SO PROUDLY SHE SAILED Tales of Old Ironsides. By Olga Cabral. Illustrated. 170 pp. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. $8.95. (Ages 10 to 14)

ON the morning of Sept. 20, 1797, a large, cheerful crowd gathered around the fine new frigate that stood, bright with flags, her hull gleaming with fresh copper, ready to slide down the ways into Boston harbor. A little after noon, carpenters knocked out her shoring timbers and - nothing happened. The Constitution sullenly refused to go into the water; a glum symbol of the thousand problems besetting the infant American Navy, she stood immobile until the following month.

Once they finally got her launched, though, she did very well indeed; so well, in fact, that she's still afloat, and still a commissioned vessel in the United States Navy. In her documentary novel, ''So Proudly She Sailed,'' Olga Cabral uses a series of vignettes to trace the career of the Constitution from the third - and successful - attempt to launch her. It's a story worth telling, for the frigate has had a remarkable life. When, in the years following the American Revolution, it became evident that the young Republic couldn't get along without a navy, a chary Congress reluctantly voted funds for six vessels. Battle ships with their two gun decks and thousand-man crews seemed prohibitively expensive, so Congress settled on compromise warships - large, sturdy frigates powerful enough to fight ships of the line in heavy seas when their lower gunports couldn't be opened, and fast enough to run if they had to.

Few compromises have proved so successful, as Miss Cabral makes clear in her story. Since no single life could span the Constitution's long history, the author has worked up a series of young protagonists, the first Johnny Griggs, an apprentice to a Boston wigmaker, who comes aboard the frigate not long after her launching and serves in the campaign to subdue the Barbary States, whose depredations on American shipping had prompted the development of the new navy in the first place.

By the time the Constitution begins the War of 1812 operations that made her famous, Johnny has been replaced by a Massachusetts farmboy named Amos Brown (the boys seem pretty much interchangeable; the ship is the true hero of this story). Under Capt. Isaac Hull, the 44-gun American vessel destroyed the British frigate Guerriere in a brief, fierce action. During the fight, an American sailor saw an English cannonball bounce harmlessly off the stout hull. ''Huzza! Her sides are made of iron!'' he called, giving his ship a durable nickname. Soon afterward, she took the powerful Java in a battle that caused the British Admiralty to forbid their frigate captains to engage the American 44's in single-ship actions - with an effect on morale that can be imagined in a proud service that had had no serious rivals for 20 years. In 1830 the Navy Department decided to scrap the aging warrior, a cold-blooded move that spurred the young Oliver Wendell Holmes to write ''Old Ironsides.'' Published in newspapers across the country, the verse ignited fierce public protest, and the Constitution enjoys the distinction of being the only warship ever saved by a poet.

Miss Cabral follows the frigate long past her fighting prime, through an 1844 cruise around the world and an interesting tour of duty hunting slavers off the African coast on the eve of the Civil War. Finally, in 1879, we see the game old anachronism carrying trolley cars, a steam locomotive and other gifts of the Industrial Revolution across the winter Atlantic to a world's fair in Paris. She nearly went to the knackers once more in 1925 - saved this time largely by the pennies of schoolchildren - before she ended up where she began, in Boston harbor, visited by as many as 14,000 people daily.

''So Proudly She Sailed'' can serve to introduce young readers to the ardors and triumphs of life aboard an American man-of-war in the age of sail. The handsomely produced book does have occasional lapses, though. When, for instance, the Constitution closes with the Guerriere, the Briton breaks out a defiant signal that reads NOT THE LITTLE BELT. Since it is nowhere explained that the Little Belt was a smaller British warship recently mauled by another American frigate, the incident is as baffling as if the flag had read NOT A POCKET COMB. Again, the text states flatly that ''the United States won the war (of 1812) as everybody knows.'' But perhaps this particular error is appropriate to this book; it is only because of the extraordinary showing the Constitution and her sister ships made in that war that one can so easily forget its true outcome.


By Flora Lewis THE INTELLECTUAL RESISTANCE IN EUROPE. By James D. Wilkinson. 358 pages. Harvard University Press. $20.

THE shock of occupation in France and the emergence from Fascism in Italy and Germany put an acute edge on the old dilemma of the intellectual society. In each country, people responded: with anguish, with imagination, for a while with a great surge of hope.

It was clear in a time of deep confusion - of triumph for some and disaster for others, but in any case of the existing establishment's total collapse -that someone had to take responsibility for social and moral guidance. In each country, intellectuals rose to the task.

James D. Wilkinson's book is a crisp survey of how they went about it during and immediately after World War II. Although the background was quite different, the pressures were similar and the essential question was the same eternal challenge.

Are intellectuals a class apart, responsible only to their own inner urges and a vision of man's need that goes beyond the daily struggle and even defies it? Are they duty bound to immerse themselves in their society to articulate its conscience and its context? Or are they natural leaders, destined not only to provide the ideas that shape society but also to make sure that they are implemented? True Test of Values

All approaches were attempted. Mr. Wilkinson summarizes and explains them with great clarity: Here is Jean-Paul Sartre, arguing the obligation of political engagement and action as the true test of values. But, as the author shows with a quick, penetrating jab of the pen, Sartre's exhilarating experience in the Resistance permitted him some unavowed assumptions and led to righteousness. Sartre's existentialism never answered the problem of how good and evil might be deduced from a contrary kind of experience.

Here is Albert Camus, rebuffed from certainty by his experience and withdrawing to a tentative pessimism about the possibility of ever being sure of morality through intellect, but not unhappy about having to live with doubt. Dignity is maybe all that can be asked.

Here is David Rousset, describing the vital importance of hope and how it felt to be liberated from Buchenwald: ''We never gave up the struggle, we never renounced, we never blasphemed against life. ... We never believed in the final disaster of humanity.''

Here is Dietrich Bonhoeffer, prepared to die for the goal of cultural survival. Here, after the war, is Guenther Eich, when the dreams of a truly new world had faded and the choices were no longer so dangerous but also not so clear: ''Be uncomfortable; be sand, not oil, in the machinery of the world.''

Here is Benedetto Croce, keeping liberty alive in the refuge of art by itself. And here is Ada Gobetti, reflecting in the letdown after the blaze was over that the problem was ''not allowing that little flame of solidarity and fraternal humanism, which we had seen born, to die in the calm atmosphere of an apparent return to daily life.''

Mr. Wilkinson presents an immense cast, not of characters, because he scants the personal, but of thoughtful, carefully articulated attitudes toward life. Of course, he points out, ultimate human drama and the immediate breath of tragedy create a special atmosphere. Everything is clearer, everyone is closer. Everything that is not directly impossible seems possible.

But soon enough came what he calls ''the restoration.'' He makes it sound as though everything slid back into the same ugly old patterns that alienated prewar intellectuals and moved them to attack bourgeois society. His careful objectivity fails to raise the question of whether it was just a restoration of ordinary human complexity when life is ordinary, when intellectuals are people among others doing their part in the division of labor.

The admirable distance Mr. Wilkinson takes from his anguished subjects leaves an appetite for a conclusion. If the intellectuals of the resistance failed to create a new society in the image of their aspirations, was it because the philistines did them in once more? Or because they really weren't capable of what they imagined? Or because their imaginations were distorted by the very attempt at transcendence?

In the end, he leaves us wondering whether he thinks intellectuals really matter or not, except at crucial moments when they are called on for expertise - as accountants and mechanics and plumbers are all important when they're needed but otherwise merge into the crowd.

The way he handles his people and his coolly judicious presentation raise the issue. But he never quite addresses it. This is a slim book, provocative and therefore finally unsatisfying. Searching Efforts

Obviously, Mr. Wilkinson is deeply interested in what an intellectual should be in or modern world or he wouldn't have gone to such scholarly, searching efforts to show what they were at a time of great crisis. And he has achieved his report with a marvelous succinctness, placing everyone precisely. His book is a little almanac written with fluent grace.

But he has chosen as subject the problem of the intellectual and politics, of where the searchlight should turn. He quotes Bertolt Brecht's ironic reminder that you can't ''dissolve the people and elect another.'' And while he doesn't draw the consequences, that seems to be the main trouble.

Illustrations: Photo of James D. Wilkinson


''ABOVE-AVERAGE temperatures for the next 90 days,'' forecasts the National Weather Service. The Old Farmer's Almanac, however, predicts that June and July will be wetter and cooler than usual, followed by an August that ''drizzles, mizzles; sun sizzles.'' (Do not bother looking up ''mizzles'' in the dictionary. ''We'll make up any word to make a rhyme,'' said the Almanac's editor, Judson Hale.)

Assuming an average summer here in New York, Fahrenheit temperatures will fluctuate between rare lows of 62 degrees (in June) and frequent highs of 90 degrees (in August). Summer means higher electric bills for fans and air-conditioners, and the heat is already on because Consolidated Edison's summer rate is almost 30 percent higher than last year's.

Running an average room air-conditioner will cost 17.4 cents an hour this summer, based on Con Ed's rate of 15.2 cents a kilowatthour, a spokesman for the utility estimated. Seasonal operation, based on 350 hours, or half the national average, will cost $61. Last summer it cost $48.30. Among suggestions for keeping this year's bill down are these:

- If you're buying a new machine, select the most efficient one you can afford. Energy efficiency ratings, appearing on a yellow label affixed to every air-conditioner, estimate the seasonal cost of its operation as well as rate its efficiency. The ratings generally range from 7.5 to 10.5, with higher numbers indicating greater efficiency and greater savings in operating costs. (The chart on the tags, however, does not list electricity rates as high as Con Ed's 15.2 cents a kilowatt-hour, but an approximation can be obtained by adding together the operating costs for the 2-cent and the 12-cent rates that are listed.)

To illustrate the possible savings, a yellow ticket on a large airconditioner estimated its seasonal operation at $76.08. This was the same cost given for operating a much smaller, less efficient airconditioner.

To determine the cooling requirements of your rooms, consult the July 1980 issue of Consumer Reports, which also rates a number of brand-name machines. The Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers, at 20 North Wacker Drive, Chicago, Ill. 60606, will also mail, free, a ''cooling load estimate form'' to help determine cooling requirements.

