Donald Trump gave a much-anticipated speech Wednesday on the subject of Hillary Clinton and the allegations of corruption that have dogged her campaign.

Trump relies heavily on the 2015 book by conservative writer and Brietbart News Editor Peter Schweizer, Clinton Cash, for his research. Here are the major allegations contained in that book that Trump mentioned in his speech:

Hillary Clinton doled out favors to Swedish Telecom giant Ericsson after it paid Bill Clinton $750,000 to give a speech in 2011.

“A foreign telecom giant faced possible State Department sanctions for providing technology to Iran, and other oppressive regimes. So what did this company do? For the first time ever, they decided to pay Bill Clinton $750,000 for a single speech. The Clintons got their cash, the telecom company escaped sanctions.”

Ericsson eric did pay Bill Clinton $750,000 while Hillary was Secretary of State, but the assertion that the company faced sanctions isn’t entirely true. Yes, the SEC did send Ericsson a letter in 2010 asking it to explain the nature of its operations in Iran, but Ericsson’s response makes it clear that the business it did in Iran was for commercial rather than for military purposes.

The book is unable to show any evidence that the State Department wanted to quash the business Ericsson was doing in Iran prior to Bill Clinton’s speech. In fact, there is evidence that the Clinton State Department and the rest of the Obama Administration wanted to spread the use of communications technology—like that which Ericsson provides—in Iran, in order to help dissidents combat oppressive governments.

But even if the payment from Ericsson didn’t end up affecting policy (and we can’t say for sure either way), it was probably not a good idea for Bill Clinton to accept money from a company who had business in front of the State Department while his wife was running it.

Hillary Clinton approved the transfer of uranium to a Russian company in return for Clinton Foundation donations

“Hillary Clinton’s State Department approved the transfer of 20% of America’s uranium holdings to Russia, while 9 investors in the deal funneled $145 million to the Clinton Foundation.”

In 2010, while Clinton was Secretary of State, the U.S. Committee on Foreign Investment approved the sale of Uranium One, a Canadian Company, to Rosatom, a Russian state-owned enterprise. The reason the feds needed to approve the deal was because Uranium One owned a significant amount of Uranium, which is considered by the U.S. government to be an asset important to national security.

While Clinton, as Secretary of State, sat on the U.S. Committee on Foreign Investment, so do the heads of many other agencies like the attorney general, as well as the secretaries of the Treasury, Defense, Homeland Security, Commerce and Energy. Therefore, the decision to approve this sale cannot be chalked up to Clinton alone. Furthermore, the approval of the sale does not mean that the Russians can remove the uranium from the United States. Without a separate approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, uranium cannot be exported from the United States. This undercuts the insinuation Trump makes that somehow Clinton alone undermined American security interests.

Hillary Clinton gave a foundation donor top secret access to information.

“Hillary Clinton appointed a top donor to a national security board with top secret access – even though he had no national security credentials.”

Trump’s statement is correct. Securities trader and Clinton donor Rajiv K. Fernando was appointed to the International Security Advisory Board, despite his lack of experience in the field, according to a report earlier this year from ABC News.

Hillary Clinton accepted expensive gifts from governments hostile to American values.

“Hillary Clinton accepted $58,000 in jewelry from the government of Brunei when she was Secretary of State—plus millions more for her foundation. The Sultan of Brunei has pushed oppressive Sharia law, including the punishment of death by stoning for being gay. The government of Brunei also stands to be one of the biggest beneficiaries of Hillary’s Trans-Pacific Partnership, which she would absolutely approve if given the chance.”

It is true that the government of Brunei treats women and LGBT community harshly. But the Clinton State Department and the Obama administration are not the first to maintain relations with foreign governments who social policies Americans generally disagree with. But what makes this truly not credible is that Trump omits the fact that Clinton transferred ownership of the jewelry to the U.S. government, as is custom for U.S. government officials who receive gifts from foreign governments.

Summary: Donald Trump mixed facts and fiction in a speech about his opponent.


Volkswagen’s ongoing emissions crisis is having a big impact on a small, oil-rich country on the Persian Gulf.

Qatar’s Investment Authority (QIA), the country’s sovereign wealth fund, is the biggest holder of Volkswagen preferred shares and the third biggest holder of its ordinary stock. Due to VW’s recent emissions test scandal, which has crushed the automaker’s stock price, the country could have lost $43 billion in the past two days, Bloomberg reported.

The QIA also owns a good chunk of shares in Glencore, which has been suffering lately as well, adding another $354 million to Qatar’s losses.

After admitting to the scandal, VW potentially faces $18 million in penalties and has set aside $7.3 billion to cover costs. The company also has to deal with a damaged reputation with consumers, which will likely affect sales. Its stock dropped 20% on Monday followed by an additional 20% on Tuesday, bringing it to a four year low.

Glencore’s stock fell 16% on Tuesday, bringing share prices to less than $1.55, an all time low, the Wall Street Journal reported. Copper, the largest earnings driver for the company, saw prices fall 3.6% to $5,036 a ton. Zinc, another major metal for the mining company, fell to $1,640 a ton, which is the lowest it has been in over six years. Glencore’s shares are down two-thirds since the beginning of the year and Switzerland-based bank Credit Suisse wrote in a note to clients that investors have lost all confidence in the company.

This terrible week for the QIA has resulted in a total of $4.6 billion in losses for Qatar.

Summary: The country could have lost $4.6 billion in just two days.


Legendary “Piano Man” Billy Joel announced yesterday that his latest trip down the aisle has ended with him splitting up with his third wife after nearly five years of marriage.

KATIE LEE’S HER SIZZLING ‘DIRTY’ DANCE WITH FASHION DESIGNER

For months, rumors have swirled that Joel’s marriage to Katie Lee Joel — who is 33 years younger than him — was on the rocks. Word got out that the 60-year-old was getting increasingly steamed at the amount of time she was spending with an Israeli fashion designer, instead of at their Hamptons mansion.

But a rep for Joel said the split was amicable and was just a matter between the two of them.

“After nearly five years of marriage, Billy Joel and Katie Lee Joel have decided to separate. This decision is a result of much thoughtful consideration. Billy and Katie remain caring friends with admiration and respect for each other,” the couple said in a statement.

It had been widely reported that the couple’s marriage was under increasing “Pressure,” as the 27-year-old brunette beauty had gravitated ever closer to haute couture designer Yigal Azrouel.

“They’re spending a lot of time together,” a source told Page Six in April. “She’s always with him. She rarely goes out to spend time [with Joel] and instead stays in the city near Yigal.”

“She even leaves her dogs at his showroom. People are definitely noticing,” the source added.

Other sources said at the time that Joel — who has been on tour — was being told by friends to ditch his much younger wife when the tour ends in August, but apparently he had had enough.

The final straw came when Katie Lee asked Billy to go with her to a party she was hosting in the Hamptons on June 13 and he exploded.

“So now you want me to be by your side and play your happy husband? Take a hike!” he said, according to a report.

Joel told The Post on the front porch of his Sagaponack spread that he “can’t talk about it.”

“Oh, boy, here we go,” he said. “It didn’t take you long to find me. Sorry, no comment. I don’t want to say anything.”

Joel married Katie Lee in a lavish wedding in October 2004 at his home in Oyster Bay, LI, after they had been dating for a year. Guests included Donald Trump and Alec Baldwin.

His daughter from his previous marriage to supermodel Christie Brinkley, Alexa Ray Joel — who is just four years younger than Katie Lee — served as maid of honor.

The couple has no kids together.

While the West Virginia-born beauty could easily have lived off her hubby’s wealth, she stayed busy as a “professional foodie,” hosting the first season of Bravo’s “Top Chef” reality program and putting out her own cookbook.

“I don’t want to just be Billy Joel’s wife,” she told Page Six Magazine last year. “I’ve always wanted to work. It doesn’t matter who I’m married to — I’m going to have my own job and my own identity.”

“If I didn’t work, they’d say, ‘She just sits around and spends his money and eats bonbons,’ ” she added. “Sometimes I feel like Dorothy and I have to keep reminding myself I’m not in Kansas anymore. I didn’t grow up wealthy. This is all new to me.”

In the meantime, Joel stays in Sagaponack while she is bedding down at his four-story townhouse in Greenwich Village — near Azrouel’s boutique.

People close to the pair said all their friends were devastated.

“Everyone is shocked because they thought everything in the press was rumors and nobody believed it would actually happen,” a source said.

With the breakup looming, Joel quietly took his aristocratic $32.5 million Centre Island home off the market, sources told The Post. Situated on 14 acres with 1,550 feet of direct waterfront, it has 20 rooms, including a ballroom, gentleman’s club, wine cellar, bowling alley, tennis court, spa and three-bedroom guest apartment.

