FORTUNE — Prefab houses have been around forever — at the turn of the last century you could order a kit house from the Sears catalogue — but they soon achieved a reputation for shoddy workmanship and unappealing design (think trailer-style homes). A new generation of architects and designers have decided that there’s no reason prefab houses can’t look great and be of high quality.

Turns out, prefab may be the most environmentally friendly way to build a house. When a house is built in a factory there’s less waste — materials can be precision measured and cut — plus a prefab structure can be erected within a couple of weeks — avoiding months and months of workmen driving greenhouse gas spewing trucks to the site. One speaker at Fortune’s Brainstorm Green conference earlier this year, Bill Haney — founder and CEO of Blu Homes, cited another advantage of prefab housing: “No one can build a traditional house on time or on budget. Psychology Today cited a study that said it’s more painful to build a house than it is to have a loved one die.”

Haney has added a high-tech element to his prefab green houses. Applying technology developed at MIT, Blu Homes designs its modern structures using steel frames that fold on hinges much like a card table. Today, most prefab homes must be delivered at great expense on wide-load trucks that are too big to travel on many roads and have to be accompanied by escort cars. A Blue Home, by contrast, can be folded up to fit on an 18-wheeler, allowing the house to be shipped relatively cheaply and easily from the company’s factory in Vallejo, Calif.

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Another advantage: Because traditional prefab houses are shipped in boxy modules that need to fit on a truck, there’s a limit on the size of rooms and heights of ceilings. A Blu Home can unfold into large rooms with soaring cathedral ceilings.

The houses range from the modest 465 sq ft Origin for $130,000 (not including foundation and site prep) to the elegant, California modern 3,000 sq. ft Breeze house, which starts at $540,000. As for its green credentials, Blu Homes use non-off-gassing materials (including low or no VOC paints) and materials that are formaldehyde-free. The homes are highly insulated and with the addition of solar panels energy costs can be dramatically cut.

The company has raised $69 million and is backed by, among others, the Disney DIS family and the Scandinavian investment company Skagen Group. The company says it expects to sell more than 100 homes this year nationwide. Blu Homes, which is not yet profitable, says it booked sales last year of $40 million and is on track to hit $70 million this year. When asked what keeps him up nights, Haney replied: “My biggest worry is keeping up with the fast growth and at the same time maintaining quality.” That’s a problem a lot of CEOs would like to have.

Summary: Blu Home's environmentally friendly pre-fab houses can be folded to fit onto an 18-wheeler.


Best Doctors Inc., a Boston second-opinion service offered by companies as a medical benefit, has acquired Rise Health, a Chicago company that specializes in data integration and analytics. Terms were not disclosed.

The deal will give Best Doctors additional services to provide to its clients and an opportunity to expand into new markets, the company said.

Both companies are privately held and don’t disclose revenues. Best Doctors has 650 employees, including 270 in Massachusetts; Rise Health has about 40.

Rise Health provides tools to help payers and providers manage the transition from fee-for-service to value-based care. According to Best Doctors, the deal will accelerate the “expansion of its digital health solutions focused on helping people get the right diagnosis and treatment.”

Summary: Best Doctors, a Boston-based second opinion service offered by companies as a medical benefit, has acquired Rise Health, a Chicago-based company that specializes in data integration and analytics.


It’s the bite that keeps on biting.

As Adidas backs away from Uruguay’s Luis Suarez after he received a four-month ban for biting a fellow World Cup player, other brands are happily hopping on board.

The best part? No fees attached.

Adidas ADS said it would no longer use Suarez for marketing promotions attached to the 2014 FIFA World Cup. Other brands were happy to pick up the slack, and some free advertising along the way.

Netflix NFLX , McDonald’s MCD , Budweiser and others turned to Twitter to promote their products and poke some fun at the 27-year-old soccer star.

(Translation: “Hello @luis16suarez, if you’re hungry come have a bite of a Big Mac.”)

Barilla also tweeted a welcome home image to its countryman–and Suarez victim–Giorgio Chiellini.

It’s not the first time marketers have played off popular fascination in real time.

Gatorade similarly turned to social media to get grab attention after after Lebron James cramped up during the first game of the NBA finals after the air conditioning went out in the Houston arena.

The tweet was a jab at an unnamed rival: Powerade, which sponsors Miami Heat’s James.

Marketers are getting better at using real time events to pick up some fee-less advertising and even, like Gatorade, interacting directly with consumers. It’s a far cry from the multimillion dollar sponsorships and television commercials that have driven marketing efforts of years past.

Summary: Sports gear maker may have cut Suarez out of its World Cup promotions, but other brands have added him in — for free.


In recent attempts to stimulate the European economy and fight deflation, the European Central Bank (ECB), led by President Mario Draghi, has cut its benchmark interest rate to 0.05%, and said it would buy €1 trillion (about $1.25 trillion) in asset-backed securities and bonds.

These changes in monetary policy sent the Euro below $1.24 in early November, its weakest in over two years, making European goods and tourism less expensive abroad. This did not lead to rejoicing on the streets of European cities, however.

“They ought to encourage consumption to reactivate the economy,” said Luis Carrasco, 42, as he stood in front of a Barcelona restaurant where he is a chef.

Many economists would argue that people like Carrasco do not understand that the ECB is doing just that, albeit indirectly; lowering rates and buying assets should get credit flowing, which in turn should increase house prices and household spending.

But another school is arguing that Carrasco is exactly right, and that what European households need is not contorted monetary policy changes but, rather, an influx of cold, hard cash. The ECB should send each European adult a check, they say, and let him spend it how he likes.

John Muellbauer, a professor of economics at the University of Oxford who recently published a piece titled, “Quantitative Easing for the People,” says that sending €500 euro checks to every EU citizen would cost a sixth of the €1 trillion Draghi talks about spending on asset purchases, and would increase EU consumer spending by €34 billion, or 1.4% of GDP.

London-based fund manager Eric Lonergan, along with Brown University professor Mark Blyth wrote the recent Foreign Affairs article “Print Less but Transfer More,” which argues that transfers of between €500 and €1,000 per capita would have a far greater effect on consumption than the ECB’s plans.

“It’s much more efficient and sensible to directly target household spending,” Lonergan says.

While stimulating the economy via society-wide handouts may seem silly or simplistic, it’s an idea with a long history. In the 1936 economics classic General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, John Maynard Keynes suggested that the treasury could juice the economy by burying bottles of cash in coal mines and having people dig them up.

And on the other side of the political spectrum, Milton Friedman noted in his essay “The Optimum Quantity of Money” that dropping cash to people from a helicopter would have a similar effect.

“It’s funny that the left and the right are unified on this policy,” jokes Muellbauer.

But while Keynes and Friedman were speaking with tongue in cheek, governments have performed a kind of cash handouts in the recent past. During slow economic times in 2001 and 2008, the U.S. gave out tax rebates, giving economists a chance to study the effect handouts would have.

While much economic theory holds that people would not spend the money, the opposite happened. According to a study from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), households spent between 20% and 40% of their rebates on non-durable goods, like food, during the three-month period in which they received their checks, and they spent another third of the rebate during the following quarter. The poor spent more than the rich.

And in 2008, another NBER report found that households spent between 50% and 90% during the quarter they received the rebate. The spending was on a mix of non-durable and durable goods (particularly cars).

Two of the beauties of the giveaway approach, says Lonergan, are that it would be applied equally to all EU citizens, no matter the country, and it would let people do what they want with their money instead of pushing them to buy assets, as cheap credit does.

“If I’m a Spanish or Italian household and I’m in a bad situation, I’ll use it to improve my situation,” he says. “If I have debt, I will use it to repay it. If I have more money, I may take a holiday or put it in a pension fund. Sometimes it’s good to let people to do what they want. They know what’s best for them.”

The idea that people would spend the money (instead of putting it under the mattress)—and in a variety of ways—was backed up on the streets of Barcelona.

“In Spain, the majority of us have debts, so we’d use it to pay debt,” said Juan Galera, 53, a self-employed mason working in the Tres Torres neighborhood. “I’d use it to pay one mortgage payment.”

Several blocks away, Pepi, who was cleaning the sidewalk outside of a dental clinic, said if she received a check, she would buy food and use it to pay her rent and electricity bills.

Of course, after years of pushing austerity policies, no one expects the EU’s greatest economic power, Germany, to embrace a handout scheme any time soon. And there is another problem with the plan: while the idea was well received, a €500 handout wasn’t exactly embraced as a panacea.

“Would it solve the crisis? That’s another question. €500 doesn’t go very far,” said Galera.

Pepi, who did not to give her last name, was more pointed.

“Just €500?” she asked. “More would be a little better, no?”

Summary: A school of economists have begun to argue that what European households need is not contorted monetary policy changes but, rather, an influx of cold, hard cash.


Dear Annie: I’ve been put in charge of hiring a few new people for our department, which does social media marketing, and I’m trying to come up with a way to describe the talent and experience we’re looking for. This is a pretty new area of the company, so there aren’t any old job descriptions around here that I could use as a template, and the ones I’ve been looking at online are mostly so boring. Is it crazy to think that, since we’re looking for dynamic, imaginative people to do interesting, creative work, the job description should be interesting and creative too? Do you or your readers have any suggestions? — Just Janet

Dear J.J.: Not crazy at all. “Job descriptions are usually just an item on a hiring manager’s checklist, so they end up as a dry list of qualifications,” explains Brendan Browne, director of recruiting at LinkedIn. That’s a wasted opportunity. “Candidates in demand now have a choice of jobs, so how are you going to stand out?” he says. “The right description is often your first, and best, chance to catch the eye of the right talent.”

Browne has had some experience with this. When he started at LinkedIn in 2010, the social media site had about 500 employees. It now has over 6,000, in 30 cities worldwide. Here are a few of LinkedIn’s tips for writing a job ad that will wow the people you want to attract:

Use recognizable titles. “Creative” titles — like Office Ninja for administrative assistant, or Brand Champion when you mean social media specialist — aren’t search-friendly, and will likely put off anyone who doesn’t know what they mean.

