09/01/2016 AT 12:30 PM EDT

It's going to be an emotional season for the cast of

... in more ways than one.

In an exclusive sneak peek at season 7 of Discovery's hit show, fans see the painful aftermath of family patriarch

. The late miner died in March at the age of 96.

grimly attends the funeral for his grandfather alongside his dad Roger.

"I lost a dad and you lost a grandpa," Roger tells his son, "all at the same time."

"I don't know what it's going to be like without him," Parker says.

This season, Parker's emotions and leadership will be tested, according to the press release.

"[Parker] makes the biggest investment in the history of his operation by ordering a customized $600,000 washplant. But will it be enough to beat out his archrival Todd Hoffman? With a new girlfriend from Australia, Ashley Yule, joining him in the Klondike, it will be a season like no other for Parker. His gold mining plan is to go lean and mean in an attempt to make his biggest profit yet."

Also within the teaser, Todd Hoofman (The King of the Klondike) isn't happy with his circumstances and also sees his fair share of stress this season after moving his entire operation to Oregon.

Not only does a fight break out on his site, he winds up admitting to losing "several hundred thousand dollars," experiences equipment issues after a machine flips over, and one worker says, "Enough is enough. I'm finished."

John Schnabel (left) with grandson Parker Schnabel

At the time of John's passing, the Schnabel family told PEOPLE that they "appreciate all of the support" fans have shown them.

"We couldn't have asked for a better father, grandfather and overall family man," the Schnabel family said. "He was a true legend and we appreciate all of your love and support as we celebrate his wonderful life."

season premiere airs Friday, Oct. 14, at 9 p.m. ET on Discovery.

Summary: The two-hour Gold Rush season premiere airs Friday, Oct. 14, at 9 p.m. ET on Discovery


David Taylor wrote a letter to the police officer's family apologising for his death. (Source: AAP)

The boyfriend of an Australian woman accused of murdering a Balinese policeman has apologised to the officer’s family in a hand-written letter.

David Taylor, a British DJ who has admitted to assaulting father-of-two Wayan Sudarsa with a smashed beer bottle, told police on Friday he had written a letter to the officer's family, Fairfax Media reports.

"He try to come up with the courage and apologise. He's very sorry, it takes time for him to come up with the courage to apologise because the incident caused the victim his life," his lawyer Mr Haposan Sihombing told the newspaper.

Sudarsa was brutally bashed on August 17 on Kuta beach and found in the sand with 42 wounds, including head injuries.

British national David Taylor participates in the reconstruction of the death of a police officer at Kuta beach. (Source: AAP)

Taylor and his Australian girlfriend, Sara Connor, have remained in police custody since the Australian embassy negotiated their surrender to law enforcement shortly after the attack.

Connor, a 45-year-old mother of two from Byron Bay, has been accused by police of destroying Sudarsa's identity cards and throwing them away.

"It was Sara who cut [them] up. The intention was to get rid of evidence," Denpasar police chief Hadi Purnomo said last month.

Sara Connor also took part in the reconstruction of the police officer's death. (Source: AAP)

Connor's lawyers insist their client is innocent and that she repeatedly tried to separate Sudarsa and Taylor after the DJ accused the officer of stealing the Australian mum's handbag.

On Monday Connor told police she was 50m away from where Sudarsa and Taylor were fighting while looking for her bag and ran to stop the fight when it escalated.

Her legal team told Fairfax Media she was eager to get home to her family.

"Understandably she is anxious, worried, she is in a foreign country. As her legal team we explained to her that this is part of the legal process, the stages," I Ketut Ngastawa said.

© Nine Digital Pty Ltd 2016


Vulnerable Aboriginal kids in the Northern Territory are crying out for help and governments are ignoring their best asset to fix the "broken" child protection and detention system, a royal commission has heard.

The Darwin community called on the NT government to enlist the cultural expertise of indigenous people in tackling the problem at a forum held by the inquiry on Friday.

David Cole is the founder of Balunu Foundation, a program that provides cultural therapy for children at risk of suicide, crime and substance abuse.

"We have the solution at the grassroots," he said.

"We understand the complexities better than anyone else. We've got the experts right here."

He has worked with more than 800 vulnerable children in the past eight years but the NT government cut the organisation's funding, forcing it to rely on federal support.

Co-commissioners Mick Gooda and Margaret White both flagged concern with the effect of fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, childhood trauma and the likely impacts on the high rates of indigenous people in the child protection and criminal justice systems.

Ms White called it the "elephant in the room in the western world" which causes appalling damage to Aboriginal children's mental development and emotional wellbeing.

But Mr Cole said family breakdown, intergenerational trauma and poverty were the root causes of heavy drinking among mothers.

"FASD is not the problem, that's the medication," he said.

"There's so much underlying trauma that drugs and alcohol is the only way they deal with it.

"The children are crying out, and if this inquiry just delivers another fancy piece of paper it will be a waste of time."

Cherrie Brown is a kinship carer who admits she has a fractured relationship with the NT Department of Children and Families, which she says is broken.

She says putting so many Aboriginal children in non-indigenous foster care is a "modern day stolen generation" and is advocating for more indigenous family consultation.

"I want change in my lifetime," she said.

"My grandmother was part of the Stolen Generation and I've had conversations about it with her. I don't want to have to talk to my niece about this one day."

In an emotional welcome to country, Larrakia traditional owner James Parfitt-Fejo spoke about his grandmother, who was taken away by the "white fella welfare man" at four years old.

"Her mother was clinging to the side of the truck and screaming when they took her away," he said.

"They did all this for the so-called protection of Aboriginal children."

The commission, which began its first public hearings this week, was sparked by an ABC Four Corners episode that aired footage of boys being tear gassed, shackled and put in spit hoods at Don Dale Youth Detention Centre.

"Some say those boys are no angels, and some wonder whether they deserved it," Mr Parfitt-Fejo said.

"But we must remember that these people have rights - basic rights, human rights - no matter the situation."

Mr Gooda said no one deserves that type of treatment, and said race played a huge part.

"I know there's a lot of inquiry fatigue and cynicism but we have got to make sure this never happens again," he said.

Mr Gooda said the inquiry would recommend fundamental policy change but the government must implement it and be held to account.

The inquiry will hold further public hearings in November.

Summary: The Darwin community has called on the NT government to enlist the cultural expertise of indigenous people to fix a broken child protection and justice system.


The Turnbull government has fast-tracked legislation to reinstate the building industry watchdog, insisting it has a clear mandate to rid the sector of thuggery.

The coalition used its slim majority to push its Australian Building and Construction Commission bills through the lower house on Tuesday, but still faces a battle in the Senate.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull summed up debate on the legislation likening construction union behaviour to "something scripted for the Godfather or the Sopranos."

The legislation sent the nation to July's double dissolution election and passed the lower house for a third time 76 to 69.

The government truncated debate to just three speakers, arguing members' views had been aired during the first two attempts to get it through.

It comes after a public spat with Liberal Democrat David Leyonhjelm, who threatened to hold the government hostage over a deal on gun imports he claims it reneged on.

Mr Turnbull insists there is "no chance at all, no prospect whatsoever" of his government weakening Australia's strong gun laws.

Senator Leyonhjelm says Justice Minister Michael Keenan promised him an importation ban on a seven-shot version of an Adler lever-action shotgun would end after 12 months.

"They did a deal with me and then they welshed on it," Senator Leyonhjelm told reporters.

"Until this is solved my relationship with the government is going to be difficult."

Mr Turnbull used video of a construction union official's threatening behaviour on a Commonwealth Games building site on the Gold Coast to bolster his case.

He believes there's no doubt his government has a mandate for the legislation after being reinstalled in July.

"And those opposite will be showing their contempt for that democratic outcome if they persist in the obstruction of these bills," he said.

"We all know criminality is rife in this sector."

Labor maintains the industry already has massive oversight from rigorous laws.

The coalition is negotiating with the crossbench to pass the bill through the Senate, including with Senator Leyonhjelm.

Independent senator Nick Xenophon - who leads a team of three - argued the construction watchdog would not be credible unless it also dealt with the plight of subcontractors when building contractors collapsed.

The legislation can't come before the Senate until the next sitting session on November 7, with senators tied up in committees this week.

Summary: The coalition has pushed legislation to reinstate the Australian Building and Construction Commission through the lower house.


A man is in a critical condition following another shooting in Queensland.

The 21-year-old took himself to Chinchilla Hospital on Thursday night with gunshot wounds to his chest and arm.

Police searched bushland after speaking to the injured man, who was later airlifted to Princess Alexandra Hospital.

Two crime scenes have been set-up in Chinchilla as detectives investigate.

The incident comes after two fatal shootings in Queensland.

The first happened about 4pm on Thursday when a man was shot in the stomach at a house in Brisbane's east, at Tingalpa.

The 32-year-old was rushed to hospital but could not be saved.

A man is due to face court charged with his murder on Friday morning after allegedly surrendering at a watch-house with a loaded shotgun down the front of his pants.

Meanwhile, an investigation is underway after a fatal police shooting at Freestone on Thursday afternoon.

A 65-year-old man was shot after walking out of bushland and threatening officers who had tried to speak with him, police said.

Summary: A man has suffered critical wounds following a shooting at Chinchilla on Queensland's Darling Downs.


Hints from the U.S Federal Reserve that it could be looking to curb its bond-buying program have been enough for some foreign currencies to fall, but David Bloom, the global head of foreign exchange strategy at HSBC has detailed those that would survive any flight back to the dollar.

"Poland, Hungary, Czech, they've done phenomenally well down when emerging markets have got burnt," he told CNBC Thursday.

"They've been a bastion of stability in the whole emerging market world."

(Read More: Are the cracks in the euro starting to show?)

Yields on 10-year benchmark U.S. Treasurys rose above 2 percent on May 22, after the Federal Reserve's policy minutes sparked fears the central bank could start tapering off its $85 billion-a-month bond purchasing program.