- Use fans and the fan setting on the air-conditioner as much as possible. If the air is not too humid, simply circulating warm air over the skin speeds evaporation, the body's natural cooling process. In the kitchen use a window-mounted fan to evacuate the hot, moist air produced by cooking - and to keep it from making other rooms in the house uncomfortable.

- An-air conditioner can cool a room quickly, so money can be saved by turning it down or off whenever the room is not to be used for an hour.

- Air-conditioners with automatic timers and temperature controls cost more, but they can also help you save money. If your machine does not have a built-in timer, which turns the machine on 30 minutes before you arrive home, one can be bought for about $10. Once the room is cool, periodically adjust the setting to obtain the best temperature, in terms of balancing comfort and cost. According to Con Ed, it costs 28 percent more to cool a room to 75 degrees than it does to maintain a 78-degree temperature.

- Use the ''exhaust'' setting sparingly, as this discharges about 10 percent of the air that you have paid to cool.

- Turn off unnecessary lights and appliances, which generate heat. A prime candidate is the drying cycle on dishwashers.

- Use an exhaust fan in the bathroom to evacuate the humid air created by bathing.

- Seal the house as well as you would in winter. Keeping the cool air in requires closing fireplace dampers, using all the storm windows and covering sunny windows with curtains, shades, blinds, awnings or the newer films that reflect sunlight away from the house. Cool air, being heavier than warm air, sinks. This means that expensively produced cool air may be disappearing through door cracks and floor registers.

- Insulation in the attic shields the sun's heat and is one of the best ways to save energy, summer or winter. Attic fans are also effective in exhausting hot air.

- Once a month clean the filter on the air-conditioner, which is right behind the plastic front. Wash it with soap and water and replace it. You should also vacuum the condenser coils and fins, usually accessible from the front. After 18 months an air-conditioner can lose from 10 to 27 percent in efficiency because of dirt on the condenser.

Also, install the air-conditioner on the shady or north side of the house, if possible. If the sun hits the unit directly, the airconditioner will have a more difficult time getting rid of heat. Shielding the unit with an awning is one solution.


HOLLYWOOD BARRY JAGODA arrived in Hollywood on Dec. 1, 1980, with the screen rights to a novel, $110,000 to spend and a jaunty confidence that by the end of a year he would be a movie producer.

When the moving vans came on Nov. 30, 1981, to take his furniture back to Washington, he was sadder but wiser. His option on ''The Man Who Brought the Dodgers Back to Brooklyn'' would expire the next day, along with his year's lease on the wrong house in the wrong neighborhood. The $110,000 was gone, and he was as far from producing a movie as ever.

''This is a story of mistakes,'' he said. The intense, 37-year-old Mr. Jagoda is not a hayseed with a dream. A 1967 graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism, a former CBS News producer and media adviser to former President Jimmy Carter, he is the proprietor of a small consulting concern in Washington. When he decided to put more than $100,000 of his own money into becoming a movie producer, he had a few friends in Hollywood and the expectation that his White House background would enable him to get his phone calls returned. Before leaving Washington, he called Jack Va lenti, president of the Motion Picture Asso ciation of America, for advice.

''Get an agent,'' Mr. Valenti said. Hollywood 'Culture'

''I never understood 'the Culture' of Hollywood,'' Mr. Jagoda said in retrospect. ''I never understood the importance of relationships and neighborhoods and agents. There are so many newcomers here, and every one of them has so many Hollywood dreams. How do you discriminate among the dreamers? By the kind of car you drive and the neighborhood you live in and who your agent is.''

His first mistake was leasing a four-bedroom house in Oxford Square, an aging neighborhood on the fringes of downtown Los Angeles. ''The first question anyone asked me was 'Who's your agent?' The second question was 'Where do you live?' '' said Mr. Jagoda. ''Then they always said, 'Oh.' My lawyer added that he never drove east of La Cienega except to the Music Center, and that was on the freeway. I hadn't realized the importance of living in West Hollywood or Beverly Hills. It was a large house, and David Ritz, the author of 'The Man Who Brought the Dodgers Back to Brooklyn,' lived nearby.''

His choice of car was luckier. ''I leased a Volkswagen convertible, an d everybody seemed to admire it, maybe because there aren't too many of them around.''

His second mistake was ''not really realizing the importance of an agent. For a newcomer, an agent is everything.'' He had sent a copy of ''The Man Who Brought the Dodgers Back to Brooklyn'' to Michael Black, a moderately important agent at ICM, a large and successful talent agency. When he phoned, he got turned down by a secretary with a curt, ''We're not interested, Barry.''

''In Washington and even New York, when you call somebody on the phone, you're treated with respect,'' he said. ''But the culture here is all first names and rude secretaries. For the first four or five months, I didn't even get in to see anybody. It was all done on the telephone. A few people treated me courteously, and in retrospect I see that as an aberration. Frank Rosenfelt, the chairman of M-G-M, was a gentleman. Norman Lear called back immediately. Director Dick Donner was polite enough to call us back after reading the screenplay to say that it was a 'charming story' but not for him. While the middle-level people were always rude, the top-level people were often civilized.'' Learning the Elementary

Thinking back on the year, he realizes that he wasted the first several months learning elementary things. ''We started sending the book around. It wasn't until February that we learned everything in Hollywood works off a screenplay and that we shouldn't have approached anybody before the screenplay was finished.''

For $25,000, he had optioned the unpublished ''The Man Who Brought the Dodgers Back to Brooklyn,'' about two friends who restore Ebbets Field brick by brick. The book was to be published in the spring of 1981, with Simon & Schuster printing 20,000 copies and spending $35,000 on promotion. David Ritz was a former college roommate - and is still a friend, although the relationship has been somewhat strained. His next mistake, Mr. Jagoda said ruefully, was hiring Mr. Ritz to do the screenplay. ''He'd had no experience writing scripts. As an amateur, I needed a well-known screenwriter.''

He freely admits that Mr. Ritz's first screenplay was awful. ''I saw the script as a good presentation of the book, but I had no idea what a screenplay was supposed to be. We had 15 people hot to read it, including Universal and M-G-M, and all their responses were similar. The script didn't grab you in the first 10 minutes, it didn't have three acts, and the characters didn't develop.''

He was stuck with Mr. Ritz because he had given him the Writer's Guild minimum fee of $26,250 for two drafts and a polish; he couldn't afford to hire another writer. Mr. Ritz's second draft was, according to everyone who saw it, a ''vast improvement.'' But the property was now somewhat stale and overexposed. Mr. Jagoda had shown it to too many people too early. By this time, it was September. The novel had been published without the supposedly promised $35,000 for promotion. It didn't sell well, although it got excellent reviews. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt praised it in The New York Times as a ''charming novelty.'' Not 'Commercial' Enough

Mr. Jagoda was also in the process of learning that, by Hollywood standards, his novel was not a ''commercial'' subject. ''It's a love story and a story of male bonding,'' he said, ''but, to Hollywood, none of that mattered. To Hollywood, it was 'a sports story.' ''

During his early months in Hollywood, he had thought if he could just get the novel and a script to Dustin Hoffman, his hoped-for star, and George Roy Hill, his hoped-for director, everything would be fine. A cynical producer had laughed at him. ''If old George is interested, he'll eat you up alive,'' the producer said. ''He'll takeover the project. As a matter of fact, anybod y will. You have no track record, so I don't know how you expect to get the picture made.''

George Roy Hill was not interested, but Mr. Jagoda was, he said, strung along by a number of other people: ''Jennings Lang at Universal encouraged us to death for six months.'' Such encouragement didn't translate into a development deal - in which a studio puts up seed money to get a new script written. Someone influential at Johnny Carson Productions was interested, but he left the company, and the new head of production told Mr. Jagoda to make his script for television.

By November, a lot of other people were telling him to make his movie for television, a polite brush-off. But he couldn't. ''I had paid too much for the book and the script,'' he said in frustration, ''So the numbers wouldn't work out for television.''

''One looks around for a happy ending,'' Mr. Jagoda added, on his way out of town. ''But, then, this isn't a movie.''

Illustrations: photo of Norman Lear photo of George Roy Hill photo of Dustin Hoffman photo of Barry and Karen Jagoda


PEKING— The little red-bound quotations of Mao Zedong have long vanished from sight, but thousands of new, pale yellow books filled bookstore shelves in China last week. They held the selected works of Liu Shaoqi, once villified as China's ''biggest capitalist roader,'' more recently resurrected as ''a great Marxist-Leninist and proletarian revolutionary.''

Mr. Liu had been China's chief of state and heir apparent to Mao until he ran afoul of the late Great Helmsman in 1966. He was stripped of his post and put in prison where he died of pneumonia in 1969. In 1980 he became the most celebrated victim of China's Cultural Revolution. The publication of his writings was calculated to push Chairman Mao into the background by expanding the volume of Marxist dogma extolled by the party.

Maoism is still paid much lip service, but with a twist. It is venerated now as the ''crystallization of the collective wisdom of our party,'' in a phrase from the watershed resolution adopted last June by the party's Central Committee. A treatise in last month's Guangming Daily says that ''Comrade Mao Zedong never considered Mao Zedong thought a product of his own personal wisdom.''

But even while his tenets are scrapped in fovor of something more pragmatic, Mao himself remains a useful symbol of party legitimacy. While last summer's party resolution accused Mao of committing a ''serious mistake'' in launching his Cultural Revolution, it concluded that his contributions to China outweighed his blunders.

Mao has been recast in an image convenient to Deng Xiaoping, China's param ount leader and twice a purge victim of the Cultural Revolution.

This has not required excessive rewriting. Chairman Mao was prolific enough in his half-century of communist activism to provide scriptural exegesis for almost any premise. Last month in the People's Daily, Deputy Prime Minister Bo Yibo published a selectively fond reminiscence of a more moderate Mao, recalling in one instance how he explained the old adage ''seek truth from facts,'' now a favorite platitude of the Deng regime.

While Mao's errors officially began with the Great Leap Forward in 1958, Mr. Deng's theoreticians have begun to chip away at the earlier inviolate years. Last month, in Red Flag, China's leading ideological journal, Hu Qiaomu took issue with Mao's famous Yenan talks on literature and the arts, which previously had been the sole criteria for assessing creativity in modern China.

Mr. Hu was quoted as saying in a speech that ''Comrade Mao Zedong lacked a full understanding of and proper confidence in writers, artists and intellectuals in general.'' He added that art must serve socialism, and not merely politics as Mao had proposed.