Keep the tone candid and conversational. Lots of ads feature a heading like “Job Overview,” followed by two or three paragraphs of jargon. Yawn. Instead, Browne recommends getting quickly to the point, with “Why Join Us?” followed by two or three sentences that answer the question.

Likewise, long lists of “Job Requirements” in some ads often include a veiled reference to a drawback of the job, buried in verbiage. That’s a mistake. “It’s essential that the ad reflect the reality,” Browne notes. “If there is something that makes this role especially tough or challenging, say it as if you were speaking to the person. Put in a ‘Worst Part of the Job’ sub-head.”

LinkedIn, for instance, is growing so fast that a few basic processes aren’t fully developed yet and have to be improvised on the fly. If something like that is true in your shop too, briefly say so. “Be authentic about the job,” says Browne. “You want no surprises for new hires later.”

Promote your company’s brand. When LinkedIn surveyed 18,000 employees across various industries on what would lure them to a new job, 56% said an employer’s job-market brand was a big influence. “People want to love where they work, so why someone would love working with you has got to come screaming through,” Browne says. It helps to replace a typically dull list of details about the company’s history with two or three sentences explaining why your business is exciting now.

Avoid buzzwords. Instead of eye-glazing boilerplate like “Fits well with our culture and the values consistent in our organization,” offer information about the actual culture at your company — maybe by mentioning why you like coming to work in the morning.

Emphasize the impact of the job. Lots of job ads contain vague descriptions like “Lead the business and drive change to meet performance goals.” Say what? “Those phrases don’t mean anything to anyone,” notes Browne. “Try spelling out specifically why the role matters, what they’ll be doing, and what they’ll learn.” LinkedIn’s survey of passive job candidates showed that people who already have jobs are most likely to move if a new job offers a candidate the chance to make their own distinctive mark. If that’s the case with the job openings you’re trying to fill, make it clear.

Be concise. The LinkedIn talent study showed there’s a 30% chance your ideal candidate will read your job description on a mobile device, where the smaller screen means each word has to count. You could also consider adding another dimension to the text by embedding a video that shows, say, some of your team’s work, or features you talking about the team, the company, and the job.

In a way, the fact that there aren’t any old job descriptions around for you to use is an advantage, because it means you get to start fresh. For most hiring managers, “it takes a shift in mindset” to get away from the same old snooze-inducing job descriptions, says Browne. “But, in the current tight market for talent, it’s worth the effort to differentiate your company from the crowd.”

Have a career question for Anne Fisher? Email askannie@fortune.com.

Summary: Job descriptions are often an employer's best chance to make a great first impression, but most are one big snooze.


FORTUNE — The news this week that ESPN would be cutting 300 to 400 jobs reverberated across the media landscape. The sports network giant is one of the last remaining examples in the industry of all-out success and profitability. Even as newsrooms have shrunk and publications have folded, ESPN has hired, hired, and kept hiring for years. Et tu, oh Worldwide Leader in Sports?

The fact that ESPN would announce layoffs now was all the more shocking given that its corporate parent, the Walt Disney Co., No. 66 on the Fortune 500 this year with $42.3 billion in revenues, is in such healthy financial shape. Disney DIS made $5.68 billion in profits in 2012, good for the 32nd-largest profit total in the 500. The company’s stock has risen 48% over the past 12 months vs. 25% for the S&P 500 SPX .

The sports network, for its part, isn’t talking much. It released a statement to the effect that it is narrowing costs in order to sustain growth: “We are implementing changes across the company to enhance our continued growth while smartly managing costs … It will make us more competitive, innovative, and productive.”

One former employee that spoke to Fortune says, “Everybody gets pissed off because they look at the big Disney figure. I remember hearing a few years back a lot of people saying, ‘Wait, the company made X billion dollars last year and they’re cutting my salary, or they’re implementing a [hiring] freeze, how could that be?’”

But, if anything, what is surprising is that ESPN was able to go until now without significant layoffs. The company has experienced hiring freezes, but it had not cut its workforce since 2009, when it laid off more than 100 people in its Bristol, Conn., headquarters office. The sports broadcaster basically sailed through a period when U.S. unemployment hit as high as 10%.

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In recent years ESPN has emerged as the biggest profit driver inside Disney. That kept it immune, to some extent, from tight scrutiny. But Disney has been working for some time to bring greater operational discipline to bear on its various divisions, and the process is finally catching up with ESPN. While 300 to 400 jobs is certainly significant, that size layoff represents a relatively small portion, about 5%, of ESPN’s nearly 7,000 full-time employees overall — about 4,000 of whom are in Bristol — and a fraction of Disney’s 150,000.

After years of expansion, ESPN, it seems, was carrying baggage it could stand to drop. One former staffer who spoke to Fortune confirms this. “There were a lot of times where you’d have three people who were all sharing probably two jobs,” says the former employee. “That happened all around the building. There are people there from the ‘80s and early ‘90s, and they’re starting to back up. For a while, ESPN was the only place that was growing. At some point, you run out of places for people to get promoted into.”

The cuts, first reported by Deadspin, are being made across the board, but began with people in sales and technology. Sources within ESPN tell Fortune that more are coming. And not just at its Bristol, Conn., headquarters: nearly 20 staffers from the affiliate marketing office in Denver were among those given the pink slip on Tuesday. That office has been shut down because, as a current ESPN employee tells Fortune, it opened way back in 1981 when the cable industry was centered in Denver; over time that changed.

ESPN will also be shutting down Unite, a 60-minute show that premiered in August on ESPNU; ESPN’s apparent hope for the show was to enter the social media space in a louder way and get access to younger male viewers. Similarly, Playbook, an offbeat section of espn.com meant for coverage of non-core sports, is closing down.

“It sounds like they’re doing it over the next month,” says one of Fortune’s sources of the rest of the job cuts, “and that the production people are next. There’s studio production and remote production, and there will be cuts from both, and people are telling me it will be more senior types.”

MORE: P&G goes back to the future: McDonald out, Lafley in

Along with its healthy profits, the sports network carries big costs: specifically, hefty rights fees, such as the $825 million it will shell out over 11 years to show the U.S. Open tennis tournament in its entirety, a deal that it just inked last week. Not to mention the billions ESPN pays to broadcast NFL and MLB games. A gargantuan new digital center that it has been building since 2011, which will house several studios and be the new home of the network’s flagship SportsCenter, is set to open for business next summer and has also increased the fiscal pressure.

“They are making a huge deal out of that digital center” internally, says a Fortune source. “Your up-front costs on this stuff are so large … So when people say, ‘Really, you just paid $700 million for this deal, and you’re cutting a guy who makes $35,000?’ Well, yeah, but you’ve already committed the $700 million, there’s no getting that back, so you’ve got to find the money somewhere.”

Even despite these cuts, ESPN has said it is still in growth mode and will be hiring down the line. Sources say one area where it will add jobs is its just-announced SEC Network, which will offer 24/7 coverage of the football-crazed Southeastern Conference starting in August 2014. Today’s job cuts may just be a way to raise capital for tomorrow’s investments.

Summary: The Disney-owned sports media giant is laying off 300 to 400 people. But it won't affect its fiscal future.


03/09/2015 AT 04:45 PM EDT

Techies everywhere have been faced with the question of whether to indulge in the new Apple Watch. Thanks to

, gadget lovers can now witness the watch – not to mention

to unveil a new partnership between the tech giant and Turlington's maternal-health nonprofit,

(EMC), at Apple's Spring Forward media event in San Francisco on Monday.

Turlington, 46, was tapped to experience firsthand the capabilities of Apple's latest gadget by training for a half

in Africa using the watch, while also raising awareness and funds for her organization through the

. She took the stage at the event alongside Cook to help debut the collaboration with a video of her experience racing in a half marathon in Tanzania just a few days earlier.

"Health and fitness have always been part of my life – as a kid, as an adult and now, as a mother," she says in the clip, which functioned as a preview for a series of full-length video posts that will document her journey as she trains for yet another run, the

Marathon, on April 26. (See the videos on

The clip shows the model both training and racing in Kilimanjaro using the Apple Watch to track her time, distance and pace. It also catches the health advocate crossing the finish line and hugging another race participant who is also wearing an Every Mother Counts jersey.

"It's going to be hard," the activist says in the video about her upcoming run. "But, like most challenges, it will definitely be worth it."

This is not the first campaign the philanthropist has worked on to help benefit the cause of women's health. Last May, the stunner also posed alongside

fragrance campaign, in which the proceeds supported several charities including Every Mother Counts.

Summary: The model-philanthropist is documenting her journey to the Virgin Money London Marathon with a series of videos on Apple.com


The final holiday weekend of the summer season in New Jersey offers, among other things, aerialists performing suspended from a moving motorcycle over the Great Falls in Paterson and a version of musical chairs played for prize money by top-notch bicyclists in Somerville.

The Paterson high-wire act, by John Henry LeMoine and his daughters, Michelle and Renee, is the feature attraction of the 11th annual Great Falls Festival, which will run from 7 this evening to 10:30 P.M. on Monday. The LeMoines will perform at 9 tonight and at 2 and 8 P.M. tomorrow, Sunday and Monday.

The festival will also provide nonstop entertainment for visitors to the park around the falls, in the restored industrial buildings and in nearby Hinchliffe Stadium. The program includes amusement rides, antique cars, foot races up Garrett Mountain, a flea market, stunt-car-driving exhibitions and a program for children. Music from disco and jazz to bluegrass and a performance by the New Jersey Festival Wood Ensemble will be provided by more than 25 groups. There will be guided tours of the National Historic District around the falls at 10 A.M. and noon tomorrow, Sunday and Monday, and in the restored Rogers Locomotive Building there will be poetry readings and an exhibition depicting the history of the industrial city. By car Paterson can be reached by heading west on Route 80 or Route 4 or by taking the Garden State Parkway to Exit 155.

