Launching the exquisitely indulgent Jaguar XJ in the teeth of a recession is a bit like your local wine bar suddenly offering vintage burgundy at £50 a pop instead of last week's cooking Chilean Merlot at less than a tenner.

This, though, is what Jaguar did at a champagne-popping, sound system-blasting party at the Saatchi Gallery, housed in the appropriately grand setting of the former Duke of York barracks in Chelsea, tonight.

The bash was hosted by Jay Leno, the US chatshow host and a dedicated car buff.

The fastest, most powerful and, it has to be said, aggressive, of the new XJ line-up at the gallery proved to be a gleaming, burgundy Supersports model, complete with a 510hp V8 engine and capable of accelerating driver and four passengers towards the motorway horizon as fast as a Maserati.

Actually, the svelte new XJ model – designed by a small team led by Jaguar's Ian Callum – has more than something of the look of the spectacular, new-generation Maserati Quattroporte.

It also borrows, through a happily distorted glass, from Jaguar's best loved historic four-door saloon, the Mk2 of 1959-67, with the curvaceous lines giving the car something of the character of a muscular yet lithe big cat.

Those teardrop windows. That sense of what Jaguar itself used to call grace, space and pace. Whatever its inspiration, this is one imposing car. Sporty. Voluptuous. Ever so slightly baroque'n'roll.

Neatly and strongly machined, aerospace-style, from welded and riveted aluminium, 50% of it recycled, decked out in supple Italian leather and a choice of veneers, equipped with air suspension, six-speed automatic gearbox, a 1,200-watt Bowers and Wilkins 20-speaker stereo and virtual instruments, the XJ should prove to be a disturbing rival for BMW and Mercedes-Benz when it goes on sale next January.

Mike O'Driscoll, Jaguar's managing director and now an employee of the Indian engineering giant Tata, talks of "making Jaguar Jaguar again".

Callum would like Jaguar to go back into racing, and he would like to have a go at designing a racer to take on the Olympian legacy of the Le Mans-winning D-Type Jaguar of the mid-50s, designed by the company's famous aerodynamicist Malcolm Sayer.

He wants Jaguars to be as surprising and modern today as the happily shocking E-type was when this stunning car made its debut in 1961 and he was six years old.

Callum submitted his first confident design to the Midlands company when he was just 13, hoping, not altogether unrealistically, for the job he has held for the past decade under Ford and now Tata ownership.

But a 155mph sports saloon, slightly bigger, although lighter and more economical, than the outgoing model in a recession, and at a time when we are meant to be more concerned with carbon emissions than acceleration and speed?

Come on. What, I ask Callum, would he say to an audience made up exclusively of loyal Guardian readers?

With a smile, but barely a pause for thought, he replies: "I'd say that a Jaguar is an indulgence, a pleasure, a car to enjoy and to keep for up to 40 or 50 years, when it becomes a classic.

"There are never going to be that many Jaguars on the road compared to mass-market saloons. But it's a celebration of British design, engineering and manufacturing – something we can get as much pleasure from making as from driving."

Is there a more eco-friendly XJ somewhere down the assembly line at Castle Bromwich, where Jaguars are built in the daunting second world war factory that produced 10,000 Spitfires? "Yes," says Callum. "It's all a matter of how much we can afford, but we've a very special hybrid prototype of the new XJ on the way."

In any case, Jaguar's press team says, the three-litre diesel version of Callum's XJ has a low carbon emission for its class [184g/km] and will return more than 40 to the gallon.

They are clearly trying, even though a Jaguar will never be – nor particularly wants to be – a Prius or, indeed, a Tata Nano.

Ratan Tata, the chairman of Tata, takes a close interest in Jaguar.

A 71-year-old Zoroastrian philanthropist, he trained as an architect and stuctural engineer in the US.

He believes, says Callum, as we wait for the razzmatazz launch party to begin and the drapes to come off the new cars, that there is a place in the world for both the big mechanical cats from Castle Bromwich as well as eco-cars, made in India, and selling for up to 50 times less than the price of a dramatic new XJ.

Summary: Company's new car, unveiled in London, is sporty, voluptuous and ever so slightly baroque'n'roll, says Jonathan Glancey


Guitar Center is the rare retailer to be betting heavily on brick-and-mortar for its future.

At a time when overall music instrument sales have stalled and web sites like Amazon.com AMZN , eBay EBAY and Craigslist are selling more and more music gear, Guitar Center is doubling down on its physical presence, with plans to open between 15 and 20 stores a year for the foreseeable future on top of its current fleet of 262 locations. (It had 210 stores back in 2007.)

One such new store is the mega-store Guitar Center opened Thursday in New York’s Times Square.

The 28,000-square-foot location is indicative of how the privately held company has been radically re-thinking its retail approach. The flagship, about the size of an average Barnes & Noble, will have 9 recording studios, offer extensive music lessons and instrumental rental programs, and boast a snazzy Platinum Club area to showcase its most expensive guitars. And this being Times Square, with the requisite need to dazzle, the Guitar Center flagship will permanently house Eric Clapton’s favorite Fender Stratocaster, “Blackie” which the chain bought for $959,500 in 2004, an auction record that still stands.

While the Times Square store is much larger than a typical Guitar Center, more and more locations of any size in the fleet will offer the same services: currently 80 stores have training spaces, something Guitar Center wants at all stores by 2017. Some 55 locations have recording studios now, and that number will hit 85 by year-end. Meanwhile the company, which sells all manner of items like drums, recording software and sheet music, in addition to guitars and amps, is ramping up rental programs at more stores.

So the idea is for Guitar Center to make its physical stores a more appealing destination that serves more customer needs with high-margin services that Amazon, and for that matter, small independent stores, can’t offer. This will reduce its dependence on instrument sales and, it hopes, raises its profitability– the return on investment for studio space has been 20%, for example.

In addition to the store expansion — the company has already scouted 150 potential store locations — the company wants to retrofit about 207 stores so they are configured to also offer these services.

“We really want to bring these new services to the existing stores—we have great stores that do a lot of business but really do it with a tired format,” Chief Financial Officer Tim Martin said at a media event in New York.

Guitar Center is by far the dominant U.S. specialized musical instrument retailer, with 2013 sales of about $2.2 billion, or five times more than its closest rival, Sam Ash Music, and a 32% share of the market, according to data from Music Trades, an industry publication. But while Guitar Center is targeting annual sales of $3 billion by 2020, its business, like that of the overall industry, has yet to fully recover from the 2008-09 financial meltdown. And that is despite help from the disappearance of countless independent stores and the decision by mass retailers Wal-Mart Stores WMT and Target TGT to drastically scale back their instrument assortment since then.

The company’s expansion and remodeling plans are expensive and until April, it didn’t really have the money for it as it dealt with the heavy debt burden leftover from the $2.1 billion leveraged buyout by Bain Capital in 2007. That changed when private equity firm Ares Management took a 60% stake in Guitar Center in a deal that converted some its debt in the retailer into equity. Bain Capital still owns a stake in the retailer. Following the Ares deal, Guitar Center’s debt fell to $1.1 billion from $1.6 billion, and its annual interest expense fell $70 million, freeing up a lot of the cash it needed.

Guitar Center’s focus on its stores might seem out of step with prevailing conventional wisdom and current practices: growth in store counts at the 100 largest U.S. retailers by revenue has slowed to less than 3% from more than 12% three years ago, according to new data from Moody’s. And more and more people are buying instruments online—according to a National Association of Music Merchants report, at any given time, there are 1 million instruments for sale on Craigslist. What’s more, according to Music Trades, seven of the 10 fastest-growing musical instrument retailers in 2013 were internet stores.

“They are locked in a mortal combat with Amazon,” Brian Majeski, editor of Music Trade magazine, told Fortune. (Guitar Center gets about 20% of sales online thanks in part to its ownership of the Musiciansfriend e-commerce site.)

Yet, like many retailers, from Macy’s (uses its stores to fill online orders) and PetSmart (many stores offer kennel services), Guitar Center seems to have discovered that physical stores are perhaps its best means of self defense. In its current retail expansion, Guitar Center will try a new tack: new stores will generally be smaller, ranging from 7,000-11,000 square-feet as opposed to the more traditional 15,000 square feet, and most new openings will be in smaller, underserved markets. And consolidation stemming from the continued disappearance of independent stores, which typically don’t have Guitar Center’s clout with vendors to negotiate better prices, will help Guitar Center. About one-third of the company’s capital budget will go to better integrating its online business and its stores.

While the company’s fortunes seem to be turning, with four straight quarters of comparable sales growth, the fact remains overall music instrument sales are barely growing, making it unlikely they’ll return to the $8 billion or so mark they hit in 2005 anytime soon. What’s more, guitar shipments fell 0.7% last year with only higher prices saving the day for retailers. But turning a guitar store into a full-service business is the prescription Guitar Center is betting on to save the day and make an eventual IPO within five years a possibility, with the full backing of its new owners, Ares.

“They want to know how can we build the stores faster, how can we retrofit them faster. They’re pushing me for faster, not slower,” Martin said of Ares.

Summary: The music retailer is making a big bet on brick-and-mortar


August 22, 2014: In a remarkable development, two American aid workers infected with the deadly Ebola virus have recovered and been released from hospital.

In a remarkable development, two American aid workers infected with the deadly Ebola virus have recovered and been released from hospital.

Their return to health came just three weeks after they were given an experimental serum never before used on humans.

