totaled $2.8 billion, up only 1 percent from a year ago.

Jana Partners, the hedge fund that took a stake in Walgreens last year and pushed for change, acquired a 7.2 percent stake and seats on ConAgra’s board in July.

Connolly, 50, was hired in April to turn the company around and, under pressure from activist investors, has vowed to divest the private label business. ConAgra’s board hoped he could repeat the trick he performed at Hillshire Brands, which was bought by Tyson Foods last year after Connolly helped it expand into more fashionable areas including gluten-free foods and high-protein snacks.

The acquisition of private-label business Ralcorp in 2013 under previous management has been a drag on ConAgra’s operations, and Treehouse Foods is considered a likely suitor for it.

A Treehouse spokesman on Thursday declined to “comment on speculation.”

Gary Karp, executive vice president at market research firm Technomic, lauded Connolly’s leadership and vision with the restructuring plan, saying it would attract top talent to the new Chicago location. “I give them high marks for courage and high marks for strategic approach,” Karp said.

In the years to come, consumers will continue to demand healthier food with greater labeling transparency and better-quality ingredients, Karp said. “All of these trends are going to continue, and we do believe that ConAgra is going to make it a key plank in their strategy,” Karp said.

ConAgra had 32,900 employees as of May 31.

Its largest customer is Wal-Mart Stores, which accounted for 18 percent of annual sales.

Jane Donahue, a Naperville Sun freelancer, contributed.


From the country's largest software developer making another big bet on hardware to the leading premium coffeehouse chain pouring out its latest quarterly results, here are some of the things that will help shape the week that lies ahead on Wall Street.

) has seen its once dominant market position in computing challenged in recent years. Folks are shifting to smartphones and tablets, categories in which Microsoft's Windows is a distant third to iOS and Android.

It hopes to change things with the arrival Monday of Surface Pro 4. The high-end tablet with its slick keyboard aims to eliminate the need for owning both a laptop and an iPad. Access to run Windows 10 means that users can run Office, desktop apps and other Windows programs.

Some of Microsoft's partners may not like seeing the software giant grow its presence in hardware, but it's the right move. Initial reviews are positive, but save up: Surface Pro 4 starts at $899.

We're in the heart of earnings season and that finds the world's most valuable consumer tech company reporting after Tuesday's market close. Apple (

) has a lot to prove. Will it offer up more concrete sales metrics for the Apple Watch line it rolled out earlier this year? How much longer can the iPhone carry the company?

Apple remains a market darling, but investors will want to make sure that it's succeeding without sacrificing margins.

The top site for video clips launches a premium platform Wednesday. YouTube Red is a new membership that lets subscribers enjoy the site without ads. It also allows subscribers to download clips for offline viewing and have access to YouTube Music.

At $9.99 a month it will be a hard sell for folks who are used to enjoying Alphabet's (

) YouTube for free, but it could succeed with folks wanting a premium experience with extra perks.

We can get back on track with earnings season Thursday with Starbucks (

) brewing fresh financials. Shares of the top dog in premium coffee hit new all-time highs last week ahead of Thursday's report.

Things have gone well for Starbucks. It seems as if there's always expansion space for the chain to take up, and store-level sales continue to be positive. Starbucks has turned a simple beverage into a luxury product. You don't see that very often.

) wraps up a busy week of earnings reports -- and the last trading day of October -- with its own updated financials. This is the hotelier behind Comfort Inn, EconoLodge, Rodeway Inn and several other value-priced lodging establishments.

It's a good time to be a hotel operator. The economy's holding up, and that encourages business travel. Gas prices are cheap, and that naturally makes it easier to justify a road trip. Wall Street's ready to check in. Analysts see revenue and earnings per share climbing in the high single digits.

Summary: The country's largest software developer makes another big bet on hardware and the leading premium coffeehouse chain pours out its latest quarterly results.


WATERLOO, Ontario— BlackBerry Ltd. ’s plan to expand its mobile software and services operations helped the smartphone maker’s bottom line in its latest quarter, but sliding handset sales weighed heavily on revenue, which fell 39%.

The Canadian smartphone maker has been focusing on mobile-device software and services for governments and businesses to drive growth after falling far behind in the consumer smartphone market.

BlackBerry’s software and services operations generated $166 million in sales in its fiscal first quarter, up about 8% from the previous quarter. After surpassing its goal of $500 million in sales from those operations in its last fiscal year, BlackBerry continues to expect the segment to generate 30% revenue growth this fiscal year.

Still, a continuing decline in handset sales helped push revenue down to $400 million in the quarter ended May 31. That missed both analyst and company expectations.

Since John Chen took over as chief executive of BlackBerry in late 2013, he has aimed to make the company’s hardware business profitable, while emphasizing its mobile software tools as drivers of growth. To bolster its software business, the company has acquired a string of mobile security firms over the past year and released many software updates aimed at email, mobile security and crisis communications in the cloud.

Software tools are more profitable than handsets for BlackBerry and fit with the company’s expectations that it will see increased demand as wireless-network use moves beyond smartphones and laptops to include a range of consumer and industrial products.

BlackBerry said more than 3,300 new and existing clients signed up for software offerings in the quarter and about 74% of its software revenue in the latest quarter was recurring.

“We’re very pleased with the momentum,” said Mr. Chen on a conference call early Thursday. “Our software business continues to achieve scale and traction, resulting in robust growth and increased market share.”

BlackBerry shares were recently up nearly 4% at $7.

Hurdles remain in BlackBerry’s handset operations, where its offerings have fallen well behind competitors such as Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co.

Analysts say the company’s Android-equipped Priv, a high-end phone that incorporates BlackBerry’s vaunted mobile security features alongside a bevy of consumer-friendly apps available from Google, hasn’t been a hit. BlackBerry hasn’t released Priv sales, but Mr. Chen said at $700, the device was too expensive for its customers. Two lower-cost Android-equipped devices are expected to be announced in July, one of which will be a full-screen touch device, Mr. Chen said.

The company sold about 500,000 handset devices in the latest quarter at an average selling price of $290, BlackBerry Chief Financial Officer James Yersh said on Thursday’s call. Device numbers are down from 600,000 sold in the fourth quarter and 700,000 in the third quarter.

Mr. Chen said BlackBerry’s top objective for the year is to ensure the mobile-device business is profitable and expects the segment to reach that milestone by the third quarter of the current fiscal year.

He added that while there are no immediate plans to stop making devices, the company now considers itself a “design house” rather than a smartphone maker. Manufacturing has been handed over to factories in Asia to reduce costs, he said. Analysts remain mixed on the future of BlackBerry’s handset business.

“We continue to believe that hardware is not essential to the business and therefore could be exited if a recovery in the segment does not occur, leaving a more profitable company,” said Daniel Chan, a TD Securities Inc. technology analyst.

BlackBerry posted a steep loss of $670 million in its latest quarter, hurt by a number of one-time items. The biggest was a $501 million charge for long-lived assets, which Mr. Chen said included hardware contracts and royalty agreements that were no longer relevant. BlackBerry also took a $57 million goodwill impairment charge and a $41 million inventory-related charge.

Adjusted to exclude items, BlackBerry had a small loss of $1 million, or break-even on a per-share basis. That is better than the 8-cent loss analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expected.

For its current fiscal year, BlackBerry expects an adjusted loss of about 15 cents a share, much smaller than the 33-cent loss analysts expect.

Write to David George-Cosh at david.george-cosh@wsj.com

Summary: BlackBerry’s plan to expand its mobile software and services operations helped the smartphone maker beat earnings expectations in its latest quarter, but a slide in handset sales continued to drag revenue lower.


Online used car sales startup Vroom relies on inventory, and eBay wants to inject new life into its own automotive business. Thus, the two companies announced a pilot program that could achieve both goals.

Under a pilot program, Vroom will offer cash to select eBay sellers who have not received or chosen to accept offers for their vehicles at the end of their listing periods. A seller can submit his or her vehicle identification number, photos, and details of the car to Vroom, which will provide a cash voucher in return.There are also certain eligibility conditions for the vehicle, related to age, mileage, and title. If the seller accepts the cash offer, Vroom will pick up car from the seller’s front door anywhere in the United States.

The program will launch in the third quarter. The partnership comes at a time when companies like Vroom are surging past eBay’s own online automotive business. eBay Motors, which launched in 2000, was the go-to place (at least online) for car owners and dealers to find buyers. The business boomed. In 2005, eBay ebay processed $13 billion worth of vehicle and parts sales.

But local marketplace Craigslist and other online car sites, such as Carmax, started to erode some of eBay’s business. An explosion of online car startups, including Vroom, Beepi, Carvana, and Shift have taken over the marketplace; eBay’s car and parts business has dropped by nearly 30% in the past five years, according to analyst estimates.

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eBay is trying to grab some of that business back through acquisitions and strategic partnerships. In March, the company bought Cargigi, an advertising services startup that helps car dealers post sales listing on online classified sites.

Unlike other online car retailers that create marketplaces for people to sell cars to each other, Vroom handles the entire transaction. The company takes possession of the used car from the seller, reconditions it, and then delivers it to the buyer’s door. The goal is to make buying or selling a used car as quick and painless as ordering an Uber.