The Peking leadership has shown concern that its disavowals on Maoism not be taken as a sign by ordinary Chinese as license to do their own thinking. Party Chairman Hu Yaobang has warned writers and artists against being seduced by ''bourgeois liberalism,'' code words for ignoring the party line in cultural matters.

In fact, the greater problem is that the Chinese have seen the ideological winds shift so many times that many hesitate to commit themselves at all. A commentary in the People's Daily last spring admitted that some people were experiencing ''temporary doubts'' about Marxism.

The new leadership has tried to fill the vacuum left by Maoism with an amalgam of patriotism, nationalism and tradition. The press has talked about developing a ''socialist spiritual civilization'' by reviving good manners, which it says were eliminated during the Cultural Revolution. There is a persistent emphasis on orthodoxy in the arts as well as political study and discipline. There have even been flashes of chauvinism, ranging from articles about China's more glorious ancient emperors to official plaudits for a victory registered by the Chinese women's volleyball team.

But while Dengists give a renewed ideological cast to political and cultural life, they continue dismantling Chairman Mao's economic policies. The government under Prime Minister Zhao Ziyang has instituted reforms making peasants and workers more responsible for what they produce. Last autumn, Chinese were told they would no longer be guaranteed lifetime jobs and should foster more private enterprise. There is even talk of smashing the ''iron rice bowl'' by dismissing workers who are lazy or incompetent.

The Maoist slogan of national self-reliance has been shelved in favor of foreign investment and technology. Joint ventures have been set up with Western firms in special economic zones and this year China is expected to open its coastal waters to offshore drilling by foreign oil companies. It resembles the kind of ''capitalist road'' that Mr. Deng was accused of advocating when he was attacked in wall posters a half-dozen years ago. But the Chinese insist that they are orthodox in their fashion, an d almost the entire economy remains state-owned or collectivized. '' Our party has created this Chinese-style Marxism which is perfectlyco mpatible with our national condition,'' Shanghai's Liberation Da ily newspaper contended. Another recent article recited the old Ma rxist contention that capitalism was doomed and communism destined to triumph in the world.

Ultraleftists nostalgic for Mao may view this as a retreat toward capitalism, but the resolution that the reformers pushed through the party plenum last June makes it hard to put the old Mao back together again. Although the degree of internal disaffection is unclear, there is no doubt that Mr. Deng's faction has strengthened its control over the Government and party. When ideology gets cited, it usually serves as ammunition for power politics.

However, the treatment of Mao seems of less immediate concern than inflation, the budget deficit or the overdue shakeup of the bureaucracy that Prime Minister Zhao has promised. Meanwhile, Chairman Mao's portrait still smiles on downtown Tienanmen Square and his colossal statue continues to dominate the entrance to Peking University. ''Deng and his people need Mao as a symbol of the greatness and accomplishments of the party,'' said a European diplomat who once studied here. ''The party has to have an identity and history, and Mao carries much of it.''

Illustrations: photo of portrait of Liu Shaoqi at a Shanghai bookstore


Reports of great white sharks in the water generally send people moving very quickly in one direction: out.

Not so for two California men who, on learning that a group of great white sharks were swimming around Huntington Beach, grabbed their stand up paddle boards and ventured out into the ocean to investigate.

With GoPro cameras strapped to their oars, footage uploaded to YouTube in June shows the pair getting up-close-and-very-personal with several great white sharks, some of which appeared to be around two metres long.

Both paddle boarders are remarkably nonchalant throughout the two minute clip, calmly taking selfies and recording the encounter as large shadows slowly move in and around their boards and dorsal fins break the surface.

“My perception of sharks has been so distorted by Jaws and other movies," Joseph Trucksess, one of the paddle boarders, later told the Orange County Register. "It was cool to see how peaceful and non-aggressive they are.”

The sharks are believed to be juvenile great white sharks (under 2.7 metres), which means they are typically not interested in or able to attack large mammals. This may explain the breezy attitude of the Californian watermen.

Huntington Beach remains open but authorities are warning people to be cautious.

Do you have any news photos or videos?

Summary: A US paddle boarder in California has used his GoPro to show his board surrounded by great white sharks off of Huntington Beach.


MGM Resorts International has poached Olivia C. Brown, general manager of the Ritz-Carlton Boston Common hotel, to run its flagship Bellagio Resort & Casino in Las Vegas.

Running the Bellagio, one of the swankiest and best-known properties on the Las Vegas strip, is a prestigious gig even for Brown, a longtime executive at upscale hotels.

“This is such an exciting career opportunity for me,” Brown said in a statement. “I’m delighted to begin working with Bellagio’s dedicated leadership team and award-winning staff to further enhance the destination’s premiere status. I’m confident my tenure and experience with some of the industry’s top luxury hotel brands, including Ritz-Carlton, will help further Bellagio’s unparalleled reputation for excellence.”

Brown took the helm of the Boston Ritz-Carlton in April 2014 after years managing hotels in Atlanta, Philadelphia, and White Plains, N.Y. for the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company. Before that, she spent 18 years working for the InterContinental Hotels Group.

Brown was born in Jamaica and raised in Canada, where she earned a degree in hospitality and tourism administration from the Centennial College of Applied Arts and Technology in Toronto, MGM Resorts said in a release.

While in Boston, Brown also served on the board of the Boston Improvement District.

Summary: Ritz-Carlton Boston Common general manager Olivia Brown will take charge of the Bellagio Resort & Casino in Las Vegas, one of the swankiest and best-known properties on the strip.


When Cramer sees a stock on the new-high list, it is either because it is part of a bull market, it announced fantastic earnings, or there is tremendous sales momentum within the sector.

However, that doesn't mean Cramer recommends chasing after every stock on the new-high list. That would just be completely ridiculous. The list is merely meant to be used as a jumping off point for stocks to start looking at. Then, the time tested method of doing your homework comes in to play, to ensure that the fundamentals of the company are sound.

One thing to keep in mind is that the market is not that hard to play, as long as it is understood that there is often more continuity than change. That means once you buy a stock, things will pretty much keep going the way they were until there is a major shift. Then, you must change your approach and be prepared with a Plan B.

A trick to the trade that Cramer likes to use, is to wait for a pullback to occur before pulling the trigger to buy a stock. He always tries to buy on weakness and sell into strength. He recommends waiting until a high-quality stock is down at least 5 percent, as that will give you a solid entry point.

"You only buy stocks that have pulled back from the new-high list if you are confident they will make a comeback for substantive reasons not having to do with the market," the "Mad Money" host said.

Read more from Mad Money with Jim Cramer

Cramer Remix: China is totally crushing this stock Cramer: Heavy-hitter stocks running with the bulls Howard Schultz: Business leaders must do more

But the most important tip is to make sure you understand why a stock has pulled back. Make sure there isn't a really good reason why everyone is selling the stock and driving the price down. Then you could get caught with your hand in the cookie jar!

So make sure that you are eyeing a stock that has only momentarily been damaged, and it isn't a troubled company that is headed down the tubes. How can you tell?

Cramer said that as long as the fundamentals haven't changed and a stock just pulled back for mechanical reasons, such as market wide panic or profit taking, you are OK.

"Some of my best picks have come out of this process, and hopefully some of yours can, too."

Summary: Jim Cramer opens his bag of tricks to share with investors the methods to his madness in stock picking.


1) Etsy, planning to price tonight for trading tomorrow on the Nasdaq, is getting most of the attention as it seeks to raise 16.7 million shares at $14 to $16. It's an online marketplace for handmade goods, making it a good play on the emerging freelance economy. It's still losing money but has a very loyal following, largely but not exclusively made up of women.

How loyal? Etsy was founded in 2005, but in 2014 sales were still growing 50 percent. Of the buyers in 2011, 45 percent are also buyers in 2014, according to Renaissance Capital.

Read MoreI worry about Fed-induced asset bubbles: Paulson

In keeping with its general ethos, Etsy is also trying to get shares in hands of small retail holders. It has supposedly set aside 5 percent of shares for the Etsy community and other individual investors. It will be interesting to hear more on how Morgan Stanley, the lead book runner, handled that.

2) It may sound a bit whimsical, but Party City Holdco is pretty serious, seeking to raise 21.9 million shares at $15 to $17. The company is the leading party goods retailer in North America. It has 880 stores and claims it is "the only coast-to-coast network of party superstores in the U.S. and Canada."

And Party City doesn't just sell in its stores. Because the company makes something like 70 percent of the products it carries, is is also a big distributor of party goods to independent stores and mass merchants.

It's a mature company, but Party City executives believe they can expand through new store openings. Comparable store sales growth was 5.8 percent for the year ending Dec. 31.

Sales, of course, are bunched around the calendar. For example, 25 percent of sales are related to Halloween. Metallic balloons account for 12 percent of sales (they last longer).

Read MoreCramer: Exploit this—a rare moment for oil & retail

The closest peer is probably crafts retailer Michaels. Shares in the company are up 60 percent from its IPO last year.

One last point: This is a Thomas Lee deal.

3) Finally, there's Virtu Financial, a market maker and financial intermediary firm, seeking to raise 16.5 million shares at $17 to $19. Virtu was preparing to go public at this time last year, but it postponed the deal due to the furor over publication of Michael Lewis's Flash Boys, which told the story of the firm's quest to correct what it saw as a market fixed in favor of high-frequency traders.

The firm attracted a lot of attention when it announced it had only one trading day of losses in 1,238 days of trading. But when you have a company that says it makes a market in more than 10,000 securities on 210 unique exchanges and markets in 30 countries, you are talking about millions and millions of transactions a day. Assuming there is even the tiniest of advantages—50 to 51 percent, say—it's almost impossible to lose money when the law of large numbers comes into play. The issue is how you get the advantage.

I will have a first-on-CNBC interview with Virtu founder and Chairman Vincent (Vinnie) Viola from the Nasdaq Thursday morning.

Summary: Initial public offering activity in the first quarter of 2015 was at half the levels for deals in the same period of last year.


So far this year, the segment's bond funds have seen outflows of $11.12 billion, while $30.35 billion has fled emerging market equity funds, according to data from Jefferies. This followed a tough 2013, which saw $14.1 billion exit emerging market equity funds, while $14.04 billion said good-bye to the segment's bond funds, according to data from Barclays.