For good reason, Dr Kent Brantly feels as if he's come back from death's door after facing the reality of catching the deadly Ebola virus while treating Ebola patients in Liberia.

“I am thrilled to be alive, to be well and to be reunited with my family,” Dr Brantly said.

Just over two weeks ago, they were considered so infectious, he and another American aid worker, Nancy Writebol, were flown into the US wearing hazmat suits to contain any possible spread of the virus.

Then, in sealed and guarded hospital rooms, they were treated with ZMapp a drug that is still being tested.

Now, both are Ebola free, and they're allowed to return home.

“I feel extremely confident that the discharge of these patients poses no public health threat,” Dr Bruce Ribner from Emery Hospital said.

Doctors can't say it was the drug alone that saved them, but they believe at the very least, it helped after both were infected while working in the Ebola ward of this Liberian field hospital.

“I woke up feeling under the weather and then my life took an unexpected turn as I was diagnosed with the Ebola virus disease,” Dr Brantly said.

They took a chance using the ZMapp drug, which had never been used on humans.

While hundreds are dying from the virus in Africa, US researchers say they can't produce the drug for them, because it's not US government approved.

It's a slow process, with workers cultivating the necessary antibodies on the leaves of specially grown tobacco plants.

It takes several weeks to produce one dose.

Meanwhile, in Liberia, armed troops are blocking roads in and out of the worst affected region.

They've quarantined 50,000 people in their shanty towns.

The South African government has banned travellers from three Ebola-hit West African nations, in an attempt to stop the disease crossing their border.

Do you have any news photos or videos?

Summary: US researchers say they can’t produce the experimental drug that may have saved the lives of two aid workers infected with Ebola.


Torrents of words and phrases fall on Edward Hopper's paintings. Deadly silence, erotic despair, haunting ambiguity, irony, symbolic decoding, metaphysical, mysterious. Almost every critic, artist, writer (especially writers), art savant, book-jacket designer or media hack sees in his mature paintings solitude, alienation, loneliness and psychological tension. The general critical observation that Hopper's paintings depicted loneliness - and that this loneliness was an integral part of the American character - is a bit puzzling. Hopper himself didn't see it and once commented: "The loneliness thing is overdone." More likely than "loneliness" is the sense of self as different and apart, feelings not limited to Americans.

Just as Graham Greene created a distinctive mood of place that critics called "Greeneland", Hopper painted the feeling familiar to most humans - the triste embedded in existence, in our intimate knowledge of the solitude of the self. Although the 20th century was the heyday of Jung, Freud and psychoanalysis, if ever Hopper felt his psyche was distorted, he did not want it corrected, for art came from who the artist was in every way. He did not wish to tamper with his subconscious nor his personal vision of the world.

Today he is a toweringly important painter whose work is seen as the expression of a singular genius. But for many years his work was ignored while his fellow painters enjoyed success and fame. Hopper had, however, a sure sense of his importance and a strong conviction that his way was the right way to paint, particularly when confronted with abstract expressionism. Ironically, there were elements in Hopper's work that appealed to many abstractionists - points where reality, representation and abstraction rubbed shoulders.

He was born in 1882, into a religious-minded middle-class Baptist family in Nyack on the Hudson river. Although the religion did not rub off, he was puritanical with right-wing leanings, a life-long conservative Republican. By adolescence, he was drawing constantly, experimenting with oils and watercolours, adept with pen and ink. When he was 12, he put on a mighty growth spurt and topped 6ft, a great gangling child, awkward and uneasy in appearance; the sense of being an outsider never left him.

His parents urged him to become a commercial illustrator, and in 1899 he started at the New York School of Illustrating, a mediocre profit-shop. He stuck it out for a year. The next autumn, he switched to the New York School of Art, a serious institution attended by Guy Péne du Bois (who became Hopper's life-long friend), Rockwell Kent and others, including the young Josephine Nivison, later his wife. Hopper stayed on at the school several years beyond the regular course of instruction.

France was then the place American artists went, and in 1906, when he was 24, Hopper arrived in Paris to board in Rue de Lille at a lodging arranged by his parents through their church. By now he was 6ft 4in, very frugal and enchained by conservative Victorian mores. Gertrude Stein, Picasso, Renoir, Cézanne were in Paris at the time, but the awkward young man met none of them and did not take part in la vie bohème . After a cold, rainy winter, he enjoyed the Parisian spring; he was impressed by the impressionists and his palette colours moved toward pastel tones.

He returned to Paris twice, in 1909 and, briefly, 1910. The city stirred not just colour but sensual content in his paintings. There are indications of the mature artist in Summer Interior , painted in 1909; in her biography of Hopper, Gail Levin notes: "the loneliness of recurrent tense interiors, the sexual under-current, and the perspective of the voyeur". His interest in the complexity of light is clear.

Back in the US he had to make a living and turned to the advertising illustration he hated. In 1912, he submitted paintings for an exhibit at the MacDowell Club. He had done a strong oil in 1911, Blackwell's Island, but he did not send this to the gallery. Instead, he dragged out four of his old European paintings and a sailing scene. No one noticed his work. He was 30 years old and had never sold a painting.

He began to do magazine illustrations for System, the Magazine of Business, his frequent subject office interiors. He could hardly guess he was laying groundwork for future paintings. He also did movie posters, the beginning of his long love affair with films.

The sociable Guy Péne du Bois was a good friend to Hopper, getting him invitations to shows, worrying about him: "The hunger of him, the hunger of him!" he wrote in his diary. "I'd like to see him out of his present condition. I'd like to see him happy." But each time Du Bois wangled an exhibition invitation for Hopper, out would come the old French paintings that apparently moved no one. The public and the art world was in a nationalistic mood for "American art".

That idea of what was "American" was narrow in geographic range and period. It was old New England - frugal, austere, hard-working, taciturn, restrained, stubborn, pious, righteous, sexually repressed. Hopper travelled to the New England coast for the first time in summer 1913 and responded to the region viscerally. Although he later travelled to the west coast, through the south and into Mexico, he rarely liked these places nor was moved to paint them. His philosophy, his behaviour, his eye and his interests were all formed by and attracted to the small, rocky world of the northeast coast that the first white American settlers made home, and the streets of New York (whose skyscrapers Hopper slighted).

New England has always been enormously important in the national consciousness; its Puritan values, along with the writings of Emerson and Thoreau, have been claimed as the essence of the American character. One attribute of Puritanism art critics never mention is the interior sense of self-congratulation and superiority that is deeply embedded in the national character. Hopper's vaunted fidelity to a particular style, subjects and method may also be ascribed to the American sense of being right while the rest of the world is wrong.

It wasn't until late in 1924 that Hopper's fortunes changed. He tried to place his watercolours with the Kraushaar Art Galleries and was refused. Farther down the street, about to pass the new Rehn Gallery, he stepped in. Before Frank Rehn had a chance to look at Hopper's work, a customer seized on a painting and bought it. For the first time, Hopper was represented by a dealer and Rehn began to sell his pictures like the proverbial hot cakes. Critics lauded him, he was invited to show at major exhibits and important museums sat up like hungry dogs around a picnic.

In 1924, Hopper married Jo Nivison. They had known each other since art school days; gradually they began to court, through the medium of French poetry and billets-doux. When they married, both of them were 41 years old and Jo was a virgin. She moved into his Greenwich Village home, the top floor of a walkup with 74 stairs. He had moved there in December 1913; they stayed there for the rest of their lives. Those stairs probably kept the Hoppers physically fit.

Jo Nivison's Pepys-like diaries give us most of what we know of the taciturn Edward. Garrulous and opinionated, attached to the silent painter as a remora to a shark, she partially controlled the history and disposition of the works through the famous dime-store account books in which each painting was carefully described and accompanied by a small sketch, sale amounts set down in her black backhand. Hopper himself also kept careful records of each painting: the double ledgers seem to attest to the curious and ongoing power struggle between the couple. Jo was a painter whose work had a nascent reputation but Hopper despised and demeaned it.

The couple, married for 43 years, exhibited a weird combination of tenderness, fury, rivalry, disdain, cuffing and biting, competition, resentment, rejection, dependency and the strength of similar interests, including mutual passions for art and the theatre. Their periods of collaboration occurred as Jo posed for almost all the female subjects in Hopper's paintings, even Girlie Show when she was nearly 60.

Success and fame came in the years after their marriage. Hopper began to catch the attention of critics, one of whom was Lloyd Goodrich. Goodrich praised House by the Railroad, one of two Hopper oils in the New Society of Artists Seventh Exhibition in January 1926 as "the most striking picture in the exhibition ... one of the most poignant and desolating pieces of realism that we have ever seen". The label of "realism" attached to Hopper with that review, although the artist claimed, even in later life, that he was still an impressionist.

Through much of the 20th century, Hopper was called a realist painter at a time when realism was denigrated by the critics. Realism was for the masses, for the boob who declared: "I don't know much about art but I know what I like." What the boob liked was Norman Rockwell's Saturday Evening Post covers - meticulously detailed paintings applying technical virtuosity to patriotic, nostalgic, down-home situations. Both Rockwell and Hopper were "realists", but there was an enormous gap between their different realities, shown by a preserved bit of dialogue.