For more about why consumers are avoiding car dealerships, watch:

In December, Vroom raised $95 million in equity and used some of those funds to acquire Texas Auto Direct, a competitor known for developing software that significantly reduces the time it takes to process and recondition used vehicles. The equity round brought Vroom’s total venture funding to $168 million—and about $35 million in debt funding—since it launched in 2013.

Investors in Vroom include Jeffrey Boyd, the chairman and former CEO of The Priceline Group pcln , and Bob Mylod, former CFO of The Priceline Group also invested in the last round. Earlier this month, Priceline’s more recent CEO Paul J. Hennessy resigned from his position to take over as chief executive of Vroom.

Summary: Can this boost eBay's auto business?


This Friday, ABC Sports will begin 180 hours of television coverage of the Summer Olympic Games in Los Angeles. A lot of what viewers will see during that time - that is, when sprinters aren't sprinting, hurdlers aren't hurdling and someone isn't selling beer or radial tires - will be ''graphics,'' a vast array of colorful visual images ranging from the familiar, five-ring Olympic logo (with the letters ABC intertwined) to animated diagrams of the 400-meter medley event in swimming.

For the past three years a team of artists and engineers has been cloistered on the fifth floor of the ABC studios at 70th Street and Broadway, preparing first for the Winter Olympics last February in Sarajevo and then the summer Games. For up to 20 hours a day, they have been assembling words, pictures and symbols on machines with space-age names like the Quantel Paintbox, the Dubner CDC (for Character Background Generator) and Chyron. Some of the resulting images turn somersaults a gold medal gymnast would be proud of.

These eye-catching graphics, made possible by recent advances in computer technology, are an obvious lure to viewers, many of whom are young and frequently exposed to the visual pyrotechnics served up by films and video arcade games. As such, their journalistic merit has often been questioned. Yet while they acknowledge a need to maintain an ''up-to- date'' image, those responsible for news and sports graphics on television steadfastly defend their use. ''We started using graphics as a means of conveying information,'' said Hy Bley, graphic director of ABC Sports, ''and that's still their primary function.''

Though ABC is the only network televising the Olympics, it is not alone in its emphasis on graphics. All three networks have been at hard at work on material for their election- year news coverage, and NBC has, for the past year, been giving its news department what amounts to a graphics facelift. The network has increased its artistic staff by 30 percent, to more than 50, and invested in no fewer than nine Paintboxes. These devices, which allow an artist to draw directly onto a screen with an electronic stylus, cost about $150,000 apiece.

All of this was done, according to Thomas R. Wolzien, NBC vice president for news production and program development, in response to concerns voiced by network executives and officials of affiliate stations that, when it came to graphics, NBC was not, well, exciting enough. ''Until about a year ago,'' Mr. Wolzein said in a recent interview at his office in Rockefeller Center, ''NBC was considered pretty stodgy.''

Not any more. Every evening now the ''NBC Nightly News'' comes flying onto the screen with the image of a rolling, blue-and-gold globe, over which appear digital letters spelling the name of the program, and many news reports are accompanied by vivid graphics. A story on the rising cost of child care, for instance, is accompanied by an animated drawing of a calculator, onto which statistics are projected. An election report from Connecticut opens with an animated map of the United States, which rotates onto its back (so to speak) while the Nutmeg State simultaneously rises up and changes color.

Mr. Wolzien and his staff are particularly proud of a spectacular, 30-second sequence that opens NBC's reports on the space shuttle Challenger. In it, videotape footage of the shuttle performing various manuevers - blasting off, soaring into the stratosphere, landing softly - is interspersed with shots of the astronauts at work in the spacecraft. The word ''insterspersed'' is used advisedly because it by no means does justice to the electronic hoops through which these various pictures jump, to dramatic background music specially composed by Henry Mancini.

''A million and a half dollars worth of equipment was used to put that together,'' said Mr. Wolzien at the end of the 30 seconds. That equipment included most of the big guns in NBC's graphics arsenal, among them a state-of-the-art computer animation machine known, appropriately enough, as the Mirage. According to Mr. Wolzien, the Mirage can ''take a picture, squash it, roll it into a ball, explode it, anything you want.''

In terms of graphics, television has come a long way from the Sputnik era, when one network's depiction of the satellite was a golf ball strung on a piece of coat-hanger wire against a dark cardboard background. To simulate stars, small holes were cut in the cardboard and a light was shone behind it. In fact, many of the significant advances in television graphics technology have come in the past four or five years, since the digital animation machines that the networks now rely on first became available.

These include the Dubner - named for its inventor, Harvey Dubner of Fort Lee, N. J. - which can be programmed to manipulate graphic images in a virtually endless variety of ways; Chyron, a machine that generates numbers and characters in all shapes and sizes, and the Paintbox. Of these, the latter is the most versatile in that it combines a sophisticated computer memory with the talents of the graphic artist: the artist draws with a stylus onto a ''bit pad,'' a plastic board with electronic sensors underneath; the sensors then transmit the artist's renderings directly onto the screen.


If the Black Lives Matter crowd is correct, bloodthirsty, racist cops are blasting black men like clay pigeons at a shooting range. The pace of this alleged slaughter is breathtaking.

“Every 28 hours, a black person is murdered by police,” Black Lives Matter activist Cherno Biko told Fox News Channel’s Megyn Kelly. “It feels like we’re in a war.”

If true, killer cops are rubbing out some 313 innocent, law-abiding blacks annually.

Rise Up October asserts that there are “over 1,000 people a year killed by police.”

Wrong! And more than doubly so.

University of Toledo criminologist Dr. Richard R. Johnson examined the latest data from the FBI and Centers for Disease Control.

From 2003 through 2012, law-enforcement officers killed an average of 429 people per year in “legal interventions.” These include a relatively small number of innocent people killed by cops and many more who died due to reasonable use of force.

When a bank robber thrusts a loaded Glock into a teller’s neck, that’s a really good time for the police to kill him.

Anti-police protesters chant the well-known names of several black males who lately have died at the hands of cops: Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice and Walter Scott.

Some cops (such as Darren Wilson, who shot Michael Brown) have been exonerated, even by Obama’s Justice Department. Others face trial — such as Officer Michael Slager, who shot Walter Scott in the back in North Charleston, SC, and the three white and three black Baltimore cops in whose custody Freddie Gray died.

What this controversy sorely needs is a strong dose of facts. Actual crime data reveal that this movement is based on mythology.

Thanks to the Ferguson Effect, blistering anti-law-enforcement rhetoric and sometimes fatal attacks on police have made cops timid, if not terrified. The result? A murder explosion that, ironically, is killing the very black people whom Black Lives Matter claims to champion. Year to date, homicides are up 8.3 percent in New York, 19.2 percent in Chicago, 51.5 percent in St. Louis and 52.5 percent in Baltimore.

On average, 4,472 black men were killed by other black men annually between Jan. 1, 2009, and Dec. 31, 2012, according to the FBI’s Supplementary Homicide Reports. Using FBI and CDC statistics, Professor Johnson calculates that 112 black men, on average, suffered both justified and unjustified police-involved deaths annually during this period.

This equals 2.5 percent of these 4,472 yearly deaths. For every black man — criminal or innocent — killed by a cop, 40 black men were murdered by other black men. The, at most, 2.5 percent of the problem generates relentless rage. And, yet, it is rude-to-racist to mention 97.5 percent of the problem.

As America’s largest police force, one would expect the NYPD to be a major player in this alleged mass murder of innocent blacks.

The supposedly trigger-happy, bigoted NYPD killed a whopping eight people last year, according to its meticulous, 73-page “2014 Annual Firearms Discharge Report.” Of these, four were black. All of them were armed with cutting instruments (scissors, a hatchet, a boxcutter and a knife) and wielded them when they fatally were shot.

Rather than NYPD gunfire, the high-profile Eric Garner case involved a police chokehold that may have given the overweight Garner a lethal coronary.

Still, these five deaths (at least four of them justified) total last year’s NYPD “genocide” against black men. They equal 4.95 percent of Gotham’s 101 black-on-black murders in 2014. Other blacks are 20 times deadlier to black New Yorkers than is the NYPD.

Yes, some police are overzealous, twitchy-fingered and — surely — racist. NYPD Officer James Frascatore’s heavy-handed takedown of tennis player James Blake outside a Manhattan hotel in September confirms that some cops need leashes.

But the notion that America’s cops simply are gunning down innocent black people is one of today’s biggest and deadliest lies.

Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News contributor.

Summary: If the Black Lives Matter crowd is correct, bloodthirsty, racist cops are blasting black men like clay pigeons at a shooting range. The pace of this alleged slaughter is breathtaking. “Every 28 hou…


Kate is just 5 years old when her father, British comedian Richard Beckinsale, dies of a heart attack in his sleep. Richard, 31, was at the height of his acting career as the star of the English sitcoms Rising Damp and Porridge. "It stayed with me, the incredible shock and huge loss," she tells PEOPLE. "I started expecting bad things to happen, that friends will leave, that loved ones will die. It kept building until I had a nervous breakdown when I was a teenager."