"With tapering confirmed and ongoing, and economic growth forecasts in emerging markets significantly adjusted downward, a lot of bad news for emerging markets is priced in," SocGen said, noting the region's equities are trading at around a 30 percent valuation discount to their developed market counterparts.

(Read more: Hedge funds sit out the emerging market turmoil)

To be sure, this isn't the consensus view.

Global fund managers have cut their equity allocations to global emerging markets, with a net 31 percent taking an underweight call, the lowest allocation since 2004, according to Bank of America-Merrill Lynch's fund manager survey for March.

But it noted its survey participants believe sentiment toward emerging markets is near a low and may improve soon.

"Investors have indicated that they see value in the region," it said, noting 49 percent of survey participants believe emerging markets are the most undervalued region.

(Read more: Will emerging markets become a euro zone-style risk?)

Even as the view slowly shifts, many cite the need to differentiate.

"The story on emerging markets is to look beneath the generic asset class. In our view, you've got to be able to differentiate," Marc Desmidt, head of alpha strategies for BlackRock Asia Pacific, told CNBC. He noted that some countries, such as India and Indonesia, are making efforts to improve their economic standing and have relatively high savings rates compared with South Africa or Turkey.

Summary: Emerging market assets haven't seen much love in the wake of investor infatuation with developed markets, but they may come back into fashion.


MOSCOW, Sept 3 (Reuters) - U.S. carmaker Ford's Russian venture, Ford Sollers, opened a $275 million engine plant on Thursday, which will help make its Russian-produced vehicles less dependent on imported components and currency fluctuations.

Ford aims to spend 60 percent of the cost of producing cars for the Russian market in the country itself by 2020, to qualify for benefits such as lower import duties on car components.

The new plant, in the republic of Tatarstan, has the capacity to produce up to 105,000 engines a year, with the possibility of expansion to up to 200,000, Ford Sollers said in a statement.

At least 30 percent of Russian-built Ford vehicles, including Ford Fiesta, Ford Focus, and Ford EcoSport models, will be equipped with locally built engines, the company said without providing a timeframe. Ford does not currently make any engines in Russia.

"Our main target in line with our long-term localization strategy was to launch engine production with a significant level of localization ... We are fully committed to this strategy which is key for our business in the current environment," said Adil Shirinov, Ford Sollers' Chief Operating Officer.

After years of growth in excess of 10 percent, Russian car sales collapsed in 2014 as the economy shrank and the rouble weakened, due to lower oil prices and Western sanctions over Moscow's role in the Ukraine crisis.

New car sales in Russia are forecast to drop 36 percent this year to 1.55 million, according to the Moscow-based Association of European Businesses (AEB). In January-July, sales fell 35 percent, year-on-year, the AEB said.

Ford's sales in Russia fell 52 percent in January-July, even though it launched four new models in the country this year. It also took control of the Ford-Sollers venture, which was in the red last year due to the economic slump.

Carmakers with models targeted at middle-class buyers and heavily dependent on imported components have been hit hardest.

General Motors Co said in March it would shut its plant in St Petersburg and wind down sales and production of its Opel brand in Russia as it did not want to make significant investments in a tumbling market.

(Reporting by Gleb Stolyarov; Writing by Maria Kiselyova; Editing by Susan Fenton)

Summary: MOSCOW, Sept 3- U.S. carmaker Ford's Russian venture, Ford Sollers, opened a $275 million engine plant on Thursday, which will help make its Russian-produced vehicles less dependent on imported components and currency fluctuations. Ford does not currently make any engines in Russia. New car sales in Russia are forecast to drop 36 percent this year to 1.55 million,...


NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Fitch Ratings has affirmed 12 classes of WFRBS Commercial Mortgage Trust 2012-C9 commercial mortgage pass-through certificates. A detailed list of rating actions follows at the end of this press release.

The affirmations are the result of the overall stable performance of the underlying pool since issuance. As of the August 2015 distribution date, the pool's aggregate principal balance has been reduced by 4.3% to $1.01 billion from $1.05 billion at issuance. Year-end (YE) 2014 financials were available for 100% of the pool. Two loans, representing 3.52% of the current balance, have defeased, both since Fitch's last rating action. The pool's YE 2014 net operating income (NOI) has increased 9.15% since issuance. Fitch has designated five loans (9.3%) as Fitch Loans of Concern, none of which are in default or in special servicing, and two (6.36%) of which are in the transaction's top 15.

The largest Fitch Loan of Concern is secured by a 481-key, full-service hotel located in downtown Milwaukee, WI. The hotel is in close proximity to the Bradley Center, US Cellular Center, and is connected to the Wisconsin Center by an enclosed walkway. Per commentary from the master servicer, the hotel was closed for 180 days in 2014 for planned repairs. These planned repairs have been satisfied, but additional repair obligations remain which are required to be completed by August 2016. Four new hotels have opened in the past two years, increasing competition in the local market. While NOI has increased year-over-year, it has decreased by 12.33% since issuance. The loan remains current but on the master servicer's watchlist.

Fitch is also monitoring the performance of a loan secured by a 150,300 square foot (sf) community shopping center located in Northridge, CA due to NOI decline. Tenants include Big Lots, David's Bridal, Pier 1 Imports and a number of other national and local tenants. YE2014 occupancy fell to 88% from 93% as of YE2013. Additionally, the servicer reported a decline in debt service coverage ratio (DSCR) to 1.41x as of YE2014 from 1.56x at YE2013. The property has substantial lease rollover occurring in the next three years, including 24% of current tenancy within a year, 9% in year two, and 32% in year three. Fitch added additional stresses on this loan to account for potential nonrenewal of tenants. The loan remains current.

The largest loan in the pool (10.6%) is secured by a 1 million sf regional mall with an adjacent strip shopping center located in North Chesterfield, VA. The property is anchored by Sears (non-collateral), JC Penney (non-collateral) and Macy's, whose lease extends into January 2020. As of YE2014, the properties were 85% occupied, compared to 95% over the same period the year prior. The servicer reported YE2014 DSCR was 1.79x, compared to 2.03x YE2013.

Rating Outlooks on classes A-1 through F remain Stable due to relatively stable performance of the pool since last review and continued paydown. No rating changes are expected unless there is material performance deterioration or loans become specially serviced. Additional information on key rating drivers and rating sensitivities are further described in the new issue report WFRBS Commercial Mortgage Trust 2012-C9 (Oct. 31, 2012), available at www.fitchratings.com.

No third-party due diligence was provided or reviewed in relation to this rating action.

Fitch affirms the following classes as indicated:

--$86.1 million class A-1 at 'AAAsf'; Outlook Stable;

--$110.4 million class A-2 at 'AAAsf'; Outlook Stable;

--$444.2 million class A-3 at 'AAAsf'; Outlook Stable;

--$96.2 million class A-SB at 'AAAsf'; Outlook Stable;

--$93.4 million class A-S at 'AAAsf'; Outlook Stable;

--$64.5 million class B at 'AA-sf'; Outlook Stable;

--$36.8 million class C at 'A-sf'; Outlook Stable;

--$42.1 million class D at 'BBB-sf'; Outlook Stable;

--$21.1 million class E at 'BBsf'; Outlook Stable;

--$19.7 million class F at 'Bsf'; Outlook Stable;

--$830.4 million* class X-A at 'AAAsf'; Outlook Stable;

--$101.3 million* class X-B at 'A-sf'; Outlook Stable.

*Notional amount and interest only.

Fitch does not rate the class G certificates.

Additional information is available at www.fitchratings.com.

Global Structured Finance Rating Criteria (pub. 06 Jul 2015)https://www.fitchratings.com/creditdesk/reports/report_frame.cfm?rpt_id=867952

U.S. Fixed-Rate Multiborrower CMBS Surveillance and Re-REMIC Criteria (pub. 10 Dec 2014)https://www.fitchratings.com/creditdesk/reports/report_frame.cfm?rpt_id=812608

WFRBS Commercial Mortgage Trust 2012-C9 -- Appendixhttps://www.fitchratings.com/creditdesk/reports/report_frame.cfm?rpt_id=698812

Dodd-Frank Rating Information Disclosure Formhttps://www.fitchratings.com/creditdesk/press_releases/content/ridf_frame.cfm?pr_id=990030

ALL FITCH CREDIT RATINGS ARE SUBJECT TO CERTAIN LIMITATIONS AND DISCLAIMERS. PLEASE READ THESE LIMITATIONS AND DISCLAIMERS BY FOLLOWING THIS LINK: HTTP://FITCHRATINGS.COM/UNDERSTANDINGCREDITRATINGS. IN ADDITION, RATING DEFINITIONS AND THE TERMS OF USE OF SUCH RATINGS ARE AVAILABLE ON THE AGENCY'S PUBLIC WEBSITE 'WWW.FITCHRATINGS.COM'. PUBLISHED RATINGS, CRITERIA AND METHODOLOGIES ARE AVAILABLE FROM THIS SITE AT ALL TIMES. FITCH'S CODE OF CONDUCT, CONFIDENTIALITY, CONFLICTS OF INTEREST, AFFILIATE FIREWALL, COMPLIANCE AND OTHER RELEVANT POLICIES AND PROCEDURES ARE ALSO AVAILABLE FROM THE 'CODE OF CONDUCT' SECTION OF THIS SITE. FITCH MAY HAVE PROVIDED ANOTHER PERMISSIBLE SERVICE TO THE RATED ENTITY OR ITS RELATED THIRD PARTIES. DETAILS OF THIS SERVICE FOR RATINGS FOR WHICH THE LEAD ANALYST IS BASED IN AN EU-REGISTERED ENTITY CAN BE FOUND ON THE ENTITY SUMMARY PAGE FOR THIS ISSUER ON THE FITCH WEBSITE.

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20150827006006/en/

Fitch RatingsPrimary Analyst:Britt Johnson, +1-312-606-2341Senior DirectorFitch Ratings, Inc.70 West Madison StreetChicago, IL 60602orCommittee Chairperson:Christopher Bushart, +1-212-908-1606Senior DirectororMedia Relations:Sandro Scenga, +1-212-908-0278New Yorksandro.scenga@fitchratings.com

Summary: NEW YORK---- Fitch Ratings has affirmed 12 classes of WFRBS Commercial Mortgage Trust 2012- C9 commercial mortgage pass-through certificates. As of the August 2015 distribution date, the pool's aggregate principal balance has been reduced by 4.3% to $1.01 billion from $1.05 billion at issuance. The largest Fitch Loan of Concern is secured by a 481- key,...