Azrouel, 36, has been linked to socialite Fernanda Niven, and is often photographed in the presence of many of the city’s top female fashion editors. He most recently made news for firing p.r. firm People’s Revolution after publicist Kelly Cutrone invited ex-Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s hooker Ashley Dupre to attend his show during Fashion Week last February.

He had frequently made dresses for Katie Lee Joel for her media appearances and a rep for her recently described it as “a simple friend-work relationship.”

Joel met Katie Lee, who at the time worked as a restaurant correspondent for the TV show “George Hirsch: Living it Up!” on PBS, in 2003 and proposed to her while on vacation in the Caribbean.

Joel, a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame who has had bouts with booze, has recorded more than two dozen Top 10 hits in his career. Some of his songs include 1973 signature tune “Piano Man” and 1976’s “New York State of Mind.”

Joel was married to his first wife, business manager Elizabeth Weber, from 1973 to 1982.

The crooner married Brinkley in 1985, but the couple split up nine years later.

Additional reporting by Jennifer Gould Keil, Neel Shah and Corynne Steindler

Summary: Guess who’s “Movin’ Out?” Legendary “Piano Man” Billy Joel announced yesterday that his latest trip down the aisle has ended with him splitting up with his third…


“THE British people have voted to leave the European Union and their will must be respected.” With these words David Cameron acknowledged an outcome that he doubted would materialise: the country had voted for Brexit. His lip quivering and his wife at his side, he proceeded to announce that he would be stepping down: staying on as a caretaker while his party holds a leadership contest to be concluded by the time of its conference in October. No candidates have put their names forward, but it is to be expected that Boris Johnson and Theresa May, and probably others, will throw their hats into the ring.

The move, so hard to imagine just hours earlier, had become nigh-on inevitable as, at around 5am, the prime minister’s defeat in the referendum was confirmed. Mr Cameron has spent the past months touring the country telling voters that a Brexit would be disastrous. He would not have wanted to stay on and make the disaster a reality. And in any case his mostly anti-EU members would not have tolerated him. He had to go.

The resignation speech, when it came, was an emotional attempt to remind the world of the best of his six-year premiership: with nods to his one-nation reforms, an emphasis on the importance of stability in the coming months and a patriotic peroration about “this great country”. It was a touching bid to leave office with some scraps of dignity and honour.

It was ineffectual. With stockmarkets around Europe crashing, recriminations whizzing through the ether and the full weight of Britain’s terrible decision to leave the EU looming over them, his achievements in office seemed, however unfairly, puny.

Most unedifying was his attempt to imbue the referendum result, easily one of the most ill-conceived and profoundly damaging political events of Britain’s post-war history, with some nobility. It had been a great democratic exercise, the prime minister told the crowds. It had been important to answer such a pressing question. The people had spoken.

To put it kindly, this was a fantasy. Mr Cameron took the reckless decision to pledge to hold a vote (against the better wisdom of George Osborne, the chancellor, who is also bound to go) back in 2013. He had not needed to. The public was certainly not clamouring for one. His motive was to placate his cranky backbenchers. His consideration given to the risks and realities of such a promise was lacking. His understanding of the “renegotiation” of Britain's EU membership, on which he rested his strategy, was cursory at best.

The prime minister’s gamble was underwritten by the assurance that he could handle it, that his powers of persuasion and credibility (which, to be fair, are considerable) would save the day. In the months and years after his 2013 speech, he wasted opportunity after opportunity to roll the pitch for the referendum; to build, over time, a durable case to stay in the EU. Under-advised and overconfident, he turned the renegotiation from an asset to a stick with which Brexiteers could beat him. His referendum campaign, for all its flashes of skill and conviction, was too little, too late. The whole exercise was a spectacularly foolhardy act of overreach. The unanticipated outcome will be a Britain poorer, more isolated, less influential and more divided.

A time will come for reflection on the good in Mr Cameron’s leadership of the Conservative Party and his premiership, on his fundamentally correct vision for a one-nation Tory party in possession of the centre ground. But it will surely be dwarfed by this giant, nation-changing misstep, one guaranteed to scar the country for decades and diminish his place in the history books. He leaves office in ignominy.

All our Brexit coverage >>

Summary: Mr Cameron’s tenure will be defined by a nation-changing misstep, one guaranteed to scar Britain for decades


Officials in St. Louis County and the tense town of Ferguson, Mo., remain mum nearly three days after an unidentified police officer shot an unarmed black teenager to death. But a young man who says he was with the victim at the time of the shooting has described a virtually unprovoked attack in which the officer fired repeatedly — even after the victim raised his hands and begged him to stop shooting.

In an interview with MSNBC, Dorion Johnson, 22, said his friend Michael Brown, 18, was walking in the street when the officer ordered him to the sidewalk. When Brown did not immediately comply, the officer put him in a chokehold. The young man struggled to free himself, and the officer pulled his gun and fired.

Wounded, Brown tried to flee but was shot a second time in the back. That’s when he turned with his hands raised, Johnson said. “I don’t have a gun. Stop shooting!” he said, but additional shots were fired.

Johnson’s version of events entered an information vacuum created by the silence of city, county, state and federal officials. Ferguson police chief Thomas Jackson said Monday that information concerning Brown’s death would be released by noon on Tuesday. But as the deadline approached, a department spokesman announced a change of plans. The officer involved will not be named, nor will authorities commit to a timeline for releasing autopsy results and other details of the investigation.

Citing threats lodged on social media, Ferguson police spokesman officer Timothy Zoll said, “we are protecting the officer’s safety by not releasing the name.”

The St. Louis County police were also mum. Their investigation into the shooting continues, said officer Brian Schellman, “but it is not for us to release the officer’s name. It is a personnel matter. It is up to the Ferguson police.”

At a press conference on the steps of the Old Courthouse in downtown St. Louis on Tuesday, the Rev. Al Sharpton and Benjamin Crump, a civil-rights lawyer representing Brown’s family, said they are considering suing the Ferguson police for the release of the officer’s name. Citing community distrust of local law enforcement, Crump called for the Justice Department to take over the investigation.

This investigation has been more complicated than most, as police have been pressed into a struggle to maintain peace in a restless and angry community. On Sunday night, peaceful protests erupted into a chaotic scene of arson and looting. Since then, parts of Ferguson — an incorporated working-class suburb of some 21,000 residents roughly 12 miles north of St. Louis — have been patrolled by scores of armored police officers with tear gas at the ready.

“This isn’t what Ferguson is about,” said one resident, Shante Duncan, 33. “This is a good community. There are lots of people on the ground doing good work, but you never hear about any of it.”

Generations of racially mixed families have lived in Ferguson, some dating back more than a century, with ancestors among the slaves who were sold at auction houses on the Mississippi riverfront. Today, its residents comprise roughly two-thirds African Americans and one-third Caucasians. Race relations, often harmonious among neighbors, are frequently tense between black residents and the mostly Caucasian city officials.

“Ferguson is notorious for being prejudiced against blacks,” said George Chapman, a 50-year-old African American who has lived in the town most of his life but said he recently moved because he was “tired of the police.”

“The police stop us all the time,” Chapman said. “The police show us no respect. They treat us like we’re nothing.”

A racial-profiling report from the Missouri attorney general’s office showed that, last year, African Americans in Ferguson were significantly more likely to be involved in police traffic stops and arrests.

Michael Brown’s parents said during a press conference on Monday that their son had overcome the racial hardships facing many young African-American males. “He was a good boy,” said his father Mike Brown Sr., determined to make something of himself and scheduled to start schooling for a career in heating and cooling.

“He was starting on a new journey,” said Brown’s mother Lesley McSpadden. “He was maturing.”

Brown’s family deplored the looted businesses in Ferguson, the violence, the vandalism that resulted in boarded-up businesses and scrawled graffiti inciting violence against police. “Why would you burn your community?” asked Brown’s grandfather, Leslie McSpadden. “Why? This should not be his legacy.”

Why, indeed. St. Louis is not the first place most Americans would name when asked to think of a city primed to blow. But friction is the result of two surfaces rubbing together, and St. Louis has always been a city where surfaces meet. It may be the ultimate border town. Its signature arch, marking the Gateway to the West, is meant to remind us that St. Louis is the place where the East ended and the West began. Likewise, its equipoise near the midpoint of the Mississippi marked St. Louis as a fault line between North and South.

The racial history of St. Louis is burdened by a hyperconsciousness of borders and boundaries. Colin Gordon of the University of Iowa brilliantly demonstrates this in his book (and related website), Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City. Few cities, as Gordon shows, have taken a more systematic approach to racial separation and division.