Still grieving for her father, Beckinsale develops anorexia around age 15 and withers to just 70 lbs. She asks her mother and stepfather to send her to Freudian psychoanalysis, and she attends sessions five days a week for four years. "It opened my eyes to things, not to be afraid of facing these fears," she tells PEOPLE. "I at least understood what they were and where they had come from."

Beckinsale stars in Kenneth Branaugh's Much Ado About Nothing, in which she plays Hero, a maiden who is the sole heiress to her father's fortune. Two years later, Beckinsale drops out of the University of Oxford to focus on acting, before heating up across the pond with roles in The Last Days of Disco and Brokedown Palace.

While performing in the touring play, The Seagull, Beckinsale meets Welsh actor Michael Sheen. The couple begins a nine-year relationship.

Beckinsale gives birth to her and Sheen's only child, daughter Lily. "I was brilliant at breastfeeding," she tells Allure in July 2006. "I was like an overproducing cow. I miss it a bit."

Beckinsale stars in her highest profile film yet: World War II blockbuster Pearl Harbor, with Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett. While training for her role as a nurse, the actress practices giving shots to a bevy of men. "All these boys would come in and drop their trousers, and I would stab and inject them," she tells Playboy. "It was an odd day."

Beckinsale's next film, the romantic comedy Serendipity, with John Cusack, comes out. She began shooting the film while wrapping Harbor and tells the Bergen Record, "They saved the kissing scenes in Pearl Harbor for the last week, and me and John had all of our kissing scenes in the first week. There was a point when I was ricocheting between New York and L.A., madly kissing everybody."

While filming Underworld together in Budapest, Sheen and Beckinsale meet director Len Wiseman. Wiseman directs the couple in the supernatural thriller about the secret history of vampires and werewolves, which opens at No. 1 and grosses $ 95.7 million worldwide.

Shortly after Sheen and Beckinsale's move from London to L.A., the pair breaks up. Reports surface that Beckinsale left Sheen for Wiseman. The British beauty denies any infidelity. "Yes, I've been completely monogamous," Beckinsale tells Allure in 2006. "It was always rather odd to me when I'd get that 'Oh, what a slut' remark. 'Oh, she ditched the father of her child and ran off with somebody else.' I mean, look around this town and tell me one other person who's slept with only two people in a decade. I might just be the only one."

After dating for months, Wiseman proposes to Beckinsale over dinner at Santa Monica's Viceroy Hotel, where he requests a cabana by the pool, a presidential suite filled with white lilies and a special type of merlot.

BIOGRAPHY (top to bottom): Chris Capstick/REX USA; Samuel Goldwyn/Everett; Ken McKay/REX USA; Frazer Harrison/Getty; Andrew Cooper/Touchstone; Everett Collection; EGON ENDRENYI/SUBTERRANEAN PRODUCTIONS; Kevin Winter/Getty

Summary: Learn all there is to know about Kate Beckinsale on People.com


SAN FRANCISCO — In a summer of political and racial tumult, young Americans are in a dour mood: pessimistic about the fairness of their economic system, questioning the greatness of the United States and deeply skeptical of the way the nation picks its leaders.

A new poll of young people between the ages of 18 and 30 finds that an overwhelming 90 percent think the two-party political system has real — though fixable — problems or that it is “seriously broken.” Three-quarters believe the U.S. is “falling behind” or “failing” as a nation.

Just over half say the chance to get ahead economically is reserved for only a few people at the top.

Though the new GenForward survey is a poll of all young people, not necessarily registered or likely voters, it nevertheless shows clear discontent with the two major-party candidates for president. Only 39 percent of young people have a favorable opinion of Hillary Clinton. Just 19 percent think well of Donald Trump.

The generation that is the most educated, diverse and indebted in U.S. history is still pining for the candidate who only this week left the race: Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.

“Millennials, unfortunately, are subject to an economic and political future that is not of their own making,” said Sarah Swanbeck, executive director of the Center on Governing & Investing in the Future at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. “It’s no surprise then that young adults across the country have increasingly turned to ‘political outsiders’ promising to reform the system.”

GenForward is a survey by the Black Youth Project at the University of Chicago with the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. The first-of-its-kind poll pays special attention to the voices of young adults of color, highlighting how race and ethnicity shape the opinions of a new generation.

There’s a strong desire among young people of all races and ethnicities for a third-party challenger to Trump and Clinton: 72 percent of Latinos and whites, 67 percent of Asian-Americans and 63 percent of African-Americans.

“The candidates we’re left with are very similar,” said Alejandro Ochoa, a 21-year-old from Adelanto, California. “I say that they’re similar mainly because they’re both rich, and I get the sense that they’re going to look out more for the 1 percent and not the rest of us.”

Only 5 percent of respondents said the United States is greater than ever, with an additional 14 percent saying it’s as great as it has been in the past. More than half said the country is “falling behind” and a quarter said it’s “failing.”

It [the survey] nevertheless shows clear discontent with the two major-party candidates for president.

Young whites expressed the greatest dismay, with 84 percent saying the country is falling behind or failing. About two-thirds of young Latinos, Asian-Americans and African-Americans thought so.

Lakevia Davis, a 24-year-old college student in Montgomery, Alabama, is among the 23 percent of African-Americans who say the country is failing. Davis worries that her older brother or father could be shot and killed by police. She wonders if the U.S. will ever have a president who can address what she sees as inequities and fear seared into the country.

“I just feel like a lot of the times we’re forced to pick the lesser of two evils rather than the right candidate,” said Davis, who supported Sanders.

A quarter of young people overall say the distribution of wealth and money is fair, but while 32 percent of whites said so, only 12 percent of African-Americans agreed. About 20 percent of Asian-Americans and Latinos said distribution is fair.

Overall, 54 percent said that only a few people at the top have a chance to get ahead, while the remainder said that anyone can rise economically. Those figures were consistent for all races and ethnicities.

Matthew Monnot, an assistant professor at the University of San Francisco School of Management, said wages haven’t grown for decades and have, in fact, decreased for lower-paid professions while increasing dramatically for those at the top.

“It’s been completely stagnant,” Monnot said, “so for the people you’re surveying, their entire life span has been that of the average worker not having any wage increase.”

Young adults are especially sour about the two-party political system. More than a third of respondents said the system is seriously broken, with just 9 percent saying it is working well. The majority, 54 percent, said the system has real problems but can be fixed.

Natalie Woodford, a white 25-year-old doctoral candidate in nutrition and exercise at Virginia Tech, counts herself in that group. She imagines a country that isn’t so consumption-oriented, a place where people don’t have to pay more to eat healthfully and don’t feel that a fat salary equals success.

“There’s bound to be people out there who are having similar thoughts and at the end of the day want to do what’s right,” she said.

The poll of 1,965 adults 18-30 was conducted June 14-27 using a sample drawn from the probability-based GenForward panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. young adult population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 3.8 percentage points.

The survey was paid for by the Black Youth Project at the University of Chicago using grants from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Ford Foundation.

Respondents were first selected randomly using address-based sampling methods, and later interviewed online or by phone.

Summary: SAN FRANCISCO — In a summer of political and racial tumult, young Americans are in a dour mood: pessimistic about the fairness of their economic system, questioning the greatness of the United Stat…


Even for investors who lived through the bear market of the 1970's, the relentless slide of stocks since March has been deeply disturbing.

Markets rarely move in one direction, whether straight down or straight up. Yet for the last four months, stocks have plunged day after day, and week after week, climaxing with Friday's 390-point drop in the Dow Jones industrial average.

Optimistic comments about the economy from Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve, and better-than-expected profit reports from some companies have not stopped the skid. Speeches by President Bush meant to reassure investors have instead seemed to frighten them.

But if history offers one certainty, it is that the slide will not go on forever, and investors who have the fortitude to step in just when the market looks its worst will probably be rewarded.

So what might stop the skid? Here are five possibilities: Stock buybacks, the Federal Reserve, the Bush administration, small investors and the market itself.

After the crash of 1987, many companies announced plans to buy back their own stock, providing a strong signal that they thought that their shares were cheap. But in this downturn, the effect of buybacks has been more muted. Many companies already buy back shares regularly to offset the additional shares issued as a result of stock option grants they give employees, so announcements of buyback programs do not send as strong a message as they did 15 years ago.

To compensate, companies could expand their buyback plans. But buybacks eat up corporate cash, and when the debt markets are unsettled and the economy uncertain, many chief executives are wary of spending money if they do not have to do so.

Still, if stock prices continue to fall, expect to see more announcements of expanded buybacks and more executives buying their companies' stock in the market, rather than through options programs. Insider buying, if it happens, would be a strongly bullish signal.

The Federal Reserve can also help. When the Dow gained 40 points in the last 90 minutes of trading last Tuesday, the tight-knit community of hedge fund managers was filled with rumors that the Fed had somehow intervened to prop up stocks. The idea that the Fed had directly bought stocks is far-fetched, to say the least.