The Flemington Fair, the state's oldest agricultural fair, will celebrate its 125th anniversary this year. Over the weekend visitors can see display areas for all kinds of farm animals, including one devoted to more than 20 types of breed horses. There is an amusement area with rides, food stands and a race track where visitors can sit in the grandstand and see stock-car and sports-car races and highwire acts at 2 and 8 P.M. On Sunday evening there will be a 100-car demolition derby. Today, more than 40 volunteer fire companies and rescue squads will perform drills, compete and put on skits on the race track.

Admission is $3; $1.50 for those 6 to 13 years old, free for under-6's. On Fridays, everyone 13 and younger is admitted free. Take Route 22 west to Somerville and then Route 202 north to Flemington . The fair is t wo miles north of town on Route 31.

Somerville's unusual bicycle races will be staged Monday as part of the town's fourth Labor Day celebration. The day's events begin in front of the Y.M.C.A. on Green Street at 11 A.M., with races for youngsters and local officials through city streets.

Shortly after noon races sanctioned by the United States Cycling Federation will be staged for riders in the midget, intermediate, veteran and senior three and four classes. There is no definite distance to these races. On each lap the rider in last place must drop out. The races end when there is only one rider left. The riders are vying for a top prize of $1,000. Somerville can be reached by taking Route 22 west from Newark.

In Metuchen the Cultural Arts Commission will repeat it popular Labor Day chalk-art contest for youngsters of all ages through high school. On Monday, Main Street between Hillside and Highland Avenues will be closed to traffic and transformed into a giant blacktop easel with hundreds of squares. Young artists will be registered for a 50-cent fee, starting at 9 A.M., given a handful of colored chalk and turned loose. The youngsters themselves will do the judging. Prizes include coupons redeemable at the local Friendly's restaurant. By car, take the Garden State Parkway to Exit 131 in Middlesex County and get on Route 27 south to Metuchen.

The resort town of Ocean City, a few miles south of Atlantic City, will stage a ''bizarre bazaar'' tomorrow on the ocean-front Music Pier from 10 A.M. to 10 P.M. The pier will house hundreds of exhibits of the work of toymakers, glassblowers, bread sculptors, stainedglass makers, fiber weavers, and jewelry and quilt makers, as well as the treasures of driftwood collectors and postcard and weather-vane enthusiasts. There will be a variety of foods and some fortune tellers and psychics. To reach Ocean City take the Garden State Parkway to Exit 31 and head east to the beach front.

An international folk festival featuring the costumes, food, customs and music of German, Irish and Slavic people is being staged at Action Park in Sussex County's Vernon Vall ey. Today there will be German festivities, with yodelers, Alpine hor n players, bell ringers,brass bands, folk dancers and a 50-piece orch estra, which arrived last week from Munich. Tomorrow, the drone of the bagpipes will be heard as an Irish festival moves on stage wit h step dancers and bandsfrom noon to 8 P.M.

The highlight Sunday and Monday will be a polka festival with the most popular Polish bands of the New York and New Jersey area on stage from 1 to 10 P.M. and performances by dance troupes. On display also will be ''the world's biggest kielbasa,'' a 35 pound-sausage donated by the Haydu Meat Company. And the Munich orchestra will perform again.

Festival admission costs $5; $3 for 3-to 7-year-olds, and free for under-3's. Admission to the Action Park amusement-ride area, which also entitles visitors to attend the festival, is $14 for adults and $7 for children.

Take Route 80 west to Route 94 west and then Route 23 north to Sussex County Road 515 to Vernon Valley at McAfee.

Summary: New Jersey   The final holiday weekend of the summer season in New Jersey offers, among other things, aerialists performing suspended from a moving motorcycle over the Great Falls in Paterson and a version of musical chairs played for prize money by top-notch bicyclists in Somerville.   The Paterson high-wire act, by John Henry LeMoine and his daughters, Michelle and Renee, is the feature attraction of the 11th annual Great Falls Festival, which will run from 7 this evening to 10:30 P.M. on Monday. The LeMoines will perform at 9 tonight and at 2 and 8 P.M. tomorrow, Sunday and Monday.


This week, 35 of those well-tailored state police officers who like to pass out speeding tickets on the New Jersey Turnpike began patrolling the streets of Trenton. Their new mission is preventing violent crime; they are part of an anti-urban crime program drafted by former Attorney General Degnan and adopted by Governor Byrne. The plan calls for placing ''metro task forces'' of state police in Newark, Jersey City, Paterson, Camden and other cities. But so far only Trenton has cooperated with this worthy experiment. Some city leaders seem to feel as threatened by this use of troopers as by crime.

Mayor Arthur Holland of Trenton says he'd prefer the aid in cash, to augment his own police department. But he knows that new money is harder to find than troopers and so accepted them. Other municipal leaders are resisting. As expected, local police object that the troopers will undermine their authority and their requests to hire more regular police.

Surprisingly, despite his city's rise in violent crime, even Newark's Mayor Kenneth Gibson has rejected the state's offer. Mr. Gibson, an announced candidate for governor, says the special patrols are just a political show for Mr. Degnan, who resigned his post this week and is expected to join the crowded primary race. Crime, though serious, can be handled well enough locally, the Mayor insists.

It is a politicized year. Yet it would be to his city's benefit if Mayor Gibson could somehow accept the offer. The state has tried to de-politicize it. Both the Attorney General and Clinton Pagano, the state police superintendent, gave local officials and police several months to help decide how and where the troopers would be deployed. And a statewide council of police officials has been established to advise the Attorney General on such questions as crime patrols, training for local police and efforts to upgrade police standards.

The truth is that Newark's citizens and business leaders, like those in other troubled New Jersey cities, would probably welcome the troopers. A plan to revitalize the downtown shopping area would be greatly aided by added security. And if Mr. Degnan collects some praise for the project, so what? One would think that accepting help from the state and distributing it locally could be made to seem as worthy - and politically shrewd - as providing it.


CHICAGO, Jan. 5— Dr. Ruth B. Love, the 48-year-old superintendent of the Oakland, Calif., schools, has been offered the post of superintendent here.

Miss Love, at a news conference in Oakland tonight, said she had not decided whether to accept the job.

The Chicago school board made the offer today after three candidates for the post, including the leading contender, Dr. Frederick D. Holliday, bowed out of consideration over the weekend.

A few weeks ago, before the school board could even make an official offer of the job to its first choice, Arthur Jefferson, superintendent of schools in Detroit, he held a news conference to say that he was not interested.

Dr. Holliday, superintendent of schools in York, Pa., and the board's second choice, withdrew his name from consideration yesterday. He said that Earl Kline, the man who would have replaced him a York's school superintendent, died on Saturday and that under those circumstances he could not leave the school system.

Vincent E. Reed, the former superintendent of schools for Washington and Thomas K. Minter, an Assistant Secretary of Education, also asked that they no longer be considered.

The withdrawal of the three narrowed to field to two candidates, Dr. Love and Dr. Manford Byrd Jr., a deputy superintendent who has been with the Chicago school system for 26 years. Both are black.

After meeting today to decide what to do in light of the withdrawal of the three candidates, the school board voted to approach Dr. Love informally to see if she would accept the post, if it were offered.

The Rev. Kenneth Smith, the school board president, said that Dr. Love had been offered the job because the board ''wanted to bring to a close the search committee efforts.''


HONOLULU, Dec. 7— About 3,000 survivors of the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor and other defense installations here on Dec. 7, 1941, joined Honolulu residents today in solemn ceremonies marking the 40th anniversary of the devastating air raid that plunged the United States into World War II.

Several thousand Honolulu residents joined members of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association in the main public ceremony at 7:30 this morning in the Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, where war dead are buried in an extinct volcanic crater, known as the Punchbowl, overlooking the modern city of Honolulu. The service was held under sunny skies that later turned to clouds and rain.

Former sailors, soldiers, marines and airmen who were on the scene 40 years ago, now gray-haired men in their 60's and 70's, came from all parts of the United States to participate in the traditional laying of wreaths and the minute of silence at 7:55 A.M., the precise time when the vanguard of more than 350 Japanese planes, off six aircraft carriers, streaked over the island of Oahu and dropped the first bombs. New Political Horizon

The veterans found a Hawaii much different from the islands they knew as servicemen. Now the 50th state, it is a prime tourist attraction whose political horizon is dominated by Americans of Japanese ancestry.

More than 2,400 Americans were killed, 18 naval ships were sunk or damaged and 321 American planes were destroyed or disabled in the sneak assault on the day that President Roosevelt, in his speech the next day calling for a declaration of war, termed ''a date which will live in infamy.''

Maj. Gen. Frank J. Schober, commander of the California State National Guard, summed up the emotions and memories of the survivors at the Punchbowl rite today.

''All of us are surely silenced as we are proud to be at this holy shrine'' to the war that he said thrust upon the United States ''its present role as leader of the free world.'' Sailors From the Arizona

Six sailors who were aboard the battleship Arizona when she was sunk by bombs and aerial torpedoes placed a wreath on the memorial built over the vessel, which is visible under the clear waters of Pearl Harbor. More than 1,000 sailors - the exact number is unknown - were left entombed in the ship because of the lethal gases that prevented removal of the bodies. After 40 years, the ship is still leaking oil.

Other ceremonies during the day at various sites that figured in the attack were sponsored by 29 military and civilian organizations. Marks left by the bombing were still visible on the buildings at Hickam Field, the Air Force base next to the Navy yard about eight miles from the city.

The returned veterans remembered Hawaii as a semicolonial outpost, mostly sugar cane, pineapple fields and palm trees, whose largest city was a poky little tropical seaport called Honolulu, a name that many mispronounced. On Waikiki's Beach

Waikiki, the beach area where wartime servicemen came to swim in their free time, was then all small residential cottages, each with a tiny lawn, palm trees and tropical flowers around it. There were only two major hotels, the seven-story, white-framed Moana and the pink stucco Royal Hawaiian, about the same height, next to it.