According to Jo's description of Cape Cod Morning (1950) in the record book, Hopper had been painting fields in September with a "blondish housewife (appraising early A.M. weather) in pink cotton dress". She noted that the "painting went off speedily..." She claimed: "It's a woman looking out to see if the weather's good enough to hang out her wash," prompting Hopper to rejoin: "Did I say that? You're making it Norman Rockwell. From my point of view, she's just looking out the window, just looking out the window."

And in that lies the great difference. Rockwell's paintings were "about" something; Hopper's were studies in mass and light expressed through the idiom of American landscape, architecture and figures. Where Rockwell painted fine detail punctiliously, Hopper's eye erased detail, a kind of painterly reductio. He left it to the viewer to construct a meaning or story, but so situational are the paintings that it is almost impossible to avoid interpreta tion and narrative explanation. These are powerful psychological paintings. Anyone who looks at a Hopper becomes involved.

By the 1930s, during a period of social consciousness and nationalism, Hopper's work began to pull serious attention; by the 1940s, he was recognised as a major American artist. Even in the 1950s, when abstract expressionism was in vogue and realism on the defensive, Hopper's professional reputation continued to grow and strengthen. Time magazine featured him on its cover in 1956, and in a survey of American art declared: "In the years since World War II, Americans have awakened, as never before, to the world's art heritage, and have discovered the startling truth that a sizable and important part of that heritage exists in their own backyard ... it has reflected not European painting but American life - rough and smooth, tumultuous and diverse. And though it is a great river of many sources and many passing moods, its strongest single current throughout is a searching realism. One measure of Edward Hopper's importance: he is today the revered champion of that tradition."

Hopper's work habits were prodigious; an immense amount of picture scouting, research, preparation, sketching and thinking lay behind each work. There are 53 surviving sketches for New York Movie , to many Hopper's finest painting. His output of oils - from the earliest 1895 Rowboat in Rocky Cove to his last painting, Two Comedians - numbered 366, roughly five paintings a year, in marked contrast to Picasso's huge output. The detailed preparatory work, the increasing difficulty of finding suitable subjects, and his long periods of depression when he did not paint at all kept the count down. He suffered from thyroid and pituitary conditions, perhaps the cause of his phlegmatic personality, his fatigues and depressions. In 1940, he painted Gas, the twilight gas station with the diagonal road and dark mass of locust trees. But of it, Jo wrote: "Pictures come so hard this year ... Ed is struggling."

The years ground on, the Hoppers holding to their routine of hauling coal up the 74 steps, summers on the Cape, scouting for picture subjects, painting, openings and art functions. Old and older the Hoppers grew; in the 1960s, they faced the danger in New York of street crime and eviction from the apartment by the landlord, New York University. Everything was harder for them. In the art world, furious arguments broke out between realists and abstract expressionists in the papers and magazines. Hopper kept painting, but worked on very few canvases. When asked what he was after in one of his last pictures, the 1963 Sun in an Empty Room, he snapped: "I'm after ME." In this great painting, he rubbed the abstractionists' noses in his abstract realism.

An early Hopper from his student years, 1902-1904, Solitary Figure in a Theater, shows an amorphous lone person seated in the dark waiting for a performance to begin. Hopper's last painting, Two Comedians, finished in the autumn of 1965, shows a man and a woman harlequin on stage taking final bows - Edward and Jo Hopper at the end of their lives. Hopper's adult life was bracketed between these two paintings. He died in his chair in the old walkup studio in May 1967.

Jo, almost blind, survived another nine months, trying to cope with taxes, bills, ill health and loneliness. At the end, says Levin in her biography, one of Hopper's important paintings "turned up inexplicably in the hands of someone who in this period took the trouble to face the 74 steps".

Edward Hopper is at Tate Modern, London SE1, May 17 to September 5. Details: 020-7887 8888.

Summary: At 40, Edward Hopper was a failure who couldn't sell a painting. How did that change? Annie Proulx on the making of a great American artist


Health workers spray bleach solution on a woman suspected of having contracted the Ebola virus

As the Ebola virus continues to spread through West Africa, the possibility that the disease could reach the U.S. is growing.

, testified before Congress on Tuesday, stressing the importance of stopping the outbreak in its tracks.

"We can't afford to wait months, or even weeks, to take action, to put people on the ground," he said.

Also on Tuesday, President Obama declared a "major increase" in America's response to the deadly outbreak in West Africa,

"Men and women and children are just sitting, waiting to die right now," Obama said.

He added: "This is a daunting task, but here's what gives us hope. The world knows how to fight this disease. It's not a mystery.

"We know the science. We know how to prevent it from spreading. We know how to care for those who contract it. We know that if we take the proper steps, we can save lives. But we have to act fast."

To date, the virus has killed at least 2,400 people, and cases are growing exponentially, with 5,000 people infected, according to the

While the disease has not yet spread outside Africa, officials say it's

with an outbreak of this caliber.

President Barack Obama speaks at the CDC

Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP

PEOPLE spoke to experts at the Center for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health to get their perspective on the threat of Ebola to Americans.

Researchers say the chance of seeing an imported case in the U.S. is as high as 18 percent by the end of September (it was less than 5 percent at the start of the month). Restricting air travel "generates only a three- to four-week delay in the international spreading," according to a study published this month in

Not very. Even if an imported case does make it to the U.S., it's unlikely it will spread through the general population. Basically, the only way for an average American to contract the disease is to visit one of the afflicted countries in Africa.

"It's healthcare providers caring for Ebola patients and the family and friends in close contact with Ebola patients that are at the highest risk of getting sick," says Kristen Nordlund, health communications specialist at the CDC. "They may come in contact with the blood or body fluids of sick patients, which is how the disease is spread."

"The chances of an average American who hasn't visited Africa getting Ebola are so vanishingly small, it's almost non-quantitative," adds Anthony Fauci, director of the NIH's Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

He illustrates a worst-case scenario: "A person could walk into an ER and not tell them he just got off a plane from West Africa, which would alert people to quarantine him. Let's say they didn't and a nurse and a doctor got infected. That small cluster would be contained almost immediately."

The CDC currently recommends that travelers avoid going to Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone unless such travel is absolutely essential. There is also an alert in place for Nigeria urging travelers to "take enhanced precautions," says Nordlund.

And what are "enhanced precautions"? The

avoiding wild animals or raw or undercooked meat; avoiding the body fluids of people who have contracted the illness; and avoiding any burial rites that involve handling the body of someone who died from Ebola.

In addition to following the precautions mentioned above, you should make sure to practice good hygiene by washing your hands with soap and water and using an alcohol-based hand sanitizer.

Adds Nordlund: "Seek medical care immediately if you develop fever, headache, muscle pain, diarrhea, vomiting, stomach pain or unexplained bruising or bleeding. Limit your contact with other people when you go to the doctor. Do not travel anywhere else."

There is a small human trial for a vaccine being carried out at the NIH in Bethesda, Maryland, right now. Ten volunteers have been given a dose of an experimental vaccine and "thus far there have been no red flags,"

This is merely Phase I of the trial, which tests to see that the vaccine is safe and that it works in humans. The first phase should be completed by November or December, at which point the vaccine will go into wider human trials.

While the vaccine looked promising in animals, Fauci cautions that doesn't mean it will be a viable treatment in humans. "We have many, many vaccines that look good in an animal model, and then when they get to a human, they just don't work," he says. "At this stage of development, it's impossible to say how promising it's going to be. Right now it looks like it's safe. That doesn't mean it's going to work."

Summary: Two experts assess the threat and what to expect from an experimental vaccine


Once again, David Muir. Reporter: 12-year-old Payton leutner now out of surgery and in her hospital bed, still unable to talk, writing messages to her parents instead, asking did they get them. And...