Ford's move into car sharing comes at a time when many in the auto industry are trying to find new ways to deal with the growing problems of congestion and mobility-on-demand services like Uber and Lyft.

Read MoreAuto sales bubble? Experts say no

Those programs, along with successful car-share firms like Zipcar have some people who live in cities rethinking whether they need to buy a car. For many the answer is no.

Instead, they are turning to car-share programs. A new study by AlixPartners finds 4.9 million people now have car-share memberships worldwide. By 2020, that number is expected to skyrocket to 26 million.

Read MoreTop of auto sales cycle is approaching: Study

So why does Ford think offering peer-to-peer car rentals will be good for business? First, it's another way to expose potential customers to Ford vehicles.

Second, Ford buyers are increasingly looking for a way to cut their monthly vehicle costs, and renting out their car or truck while they are not using it is one way to do that.

Fields says the program is all about Ford taking a different approach to business.

"We are driving the company these days to challenge custom and question tradition and use technology to make customers' experiences better," he said.

Summary: In a sign automakers are increasingly aware they'll have to try new approaches to reach customers, Ford is launching a car-share program.


DALLAS (AP) — More than 14.2 million people are expected to fly over the seven days surrounding the Labor Day holiday, a 3 percent increase from last year, according to Airlines for America, the industry's trade and lobbying group.

The unofficial end of summer is one last long weekend for Americans to sneak in a trip, with Friday, Sept. 4, expected to be the busiest day to fly.

Millions of others will drive or take trains and ferries during the holiday. For instance, 1.14 million people are expected to use intercity buses, an increase of 5 percent compared to last year, according to the Chaddick Institute for Metropolitan Development at DePaul University.

But for those who need to get across the country fast, nothing can compete with flying. More families are now able to afford to hop on a plane thanks to a stronger domestic economy.

In advance of the holiday, American Airlines and Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport granted The Associated Press unique access to their operations to get a sense of what it takes to get thousands of passengers to their destination.

(Click here to see the video: https://youtu.be/oXFC2CZ1Lp8 )

Each day, more than 170,000 passengers use the airport, making it the ninth busiest in the world. Since many of those trips are on smaller, domestic jets, the airport sees a higher share of takeoffs and landings than other big hub airports — 1,845 daily flights, which is the fourth most in the world.

In the bellies of those jets each day is another 1,873 metric tons of cargo. It takes a workforce of 60,000 to get all those passengers and the cargo to their destination.

The airport covers 17,207 acres — an area larger than Manhattan — and has five terminals with a total of 165 gates. To get around, passengers use the Skylink tram system, which travels 35 mph to 37 mph. In its decade of operation, the tram fleet has traveled a combined 32,465,945 miles.

Whether traveling this holiday or not, here's a look at one of the world's busiest airports: https://youtu.be/oXFC2CZ1Lp8

Scott Mayerowitz can be reached at http://twitter.com/GlobeTrotScott

Summary: DALLAS— More than 14.2 million people are expected to fly over the seven days surrounding the Labor Day holiday, a 3 percent increase from last year, according to Airlines for America, the industry's trade and lobbying group. For instance, 1.14 million people are expected to use intercity buses, an increase of 5 percent compared to last year, according to the...


Carly Fiorina (left) and Donald Trump

09/15/2015 AT 01:30 PM EDT

Rule #1 in politics: turn every negative into a positive.

Earlier this month, Republican Presidential candidate

was insulted by GOP rival

, who took aim at her looks in an interview with

"Look at that face!," the magazine

Trump as saying. "Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president. I mean, she's a woman, and I'm not s'posedta say bad things, but really, folks, come on. Are we serious?"

Fiorina is clearly very serious. The Carly for America Committee has released a web ad responding to Trump – although they don't mention him by name.

The ad, called "Look at this Face," shows Fiorina speaking at a Republican women's event.

"Ladies, look at this face," Fiorina says in the ad. "And look at all your faces. The face of leadership."

"This is the face of a 61-year-old woman," says Fiorina, a former Hewlett-Packard chief executive. "I am proud of every year and every wrinkle."

See the full ad above.

Summary: "I am proud of every year and every wrinkle," Republican hopeful Carly Fiorina says in a new campaign ad


The newly disclosed hedge fund attack began in late 2013, when hackers sent a so-called "spear phishing" email—a seemingly innocuous message that, when opened, inserted the malware onto the hedge fund's servers. The spear phishing emails appeared as if they were about the capital markets industry, in order to make it more likely that the hedge fund employees would click on them.

The details of the attack were provided by BAE Systems and were not independently verifiable by CNBC.

Over the months after the email was sent, financial analysts and IT managers at the firm noticed two problems that they did not initially realize were connected. At first, the firm noticed that its algorithmic trading strategy—a computer-based trading system that depended on high-speed trades—had suddenly become ineffective. Upon investigation, the traders discovered an unexpected lag time between when they were issuing trade orders and when those orders were executed. The delays the attackers added to the trading software ranged from hundreds of microseconds to the low-single-digit milliseconds. BAE's analysts concluded the attackers were trying to create tiny delays in the hundreds of microsecond range.

Read MoreUS companies seek cyber experts for top jobs, board seats

At the same time, the firm's IT staff observed suspicious behavior on their computer network—files being moved on the system in ways that couldn't be explained by normal business operations. At that point, the firm brought in BAE Systems to analyze the IT problem, Henninger said.

Over subsequent weeks, the team found that the malware had been programmed to insert a random lag into the firm's order entry system of just a few milliseconds. The malware also recorded the details of those orders. "That piece of malware was undermining the effectiveness of that trading strategy and it was exposing the details of that trading strategy to someone who could easily copy that information out of the network and replicate it, trade ahead of it, trade around it, et cetera," said Henninger.

He said BAE systems does not know what happened to the trading data after it left the hedge fund's computers, but that the most likely explanation is that the intruders were able to reap significant profits from trades of their own in financial markets.

Henninger said the malware represented a multimillion dollar problem for the hedge fund. "This was not something that was a minor issue for them," he said. "This was something that was getting reviewed at the board level of this hedge fund precisely because it was having a material impact on performance across the portfolio."

Public disclosure of illicit trading based on hacked information is exceedingly rare.

In 2010, however, the SEC obtained summary judgment against a computer hacker for insider trading. In that case, the hacker, a Ukrainian citizen, penetrated the servers of an investor relations service that was preparing a press release for IMS Health Inc. According to the SEC, the hacker discovered that IMS Health was preparing to announce negative earnings—and executed several options trades that ultimately generated $287,346 in profits. The defendant was ordered to pay a penalty of about $580,000.

Summary: BAE Systems Applied Intelligence says a large hedge fund was the victim of a sophisticated cyberattack in late 2013 before it was thwarted.


According to industry data, minivan sales shrank by 4 percent in 2013 compared to the prior year, to about 532,000. That's still enough volume that it can't completely write off what critics have dubbed "mom-mobiles," but it's a far cry from the nearly 1.4 million minivans sold at the segment's peak in 2000.

Read MoreIconic cars that are no longer around

Before the decision to withdraw the Caravan, the segment already boasted fewer names than in the mid-1990s, when it captured a peak 8.5 percent of the total U.S. automotive market. Chrysler also killed off the old Plymouth Voyager, and both General Motors and Ford have pulled out of the segment.

Other than the Town & Country, the only models now available are the Honda Odyssey, the Toyota Sienna, the Nissan Quest, the Kia Sedona and the Mazda5.

Odds are that when it cuts its current lineup in half, Chrysler will see a further decline in total sales, said David Sullivan, an analyst with consulting firm AutoPacific.

But the surviving Town & Country model just might reinvigorate the segment if the Detroit automaker delivers the sort of surprise-and-delight redesign it came up with for its original 1984 models.

Read MoreCaravan rides into the sunset

"They could come up with a new model that will awaken or redefine the segment," said Sullivan, who attended a daylong briefing on Fiat Chrysler's product plans earlier this week. "They are doing more research on this new minivan than I've seen in a long time. "

Good, new product has traditionally been a way to reinvigorate a weak product segment. But with just a few exceptions, the minivan market hasn't seen much innovation in recent years. Chrysler's No. 1 competitor, the Odyssey, added a built-in vacuum cleaner for its 2014 model, but that's a far cry from such once-revolutionary breakthroughs as sliding doors, foldaway seats and a dozen cup and juice box holders.

Summary: The discontinuation of the Dodge Caravan marks the steady decline of the once-popular minivan segment.


Apple has been slowly laying the foundation to become the leader of e-commerce and mobile payments, and all the pieces are just about in place:

First, get everybody's credit card numbers in a database via a cool product that everybody wants and uses: iTunes. Done.

Second, create a device that people carry with them at all times that will hold these credit card numbers: iPhone. Done.

Read MoreConsumers look to Apple iWatch as a game changer

Third, create a very secure system so if a thief stole an iPhone, he would not be able to use the phone or the credit card numbers in it, making it much more secure than a regular leather wallet with credit cards. Use something like fingerprints that a thief couldn't reproduce or fake: TouchID on the iPhone 5S. Done.

Fourth, put an NFC (near field communication) chip in the phone so the consumer simply verifies his ID with his fingerprint and then waves the iPhone at the register. The NFC chip then sends the encoded card number. Almost done.

Some industry analysts believe the iPhone 6 may have an NFC chip. After that, it's simply a matter of getting merchants to install NFC-enabled registers.

Read MoreApple readies $17B jumbo bond sale

When the Wall Street Journal asked about mobile payments, Cook responded: "I think it's a really interesting area. We have almost 800 million iTunes accounts and the majority of those have credit cards behind them. We already have people using Touch ID to buy things across our store, so it's an area of interest to us. And it's an area where nobody has figured it out yet. I realize that there are some companies playing in it, but you still have a wallet in your back pocket and I do, too, which probably means it hasn't been figured out just yet." That wallet may not be in your back pocket for much longer.

—By Bill Hardekopf, The Christian Science Monitor

Summary: Apple CEO Tim Cook wants to replace the wallet with a mobile payment system. This is a step for Apple to become the leader in e-commerce.