Shortly after, emerging market (EM) currencies began to tumble as investors started to bringing their dollars back to the U.S. in the view that interest rates would move higher. For instance, South Africa's rand tumbled 6 percent against the dollar in a month, the Indian rupee fell 24 percent in three months and the Malaysian ringgit slipped 10 percent in three months. Meanwhile, the yuan, the Vietnamese dong, the Russian ruble, the Mexican peso and the Brazilian real all clocked-up declines against the dollar this year before stabilizing.

Meanwhile, the Polish zloty, the Hungarian forint and the Czech koruna were relatively untouched and in some cases actually appreciated against the dollar.

(Read More: Confused about Fed tapering? Don't be)

Summary: David Bloom, the global head of foreign exchange strategy at HSBC, lists the currencies that would survive a flight back to the dollar.


At least six businesses have been destroyed in a fire that broke out at a shopping strip in Fairfield, western Sydney, last night.

The blaze began in a variety shop on Ware Street about 9.40pm AEDT and spread to adjoining businesses.

At least six shops have been destroyed in the Farfield fire. (9NEWS)

Firefighters spent hours working to put out the fire. (9NEWS)

Firefighters were called and spent hours working to extinguish the blaze, which was finally put about 2.30am AEDT.

"There's lots of smoke, lots of firefighters doing their job," one witness told 9NEWS.

Firefighters believe no one was inside the shops at the time of the blaze, and will begin assessing the damage once the building is deemed safe.

The cause of the fire is not known.

© Nine Digital Pty Ltd 2016

Summary: Fire has ripped rough a row of shops in Sydney’s west overnight, with at least four shops severely damaged.


TAMPA BAY, Fla. — The Tampa Bay Lightning have signed forward Mathieu Joseph to a three-year, entry-level contract Saturday, vice president and general manager Steve Yzerman announced.

Joseph, 6-foot-1, 172 pounds, has played in 29 games with the Saint John Sea Dogs of the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League this season, notching 25 goals and 45 points. He is tied for the league lead for goals and is also tied for third for shorthanded goals with four, tied for fourth for power play goals with nine and tied for second for plus/minus with a plus-23 rating.

A native of Chambly, Quebec, Joseph has played in 176 career QMJHL games, all with the Sea Dogs, during the previous four seasons. He has registered 80 goals, 171 points, 17 power play goals and 13 shorthanded goals, with a plus-73 rating. Joseph has played in 10 career playoff games with Saint John, recording six goals and 10 points.

Joseph is currently playing for Team Canada at the 2017 World Junior Championships in Toronto and Montreal, which begins Monday.

The 19-year-old was drafted by the Lightning in the fourth round, 120th overall, of the 2015 NHL Draft.

Summary: The Tampa Bay Lightning selected Mathieu Joseph 120th overall in 2015.


Honda is ready for an adventure. The company has confirmed it will offer an "adventure" class, liter-sized dual sport motorcycle as part of its 2016 line-up.

The CRF1000L Africa Twin, a production version of the True Adventure machine Honda teased at last year's EICMA motorcycle show in Milan, Italy, will be in U.S. dealerships early next year, the company said.

The new bike is an update on Honda's XRV650 Africa Twin, which was offered to consumers in 1989 after its race version won four successive wins by the company's NXR750V in the Dakar Rally -- the off-road endurance race that has set the standard for dual sport requirements.

Honda withdrew from Dakar racing that same year, and after a 24-year absence returned to the competition in 2013 with an all-new CRF450 Rally. The company scored multiple stage wins that year, and in two subsquent Dakar races.

The Japanese motorcycle giant enters a field already crowded with popular dual sport and adventure bikes.but it's a key segment -- the fastest-growing niche in the U.S. motorcycle market, analysts have said.

The category is dominated by BMW's R 1200 GS and KTM's 1190 and 1290 Adventure and Super Adventure motorcycles. But those two venerable machines are now competing for attention with dual sport and sport touring bikes like Yamaha's Super Tenere and new FJ-09, Suzuki's V-Strom, Kawasaki's KLR650 and Versys, Triumph's Tiger and Ducati's Multistrada -- and, in a way, its own veteran XR650L.

But this Honda does have something unique to the category -- an automatic transmission. The Africa Twin will be available with the company's DCT technology, specially tuned, the company said, for use in the dirt.


Insurance giant Chubb recently began offering optional cyber bullying coverage for its homeowners insurance clients. Anyone who has had embarrassing photos posted on social media or been deluged with angry messages can attest to the high emotional cost of cyber bullying. But there is also a cost in real dollars for some to clean up their online reputations, including legal fees, security measures and even counseling.

Up to 40 percent of adult Internet users are dealing with this issue, according to 2014 Pew Research Center data. Chubb's coverage is included in the company's Family Protection policy, which costs around $70 a year. It covers up to $60,000 in compensation to clients and their families to pay for services including psychological counseling, lost salary and, in extreme cases, public relations assistance.

An illustration picture shows a man starting his Twitter App on a mobile device. REUTERS/Kai Pfaffenbach

"It's so hard to have complete control online," said Christie Alderman, vice president of client product and services, Chubb personal risk services. "We do know that when it does occur it can be really devastating."

Nicole Prause, a neuroscientist from California, learned the costs of cyber bullying the hard way.

After publishing a 2013 peer-reviewed paper that suggested sex addiction is not a clinical diagnosis, Prause said she was subjected to online insults from people she believes oppose her work.

The abuse varied in scope, from repeated claims that she faked her data to comments about her appearance.

"I had a TED Talk (posted online) and they just filled it with 'tranny' comments," said Prause, who worked at the University of California-Los Angeles at the time the attacks began. "They have definitely singled me out."

Prause filed a cease-and-desist order against her harassers, and said those persons are no longer allowed to contact her directly. But Prause said she spent around $5,000 to mitigate the damage over the years, hiring an attorney and someone to take screenshots of the abuse lobbed at her online.

Rich Matta, the chief executive officer of ReputationDefender, an online reputation management firm, says that the average consumer dealing with this problem can spend around "a few thousand dollars" a year to combat cyber bullying.

"It's no surprise that remediation of cyber bullying is now insurable," Matta said, referencing the Chubb insurance policy.

But some feel that taking out an insurance policy against online harassment is going too far.

Sameer Hinduja, co-director of the Cyberbullying Research Center and a professor of criminal justice at Florida Atlantic University, said insurance for cyber bullying reinforces a victim mentality and is "tapping (in to) the fear."

"You can do a lot on your own to safeguard your reputation," Hinduja said.

Experts say it is important for consumers to be proactive in protecting their online reputation, by taking a few simple steps.

Here are a few tips to avoid the cyber bully trap:

Hinduja recommends setting social media profiles to "private," to avoid writing posts that are too frequent and opinionated, and to block or mute accounts that go too far.

"You are going to be a much better advocate for yourself," Hinduja said.

2. Be proactive about your child's online presence

While more schools are educating kids about cyber abuse, Matta said parents still need to monitor how their kids use social media. "They need to establish some boundaries and rules around when it's OK to use technology," he said.

3. Get help when you need it

For those who feel overwhelmed managing their online presence, resources like online ReputationDefender can offer a reprieve - for a price. ReputationDefender typically charges private clients between $3,000 and $20,000 per year, while Reputation 911 offers monthly packages for personal reputation management between $195 and $995.

Read More: NFL Pick Falls in Draft After Bong Video Appears on Twitter

Summary: Chubb recently began offering insurance to help mitigate the financial repercussions of cyberbullying.


I REALLY gotta start losing weight before spring break," a 15-year-old from Long Island wrote in her blog on Xanga.com, a social networking site. "Basically today I went 24 hours without food and then I ate green beans and a little baked ziti. Frankly I'm proud of myself, not to mention the 100 situps on the yoga ball and the 100 I'll do before sleep ... Yey for me."

Illustration by Steve Williams; photograph of woman, David Waldorf/Getty Images

Peter Thompson for The New York Times

Ashley Filipp, a recovering anorexic and bulimic, now counsels others with eating disorders.

A Californian, 18, wrote: "I'm at 108 right now. Spring break is in about 3 weeks and I want to be down to at least 99-100. That can easily be done."

From a writer identifying herself as Workhardgetskinny: "I only did 100 crunches but I'm trying to do 200 more before bed. ... 2 full days till spring break!"

The discussion took place in one of Xanga's blog rings, a string of Web logs connected by a common theme, in this case a spring break challenge, in which young women pledged to shed a lot of weight before their trips to the beaches of Florida and Mexico.

Their home pages were decorated with images of gaunt supermodels and pipe-cleaner-thin celebrities like Nicole Richie. Declarations like "Food Is Poison" and "Diet Coke Is Love" blared like banner advertisements across screens. Participants also shared their daily indulgences. One writer confessed to eating "one cracker, one strawberry and a little bit of soup" in a 24-hour period. Another recounted a lunch that consisted of a slice of mango and a stick of gum.

For most students spring break represents the promise of a beer-soaked respite from Northern cold and midterm stress, a time to let go and revive. But for a subculture of students with eating disorders, this annual weeklong bacchanalia, unfolding across Florida, Mexico and the Caribbean during March and April, represents the summit of deprivation and self-denial.

Though not widely discussed  sufferers of eating disorders often spend years in denial about their condition, and therapists treating them can rarely isolate any single reason for these complex psychological syndromes  those who treat eating disorders say spring break is one of the most dangerous times of the year for young women struggling with their weight and eating.

"This is a trigger time for youth to start to obsess about weight and body image," said Margo Maine, a clinical psychologist in West Hartford, Conn., who specializes in eating disorders. She said she observes a spike in weight anxiety every year among her younger patients before spring break. "By the beginning of February people are starting to talk about their bodies and getting ready for spring break. Even girls who are simply around that talk can't get away from it."

The fantasy of achieving a "bikini-ready" body on a deadline is an intoxicating incentive, according to those who have experienced and observed the behavior. And in a school setting, in which tightly knit groups of young women are all vacationing together, diets easily become competitive or, as Dr. Maine put it, contagious.