Once again, David Muir. Reporter: 12-year-old Payton leutner now out of surgery and in her hospital bed, still unable to talk, writing messages to her parents instead, asking did they get them. And across town at the waukesha police department, they had. The two other friends at that sleepover now answering questions of their own. Ellen gabler is a reporter at "The Milwaukee journal sentinel." She has followed this case closely. The thing that was the most surprising and shocking to me was how planned out this whole thing was. Reporter: The portrait they paint even before those woods is chilling. A plot they tell police that was in the works for months. You can't believe this is actually 12-year-olds, especially 12-year-old girls. Reporter: They tell police they committed this crime in part out of their devotion to a character they discovered on the internet. Slender man. A tall, faceless, mysterious figure. A fictional character who lurks in the background, sometimes peering over the shoulders of children. The story of slender man changing, evolving all the time with help from fans all over the world adding to the story online giving this fictional character new life every day. You have said that slender man is the bogeyman of this digital generation. He is. The thing that we fear that we don't actually encounter. Right? So we check our -- we check under our beds for the slender man but he's, you know, not actually there. Reporter: Not there, because he doesn't exist. But listen to what these two girls begin to tell police. Anissa wieir revealing to investigators it was Morgan's idea to kill Payton to prove themselves "Worthy" to slender man. Anissa telling police her friend suggested, "We should be proxies of slender." Anissa says she was surprised by Morgan's plan but excited to prove that this fictional internet character actually existed. To prove the skeptics wrong. The girls were very clear with police that they were trying to kill the victim. They wanted to do it as a sacrifice to slender man. One of them said that slender man had been watching her. Reporter: And in excruciating detail, they describe multiple plots, all beginning with that Friday night sleepover. Morgan's father picking up Payton who was over the moon about this slumber party. They go to skateland to go rollerskating, and there was already a plan for later. They went to skateland that night. And they went skating. And they had originally planned to kill their friend that night in Morgan's house. Reporter: Payton's own parents now aware of what those girls have told police. They were planning on slitting her throat and putting a blanket over her head and making it look like she was sleeping, in the morning. And then -- and then leaving. Leaving her there. Reporter: But for some reason, at that moment, the girls changed their minds. She wouldn't be here right now. If it -- they had waited until 2:00 in the morning and done this overnight, she wouldn't have been found for hours. Reporter: So the next morning comes and they change the plan? Mm-hmm. Reporter: The plan now is to go to the park into a park bathroom? Yep. They brought her here to the park on Saturday morning to kill her in this bathroom. 0their big concern was finding a drain for the blood to go down, not the fact that they were going to stab and kill somebody. Reporter: As they leave Morgan's house for the park, Anissa tells police Morgan lifts up her white jacket, the knife tucked in her waistband and Anissa tells police, "I thought dear god, this was really happening." But once inside that park bathroom, something happens between the girls now hatching their second plot. There was a back and forth between Morgan and Anissa about who was going to stab the girl. Both of them chickened out, essentially, and said that -- they told police they couldn't do it. So for the second time, the plan to kill her didn't work out. Reporter: But there would be one more plan. The girls leave that bathroom and walk down a nearby road to S.E wood and Payton's parents take me there, revealing to me what their little girl told them. They got to the park and they told her they wanted to play hide-and-seek in the woods. She told me she didn't wanna go. Reporter: She sensed it. Yeah. She did say she was forced to go. Reporter: To play hide-and-seek. To come -- she was forced to go into the woods. Reporter: In fact, the girls tell police about that game of hide and seek. And Morgan was the first seeker. And so Anissa and the victim were hiding. Anissa told her to lay down in the dirt. And she didn't want to. Reporter: Anissa tells police she sits on Payton. And that Payton says to her, "I can't breathe." Anissa tells investigators she was thinking, "If I sat on her, Morgan could then stab her." But she tells police they both fear Payton's screaming will draw attention. Anissa gets up. In that moment, they were passing the knife back and forth. Because they were having second thoughts, even in that moment. Reporter: That point, one girls says to the other, just go crazy? Yeah, yeah. Yep. Reporter: A short time later, Anissa tells police Morgan takes the knife, turns to her friend and says, "I'm not going to until you tell me to." Anissa says she then told Morgan to "Go ballistic, go crazy." Payton is stabbed 19 times. Stumbling, trying to get up. Anissa told police that, after they had stabbed her, she yelled, "I hate you. I trusted you." The suspects were getting worried that somebody would hear her. And so they told her to lay down. And they said that she wouldn't lose blood as quickly. Reporter: The two girls tell police they signal to Payton they would get help. But they had no plan to. They would leave her right there. And has Payton talked at all about the horror of that moment? We asked her what she remembered about what happened. And she said she remembered everything. Reporter: Everything. Her friends at that sleepover, asked by police, how they felt about what they did. Anissa seemed most torn. She said, according to police, "The bad part of me wanted her to die. The good part of me wanted her to live." When you hear that? When I hear that, I hear a girl who was struggling with the decision that they were making. She sensed that it was the wrong decision to be making. Reporter: Police say Morgan said, it was weird that I didn't feel remorse. Yeah. Reporter: This was a girl who had been in your home many, many times. That line, it was weird that I didn't feel remorse. That was hard to read, because I thought that she really cared about Payton as a person and they were good friends. Reporter: In court, we heard Morgan described as a child with problems. But did you see any of that? Not really, no. Reporter: This wasn't a disturbed child you bring in your home? No, no. Reporter: They knew Morgan. They liked her. They knew her parents. So when we come back, what was it? What set those girls off? Could a fictional character really convince two 12-year-olds to kill? How do you even wrap your heads around that? I can't. Reporter: And the debate should those girls be tried as adults. What we've learned tonight.

This transcript has been automatically generated and may not be 100% accurate.

Summary: Anissa Weier says that it was Morgan Geyser's plan to prove themselves worthy to the fictional character.


Last week, Apple APPL and Facebook FB created a media firestorm after announcing that their lush benefit packages will now include egg freezing coverage. But lost in the theoretical discussions about the merits of this perk are more realistic considerations.

The cavalier marketing of whizzy egg freezing is clearly working if two of the largest tech companies are signing up to pay for it. Yet knowing what I know now about reproductive medicine, I would advise any woman considering this risky surgical procedure to consider that egg freezing–using startup lingo–is the very high-risk “A round.” It is a long, long way from a successful exit.

Egg freezing is far from settled science. In the UK, which is one of the few countries to track and account for fertility treatment outcomes, only 20 babies have been born from frozen eggs, according to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA). And no one knows for sure how egg freezing chemicals are absorbed by eggs, or how they affect cell development.

For a 38-year-old woman, the chance of one frozen egg leading to a live birth is only 2% to 12%, according to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM). This is a key finding given that the average age of non-medical egg freezing customers in the U.S. is 37.4.

Amid the latest tech perk bragging rights, sobering facts about the procedure’s limitations and the associated risks have been overlooked and underreported.

First, most people don’t realize the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the ASRM do not endorse the use of egg freezing to defer childbearing. The ASRM’s decision to lift the “experimental” label from this still young procedure in 2012 only applied to medically indicated need, such as women with cancer.

Second, there are no guarantees for a successful or healthy pregnancy and delivery. In order to attempt pregnancy, egg freezing must be followed by in vitro fertilization (IVF) with another laboratory procedure, a technique known as ICSI (Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection). For the latest flash freezing process trumpeted by enterprising fertility clinics and a host of profit-driven service providers, the most comprehensive data available reveals a 77% failure rate of frozen eggs resulting in a live birth in women aged 30, and a 91% failure rate in women aged 40.

But the dry statistics don’t take into account the very real emotional strain and trauma that often accompanies artificial reproduction and their frequent failures. Silicon Valley celebrates success. Even business failure can be accepted as an opportunity to learn. But failure takes on a much deeper personal meaning when it involves parenthood expectations.

I have seen the good, the bad and the ugly where fertility medicine is concerned. The first time I visited a fertility clinic I was 33 and in great health. I met with an ASRM affiliated doctor who received his training at Stanford University. My attempts were paid out of pocket (none of my employers offered infertility benefits). I pursued increasingly complex procedures including egg retrievals and ICSI IVF with both fresh and frozen embryo transfers.

This venture spanned seven years with three Bay Area fertility clinics. Every effort, before I turned age 40, resulted in failure. The dazzling promise of motherhood sold by for-profit clinics led to miscarriages and devastating, prolonged despair, which took me another decade to fully reconcile. My experience, unfortunately, is far from unique. Around the world, an estimated 1.5 million each year attempt IVF and 1.2 million fail.

Rather than debate the merits of employee perks, energy would be better directed at holding to account those doctors, clinics and service providers engaging in increasingly irresponsible or unethical behavior–often at the expense of uninformed or naïve customers.

In the pursuit of new perks employers would do well to apply more scrutiny to reproductive technology vendors who, in the name of scientific invention and potential new business markets, push to sell treatments while losing sight of the most basic code of medical conduct: do no harm.

Unfortunately many ambitious young women on Silicon Valley campuses and in workplaces around the world are going to learn a hard life lesson; when it comes to fertility options, the odds are rarely stacked in their favor.

Pamela Mahoney Tsigdinos works in the venture capital and tech sectors. She is also the author of the award-winning book, Silent Sorority. Her work has been featured in The New York Times and Huffington Post. Her op-ed, “Selling the Fantasy of Fertility,” was nominated for a 2014 Exceptional Merit in Media Awards (EMMA) by the National Women’s Political Caucus.

Summary: Ambitious young women on Silicon Valley campuses are going to learn a hard life lesson.


Another fall in German business confidence poured cold water on Europe’s financial markets Monday, dousing hopes for a relief rally after the continent’s biggest banks emerged unscathed from the European Central Bank’s stress test.

The closely-watched Ifo business climate index fell to 103.2 in October from 104.7 in the previous month, its lowest level since the start of 2013. Both the assessment of current conditions and of expectations for the future were markedly lower, as the Eurozone’s largest economy continued to struggle with issues ranging from a sharp drop in exports to Russia to the Eurozone’s stagnation and increasing pressure on Germany to do more to revive it.

Ifo said the climate in manufacturing “deteriorated significantly”, and said its manufacturing index is now only marginally above its long-term average. However, the service and construction sectors, which are less sensitive to the export outlook, both held up comparatively well.

The news was enough to turn Europe’s stock markets around after a bright start helped by the news that none of the region’s most important banks failed the ECB’s stress test, and by a victory in Ukraine’s parliamentary elections for moderate, pro-European parties.

Markets had reacted enthusiastically to the ECB’s assessment that only 13 (relatively small) banks still don’t have enough capital to withstand a sharp downturn in the Eurozone economy. Shares in some of the banks that people expected to fare worse, such as Germany’s Commerzbank AG or Spain’s Bankia SA, rose sharply in reaction to the news, before the whole market was hit by the news from Ifo.

The ECB’s stress test was the latest in string of efforts by European authorities to restore confidence in a banking sector which often hasn’t looked fit for purpose since the crisis.

JP Morgan analyst Kian Abouhussein in London said the exercise was “credible, detailed and implies limited capital raising” for the most significant banks. That’s a sharp contrast to the reception given to earlier efforts, which were hobbled by political reluctance to admit to the scale of the problems in the sector, and which were discredited by some high-profile failures among the banks that passed.