It started with … well, how far back do we want to go? The infamous Dred Scott case of 1857 — that spark in the powder keg of the Civil War — began in St. Louis as a question of whether a man’s human rights evaporated when he crossed the border into a slave state. In the decades since that terrible war, St. Louis has tried a number of tactics to keep the races apart.

In 1916, the city passed a zoning law that explicitly restricted black homeowners to certain neighborhoods. The following year, in a case out of Louisville, Ky., the Supreme Court struck down racial zoning laws. So St. Louis realtors responded with a series of restrictive covenants designed to separate the races. White homeowners were forbidden to sell their houses to black customers, and real estate agents could lose their licenses if they participated in a forbidden transaction.

Eventually the covenant strategy failed as well. In 1946, the Supreme Court struck down those arrangements in a case that came from St. Louis.

Now the metropolis turned to redlining, the practice of steering black buyers into certain neighborhoods by discriminating on their mortgage applications. Through it all, white homeowners accelerated the division by moving away from downtown and into predominantly white suburbs — the same “white flight” that remade American cities from coast to coast after World War II.

You can see it all in Gordon’s maps, drawn meticulously from government records and Census data. Or you can read it more poetically in the charming prose of the late St. Louis writer Stanley Elkin. In his 1980 love song to St. Louis, first published in Esquire, he noted the peculiar boundaries of his chosen home:

“St. Louis … is a city of sealed neighborhoods, gated as a railroad crossing, of blocked-off streets and private places, chartered as a nation, zoned as meteorological maps, the enclaves and cul-de-sac of stalled weather.”

The shooting of Michael Brown, and the violence that followed, happened smack on one of those borders. Ferguson is an inner-ring suburb that is neither black nor white. Its southern border abuts a storied country club where Ben Hogan won the 1948 PGA Championship. Other parts of the little city-inside-a-city produce an overall unemployment rate of nearly 20%.

Established in 1894, Ferguson encompasses rough-around-the-edges manufactured homes and turn-of-the-century Victorian manors within its 6 sq. mi. It is a mixture of suburban and blue collar, home to “King of Kash” payday loan shops as well as boutique home-decor stores. One of Missouri’s largest corporations, Emerson Electric, has its headquarters there.

St. Louis rapper Tef Poe, writing in the Riverfront Times, caught the jagged feeling of the border city last year in his description of a neighborhood not far from Ferguson: “Rich people, middle-income, lower-income and dirt-poor people living blocks apart from each other in what is basically the same neighborhood.”

As the tension in Ferguson and nearby communities stretched into its fourth day, protesters seemed torn by the friction of a city built on such fine lines. “We’re not stupid! We’re not stupid!” a group of peaceful protesters chanted in the direction of a line of 130 county police in riot gear. Chanel Ruffin, 25, a Ferguson resident, said that “Ferguson police show us no respect. They harass black people all the time.” She said she knew Michael Brown, and “he was a nice guy. He was going to start college and make something of himself. He didn’t deserve to be shot so many times.”

Like others in the crowd, Ruffin did not try to explain the riot — much less to justify it. “I’m not saying what they did was right,” she said.

Things happen along these fault lines that cannot be entirely explained.

They can only be felt. “People were acting out of emotions,” Ruffin ventured. “There are a lot of people hurting.”

— With reporting by Kristina Sauerwein / Ferguson, Mo.

Summary: The racial history of St. Louis is burdened by a hyper-consciousness of borders and boundaries


Jul 6, 2016 5:57 PM EDT Politics

By Emily Schultheis / CBS News

Presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump and the Republican National Committee raised $51 million in June, a big improvement for a candidate who just recently began fundraising for his campaign in earnest.

Trump raised $26 million for his own campaign, his team announced, with an additional $25 million raised jointly with the RNC at 22 separate fundraising events around the country. According to the campaign, 400,000 people donated, and 94 percent of those donations were for less than $200.

In addition to the $51 million raised, Trump contributed $3.8 million of his own money to the campaign. His campaign did not announce how much money it currently has on hand, or how much it spent during the month of June.

Trump's $51 million haul is a big improvement over his past fundraising, which was nearly nonexistent: at the end of May, for example, he raised barely more than $3 million and had just $1.3 million on hand. It was only in late May that Trump began holding and attending fundraisers, and he sent out his first email fundraising appeal in late June.

The figure will help quiet concerns within the GOP about Trump's inability to raise the kind of money he needs to compete this fall--and suggests Trump, who has benefited from support within the Republican grassroots, can tap into that supporter base to effectively raise cash.

But it's still considerably less than the $68.5 million Hillary Clinton raised with the Democratic National Committee in June, including $40.5 million that was raised specifically for her campaign.

And compared with his party's standard-bearer four years ago, Trump isn't yet measuring up: in June of 2012, GOP nominee Mitt Romney raised $106 million with the RNC, finishing the month with $160 million on hand for his campaign.

That said, it's worth noting that Trump is also likely spending at a far slower clip than either Clinton or Romney: he's run virtually no TV ads lately, and has a much smaller (and presumably less expensive) campaign operation than other recent party nominees at this point in the race. It won't be clear exactly what Trump's burn rate is until his full report is filed with the Federal Election Commission.

The GOP pol teased the big fundraising announcement in a tweet Tuesday night, saying there would "be a big gasp" when people saw the numbers:

Raised a lot of money for the Republican Party. There will be a big gasp when the figures are announced in the morning. Lots of support! Win

Summary: The sum will help quiet fears that Trump can't or won't raise enough money to compete this fall, but he's still far behind Democrat Hillary Clinton


07/11/2016 AT 02:45 PM EDT

will grow up living a "normal" life – dad

In a sneak peek at Tuesday's episode of

, Smith's photographer ex opens up about how he's raising his 9-year-old daughter with the late model and reality TV personality.

"It's different than a normal situation," admits Birkhead, now 43, of getting Dannielynn to terms with her famous mother's life cut short. "I make it as normal as I can."

Birkhead continues, "She knows that her mom was famous and that people want to know about her. It's different for my daughter because it's nothing for her to go past and see a story in the checkout stands on the cover of magazines of her mom or herself or us."

Dannielynn was just 5 months old when her mother

age 39 of a drug overdose in Florida.

These days, Birkhead is keeping mindful of preserving Smith's memory – and the tough lessons resulting from her early death – for their daughter.

"We go back all the time and we go to [Anna Nicole's] grave," he told

in November. "We visit and I tell Dannielynn stories about her mom. I don't sugarcoat it. I say there are some things that your mom did and you know I try to make her learn from it."

airs weekdays (check local listings).

Summary: Dannielynn, now 9, was just 5 months old when Smith died of a drug overdose


President Obama announcd a set of executive actions on gun control Tuesday aimed at reducing gun violence in the United States. His announcement followed a spate of mass shootings that have once again ignited the national debate over gun control.

Here’s four things you need to know about Obama’s big move.

The executive actions most significantly impact the so-called gun show loophole

People were previously allowed to buy firearms at gun shows without undergoing a background check. Under the new rules, any business that sells firearms—in a brick-and-mortar store, over the Internet or at a gun show—must have a license and conduct background checks on people trying to buy guns.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) had previously not required background checks from people making occasional sales or exchanges of firearms for a personal collection.

It doesn’t require every gun sale to be preceded by a background check

The action requires sellers at gun shows to conduct background checks but does not mandate checks in every instance. Those who buy or sell only as collectors would not have to undergo a check.

In a news release, the White House said the ATF is finalizing a rule to require background checks for people trying to buy the most dangerous weapons.

The government will spend money to make sure background checks take less time

The President’s fiscal year 2017 budget will include funding for more ATF investigators and agents, and the FBI will hire more than 230 staff members to help with background checks, which will now be processed 24/7. The ATF also established a center to track illegal online firearms trafficking and will devote $4 million to adding personnel to the National Integrated Ballistics Information Network.

Obama has defended the legality of the actions

The executive actions have been met with opposition Republicans who say it infringes on the Second Amendment right to bear arms, but Obama defended his legal authority in taking such steps. “I’m also confident that the recommendations that are being made by my team here are ones that are entirely consistent with the Second Amendment and people’s lawful right to bear arms,” he said on Monday.

Summary: The actions primarily target firearm sales at gunshows


''The bigger the seat, the more chafing or rubbing,'' he said.

Worse, wide seats do not support the pelvis properly, notes Tom Kellogg, a bicycle racer, custom-frame builder, and president of Spectrum Cycles in Breinigsville, Pa.

The seat, he said, should support the ischial tuberosities, the two bones at the bottom of the pelvis that bear the rider's weight.

''Cushioning does not help; the shape of the saddle does,'' he said.