For Ashley Filipp, a recent college graduate and recovering anorexic and bulimic, the warmup to spring break when she was a student in Colorado represented, she said, "the big time of the year." She added, "You start realizing that you have been packing on the winter pounds, the insulation, and now it's time to lose them."

Starting in her senior year of high school, Ms. Filipp, 24, recalled preparing for her annual spring break trip to Mexico at least 100 days beforehand. "As soon as we would make our plans, my best friend and I would start counting 'How many days to Cancun?' " recalled Ms. Filipp, who now works as a crisis help-line counselor for the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders in Highland Park, Ill.

By the time Ms. Filipp entered college, she said, there was no shortage of students eager to join her in what became a pre-spring-break ritual. In January and February, she said, the scene inside her sorority house at times resembled an Olympics of extreme weight loss. Some students would subsist on little more than lettuce flavored with calorie-free spray butter flavoring. Others would purge by vomiting or swallowing laxatives. Obsessive exercise was common.

The group dieting that is relatively ad hoc among friends and sorority sisters takes a more organized form on the Internet, where spring break has become a popular topic on Web sites and message boards maintained by devotees of a controversial underground movement known as "pro-ana," or pro-anorexia, who sometimes identify themselves in public by wearing red bracelets. There are hundreds of pro-ana Web sites promoting and supporting the "anorexic lifestyle," despite aggressive efforts to shut them down by eating-disorder activists. In addition the pro-anas are also present on social network sites like MySpace.com, Xanga and Livejournal.com, where blog rings topics range as widely as emo music and parasailing.

Summary: A carefree time for most prompts a dangerous game for others. Young women are pledging to shed a lot of weight before their trips to the beaches.


By PETE DONOHUE DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

Monday, January 14th 2002, 2:24AM

Police suspect a notorious, convicted graffiti vandal - blamed in the past for more than $1 million in property damage - is leaving his mark again around the city.

In the last several weeks, DESA, the moniker used in the past decade by Robert Morrissey, was spotted scrawled at "some street locations and subway locations" in his old haunts, such as Ridgewood, Maspeth and Glendale in Queens, said Lt. Steve Mona, commanding officer of the police Transit Bureau's vandal squad.

"Apparently, he is back," Mona said, referring to the vandal branded in an August 1994 page one story in the Daily News as the city's worst graffiti punk.

"What we've seen from him is new. It's not like old stuff. It's new stuff that we're noticing."

Targets included commercial buildings and mailboxes, and one DESA tag was discovered by police in the G line Classon Ave. station in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn.

Also, several subway train windows were observed recently by The News marred by DESA tags.

Investigators believe the latest DESA graffiti is the work of Morrissey, and not a copycat, based on their expertise in recognizing individual styles, Mona said.

Morrissey, now 26, whose last known address was in East New York, Brooklyn, could not be reached.

His first brush with the law came in 1992, officials said, after years of defacing buildings, storefronts, lampposts, bridges, overpasses and even police cars.

He was accused of making threatening telephone calls to an anti-graffiti group, the Greater Ridgewood Restoration Corp. He pleaded guilty to aggravated harassment and was sentenced to three years of probation and 1,000 hours of community service.

After completing half of the community service, he was busted again in October 1993, for spraying six subway cars in Queens, and sentenced to one to three years in prison.

Six years ago, cops arrested Morrissey again when he was caught spray-painting his tag on a Brooklyn firehouse.

He told police at the time he was "addicted" to graffiti, and was sentenced to another year in jail.

Summary: Police suspect a notorious, convicted graffiti vandal - blamed in the past for more than $1 million in property damage - is leaving his mark again around the city. In the last several weeks, DESA, the moniker used in the past decade by Robert Morrissey, was spotted scrawled at "some street locations and subway locations"in his old haunts, such as Ridgewood, Maspeth and Glendale in Queens, said


SAN FRANCISCO - Sanofi SA plans to wring $170 million in annual cost savings out of its operations after having acquired the Cambridge biotechnology company Genzyme Corp., but many of the cuts will be outside the Boston area, Sanofi’s chief executive said.

For instance, Sanofi, a French drug maker, is closing a New Jersey research laboratory because it has been less productive than Genzyme’s labs, which have developed treatments for rare diseases, chief executive Christopher A. Viehbacher told investors yesterday at the 30th annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco.

“Genzyme’s having a big impact on the Sanofi culture,’’ Viehbacher said. “Being a leader in life sciences in Cambridge, Mass., means we’re able to look at all our facilities. We decided we didn’t need a research facility in Bridgewater, N.J. So all of the cost savings are not coming out of Genzyme.’’

Sanofi acquired Genyzme last year after drawn-out negotiations that began with an unsolicited takeover offer by the pharmaceutical giant. Sanofi has eliminated some jobs at Genzyme headquarters in Kendall Square but has added research and manufacturing jobs in the Boston area, keeping its Massachusetts workforce stable at about 4,500 employees.

“One of the things Genzyme did extremely well is they could identify a [drug] target, test it on humans early on, and they knew it was going to be successful,’’ Viehbacher said. “That’s a skill the industry is going to need to have.’’

Sanofi has also begun using its $20.1 billion Genzyme purchase to reorganize its drug-discovery efforts, concentrating more of them at a small number of research and development centers in Cambridge, France, Germany, and China, Viehbacher said.

Tapping into the Boston’s life sciences cluster, Sanofi said yesterday that it will coinvest with the Boston venture capital firm Third Rock Ventures in Warp Drive Bio, of Cambridge, which is developing technology that will allow it to make drugs from microbes found in plant extracts.

Also participating in the $125 million funding round will be Greylock Partners, a venture firm with offices in Silicon Valley and Cambridge.

“Coinvesting with a VC gives you a second opinion,’’ Viehbacher said.

While his Paris-based company will not start its own venture capital arm, as some rival drug makers have, “We’re prepared to take equity positions in start-ups,’’ he said.

Viehbacher said Sanofi’s cost-reduction push is part of a strategy to develop fewer drugs at its own research sites and more in collaboration with other companies and institutions, a strategy employed by other drug makers. Viehbacher said 50 percent of drugs will be developed in collaboration with partners, compared to 30 percent currently.

Sanofi is facing a so-called patent cliff as the patents for several of its best-selling drugs expire this year, enabling competing low-cost generic therapies to enter the market.

As a result, Sanofi is expanding into areas such as biotech drugs, vaccines, consumer health care, and pet and animal medicines to lessen its exposure to traditional chemical-based drugs, Viehbacher said.

Those markets are “fundamentally changing the structure of the company,’’ he said, and now represent two-thirds of Sanofi’s annual business.

“2012 has been one of the years that’s been circled in red at Sanofi,’’ said Viehbacher. “It’s the year of the infamous patent cliff. This is the third patent cliff of my career, and I’m determined to avoid a fourth.’’

Sanofi’s diversification has positioned the company for renewed growth in coming years, Viehbacher said. He projected annual sales growth of 5 percent from 2012 to 2015.

Summary: Sanofi SA plans to wring $170 million in annual cost savings after having acquired Cambridge biotech Genzyme Corp., but many of the cuts will be outside the Boston area.


LOS ANGELES | Wed Mar 5, 2008 4:40am EST

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The final epilogue to the tumultuous writers strike has been written, but Hollywood is bracing for a possible sequel to the costly walkout -- this one starring film and television actors.

While the TV industry has rushed to bring derailed shows back on the air since screenwriters returned to work three weeks ago, the threat of renewed labor unrest by actors in the months ahead has put movie studios in a tenuous situation.

Filmmakers are reluctant to launch any production that cannot be completed before the expiration of the Screen Actors Guild's major film and TV contract on June 30 -- a date being treated as the union's de facto strike deadline.

Assuming a typical 60-day movie shoot, plus extra time for days off, possible overruns and re-shoots that might be necessary, that means few if any big-studio movies will start filming after the end of this month, industry experts say.

"The studios for the most part are not greenlighting any movies that would have to be in production after that (June 30) deadline," said an insider at one leading talent agency who was not authorized to speak publicly about client issues.

Labor jitters have even prompted Hollywood's leading insurance carrier, Fireman's Fund Insurance Co, to offer a first-of-its-kind "strike expense" policy for studios.

The policy covers the costs of a strike-related production shutdown in the event that an actor's illness, equipment damage or other unexpected loss pushes the shooting schedule of a movie past SAG's June 30 contract deadline.

To qualify, a film must be scheduled to finish shooting by June 15 and already be covered by a so-called completion bond, which insures a movie's financial backers against the cost of failing to finish a picture on time and on budget.

SAG itself sought on Tuesday to assist smaller, independent producers having trouble getting bonded by offering special waivers that permit them to employ union actors in the event of a strike. The producers in turn must accept the terms of any interim contract SAG may offer and any final settlement reached with the major studios, which are ineligible for a waiver.

SAG already has signed several producers to one of its "guaranteed completion contracts," and several more applications are pending, union sources said.

Nerves are still raw from a 14-week strike by 10,500 writers that shut down much of the television industry and derailed numerous film projects, idling thousands of production workers and costing the local economy some $3 billion.

The walkout ended February 12 after the two sides reached agreement on a deal giving writers more money for work distributed over the Internet. The contract was formally ratified by the Writers Guild of America membership last week.

The Screen Actors Guild shares many of the same contract demands. But SAG also faces issues unique to its 120,000 members, such as forced commercial endorsements through product placement in TV shows and movies.

Many in Hollywood believe strike fatigue is running too high for another work stoppage to materialize. But with tens of millions of dollars at stake when a film production is disrupted, movie studios are playing it safe. Some of the industry's biggest names are caught up in the uncertainty.

Steven Spielberg has called off the April start to a DreamWorks film about the trial of the 1968 anti-war activists, the Chicago Seven, according to Daily Variety newspaper

Michael Bay, director of the 2007 summer action blockbuster "Transformers," is keeping his fingers crossed as he and DreamWorks stick to an early June start date for a sequel to the movie.