But the Fed does have at least three ways to support stocks indirectly. It can buy Treasury bonds and notes from banks, an action that puts more cash into the banking system. It can also lower short-term interest rates, a step that should help the economy by decreasing the cost of borrowing.

Lower rates might also encourage investors to take some of their savings out of money market funds and put them into stocks.

With the support of the Treasury Department, the Fed can also step into the currency markets to support the dollar, whose recent fall has been a burden on stocks.

But it is far from clear that the Fed thinks it needs to intervene. The sell-off has been orderly until now, and stocks are hardly trading at bargain levels. Mr. Greenspan may well view the downturn as painful but necessary to correct the speculative excesses of the bubble, and refrain from action as long as the plunge does not seem to be hurting the real economy.

The Bush administration — including the president and his economic team — have had little success so far in their efforts to restore confidence. Despite the federal government's rising budget deficit, the president's main economic priority appears to be making permanent a tax cut that was conceived during a surplus and would favor the richest Americans.

Paul H. O'Neill, the Treasury secretary, carries relatively little weight on Wall Street or in Washington.

Meanwhile, Harvey L. Pitt, the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, has become the focus of scorn among many investors for his ties to the accounting industry at a time when corporate accounting is in its worst shape since before the S.E.C. was created. To many investors, Mr. Pitt appears to have been slow to grasp the seriousness of the problem, and some of them say his proposed reforms have been weak.

Wall Street might greet a change at the top of the S.E.C. or the Treasury Department as a sign of the president's great concern about the market's slide.

A wave of buying from small investors, either directly or through mutual funds, would also provide important short-term support.

But individuals appear increasingly panicked by the plunge. After buying funds almost every week between October and May, investors have sold shares for each of the last six weeks, and the redemptions are accelerating, said Thomas McManus of Banc of America Securities. For the week ending last Wednesday, investors sold $11 billion in stock funds.

As a result, instead of propping up the market, small investors appear to be worsening its slide, at least for the time being.

In the short run, the best reason to expect a strong rally is the market itself. Stocks do not move one way forever. Most technical indicators, like the ratio of stocks falling to stocks rising, show the market is overdue for a sharp turn.

Summary: If history offers one certainty, it is that the slide on Wall Street will not go on forever. A look at five possible reasons for a rebound.


Robert R. Johnson is president and CEO of the American College of Financial Services and co-author of the recent McGraw-Hill book, Invest With The Fed.

The stock market is considered one of the most reliable leading economic indicators. Since Brexit, U.S. markets have not only bounced back, but several indexes have set all-time highs. Among other factors, this is because Hillary Clinton will likely win the presidency in November. Donald Trump continues to find ways to blunder—for example, the recent dust up around his six-pointed star tweet that was widely criticized for being anti-Semitic. And while many of the polls have tightened in recent days, the conventional wisdom continues to suggest that Clinton’s campaign infrastructure is much stronger than Trump’s and will deliver a victory. That is welcome news to investors.

While Clinton is far from the ideal candidate, Trump is downright dangerous from Wall Street’s perspective. The danger factor centers on the uncertainty around the myriad of economic disruptions posed by a Trump presidency. There is a timeworn adage that “Wall Street hates uncertainty,” and uncertainty is a characteristic Trump fully embraces. Even former presidential candidate Ben Carson, a Trump supporter, referred to him as “unpredictable” earlier this week. From his proposals to tear up trade agreements, lower both corporate and individual tax rates, deport undocumented immigrants, and build a wall on the border with Mexico, Trump has advanced a collection of disjointed ideas, backed by few specifics and little information on how these plans would be financed.

The consensus of the markets is that we know much more about what we’re getting with Clinton than Trump. Wall Streeters are speaking with their checkbooks, and Trump is getting a tepid monetary response from a constituency that’s generally very friendly to the Republican nominee. This is despite the fact that from the beginning of her presidential run, Clinton has advocated for policies that Wall Street hates, including increasing the minimum wage, paid for in large part by higher taxes on high-income Americans.

What is most troubling to financial market participants is that Clinton’s primary battle with Bernie Sanders has forced her to lean more heavily to the left than Wall Street finds comfortable. Perhaps the largest impact of Sanders on Clinton’s positioning has been on global trade. Clinton entered the race as a staunch supporter of free trade and has since been forced to adopt Sanders’ stance opposing the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Ironically, this is one of the few areas in which Clinton and Trump now seemingly agree.

The strong campaign run by Sanders has also forced Clinton to show support for free college tuition at state colleges and universities for those from families below top-income earners. While such a proposal is unlikely to pass muster if Republicans hang on to the House and Senate, sweeping additions to already-burdensome entitlement programs give market watchers significant heartburn.

While Clinton has taken a left-hand turn in recent weeks, the markets are hopeful that she’ll take a page from her husband’s playbook and campaign from the left and govern from the middle. The most plausible possible derailer of this, from the markets’ standpoint, would be a landslide loss by Trump that leaves Democrats in charge of the presidency, House, and Senate. But a Trump victory would concern markets even more. That would shake the markets much more than Brexit, and potentially for a much longer period of time.

Having said that, when asked at the Berkshire Hathaway brk.a Annual Meeting in April about the potential impact of a Trump presidency, Warren Buffett said he does not think that this year’s election will change much for Berkshire. He said Berkshire will do just fine, whether Trump or Clinton becomes president, and that no politician can change the long-term outlook for America. That sounds to me like a challenge to Trump. By the way, “The Oracle of Omaha” has indicated that he is casting his ballot for Clinton.

Summary: Wall Street hates uncertainty.


Whatever your approach to footwear and stride, a plethora of scientific research continues to refresh the idea that running has very real and genuine benefits to the Average Joe.

Research released yesterday suggests that men who regularly run long distances should win in the evolutionary battle to reproduce.

Scientists from Cambridge University studied 542 runners at the Robin Hood marathon in Nottingham and found that those who finished faster were more likely to have stronger sex drives and higher sperm counts.

They posit that the good runners are likely to have good stamina in their blood, thanks to ancestors who were excellent persistence hunters. Men who could catch dinner would also have the pick of the females, meaning that they passed down stronger genes to their progeny.

“The observation that endurance running ability is connected to reproductive potential in men suggests that women in our hunter-gatherer past were able to observe running as a signal for a good breeding partner,” said the study’s lead author, Dr Danny Longman.

“It was thought that a better hunter would have got more meat, and had a healthier – and larger – family as a consequence of providing more meat for his family."

Telegraph Men columnist Tobias Mews recently ran a marathon while on his honeymoon

Not only is an endurance runner more likely to bring home the bacon, but he also makes for more learned conversation once the food is cooked and set on the table.

Scientists this week discovered that the same bodily process that helps fuel the body efficiently also improves memory and learning.

A single protein, called estrogen-related receptor gamma (ERRγ), controls the release of energy to the muscles and the brain. Become good at producing ERRγ and your performance in memory tests as well as marathons should improve.

"This is all about getting energy where it's needed to 'the power plants' in the body," said Prof Ronald Evans, director of Salk Institute for Biological Studies in California.

"The heart and muscles need a surge of energy to carry out exercise and neurons need a surge of energy to form new memories."

Anecdotally, there are plenty of instances of great thinkers who have also been impressive runners. Enigma code breaker Alan Turing could run a marathon in two hours 46 minutes; British politician and journalist Matthew Parris managed two hours 32 minutes; while Nobel Prize winning scientist Wolfgang Ketterle once clocked two hours 49 minutes.

Alan Turing almost competed for Britain in the 1948 Olympics

It's long been the insistence of avid runners that going for a jog makes them feel better. To the uninitiated, it can sound like the pious sermon of the faintly unhinged – but there is now concrete scientific evidence to substantiate their claim.

In autumn last year, researchers at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden discovered that aerobic exercise like jogging purges the blood of a substance known as kynurenine, which accumulates during times of stress and is believed to be linked to depression.

“It is possible that other kinds of exercise will also have an effect, like resistance training such as weightlifting," said Dr Jorge Ruas, principal investigator at the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology. "But our results support the use of aerobic exercise like biking and running.

“Skeletal muscle appears to have a detoxification effect that, when activated, can protect the brain from mental illness.”

Exercise is also believed to encourage the body to release serotonin, which improves mood. Ultra-marathon runners often speak of 'surfing a wave of serotonin' while covering the type of distances that make non-runners cringe.

Mo Farah makes history at the Olympic Stadium in 2012 Photo: GETTY IMAGES

It's common sense that an active lifestyle begets a healthy body - but jogging seems to be particularly beneficial when it comes to helping ward off the evils of cancer.

In a wide-ranging paper that was published in 2009, Finnish scientists revealed their conclusions after studying the health of a group of 2,560 middle-aged men over the course of roughly 17 years.

They found that the men who were physically active were the least likely to develop cancer. No surprise there. What was more interesting was that those who ran - or did exercise of a similar intensity - for 30 minutes a day were the most protected, exhibiting “a 50 percent reduction in the risk of dying prematurely from cancer,” according to Sudhir Kurl, medical director of the School of Public Health and Clinical Nutrition at the University of Kuopio.