But if the stress test gave a largely clean bill of health to individual banks, the scale of the task for the sector as a whole was underlined again Monday when the ECB released its latest figures showing that lending to the private sector fell 1.2% in the year to September. Although that’s an improvement from a contraction of over 2% as recently as May, loans to businesses have been falling without interruption for over two years, partly because of the inability of weak banks to lend, and partly because of a shortage of credit-worthy borrowers.

Summary: A gloomy reality check from the Eurozone's largest economy shows there'll be no quick turnaround, despite the ECB's blessing on most of the region's largest banks.


Updated NOV 09, 2014 10:02a ET

GLENDALE, Ariz. -- On face value, the Coyotes' 1-0 loss to the New York Islanders on Saturday at Gila River Arena was a disappointing setback at the end of a successful week. But this loss was a product of fatigue, not poor play.

A hard-fought shootout win in Anaheim on Friday took its toll on Arizona.

"That's an awful tough turnaround," said Coyotes coach Dave Tippett, who is the last person in this organization whom you'll hear offer excuses. "That team (New York) is sitting here waiting for you and we played a real hard game last night in Anaheim, got back at 2:30 in the morning.

"You can tell. There's times when your forecheck isn't quite as crisp and your power play wasn't quite as crisp but you try to find a way to work through that and still win and we were in position to do that. Unfortunately, we didn't."

The loss ended a modest three-game winning streak for the Coyotes, but what remained were encouraging signs.

Goalie Mike Smith turned aside 31 shots and had no chance on Frans Nielsen's bullet from the high slot with 2:31 left in regulation. Since allowing 16 goals on 90 shots (.822 save percentage) in his first three starts of the season, Smith has allowed 19 goals on 248 shots (.923 save percentage) over his last eight games.

"He's been great the last few games. He's been the best player on the ice," Coyotes captain Shane Doan said. "When you have the better goalie every night you usually win. Tonight we did, and we didn't find a way to take advantage of that."

All the same, the structure with which the Coyotes played in their own end for a second straight night was a positive. New York threw 32 shots at Smith, but the Coyotes did a good job of limiting rebounds and, for the most part, the Islanders shots did not come from the highest percentage areas.

In effect, this was the model of what the Coyotes want to be each night: a structured team with good goaltending that relies on greasy goals or power play goals to scratch out points.

The power play was the one problem. Arizona had five chances but couldn't cash in. Part of that was fatigue. Part of that was the Islanders' ability to get in passing and shooting lanes. New York blocked 16 shots and 13 different Islanders were credited with blocks.

Part of it was simple execution. Arizona began the season as one of the league's top two or three power plays, but the Coyotes are 0 for 12 in the last three games. On a team playing with such a slim margin of error, that stat matters, whether it's a short-term problem or not.

"The same thing happened 5-on-5 where we didn't score for a little bit and then we started to get some," Doan said. "We've got to find a way to get the power play going again because specialty teams are huge, especially in the West when it's so tight.

"I mean a lot of things were close; we are close in a lot of areas but the pucks don't bounce in the right direction and we have to find a way to generate one, and generate one to go in. You can play great defensively, but if you don't score it doesn't really help, so we need to find that balance and find a way to generate offense."

Follow Craig Morgan on Twitter

Summary: A tough shootout win in Anaheim the previous night took its toll on the Coyotes in a 1-0 loss to the New York Islanders.


Transcript for Bike Stolen from Home Appears at California Flea Market

Just minutes from the home of the Oakland Raiders a public flea market some items are used and police say others are hot. We're going to have a flea market. We go in with hidden cameras roll. Hunting for our blight within minutes we fight for sale and buy it from this man for 200 books we just found the plight. The marine bike that we were looking for now it's time for meetings get some answers appreciate utility would. The working of the Boeing. The Phillies name is Ricardo stand Dina and we are told he's a regular here. Obviously doesn't look like the guy who stole our flight got great shoes gloves still he wanted to know how he got his hands on people like yesterday. Because we've been tracking and neglect was taken from them. Yeah there can be taken while overall good divide Blackwell approval for the former cook you know. Today we know the flight was in that storage facility remember he tracked it there the night before. That actually Neverwinter that hosts the review as important. It was in this more visibility and it was. As usual rubber boots you're popular people weren. But we won't more than our flight back we want to pay back literally. Blew his death. I think good enough people you'll work with. Well. He kept saying. The bike was. Well plots had us then Jose flea market but heck that's way out there. That's about what happened here this flight was never in San Jose we know that 4175. Doesn't like me. When we went to bed last night we did not expect this.

This transcript has been automatically generated and may not be 100% accurate.

Summary: Using tracking equipment, ABC News' Gio Benitez tracked down a stolen bike to a flea market where it was for sale.


It’s snowing, so it must be time to be mad at Uber. (note, other common weather conditions for being mad at Uber include sunny, cloudy and night).

The on-demand ride service announced earlier today that it would cap “surge pricing” during today’s blizzard in New York City, in accordance with an agreement last year with New York’s attorney general. That deal came after Uber was accused of price gouging during Hurricane Sandy. Moreover, it will donate its share of any ride proceeds to the American Red Cross.

In a normal world, Uber would be hailed here for learning from past mistakes and evolving into a good corporate citizen. But because more than a few people mistake the company’s CEO for Monty Burns, some either are damning Uber with faint praise:

thanks be to the benevolent Uber, for capping surge pricing during a storm, sure glad it's based on their whims and not regulation.

— Henry Baker (@HenryBaker) January 26, 2015

Or are suggesting that its blizzard strategy is actually part of a Machiavellian long-game:

Anyone else concerned @Uber will purposely limit supply during capped-surge so they can validate egregious #surgepricing all other times?

— Corigin Ventures (@CoriginVentures) January 26, 2015

But don’t think that this is the end of the complaints. I’d bet almost anything that we’ll later see tweets about how difficult it is to get an Uber, given that the 2.8x surge cap might not be enough incentive for drivers to brave blizzard conditions (particularly given that they pay their own auto insurance premiums). Or perhaps that there is an Uber stuck in the road, blocking a plow.

Here’s the most important thing to really remember about Uber , when it comes to this blizzard: If you have a problem with Uber, the problem is really with you.

YOU don’t need to go out for 24 hours, unless it is a health emergency. And, if it is a health emergency, YOU need an ambulance, not an Uber.

If, for some reason, YOU failed to prepare adequately for a highly-publicized storm and Uber is your only way to get some much-needed supply (from closed stores?), then don’t complain about price or availability. YOU brought it upon YOUrself.

Learn more about the upcoming storm from Fortune’s video team:

Summary: Uber is doing the best it can to prepare for the blizzard. Are you?


Globalization is complex, but it doesn’t have to be complicated.

By Mark Woodward, president and CEO, E2open

“It has been said that arguing against globalization is like arguing against the laws of gravity.” – Kofi Annan

In today’s world, we can resist globalization about as readily as we can resist the downward pull of gravity. We may try—with our Icarian wings and desperate toning and tightening at the gym—but the Newtonian law remains: what goes up, will assuredly come back down.

And so it has become with globalization, an inevitable force of nature, “flattening” our world and forcing us to think and act internationally.

Nowadays, global outsourcing and distributed manufacturing environments are pervasive. What this means for the supply chain is that it involves more players in more parts of the world, each with different languages, processes, and protocols. To make matters more complicated, consumer demand is anything but constant—fluctuating according to perplexing “natural laws” of its own.

The supply chain—like the global economy—has undergone drastic change in the past decade, setting new requirements for effective management of global demand-supply network processes. For many, it is a logistics nightmare, and solving these challenges is defeating some of the largest corporations in the world.

But change—and even economic recession—doesn’t necessarily mean corporate disaster. Some industry leaders have responded intelligently, adapting their systems and processes to accommodate an increasingly outsourced, complex value network. They’ve recognized that the supply chains of the twentieth century are no longer, and that their technologies had better reflect that change.

Future Proofing the Supply Chain

Just as gravity is responsible for keeping our galaxy’s planets in orbit, visibility, collaboration, and control are now the crucial elements in effectively balancing demand with supply. And some companies are getting it. One multi-billion dollar corporation in the high tech sector has been riding the wave of new demand-supply network technology with marked success.

As the discombobulated offspring of two industry giants, this company was not only determined to keep its head above water in the current climate, it was also committed to investing its resources in the future health of its supply chain. What was once a disjointed, manually-based supply chain is today a shining example of demand-supply network efficiency and intelligence.

So how’d they get there? Gradually. But with enough executive foresight and dedication to make a long-term supply chain strategy actually work. And by “work” I mean a supply chain that is wholly adapted to today’s global, networked, automated world.

Four easy steps to get your supply chain functioning as effectively as our exemplar’s? Not quite, but I’ve whittled my list of the company’s key demand-supply network achievements down to a digestible bunch. And it’s certainly a good place to start.

What’s required of your company is the same thing that was required of our case study—a shift in focus. On-premise is out; on-demand is in. Supply that dictates demand? I don’t think so. Let’s face it, demand may be fickle—even stingy—but it will always be boss. The natural laws of the universe are at it again…But darn! If only what went down would so assuredly come back up.

Woodard is president and CEO of E2open, a Foster City, Calif.-based company that offers software-as-a-service solutions to help corporate clients manage their global demand-supply networks.