"If there is a strike, we shut down. But shutting down isn't that big a deal," Bay told Variety, explaining that he hoped to mitigate the cost of a potential disruption by working out special deals in advance with equipment vendors and sound stages where he would shoot.

Independent producers who rely on third-party financing lack such flexibility because investors require completion bonds, which insurance companies are unwilling to issue for any film that cannot be finished by June 15.

SAG's offer of guaranteed completion contracts is designed to help independent filmmakers overcome that hurdle.

Meanwhile, SAG leaders have come under mounting pressure to open contract talks with the major studios as soon as possible, leading to tensions between the guild and its sister union, the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA).

SAG President Alan Rosenberg, who campaigned on a promise to take an aggressive stance at the bargaining table, has insisted the guild will not be ready to begin official talks before early April.

Some leaders of AFTRA and SAG's New York wing have agitated for talks to begin sooner, as have several high-profile actors, including George Clooney and Tom Hanks, who met with Rosenberg over dinner last month. They and other stars also took out full-page ads in Hollywood trade papers calling for immediate negotiations.

And over 1,000 SAG members recently presented Rosenberg with a petition urging the union to limit any voting on a new contract or strike authorization to those members who have worked a specified number of days during the past six years.

Rosenberg said he opposes the idea but would take it to SAG's governing board at its next meeting in April.

Rosenberg and SAG executive director Doug Allen recently suggested that informal talks like those that led to contracts with the WGA and the Directors Guild of America, were already under way. "We will certainly continue to meet with the CEOs of the major networks and studios as we prepare for formal negotiations," they wrote in a February 28 memo to members.

Summary: By Steve Gorman LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The final epilogue to the tumultuous writers strike has been written, but Hollywood is bracing for a possible sequel to the costly walkout -- this one starring


Posted about 18 hours ago

Ann Romney is not photographed as well as Michelle Obama. If you need a stellar full-length shot of Michelle, it's not hard to find with a quick search on Getty Images. If you need the same of Ann, BuzzFeed's photo editors and I have found, you'll have to dig a bit harder. Ann is more likely to be awkwardly cropped, hidden by a shadow, or photographed at an awkward angle.

You get a sense of this just looking at Michelle and Ann's Google Image results. Michelle's top result is basically flawless:

Ann's is an incredibly awkward shot of her leaving a restaurant, her eyelids half-closed and hair mussed.

This disparity has nothing to do with who's more attractive or photogenic (both are attractive, well-dressed women, let that be said now). Rather, it suggests that the media demands different types of coverage of the candidates' spouses, and that each has grown into their role on the campaign quite differently.

"I’m saying this as a foreigner: when I look at Ann Romney, I see someone who [is] a very traditional American, well-to-do, well-dressed woman," said New York Times photographer James Hill, who is British, lives in Russia, and has covered elections all over the world. "Everything’s in the right place. It’s all very neat and tidy, but it’s maybe not very exciting. Whereas when you see Michelle Obama, you’re seeing somebody who’s different. Who’s more brick-breaker, who’s tall and sort of has pizzazz and style, and is very self-confident as well. You see that."

Republican strategist Bay Buchanan said that Michelle Obama may be photographed better this election than Ann since she's been under intense public scrutiny for much longer. "Michelle Obama has been first lady for four years, so of course there's been a lot of attention and she's developed a lot of followers out there, both in the media and outside the media. And so you expect people to say, 'What is she going to wear?'" Buchanan said. "If Ann Romney becomes first lady, I'm sure the same thing will happen but it'll just be a little bit different."

She's right — it's not fair to compare Michelle's current campaign photos to Ann's since Michelle has been first lady for four years now, has developed a strong following, and will naturally have a bigger, more visible role. So we went back and looked at Michelle's treatment in the 2008 race to see how it measured up to Ann's. We looked at Getty because that's our go-to source for photos of the two, and focused on the time period between when the candidates knew they had their party's nomination up to today's date, October 18. April 10, 2012 was about when Rick Santorum dropped out of the race, clinching Mitt Romney's nomination. And June 7, 2008 is about when Hillary Clinton suspended her campaign, giving Barack Obama the Democratic nomination. Here's what we found with those dates in mind:

• Michelle appears in 992 photos on Getty tagged "michelle obama" between April 10, 2008 and October 18, 2008.• Ann only appears in 645 photos on Getty tagged "ann romney" between April 10, 2012 and October 18, 2012.• Michelle appears in 556 photos on Getty tagged "michelle obama" between June 7, 2008 and October 18, 2008.• Ann appears in 589 photos (so, slightly more than Michelle) on Getty tagged "ann romney" for the period from June 7, 2012 to October 18, 2012.

The difference between photos of the two women from the June to October period is small enough to be insignificant. But looking at that April 10 to October 18 period, Michelle was photographed 54 percent more than Ann.

Michelle's position in the campaign was exciting and historic: she was in the running to become the first black first lady. Ann would be another white first lady with a hardly surprising inclination for Oscar de la Renta dresses. The number of images of Michelle suggest that she was very exciting to the media even before she was dressing that spectacularly. Here she is at a primary event in Pennsylvania on April 22 of that year:

I find it impossible to imagine her wearing anything like this now, and even by 2008 fashion standards, am surprised she wore it then. However, her clothes became more of a Thing in the late spring and early summer of 2008, when the little-known Maria Pinto emerged as her favorite designer. Michelle famously wore a purple sheath dress by Pinto when she fist-bumped her husband at a campaign rally in St. Paul, Minnesota on June 3, 2008.

"I think Michelle Obama was very much part of this young, exciting equation. She was part of this change, — a black president, a young president. It was a watershed in American politics," said Hill. "And I guess that she was part of that. [She wears] bright, solid-colored dresses — you can’t miss her, let’s face it."

Around the time of the fist bump, Michelle's clothes became an obsession and full-length shots of her outfits became necessary for pretty much every women's media outlet. She continued wearing things by atypical designers like Isabel Toledo and even mixed in $40 dresses from H&M, and the occasional sweater set from J. Crew as she worked the campaign trail. These moments defined her early on as a cool, occasionally thrifty, and tasteful woman. She was a media darling, ending up on six magazine covers during the campaign (seven if you count the controversial New Yorker cover) compared with Ann Romney's two magazine covers so far this campaign.

So, Ann Romney hasn't created the same intrigue as Michelle Obama. She wears Oscar de la Renta, like many first ladies before her (a label Michelle has never worn). She has a horse that competes in the sport of dressage, the point and rules of which remain murky to most Americans. She just doesn't have the same cool factor as Michelle.

And a lot of the difficulty with photographing either of them comes from the constraints put in place by security and the campaigns themselves, who want to control every aspect of their coverage. Photographers can only stand in one confined place, which sometimes prevents them from getting the best shots of the candidates and their spouses, if they're around. But also the campaigns orchestrate every detail of publicity opportunities, including what the spouse's involvement will be and, probably, where that person will stand. "The world we live in is so very conscious of image. People are afraid, I think," Hill said. "And the campaigns obviously follow as well."

And some from the Republican party rebuffed suggestions that Ann is standing in Mitt's shadow or photographed consistently badly.

"You're not looking hard enough," Republican National Committee chairman Reince Preibus told me when I asked why she was plagued with bad photo luck. "I think there's a lot of great photos of her. She's a pretty lady."

— With research by Alanna Okun.

Summary: Ann is not photographed nearly enough or as well as Michelle Obama. She's just not as exciting, said a Times photographer.


Governor George Pataki of New York has finally pulled the plug on one of the more dubious cultural legacies of 9/11. The International Freedom Centre, a proposed museum for the World Trade Centre site, had long been derided by critics as an un-American and inappropriate commemoration of the attacks. But its real problem was never a failure of respect for 9/11. Instead, from the start the initiative lacked either intellectual rigour or curatorial credibility.

The man behind it was Tom Bernstein. A leading figure in east-coast cultural life, Bernstein is a successful New York entrepreneur and a committee member of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC. And it was the Holocaust Museum - that hugely moving visitor experience combining personal tragedy, historical narrative and "never again" editorialising - which provided the initial template for the IFC.

There was to be a combination of exhibits, educational programmes and "civic engagement networks" stepping off from 9/11 to portray the role of freedom around the world. At its core would be a history of America and the "story of its ever-widening circle of freedom".

But museums are rarely value-free endeavours. By championing freedom in the specific context of 9/11 and its aftermath, the IFC would have intervened very publicly in a global debate about America and the "war on terror". While it might have been marketed as an international museum fostering the values of tolerance, diversity and understanding, the IFC was in truth a product of its time with an unsubtle political message. This was to be a museum of the Bush era: a physical testament to a complex notion that the president has made his ideological watchword and military calling card.

With the world crudely divided by the White House into "freedom lovers" and "freedom haters", it was clear which side the IFC would have to take. Indeed, the underlying neoconservative ethic of the centre seemed only confirmed by the political hue of its directors. Prominent among them was Natan Sharansky, the former Soviet dissident, Bush mentor and leading Israeli hawk whose conception of freedom does not extend to the occupied Palestinian territories; the Ronald Reagan presidential librarian Richard Norton Smith; and the former Wall Street Journal publisher Richard Tofel. Thankfully, the academic advisory board was slightly more balanced.

Then there was the question of what to put in the museum. From the outset Governor Pataki declared the site should contain nothing that denigrates America, freedom or the courage shown on 9/11. The IFC was directed to portray America as a "beacon" of freedom around the world. So we could expect a great deal on the Founding Fathers, but less about the histories Simon Schama has unearthed of black slaves fighting for liberty on the British side. Similarly, would the IFC's analysis of the second world war be a tale of D-Day derring-do or give Stalin's Red Army the recognition it deserves for crushing Hitler?