Dave Levy, a custom builder, former bicycle racer and the owner of Ti Cycles in Seattle, points out that experienced bicyclists support one-third of their weight on their hands, one-third on their feet, and one-third on their buttocks.

''If you are sitting on top of a big cushy ball, there is no way to make it so that your body will support itself efficiently,'' he said.

Novices, said Dr. Hagberg, tend to ''sit straight up, with all their weight on their butt,'' and no wonder they are in pain.

Another mistake that beginners often make is to set the seat so low that their legs are scrunched or, less often, so high that the riders rocks from side to side. ''Knee problems in the making,'' the experts say.

Richard Schwinn, a custom bicycle-frame builder who happens to be a great-grandson of the founder of Schwinn bicycles, said that many people get the idea in childhood that their feet must touch the ground when they sit on a bicycle seat. But that means that the seat is so low that the cyclist's knees are under constant strain, to say nothing of making pedaling inefficient, said Mr. Schwinn, who owns Waterford Precision Cycles in Waterford, Wis..

''The saddle height that works properly is tall enough that you can't put your feet on the ground when you are sitting on the saddle,'' Mr. Schwinn said.

Some clients tell him they are terrified when he sets their seats, Mr. Schwinn said, but ''once you learn how to mount and dismount, having a saddle at the proper elevation is easy.''

For serious riders, a custom bike can enhance the experience. It turns out that ready-made bicycles are best for average-size men. They are less likely to fit women, whose legs and thighs tend to be proportionately longer. Very short and very tall women have particular problems, as do men whose arms or legs are disproportionately long or short.

I know those bicycle-fitting problems firsthand. With my ready-made bicycle, I had to stretch to reach the handlebars. After an hour or so of riding, I would get shooting pains in the back of my neck. And I could never sit in a way that allowed me to use my legs most efficiently when I climbed hills.

For the casual rider, such details are almost arcane; for the serious rider, they become crucial.

''If you get on an ill-fitting bike and ride five miles -- I've done that and still had fun,'' Mr. Schwinn said. ''If you told me to ride 20 miles, it would be a death roll. If your typical ride is 30 miles or more, relatively subtle differences can have a big impact.''

Entering the world of custom-made bikes means trusting a frame builder in an arena where builders learn their craft by apprenticeship, and by trial and error, and where there is no way of knowing if their performance claims are correct until your first ride.

Over the years, Mr. Vandermark said, frame builders develop their own systems for fitting and building a bicycle and consider them to be trade secrets. The fine details can make the difference between one that is O.K. and one that is almost magical.

To get those details right, Mr. Vandermark asks questions that seem almost whimsical, for example, ''Do you pedal when you go around a sharp curve?''

''If you pedal through corners,'' he explained, ''it affects the height of the cranks from the ground. The lower we make that, the more stable the bike will be. The higher we make it, the easier it is to pedal through corners without clipping a pedal.''

In addition, Mr. Vandermark said, a rider who pedals through sharp curves tends to be someone who is more confident and will want a stiffer frame. The advantage is better acceleration -- ''when you stand on the pedals, it responds.''

The disadvantage is that the rider feels every bump in the road.

Building a frame, custom builders say, is a matter of constant compromise. Even making a bicycle lightweight involves sacrificing other features, like stability and handling. Mr. Schwinn, a heavy man, saw those problems firsthand when he test rode a featherweight bicycle with a titanium frame. Something seemed wrong the moment he started to ride.

''I thought the pedals were going to fall off the bike,'' he said. ''It was the weirdest feeling. It turned out that it wasn't the pedals. It was the chain wheel flexing back and forth.''

My custom bicycle is not the lightest possible -- it is made of steel. But it was nothing like the ready-made bicycle I had been riding.

It was completed on a steamy Friday last July, ready for pickup at a local bicycle shop that had done the paperwork, measured me, and added its components, like a seat and a chain wheel. I left work early to get it.

The dimpled young man at the shop was crestfallen when I grabbed the bicycle and dashed out. He wanted me to ride it around the parking lot.

''I wanted to see the expression on your face,'' he explained.

I scoffed. After all, this was just a bicycle, I thought. The difference is it will fit me. The pain in the back of my neck will no longer plague me and I will do better on hills.

When I got home, my son and I headed out for a quick ride. Before I had gone a quarter-mile, I knew what the man at the shop meant. The bicycle responded, it handled, it moved, it was like a living thing. I was flying. Now that was bicycling.

Summary: Increase in sales of specialty road bicycles from 171,600 in 2002 to 185,400 in 2003 reflects growing interest in serious cycling in United States; five-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong's influence is cited as partial cause for growth in cycling; new bicycle technologies, including custom cycles with computerized features and ultra lightweight frames, can reduce rider injuries and make extended riding more fluid; suggestions for proper bicycle fit and adjustments described; photos (L)


Sukhinder Singh Cassidy is all about the numbers.

On Thursday, the tech entrepreneur launched theBoardlist Index, which aims to track the number of private and public tech company board seats filled by women. “The more transparent the data is, the greater the ability to say what needs to be done,” says Singh Cassidy, who founded theBoardlist in July of last year with the goal of getting more qualified women on boards. The new index will be updated quarterly.

According to theBoardlist, as of June 30, just 6.8% of private tech companies’ and 10.2% of unicorn companies’ (valued at $1 billion or more) board seats are filled by women. Moreover, the data reveals that nearly four out of five private tech companies have no women on their boards whatsoever.

“I really feel like CEOs and boards and leadership teams are on the wrong side of history if they don’t start adopting solutions,” says Singh Cassidy, the founder and CEO of video shopping platform Joyus and a seasoned tech exec whose resumé includes stints at Google, Amazon, and Polyvore.

The launch of the new tool also marks the first birthday of the company, and Singh Cassidy, true to her love of data, is using the anniversary to take stock of the initiative’s progress. Since its founding, 34 female candidates from the platform have been made directors at public and private companies. Three of these women were placed directly at these companies by theBoardlist, including two new appointments: Deirdre Bigley on the board of Shutterstock sstk and Betsy Rafael as a director of Shutterfly sfly .

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One of theBoardlist’s biggest priorities for the next year will be to drive scale, which means, in part, doubling its revenue from roughly $500,000 to $1 million, Singh Cassidy says. In addition to expanding across industries and geographies—new areas of focus include Los Angeles, Chicago, Austin and Seattle—theBoardlist is debuting its Assisted Search, a full set of head hunting services aimed at helping match executives with qualified candidates.

Singh Cassidy expects Assisted Search to become a major income stream for the company, which currently makes money through corporate membership fees (companies pay to see female board candidates) and sponsors, which include Silicon Valley Bank and law firm WSGR.

Since launching a year ago, 120 searches for board candidates have taken place on theBoardlist. Singh Cassidy believes this is a significant number, though she acknowledges that the company has “just scratched the surface.” Meaningful change, she says, happens “over many, many, many years.”

And one year in, Singh Cassidy is committed to sticking around: “Our mission is to do this work for years to come.”

Summary: Sukhinder Singh Cassidy brings transparency to Silicon Valley.


Sonja Morgan's oblivious reality is being torn apart after the TV personality showed horrible timing in a tweet posted moments after the deadly rampage in Southern France.

The "Real Housewives of New York" star quickly came under fire after she casually tweeted about getting pampered before heading off to vacation in the region.

The inappropriate message came roughly an hour after a gun-toting driver plowed into a crowd celebrating Bastille day in the town of Nice on Thursday night, killing at least 77 people and wounding 50 others.

The driver, armed with firearms and grenades, was shot dead by police after his deliberate massacre, French officials said.

Sonja Morgan called out by mother of pediatric cancer victim

Morgan, who has appeared on the reality show for the past five years, seemed unware of the chaos unleashed in the area.

"W/ my dearest @MarcoM57 @JohnBarrettNYC getting ready 4 the #southofFrance after 1 last job," she tweeted.

The 52-year-old even added a "blessed" emoji, several vacation-themed emojis and a selfie of herself at a salon.

"Perhaps you should read the news," one follower quickly warned the reality starlet.

ISIS told supporters to run over people in cars years before Nice

Several other social media users also blasted Morgan for her apparent ignorance and included the hashtag "Pray for France."

"Turn on the TV," one wrote.

"Really! Maybe turn the news on!" another retorted.

Despite the flood of comments, Morgan didn't delete the controversial post.

An hour later, she returned to Twitter and explained she "just heard the news."

"Literally out of pocket all day. My heart and prayers go out 2 the victims of the Nice attack," she continued.

Summary: Sonja Morgan' reality is being torn apart after the TV personality showed horrible timing.