According to research conducted at Bellarmine University in Kentucky, US, running increases blood flow to your ears, which results in improved hearing.

Dr. Paul Loprinzi studied 1,082 adult women and concluded that those with higher cardiorespiratory fitness had better hearing function at high and low frequencies. The women with higher aerobic fitness were six per cent more likely to have good hearing than bad hearing.

Summary: Jonny Cooper looks at the unlikely positives of going for regular jogs,   including a boost in your fertility and a decrease in your chances of   developing cancer


“I’m proud to be British. My parents live in London. Simon has lived his whole life in two streets of north Manchester. Our house is the only home our son and daughter have ever known. But we have to do this, not least for the sake of our children.”

She is not the only member of Britain’s 300,000-strong Jewish community to feel things have reached crisis point. Since the gun attack that killed three people at the Jewish Museum in Brussels last year and the murder by radical Islamists of four Jews at a kosher supermarket on the outskirts of Paris last month, the chorus of concern has been growing. The actress Maureen Lipman recently revealed that she, too, is considering leaving the UK because of the rising number of attacks on Jews.

A poll by the Campaign Against Antisemitism last month found nearly half of Britons thought that at least one anti‑Semitic view presented to them was “definitely or probably true”.

Then, yesterday, annual figures from the Community Security Trust (CST), which monitors anti-Semitism in Britain, showed a record number of anti‑Semitic incidents in 2014 (1,168 incidents were recorded, more than double the 535 incidents logged in 2013).

London and Greater Manchester bore the brunt of the increase, with Manchester seeing a 79 per cent rise. One incident cited in the report involved the daubing of swastikas and the term “Jewish slag” on gravestones at a Jewish cemetery in Manchester. Greater Manchester Police says it has stepped up patrols.

The findings are borne out by the Goulds’ experience. “The other week, I was standing in the queue at a large supermarket in Manchester when the man in front of me said, 'F------ Jews, they’re all over the place. They’re thieves, they are taking over our property. They’re everywhere,’ ” says Honey. “I’ve no idea if he knew I was Jewish or not, but I was absolutely terrified, and fled.”

Then a Jewish neighbour’s son who was wearing his kippa (skull cap) was slapped in the street by a white Polish man, who “just sprang forward and hit him”.

Honey says: “I know there are plenty of people who simply want to live a peaceful coexistence. But there is so much anti‑Semitism in Britain, and it’s coming from all sides. Our local Jewish schools look like prison camps. They’re surrounded by wire fences. There are guards on patrol, some with dogs. On Saturdays, you see police walking the street with members of the CST. I don’t want to sit at home panicking when my husband goes to the synagogue. I just want to live in peace.”

Radical Islam, agrees Simon, is not the only driving force behind the rise in anti‑Semitism. The far‑Left habitually conflates Jews with Israel and Zionism, he says. The far‑Right, meanwhile, may be “happy firing salvos at the Muslim population, but I know we are only one step away from their wrath,” he says.

Having spent 10 years on the northern board of the CST, he is acutely aware of how bad things have become. “I’ve been exposed to, and become familiar with, spiralling anti‑Semitism,” he says. “Eggs hurled from passing cars, swastikas on Jewish headstones, messages of hatred. Last summer, central Manchester – a place I love and have always lived in – became a flashpoint for virulent anti-Israel demonstrations. It was terrifying to see this on the streets of my home city.”

He praises the Government’s response to the problem, but doubts its ability to stop it.

But how does a family like the Goulds start a new life where they know almost no one? (Honey has a grandmother in California, but the family will be living many hundreds of miles away from her.) One wonders why they don’t make Israel their home. Instead, they are relocating to Scottsdale in the Arizona state capital of Phoenix. Home to more than 100,000 Jews, it is a community they believe is large enough for them to feel comfortable in.

The Goulds admit that moving to America is far from easy, however, not least because of the need for a visa and subsequent Green Card. It was only after long hours of research that Simon discovered a little-known scheme called the EB-5 Visa. This awards a Green Card to those who invest in projects in rural regions or areas of high unemployment. Simon is meeting the requirements by making a five-year loan to help fund a large hotel development in Vermont.

“There seems to be a tacit belief that the only place for Jews to thrive and flourish is Israel,” says Honey. “But in America you get every kind of American: African-American, Chinese-American. We’ll be British-American. I’m taking my patriotism with me.”

In fact it will not be the first time Honey has been uprooted. Born in Manchester, she moved at the age of eight to Iran, where her father had a job as a commodity broker. The family occupied an airy apartment in Tehran and mixed freely among the vibrant Jewish community. But life changed overnight with the overthrow of the Shah in 1979 and the introduction of martial law. Arriving at school one day, 12-year-old Honey and her nine-year-old brother were told they had to go home immediately. Their mother was waiting in tears at the front door and had already started packing their belongings. Within hours, the children were on a flight to London, where they were sent to boarding school. Honey didn’t see her parents for a year.

“I’ve known what it is to flee in fear,” she says. “I don’t want to do that again. I want to leave the UK now on my own terms.” But she adds sadly: “This was the place where I finally felt safe, that I could finally call home.”

Now her own daughter will also be uprooted. But Angel, a thoughtful and circumspect teenager, is in favour of the move. “Of course it will be hard, but there’s always Facebook to keep in touch,” she observes. “I’m looking at the bigger picture, how things are changing. I want to live in a place where I won’t be judged by my religion, where I can hold my head up high.”

Arron, meanwhile, has already taken a place to study political science at the University of California, Berkeley. Honey will use her marketing background to look for work, while Simon will pursue business opportunities in the US. He admits he is taking a chance financially, but he is so evangelical about the move that he has set up a website, www.emigrate-to-america.co.uk, offering advice to others on how to make the move.

“I am the fourth generation of Jew in my family to live in Britain,” he says. “Britain offered a safe haven, a chance for them to raise a family, build a home. I am eternally grateful for the refuge Britain and its government has given to the Jews. But I can’t help feeling that the future is no longer here. The grandfather of one Jewish friend said 'It’s time to leave when you are no longer free to sit on a park bench’. I think that time is fast approaching. I’m leaving before I’m told that I have to go.”

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Summary: After watching the rise in anti-Semitism in this country, the Gould family has   taken the radical decision to emigrate to America. They tell Angela Epstein   why


Hummus can also help to improve bone, muscle, skin and blood health due to the high levels of protein it contains.

As part of an experiment looking at how $27 billion worth of food is wasted in Canada each year, Grant Baldwin and his wife Jen Rustemeyer, decided to live for six months, eating only food waste.

Four months into the experiment Baldwin found an industrial-sized dumpster filled with hundreds of tubs of non-expired hummus. They ate it for eight weeks.

Because hummus is so full of protein it can help you fight hunger cravings, as well as balancing your blood sugar levels to help stop you from excessive snacking.

It also has a pretty high iron content which helps to boost your energy, which in turn could make you more willing to exercise regularly.

Dizengoff, named after a street in Tel Aviv but based in Philadelphia, serves only freshly-made hummus to its eager customers.

Summary: Hummus fans around the world, it's time to celebrate:


Hillary Clinton must not have been impressed by the Republican convention. In choosing Tim Kaine as her running mate late Friday, the Democrat is showing that she is so confident of winning in November that she can risk choosing a capable if conventional Senator who can help her govern perhaps more than he can help her win.

If she feared that Donald Trump might pull away millions of Bernie Sanders voters, she might have gone for an economic populist like Senators Sherrod Brown (Ohio) or Elizabeth Warren (Massachusetts)....

Summary: Clinton’s choice of Tim Kaine as a running mate shows how confident she is of victory in November, says a Wall Street Journal editorial.


The state mounted a PR blitz to show beachgoers that Florida’s surf had been spared an oily disaster. Presidential visits aside, it seems social media helped save summer tourism on the Gulf of Mexico

The BP BP Deepwater Horizon spill happened in the middle of nowhere in the Gulf of Mexico, but it also took place, as every event of global import now does, in the realm of social media. The company and the government learned — again — the hard lesson that controlling the information and imagery from the spill is nearly impossible in today’s climate. That meant the tourism industry around the gulf faced a big problem — the images, without context, had linked the entire region to the unprecedented number of images of slicks, oil-soaked wildlife and constant footage of the Macondo well gushing millions of gallons of crude, even though parts of the gulf were spotlessly clean.

“When you think gulf tourism, you typically think Florida,” says Will Seccombe, chief marketing officer for Visit Florida, the state’s tourism division. Tourism is crucial to the state — Florida pulls in about $20 billion in visitor spending annually out of the $34 billion gulf tourism industry. To survive, Florida had to separate itself from the rest of the gulf in the minds of travelers.

On May 11, about three weeks after the spill, Visit Florida launched a marketing campaign that BP would have killed for, taking advantage of the same social media tools that the media used to spread information about the spill. Visit Florida created a website called Florida Live to provide real time information about how the spill was — or rather, wasn’t — affecting the coast.