More contentiously, how would curators cover those parts of US history when the Pentagon and state department have not been on the side of "freedom lovers"? Would Bernstein, Sharansky et al honestly guide us through the role of the CIA in Chile, the US-funded death squads in Nicaragua and Guatemala or the back-channel bolstering of any number of Middle East despots?

Unsurprisingly, many relatives of the victims of 9/11 felt that any serious museum would detract from a memorial to their loved ones and were in no mood for a balanced account of American history at such a personal and painful location. And they were right: the World Trade Centre site should be a place for reflection, and not a politicised narrative of US freedom-fighting.

Museums set up under political pressure typically end in embarrassment and failure. Currently, across eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, the great, bombastic museums of the cold war are crumbling. Where once communist authorities turned Nazi death camps from sites of Jewish remembrance into anti-fascist memorials, now they are having to deliver a more credible account of the past. Similarly, the politicised exhibits of the IFC would have had to reflect the ethos of each passing administration.

Yet at least the founders of the IFC wanted to mark the events of September 11 with something noble if misguided. Now the residents of New York are going to get the chance to commemorate 9/11 and celebrate their freedom in a themed retail park.

Summary: Tristram Hunt: The World Trade Centre site is not the space for an ideological museum about US love of freedom.


HOUSTON, Jan. 10— Army's director of athletics, Carl Ullrich, said today that the Military Academy would like to join the Ivy League in basketball, but probably not in football.

Ullrich's reaction came in response to a report that the Ivy League is interested in expanding in all sports from eight to 10 institutions, with Army one of six likely candidates for membership in the Ivy group. None of the half-dozen teams have been officially approached by Ivy representatives.

The other five schools the Ivy League is interested in are Northwestern, Navy, Colgate, Holy Cross and William & Mary. Fred Hemke, Northwestern's faculty adviser for athletics, said that the school would be interested in talking with the Ivy League. Army and Navy, which have been members of baseball, wrestling and swimming leagues with the eight Ivy colleges for many years, wanted to join the Ivy League in basketball two years ago, but were turned down. As a result, Army, seeking to join a basketball league, helped form the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference with Fordham, Iona, Fairfield, St. Peter's and Manhattan.

The eight Ivy institutions are Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Pennsylvania, Princeton and Yale. Interviewed here at the site of the National Collegiate Athletic Association convention, which starts Monday, Ullrich said: ''We'd love to get into the Ivy basketball league. But we couldn't afford to join them in football.'' Ivy League in Lower Bracket

The Ivy League teams were forced to drop from Division I-A, or major college football, into Division I-AA by a vote of N.C.A.A. Division I-A teams last month. Army, Navy, Holy Cross and Northwestern remained in Division I-A; Colgate and William & Mary were also reclassified as Division I-AA teams.

The reorganization of the major football teams made it mandatory for a team to average 17,000 at home games or have a 30,000-seat stadium for it to be in Division I-A. The majority of Ivy teams did not qualify, so the entire league was demoted to I-AA.

Army, which fills its 41,000-seat Michie Stadium for most home games and appears on television once or twice a season, thinks it may lose the income from such crowds and televisi on appearances if it joins the Ivy League in football, according t o Ullrich.

Northwestern, a member of the Big Ten Conference, is considered out of its element in that powerful league, in which it is the only private university among state institutions.

Some Big Ten officials indicated today that if Northwestern were to leave, they would move to admit Penn Stat e as a replacement. Nebraska, a m ember of the Big Eight, appeared to the second choice. Pittsburgh, w hich has indicated a desire to join the Big Ten in recent years, seemed to have little chance.

Joe Paterno, athletic director and football coach at Penn State, said, ''If this ever happened, we certainly would be interested in the Big Ten.''

Hemke confirmed tonight that Northwestern had come close to joining the Ivy League two years ago, when the league voted, 7-1, to admit Northeastern. The Ivy League, however, requires a unanimous vote for admission.

Hemke said, ''I was not the faculty representative then, but that is the way I understand it happened. Although we would like to upgrade our athletics within the Big Ten, we are always interested in continuing a dialogue with the Ivy League.''

Northwestern might present financial problems for the league. Stretching from Philadelphia in the south to Hanover, N.H., in the north, and from Boston in the east to Ithaca, N.Y., in the west, the Ivy is a compact group. If the eight teams had to travel regularly to Northwestern, which is in Evanston, Ill., a Chicago suburb, the travel costs would be high.

Army, on the other hand, is located in the midst of the Ivy group, 50 miles north of New York City. Holy Cross is in Worcester, Mass., just west of Boston. Colgate is in Hamilton, N.Y., about 50 miles from Ithaca, N.Y., where Cornell is situated. Navy and William & Mary are far enough south of Philadelphia to cause some concern over travel costs.

Howard R. Swearer, the president of Brown University, is scheduled to address the N.C.A.A. members Monday, when the association's 76th annual convention opens. He will express the Ivy League's displeasure with the reclassification of Ivy football teams from Division I-A to I-AA.

It is expected that during the convention, the N.C.A.A. member institutions will vote for stronger N.C.A.A. control of football television and cablevision rights to games played in the regular season. Some members of the College Football Association will challenge this with a proposal to prohibit the N.C.A.A. from exercising control over property rights they claim belong to the individual universities. These C.F.A. members contend that television and cablevision rights are among those property rights.

The C.F.A. consists of 61 major football colleges, all of whom also belong to the N.C.A.A. The property rights proposal will probably be defeated by the N.C.A.A. membership, opening the way for the association to enlarge its long-standing control over these football television rights.


UPDATED 05/07/2014 at 06:00 PM EDT • Originally published 05/07/2014 at 04:00 PM EDT

Oklahoma Thunder forward Kevin Durant accepted his first MVP award in Oklahoma City Tuesday, and his speech was one for the ages.

Among the speech's many heartfelt moments (Durant's admission that growing up, he wanted to become a rec league coach, to "stay home and help the kids out"), the section Durant addressed to his mother was the most affecting. It's appropriate that Mother's Day is coming up: Durant pours his heart out in his speech, first to his grandmother (who still texts him after each game) and then to his mother.

"I don't think you know what you did. You had my brother when you were 18 years old," Durant says (around 23:13). "Three years later I came out. The odds were stacked against us. Single parent with two boys by the time you were 21 years old."

"Everybody told us we weren't supposed to be here. We moved from apartment to apartment by ourselves. One of the best memories I have is when we moved into our first apartment. No bed, no furniture, and we just all sat in the living room and hugged each other because we thought we made it."

"When something good happens to you, I don't know about you guys, but I tend to look back to what brought me here. You woke me up in the middle of the night in the summer times. Making me run up a hill. Making me do push-ups. Screaming at me from the sidelines at my games at 8 or 9 years old."

"We weren't supposed to be here. You made us believe. You kept us off the street, put clothes on our backs, food on the table. When you didn't eat, you made sure we ate. You went to sleep hungry. You sacrificed for us. You're the real MVP."

The best part? Durant's mom was sitting in the front row for the whole thing.

Summary: "You sacrificed for us. You're the real MVP," Durant said


Some of the most inspiring words in the entire Bible are found in the opening pages of Genesis. Here we are told that humans were created in God’s image and given a divine mandate to care for Creation (Gen. 1:26-31). Our vocation—our calling—is to partner with God in preserving and sustaining the earth with all the creatures and species that God has made. The word used in most translations is “dominion,” and the true meaning is what we would today call “stewardship.”

Unfortunately these passages have often been used and abused to advance countless agendas, often to the great detriment of the Earth and its inhabitants. The deep sense of stewardship implied by and inherent in these verses is ignored and the word “dominion” has been interpreted as domination—and a license to destroy. Such thinking is not just unfaithful to God; it is dangerous to all God’s creation and creatures.

The most recent example of this unfortunate mindset can be seen in the recent comments made by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) denying that human activity contributes to climate change. He claimed proposals attempting to address the troubling climate trends were problematic because they might hamper economic growth and lacked international buy-in. We certainly wouldn’t want something as insignificant as the sustainability of our planet to impinge on next quarter’s GDP, or worse yet, a potential candidate’s presidential campaign.

Much attention has been given to Rubio’s denial of climate science. After all, there is overwhelming evidence that climate change is real and humans are contributing to it in significant ways. But what’s potentially more harmful than his devaluing of the widespread scientific consensus is the utter lack of discussion about moral implications. This was in fact a political denial of the facts, for the sake of a voting base he desperately wants to cultivate; but worse, a cover up of both moral and theological imperatives.

And there are serious moral costs to our willful ignorance and political inaction on climate change.

It is time to acknowledge this as the sin of short-termism. By prioritizing the present—and at worst, current political calculations—at the expense of the future we are risking the health and prosperity of future generations. Our nation has long prided itself on leaving the next generation better off, but what sort of example are we now setting and what inheritance are we passing on? It is hard to answer these questions honestly because we are unwilling to admit the truth. Scientific denial is psychologically easier. For some of our elected leaders it is also politically convenient.

While its secular usage is increasing, the word “repentance” remains a deeply theological term. Biblically, it demands both an acknowledgment of the wrong that has been done and a commitment to act differently in the future. You cannot repent if you are unwilling to change. When it comes to climate change, we cannot just lament what has gone wrong. And we must do more than just point to the already alarming consequences of climate change and the catastrophic potentials which lie ahead. Instead, we must repent of the harm we’ve caused and commit ourselves to a new course of action.

In a recent speech, President Obama outlined an agenda for addressing climate change. He clearly named the goals which must be sought: first, a transformative investment in clean energy; second, a significant reduction of dirty energy; and third, a collective commitment in every part of our society to save energy. It’s really as simple as that. So why can’t we agree to the moral narrative that underlies these outlined solutions? The tremendous gains that can be achieved—for both the public and private sector—from increased energy efficiency and a renewed commitment to conservation is something good for our planet, our lifestyles, and our souls.