The Glasgow East MP Natalie McGarry is facing a second police inquiry after the SNP regional association of which she was formerly convenor made a complaint about alleged financial discrepancies.

Police Scotland confirmed it had received and was now investigating a report from the SNP’s Glasgow regional association regarding missing funds from the association’s accounts.

But a spokesperson for McGarry said: “Police Scotland have not been in contact with Ms McGarry in relation to recent media reports. Ms McGarry is clear that no wrongdoing has been committed on her part and she will fully cooperate with Police Scotland in their inquiries.”

McGarry withdrew from the SNP whip last November after she was linked to an allegation that tens of thousands of pounds in donations may be missing from Women for Independence, the campaign group she helped found. Police Scotland’s inquiries into this allegation remain ongoing. McGarry denies any wrongdoing.

McGarry has continued to attract controversy since her resignation. In May, she admitted she had made a “serious mistake” when she accused a pro-union campaigner of being an “outed Holocaust denier” on social media. Alastair Cameron, director of the campaign group Scotland in Union, accepted McGarry’s apology, and agreed legal costs and a charitable donation, after the Glasgow East MP settled legal proceedings out of court.

In January McGarry prompted another Twitter row after she accused JK Rowling of bullying, causing the Harry Potter author to threaten legal proceedings.

An SNP spokesperson said: “It would be inappropriate to comment while these matters are being considered.”

Summary: Glasgow East MP who resigned SNP whip is investigated by Police Scotland after allegation about financial discrepancies


NEWARK, Sept. 23— A former debt collector who wrote a how-to crime book while in prison has been sentenced to more prison time for credit-card fraud and told to repay American Express $35,000.

The man, Barry Sussman, 28 years old, of Paramus, was sentenced last week to five years in prison and also ordered to get psychiatric treatment. He received a 12-year suspended sentence for mail fraud and three years of probation.

Mr. Sussman pleaded guilty Sept. 8 to one count of credit-card fraud and four counts of mail fraud.

He could have received up to 30 years in prison and more than $1 million in fines. Acquired Up to 200 Credit Cards

An assistant United States attorney, Arthur P. Zucker, said that Mr. Sussman admitted to having illegally acquired between 100 and 200 credit cards over six years.

He obtained them by using the names of fictitious people and companies and by devising an elaborate system of post office boxes and telephone answering services to field inquiries from his creditors, Mr. Zucker said.

Mr. Sussman had written a manuscript, ''I Scam . . . You Scam, Specific Methods for Defeating Bureaucratic Organizations,'' while serving a two-year prison term for violating probation, Mr. Zucker said. He said it was ''a how-to book for the con man'' that included advice on getting as much as $60,000 from one fraudulent credit card and earning up to $300,000 from a phantom business. The book was never published.

''A steady stream of cash and prizes will make every day seem like you are a contestant on 'The Price Is Right,' '' Mr. Zucker quoted from the manuscript in a memorandum to Federal District Court Judge Alfred J. Lechner. 'He Would Do It Again'

''When you read the book you get the impression he was advocating it, that he loved it, he enjoyed it,'' Mr. Zucker told the court. ''He would do it again.''

Judge Lechner told Mr. Sussman that he was an intelligent man with a good education who had repeatedly engaged in criminal activity.

''You used your intellect as a street thug would use a weapon to coerce money out of people,'' the judge told him.

He ordered Mr. Sussman to report voluntarily on Oct. 7, to begin serving his prison sentence, and raised his bail from $10,000 to $100,000.

Defense attorney, Arthur J. Maurello, asked the court for leniency, saying Mr. Sussman had already served two years in prison. He also said his client was suffering from a ''psychiatric disorder.''

''Writing a book is far less grievous than committing a crime,'' Mr. Maurello said. ''He could have been doing a lot worse things and he wasn't.''

''In jail my writing was my therapy,'' Mr. Sussman told the court. ''I have been punished. I have been rehabilitated.''

Summary: LEAD: A former debt collector who wrote a how-to crime book while in prison has been sentenced to more prison time for credit-card fraud and told to repay American Express $35,000.


WASHINGTON -- Shortly after lunch tomorrow, judges in a federal court that specializes in patent appeals will ponder an existential question: Can a company patent how it makes a peanut butter and jelly sandwich?

Specifically, the judges will consider whether J.M. Smucker Co.'s method for making Uncrustables -- sealed, crustless peanut butter and jelly pockets -- is worthy of legal protection against imitators.

Summary: Federal judges are considering whether Smucker's method for making sealed, crustless peanut-butter-and-jelly pockets is worthy of legal protection against imitators, as critics decry the state of the U.S. patent system.


Everyone, including Arthur, got more out of Bonnaroo than they did on a subsequent trip to Disneyland, she added. “For some people, a cruise is their ideal vacation, but for us, Bonnaroo is a combination of all of the things we love, like camping and listening to music under the stars.”

Ariel Meadow Stallings also considers family time paramount. She took her then-5-year-old son to Beloved, a music-and-art festival in Tidewater, Ore., to share her passion for dancing. “Of course, we can always dance in the living room, but there aren’t many places to dance to a full sound system and light show,” she said. “Music festivals give me the chance to share that part of my life with my favorite person.”

Parental interest in attending festivals with the whole family isn’t lost on festival organizers. Some festivals, even small independent ones like Basilica, encourage children to participate, while others have programming specifically for them: Austin Kiddie Limits at Austin City Limits; Kidzapalooza at Lollapalooza; and Youngershoot at Bumbershoot. These festivals offer activities like mural-making, music lessons, temporary tattoos and child-oriented music performances.

The programing is generally designed for the under-10 set, but some parents find that their children prefer main-stage acts. Yvette Geigenmiller has taken her children to Austin City Limits for three years running. In 2014, her 6-year-old daughter was especially excited to see Capital Cities, while her 11-year-old son was all about Skrillex.

“My kids really love crowds and visual entertainment,” Ms. Geigenmiller said. “We definitely bond over music.”

Kidz Jam at Bonnaroo features different child-friendly activities each day, including instrument making, communal canvas painting and a tie-dye party. Since 2007, Bonnaroo has also had a family camping area, and for those up early enough, before the music starts around 1 p.m., there is yoga and a 5K run that families are welcome to join.

And for the first time in its 11-year history, the Chicago-based Pitchfork Music Festival had a dedicated children’s area this year. Michael Grant, a lawyer in Chicago, has taken his four daughters, all 10 and under, to Pitchfork for the past three years. “Because it’s in a park, you can always get away from the music and regroup if you need to,” he said.

But do families tie into the less savory aspects of music festival culture, the type that tend to make headlines when the Electric Daisy Carnival rolls into town?

While the smaller, esoteric festivals are a far cry from mainstream festivals like Lollapalooza, Governors Ball and Coachella, certain elements of hedonism endemic to the communal experience of music keep some parents from taking their children.

“I can’t expect adults to behave well in that sort of setting,” said Diana Sherman Whittles, a mother in Hoboken, N.J., who attends music festivals, but without her sons. “Plus, I don’t want to have to make multiple trips to the bathroom or for snacks, and I don’t want to have to leave early because my kids are tired or bored.”

Similarly, Henry Owings of Atlanta has taken his 5-year-old daughter to see smaller shows, but not mainstream festivals. “A festival isn’t for her, it’s for me,” he said. “She’d rather go to the beach.”

For festivalgoers who do take their children, angry comments can bubble up on forums like Reddit, where one first-time Bonnaroo attendee posted in 2014: “I was shocked and dismayed by all the children there. I saw a mom breast-feeding her baby during Cake!”

When the actress Alicia Silverstone took her 11-month-old son to Coachella in 2012, there was much hand-wringing by the gossip blogs and a photo-shaming “Coachella baby” Tumblr.

Kate Fisher, a former teacher in Asheville, N.C., who has taken her sons to Moogfest and the electronic dance music festival Mountain Oasis, said that choosing festivals is important, as is a parents’ own behavior, which children will model.

“You want them to feel like they belong, that they are welcome,” Ms. Fisher said. One year, Fishbone played the festival Leaf in Black Mountain, N.C., and after the first few songs the mosh pit really got going, so she took her sons back to the tent for s’mores.

But the experience was no dealbreaker. “Are you going to put your kids in a bubble and not let them be exposed to anything?” she said. “If you’re not O.K. with things being a little messy or loud during nap time, then don’t take the kids.”

Tips for Unfettered Music Appreciation

To quote the Boy Scouts: Be prepared.

CHECK THE RULES Before you go, become familiar with the festival’s policies. Know what you cannot bring inside. (For example, some festivals welcome strollers, but others ban them.) Don’t forget sunblock, water — some festivals allow patrons to bring in empty bottles for on-site refilling — and ear protection.