Tourism in Florida’s gulf-side panhandle still suffered from the spill, but tourism actually increased statewide last quarter, up 3.4% from the same time last year. The number can mask part of the hit to the tourism industry, says Roger Dow, president and CEO of U.S. Travel. For example, several hotels in the gulf were occupied with BP cleanup workers and media, which skewed the actual tourism statistics. Also, strong numbers in West Palm Beach and Miami this past quarter carried the weight of weak tourism on the coast.

But in these coastal areas, there’s evidence that Visit Florida’s social media blitz helped.

“I think Florida Live is a great model, a great best practice for responding to tourism crisis,” says Lori Pennington-Gray, a tourism crisis management expert at University of Florida’s Center for Tourism Research and Development.

Over the course of the spill, the site added features including live video of beaches, Google GOOG maps and links to resident’s Twitter feeds and Flickr pages. It increased Visit Florida’s website traffic by 46% compared to the same time last year, and bumped up its Facebook page traffic about tenfold — now the site has over 8,000 fans.

The social media aspect is key for modern tourism, because it connects local Floridians to potential tourists, says Pennington-Gray. Floridians were already shooting video, taking pictures, and making useful comments online. So Visit Florida turned Florida Live into a platform that linked residents’ tweets and photos to a Google map. And that simple step — aggregating the positive content that real Floridians and tourists were already creating — helped reinforce to the public and traditional media that Florida’s beaches were safe from the oil, at least for sand-castle building purposes.

Many parts to Florida’s social media cocktail

The marketing strategy could probably translate to many uses, but there are several reasons why it made sense for Florida, post spill. First of all, Florida’s beaches were clean, for the most part. So instead of telling people to come despite of polluted coastal areas, Visit Florida had to figure out how to show people what the beaches actually looked like. Florida was primed to do this because the state government understands the economic importance of tourism. Tourism is top priority in a crisis, says Pennington-Gray. Governor Charlie Crist secured $25 million from BP in mid may to launch Visit Florida’s marketing campaign.

The real-time aspect of the marketing campaign was key for this crisis, she adds. Unlike a hurricane, which is a finite event, the oil spill stretched over a long period of time. Visit Florida had to adjust to looming uncertainty about the effects of the spill every day. “By having video cams of the different beaches, it could stay dynamic and be able to respond to those changes on a daily, even hourly basis.”

Florida will still have to clear up perception about the spill, says Dow, and the travel industry needs to be active in that effort. “No one in their right mind would have said, ‘let’s let the oil spew until this runs out.’ This is the same thing. We’ve got to cap this perception.”

The spill will cost gulf coast economies $22.7 billion* over three years, according to a study commissioned by Oxford Economics. The same study estimates that getting $500 million in funds for effective marketing campaigns could cut that cost by about $7.5 billion. “It makes good business sense,” Dow says. “BP has said they’re going to cover losses. Our point of view is that it’s a heck of a lot better for to do preventative work.”

Part of that preventative work is for state tourism divisions to have a good social media platform. Florida’s is going to stay, says Seccombe. “Florida Live was born out of the oil spill, but the information and the concepts and the tools that were built will live on well beyond. It’s shown so much engagement with our visitors to the website, and reinforces the trust message that we try to communicate.”

*Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story omitted the decimal point in this figure. The sentence has been corrected.

Summary: The state mounted a PR blitz to show beachgoers that Florida’s surf had been spared an oily disaster. Presidential visits aside, it seems social media helped save summer tourism on the Gulf of Mexico By Shelley DuBois, reporter The BP Deepwater Horizon spill happened in the middle of nowhere in the Gulf of Mexico, but…


Lance Crosby, who co-founded SoftLayer, the cloud computing company IBM bought three years ago for about $2 billion, is finally ready to talk about StackPath, his cybersecurity startup.

It’s a well-funded effort; StackPath has $150 million in backing from Boston-based private equity fund ABRY Partners, and another $30 million from what Crosby calls “friends and family.”

He and co-founder Andrew Higginbotham, who headed up CenturyLink’s ctl cloud business, have been spreading it around: Over the past year, they’ve purchased four security startups:

Former SoftLayer Chief Resurfaces at Security Startup

“We view global threat intelligence like we view data centers: Not everyone needs to build one,” Crosby told Fortune in an interview. “The CDN lets you see what clean traffic looks like, the DDOS shows you the nastiest stuff, and the firewall lets you see the other nasty stuff.”

This is an ambitious undertaking. StackPath will compete with Akamai in CDNs, Prolexic, and others in DDOS—CloudFlare, which offers CDN, DDOS and firewall capabilities, for example.

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It’s goal is to make it easy for customers to use StackPath to protect their data and applications regardless of where they run—in their own data enters or in Amazon amzn Web Services or IBM ibm SoftLayer, or other clouds.

Customers can pick and choose from the various aforementioned services, or implement them all on a subscription basis.

Toward that end it’s got a good start with the 30,000 aggregate customers of its various components. Crosby will speak more on the company’s plans and technology this week at the HostingCon technology conference.

Summary: StackPath has $180 million funding to offer range of cybersecurity services via subscription.


The metaphysical explanation is that Roger Federer is one of those rare, preternatural athletes who appear to be exempt, at least in part, from certain physical laws. Good analogues here include Michael Jordan,(7) who could not only jump inhumanly high but actually hang there a beat or two longer than gravity allows, and Muhammad Ali, who really could “float” across the canvas and land two or three jabs in the clock-time required for one. There are probably a half-dozen other examples since 1960. And Federer is of this type — a type that one could call genius, or mutant, or avatar. He is never hurried or off-balance. The approaching ball hangs, for him, a split-second longer than it ought to. His movements are lithe rather than athletic. Like Ali, Jordan, Maradona, and Gretzky, he seems both less and more substantial than the men he faces. Particularly in the all-white that Wimbledon enjoys getting away with still requiring, he looks like what he may well (I think) be: a creature whose body is both flesh and, somehow, light.

This thing about the ball cooperatively hanging there, slowing down, as if susceptible to the Swiss’s will — there’s real metaphysical truth here. And in the following anecdote. After a July 7 semifinal in which Federer destroyed Jonas Bjorkman — not just beat him, destroyed him — and just before a requisite post-match news conference in which Bjorkman, who’s friendly with Federer, says he was pleased to “have the best seat in the house” to watch the Swiss “play the nearest to perfection you can play tennis,” Federer and Bjorkman are chatting and joking around, and Bjorkman asks him just how unnaturally big the ball was looking to him out there, and Federer confirms that it was “like a bowling ball or basketball.” He means it just as a bantery, modest way to make Bjorkman feel better, to confirm that he’s surprised by how unusually well he played today; but he’s also revealing something about what tennis is like for him. Imagine that you’re a person with preternaturally good reflexes and coordination and speed, and that you’re playing high-level tennis. Your experience, in play, will not be that you possess phenomenal reflexes and speed; rather, it will seem to you that the tennis ball is quite large and slow-moving, and that you always have plenty of time to hit it. That is, you won’t experience anything like the (empirically real) quickness and skill that the live audience, watching tennis balls move so fast they hiss and blur, will attribute to you.(8)

Velocity’s just one part of it. Now we’re getting technical. Tennis is often called a “game of inches,” but the cliché is mostly referring to where a shot lands. In terms of a player’s hitting an incoming ball, tennis is actually more a game of micrometers: vanishingly tiny changes around the moment of impact will have large effects on how and where the ball travels. The same principle explains why even the smallest imprecision in aiming a rifle will still cause a miss if the target’s far enough away.

By way of illustration, let’s slow things way down. Imagine that you, a tennis player, are standing just behind your deuce corner’s baseline. A ball is served to your forehand — you pivot (or rotate) so that your side is to the ball’s incoming path and start to take your racket back for the forehand return. Keep visualizing up to where you’re about halfway into the stroke’s forward motion; the incoming ball is now just off your front hip, maybe six inches from point of impact. Consider some of the variables involved here. On the vertical plane, angling your racket face just a couple degrees forward or back will create topspin or slice, respectively; keeping it perpendicular will produce a flat, spinless drive. Horizontally, adjusting the racket face ever so slightly to the left or right, and hitting the ball maybe a millisecond early or late, will result in a cross-court versus down-the-line return. Further slight changes in the curves of your groundstroke’s motion and follow-through will help determine how high your return passes over the net, which, together with the speed at which you’re swinging (along with certain characteristics of the spin you impart), will affect how deep or shallow in the opponent’s court your return lands, how high it bounces, etc. These are just the broadest distinctions, of course — like, there’s heavy topspin vs. light topspin, or sharply cross-court vs. only slightly cross-court, etc. There are also the issues of how close you’re allowing the ball to get to your body, what grip you’re using, the extent to which your knees are bent and/or weight’s moving forward, and whether you’re able simultaneously to watch the ball and to see what your opponent’s doing after he serves. These all matter, too. Plus there’s the fact that you’re not putting a static object into motion here but rather reversing the flight and (to a varying extent) spin of a projectile coming toward you — coming, in the case of pro tennis, at speeds that make conscious thought impossible. Mario Ancic’s first serve, for instance, often comes in around 130 m.p.h. Since it’s 78 feet from Ancic’s baseline to yours, that means it takes 0.41 seconds for his serve to reach you.(9) This is less than the time it takes to blink quickly, twice.