Here is the moral narrative. What will your grandchildren’s grandchildren ask about why we, and why you, did not do what was necessary for them? Why were we so selfish and short-sighted? Why didn’t we care enough about the future of our world and theirs, to take care of our descendants? And here is the biblical and spiritual narrative: does care for God’s creation really allow us to exploit the earth and its resources for short term economic self-interest? Is that good stewardship and the humble worship of God?

There is much to be commended in the President’s plan and what many scientists are pleading for, but unless we confront the underlying narratives that inhibit faithful progress even the most obvious policy solutions will remain out of reach because of our nation’s dysfunctional politics and short-term economics. The irony is that the moral course of action would bring new economic opportunities. There are more potential good jobs in the retrofitting of the nation to conserve energy, and the re-wiring of our energy grid for a cleaner future; but that would not be in the self-interest of the oil and gas companies that now control the country and its politics.

As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. so often quoted, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Of this I have no doubt. My only question is whether we’ll have the moral courage on climate change to bend it fast enough before catastrophe becomes unavoidable. For the sake of my grandchildren—for the sake of my grandchildren’s grandchildren—I hope we start taking our calling as stewards of God’s Creation a lot more seriously.

It’s time to stop denying science, denying our created instructions, and denying the sovereignty of God. Instead, let’s start acknowledging our moral responsibilities.

Jim Wallisis president of Sojourners. Follow Jim on Twitter @JimWallis.

Summary: To ignore climate change is to abuse the moral call to care for the environment, and generations to come will suffer.


There’s nothing new about ambitious start-ups duking it out for the recognition and money that comes with winning a prestigious start-up competition. What might be surprising is that two of the largest such competitions this year were hosted in the Middle East solely for Middle East entrepreneurs. And their sponsors, MIT and Google, are among the most vaulted names in global technology.

In a region dominated by instability and uncertainty, any investor might ask, “Why now?”

“In fact the time is ripe now,” notes Wael Fakharany, Google’s Regional Manager for Egypt and North Africa, and founder of Ebda2 (Arabic for “Beginning”), Google’s first regional competition focused on Egypt entrepreneurs. “There are many unsettled places in the world showing remarkable innovation today.” He points to the basic demographics of Egypt: More than 17 million enrolled students, over 2.3 million Egyptians working in the technology sector, over 35 million people actively using the Internet and over 90 million mobile users. “We believe that one of the next waves of impact and growth will emerge from this part of the world,” he says.

This confirms the momentum that Hala Fadel, a Paris and Beirut-based global investor and founder of the MIT Enterprise Forum of the Pan-Arab Region, has seen in there recently. This year’s MIT Business Plan Competition, done in partnership with the Saudi corporate social responsibility effort Abdul Latif al Jameel Community Initiative and covering all of the Middle East, is her fifth. “During 2006, our first year, we expected 200 applications from around the Middle East, but received over 1,500,” she says. “This year over 4,500 teams of three people or more competed – that means over 13,000 potential entrepreneurs.” She added that nearly half of the teams this year included women. “We even received over 100 applications – get this – from Syria!”

MORE: What’s really holding Arab women back?

MIT pitches ranged from addressing local and regional needs to aspirants looking to compete with world-class global technology start-ups. First place, along with a $50,000 prize, went to Butterfleye, which has created a smart goggle for swimmers that monitors their heart rate and tracks their fitness.

Winner of the $10,000 second-place prize, Qabila Media Productions, took off when its crowd-sources video services went viral during the Egyptian uprising. Third place Silgenix, also from Egypt, created an integrated circuit design company specializing in increasing the battery lifetime of portable electronic devices. Other finalists created regional social networks, eCommerce platforms, online education courses, capabilities to increase internet connection speeds and reliability among others. Competitors came from every corner of the region, from Saudi Arabia to Palestine.

More than 4,200 entrepreneurs competed in Google’s Egypt-focused Ebda2, culled down to twenty finalists over nine months of multiple rounds of training, mentoring and judging. To create awareness, Ebda2 and Google staff chartered a bus and travelled throughout the country on a road show to gather participants and to offer training. Visiting twelve universities in twelve cities as widely diverse as the large urban centers of Cairo and Alexandria to the smaller cities such as Tanta, Fayoum, Port Said, they met more than 1,500 entrepreneurs with ideas in areas ranging from consumer internet to health care.

The winner of $200,000, Bey2ollak, is a six-person team taking on one of the most vexing problems in Egypt – traffic. It offers a crowd-sourced traffic information service and mobile app to track all major roads in Cairo and Alexandria. “I could not believe my eyes as I spent a day meeting with the finalists,” says Mohammed Gawdat, Vice President of Google GOOG in Southern and Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa. “The passion, the energy, freedom of expression, thought leadership and the healthy disregard for the impossible blew me away. I felt as if I were spending the day with Googlers.”

MORE: The problem with the Arab world’s love affair with English

Do these competitions matter? “We believe that the Internet is a net contributor to the economy in the region and in Egypt,” notes Fakharany, “But it is also the best kept secret. We spent $200,000 in this one, but we are committed to spend another $2.3 m over the next couple of years. The face of Egypt can be changed through technology.”

Fadel believes that a connectedness created in gatherings like these help foster further innovation, just as it does in the U.S. “Being an entrepreneur is, by definition a lonely thing,” she says. “The odds of failure are great. One cannot underestimate the importance of mental support to startups when participating because they realize that they are not the only ones working hard in this region when they see others like them doing the same and succeeding.”

Both Fadel and Fakharany believe we are in the earliest days of this startup boom in the Middle East. Global and local institutions, in fact, have been hosting hundreds of competitions throughout the region, and more will come. “Success breeds success,” says Fadel. “It’s just basic math.”

Christopher M. Schroeder @cmschroed is a Washington, D.C. and New York-based entrepreneur, venture investor and former CEO of the online content and social platform start-up healthcentral.com , which he sold last January. He is writing a book about tech start-ups in the Middle East due Spring 2013.

Summary: Many areas in the Middle East are still reeling from the uprisings last year, but investors and entrepreneurs see nothing but opportunity.


Last week it was announced, to much bewilderment, that the director of the Photographers' Gallery, Paul Wombell, had resigned, for reasons that have not been given. This week, the gallery's annual prize exhibition opens, accompanied by more change: higher prize money (£30,000 for the winner) and a new sponsor, the Deutsche Börse, the German stock exchange, which is heavily involved in developing its own collection of contemporary photography. Participants are now nominated on the basis of shows or publications held anywhere in Europe in the preceding 12 months. It should make what is already one of the world's most interesting photography competitions even broader and more intriguing.

French photographer Luc Delahaye started out as a war reporter, and his work has taken him from Kabul to Baghdad, Bosnia to Rwanda. I find his earlier images of war - a dead Taliban fighter in a ditch, a crowd on the road to Kabul with bodies strewn amid them - deeply depressing, not least because of the panoramic, high-resolution quality of the images themselves. They have an almost pornographic grandeur. His image of a funeral in Musenyi in Rwanda reminds me of Courbet's monumental 1855 painting A Burial at Ornans: in both com positions, mourners stand like a wall about the open grave, which our eyes have to traverse like a sort of ditch. We are left asking ourselves on which side of death we stand.

In much of his more recent work, Delahaye has turned his all-seeing eye to the UN Security Council, the Milosevic trial in The Hague, a conclave in St Peter's in Rome. In the trial scene, Milosevic sits dead centre, in the bureaucratic anonymity of the courtroom. Nothing much seems to be happening. (In the show's catalogue, this full-spread image is so badly guttered that the accused disappears in the fold of the page, and you can find him only by almost breaking the spine of the book. For a moment, I thought this must be some kind of conceptual gag.) In the Ordinary Public Consistory, at which new cardinals are elected, all human life is subsumed in ecclesiastical fancy dress, and dwarfed by the vast architectural space.

Turning again to a smoke-filled street in downtown Baghdad, or to a panorama of ruins in Jenin, in which humans are similarly diminished and almost inconsequential presences, it appears that human life is being somehow pulverised and ground to dust. The people we see are like those tiny blob-people with which painters once populated bombastic landscapes, there to add a sense of scale and scurrying movement to a scene of awful and indifferent grandeur.

In Stephen Shore's 1979 image of Yosemite National Park, the figures are tiny but individual, uncowed by the towering mountains and the spectacular scenery. There's a baby buggy by the river's edge, a mother walking a toddler. Dad, his back to all that scenery, photographs a kid standing in the river. Nineteenth-century painters such as Albert Bierstadt painted Yosemite as though it were made by God, untouched by man and seen by Claude Lorraine. The photographer Carleton Watkins turned it into a vast inhuman panorama. Instead of the sublime, Shore gives us Yosemite as a tourist photo-opportunity.

I prefer Shore when he details the ordinary. He once sat in an Idaho motel and photographed the view from the bed, jeans and sneakers poking into the bottom of the image, as he looks across to his cheap suitcase and the wall-mounted TV. Shore fixed the place, the dead atmosphere, the generic moment. This image makes you think of all the forgettable rooms you've ever stayed in, where you leave no trace.

This is photography as pause: one more stop on Shore's extended 1970s American road trip, following in the tyre tracks of Robert Frank, Jack Kerouac, Cartier-Bresson and Humbert Humbert in Nabokov's novel Lolita, all of whom began their own picaresque journeys in 1947, which, more than coincidentally, was the year of Shore's birth.

Shore's colour images are consciously located in the American photographic tradition, and in the larger tradition of Americana. Despite his recent republication of a sort of "director's cut" of his 1982 book Uncommon Places, I wonder what the point is of having these 30-year-old photographs here. They have already achieved classic status; however immediate their presence, they belong to another time.

There are other beds, other hotel rooms in the photographs of JH Eng-ström. This is unsurprising when one realises that professional photographers spend a lot of time on the road. One can recall a whole lexicon of hotel room photographs, from Nan Goldin to William Eggleston to Juergen Teller to Nobuyoshi Araki, all of whose images are distinguished not so much by the differences between the rooms themselves, and the kinds of things people get up to in them, nor by the differences between cameras or lenses or print quality or scale, but by the very different sensibilities of the photographers themselves - a viewpoint that is about more than camera position.