START SMALL If it’s your first time bringing the kids, start with a small festival, such as Huichica. Adventurous families can try Panorama.

IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU Your child’s needs come first. You must be willing to miss the act you most want to see.

THINK SAFETY Create a safe retreat away from the chaos.

SCOUT OUT FIRST AID Know where to find the medical tent. That’s also one place to breast-feed if you want privacy.

PARENT POOL Go with other families.

SKIP THE CROWDS Avoid arriving and leaving with the masses.

A version of this article appears in print on July 22, 2016, on page C23 of the New York edition with the headline: Rocking Out in the Mosh Pit, With Baby in Tow. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe

Summary: As the festival industry grows, parents are starting to take their children with them — but not without some sidelong glances.


This week, the internet was up in arms over the Ladyball, a soccer ball “specifically designed for a lady’s game.”

Launched on Wednesday, the Ladyball was described in an online video ad as being “soft-touch for a woman’s grip, eazi-play for a woman’s ability, and fashion-driven for a woman’s style.”

Once word of the ball got out, Twitter users came to the defense of women athletes everywhere.

Wow…can't really get much more sexist than this #Ladyball…We may as well take our soft, pink painted talons back to the kitchen sink.

— Fiona Shannon (@fifiShannon) January 15, 2016

On Friday, it was revealed that the ball was a hoax, created as part of a marketing campaign announcing European supermarket chain Lidl’s sponsorship of the Ladies Gaelic Football Association (LGFA), an organization of Irish women’s soccer clubs.

“Our reason behind doing this was to try and get people talking about women in sport because they don’t get the support they deserve currently. So we took a risk and decided to launch this fake product,” said Lidl spokeswomen Aoife Clarke in an email to Fortune. Clarke noted that the Ladyball concept took off on social media and that the term was trending on Twitter for over 15 hours.

The Ladyball website, which originally showcased the fake product, now explains the initiative in a real ad. It reads: “Not everyone takes women’s sport seriously. But we do.”

While the ad stirred up controversy online, it was successful in getting its message across. “We appreciate some may have been offended but we had the best of intentions throughout this campaign and are committed to supporting the LGFA over the next 3 years,” wrote Clarke.

The method may have been unorthodox, but the message is crystal clear: It’s time to take women’s sports seriously.

Summary: It involved something called a Ladyball.


The camouflaging demonstrates the power of the $75 billion global athletic footwear industry, which closely monitors what athletes wear — and, with lawyers at its beck and call, what they do not.

Although it is unclear how many athletes will be disguising their footwear at the Games, the practice is not uncommon at track meets, with the reasons for the cover-ups almost as varied as the shoes available.

Athletes who have no shoe sponsor may not want to give free advertising to any company, preferring to signal that they are free agents. Taiwo called this an act of “no representation without compensation.”

Other athletes disguise shoes because they are transitioning from one company to another and are continuing to wear their old shoes while new ones are being perfected. Some, like Taiwo, participate in events for which their sponsor does not make shoes. Some athletes are simply dissatisfied with the gear made by their sponsor.

Sometimes, shoe companies give permission for athletes to wear another, disguised brand. Other times, they take umbrage, and the controversy becomes public.

In a widely reported incident in 2013, Nike withdrew a contract offer to the American record-holder in the pole vault, Brad Walker, after Walker taped over a strap on his shoes and covered the swoosh logo.

Walker wrote on Facebook at the time that he was not trying to undermine Nike but was using tape to “hold together a shoe that shouldn’t break down within 6 months.”

Nike did not say why the contract offer was rescinded, only that Walker “did not take up this option in a timely manner.” Walker put his gear up for sale on eBay.

Mike Hazle, the 2011 American champion in the javelin, said his Nike-made shoes were too narrow, causing his toenails to fall off and his feet to become numb. So for years, he said, he borrowed gear made by Asics and Li-Ning, a Chinese company, from a fellow javelin thrower. He covered those logos with tape or with slices from wristbands that bore the Nike swoosh.

It was never a problem in the little-noticed event, Hazle said, until he won the United States title and a photograph of him appeared in Track & Field News. His left foot was raised after a throw, revealing the check-mark logo of Li-Ning on the bottom of his shoe.

Nike was not pleased and exercised an option on his contract in 2012 to keep him from signing with another company, Hazle said, but offered only $10,000 with no chance of bonuses.

It is unfortunate “if someone is paying your bills and you’re supposed to wear what they give you and it doesn’t work,” Hazle said from Afghanistan, where he is serving in the Air National Guard. “But at the end of the day, it’s going to compromise your performance, so you’ve got to take care of yourself.”

Nike said it did not comment on contracts but expected that its sponsored athletes “will always wear Nike products unless there is some specific, mutually agreed exception.”

Get daily updates during the Olympics as well as a weekly roundup of sports news.

One high-profile exception took place last year. Christian Taylor of the United States, who won the triple jump at the 2012 Olympics and signed with Nike in 2015, was permitted to wear Adidas shoes at the world track and field championships in Beijing while Nike customized shoes for him. Taylor, the triple jump favorite at this year’s Olympics, now wears Nikes.

Two medal favorites in the high jump, Mutaz Essa Barshim of Qatar and Derek Drouin of Canada, have also been permitted by Nike to wear shoes from other brands that are covered by elastic sleeves resembling spats that bear the Nike swoosh.

“As with any athlete, we are working closely with them to get the shoe that best suits their specific needs,” Charlie Brooks, a Nike spokesman, said in an email. “There’s no issue with our shoes; it’s just a matter of personal customization for these athletes. We anticipate they’ll be jumping in Nike shoes soon.”

Camouflaging reflects the particular nature of track and field, which finds itself in the limelight every four years during the Summer Games.

Sprinters, pole-vaulters and steeplechasers generally do not receive annual salaries from teams the way professional football and basketball players do. Instead, they mostly rely on prize money and contracts with shoe companies, along with other endorsements.

The apparel companies, Nike in particular, wield strong influence. They equip athletes and keep the struggling sport afloat. But they can also reduce payments when certain performance goals are not met. And at certain meets like the Olympics, athletes are restricted from wearing competing sponsor logos on their uniforms and as temporary tattoos.

The number of track meets is dwindling, as are the available prize money and appearance fees, athletes and agents say. Rampant doping has threatened the legitimacy of the sport. Income disparity is wide.

The sprinting champion Usain Bolt of Jamaica, track’s one global superstar, who is sponsored by Puma, makes $32.5 million a year, including $30 million in endorsements, according to an estimate by Forbes. Far less visible but successful athletes say they might make as little as $10,000 to $25,000 annually.

Carl Lewis, a nine-time Olympic gold medalist who has had a long affiliation with Nike, said the camouflaging of shoes was “a microcosm of what the real issue is: Are we really creating a professional sport?”

“Why are we so dependent on just shoe companies?” said Lewis, an assistant coach at the University of Houston.

Some athletes said they considered it disrespectful and unprofessional to cover up the logo of a sponsor.

“If they’re paying money, the least we can do is respect their dollar,” said Wallace Spearmon of the United States, a 200-meter sprinter and a former Nike athlete.

Other athletes owe no allegiance because they have no shoe sponsor.

Johnny Dutch of the United States has run the fastest time in the world this year in the 400-meter hurdles. But he said he had been without a shoe sponsor for three years, since his Nike contract ended. At the Olympic track and field trials in July in Eugene, Ore., Dutch wore shoes that were spray-painted neon orange to cover the logos of Nike and two other brands.

This was done, in part, to express his artistic side, said Dutch, 27, an aspiring filmmaker. But it was also his way of saying that, for him to display any shoe company logo, “they’ve got to support me,” he said. “They’ve got to give me something where I can live and pay my medical bills.”

Money had become so tight, Dutch said, that he had moved from Miami to live with his parents in Raleigh, N.C. His chance to gain visibility and financial buoyancy as an Olympian disappeared when Dutch clipped the final hurdle in the 400-meter hurdles at the trials and faded from first place to fifth.

Only the top three advanced to Rio. Disconsolate, Dutch said he intended to retire.

“I feel like I can’t do this no more,” he told reporters. “I’ve been struggling financially. I don’t have a contract. I have no job.”

A version of this article appears in print on August 3, 2016, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Competing for Olympic Fame, Wearing Brand X on Their Feet. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe

Summary: Although it is unclear how many athletes will be disguising their footwear at the Rio Games, the practice is common at track meets, for various reasons.


9 sophisticated hairstyles to steal from Olivia Palermo

Half-up hairstyles are perennially popular for weddings, and here, we can see why. Palermo pairs her glossy curls with a center part in this half-up half-down creation. It's a classic look that would work for brides of all kinds.