Papua New Guinea's prime minister has softened his tough talk of expelling Australian public servants from his country by the end of the year.

Peter O'Neill announced moves in the parliament two months ago to turf out foreign advisers, raising concerns they were spying on his government and their presence is making local public servants lazy.

Mr O'Neill now says he does not want consultants and middlemen eating up aid budget allocations, but prefers a change to contract officers who can be accountable to his government.

"Nobody is being thrown out on the street," Mr O'Neill told AAP in Port Moresby.

"We know they have families. We are not that silly to displace families overnight."

Mr O'Neill wants to ensure those posted to PNG show loyalty to the government and to service.

"I don't think that's too much to ask for," he said.

Australia has 34 public servants on secondment to the PNG government and more than 100 technical advisers in the country.

Do you have any news photos or videos?

Summary: PNG's prime minister says he will not be booting out Australian public servants on secondment this year but wants some changes to arrangements.


A salary is one of the most compelling factors for individuals deciding on a career path, a degree or even where to live, since some parts of the U.S. pay higher wages, on average, for the same position.Although education can determine a worker'ssalary and even employment, not all high-paying jobs require advanced degrees.With data recently released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS),CNBC.com took a look at the most highly-compensated occupations in the country, based upon BLS job definitions.The BLS also breaks down average salaries geographically and by industry.The jobs listed here are placed in categories according to career path. The numbers are from 2011—the most recent figures available.So, what are the highest paying jobs in the country? Click ahead to find out!By Morgan Giordano, Special to CNBC.comPosted 2 July 2012

Photo: Mark Williamson | Oxford Scientific | Getty Images

Summary: A salary is among the most compelling factors for individuals deciding on a career path, a degree or even where to live, since some areas pay higher salaries for the same position.


Bond yields rose briefly as U.S. oil prices rose above $51 a barrel. They were last down 2.6 percent at $47.24.

Oil prices, which are pegged against the greenback globally, climbed earlier partly on a steep drop in the dollar after the Swiss National Bank abandoned its three-year old cap on the franc.

On the open market, the 30-year Treasurys yield was 2.437 percent, down 1.6 basis points from Wednesday when it set a record low of 2.395 percent.

Benchmark 10-year yield was 1.792 percent, reflecting a price gain of 18/32. It hit a near 20-month low of 1.784 percent on Wednesday.

Read MoreBofA profit falls on lower bond trading

U.S. yields are higher than those in Japan and much of Europe, where short-dated yields have been stuck in negative territory .

Investors are waiting to see whether the European Central Bank might embark on an aggressive bond purchase program, similar to the one the Fed ended last year, in a bid avert deflation spreading across the euro zone.

"People are scared about deflation and the global economy rolling over. The catalyst is whether the ECB will engage in quantitative easing (QE)," said Brian Smith, a bond trader at TCW in Los Angeles.

The ECB will hold a policy meeting on Jan. 22, and economists polled by Reuters placed a 70 percent chance that policy-makers will decide on QE.

Summary: Yields on U.S. government debt were lower on Thursday after U.S. jobless claims and producer data.


In addition to the $2.2 billion in assistance Japan pledged for the Middle East two years ago, Abe said his government would provide another $2.5 billion in non-military assistance in fields such as humanitarian assistance and infrastructure.

"The Middle East ... that's the region endowed with great possibilities," said Abe, whose tour will also include Jordan, the Palestinian territories, Lebanon and Turkey.

"And yet now it appears to be no exaggeration to say that the region is exposed to a challenge that is among the most serious in its modern history."

The Japanese leader stressed the need for economic growth in the Middle East, where militants often try to exploit frustrations with issues such as unemployment and neglected schools to gain recruits.

Security crackdowns alone have failed to defeat militancy in Egypt, the most populous Arab country, and other states as well.

Japan will provide Egypt with $360 million in loans for projects including an airport and a power grid in a country suffering from an energy crisis, Abe said.

"These are intended to contribute to Egypt's development, and by extension, to widening the foundation for stability across the entire region," he added.

Aside from tackling Islamic State, the region and Western leaders also face the daunting task of securing serious progress on the Israeli and Palestinian front.

"Japan believes that the day will come in the near future when we can recognize Palestine as a state," said Abe.

"In order for that day to arrive sooner, we will appeal to both Israel and Palestine to resume negotiations to advance the so-called two-state solution."

Summary: Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe pledged on Saturday about $200 million in non-military assistance for countries battling Islamic State.


FORTUNE – The state of the U.S. job market ended 2011 on a high note, according to figures released today by the Labor Department. The U.S. added 200,000 new jobs last month, helping bring the unemployment rate down to a three-year low of 8.5% from a revised 8.7% in November. December’s gains mark the sixth consecutive month the economy added jobs. What’s more, it’s above the 125,000 jobs a month many economists believe is needed in the U.S. to keep up with population growth.

But while this is encouraging, the number of jobs created in December is perhaps the best we can hope for entering 2012, a fact that might explain why markets today seem less than convinced that the sluggish economy has fundamentally turned around. In mid-day trading, both the S&P 500 and the Dow Jones Industrials were down slightly, while the Nasdaq posted a small gain.

Here’s why investors aren’t celebrating:

First, a big portion of the jobs added in December reflect the holiday season and mild weather, according to Capital Economics US chief economist Paul Ashworth. In a report, he points out that 42,000 of the job gains were in the couriers and messengers sector linked to online holiday shopping. So it’s reasonable to presume a bigger than normal drop in courier employment come January. What’s more, unseasonably mild weather last month helped explain the 17,000 bump in construction jobs. As Ashworth points, only 127,000 people couldn’t work because of bad weather – well below the December average of 192,000 during the previous five years.

To look at it from a bigger picture, little has really changed. Indeed, the U.S. added 1.6 million jobs in 2011. But we’re still far from restoring employment to pre-recession levels given that the economy lost 8.8 million jobs during the downturn and its aftermath. And two key ailments continue to unnerve investors: Europe’s ongoing debt crisis is still in crisis mode, while the U.S. housing industry has yet to rebound.

As Paul Dales of Capital Economics noted earlier this week, jobs growth may not accelerate by much more. He expects the unemployment rate to hover above 8% throughout 2012. Surely this is better than being stranded above 9% during previous years, but it’s still a long way from a strong economy.

Summary: Investors aren't celebrating today's solid jobs report because there's still too much uncertainty hanging over the economy.


Behold the convenience store, the place off the highway or just down the road where we unsheathe our lunch from heavy plastic and clutch restroom keys attached to blocks of wood. It is where we shuffle in the morning cold while we gas up the SUV. It is part of our pop culture, from Apu’s Quik-E-Mart and the seditious Dante and Randal in Clerks to Chevy Chase telling his son in National Lampoon’s Vacation that he is so hungry he could eat a gas-station sandwich.

And yet change is afoot. To find it, the best place to go is Altoona, Pa., the home of Sheetz, one of the largest and fastest-growing convenience-store operators in the country, with 440 outlets and annual revenues of $7 billion. The brash and sprawling Sheetz clan is at the leading edge of an effort to remake convenience stores into something tastier and more wholesome, built around prepared food rather than chips, gas, and cigarettes. One indication of the upgrade: Sheetz, the home of the shmuffin and the shmiscuit and the shmagel, was among five winners of the 2012 Golden Chain Award from Nation’s Restaurant News, the first time a convenience store made the cut.

Nobody’s going to mistake a Sheetz for a Jimmy John’s, one of the other winners, but the lines are blurring. As it builds out its southern flank, Sheetz is adding drive-throughs, using sriracha sauce in its condiments, and experimenting with seating and layouts aimed at making its stores places to hang out, sort of like Starbucks — except of course that they’re open 24 hours a day and have ranks of gas pumps that light up the night sky, not to mention the occasional condom vending machine in the restrooms.

And there’s the challenge for Sheetz and WaWa and QuikTrip and Kwik Trip and all the rest of the close-knit and spelling-challenged industry as it takes on the burger chains and sub shops of America. “We really need to get new food customers, and our problem, our hurdle, is people unwilling to buy food at a place that sells gas,” says Travis Sheetz, the company’s executive vice president of store operations and one of a dozen Sheetzes involved in the business. “It’s always been that way.”

The son of a dairyman, Bob Sheetz opened his first convenience store in downtown Altoona in 1952, but the family skill at recognizing opportunity and understanding the subtleties of marketing began a generation earlier, when Bob’s father, Gerald, went to a milk convention in Pittsburgh and saw two name tags. One was for Gerry Sheets, which was his name. The other was for a Gerry Sheetz. He took the other guy’s. “I like the z,” he told his wife, and he legally changed his name.

Altoona’s original claim to fame is as the home of Horseshoe Curve, where the railroad nearly bends back on itself in a long and panoramic switchback. In the 1950s the city was a bustling place, with 15,000 employees of the Pennsylvania Railroad working around the clock to repair engines and freight cars. Pennsylvania’s blue laws kept supermarkets closed on Sunday, but the restrictions did not apply to small retailers, creating a tidy loophole for the Sheetz enterprise. As the restrictions on Sunday commerce were loosened in the 1970s, Sheetz started selling gas as a way to make up for the lost business. Even today, Pennsylvania is a thicket of retailing restrictions. Cigarettes can’t be discounted below a state minimum, and convenience stores can’t sell beer. Sheetz has been fighting restaurants and beer distributors to get the law changed and even deployed a Rube Goldberg maneuver that allows it to sell beer at exactly one store. In the early days the ban kept the national chains away, meaning a little less competition and a little more room to experiment.

By 1984, Bob had 100 stores, and he moved to Florida and turned the CEO job over to his brother Steve. Three other brothers — Louie, Charlie, and Joe — were also working at Sheetz, along with Bob’s son, Stan. The push into custom-made food came about in 1986 because the stores were open 24 hours a day and employees on the night shift didn’t like to work alone. When the company added a second employee, it needed more revenue to offset that expense, and found it in made-to-order sandwiches.

Stan, who would become CEO in 1995, was the architect of the plan, and he held firm during the bumps of the transition. “He saw gas wasn’t going to be the main producer,” says Bob. “He said, ‘We’re going into the fast-food business.'”

You can see that change on the shelves, where products that aren’t food or aren’t for immediate consumption have been reduced to a bare minimum. At one store I visited, there were 51 varieties of potato chips, one kind of mustard, and one type of disposable razor.