Like Shore, Engström has been on his own road trips, around his native Sweden and to the US. More hotel rooms, more unmade beds. Shore once photographed a bowl of soup in a diner, the table setting precise, the cutlery marshalled exactly. Engström shows us a kitchen table littered with the desolate remains of a meal. Where Shore is alert to formal composition and arrangement (in the world as much as in the photographs themselves), Engström homes in on the out-of-kilter, on anxious moments, the point when photographer and subject confront one another as if for the first time. Whether it is an empty room, a naked friend or lover, a bare tree reflected in a window, an abandoned meal, his photos are full of strangeness. This is accentuated by the prints themselves, with their inadvertent scratches and blips, the stray elements creeping in at the edges, the blurrings and croppings.

You get a real sense of the photographer's nervousness and his ability to capitalise on the creative chances every part of the process permits - from taking the photo to its final printing, scale, format and so on. His portraits are particularly unnerving, which comes as a bit of a surprise when one learns that he used to be Mario Testino's assistant; maybe this was a kind of aversion therapy, turning him away from Testino's unrelieved slickness. Engström's work is nothing but alive. He has said he spent "three years grappling with the possibility and impossibility of capturing people's presence", and this is very evident in the portraits. They have a spectre-like quality of immediacy, capturing the strangeness of other people - distorted, disproportionate, foreshortened by the cam era's proximity. A shadow falls across a woman's eyes. Was it in the room or did it appear in the developing process? He also makes you aware of the difference between what you think you see and what is there. How odd the body is, how vulnerable, how absurd it sometimes looks. These works appear to be deeply subjective images, but they touch something real. There is also poetry here.

Düsseldorf photographer Jörg Sasse doesn't even take his own photographs. He digitally invents them from found images. The real in Sasse's work is the photograph itself, so heavily mediated are its scanned, pixelated and manipulated sources. However much I am drawn to his impossible images - motorways with flyovers going nowhere, a suspension bridge with oddly blurred shadows and phantom girders, a football game seen through the grid of the goal net, but impossibly elevated above the pitch - most are too much like surreptitiously tweaked sight-gags for my taste.

Sasse is an interesting but minor scion of the Düsseldorf "school". We know Shore's America too well. Delahaye's work is a further example of genre photography. I can't get Engström out of my head. Guess who I think should win.

· The Deutsche Börse Photography Prize is at the Photographers' Gallery, London WC2, from Friday to June 5. Details: 020-7831 1772.

Summary: In this year's Photographers' Gallery prize show, mountains, hotel rooms and motorways are the stars - and people are weirdly insignificant. By  Adrian Searle.


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Summary: Educate yourself.


Everyone from hedge funds to mutual fund managers to retail investors has been wading deeper into the private markets, buying shares of startups that have yet to go public. So perhaps it should come as no surprise that former New York Stock Exchange CEO Duncan Niederauer has found greener pastures in the world of venture capital fundraising and private stock offerings.

Niederauer announced today that he will become the fourth managing director of Battery East, a Silicon Valley deal-making startup that officially launched last month. Formed by veterans of BlackRock and two venture capital firms, Battery East already has helped broker more than $300 million in transactions. That total includes both secondary sales of private stock and primary fundraising rounds for startups like ad-tech platform Turn and stock trading platform IEX.

“This was one of the things I wanted to do, given the opportunities in the private companies that we’ve all been thinking about,” says Niederauer, who spent his last days at the NYSE “pitching in” on Alibaba’s BABA record-breaking IPO. “My future is going to be looking for opportunities in the private market as well.”

While in the 1990s it was common for companies to go public at valuations of just a few hundred-million dollars, today’s tech startups are choosing to ripen longer in private, before going public at multi-billion dollar valuations that would make even Amazon AMZN and Microsoft’s MSFT IPOs look tiny. Thanks to regulations that made it harder for companies to go public (the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002) and easier to stay private (the Jumpstart Our Business Startups, or JOBS, Act of 2012), American stock exchanges have been seeing potential clients resist their overtures.

Although U.S. IPOs have rebounded fiercely since the recession, with about 227 in the first three quarters of this year, according to data from Ernst and Young and NASDAQ, that is still far from the 429 IPOs that U.S. exchanges totaled in 2000—the year the dotcom bubble burst.

And rather than lose business while waiting twice as long for companies to go public, the major stock exchanges themselves have begun dabbling in the private market. For example, Nasdaq earlier this year opened the Nasdaq Private Market, where companies that are not yet ready to go public allow vested employees to sell portions of their equity.

At the NYSE, Niederauer says he increasingly dealt with private companies on various initiatives and worked on the JOBS Act regulations to make the IPO process friendlier to entrepreneurs—an effort he wrote about for Fortune.com in 2012. But he also encountered companies that were dead set against going public, causing angst for their employees and early shareholders, as well as would-be investors. “That confluence of variables has never been in play before, and that’s why we think there’s an opportunity,” he says. “I tried to do this at the exchange and I don’t think this is really that different.”

Indeed, as firms like Battery East work to increase liquidity in private investments, it may become less important—to investors, and to employees—whether a company is public or private at all.

Summary: Duncan Niederauer was the IPO king, but his new job might delay the next big public company from emerging.


A Bentley University accounting professor’s “entire body of work” is in question, following the school’s investigation of two papers by James E. Hunton in which data were found to have been falsified.

A letter posted on Bentley’s website Monday by provost Michael J. Page said that Hunton, acting alone, had engaged in research misconduct with two papers published in accounting journals. The university launched its investigation in late 2012, after one of the journals retracted his paper. As a result of evidence found in the university’s inquiry, “Dr. Hunton’s entire body of work while at Bentley is subject to a further review in collaboration with the publishers of those articles,’’ Page said in his letter.

Hunton was a noted faculty member at the Waltham institution as the Darald and Juliet Libby Professor of Accounting, focusing on information systems, fraud, and forensics. He resigned in December 2012 as the investigation was underway, citing family and health reasons.

Hunton could not be reached for comment Monday.

According to Bentley’s investigation report, Hunton failed to cooperate with the university’s inquiry. Despite being told to retain any relevant documents, Bentley found that Hunton had cleaned out all his physical files before leaving, and that his laptop had been wiped clean.

Other electronic records reviewed by the university found that certain documents related to Hunton’s research had been altered after allegations were first made against him in the fall of 2012.

In particular, Hunton had said that confidentiality agreements with the firms used in his data-gathering prevented him from sharing original data with his coauthors and editors. The university’s investigation found that the agreements included “unusual redactions, contradictory dates, and — most damaging of all — evidence that the documents had been revised” after allegations were raised.

The problems with Hunton’s work first came to light when the American Accounting Association’s Accounting Review posted a notice of retraction in November 2012, saying, “The authors confirmed a misstatement in the article and were unable to provide supporting information requested by the editor and publisher.”

Bentley found no evidence of collusion by Hunton’s coauthors.

Page, the provost, called the findings against Hunton upsetting. “Let me conclude by again stating that academic integrity and professional ethical behavior are the bedrock of our community,’’ he wrote in his letter. “It is painful for us to discover that these important principles were violated by a colleague.”

Summary: A Bentley University accounting professor’s “entire body of work” is in question, following the school’s investigation of two papers by James Hunton in which the data was found to have been falsified.


FORTUNE — When it comes to insider trading and executives, the market has always responded with a wink and a nod. By definition, every time an executive buys or sells a stock it’s insider trading. Do CEOs have information that no one else has about their company? You betcha. Do they trade on that information? Too many of them seem to.

And this is no secret. There is a whole school of investing devoted to watching the trades of executives — it’s viewed by some investors as legitimate insider trading.

So it’s no surprise that the Wall Street Journal was able to round up a number of questionable examples of insider trading by executives. The WSJ‘s study itself, as others have pointed out, was flawed. It was set up in a way that was the data equivalent of entrapment.

But those who are harping on that are missing the point. The WSJ didn’t need to do its own study. In the past two years, the Securities and Exchange Commission has nabbed an alarming number of hedge funders for insider trading, some with the help of top executives. The SEC seems to be building a case against top hedge fund manager Steven Cohen of SAC Capital — it recently charged one of Cohen’s former traders with one of the biggest insider trading schemes in history. What’s more, there are plenty of studies out there already that show insiders routinely beat the market, something very few full-time professional investors are able to replicate.

MORE: A who’s who of Steven Cohen’s web

A decade ago, the SEC came up with a system it thought would limit or eliminate executives from profiting from insider information. The agency encouraged executives, but didn’t require them, to lock in dates well in advance for when they would buy or, more often, sell their companies’ shares. If stock sales were planned for months, and were routine, then there would be no ability to cheat. Right?

Not exactly. The plans proved to be more flexible than the SEC envisioned. But that’s not their biggest weakness. In most instances of apparent insider trading by an executive, a CEO miraculously appears to be able to dump a big chunk of their stock holdings right before the company reports bad news, like the quarter was worse than expected, saving them hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of dollars. Other shareholders, not in the know, take the hit.

But a pre-set stock plan won’t stop that. That’s because a CEO has the ability within some reason to decide when to let the market know that his business has taken a turn for the worse. Seems natural to release news that will be bad for shares on a day when you are holding less of those said shares.

MORE: Blackrock’s new bond plan

Alan Jagolinzer, a business professor at the University of Colorado Boulder who has studied these plans, says there is a lot of variation in the way the plans are set up, but there isn’t any evidence to suggest that executives are kept in the dark as to when their pre-set sales will occur. Indeed, a recent study of executive stock option plans found that companies were more likely to announce bad news in the days after a stock grant expired than before.

So given that preventing insiders from acting on private information is very, very hard, what can we do about it? First off, executives who lock in stock sales in advance shouldn’t be able to know when the actual sales will occur. Blind trusts aren’t perfect, but they are better than the alternative.

MORE: Who needs a blind trust?