But as the 50th state, a status gained in 1959, Hawaii is a far different place. ''I couldn't believe it,'' Walter De Vinck of Carmel, Calif., a sailor aboard the destroyer Blue at Pearl Harbor 40 years ago, said of the vibrant new city with buildings of 30 and 40 stories blotting out the green Koolau Mountains that once were the town's only skyline.

''They say the Royal Hawaiian hasn't changed,'' his wife, Johanna, said, adding: ''The shops make my eyes stick out like Ping-Pong balls.''

The Royal Hawaiian and the Moana are dwarfed by newer hotels like the 31-story Sheraton-Waikiki, the reunion headquarters of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association. Some of the veterans thought it ironic that all three hotels, and a dozen others along the beachfront, were owned by big Japanese interests. Ex-Sailor From Seattle

Robert Hefner of Seattle, who had been a sailor aboard the destroyer Downs during the attack, looked at the coming and going of numerous Japanese vacationers and honeymooners in the busy lobby of the Sheraton-Waikiki. He said, ''I feel like I'm on the Ginza.''

Less visible to the veterans, most of whom had arrived over the weekend, were the changes in Hawaii's political power structure since the war, represented by the dominant position of citizens of Japanese ancestry. Many of these are also war veterans, like Senator Daniel K. Inouye, who lost an arm in Italy, and Hawaii's other Senator, Spark M. Matsunaga.

Both Senators are Democrats, as are Gov. George Ariyoshi, also of Japanese ancestry, and Hawaii's two Representatives, Daniel K. Akaka, a native Hawaiian, and Cecil Heftel, a Caucasian. Like the rise to leadership of Hawaii's ethnic Japanese, the transfer of power from the Republicans to the Democrats is a change traceable to the new situation in the islands after the raid on Pearl Harbor. Suspicion and Prejudice


PEKING By JAMES P. STERBA

PEKING - When Alexander M. Haig Jr. last came to China in early 1972 to prepare for President Richard M. Nixon's dramatic visit, Peking was not bottling Coca-Cola, Fujian Province was not making Camel cigarettes and Chinese movie studios were not using Kodak film. They are now. Direct trade between China and the United States will probably exceed $6 billion this year. Joint business ventures are encouraged, thousands of students and scholars have been exchanged, United States oil firms are preparing to bid on exploration tracts in the South China Sea and, as Mr. Haig prepared for his expected arrival today in Peking for a three-day visit, the two Governments had been talking for some time about ''mutual security interests.''

It has been nine years since the Chinese-American breakthrough at Shanghai and 2 1/2 years since Washington broke official relations with the Republic of China on Taiwan and established normal diplomatic relations with the mainland Government. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late 1979 helped draw Washington and Peking still closer.

But it has also been about one year since Ronald Reagan, in the words of the official Chinese News Agency Xinhua, ''insulted one billion Chinese'' by calling for renewed ''official'' ties with Taiwan. At the time, Leonard Woodcock, the American Ambassador to Peking, said the campaign remarks threatened to upset delicate Chinese-American understandings. Since Mr. Reagan's election, it has hung like a dark cloud over the Chinese leadership.

Insults may be throwaway lines in American domestic politics; not so in China. In Peking, they are among the most powerful weapons available to leadership factions attempting to undermine each other's power. Minor mistakes, misstatements and humiliations have the power of electoral votes which are hoarded for use against adversaries in moments of weakness. A Prime Irritant Revived

What made Mr. Reagan's ''insult'' so humiliating and thus so hard to forget was that it resurrected the Taiwan issue at a time when, by most accounts, neither China nor Taiwan wanted it resurrected. In the warm glow of Sino-American normalization, which was portrayed to the mainland Chinese as a great victory for them, Peking could swallow the Taiwan Relations Act in 1979 with sharp but short-lived protests for the record. Even quiet arms sales to Taiwan, provided for in the act, proceeded with relatively minor objections. Critics of Vice Chairman Deng Xiaoping, China's leader, found it hard to snipe at leftover United States-Taiwan irritants in the overwhelming glow of the normalization ''victory.''

But Mr. Reagan's campaign rhetoric helped make Taiwan a prime irritant again in Chinese Communist Party politics. And as the glow of normalization faded into the routine business of deepening official ties between Peking and Washington, the Taiwan Relations Act continued to preoccupy Peking, mostly because the Reagan Administration at first did little to help Mr. Deng ward off the potent notion that he was being made a fool of by the new occupants of the White House.

China's Government-controlled press has leveled more criticism at the Taiwan relations law this month than at any time since the act was passed by Congress in March, 1979, as the instrument for governing unofficial United States-Taiwan relations. The criticism continued while Washington was preparing for Secretary of State Haig's visit. The preparations included the announcement that export controls are to be lifted on the sale to Peking of military-related technology, something China has wanted for a long time.

In the past few weeks, senior Chinese Foreign Ministry officials have told visiting delegations that the Reagan Administration is overestimating China's patience about Taiwan and that moves to sell fresh supplies of arms to that island would have ''dangerous consequences.'' Last week, just before Mr. Haig departed for Asia, the Foreign Ministry commented on reports from Washington that the United States wanted to provide Peking with military-related hardware and also to sell new defensive weapons to Taiwan. ''We have time and again made it clear,'' the ministry warned, ''that we would rather receive no U.S. arms than accept continued U.S. interference in our internal affairs by selling arms to Taiwan, to which we can never agree. Should the United States continue to sell arms to Taiwan in disregard of our repeated expressions of resolute objection, we certainly will give a strong response.''

Chinese officials pointed to the response they made earlier this year when the Netherlands Government permitted a Dutch firm to sell two small submarines to Taiwan. Peking recalled its ambassador to The Hague, downgrading official relations to the level of charge d'affaires.

As Mr. Haig's party arrived for a stopover in Hong Kong, Xinhua published a blistering commentary, saying that any American effort to sell arms to both China and Taiwan ''is doomed to failure.'' Perhaps more important, the commentary, written under the pen name, Hau Xiu, by a senior official, said that United States interests in further ''strategic relations'' with China were now regarded as secondary to arms sales to Taiwan ''because this is an issue of principle and China will not barter away principles.''

Mr. Haig commented that he was not in Asia to sell arms to anybody, but to talk about broader issues. Reporters accompanying him were told that the Administration saw no urgency about supplying advanced aircraft to Taiwan. Mr. Haig, they were told, intends to tell the Chinese that the growing Soviet military threat has created ''a strategic imperative'' for them to establish closer ties in all spheres.

Mr. Woodcock, Washington's first Ambassador to China, told a Congressional hearing this month that tensions between China and Taiwan had dropped to their lowest level in 30 years, that Taiwan did not need fresh arms for its defense and that China could not afford to buy and could not absorb much in the way of United States arms. Nevertheless, the arms issue, like the Taiwan issue, has grown in importance, casting a shadow over what has been a brightening relationship between Washington and Peking.

Illustrations: photo of Taiwanese trading ship being loaded with electrical wire graph of U.S. trade with China from 1972-1980 graph of U.S. trade with Taiwan from 1972-1980


JERUSALEM, June 21— Israel today rejected the Security Council's condemnation of the bombing attack on an Iraqi nuclear reactor two weeks ago, and chided the United States for approving ''this unjust resolution.''

In a statement read by Prime Minister Menachem Begin, the Cabinet said that the Council action, which came on Friday, ''gave expression to the double standard prevailing in the international body.

''The Iraqi dictatorship built a reactor in order to prepare secretly, under false pretensions and deceit, atomic bombs to be thrown in time on the centers of the Jewish population in the State of Israel,'' the communique said.

''For what are they condemning at the Security Council? Not the potential producer of atomic bombs, but the people who prevented, thanks to the heroic action of its sons, the disaster to be suffered by its citizens and children.'' Mild Rebuke for the U.S.

The statement added this relatively mild rebuke of the Reagan Administration: ''In sorrow, we note that the United States, our friend and ally as stated by its Ambassador to the United Nations, gave hand to the grave wrong done to Israel. The United States has even conducted talks with Iraq in order to formulate a resolution agreed beforehand between the two of them.''

Despite the American vote, officials in Jerusalem remained optimistic about the course of American-Israeli relations, stressing President Reagan's acknowledgement at a news conference last week of threats posed to Israel.

''Reagan gave us the feeling that this vote was pro forma,'' said one official, noting Washington's desire to maintain good relations with the Arabs.

Yehuda Blum, Israel's delegate to the United Nations, even praised the American representative during an interview on Israel Army radio. ''Speaking about Jeane Kirkpatrick,'' he said, ''I think that she can be counted on as far as her friendship to Israel is concerned.'' Standing in Polls Increases

The June 7 attack on the Iraqi reactor appears to have increased Mr. Begin's standing in public opinion polls. A survey of 1,268 adults by the Modiin Ezrahi Applied Research Center from June 15-18 showed Mr. Begin's Likud bloc winning 49 of the 120 seats in Parliament, compared with 46 seats in a similar poll just before the attack.

The results, published today by The Jerusalem Post, showed a drop by the opposition Labor Party from 40 seats just before the reactor strike to 37 just afterward. The percentage of undecided voters rose from 14.5 to 22.8 in the same period.

In a related matter, a Begin official said today that the Prime Minister, in misquoting a Baghdad newspaper to justify the Israeli attack, was the victim of ''poor staff work,'' and that the error was not a deliberate distortion.

At a news conference June 9, Mr. Begin read what turned out to be a nonexistent passage attributed to the Al Thawra newspaper of Oct. 4 saying that the Iraqi reactor was not designed against Iran, which was suspected of having bombed it Sept. 30, but against Israel.

Meanwhile, the Israeli radio reported that the head of Mossad, Israel's intelligence agency, had complained to Mr. Begin about excessive publicity about details of the Iraqi reactor. The report asserted that the intelligence chief, whose name is a state secret, was concerned about jeopardizing sources and methods of gathering information. The Prime Minister's office denied the report.