The Sheetz biscuit comes to the store frozen. It’s not as delectable as the made-from-scratch biscuit rolled out each morning at your local Biscuitville, but when you throw in the gas and the lottery ticket and the candy bar for later, it all works out. It’s the value in what Stan Sheetz calls “selling time.”

Better food starts with improved logistics. Sheetz runs a distribution center and commercial kitchen and bakery a few miles south of Altoona. (A sister facility is in the works for North Carolina to more efficiently serve the company’s Southern expansion.) As the company has grown, it has taken charge of more of its warehousing, giving it control over delivery schedules and also a fleet of trucks and vans that are washed every day and do double duty as rolling billboards. Sheetz does most of its business at lunch. It spent a lot of time chasing dinner before realizing the bigger prize was in America’s fourth — and favorite — meal: snacks. Hence the popcorn chicken and the fried pickles and the sliderz, with the Sheetz “z,” all available anytime of the day or night.

As Sheetz tries to increase its food and beverage business to weekly sales of $50,000 per store, the equivalent of McDonald’s and industry leader Chick-fil-A, it faces a challenging dance. Though it wants to be seen as a restaurant, it pulls in a lot of diners by selling gas, about 65,000 gallons a week per store, more than double the industry average. One secret to that volume is lots of pumps, so drivers don’t have to wait. But all those pumps detract from the food vibe the company is trying to create, particularly in new markets where the public still thinks that gasoline and decent food can’t coexist. And putting in booths and tables and encouraging millennials to hang out means there’s a slower turnover of parking spaces and a hassle for customers wanting to get in and out quickly.

Sheetz’s solutions include more parking in bigger lots, now approaching three acres, and moving the pumps to the back, which zoning officials like as well. And to underscore the separation of the fuel from the food, it’s phasing out the covered walkway that keeps customers dry when they walk from the pump to the store.

Ample seating is still a rarity at most convenience stores, where the goal is to fill up your tank, put a little dent in your wallet, and then get you back on the road. Despite Sheetz’s success, most competitors aren’t going to the same extremes, at least not yet. But Jeff Lenard, vice president of industry advocacy at the National Association of Convenience Stores, says a transition is under way. “The industry is pointing toward the day that they are all restaurants that sell gas,” he says.

Some of this shift and acceptance is generational. I spoke with LeChelle Rick, a self-described Sheetz freak who lives in eastern West Virginia. Her daughters, ages 11 and 13, have caught the bug, and it’s now their fast-food place of choice. “I still think of it as a gas station,” says Rick, “but my daughters think of it as a restaurant.”

Sheetz started branding and delivering its own gas in its own tankers 20 years ago, after one of its fuel distributors had a spill but Sheetz got the black eye in bad publicity. The company took over making its own doughnuts in 2008, rather than continuing to rely on Krispy Kreme’s commissary. It has its own line of bagged nuts, candy, and beef jerky. And it has resisted entreaties from Wall Street for private equity investments, instead relying when necessary on traditional bank financing and some insurance placements.

It’s all about maintaining control, which family members say is nearly a genetic trait at the heart of their operations and a big key to their success. “We don’t play well with others,” says Joe Sheetz, now in charge of finance and store development but set to step in later this year as CEO, replacing his cousin Stan. (Joe’s father, known as Big Joe, died in 2006.) Travis is Joe’s brother, and sister Ashley Sheetz runs social media, including the Facebook page and its nearly 900,000 fans. Family members control a little more than 90% of the stock. Employees own the rest. Book value, it’s all worth about $650 million, but probably double that, Joe says, if it were traded on an open market.

There’s been substantial churn in the convenience-store business in recent years as midsize operators, many of them family-owned like Sheetz, sold to larger companies. Industry consultant Lesley Saitta at Impact 21 Group says the majority of those deals are driven by succession issues. “It’s all about figuring out the third generation. The best operators spend a lot of time in succession planning and understanding those dynamics. Sheetz is really focused on that.”

The typical family business is pyramid-shaped, with a small first generation of founders. The Sheetz brothers’ model, five wide, is flatter, more a family hedge than a family tree. In addition, the age disparity among the brothers, from 57 to 78, and their offspring, from 18 to 57, allows continuity and a smoothing-over of generation gaps. “It’s a real advantage to have large families in the second generation, because it minimizes the focus on a single person and gives you more candidates,” says Steve McClure of the Family Business Consulting Group. His firm is advising Sheetz and the family as they put in place more formal governance structures. “Family businesses that sell don’t plan,” says McClure, “and these guys are planners.”

Part of that planning involves keeping the Sheetz family happy, including the majority who don’t work for the company but nonetheless look forward to their dividend checks. It also means a more formal communications process through the creation of a family council that will work with the voting trust that controls most of the shares. Unlike previous CEOs, Joe will report to a board of directors, comprising both insiders and outsiders.

One of the people advising Sheetz on this transition is Chet Cadieux, who is the CEO of QuikTrip, another successful player, based in Tulsa. Cadieux wonders, half-seriously, if there is something in the water in Altoona that drives the Sheetzes to be a little different and perhaps ahead of the curve. “They’re incredibly creative and not afraid to try new things. As companies get bigger with more to lose, they tend to develop an aversion to innovation at the risk of damaging what they’ve got.”

The Sheetzes wonder about the Altoona difference too. Steve helped fund a center for entrepreneurship at the tiny Penn State branch here, part of an effort to nurture local talent for themselves and the community. Joe says that as the company has grown, recruiting has become easier, because people in the industry want Sheetz on their résumé. And for the potential hires that don’t want to move to Altoona, he says, “the people we couldn’t get to come here are people that we probably don’t want.”

I asked a lot of the Sheetzes about Altoona, and they all praise the area’s work ethic as being central to their success. But there’s more than that. Louie Sheetz, who heads marketing and is the youngest member of the first generation, told me the city also has a bit of a wiseass culture, which at first blush seems a little iffy but nonetheless has also become part of the Sheetz juju. That yin and yang, the no-BS, lunch-pail approach married to something edgier, something snappier, is a hard act to pull off, particularly at a place where sandwiches cost four bucks and gas is virtually a commodity. But it’s there, and you can get a glimpse of the Sheetz juggling act in Pom Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, Morgan Spurlock’s cheeky look at marketing and product placement. The rest of the fast-food business turned Spurlock down, but Sheetz flew Spurlock out to Altoona. In the documentary, after Spurlock makes his pitch, Stan delivers a soliloquy that, if not quite Shakespeare, still gets at the essential truths of what’s going on in the movie and by extension the marketplace: “Here’s this jerk who’s making this horrible marketing movie with the assumption that Americans are idiots. Morgan is an idiot. He thinks all Americans are idiots, and all the people who sponsored this film are idiots — they’re bigger idiots. What does that do to our brand?”

Then, after the rant, it was time for business, because what Spurlock was selling the company was opportunity before a larger audience. Sheetz paid $100,000 to be part of the movie, which premiered in 2011 at the enormous Jaffa Shrine Center in downtown Altoona. There were special Sheetz beverage cups to promote the movie, and if you were there you could collect all four.

This story is from the May 20, 2013 issue of Fortune.

Summary: With cigarette sales off and cars more fuel-efficient, what's a convenience store chain to do? This one's taking on the fast-food restaurants.


02/13/2016 AT 11:35 AM EST

Jenner joined the two men for their joint appearance at 1 Oak nightclub in New York City on Friday night.

Kylie Jenner, Scott Disick and Tyga

Jenner wore a chic black cutout jumpsuit, which she topped with a red leather coat and paired with black pumps and a tiny gold bag. Tyga, her rapper boyfriend, wore a tan hooded sweatshirt with a tan leather jacket, ripped jeans and sneakers. Disick, the

, sported a knee-length dark fur coat over a black T-shirt, jeans and suede boots.

Tyga and Disick have a history of spending plenty of quality time with each other. Last year, they were spotted

while the Kardashian-Jenner crew visited

in the hospital after she gave birth to her second child. More recently, they both appeared on

in January and, earlier this month,

for Tyga's performance at Drais nightclub.

Summary: The trio stepped out at Up & Down nightclub in New York City on Friday


The families were planning to submit a letter of complaint to the justice minister to draw his attention to what they said was the miserable condition of prisoners at the Sala detention centre who have been on hunger strike for three weeks now.Â Aljazeera's correspondent in Morocco, Hasan al-Fatih, was beaten up by Moroccan security forces when Aljazeera's TV crew tried to prevent them from smashing their camera in a bid to stop them from reporting on the protest.

Speaking from Rabat on Thursday, al-Fatih said: "We were covering a sit-in organised by families of detainees of al-Salafiya al-Jihadiya group in front of the headquarters of the Moroccan justice ministry.

"At first, the Moroccan security authorities asked us to leave the area without assigning any reason.

"When we insisted on filming the protest, some security personnel intervened, particularly the support forces, which troubled us a lot."

Al-Fatih said: "One member of the general information force tried to smash an Aljazeera camera but we prevented him from doing so. Other members of the force responded to our action in a violent manner, and I was beaten on the neck and my shirt was torn. I am still in pain from the bruises on my neck."

He said other security officers then intervened to disperse the general information personnel who had prevented us from covering the protest.

"The authorities want to limit the group's activities, not destroy it" Mohamed Darif,Islamism specialist,Hassan II University,Casablanca

Mohamed Darif,Islamism specialist,Hassan II University,Casablanca

Group members on Wednesday said security forces arrested more than 500 members of Al Adl wa al Ihsane (Justice and Charity) since late May after it launched an "open doors" campaign to recruit outside traditional areas such as mosques and universities.

Some were beaten and nearly all were quickly released.

Fathallah Arslane, Al Adl's spokesman, told Reuters that 45 group activists were arrested in the town of Bouarfa in northeast Morocco on Tuesday night before being set free in the early hours of the morning.

He said 43 Al Adl members were rounded up earlier in Oujda and Nador, also in the northeast, among them the group's second-in-command, Mohamed Abadi.

All but one were released, although Abadi and two others must face prosecutors at the end of the month.

Mohamed Darif, an Islamism specialist at Hassan II Uuniversity in Mohammedia near Casablanca, said: "The authorities want to limit the group's activities, not destroy it."