Summary: Globalization is complex, but it doesn't have to be complicated. By Mark Woodward, president and CEO, E2open “It has been said that arguing against globalization is like arguing against the laws of gravity.” – Kofi Annan In today’s world, we can resist globalization about as readily as we can resist the downward pull of gravity.…


03/10/2015 AT 02:55 PM EDT

We continue to live in a word of GIFs. We use them to talk and to mock and to react when words fail us. It may not surprise you to learn, then, that there is an awards show that celebrates GIFs specifically: the GIFYs.

After accepting votes from the public for 2014's best GIFs in categories such as "animals," "cats" (in a class by themselves), "weird" and "art + design," winners were announced March 5.

The No. 1 gif, according to voters, featured President Barack Obama skateboarding. It debuted on an episode of

For comparison's sake, 2013's GIF of the Year featured Oprah Winfrey unleashing a swarm of angry bees upon her studio audience.

And because your day may be lacking in amusing GIFs, here also are the GIFs of the year in the categories of animal, cat, weird and art + design.

See the rest of the winners on

Nominees were submitted by the general public and also hand-picked by a panel of expert GIF-ologists. The awards show itself is presented by the Los Angeles branch of ad agency

Summary: The second annual GIFYs named the top GIFs of the year; last year's celebrated Oprah's "BEES"


As March Madness starts next week, all eyes will be on the players and coaches who routinely face high-pressured competition. Deadlines will loom; the stakes will be high and not everyone will come away as a winner — similar to the way it works in the business world.

Today’s executives and managers can learn a lot from the games, so here are three leadership lessons from March Madness:

Competition is a good thing:

Anyone who has watched the television series The Road to March Madness can see the intensity and competition that exists during inter-squad practice. Players from the same team are frequently battling one another for shots, prime positions and minutes on the floor. They are pushing one another along the way, and the most successful coaches are able to harness that competition and win a national championship.

The lesson here is don’t be afraid of competition. It can raise the level and intensity of your team and will be what inevitably gels them together. Through competition, individuals and teams push themselves to achieve what seem like insurmountable goals.

Never underestimate the underdog: One of the things that attracts many of us to March Madness is that inevitably, year-after-year, an underdog will come out of nowhere and slay Goliath. Whether it’s a prestigious Ivy League school or a little-known, small Midwestern school — everyone who fills out a bracket is looking forward to watching this year’s Cinderella story play out.

For business owners, there is a lot to be learned from those underdog stories of success. Each of our organizations are filled with stories of entry-level employees who came onboard and found their own unique way to claw, scratch and fight all the way to the top. When hiring, consider looking past the Goliath candidate who boasts an impressive pedigree, fancy degree and ample experience in favor of one who embodies passion, grit, and the determination of a champion.

Trust your team: There’s no way to get around it — every team that makes the tourney this year will be filled with talent and future NBA stars. What’s the difference between all of those teams versus those that will make up the Final Four? When John Calipari, head coach of the University of Kentucky’s men’s basketball team, spoke at our leadership conference last year, he made it very clear. His role is getting the right players together and encouraging them to work toward a common goal.

But at a certain point in the season, the players must take over the team, fighting for themselves and one another. It is no different within successful organizations. At a certain point, micromanaging won’t get the job done, but stepping back and letting your team lead themselves will result in huge wins.

Asher Raphael is the Co-Chief Executive Officer of Power Home Remodeling Group, A Pennsylvania-based home remodeling company.

Summary: On the court or in the office, a stellar manager doesn't under estimate the underdog and trusts his team.


Earlier today via simultaneous events in New York City, London, and Munich, DJI—maker of the ubiquitous white quadrotor aircraft that have become synonymous with the word “drone”—released the latest in the company’s Phantom drone series. Hong Kong-based DJI already claims to own roughly half of the recreational drone market. (Analysts largely haven’t challenged claims it sells 30,000 aircraft each month.) With the release of the relatively low-cost, high-performance Phantom 3, it’s fair to say DJI is about to sell a lot more of them.

Outwardly, the new Phantom 3 comes off as an incremental improvement on its predecessors, sporting the same signature white plastic body, a camera fitted to its underbelly. But in the Phantom 3 DJI has made some critical adjustments—in terms of both hardware and software—that make for a much more versatile piece of equipment without dialing up the price or dialing down performance.

Put another way, the Phantom 3 is designed as a highly-capable aerial photography drone that should maintain its place in the recreational market that’s also robust enough to cross over into commercial applications. And it’s coming to market at a time when commercial drone use is rising sharply, even in the U.S. where commercial drone regulations have lagged behind the rest of the world.

For the most part, this has less to do with the drone itself and everything to do with the camera and software augmenting it.

“This camera system is the most technologically advanced you will find on any consumer quadcopter,” DJI Director of Aerial Imaging Eric Cheng said at the NYC unveiling. And he’s not wrong. The higher-end version of the Phantom 3 comes with a camera capable of shooting video in 4K at 30 frames per second, while the lower end still shoots in very respectable 1080p HD. Still images on both versions come as large as 12 megapixels. The camera also incorporates a rectilineal lens, eliminating the wide-angle, fish-eye effect produced by many integrated drone cameras, including those built into DJI’s previous models.

If these sound like specs only a videographer could love, keep in mind resolution equals data, and data is where commercial applications live. Jono Millin, co-founder and chief of product at San Francisco-based drone analytics startup Drone Deploy, describes the adjustments made to the Phantom 3’s camera as a major leap forward for a consumer-facing drone, making it “the gateway drone for everyone.” Meanwhile, putting a high-resolution rectilineal lens on the Phantom 3 pushes it into territory beyond recreational photography, making it capable of aerial mapping or other applications like agricultural monitoring or construction site inspection.

Key to this, Millin says, is a software overhaul that allows imagery and video to stream directly from the drone to the Web so data processing can take place in real time. (Most consumer drone models, including previous iterations of the Phantom, require the drone to land before data can offload for processing.) That seamless data download is an attractive quality in a commercial drone, allowing drone analytics companies like Drone Deploy to do a whole lot more with the image data drones are uniquely capable of connecting. It also opens up new frontiers in journalism and other media, wherein imagery and video can stream to the Web in real time. (Imagine Twitter’s Periscope via drone, live-streaming aerial video directly to viewers.)

Topped off with a new SDK that allows operators to build their own application-specific software for the Phantom 3, and one can picture something that goes beyond the recreational drones that DJIs Phantoms have always been. The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration on Friday approved 30 more exemptions allowing companies to fly drones commercially, bringing the total number of exemptions up to 90 with more than 700 still pending. DJI wants a piece of that growing commercial business, and in the Phantom 3 they have an affordable platform (starting at $999) that can maintain its lead in the recreational space while grabbing a piece of the commercial aerial imagery market.

Summary: The latest iteration of the company’s Phantom drone costs little, does much, and is ready to cross over into commercial applications.


Boko Haram said more than 200 kidnapped schoolgirls have been married off. (AAP)

Boko Haram has seized the northeastern Nigerian town of Chibok, from where 276 girls were kidnapped more than six months ago and which the government vowed to secure after the mass abduction.

The April 14 kidnapping in the impoverished town in southern Borno state brought unprecedented global attention to the armed Islamist group's brutal five-year uprising.

Heads of state and top celebrities joined a viral social media campaign calling for the rescue of the seized, mostly Christian, schoolgirls, 219 of whom are still being held.

Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan has repeatedly promised to rescue the schoolgirls, including on Tuesday when he launched his bid for a second term in office ahead of February 14 polls.

In a July meeting in the capital Abuja with those affected by the kidnapping, Jonathan and top military brass also pledged to provide better security for the town.

But the violence in the northeast has intensified since, with Boko Haram reportedly seizing more than two dozen towns and Nigeria's security forces reportedly absent in many areas.

The military was not immediately available to comment on the developments in Chibok.

But given the town's symbolic significance, its fall will likely raise fresh doubt about Nigeria's ability to handle the Boko Haram threat.

"Chibok was taken by Boko Haram. They are in control," said Enoch Mark, a Christian pastor whose daughter and niece are among the hostages being held.

Mark and the senator for southern Borno, Ali Ndume, said the militants attacked on Thursday, destroying communications masts and forcing residents to flee.

Ndume said that he had received calls from fleeing residents about the attack that the town "was now under their (Boko Haram) control".

In a series of phone calls to AFP in recent months, Chibok elders stressed that security had continued to deteriorate, despite the promises made by the government.

Pogo Bitrus, chairman of the elders forum in Chibok, also confirmed the attack but said troops were being deployed and were going to retake Chibok.

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Summary: The Islamist group Boko Haram has seized the northeastern Nigerian town of Chibok from where they kidnapped 276 schoolgirls more than six months ago.


Herman D. Farrell Jr. was chosen unanimously yesterday to head the Democratic Party in Manhattan, the successor to the organization that once made ''Tammany Hall'' a synonym for big-city machine politics.

The 49-year-old Mr. Farrell, who represents Washington Heights in the State Assembly, promised to be a leader for ''the electronic age.''

He said it was well past the time when ''a leader sat in a back room and pulled strings.''

''He has to be a public figure who will take the lead on issues,'' he added. Mr. Farrell, who is black, is known as Denny. He emerged from a three-way fight against two candidates to succeed Miriam Bockman, the Manhattan party's first female leader.