Jonathan Ive is taking on an even more important role at Apple. The design mastermind behind the look of the iPhone and the iPad will be promoted from senior vice president of design to the newly created position of chief design officer, CEO Tim Cook said in a memo to staff.

“Jony is one of the most talented and accomplished designers of his generation, with an astonishing 5000 design and utility patents to his name,” Cook said in the memo, obtained by 9to5Mac. “His new role is a reflection of the scope of work he has been doing at Apple for some time.”

Ive is already responsible for overseeing the physical look of Apple products as well as the design of the company’s software. In his expanded role, he’ll have more time to focus his design expertise on other parts of Apple’s empire, such as its Apple Stores, the physical packaging of its products and even the design of its massive new spaceship-shaped headquarters, which is set to open by 2017.

In an interview in The Telegraph, which first reported the promotion, Ive revealed that one of the touches he’s added to the new campus is custom-designed desks that can be raised or lowered with the press of a button.

Freeing up Ive to do more big-picture thinking will be two men taking on some his previous day-to-day managerial duties. Richad Howarth is being promoted to vice president of industrial design and Alan Dye will become the vice president of user interface design. The changes take place on July 1.

Summary: Jonathan Ive gets a new title


06/23/2015 AT 09:30 PM EDT

Justin Combs posted a photo with his famous father,

, in what appears to be a response to his father's arrest for assault.

"I thank God for having a father that's always there for me," Justin wrote. "Love you, pops!"

The elder Combs, 45, was

at a UCLA athletic facility and held for investigation into three counts of assault with a deadly weapon, one count of making terrorist threats and one count of battery. Justin Combs, 21, is a defensive back for UCLA's football team, and while the details of Monday's interaction are still unknown, a representative of Sean Combs has said that "any actions taken by Mr. Combs were solely defensive in nature to protect himself and his son."

By Monday evening, the music mogul was out on $50,000 bail, according to the

According to a statement from UCLA, the weapon used in the altercation on Monday was a kettle bell and no one was seriously hurt in the incident.

"I'm thankful that our staff showed the level of professionalism that they did in handling this situation," said football coach Jim Mora in a statement. "This is an unfortunate incident for all parties involved. While UCPD continues to review this matter, we will let the legal process run its course and refrain from further comment at this time."

Summary: Justin Combs posted a photo of him and his dad, thanking him for always being there


06/24/2015 AT 09:40 AM EDT

on Monday and told the late night host he'll be stripping and singing in

's precursor, which was inspired by his early life. Following the box office success of the first movie, the sequel flick revolves around the male exotic dancers going to a strippers' convention.

Bomer, who reprises his role as Ken, has a scene where his character serenades a group of Southern women who hired the male strippers for a night of steamy fun – but one of the women seems a bit down. To cheer her up (and turn her on), Bomer strips and sings

' ballad "Heaven." He says the idea for him to sing is pretty much the fault of his his costar,

"In between takes we would entertain extras ... Channing would shove a microphone in their face and say, 'Do something,' and Joe Manganiello – who I went to college with at Carnegie Mellon – knew that I sang and said, 'You should sing a song.' So I did, and Channing remembered that, and he was like, 'You're singing in this one.' "

Bomer continued, "I was like, 'Oh man,' because, you know, it's daunting to have to take your clothes off in front of strangers and then to sing live on top of that."

: "I think I'd rather take my clothes off than sing. All things being equal. I don't want to do either, but I certainly don't – singing in front of people would make me terrified."

But Bomer, 37, had a different take on it: "There's something about taking your clothes off at the same time that actually made it easier."

"Oh well, there you go," says Meyers, 41. He then asks if Bomer and Manganiello, 38, had any

, and the actor recalls a character he created for himself as an assignment – a heroin-addicted peacock that worked at a tanning salon.

"And we did clown work together, we did Shakespeare together and now we've stripped together," says Bomer.

"Wow that's fantastic," says Meyers.

Bomer responds, "I don't know where to go from here."

hits theaters on July 1.

Summary: The Emmy winner sings Bryan Adams, and things get steamy in the Magic Mike sequel


Nicole Ari Parker and Boris Kodjoe

are costars again – only this time they're not necessarily sticking to any script.

The husband and wife, who fell in love while starring together on Showtime's

"We have a great professional relationship because that's how we met," Parker tells PEOPLE. "So I think the beginning [of our show's foundation] is all there, but we're going to learn as we go and have great guests and be thrown for a loop and recover. We're ready for it all."

Kodjoe notes that debuting the show just weeks after he and Parker celebrated their 10th wedding anniversary feels like "a new chapter in our relationship. It's a new chapter in our careers. We're super excited. We're ready for the challenge."

Though they're not the first famous spouses to co-host a TV series (

are just a few who've led the way), Parker and Kodjoe are breaking ground by putting themselves – and their dynamic as partners – front and center five days a week.

"We're using this platform as authentically as we can. We are who we are," says Kodjoe, 42. "We're talking about everything that we're passionate about, whether it's current affairs or parenting, love, relationships, special needs."

That will "absolutely" include their experiences raising daughter Sophie, who was

the day after she was born in 2005 (Parker proudly reports that the 10-year-old is now a "budding ballerina"), and their son Nicholas, 8½, who is having a ball on the soccer pitch.

"The great thing about the daytime format is, you win when you are yourself," says Parker, 44.

When addressing divisive or controversial topics,

will engage experts, and the show will also welcome celebrities for dishy sit-downs. On the second count, Parker is confident she and her husband will be able to go deeper than many other daytime hosts because "there's a trust factor."

"We're always on the other side of the couch," she explains. "Our perspectives now have changed. The advantage we have is that we know what it's like to be the celebrity ... so we're going to put a special effort into coming up with topics that are fresh. We're there to give them a place to celebrate them and give them a place to share."

Of course, with the couple's move to the other side comes a greater exposure to personal scrutiny than either of them confronted while acting in scripted projects.

"If somebody doesn't like a movie I've done or a TV show we've done, you can kind of walk away, shake it off," says Parker. "This is a whole new arena. You're being yourself, but you're also opening your real self up to a lot of criticism. If someone says, 'I don't like the sound of her voice,' I might cry."

That said, it's safe to say nobody will be crying over Parker's creative approach to maintaining viewers' interest: "If the ratings drop, my husband will just take his shirt off."

She also teases, "I've gotten my abs [in shape]. The muffin [top] is shrinking. I might take my shirt off, too."

Kodjoe chimes in, "We'll be naked most of the time."

airs weekdays on Fox (check local listings).

Summary: Kodjoe and Parker – who fell in love on set and have been married for 10 years – open "a new chapter" as co-hosts of a daytime talk show


What exactly are a plane's black boxes and how do they work?

Aircraft manufacturers equip all their planes with two black boxes – a flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder.

A flight data recorder tracks all the plane's critical information during flight – everything from altitude, air speed, pitch, fuel levels and temperature. Most data recorders are able to record up 25 hours-worth of information, which is plenty for all long-haul flights. Once 25 hours of data is recorded, it will simply loop onto itself and record over the existing data.

The other black box contains the cockpit voice recorder. This provides playback of everything the pilot, crew and air traffic controllers discuss. It also records critical alarm noises that may go off during a flight. Investigators can gain an insight into what happened in the final minutes before a plane crash by listening to these recordings.

Read MoreAirbus crash: Search and rescue in pictures

Despite being referred do as a black box, the devices are actually bright orange. These make it easier for search crews to locate the boxes in a crash. Both black boxes are capable of withstanding up to 3,400 G's worth of impact – or as much force as going from 112 kilometres an hour to zero in one second.

Summary: A guide to how aircraft manufacturers equip all their planes so that investigators know what happens in a crash.


The metaphoric relationship between dancing and sex is a two-way street, as in "rockin' and rollin'" and the euphemistic "horizontal tango", a term so cheesy it should turn all right-minded people into wallflowers. Latin dancing, in particular, we think of as a public analogue of intercourse. Inevitably The Simpsons has spoofed this idea with a dance called La Penetrada, which promises to make "sex look like church". In literary circles, Eros graces Jane Austen's dances, despite all the juvenile giggling over red breeches and the stubbornness of the leading man. One of the central cinematic examples of dance as erotic affirmation surely belongs to Saturday Night Fever, with John Travolta's exuberant pelvis nodding "Yes, yes, yes!" to all of life's propositions.

But dancing, especially when conducted with precision in dimly lit ballrooms, also has a ghoulish aspect, one that our innate cultural sensors immediately recognise. In fact, if people still dressed as skeletons for Halloween, rather than as someone from a viral internet video or a coquette with a smear of fake blood on her lips, then the parties thrown on 31 October would be less rock'n'roll and more evocative of that old medieval archetype, the danse macabre. This 15th-century scene was typically set in a graveyard and showed the personified figure of Death leading a troupe of the living intermingled with cavorting skeletons. It has since influenced all the major art forms, and from mid-November, London's Wellcome Collection will host an ensemble of pictorial danses macabres as part of its major winter exhibition, Death. The collection is the work of the Chicago-based former antique print dealer Richard Harris, and among this 300-piece tribute to mortality there is a sort of international championship of skeleton-weight dancing.

Emphasising the carefree spirit of the world beyond, the 19th-century Japanese artist Kawanabe Kyosai's Frolicking Skeletons shows a bony whorl of carcasses on a hillside. Walter Sauer's 1925 interpretation, a black-and-white woodblock print, is a more obvious cousin to our contemporary iconography of bats, tombstones, full moon and skulls, and was inspired by both European symbolism and Japanese printmaking. Otto Dix's Dance of Death 1917 is a sarcastic title for his battlefield etching of dismembered soldiers skewered on barbed wire, for there's no music in these splayed corpses. The soldiers are as evocative of a jig as a chalk outline is of a break-dancer. Tellingly absent in Dix's scene is the animating figure of Death. If war's monstrosities make collateral damage of God, then it seems that the Reaper, too, has no place in this evil world of men.