Second, executives should only be allowed to sell after earnings releases, not before. The point of stock options is to align executives with shareholders. They should be forced to share the pain when their company fumbles, not be able to sidestep it by selling in advance.

There actually is one silver bullet that would end 90% of all illicit insider trading by executives: Ban stock options, or otherwise paying top executives in stock. Unfortunately, that’s probably not going to happen. Not just because of a widely held, but not really proven, belief that executives who are paid in shares are better for shareholders. The reason options and stock grants aren’t going away is because of accounting.

By current rules, paying executives is cheaper that paying executives in cash. Shareholders, too, share in the benefit of the accounting illusion. But it’s not costless. Until the market is willing to give that up, there will always be executives who are able to cash in by knowing before others that they have screwed up, leaving regular shareholders to take the hit.

Correction: An earlier version of this story said that companies don’t have to expense compensation when they pay executives in cash. That’s wrong. Companies have to amortize those payments overtime.

Summary: Forcing executives to schedule their trades well in advance won't stop them from taking advantage of bad news.


Updated DEC 30, 2014 1:52a ET

GLENDALE, Ariz. -- On Saturday, Shane Doan unveiled the shattering stick trick. On Monday, he engineered the disappearing hat trick.

Doan was originally credited for the first goal in Monday's 4-2 win over the Philadelphia Flyers at Gila River Arena that gave Arizona a three-game winning streak, matching its season-high. But a few minutes later, Antoine Vermette got official credit for tipping the puck past Philadelphia goalie Steve Mason.

That fact became important when Vermette added a second-period goal and an empty-netter to seemingly post his fourth career hat trick.

Not so fast. After the game, the NHL changed the goal back to Doan, erasing Vermette's hat trick and robbing many fans of the caps they had tossed on the ice.

"How did they think he touched it in the first place?" Doan asked with mock indignation of his first goal at home this season.

We're not sure. The puck did appear to change directions but it could all be part of an elaborate conspiracy. After all, soon-to-be majority owner Andrew Barroway was in attendance on Monday, and Vermette will be an unrestricted free agent after the season. That third goal could have helped him get more money.

"That's why I want him at two," coach Dave Tippett quipped.

When told of Tippett's comments, Vermette feigned pushing past reporters with a lemme-at-him look on his face.

"Is that what he said?" he asked of Tippett. "Where is he?"

The Coyotes needed both Vermette's and Doan's contributions -- not to mention Oliver Ekman-Larsson's ninth goal of the season -- because Philadelphia rallied with two late, third-period goals to make a 3-0 game very interesting before Vermette pushed a puck into an open net with 28 seconds left.

"We still gave up a lot of chances tonight," Tippett said. "Let's not beat around the bush here. We gave up more than we should have."

But the Coyotes held on for a win and a large chunk of credit for that belongs to goalie Devan Dubnyk once again. Dubnyk stopped 30 shots and made a handful of spectacular saves, including a post-to-post save late in the third period to snuff Vincent Lecavalier's one-timer from the right circle.

Dubnyk has stopped 91 of the 95 shots he has faced in this three-game winning streak and has stopped 223 of 241 in December for a .925 save percentage.

"Hopefully, January goes the same way," said Dubnyk, who has engineered a remarkable turnaround from last season's debacle in Edmonton.

"There's been times where I've felt good and had good runs but this one is special to me after going through last year. This one feels real good and there's a lot of motivation to keep this one going."

The win marked the first time the Coyotes had won a home game in regulation since a 3-2 win over Toronto on Nov. 4. The ingredients were simple.

Aside from Dubnyk's strong play, which is bleeding confidence into the rest of the team, the Coyotes played a hard-checking style, had good pace and managed to get a lead so they weren't chasing the game.

"It's obviously a better feeling than we've had lately and we certainly want to build on that and really focus on the process," Vermette said. "It's nice to get rewarded some times. We're taking good steps here."

Follow Craig Morgan on Twitter

Summary: Coyotes goalie Devan Dubnyk stopped 30 shots as the Coyotes posted their third straight win by beating the Flyers.


After years of struggling with bipolar disorder,

has found a treatment plan that works for him – one that doesn't include a prescription.

"I don't take any medication," he

earlier this week. "I went to therapy ... but I think the idea that there's a one size fits all [solution] is one of those myths. Everybody figures themselves out in a different way."

Now with his band, Fall Out Boy,

on the road, Wentz is surrounded by a strong support system.

"We therapize each other," he joked. "There's no shame in talking about that kind of stuff, it's not something that you should feel scared talking about."

The band's guitarist, Joe Trohman, hinted that the lack of communication between the members played a part

, but lead vocalist Patrick Stump said they have finally found their groove.

"We're all very comfortable discussing our collective health with each other," he said. "I think that's the thing we've made very cool with each other."

The interview comes days after Wentz opened up to

on Tuesday about a particularly low point in his life:

Despite believing their relationship would be a "forever thing," Wentz recalled the moment his marriage began to fall apart.

"At 31, we had all these great years as a band and then we took time off and I basically

," he said of caring for their son, Bronx Mowgli, whom

"I had the beard, the flannel shirt. I didn't know what my identity was ... when your identity is what you do, it's hard when you stop doing it."

It was then that Wentz began to grow out his beard and paid little attention to his personal appearance, causing the "vicious cycle" to snowball even further.

"It was the first time where I was like, 'Well, no one's really taking my picture. I'm just basically hanging out with my kid all day. Who cares?' " Wentz, 35, said. "I think when you stop caring about ... your personal hygiene, it makes you even more depressed, but it makes you do it more."

And between their young age – Wentz was 28 and Simpson was 23

– and having their marriage play out in the public eye, the musician said it was all just too much to overcome.

"I think there's an important thing where you know how to fight because you can fight with somebody and it's not the end of everything. But if you don't know how to have those arguments, then they become nuclear," he told Stern.

"You have people scrutinizing everything you do. 'He cut his hair, it's break-up hair.' It's like, 'What? It's a hair cut.' It's just insane."

Following their split, Wentz went into a "panic" – and even considered quitting music – as he blamed the divorce on Simpson, a belief he now knows is unfair.

"I would be an idiot to think that I didn't contribute to the unraveling [of our marriage]. Of course, at first, I'm like, 'This sucks! You bailed on me!' But you get perspective. We have a kid together. Our kid is awesome."

once again: He and Simpson have learned to co-parent in a "really good, healthy way," and he and his girlfriend, model Meagan Camper,

But despite being "a man in love," Wentz said he and Camper have no immediate plans to

"When you're really committed to somebody, you know that you're going to be with them, whether a ring changes that or not," he said. "I do still believe in marriage. My parents are married. My sister is married. I am in love."

Summary: "At 31, we had all these great years as a band and then we took time off and I basically became Mr. Mom," Wentz said


Updated JAN 29, 2015 9:10p ET

PHOENIX -- In between the burning questions about her costumes, her hair and the planned choreography of her halftime show at Super Bowl XLIX, pop mega-icon Katy Perry delivered the line of the week when asked if she had her single-girl's eye on a particular player in Sunday's game at University of Phoenix Stadium. "I'm just here so I don't get fined," Perry said, channeling the infamous line from Seahawks running back Marshawn Lynch at Super Bowl Media Day. Given the gathered crowd and the size of room designated for Perry's press conference on Thursday at the Phoenix Convention Center, you could make a strong argument that the Super Bowl is the sideshow this weekend while Perry is the headline act.

One of the world's biggest music stars has a record 64.1 million followers on Twitter, a Grammy Award, anthemic hits like "Roar" and "Firework" that she will perform on Sunday, and a reported net worth of $130 million. She also promised that "nothing in my performance will be deflated."

"Katy Perry is as big as it gets," said Patriots tight end Rob Gronkowski, who was one of many players singing her songs at media day.

Perry spent about 20 minutes discussing her upcoming performance immediately after national anthem singer Idina Menzel fielded questions. Perry was joined at one point on stage by her dog, Butters, and she reminded everyone that she spent her kindergarten and first grade years at Paradise Valley Christian School, so "I feel like this is somewhat of hometown turf," she said. "I feel very comfortable here."

Here's a sampling of her other responses.

On asking Lenny Kravitz to join her on stage: "We've worked up something incredibly soulful. Of course he brings his soul and I think he's going to make the night even sexier -- just the appropriate sexiness, everyone. Family fun."

On what viewers can expect: "I think I'm the only person in Super Bowl halftime history that will bring both a lion and sharks to the show. It's going to be wild out there."

On who she's rooting for: "I love the Seahawks because of (friend and QB) Russell (Wilson) so I think that I'm going to probably go for them."

On potential costumes (maybe channeling Katniss Everdeen): "If I have 12 1/2 minutes I'm going to take the opportunity to show off a few looks. I know there are some bets going on out there, so I won't ruin the surprise. I don't believe in gambling, but this is exciting. I've never been bet on as far as what my hair color is going to be.

"All I'll say about my opening costume is that it's going to be flaming hot."

On surprise guests: "I thought long and hard about it. I wanted to kind of bring someone back, a throwback of sorts that definitely needed some more shine. All I can say is it will be a real female fun night. When this person enters the stage and when you hear the first ring of the cord, I think jaws will drop and faces will melt."

On the show: "I'm not bringing any elements from my tour, which is such a visual feast in and of itself. I made a whole different show for this particular halftime show. We've spent many months curating such a wonderful show."

On concerns over wardrobe malfunctions (a la Janet Jackson): "I'm not self-sabotaging by nature. If there is news about my performance, I want for all of it to be about the music and female empowerment and that everybody just had a great time. "I can only control myself. I've done plenty of fittings. I'm working with my costumes on the field already. Like I said, my motivation and my objective here is for people to be talking about the music the next day. I hold a lot of pride in the music, and I wouldn't want anything to (deter) from that."

Follow Craig Morgan on Twitter

Summary: Stealing the line of week, mega pop icon and Super Bowl halftime performer Katy Perry told the assembled media on Thursday that she was 'just here so I won't be fined.'