The upshot is that pro tennis involves intervals of time too brief for deliberate action. Temporally, we’re more in the operative range of reflexes, purely physical reactions that bypass conscious thought. And yet an effective return of serve depends on a large set of decisions and physical adjustments that are a whole lot more involved and intentional than blinking, jumping when startled, etc.

Successfully returning a hard-served tennis ball requires what’s sometimes called “the kinesthetic sense,” meaning the ability to control the body and its artificial extensions through complex and very quick systems of tasks. English has a whole cloud of terms for various parts of this ability: feel, touch, form, proprioception, coordination, hand-eye coordination, kinesthesia, grace, control, reflexes, and so on. For promising junior players, refining the kinesthetic sense is the main goal of the extreme daily practice regimens we often hear about.(10) The training here is both muscular and neurological. Hitting thousands of strokes, day after day, develops the ability to do by “feel” what cannot be done by regular conscious thought. Repetitive practice like this often looks tedious or even cruel to an outsider, but the outsider can’t feel what’s going on inside the player — tiny adjustments, over and over, and a sense of each change’s effects that gets more and more acute even as it recedes from normal consciousness.(11)

The time and discipline required for serious kinesthetic training are one reason why top pros are usually people who’ve devoted most of their waking lives to tennis, starting (at the very latest) in their early teens. It was, for example, at age 13 that Roger Federer finally gave up soccer, and a recognizable childhood, and entered Switzerland’s national tennis training center in Ecublens. At 16, he dropped out of classroom studies and started serious international competition.

It was only weeks after quitting school that Federer won Junior Wimbledon. Obviously, this is something that not every junior who devotes himself to tennis can do. Just as obviously, then, there is more than time and training involved — there is also sheer talent, and degrees of it. Extraordinary kinesthetic ability must be present (and measurable) in a kid just to make the years of practice and training worthwhile...but from there, over time, the cream starts to rise and separate. So one type of technical explanation for Federer’s dominion is that he’s just a bit more kinesthetically talented than the other male pros. Only a little bit, since everyone in the Top 100 is himself kinesthetically gifted — but then, tennis is a game of inches.

This answer is plausible but incomplete. It would probably not have been incomplete in 1980. In 2006, though, it’s fair to ask why this kind of talent still matters so much. Recall what is true about dogma and Wimbledon’s sign. Kinesthetic virtuoso or no, Roger Federer is now dominating the largest, strongest, fittest, best-trained and -coached field of male pros who’ve ever existed, with everyone using a kind of nuclear racket that’s said to have made the finer calibrations of kinesthetic sense irrelevant, like trying to whistle Mozart during a Metallica concert.

According to reliable sources, honorary coin-tosser William Caines’s backstory is that one day, when he was 2½, his mother found a lump in his tummy, and took him to the doctor, and the lump was diagnosed as a malignant liver tumor. At which point one cannot, of course, imagine...a tiny child undergoing chemo, serious chemo, his mother having to watch, carry him home, nurse him, then bring him back to that place for more chemo. How did she answer her child’s question — the big one, the obvious one? And who could answer hers? What could any priest or pastor say that wouldn’t be grotesque?

It’s 2-1 Nadal in the final’s second set, and he’s serving. Federer won the first set at love but then flagged a bit, as he sometimes does, and is quickly down a break. Now, on Nadal’s ad, there’s a 16-stroke point. Nadal is serving a lot faster than he did in Paris, and this one’s down the center. Federer floats a soft forehand high over the net, which he can get away with because Nadal never comes in behind his serve. The Spaniard now hits a characteristically heavy topspin forehand deep to Federer’s backhand; Federer comes back with an even heavier topspin backhand, almost a clay-court shot. It’s unexpected and backs Nadal up, slightly, and his response is a low hard short ball that lands just past the service line’s T on Federer’s forehand side. Against most other opponents, Federer could simply end the point on a ball like this, but one reason Nadal gives him trouble is that he’s faster than the others, can get to stuff they can’t; and so Federer here just hits a flat, medium-hard cross-court forehand, going not for a winner but for a low, shallowly angled ball that forces Nadal up and out to the deuce side, his backhand. Nadal, on the run, backhands it hard down the line to Federer’s backhand; Federer slices it right back down the same line, slow and floaty with backspin, making Nadal come back to the same spot. Nadal slices the ball right back — three shots now all down the same line — and Federer slices the ball back to the same spot yet again, this one even slower and floatier, and Nadal gets planted and hits a big two-hander back down the same line — it’s like Nadal’s camped out now on his deuce side; he’s no longer moving all the way back to the baseline’s center between shots; Federer’s hypnotized him a little. Federer now hits a very hard, deep topspin backhand, the kind that hisses, to a point just slightly on the ad side of Nadal’s baseline, which Nadal gets to and forehands cross-court; and Federer responds with an even harder, heavier cross-court backhand, baseline-deep and moving so fast that Nadal has to hit the forehand off his back foot and then scramble to get back to center as the shot lands maybe two feet short on Federer’s backhand side again. Federer steps to this ball and now hits a totally different cross-court backhand, this one much shorter and sharper-angled, an angle no one would anticipate, and so heavy and blurred with topspin that it lands shallow and just inside the sideline and takes off hard after the bounce, and Nadal can’t move in to cut it off and can’t get to it laterally along the baseline, because of all the angle and topspin — end of point. It’s a spectacular winner, a Federer Moment; but watching it live, you can see that it’s also a winner that Federer started setting up four or even five shots earlier. Everything after that first down-the-line slice was designed by the Swiss to maneuver Nadal and lull him and then disrupt his rhythm and balance and open up that last, unimaginable angle — an angle that would have been impossible without extreme topspin.

Extreme topspin is the hallmark of today’s power-baseline game. This is something that Wimbledon’s sign gets right.(12) Why topspin is so key, though, is not commonly understood. What’s commonly understood is that high-tech composite rackets impart much more pace to the ball, rather like aluminum baseball bats as opposed to good old lumber. But that dogma is false. The truth is that, at the same tensile strength, carbon-based composites are lighter than wood, and this allows modern rackets to be a couple ounces lighter and at least an inch wider across the face than the vintage Kramer and Maxply. It’s the width of the face that’s vital. A wider face means there’s more total string area, which means the sweet spot’s bigger. With a composite racket, you don’t have to meet the ball in the precise geometric center of the strings in order to generate good pace. Nor must you be spot-on to generate topspin, a spin that (recall) requires a tilted face and upwardly curved stroke, brushing over the ball rather than hitting flat through it — this was quite hard to do with wood rackets, because of their smaller face and niggardly sweet spot. Composites’ lighter, wider heads and more generous centers let players swing faster and put way more topspin on the ball...and, in turn, the more topspin you put on the ball, the harder you can hit it, because there’s more margin for error. Topspin causes the ball to pass high over the net, describe a sharp arc, and come down fast into the opponent’s court (instead of maybe soaring out).

So the basic formula here is that composite rackets enable topspin, which in turn enables groundstrokes vastly faster and harder than 20 years ago — it’s common now to see male pros pulled up off the ground and halfway around in the air by the force of their strokes, which in the old days was something one saw only in Jimmy Connors.

Connors was not, by the way, the father of the power-baseline game. He whaled mightily from the baseline, true, but his groundstrokes were flat and spinless and had to pass very low over the net. Nor was Bjorn Borg a true power-baseliner. Both Borg and Connors played specialized versions of the classic baseline game, which had evolved as a counterforce to the even more classic serve-and-volley game, which was itself the dominant form of men’s power tennis for decades, and of which John McEnroe was the greatest modern exponent. You probably know all this, and may also know that McEnroe toppled Borg and then more or less ruled the men’s game until the appearance, around the mid-1980’s, of (a) modern composite rackets(13) and (b) Ivan Lendl, who played with an early form of composite and was the true progenitor of power-baseline tennis.(14)

Ivan Lendl was the first top pro whose strokes and tactics appeared to be designed around the special capacities of the composite racket. His goal was to win points from the baseline, via either passing shots or outright winners. His weapon was his groundstrokes, especially his forehand, which he could hit with overwhelming pace because of the amount of topspin he put on the ball. The blend of pace and topspin also allowed Lendl to do something that proved crucial to the advent of the power-baseline game. He could pull off radical, extraordinary angles on hard-hit groundstrokes, mainly because of the speed with which heavy topspin makes the ball dip and land without going wide. In retrospect, this changed the whole physics of aggressive tennis. For decades, it had been angle that made the serve-and-volley game so lethal. The closer one is to the net, the more of the opponent’s court is open — the classic advantage of volleying was that you could hit angles that would go way wide if attempted from the baseline or midcourt. But topspin on a groundstroke, if it’s really extreme, can bring the ball down fast and shallow enough to exploit many of these same angles. Especially if the groundstroke you’re hitting is off a somewhat short ball — the shorter the ball, the more angles are possible. Pace, topspin, and aggressive baseline angles: and lo, it’s the power-baseline game.