Traditionally the allegorical agenda of the danse macabre is to remind the vainglorious that all of life's roads, from the gold-paved to the potholed, lead to the final, spasmodic chorea of the deathbed. And yet dancing is a complex image through which to illustrate death's egalitarianism, since few places have traditionally shown less sympathy to democracy than the European ballroom. Courtly dances have always been animated by the violence of hierarchy. Silk fans open and close like barber knives, and even the slang of the dance is serrated: when nobles aren't cutting each other with their glances, they're carving happy couples apart by cutting in. It's therefore apposite that later versions of the danse macabre exchanged the graveyard for the aristocrat's party in order to emphasise the immoral decadence of the privileged classes. As an uninvited challenger to this opulence, Death hits the dancefloor bearing the largest and heftiest of the metaphorical blades.

In Edgar Allan Poe's story "The Masque of the Red Death", Prince Prospero holds a grand party in his mansion while around him his serfs are dying of plague. Prospero arrogantly believes that wealth ensures immunity from contagion, until the masked presence of Death gatecrashes the soirée and "with a slow and solemn movement, as if more fully to sustain its role, stalked to and fro among the waltzers". A visual equivalent to Poe's eerie massacre is Alfred Rethel's Death the Strangler – The First Outbreak of Cholera at a Masked Ball in Paris, 1831, which is also part of the Wellcome exhibition. In this wood engraving, Death is the sauciest allegory on the block, manifesting as a skeleton among the fresh corpses of partygoers, wearing something between a monk's hooded habit and a negligee. Jauntily playing the fiddle with a thigh bone, one severely well-turned ankle thrust forward, Death takes over from the band of musicians who are depicted fleeing in horror. Here Death targets the upper classes, and, as in Poe's tale, the music's tempo seems to catalyse the infection, making it an instant killer.

The great literary modernists used the danse macabre more subtly, rarefying it into a sort of dreadful fume, a felt but unspoken atmosphere that gave pallid overtones to otherwise convivial scenes. Modernism was in many ways a morbid enterprise, with keen instincts for investing the festive with the funereal. The relatively new invention of the X-ray – science's realisation of memento mori – offered a cutting-edge metaphor through which to explore our mortal fears. There's no shortage of sinister balls in Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, and at one of them an X-ray image becomes a party-piece, eliciting one man's grave denial "at the sight of this rosary of bones labelled as being a picture of himself". Arguably this heightened awareness of what lies beneath prompts another of Proust's characters to compare an elderly guest to "a skeleton in an open dress".

Proust diffuses the heavy-handed allegorising of Poe and Rethel by working with the same ideas at the level of metaphor. His most chilling partygoer is a doctor by the name of Professor E, described as wandering around the gathering alone, "like a minister of death". But Proust also understood aristocratic vanity, and how the complex rituals of French social life were designed to suppress the possibility of death, just as Prince Prospero believes his palace gates will keep out the plague. In one of Proust's darkest and funniest party scenes, the dying Charles Swann tries to broach the subject of his impending demise with his hosts, the Duke and Duchess of Guermantes. Swann accepts their wilful evasion of his announcement, knowing "that for other people their own social obligations took precedence over the death of a friend". While his wife disappears to change her shoes, the Duke talks helplessly to Swann in morbid colloquialisms, displaying a Freudian compulsion that would make Basil Fawlty cringe. He tells poor Swann how his wife is "tired out already, she'll reach the dinner-table quite dead. Besides, I tell you frankly, I'm dying of hunger."

Virginia Woolf, an admiring reader of Proust, was interested in the dramatic potential of the party as a way of bringing to the fore that which the joviality of the occasion attempts to deny. In Mrs Dalloway's climactic gathering she describes one guest as a "spectral grenadier, draped in black". Death arrives here, too, not as a shrouded figure but in the form of gossip: a shell-shocked soldier, a patient of one of her affluent acquaintances, has that very evening flung himself from his window. "Oh! thought Clarissa, in the middle of my party, here's death." The soldier's suicide is a textbook memento mori for Mrs Dalloway, who has been rendered blasé to the terror and beauty of living by the self-absorbed anxieties of social life. One of the cruellest moments in Stephen Daldry's film The Hours, based on Michael Cunningham's Woolf-inspired novel of the same name, occurs when a terminally ill character tells his friend and carer: "Oh Mrs Dalloway, always giving parties to cover the silence."

The Christmas party in James Joyce's "The Dead" is another attempt at the suppression of existential silence, and is perhaps the most concerted modernist interpretation of the danse macabre. The floors of the house creak and thump with waltzes and quadrilles, but this liveliness summons ghosts. Gabriel Conroy's wife Gretta stands on the stairs, transfixed by a song that reminds her of a dead love from her youth. After Gretta tells Gabriel about this memory, Gabriel becomes conscious of the decay he has felt all along. In his nervous speech at the party he describes his old aunt as being "gifted with perennial youth". However, once cuckolded by his wife's reminiscences, he thinks how this same aunt "would soon be a shade … He had caught that haggard look upon her face for a moment when she was singing."

On a wall above the piano, Gabriel notices a picture of Romeo and Juliet's balcony scene hanging beside a needlework depiction of Edward IV's sons, presumed murdered in the Tower of London. Desire and death rub shoulders here, by now a familiar partnership in our post-Freud world. Richard Harris's collection reflects the dynamic between eroticism and annihilation in pieces such as Ivo Saliger's The Doctor, the Girl, and Death. In this muted etching on brown paper, a brawny doctor holds up a slumping, naked girl, his free hand jealously pushing against the skull of the crouching skeleton that grasps the girl's thighs and paws at her hair. A piece entitled "Au Revoir" is a French postcard displaying a black-and-white sketch of two lovers on the cusp of a kiss, their dark bouffant heads of hair doubling as the cavernous eyes of the skull into which their clinch is set. A photograph by the Czech photographer František Drtikol, who often used professional dancers as his subjects, shows a female nude holding a skull. The erotic vitality of the model's strong, naked physique contrasts with her sobering prop, but the meaning of the image is made ambiguous by the careful balance of its symbolism: does the dwarfed skull's empty gaze wither the nude's fecundity, or do life's largeness and vigour ultimately overwhelm the smallness of death?

The Freudian notion that pleasure and destruction are our two principal motivations continues to fuel the potency of dancing as an ambiguous symbol long after its macabre medieval career. After the modernists, Eros and Death continue their waltz in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's The Leopard, a novel that is clearly alert to the decay woven into youthful romance. At yet another deathly ball, men wearing black are likened to carrion crows; the women are wrapped in dresses from Naples, sent to them "in long black cases like coffins". The party's beautiful young couple, Tancredi and Angelica, remind the Sicilian prince, Don Fabrizio, of actors playing Romeo and Juliet (them again) who are unaware of where the script will lead them. Melancholy with middle age, the prince watches them blithely sailing over the dance floor, sensing both their tenderness and self-interest, and how these complexities of love are in the end trumped by the unspoken fear of death, "by the mutual clasp of those bodies destined to die". Here Don Fabrizio is sick with the nostalgia portrayed in Alexander Pope's "Epistle to a Lady", which dramatises lost beauty as a sort of hag's jig: "Still round and round the Ghosts of Beauty glide, / And haunt the places where their Honour dy'd."

There is ironic power in coupling the vivacity of dance with the tomb's stillness. At their best, the artistic progeny of the danse macabre occupy that affecting region between archetype and cliché, allowing the artist access to themes of hubris, decadence, ephemerality and sorrow. Dance being a temporal medium gives it a natural kinship with the idea of mortality. In Joyce's story, Miss Daly's waltz "made lovely time" but, while time may be many things, lovely isn't one of them. The waltz's three-quarter pulse produces a temporal circularity that attempts to defy life's linear diminishing.

Dance's temporal evasions and manipulations serve only to make the ineluctability of time more apparent, and it's arguably this curious inversion that has attracted the artistic imagination. It is harder to sense the frantic denial beating within free-style dancing's sheer exhilaration. But even young, rhythmic Tony in Saturday Night Fever feels the acceleration of all this exhilaration, as though disco, being life in fast-forward, is its own groovy kind of memento mori. "Dancing can't last for ever," Tony says. "It's a short-lived kind of thing … I'm getting older, you know?"

Summary: From the cavorting skeletons of medieval danse macabre to Saturday Night Fever, the terror of mortality has always mingled with joie de vivre on the dancefloor. By Laurence Scott


Google Inc. said yesterday that it will give $6 million to three Boston-area groups as part of its effort to support education and technology nonprofits.

The grants will go to Citizen Schools, the Concord Consortium, and the Harvard School of Public Health. Google did not release specific amounts of each grant, but they are part of $40 million in donations to about 40 groups worldwide.

Google said it singled out Citizen Schools, a Boston group that connects volunteers with area middle school students, for its work in exposing students to science, technology, engineering, and math education, and for expanding the “horizons of underprivileged youngsters.’’

Code for America, a San Francisco-based technology nonprofit that has partnered with the city of Boston to develop software apps, received $1.5 million.

Google also supported several tech endeavors to fight modern day slavery and human trafficking such as Polaris Project’s National Human Trafficking Hotline and the Slavery Footprint calculator.

Summary: Google Inc. announced today that it will give $6 million to three Boston area groups as part of its effort to support education and technology nonprofits. The grants will go to Citizen Schools, the Concord Consortium, and the Harvard School of Public Health. Google said it singled out Citizen Schools, a Boston group that connects volunteers with area middle school students, for its work in exposing students to science, technology, engineering, and math education and for expanding the “horizons of underprivileged youngsters.’’


Unlike many Apple product launches, there were no fans queuing around the block Friday because the devices were only available for pre-order online.

Apple touted the design of the Watch at its launch in March and the devices have a number of interchangeable bands. The global launch means people in Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, the U.K. and the U.S, can now pre-order a device.