Mrs. Bockman decided to step out after four years in which a promise conferred by her political closeness to Mayor Koch failed to translate into restoration of the fractious Manhattan organization's power. 2 Other Candidates Withdraw

In the maneuvering to succeed her, first Joseph Fallon, the Yorkville leader from the Upper East Side, counted votes and decided that he did not have enough.

Then James McManus, who is the fourth generation of what some politicians call ''the McMani'' to lead the Hell's Kitchen district on the West Side, met with his friends a few hours before the county executive committee meeting and decided that he was about seven votes behind Mr. Farrell.

So he nominated Mr. Farrell and pleaded for party unity. ''Give Denny a chance of building this party,'' he said. The 80 committee members met at the 60 East Club to cast 204 weighted votes. With district leaders and legislators of a notoriously independent sort, the county party now has little strength. ''We'll change with what I call 'issue discipline,' '' Mr. Farrell promised.

Illustrations: photo of Herman Farrell and Miriam Bockman


CAPE TOWN— From a railway overpass on a suburban avenue that serves as one of this city's numerous racial boundaries, it is possible to peer into two adjacent middle-class communities. One is reserved for whites, the other for the people of mixed race who are officially classified as coloreds.

In the area known as Plumstead, the houses tend to be tidy and modest one-story structures with metal roofs. Across the road in Fairways, they are more substantial and stylish, often two stories high and usually with tiled roofs. Fairways, the more affluent of the two neighborhoods by all the surface signs, happens to be the one reserved for coloreds.

One of a small number of enclaves for the merchant and professional elite among coloreds, it would seem to indicate that the white authorities have made headway with their policy of easing pressures that are potentially revolutionary by conceding material privileges to brown-skinned South Africans who account for a majority of the population in this part of Cape Province. It is a policy that some white strategists now hope to extend to urban blacks.

But even the neighborhood's name carries a stigma of second-class citizenship, for it derives from the nearby Royal Golf Club, where none of the residents of Fairways would be considered for membership. More important, the emerging colored elite is as thoroughly disenfranchised as the poorest squatters occupying metal ''pondokies,'' or shanties, in such densely populated areas here as Elsie's River and Bishop Lavis. The Wrong Kind of Image

In the eyes of their inhabitants, the middle-class colored neighborhoods are ghettos too. Richard Rive, a novelist and critic, recalled the disappointment of a German television crew that came to interview him in his new California-style home in a suburb called Windsor Park.

''This is not the kind of image we want to put across,'' Mr. Rive said, paraphrasing his visitors. ''How are we going to explain that you're oppressed? I said: This is not because of the system. It's in spite of the system.''

''I'm living better than I was 15 years ago,'' the writer continued in a voice edged with irony. ''I've got everything I want - except the franchise. And I'm not contented.''

For the Afrikaners, the dominant political group, the future political role of the coloreds is the hidden issue of an election campaign just getting under way in which Prime Minister P.W. Botha is seeking a mandate from the all-white electorate.

The extension of the franchise to the 2.7 million coloreds - and to the smaller Indian and Chinese communities - has come to be a touchstone issue in Afrikaner intellectual circles, partly because most coloreds are Afrikaans-speaking with a cultural background that is not easily distinguished from that of the Afrikaners themselves. Power-Sharing Called Inevitable

An even stronger motive for change among those who advocate it is that it would signal a retreat from the policies of strict racial separation imposed after the National Party came to power in 1948. ''Power-sharing between whites, coloreds and Asians is inevitable,'' said Prof. Willie Esterhuyse of Stellenbosch University, a member of the governing party whose latest book was titled ''Farewell to Apartheid.''

The assumpton that the Prime Minister is prepared to restore political rights to coloreds, who had them to a limited degree in Cape Province until 1956, may be only an assumption, but it has helped to send waves of anxiety through the rank-and file of Mr. Botha's party where any concession to coloreds is likely to be seen as a harbinger of concessions to the black majority.

Those within the governing party who yearn for such a breakthrough are plainly a small minority. Few of them really expect the coloreds to be granted equal political rights, including the right to sit in Parliament, because they recognize that such a change, as a matter of sheer arithmetic, could lead to the collapse of National Party power. If the coloreds were given the vote on the same terms as whites, they would account for more than one-third of the electorate.

The relationship envisioned by most Afrikaner intellectuals who look for movement on the colored vote would leave brown-skinned South Africans separate and dependent, said Prof. Jakes Gerwel, who heads the Afrikaans department at the University of the Western Cape. ''It's not intended as equality,'' he said. ''It's not something which any self-respecting colored man could accept.''

Professor Gerwel, who views himself as a relative moderate still within the political spectrum of his community, was detained last year without charge during a student boycott that shut down the university and the segregated colored school system for several months. An Obstacle to Partnership

The boycott, which ultimately spread to black schools, was started by students who are classified as coloreds but prefer to be known as ''blacks'' because they see themselves as part of a larger struggle against white domination. While it demonstrated their militancy and rejection of leaders who work within the system, the boycott also showed that the privileges coloreds have in comparison with blacks can be an obstacle to the kind of partnership the students were trying to make real.


Mr. and Mrs. Frank B. Ober Jr. of Monkton, Md., have announced the engagement of their daughter, Alice Lawrence Ober, to Harry L. Curtis 3d, son of Mr. Curtis Jr. of Lynnfield, Mass., and Mrs. Morton Margolis of North Andover, Mass.

A June wedding is plannned.

Miss Ober, a candidate for a master's degree at the Bank Street College of Education, was graduated from the Garrison Forest School and cum laude from Wheaton College, having studied during her junior year at the University of London. She made her debut in 1974 at the Bachelors Cotillon in Baltimore.

Her father is owner-operator of Hope Hollow Farm, where he breeds and raises registered Holstein cattle. The future bride is a granddaughter of the late Frank B. Ober, a retired partner in the Baltimore law firm of Ober, Grimes & Shriver; the late Mrs. Ober, and of Mr. and Mrs. Raeburn H. Parker of Garrison, Md. Mr. Parker retired as assistant treasurer of Airco Inc., formerly the Air Reduction Company in New York.

Mr. Curtis, a financial analyst for W.R. Grace & Company in New York, received an M.B.A. degree last year from Columbia University. He was graduated from the Pike School, the Governor Dummer Academy and Lafayette College.

His father is an electronic engineer with the Raytheon Company in Bedford, Mass., and his stepfather is a retired professor of the humanities at Boston University. The prospective bridegroom is a grandson of Gordon Chickering Prince of Wenham, Mass., and the late Anna Agassiz Prince, and a descendant of Louis Agassiz, the zoologist and geologist who was a professor at Harvard University, and his wife, Elizabeth Cabot Cary Agassiz, who was the first president of Radcliffe College.

Illustrations: photo of Alice Ober


WASHINGTON, Oct. 22— Most monuments in Washington are made of granite and marble. Representative Richard Bolling's will be constructed of paper and ink.

The Missouri Democrat, chairman of the House Rules Committee, announced recently that he was retiring next year and planned to write a book on the ''exercise of power'' in America. It is probably fitting that the lawmaker sees this volume as his last legacy: A man of large intelligence with an ego to match, Dick Bolling would not trust anyone else to design his memorial.

It strikes some Washingtonians as odd that Mr. Bolling, at the relatively youthful age of 65, would hand over the levers of political power and take up the more humble tools of the writer. But the Missourian lives with a rocky health record - heart attack, back injury, treatment for an alcohol problem he has publicly acknowledged - and he feels the need to get on with a job that could take 10 years or more.

''This is the only way,'' he says of his retirement decision, ''that I'll ever take on this project that's been stuck in my craw.'' Major Influence on House

Chairman of the Rules Committee is at times a powerful job, and as Alan Ehrenhalt of Congressional Quarterly has written, Mr. Bolling ''probably has influenced the House more than any member of his generation.''

Over the years, he has been the main author of reforms that curbed abuses of the seniority system and established an orderly Congressional budget process. But Mr. Bolling is now asking: Is that all there is?

As he pondered the shape of his paper-and-ink monument, Mr. Bolling sketched an outline that amounts to an updated account of democratic theory, a modern version of the Federalist Papers with a dash of Machiavelli thrown in. The Congressman may not be a direct descendant of the Founding Fathers, but he likes to consider himself at least a distant member of the family.

''It sounds terribly presumptuous to talk this way,'' Mr. Bolling said with a broad smile, ''but it seems to me that the country was founded by people with a strong sense of political theory, and I'm not offended by theory. I've had a unique opportunity to look at the exercise of power, and I have some qualifications for trying this task.

''Somebody has got to try to figure out how we should govern ourselves -ideally. Somebody has to have the gall to challenge everything, to take the bark off the tree.''

Mr. Bollings's qualifications - and his gall - are not in dispute. Protege of Rayburn

In some ways, he is going back to the workbench he abandoned 40 years ago, when his pursuit of a doctorate in history at Vanderbilt University was interrupted by five years in the Army.

After his discharge in 1946, Mr. Bolling found a job at the University of Kansas City, and two years later he ran for Congress, very much a part of the new generation of leaders who were born in the 20th century and nurtured on the experience of Depression and war.

''Like a lot of other people - Adlai Stevenson, Paul Douglas - I thought we should step in and take responsibility,'' said Mr. Bolling, who helped organize Americans for Democratic Action in the post-war years. ''I felt Truman ought to have a real supporter in Congress.''