It wasn’t that Ivan Lendl was an immortally great tennis player. He was simply the first top pro to demonstrate what heavy topspin and raw power could achieve from the baseline. And, most important, the achievement was replicable, just like the composite racket. Past a certain threshold of physical talent and training, the main requirements were athleticism, aggression, and superior strength and conditioning. The result (omitting various complications and subspecialties(15)) has been men’s pro tennis for the last 20 years: ever bigger, stronger, fitter players generating unprecedented pace and topspin off the ground, trying to force the short or weak ball that they can put away.

Illustrative stat: When Lleyton Hewitt defeated David Nalbandian in the 2002 Wimbledon men’s final, there was not one single serve-and-volley point.(16)

The generic power-baseline game is not boring — certainly not compared with the two-second points of old-time serve-and-volley or the moon-ball tedium of classic baseline attrition. But it is somewhat static and limited; it is not, as pundits have publicly feared for years, the evolutionary endpoint of tennis. The player who’s shown this to be true is Roger Federer. And he’s shown it from within the modern game.

This within is what’s important here; this is what a purely neural account leaves out. And it is why sexy attributions like touch and subtlety must not be misunderstood. With Federer, it’s not either/or. The Swiss has every bit of Lendl and Agassi’s pace on his groundstrokes, and leaves the ground when he swings, and can out-hit even Nadal from the backcourt.(17) What’s strange and wrong about Wimbledon’s sign, really, is its overall dolorous tone. Subtlety, touch, and finesse are not dead in the power-baseline era. For it is, still, in 2006, very much the power-baseline era: Roger Federer is a first-rate, kick-ass power-baseliner. It’s just that that’s not all he is. There’s also his intelligence, his occult anticipation, his court sense, his ability to read and manipulate opponents, to mix spins and speeds, to misdirect and disguise, to use tactical foresight and peripheral vision and kinesthetic range instead of just rote pace — all this has exposed the limits, and possibilities, of men’s tennis as it’s now played.

Which sounds very high-flown and nice, of course, but please understand that with this guy it’s not high-flown or abstract. Or nice. In the same emphatic, empirical, dominating way that Lendl drove home his own lesson, Roger Federer is showing that the speed and strength of today’s pro game are merely its skeleton, not its flesh. He has, figuratively and literally, re-embodied men’s tennis, and for the first time in years the game’s future is unpredictable. You should have seen, on the grounds’ outside courts, the variegated ballet that was this year’s Junior Wimbledon. Drop volleys and mixed spins, off-speed serves, gambits planned three shots ahead — all as well as the standard-issue grunts and booming balls. Whether anything like a nascent Federer was here among these juniors can’t be known, of course. Genius is not replicable. Inspiration, though, is contagious, and multiform — and even just to see, close up, power and aggression made vulnerable to beauty is to feel inspired and (in a fleeting, mortal way) reconciled.

David Foster Wallace is the author of “Infinite Jest,” “Consider the Lobster” and several other books.

A version of this article appears in print on , on page 647 of the New York edition with the headline: Federer As Religious Experience. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe

Summary: How one player’s grace, speed, power, precision, kinesthetic virtuosity, and seriously wicked topspin are transfiguring men’s tennis.


In 1939, the producers of Gone with the Wind had to fight for the inclusion of Rhett Butler’s famous line, “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.” And it’s been downhill ever since.

One survey found almost 90% of Britons swear (an average of 14 times a day) and barely any of them think it’s offensive

Swearing is everywhere and we’re all to blame. One survey found that almost 90% of Britons swear (an average of 14 times a day) and barely any of them think it’s offensive.

So if everyone’s doing it and nobody cares, should we just stop clutching our pearls and accept salty language at work? In truth, many of us do it anyway. And while the professional world disapproves (or at least acts like it does), some researchers think swearing has certain advantages.

Does swearing make you look stupid and unprofessional?

It can make you feel better, but it doesn’t earn you respect - James O’Connor

Many people think employees should take the high road. A CareerBuilder survey found that 81% of employers think profanity is unprofessional. And most think it shows immaturity, a lack of control and even makes the employee appear less intelligent.

“You might ask what harm does it do, but what good does it do? It can make you feel better, but it doesn’t earn you respect, reflect strong character, solve disagreements, exhibit intelligence, or get you promoted,” says James O’Connor, the author of Cuss Control, a book on how to curb cursing.

Then again, there are plenty of people at the top of the pecking order who swear. It’s not just celebrity chefs like Gordon Ramsay or fictitious characters like the industrial-strength foul mouth Malcolm Tucker from The Thick of It.

Executives like Yahoo’s former CEO Carol Bartz and T-Mobile’s current CEO John Legere have both happily and publicly dropped the f-bomb. Even US President Barack Obama famously said he was trying to figure out “whose ass to kick” after the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Clearly, swearing hasn’t stopped every potty-mouth’s career progress. One study even shows that “judicious” use of swearing can make you more persuasive. Maybe, out of the right mouth, it’s a leadership tool.

Nobody’s suggesting that swearing is a substitute for being good at your job. But can it help? Some research suggests it might, in a roundabout sort of way.

In a 2007 study, a researcher went on an undercover mission, as a worker at a British mail-order warehouse. He was initially excluded from the social group in the office, but things changed after he swore at another employee. It was a sort of initiation rite that cemented a bond with the rest of the group.

Swearing like a sailor isn’t just a blue-collar hobby

The co-author of the study, Yehuda Baruch, who’s now a professor at the University of Southampton Business School, says that swearing like a sailor isn’t just a blue-collar hobby.

“We are all human beings, and even if you’re a distinguished lawyer, you might swear,” according to Baruch.

But how does that help? Well, carpet bombing your workplace with profanity won’t get you a promotion, but fitting in at the workplace helps.

“I’m not saying this a major criteria for promotion, but one criteria for promotion is the ability to connect with people. In certain contexts, swearing is a way to connect,” he says.

Two sides of the coin

But this might also suggest a broader problem with swearing. If it serves to consolidate the bonds in one group, is it to the exclusion of others? And if so, could it play a part in making the workplace more hostile?

“Swearing usually expresses anger or a negative attitude that can be contagious, creating a less pleasant working environment,” James O’Connor says.

And really, its effect on the working environment is where it becomes a genuine issue.

“Context is everything,” according to Roland Hassall, who’s a Sydney-based workplace lawyer at Sparke Helmore. His firm deals with a case a week where swearing is a factor. But it’s almost never the only factor, or even the main one.

Most workplaces today aren’t concerned about offending tender ears. They’re interested in creating a harmonious and productive working environment. Employment cases that involve swearing are more often about something more serious, like bullying or harassment.

Society is a lot more permissive now than say in the 1960s in terms of what you can say

“Society is a lot more permissive now than say in the 1960s in terms of what you can say,” Hassall says.

But there is a clear exception to this rule. There’s far less tolerance for sexist and racist language, which can quickly cross the legal line into sexual harassment or discrimination.

“Most of the tribunals or commissions would have no hesitation upholding disciplinary action in cases like that,” he says.

But if sexist and racist language is rightfully a no-go zone, there are other well-worn rules for avoiding trouble. If in doubt, don’t swear in front of children, microphones, customers, patients or interview panels. And swearing at an actual human is riskier than swearing at the paper jam in the printer.

When, where and how you swear matters just as much as which linguistic grenade you toss

When, where and how you swear matters just as much as which linguistic grenade you toss. But figuring out what’s acceptable and what’s off-limits is subjective and blurry, and at times pretty weird.

At the extreme end of the spectrum, swearing is flat out illegal in some countries. Recently, rapper 50 Cent was arrested and fined for using profanity during one of his shows in St Kitts. In the United Arab Emirates, there are more serious penalties, even for swearing over a messaging app.

Figuring out what’s acceptable in other cultures can be very tricky. While religion-based swearing has lost its impact in many western countries, blasphemy laws are still enforced in the Middle East. In some Asian cultures, a poorly-placed swear word might result in a loss of face, which could sour the relationship. Even within the US, there are some pretty dramatic differences in what people find offensive. In short, it’s probably best to err on the side of caution if you don’t know the rules.

One Sydney-based journalist, who asked to remain anonymous, broke most of the rules and came out better off. She says firing off nuclear-grade expletives at her boss actually earned his respect.

She was covering a story on a hot summer day, and asked the chief of staff to send a bottle of water and a sandwich when he changed over the camera crew. Neither the water nor the sandwich materialised and she fainted in a press conference.

Later, she called him and gave him both barrels, loudly calling him a name most wouldn’t use on their worst enemies.

“I’m really glad I did it, and I think the swear words expressed exactly how angry and upset I was. It may not have been ‘professional’ but I think it got me a lot more professional respect,” she says.

“He later told me he had a lot more respect for me after this incident, and since then has genuinely checked with me to make sure I’m OK (not in a patronising way either – I think it just made him remember I wasn’t a robot).”

But again, context is everything. She had the moral high ground in the dispute. She works in an office where swearing is common. Perhaps in another workplace, it would have ended very differently.

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Summary: Is it time to lighten up about four-letter words at work? Cursing at the office can have its advantages, but it depends on the culture, writes Tim McDonald