Prim, proper ballerina buns are way too conventional for the risk-taking Palermo. As opposed to those structured updos where nary a hair sticks out of place, this one has lots of volume and wisps, a nonchalant way to sport such a ladylike hairstyle. This updo is perfect for a veil, and a wonderful choice for brides that favor traditional wedding styles.

Is this not the coolest fishtail braid you've ever seen? Palermo's consistently shiny locks make this hairstyle really pop. The stray pieces and relaxed styling are the kind of elements that alternative and bohemian brides should look to. Though unconventional, this braid is still totally romantic and bridal.

Shine on, you lovely bride-to-be! Palermo's expertly styled curls are refined enough for a formal wedding, but simple enough for a more casual affair. Even bohemian brides will love her perfect waves; they'd look great under a flower crown!

A little bit of braid, a little bit of twist, and a tidy updo help make this an enviably chic hairstyle for a summer wedding. Can't you picture saying "I do" in the south of France with hair as stylish as this? Palermo's pearl earrings and cat eye sunglasses bring out the updo's ladylike essence—it's a winner for a polished, Audrey Hepburn-like wedding day ensemble.

This gorgeous, shoulder-length hairstyle is a modern take on waved, retro bobs. Planning a Old Hollywood-inspired wedding filled with vintage touches? This is the look for you! These smooth locks are a great way to frame an oval-shaped face, as well.

What better place to wear a French twist than in Paris? Palermo didn't miss her chance to do so when she stepped out in this utterly romantic updo. The epitome of French chic, this is a hairstyle that sophisticated, uptown brides will fawn over.

Palermo isn't usually one to tie her enviable locks into such a traditional hairstyle, but this braid has just enough panache to complement her to-die-for fur jacket. Bohemian brides, take note of the polished way she mussed up the top, while the rest of the braid is composed. The juxtaposition is exciting and lovely, ideal for a hippie-inspired wedding dress.

A smooth, straightened hairstyle helps highlight Palermo's naturally perfect hair and subtle highlights. It can be tough for brides to keep strands this silky on a hot, summer wedding day, but a frizz-fighting shampoo and a deep conditioner can help guarantee straight hair with lots of body like Palermo's. This style will let a unique or whimsical wedding dress really take center stage!

Olivia Palermo, our June/July cover girl, didn't get her fashion icon reputation for no reason. The entrepreneur (she runs her own e-commerce site oliviapalermo.com) and bride-to-be always steps out in perfectly coordinated, ladylike, and enviable ensembles. Her Brides cover and inside photo shoot take her trademark style to the height of bridal glam (the lace fit-and-flare Elie Saab wedding dress with sheer ruffle skirt and long sleeves is an instant classic). But we'd be remiss to discuss her style without mentioning her hair, an integral part of her beauty look.

Palermo credits her shiny, thick, and healthy locks to her mother, who shares that genetic gift. Instead of always wearing her perfect hair down (though she totally could), Palermo mixes it up with tons of wedding-worthy hairstyles that brides everywhere can emulate. What she does best is taking classic styles and giving them a classy, Palermo twist. We found ten looks that show how, with the right product and tool, brides can look like Palermo for their wedding.

Case in point: Her note-perfect half-up hairstyle, the epitome of bridal glam. It showcases her trendy center part and shiny, wavy strands. Palermo's lovely ballerina bun is the ideal hairstyle for a veil, while her twisted updo is equally veil-friendly, though with enough of a spin to make it still stand out on its own. We love her braid for its romantic volume at the crown, which adds height and excitement to the red-hot bridal look.

Summary: Olivia Palermo is the queen of feminine, sophisticated wedding hair! Check out 10 of her best looks for brides.


Donald Trump has some investment advice for you: Get out of the stock market. Funny thing, though: Trump apparently still has stock investments, a lot of them.

At least he did as of mid-May, the last report of his personal finances to the Federal Election Commission, as much as $91.5 million. The Republican presidential nominee declared he had up to $8.5 million in individual shares, up to $73 million in equity mutual funds, and up to $10 million with Paulson & Co. hedge funds that have a large presence in stocks. (John Paulson, the asset management firm’s chief, was just appointed to the candidate’s economic advisory team.)

Trump may have jettisoned his stock holdings during the last two-plus months, but that’s unlikely. A request made to his campaign for an update—and an explanation of why he seemingly has stayed in stocks—went unanswered. Asset disclosures to the FEC are reported in several ranges, like $1 million to $5 million. Here, we are using the upper number of each range.

Ironically, Trump has been warning people to get out of stocks for months because of a horrific recession he saw coming. He recently reiterated that bearish counsel in a phone interview with Fox Business’ Stuart Varney and shifted his rationale for an exit a bit. He told Varney that he was worried that the market was being artificially propped up by the Federal Reserve’s low interest rates.

“I did invest and I got out, and it was actually very good timing,” the businessman-turned-candidate said. “But I’ve never been a big investor in the stock market.”

Judging from his most recent financial disclosure, his assertion that he “got out” is only partly true. Last summer, the Trump campaign announced that he had unloaded most of his stock holdings in January 2014, retaining just $22 million. The announcement, in a press release, provided no further breakdown of what remained. Thus far, contrary to his assessment, his timing has not been good: The S&P 500 since mid-January 2014 is up almost 19%.

Of course, the vast majority of Trump’s wealth — which he puts at $10 billion, Forbes puts at $4.5 billion, and Bloomberg at $2.9 billion—is in real estate. Trump’s sizable portfolio in stocks is spread across four brokerages, led by Deutsche Bank’s asset management arm. He also has a big stock position with 11 mutual funds sponsored by Baron Capital.

A review of Trump’s investments illustrates how heavy his equities involvement is:

Individual stocks. For the most part, Trump goes for shares of large blue chips like General Electric GENERAL ELECTRIC COMPANY GE 0.06% and Exxon Mobil EXXONMOBIL CORPORATION XOM 0.36% . Many of them pay nice dividends. He does invest in tech firms, which tend to be giants on the order of Google-parent Alphabet ALPHABET INC. GOOG 0.02% and Apple APPL 0% . A stock market tumble is less likely to devastate these large companies, but they would hardly be immune.

Mutual funds. Most of his mutual fund money is in the 11 Baron funds, ranging from small-capitalization stocks to emerging-market ones. These are decent performers, with four of them ahead of the market this year and only one in the red. Two of them have a coveted five-star ranking from research organization Morningstar, and two others have four stars. The problem with them is they have high fees, charging around 1.3% of assets yearly.

Hedge funds. This is where Trump really steps out on the wild side. Hedge funds are vehicles for the wealthy that aim to beat the market, often by taking outsized risks. That’s the case with his foray into three Paulson funds, two of which generally are focused on stock plays, such as betting on mergers: Advantage Plus and Paulson Partners. (The other, Paulson Credit Opportunity, specializes in bonds.)

John Paulson, who made his name betting against subprime mortgages leading up to the financial crisis, has had less luck lately. Paulson’s flagship Advantage had negative returns in four of the five years through 2015 and 2016’s first quarter (the latest available), according to website ZeroHedge. Paulson funds are the fourth largest shareholder in troubled Valeant Pharmaceuticals VALEANT PHARMACEUTICALS INTL INC VRX -10.36% , whose stock has suffered a 90% swoon over the past 12 months, amid controversies over the high prices it charges for drugs, among other things.

Trump’s biggest hedge fund investment (up to $50 million) is in BlackRock’s Obsidian, which is dedicated to fixed-income, not stocks. This doesn’t mean safer stuff like Treasury notes or investment grade corporate bonds, however. Obsidian takes large positions in junk bonds, whose performance often correlates to the stock market.

Trump is hardly alone in his downbeat view about stocks, to be sure. Celebrated money manager Bill Gross also cautions that faith in stocks’ further rise is unwise. The reason: He frets that low rates are eroding the nation’s economic base, in particular harming banks, which depend on income from loans. Other investment strategists worry that stocks are overvalued and due for a fall. The S&P 500’s price/earnings ratio, a gauge of the broad market’s valuation, is now just over 18, higher than the historical average of around 15.

That said, the standard financial advice is to hold a large amount of stocks, through fair times and foul. The argument is that equities have proved to appreciate well over the long term in tune with the overall economy, which despite some frightful downturns has historically expanded. It’s smart to diversify your wealth across many asset classes, the thinking goes, with stocks having an important place.

So a large cadre of investing pros see the stock market continuing to advance amid decent economic news, such as Friday’s robust jobs report for July. “Forget all the noise” from pessimists, says financial adviser Andrew Houghton, co-founder of Delta Asset Management in San Francisco. “The data show us that the market could take off.” He adds that he has no opinion on Trump’s views or situation.