For his part, Arslane says: "The authorities want to muzzle us."

Al Adl's founder, Abdessalam Yassine, was under house arrest for almost 10 years until 2000 for challenging the monarchy's powers, including the king's status as Commander of the Faithful - the spiritual leader of the country's Muslim community.

The group, Morocco's biggest opposition force with about 250,000 members, would like to see an Islamic state organised according to Sharia law, although it says it rejects violence.

Summary: The Moroccan security authorities have prevented families of detainees of al-Salafiya al-Jihadiya group from organising a sit-in in front of the headquarters of the Moroccan justice ministry in Rabat.


An EC report saidÂ that the two countriesÂ still needed to work harder to overcome corruption andÂ organised crime and toÂ ensure the proper use of EU funds and food safety.

It will install safeguards -Â such asÂ the possibility of withholding EU funding, theÂ temporary suspension of EU rights, banning the sale of unsafe food and the non-recognition of certain civil and criminal judgements orÂ arrest warrants -Â that can be applied up to three years after the countries join.

TheÂ EC said in a statement that "Bulgaria and Romania have carried out an extraordinary reformÂ process and they have gone through a remarkable transformation.

"However, there are still a limited number of areas whereÂ further progress is needed in the months leading to accession andÂ beyond."

The conditional sanctions are meant to reassureÂ critics of enlargement who say the countries are too poor, corrupt and weak to cope with EU membership, officials say.Jose Manuel Barroso, European Commission president, and Olli Rehn, EU commissioner for enlargement, will visit Bulgaria and Romania on Tuesday and Wednesday to explain the EU recommendations.

Bulgaria and Romania have struggled in the run up to accession, scheduled for January 2007, to receive the benefit of EU funds because of slow reforms in state administration.

Workshops on how to apply for funds across different sectors of the economy are being carried out by the ministries involved in an attemptÂ to prepare businesses to benefit from EU funds.

Upon entering the EU, the two countries are expected to sustain their already impressive growth rates, bring in foreign investment and encourage tourism.

Traian Basescu, Romania's president, said: "Only with this will the biggest historical wave of EU enlargement be completed - a direct consequence of the collapse of communism."Â

By raising the possibility of withholding some membership benefits if the two countries are not up to scratch, Brussels is also seeking to smooth ratification in national parliaments that have not yet approved the accession treaty, notably Germany.

EU diplomats say that after the entry of Bulgaria and Romania, the rate of expansion will slow.

Croatia is next in line.

Summary: Bulgaria and Romania can join the European Union in January next year, but the two countries have much work to do to meet EU standards, the European Commission says.


Photographer Frédéric Brenner made his name taking pictures of Jews all around the world, but his latest project focuses on just one country: Israel. His new exhibition, “This Place” at New York’s Brooklyn Museum, showcases photos by 11 artists and Mr. Brenner himself.

Israel has fascinated Mr. Brenner all his adult life. Born in Paris in 1959 to secular Jewish parents, he didn’t become interested in Jewish issues until he went to university in Paris, where he set out to become a social anthropologist and to study Jewish identity.

Photography was his means of research, and the concept has guided his career. Mr. Brenner, 57, is best known for his sweeping “Diaspora” series, in which he visited 40 countries over 25 years to chronicle the far-flung Jewish people and their “portable identity.”

He calls his new exhibit, open through June 5, “the other face of the coin”—Jewish identity as it has found expression in a specific place and among a large population of non-Jews in the Middle East. The series features about 500 photos by photographers from eight countries, including Wendy Ewald from the U.S., Jungjin Lee from South Korea and Nick Waplington of Britain. The well-known photographers Thomas Struth, Steven Shore and Jeff Wall also joined the project.

The subjects of the series are drawn from across Israel’s familiar political and religious boundaries. In one photo, Mr. Brenner shows a family of Jewish settlers with cattle and sheep in the West Bank’s Judean Hills. In another, the French photographer Gilles Peress captures Palestinian children playing in the streets of East Jerusalem.

Mr. Brenner says that the region’s deep conflicts were an “unavoidable reality” but adds that the photographers never ran into any trouble. In the West Bank as in Israel itself, he says, his strategy was the same: He would meet local people and get to know their stories before photographing them.

Mr. Brenner thought that the best way to get beyond the political narrative of the Israel-Palestinian conflict was to invite photographers from outside the region. He wanted them to give a sense of the history of different traditions and religions in the country, to show how everyone in Israel is an outsider of some kind. “I thought it would be more pertinent to bring others to question this otherness.”

Mr. Brenner says that he didn’t choose photographers with experience in conflict zones because he wanted them to have a more “poetic” approach. He also wanted each photographer’s work to differ from the others as much as possible.

Although Mr. Brenner was responsible for finding and helping to select the photographers in the show, he calls himself the project’s producer rather than its curator. He came up with the concept, assembled a team of organizers and got funding. The independent photography curator Charlotte Cotton, who has held positions at such places as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, curated “This Place.”

“I became a kind of conductor of a huge symphonic orchestra,” Mr. Brenner says. “The idea was to get each artist to play according to his own score and then all to play together.”

From 2009 to 2012, the photographers spent anywhere from weeks to months in Israel and the West Bank and were free to photograph whatever they wanted.

The Czech photographer Josef Koudelka—best known for his pictures of the Soviet invasion of Prague in the 1960s—captured stark, barren images of the security barrier separating much of the West Bank from Israel. Mr. Waplington, who has focused on images of class and conflict in the past, contributed portraits of families living in Israeli settlements. Some of the artists, such as Ms. Lee, who is known for her photographic landscapes printed on handmade paper, focused on desert views and single objects in nature.

Mr. Brenner’s own photos in the exhibit attempt to show “longing, belonging and exclusion.” One image portrays the multiple generations of a family, each with different attire and expressions; the oldest is wearing a more traditional outfit.

Mr. Brenner considers “This Place” as much an effort to explore his own background as to understand Israel. “It’s my search, my journey of: How do we live? How do we embrace the foreign, the strange, the stranger within ourselves?”

Write to Alexandra Wolfe at alexandra.wolfe@wsj.com

Summary: In “This Place” at New York’s Brooklyn Museum, photographer Frédéric Brenner shows the results of photographic trips to Israel by himself and 11 other artists.


Tai Hui, chief market strategist for Asia at J.P. Morgan Funds, told CNBC: "The timing of this volatility coincided with a level of pessimism on China that we haven't seen for quite some time."

The possibility of sanctions against Russia loomed on Wednesday, after reports that the G-7 group of countries will declare Russia's annexation of Ukraine's Crimea region a violation of international law.

"Concerns about the Ukrainian situation are unlikely to go away given that EU leaders seem determined to implement some form of sanctions against allies of President Putin, which could, in turn prompt a counter response," Michael Hewson, a chief market analyst at CMC Markets said in a morning note on Wednesday.

In the U.S., the day will be a quiet one for scheduled economic and corporate news, with the weekly MBA Mortgage Index the main feature on the data docket. There will also be weekly crude inventories at 10:30 a.m. ET and the Treasury's budget for February at 2 p.m.

No major U.S. companies are expected to report quarterly results before Wall Street opens on Wednesday.

Copper was in the spotlight on Wednesday after prices fell to their lowest level in nearly four years overnight. Selling was intensified by worries about cooling Chinese demand and the liquidation of inventories used for finance deals.

(Read more: Are Dr Copper's days numbered?)

Summary: U.S. stock index futures slumped on Wednesday, as shares in Europe and Asia fell on concerns about China's economy and the turmoil in Ukraine.


SAN DIEGO, July 29, 2014 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Shareholders Foundation, Inc. announces that a deadline is coming up on August 15, 2014 to get actively involved in the lawsuit filed for certain investors in shares of Hertz Global Holdings, Inc. (HTZ) over alleged Securities Laws Violations by Hertz Global Holdings.

If you purchased shares Hertz Global Holdings, Inc. (HTZ), you have certain options and for certain investors are short and strict deadlines running. Deadline: August 15, 2014. HTZ investors should contact the Shareholders Foundation at mail@shareholdersfoundation.com or call +1(858) 779 - 1554.

The plaintiff alleges that Hertz Global Holdings, Inc issued financial statements that were not accurate, did not comply with Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP), and served to artificially inflate the market price of Hertz Global Holdings, Inc's publicly traded securities

On June 6, 2014, Hertz Global Holdings, Inc. disclosed in a filing with the SEC that on May 13, 2014, each of Hertz Global Holdings, Inc. and The Hertz Corporation (collectively referred to herein as "Hertz" or the "Company") delayed the filing of its Form 10-Q for the period ended March 31, 2014.

Hertz Global Holdings, Inc. said that during the preparation of the First Quarter 10-Q, errors were identified relating to Hertz's conclusions regarding the capitalization and timing of depreciation for certain non-fleet assets, allowances for doubtful accounts in Brazil, as well as other items.

Furthermore, Hertz Global Holdings, Inc. said that the Audit Committee has concluded that the financial statements for 2011 should no longer be relied upon, and Hertz must restate them, and that Hertz also needs to correct the 2012 and 2013 financial statements to reflect these errors.

Shares of Hertz Global Holdings, Inc. (HTZ) dropped from over $30 per share on June 5, 2014, to as low as $26.24 per share during June 10, 2014.

Those who purchased shares of Hertz Global Holdings, Inc. (HTZ) have certain options and should contact the Shareholders Foundation, Inc. by e-mail at mail@shareholdersfoundation.com or call +1 (858) 779-1554.

The Shareholders Foundation, Inc. is a professional portfolio legal monitoring and a settlement claim filing service, which does research related to shareholder issues and informs investors of securities class actions, settlements, judgments, and other legal related news to the stock/financial market. The Shareholders Foundation, Inc. is not a law firm. The information is provided as a public service. It is not intended as legal advice and should not be relied upon.

CONTACT: Shareholders Foundation, Inc. Michael Daniels +1 (858) 779-1554 mail@shareholdersfoundation.com 3111 Camino Del Rio North Suite 423 San Diego, CA 92108

Summary: SAN DIEGO, July 29, 2014-- The Shareholders Foundation, Inc. announces that a deadline is coming up on August 15, 2014 to get actively involved in the lawsuit filed for certain investors in shares of Hertz Global Holdings, Inc. over alleged Securities Laws Violations by Hertz Global Holdings.