In an attempt to create exclusivity and capture a high-end, luxury audience, Apple has even released an 18-karat gold version known as the Edition which starts at $10,000. The Apple Watch Sport starts at $349, while the Apple Watch starts at $549.

Slice Intelligence said that U.S. customers spent an average of $382.83 on the Apple Watch Sport and $707.04 on the Apple Watch.

Summary: Apple's first foray into the world of the smartwatch generated nearly 1 million pre-orders in the United States Friday, according to early estimates.


On the outlook for the economy, the public's views have further to recover. Only 28 percent of Americans believe the economy will get better in the next year, a one-point improvement from last quarter but below the post-recession high of 36 percent in March 2012. Even in the middle of the recession, Americans were more optimistic, with 42 percent of the public believing that the economy would improve in December 2008.

Read MoreUS service sector growth slips in March: ISM survey

Views on the economy were helped by relatively upbeat views on wage expectations and increases in home values. The net percentage of Americans expecting their home values and wages to go up (that is, those expecting an increase minus those expecting a decrease) were both at post-recession highs last quarter and came off only a bit in March.

A possible sign that the economy is in better shape is that Americans seem a little less focused on it overall. Asked about the top issue for the 2016 presidential election, 23 percent of the public pick the economy and unemployment as their No. 1 issue, followed by healthcare with 17 percent. But as recently as last year, the economy was the top issue for 40 percent of the public, according to a CNN poll.

Meanwhile, average investors are a bit less bullish on stocks then they were last quarter, but the wealthiest Americans—those with at least $100,000 in income and $50,000 in stocks—are more bullish than they were.

Summary: Americans' views on the state of the economy improved in the latest CNBC All-America Economic survey.


NYMEX oil has been hovering around the $48 support level for several months. Oil first developed a rebound from the low of $44.45 after falling below support near $48. The second fall below $48 developed a rebound from the low near $43.46. This lower low is not evidence of a continuation of the downtrend, however. Oil is developing a consolidation pattern around the $48 level. The upper edge of the consolidation pattern is near $53.53. The lower edge of the consolidation pattern is near $43.456.

NYMEX oil trades in broad trading bands that define the trend behavior. The fall in oil was very rapid with short-lived consolidation or pauses near each of the significant support or resistance levels. These support and resistance levels also define the limits and barriers to any future rally and uptrend development.

Read MoreAnalyst: We've got an oversupplied oil market

Oil continues to move in a consolidation a between support near $48 and resistance near $58. On the daily chart (not pictured), the Guppy Multiple Moving Average (GMMA) indicator shows the short-term group of averages testing the lower edge of the long-term group of moving averages. It has tested this level four times starting 2015 February. The long-term group of averages indicates what investors are thinking. This group of averages is beginning to compress but it has not yet begun turn upwards. This shows investors have stopped the heavy selling. Investors are not yet strong buyers. This behavior is necessary before any new uptrend can develop.

Investors and traders should watch for this future GMMA relationship to develop to confirm a new uptrend is developing. They watch for the short-term group of GMMA averages to compress and move above the upper edge of the long-term group of GMMA averages. The upper edge of the long-term GMMA is near $50 and below historical resistance near $58. Investors watch the GMMA behavior during the retreat away from resistance near $58. The retreat should retest the lower edge of the long-term GMMA and then rebound from this support level.

The development of the new uptrend starts when the oil price moves out of the consolidation band. The development of a new uptrend in oil is confirmed when the price is able to stay above resistance near $58.

Strong and fast downtrends normally do not quickly reverse direction, so there is a high probability of a period of consolidation activity between $48 and $58 that may also last several months. This consolidation band provides a rally and retreat trading environment suitable for traders. Investors should wait for a sustained breakout above $58 shown on the weekly NYMEX before they join the new long-term uptrend.

Daryl Guppy is a trader and author of Trend Trading, The 36 Strategies of the Chinese for Financial Traders – www.guppytraders.com. He is a regular guest on CNBCAsia Squawk Box. He is a speaker at trading conferences in China, Asia, Australia and Europe.

Summary: Oil prices rose as the framework Iran deal offers little chance for a increase in oil exports, but charts suggest it's too early to expect any price rise.


The loudest opponents of the new law come from the restaurant and franchise restaurant industry. They've argued for months that the increased minimum wage will force them to increase prices, fire employees or cut employee hours, and even go out of business. But advocates for the wage hikes scoff at those claims and the next year is likely to be filled with lots of dueling statistics, dueling anecdotal stories, and generally a lot of yelling and screaming with neither side backing down.

Read MoreHow Seattle franchisees are fighting the $15 minimum wage

Whichever side you fall on, there is one undeniable casualty as a result of the minimum-wage hike in Seattle: tips.

The city's new rules say that employers can count tips against the minimum-wage requirement. On top of that, a tipped employee's minimum wage in Seattle is set at $10/hour, compared to $11 for everyone else. While this helps employers meet the new costs, it's likely to turn out to be a triple whammy for the waiters and waitresses who rely on tips:

More taxable income. The current federal minimum wage for tipped workers is just $2.13/hour. In Seattle, the minimum wage for tipped workers even before this "increase" was much more than that, but it was still less than $10/hour. Either way, that first $10 in tips for workers will now become part of a more reportable and taxable income when it used to be a cash-in-pocket payment.

Lower tips. The dining public in Seattle is well aware of the minimum-wage hikes and is seeing this as a "raise" in tipped workers' pay as opposed to a de facto reduction in their income. Many restaurant workers are already reporting reductions in tips as customers take all of this into account.

Math. Employers now have a massive new burden of calculating volatile tip income for each worker and keeping very accurate records and making those gap payments when workers don't reach the $10/hour threshold.

Simply put, this makes it harder for even honest employers to pay their tipped workers accurately and in a timely fashion. And anyone who knows how the real world works knows that when you make it harder to do something, it often doesn't get done. This is not just a hypothetical scenario. All of the major labor activist groups across the country have long argued that tipped workers are more likely to be illegally underpaid. When business is down, they argue, there's a huge incentive for employers not to make up the wage difference for their employees. There are hundreds of documented cases of businesses doing just that.

Read MoreGwyneth Paltrow fails $29 food-stamp challenge

Meanwhile, that failed "we're from the government and we're here to help" reality in Seattle is now in danger of spreading to the much larger city of Los Angeles. L.A.'s restaurant owners are pushing hard for a similar tipped-income offset to the newly proposed $13.25 to $15.25 minimum wage the L.A. city council is currently considering. And the restaurant owners may win this fight because L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti is already on record supporting a California state assembly bill that would count tips toward meeting minimum pay requirements. In other words, the push to supposedly raise minimum pay in Los Angeles has a great chance of bringing down a long-standing California law that made working as a tipped employee much more lucrative.

And it's really a bad thing to mess with tipping, because tipping is one of the few remaining ways the customer and the actual person providing a service can relate to one another in a truly free market sense. It's empowering for everyone involved in the transaction. I may not have any control over what my waiter's minimum pay from his employer is, but tipping gives me the power to be the primary source of my waiter's income during the time he's serving me and my family.

Read MoreWant $70000 in minimum wages?

The waiter may not be able to improve his base salary more than once or twice a year no matter how well he works. But every time he serves a customer he has an excellent chance of being rewarded more financially for making an extra effort. It's an unwritten contract between the two of us that more often than not results in me getting very good service and the waiter getting a financial boost for doing so. It's a terrible thing to reduce the financial effectiveness of tips because of rules imposed by an outside party who is not the customer, the service provider, or even that service provider's employer. In this case, that outside party is the government.

Maybe we should make our elected leaders work only for tips from the real voters.

Commentary by Jake Novak, supervising producer of "Power Lunch." Follow him on Twitter @jakejakeny.

Summary: Waiters and waitresses who rely on tips will get hit with a triple whammy, says Jake Novak.


1) Over the weekend, as traders pondered the start of the year, much was made of the fact that only one of the ten sectors in the S&P 500 is up so far in the New Year: Financials.

It's true that a small number of big cap-names are doing well in 2014:

Bank of America up 5.4 percent;

Goldman Sachs up 0.5 percent;

Morgan Stanley up 0.5 percent;

JP Morgan up 0.3 percent;

Some of this is clearly based on expectations of a steeper yield curve, and perhaps on more mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and leveraged buyout activity. Still, financial sector names had a good year, and much of this is already anticipated.

But it's a small group. Only 22 of the 81 stocks in the financial sector are positive. Most insurance companies are down, as are most regional banks. Outside of the large-caps above, there's a smattering of REITs in the green:

Boston Properties up 1.2 percent;

Simon Property Group up 1.2 percent;

Equity Residential up 1.1 percent;

Kimco Realty up 1.0 percent;

What do they have in common? They are the biggest companies in the Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) space. In fact, they are 7 of the 10 largest REITs by market capitalization that is in the Vanguard REIT Index Fund.

Again, I get it: as interest rates rise, the cap rates rise, which increases the value of some of these properties. But that also seems priced in.

Summary: We start the first full trading week of 2014 with Asia notably weaker. Overnight, Japan and China's benchmarks buckled.


A mission control official in Moscow said at dawn on Friday "they've completed the landing," after the small Soyuz TMA-8 capsule, charred black from re-entry into the atmosphere, landed in northern Kazakhstan.

The craft, returning from the International Space Station, was also carrying Russian cosmonaut Pavel Vinogradov and US astronaut Jeff Williams.

The capsule slowed its descent with parachutes and fired rockets to make a soft landing on its side in a field about 80km north of the town of Arkalyk.

A Russian space programme recovery team surrounded the craft, opened the hatch and extracted the cosmonauts.

At a farewell ceremony aboard the station just before the landing Ansari said: "This 10 days has been magnificent for me. I hope to be able to have this experience once again in with a bunch of red roses the near future."

Ansari, a 40-year-old US telecoms entrepreneur who left Iran in 1984, was the first female tourist, first female Muslim and first Iranian-born tourist to go into space.

AnsariÂ waved and smiled broadly after being presentedÂ with a pink ribbon by the recovery team.