As a young member of the House, Mr. Bolling became a protege of Speaker Sam Rayburn and seemed destined for the top of the leadership ladder. But people use ''arrogant'' to describe Mr. Bolling the way they use ''affable'' about Ronald Reagan - the words stick like nicknames - and as the Missourian tried to climb the ladder, his fingers kept getting mangled. After Mr. Rayburn's death in 1961, Mr. Bolling lost two elections for majority leader and wrote two books criticizing the way Congress was run. Will Emphasize Pragmatism

As he begins to think about his new book project, Mr. Bolling has more questions than answers. But he is clearly eager to elaborate on one of his favorite themes, the need to reorganize and rationalize Congressional structure and procedure, particularly at a time when special interest groups seem to dominate Capitol Hill like an occupying army.

In addition, the volume will emphasize the virtues of pragmatism, as opposed to a more rigid, ideological approach to problem-solving. That issue is very much on the mind of this old liberal - the son of a La Follette progressive from Wisconsin - as he watches the Reagan Administration ''turn back the clock 40 years, maybe 50 years.''

Chroniclers of Capitol Hill have called Mr. Bolling the ''philosopher king'' of Congress, but these days he's more like an Old Testamount prophet, foreseeing disaster at every turn. ''The President's coalitiion is already doomed,'' he predicted. ''People are very rapidly catching on that the Reagan program is really a return to the old trickle-down theory of economics, and that's simply not going to work.'' Ready to Relinquish Power

But jeremiads are not his only message. Mr. Bolling feels that his generation is ready to hand over power to a younger crowd, new leaders who might be better suited to deal with current complexities.

''The people of my generation,'' he said, ''are not used to complexity. We weren't brought up, for instance, to take computers for granted. I think it's about time that new people took over the leadership, people who were educated to appreciate a larger and more developed United States.''

But Mr. Bolling worries that the new generation will lose the lessons of the past. ''I have one reservation about them,'' he confessed. ''Do you have enough compassion? They've had no real experience, most of them, with the dreadful hardships of the New Deal days, the Depression days. They haven't had first-hand experience.''

Illustrations: photo of Richard Bolling


In a letter published on Nov. 13, ''The Folly of Focusing on Handgun Murders,'' John Lewis argues that we do not have a handgun problem in the United States but a violence problem - because only half the homicides are committed with handguns. Efforts to control handguns, he writes, distract us from the more important goal of an end to all violence and crime.

As a practical matter, it seems reasonable to pursue a goal that may solve half the problem, and can do so quite easily, rather than try to change human nature, with a near-zero chance of success.

There is not a single convincing argument favoring the proliferation of handguns. Detective fiction and cheap-thrill entertainment have made the handgun a macho symbol, but it is actually the weapon of the coward who, unwilling to risk physical confrontation, kills safely from a distance, like the poisoner. THOMAS T. SEMON, Demarest, N.J., Nov. 13, 1981

Summary: To the Editor:    In a letter published on Nov. 13, ''The Folly of Focusing on Handgun Murders,'' John Lewis argues that we do not have a handgun problem in the United States but a violence problem - because only half the homicides are committed with handguns. Efforts to control handguns, he writes, distract us from the more important goal of an end to all violence and crime.


PEKING, March 14— The Peking leadership, showing concern that the country's birth rate is beginning to rise again, has formally warned Chinese to adhere to the strict family planning measures that it has laid down.

A new directive issued jointly by the Central Committee of the Communist Party and the policy-making State Council urged that steps be taken to halt what the New China News Agency today called ''the current tendency of rising population growth rate.''

The family planning directive was given front-page prominence today by People's Daily, which published a supporting editorial entitled, ''Persist in a Scientific, Correct Population Policy.'' The party newspaper said that younger generations should ''grow up with a better cultivated mind and physique.''

The directive followed new guidelines laid down last week in which couples living in cities were ordered to have no more than one child. The guidelines, which appeared last Thursday in the Guangming Daily, were only part of the new effort to keep the population from getting out of hand. Could Soon Reach 1.3 Billion

The editorial in People's Daily today cautioned that if the present growth went unchecked, China's population could exceed 1.3 billion people by the year 2000, which is 100 million more than the Government's target. The population is already thought to have reached one billion people, though the exact number will be determined by a national census scheduled for July.

At a United Nations-sponsored Asian population conference held here last autumn, China reported an annual growth rate of only 1.17 percent, which is well below Asia's overall population growth rate. The Asian parliamentarians at the conference endorsed a proposal to reduce Asia's population to a 1 percent growth rate by the year 2000.

Several years ago, the policy was introduced of encouraging couples to have only one child, because the population was continuing to outstrip its agricultural and other resources. The policy has combined financial and social incentives and penalties to discourage couples from having more children.

Chen Muhua, who headed the State Family Planning Commission, reported last October that 10 percent of the couples of child-bearing age had pledged to have only one child.

The weekly Beijing Review in January called the one-child limit per family ''not our permanent population policy but an emergency measure, a social paycheck for the unplanned population reproduction from the 50's to the 70's.''

Judging by recent statements and articles, the Chinese leadership has at least two reasons for renewed concern, apart from current statistics. 300 Million Near Marriage Age

One is that 300 million Chinese born during the chaos of the Cultural Revolution between 1966 and 1976 will be approaching marriagable age and are likely to contribute to a baby boom.

Another is that the new agricultural policies, which have given China's 800 million peasants more responsibility for what they produce, have made it once again profitable for farmers to have large families, and particularly sons, to help increase their crop yields.

There have been indications in the Chinese press that this has undermined family planning programs in the countryside. The rural suspicion of birth control may be one reason why only urban dwellers have been officially limited to a single child. The New China News Agency today quoted the new directive as emphasizing that ''family planning must go hand in hand with the practice of the responsibility system in production. One-child families should have encouragement.''

Today's editorial in People's Daily alluded to the problems that China already had feeding itself and said that if it kept eating up the available food, ''our country has no hope.''

A population research group of scientists here has estimated that China's most suitable population size in 100 years should be only 650 million to 700 million, which is a third below the current population and could only be achieved by maintaining a one-child family for the next 75 years.


SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 6— Patricia Hearst, who was convicted of bank robbery in 1976, today dropped her attempt to win a new trial. Miss Hearst, 26 years old, had been seeking to show that her conviction resulted from an inadequate defens e by F. Lee Bailey and J. Albert Johnson, the Boston lawyers.

Today Miss Hearst said, ''This decision is based on my desire to put this litigation behind me for personal and family considerations.''

She said she knew she would be unable to renew the legal action once it was dismissed.

At the heart of Miss Hearst's argument was the assertion that decisions were made in her trial that favored Mr. Bailey's plan to write a book about the case. These decisions disabled her defense, she contended.

Mr. Bailey had contracted in 1976 with G.P. Putnam's Sons for a $225,000 payment for a manuscript and with Ladies' Home Journal for $40,000 for serial rights to a book called ''The Defense of Patty Hearst.'' But after Miss Hearst was convicted, the manuscript was rejected.

Today's action means that an investigation of Mr. Bailey's behavior in dealing with the publishers is now terminated. Miss Hearst's own story, titled ''Every Secret Thing,'' is now in the bookstores. In it she tells of her experiences after being kidnapped Feb. 4, 1974, in Berkeley by the Symbionese Liberation Army, the revolutionary band. She says she was first a captive and then an unwilling member of the group, and she repeats the story of the bank robbery that she told at her trial in February and March 1976. She said she was forced by threats to accompany her abductors.

Written by Alvin Moscow, an established author, Miss Hearst's story was purchased by Doubleday & Company for $800,000, according to sources familiar with the deal. They said Miss Hearst was paid $700,000 and Mr. Moscow $100,000.

Miss Hearst, who is now married to her former bodyguard, Bernard Shaw, and has a 7-month-old daughter, served 22 months of a sevenyear prison term. President Carter commuted her sentence in February 1979.

Very little was disclosed about the arrangements that were reached to end the case. Federal District Judge William H. Orrick instructed the parties and attorneys not to discuss the case when it began in August 1978, and he renewed that order yesterday.

Miss Hearst's attorney, George C. Martinez, appeared before Judge Orrick at 5 P.M. Tuesday with a declaration he said he had seen Miss Hearst sign. The quickly arranged session was not announced to reporters. Proceedings Terminated

The judge accepted the declaration, and this morning he filed an order that dismissed the petition for a new trial. The closing paragraph of his order read: ''The Court finds it neither advisable or in the interests of justice to proceed with any disciplinary proceedings in this case with reference to Patricia Campbell Hearst's former attorneys, Mssrs. F. Lee Bailey and J. Albert Johnson, and accordingly orders all proceedings herein terminated in their entirety.''

Judge Orrick entered the case in 1976 to sentence Miss Hearst after her trial judge, Oliver J. Carter, died. Then, when she filed her motion for a new trial, it went to Judge Orrick. He rejected it, but the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ordered him to conduct hearings at which Miss Hearst could challenge Mr. Bailey's conduct on ethical grounds.

She asked the United States Supreme Court to short-circuit this by ordering a new trial, but the Court refused and sent the case back to Judge Orrick for a hearing.

Sanford Svetcov, an assistant United States attorney who argued for upholding the conviction, said: ''I'm glad it's over. Her conviction stands.''

Robert Cartwright, attorney for Mr. Bailey and Mr. Johnson, said: ''We're very pleased. We feel it is a very good disposition for everybody.''