The space travellers were then taken away for medical checks.

There have been three other space tourists, each paying the Russian space programme about $20 million for the trip.

Ansari blasted off from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on September 18 along with a fresh US-Russian crew that relieved Vinogradov and Williams on the space station.

Summary: A Russian Soyuz capsule carrying Iranian-born space tourist Anousheh Ansari has landed safely in the Kazakh steppe.


It's been a rough year for Twitter. The company's stock fell more than 5 percent on Monday, reaching an all-time low since it started trading publicly in November 2014. But one trader says Twitter will make a full comeback by 2017.

"In the short term, there's nothing really saying Twitter can reverse and go higher," Andrew Keene of KeeneOnTheMarket.com said Monday on CNBC's "Trading Nation." "However, I think it's a great longer-term play."

The social media firm's first-quarter earnings report prompted a sharp drop of 18 percent in the company's share price. More recently, Twitter reported earnings that beat expectations in July, but the stock fell more than 14 percent on disappointing active-user numbers. The stock is down more than 18 percent year-to-date.

Without naming a specific catalyst for Monday's selloff, analyst Ronald Josey of JMP Securities said the stock's overall weakness is due to continued concerns over the company's growth, product launches and search for a new chief executive.

Read More Twitter closes at record low amid growth concerns

But Keene said the social media firm still has a lot of potential with its user base of 316 million monthly active users. He said the company will rebound once it fixes its monetization problems, or it could be a potential buyout target.

"I think it will reverse and over time, I'm not talking about the next day, in the next week even, but I think it can recuperate to about the $45 dollar level," Keene said.

For his trade, Keene is buying the January 2017 35-strike call option and selling the 45-strike call option for $2.50. Keene's price target is $45 by January 2017, and his trade is profitable if Twitter rises above $37.50 by that time.

"I can be initially wrong because the price action and price momentum is to the downside on the daily and weekly chart," Keene said.

For now, analysts aren't too positive on Twitter's outlook. Out of 40 analysts that cover the stock, 63 percent have a "hold" rating, with an average target price of about $40, according to FactSet.

Read MoreTwitter stock sinks as execs warn on user growth

"Twitter can be a successful internet player with highly unique characteristics, but if the addressable audience is going to remain limited, it stifles Twitter's long-term earnings power," Nomura's Anthony DiClemente wrote in a research note Wednesday, after cutting Twitter's target price following earnings to $33 from $39.

A Stifel report from last week also expressed concern about dwindling users.

"We have long held that revenue growth and user growth would have to converge but even we did not expect it this soon," Stifel's Scott Devitt wrote. "In short, we continue to believe the company has a product problem."

Summary: Twitter's stock has fallen to all-time lows since its IPO, but one options trader says to buy in for a comeback.


Oracle announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Responsys in a deal worth nearly $1.5 billion, as the software giant looks to strengthen its cloud division.

Shares of Responsys spiked nearly 40 percent after being temporarily halted following the announcement.

Oracle's offer of $27 a share represents a 38-percent premium to Responsys' closing price on Thursday. Responsys is a software company that helps marketers run email campaigns.

"Our strategy of combining the leaders across complementary technologies signifies Oracle's overwhelming commitment to winning and serving the CMO better than any other software company in the world," said Mark Hurd, president of Oracle, in a press statement.

Oracle said it expects to close the deal during the first half of 2014.

"Responsys has always been focused on helping marketers realize their largest opportunity—coordinating their marketing touch points across channels, across the customer lifecycle, and across industries, and as a part of Oracle, we will only accelerate our efforts," said Dan Springer, CEO of Responsys.

Oracle shares were slightly lower. (Click here for the latest quote.)

On Wednesday, Oracle posted quarterly results that topped Wall Street expectations, reversing three-straight quarters of revenue misses.

—By CNBC's JeeYeon Park. Follow her on Twitter @JeeYeonParkCNBC.

Summary: Oracle announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Responsys for $27 a share, or approximately $1.5 billion.


The expected $68 price per share for Alibaba's IPO is a lucky number for the Chinese.

The word for "eight" in Mandarin Chinese is "ba," which sounds similar to the word signifying the arrival of good fortune. Although none of the Chinese characters for Alibaba are the ones for "eight," the last two words have the same lucky "ba" sound.

The Chinese word for "six" is also traditionally considered an auspicious number, and there's a Chinese saying that goes "double six, great future."

In all, a pricing of $68 a share for Alibaba would combine the good luck of both "six" and "eight" with hopes of great success.

Read MoreOh, the power of Alibaba

Many had originally speculated that Alibaba's IPO would have come on August 8, literally the eighth day of the eight month in Chinese, for maximum charm.

In terms of bad luck, other Chinese superstitions include avoidance of "four," which sounds like the word for dead—"si." Many Chinese buildings skip the fourth floor, just as Western ones often omit the 13th.

On Thursday, Alibaba gave the New York Stock Exchange a Tao Doll, a more larger version of the pint-sized mascot for the company's e-commerce site Taobao. Rather than the original orange, the doll is blue and covered with symbols of Chinese mythology.

Summary: The expected $68 price a share for Alibaba's IPO is a lucky number for the Chinese.


The elder Lee drew praise for his market-friendly policies, but also criticism at home and abroad for his strict controls over the press, public protest and political opponents.

The election came as economic risks are in focus due to uncertainties stemming from China's economic slowdown and wobbly markets.

DBS Bank, Singapore's biggest lender, this week cut its economic growth forecast for Singapore to 1.8 percent, below the official forecast of 2-2.5 percent.

Read More Showdown of Singapore's political party apps

"In the end I would say there was this flight to safety given the economic uncertainties," said Eugene Tan, a political analyst and associate professor at Singapore Management University.

Years of strong growth have turned the island nation into an international financial hub with spotless streets and malls, well-tended parks and living standards unmatched in Southeast Asia.

But that success and an influx of foreign workers have brought high property prices, crowded public transport, and a widening wealth gap which have fuelled resentment among many in a city that surveys rank as one of the world's most expensive.

A total of eight opposition parties had hoped to take advantage of the grumbling and big crowds had turned out for opposition rallies during the campaign, in which candidates focused on basic issues of jobs, healthcare and housing.

The PAP was forced to shift slightly to the left after its poor showing in 2011 to address an emboldened opposition's calls for a better deal for middle- and lower-class voters.

The government launched a multi-billion-dollar healthcare insurance programme for the elderly, introduced cooling measures for the property market and curbed the flow of foreign workers.

--Additional reporting by Aradhana Aravindan, Chyen Yee Lee, Fathin Ungku, Edgar Su, Anshuman Daga and Christophe Van Der Perre

Summary: Singapore's ruling party won a strong election victory, boosting its vote share and seat tally, brushing off the opposition in a hotly contested poll.


There’s a certain theatricality about Davis, the dissolute professor played by Craig Mathers in “Academy Fight Song,” a play making its world premiere in a Centastage production running through Sept. 26. Whether verbally fencing with his department chair or ex-wife, or giving a hilariously inappropriate presentation to academic peers, Davis seems to be always performing. It’s a tap dance of wit, emotional evasion, and sloppy charm, and an act that has served him reasonably well in the past. But for all his face-saving bluster he’s reached middle age with only a contract-to-contract position as adjunct faculty, an unpublished book, and an unproduced screenplay to show for it.

As written by playwright Andrew Clarke — who, yes, teaches playwriting at Emerson College — Davis could come off as a preening boor. So it’s a tribute to Mathers’s lively performance that we understand his charm, and believe that he could have safely ridden his wave of bad behavior for a while, even if headed merely toward professional (and personal) mediocrity. Mathers is laugh-out-loud hilarious in a monologue that best showcases Davis’s disdainful hamminess.

Much of “Academy Fight Song” feels very familiar. Characters like Davis pretty much occupy their own subgenre in literature and film. (Do I even have to mention that he has too much fondness for brown liquor, and a roving eye pointed toward graduate students?) As such, little about the play feels particularly urgent. But Clarke’s dialogue is so smart and funny — and the four-person cast does so well with it — that the play sustains itself over its 80-minute run time, and offers a convincing portrait of a man and his chronic self-sabotage.

What professional promise Davis once possessed is now exhibited more promisingly in Jonathan (Tyler Catanella), the whiz-kid protégé turned competitor. He’s a former student who for mysterious reasons has become, in his mid-20s, an in-demand scholar and writer. “You’re getting the life I trained for,” Davis says at one point, and it’s as much an objective observation as a cry of distress.

Jonathan is working on what seems to be a text-heavy graphic novel, and the play turns on the notion that he can stoke a bidding war among publishers in part by affecting “the whole Salinger act” and disappearing from an obscure academic conference. Catanella is called upon to perform a huge personality shift between his two scenes, and while he’s convincing in both modes, Jonathan ends up feeling like two different people.

In fact, all the plot machinations, and the verbally circuitous ways in which they’re set up and then explained — Davis’s drinking buddy and boss Greer (Richard Snee) talks at length about an offstage character who Clarke probably should have just saved for a different play — are the least convincing elements of the piece. Since they are there only to put Davis in a moment of crisis so we can see him respond to it, they should be less cumbersome in the flow of things.

Clarke has loaded the play with very funny lines, and director Joe Antoun keeps things moving, particularly in a scene between Davis and ex-wife Liz (Tracy Oliverio) that reveals their relationship as one of the more interesting aspects of the play. (“I didn’t enjoy myself nearly as much as you suspected,” he says by way of lame excuse for a past extramarital dalliance.)

Centastage should be applauded for its quarter century of developing new plays written by New England authors. Ideally, the result would always be plays with something new to say, a sense of social and cultural urgency. Though I’m not convinced this particular story absolutely needs to be told (again), this production does tell it well.

Written by Andrew Clarke. Directed by Joe Antoun. At Calderwood Pavilion, Boston Center for the Arts, through Sept. 26. 617-933-8600, www.bostontheatrescene.com