Nevertheless, to hear Trump tell it, doom lies ahead for stock investors. That is, unless he wins the election.

Summary: The candidate reports up to $91 million in equity holdings.


Late last week, Amazon filed a lawsuit against more than 1,114 individuals who allegedly have posted fake product reviews on the site. Amazon claims many of the defendants have operated mostly out in the open, listing their services and answering ads via the “gig site” Fiverr.com to write glowing five-star reviews for $5 a pop.

“Unfortunately, a very small minority of sellers and manufacturers sometimes try to gain unfair competitive advantages for their products on Amazon.com. One such method is creating false, misleading, and inauthentic customer reviews,” the lawsuit states. “Amazon has conducted an extensive investigation of the defendants’ activities on Fiverr, including purchasing ‘reviews’ for products and communicating directly with some of the defendants.”

The suit states that even though fake reviews are “small in number,” they “significantly undermine the trust that consumers and the vast majority of sellers and manufacturers place in Amazon.”

But is the rate of “false, misleading, and inauthentic customer reviews” truly small? Previous research estimates that 30% of product reviews are fake. That seems pretty big—enough to have real influence in a product’s overall ratings, and higher than the projected rate of fake online reviews for other things like hotels and restaurants (10% to 20%).

Read Next: 5 Amazon Shopping Hacks You Didn’t Know Existed

The Amazon crackdown is hardly the first investigation focused on outing fake online reviews. In 2013 the auto research site Edmunds.com sued an “online reputation company” for promising to flood sites such as Yelp, Cars.com, and Google+ with fake online reviews of car dealerships. Yelp has likewise unearthed conspiracies of local businesses agreeing to rub each other’s backs, in the form of swapping five-star reviews all around. For years, software engineers have been working on algorithms to detect fake online reviews and put a stop to them. But based on Amazon’s lawsuit—which is the first to target individuals rather than websites where short-term freelancers can be hired—apparently there’s still a market for them.

Many of the listings at Fiverr.com are for jobs in which the reviews are blatantly fake, based on no experience whatsoever with the product or service. One freelancer named as a defendant wasn’t even promising to make up the review, instead offering to companies in need of ratings assistance: “Please write a review then I will post it.” As of Monday afternoon, there were still plenty of listings at Fiverr from freelancers who will happily write five-star reviews for any business paying $5.

Others have grown more careful about how to generate positive reviews. The gig site Freelancer.com used to have a category of jobs titled simply “Fake Review Writer,” but now its “Reviews Writing” section tells businesses that the “the best marketing ploy” is to pay reviewers “after you have let them try out your product.” Judging how little these sites pay, however, it’s hard to believe the reviewer spends much time with each product, if indeed reviewers ever get their hands on them.

Read Next: 5 Outrageous Ways People Try to Game Online Reviews

Summary: So much for the "wisdom" of the crowds.


Online retailer Beyond the Rack has filed for protection from creditors, as the flash-sale fashion site faced a liquidity crisis and was unable to find a buyer.

The Montreal-based company, which changed its legal name to 7098961 Canada Inc. the same day as the March 23 filing, had raised at least $90 million in venture capital and financing to compete with rivals like Gilt Groupe and Rue La La. Despite signing up millions of members, many of these flash-sales sites have struggled.

Beyond the Rack filed for protection about a week after negotiations with a potential buyer fell through, according to court documents. The company, which recently slashed its workforce, has been granted court protection until April 22. The company said its U.S. subsidiary hasn’t filed for bankruptcy protection and its website is still operating.

“We’ve solicited 423 potential buyers to date, and we’re asking for offers by April 18,” said Benoit Gingues, a partner at Richter Advisory Group Inc., the company’s court appointed monitor. “We’re confident that we will find a buyer that will continue the business.”

Launched in 2009 by former Saks executive Yona Shtern, Beyond the Rack pitches steep markdowns on designer goods, accessories and home décor. The sales typically last 48 hours and are announced to email subscribers. The company has 14 million members, and 450,000 active buyers, according to court filings.

But Beyond the Rack struggled to turn a profit and spent its funds on “aggressive and costly marketing campaigns aimed at increasing customer growth,” according to court papers. It filed for protection with less than $1 million in cash, the documents show.

Several of the company’s rivals have been sold. Hudson’s Bay Co. HBC 0.49 % , owner of Saks, acquired Gilt in January for $250 million, a fraction of the $1.1 billion value that venture capitalists had placed on Gilt in 2011. Rue La La is now owned by Kynetic LLC, which also runs other e-commerce companies.

Like its peers, Beyond the Rack sought a suitor. The company hired bankers last year to pursue a sale and was in negotiations with an unnamed buyer in March, according to court documents. But the negotiations collapsed on March 16, the documents show. Beyond the Rack also hired bankers in 2014 to pursue an IPO or sale.

The company’s sales declined 28% to 96 million Canadian dollars ($73.4 million) in the fiscal year ended Jan. 31, down from C$133.1 million in the prior year. The company recorded a loss from operations of C$17.1 million in the most recent fiscal year

“The company operates in the nascent e-commerce retail industry, where many of its peer companies are in a similar position, in that they have incurred financial losses and have yet to demonstrate a positive cash flow and financial sustainability,” according to court papers signed by Mr. Shtern. The executive didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

The filing comes after management implemented cost-cutting measures, including layoffs. As of March 21, there were 62 employees in Montreal, down from 190 a month earlier.

At the time of its filing, the company owed about C$44.3 million, including C$12 million in a term loan and revolving line of credit from Silicon Valley Bank. It had C$6.8 million in outstanding customer orders as of March 17.

Write to Khadeeja Safdar at khadeeja.safdar@wsj.com


"Trigger-happy" Papua New Guinea police shot dead a young man while trying to clear a shanty town area in Port Moresby for development.

PNG Prime Minister Peter O'Neill said a full investigation was underway into police actions after the 25-year-old died.

"There are a few police that are not using reasonable means to address challenges they face and they jump into situations where they are trigger happy," Mr O'Neill said in a statement, adding the officers needed to be isolated to restore confidence in the force.

Summary: An investigation is underway after PNG police shot dead a 25-year-old man while clearing a shanty town area in Port Moresby.


LONDON — For the jobless man living on welfare who made the find in an English farmer’s field two months ago, it was the stuff of dreams: a hoard of early Anglo-Saxon treasure, probably dating from the seventh century and including more than 1,500 pieces of intricately worked gold and silver whose craftsmanship and historical significance left archaeologists awestruck.

When the discovery in Staffordshire was announced Thursday, experts described it as one of the most important in British archaeological history. They said it surpassed the greatest previous discovery of its kind, a royal burial chamber unearthed in 1939 at Sutton Hoo, in Suffolk. That find shaped scholars’ understanding of the warring Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of 1,300 years ago that ended up as the unified kingdom of England.

The new trove includes items that one expert in Anglo-Saxon artifacts said brought tears to her eyes: gold items weighing 11 pounds, and 5.5 pounds of silver. Tentatively identified by some experts as bounty from one of the wars that racked Middle England in the seventh and eighth centuries, they included dagger hilts, pieces of scabbards and swords, helmet cheekpieces, Christian crosses and figures of animals like eagles and fish.

Archaeologists tentatively estimated the value of the trove at 1 million pounds — about $1.6 million — but say it could be many times that. And they took a vicarious pleasure in noting that the discovery was not the outcome of a carefully planned archaeological enterprise, but the product of a lone amateur stumbling about with a metal detector.

“People laugh at metal detectorists,” Terry Herbert, 55, who made the find, said Thursday at a news conference at the Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, where the objects will go on display on Friday for two weeks. “I’ve had people go past and go, ‘Beep, beep, he’s after pennies.’ Well no, we’re out there to find this kind of stuff, and it is out there.”

Mr. Herbert spent 18 years scouring fields and back lots without finding anything more valuable than a piece of an ancient Roman horse harness. Now, under British laws governing the discovery of ancient treasures, he stands to get half the value of the booty. When his discovery was announced on Thursday, he kept his wish list modest, saying he would like to use some of his windfall to buy a bungalow.

Since the July day when his detector picked up traces of the hoard beneath a field in Staffordshire, a Midlands county that was at the center of the ancient Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia, Mr. Herbert said, he has been seeing piles of gold in his sleep. Awake, he has quietly celebrated his triumph over all the people who mocked him in the years when a typical day’s finds amounted to little but scrap.

As for his fellow hunters in the Bloxwich Research and Metal Detecting Club, he said, “I dread to think what they’ll say when they hear about this.”

He said that on the day of his discovery he reworked a mantra that he regularly used for good luck. “I have this phrase that I say sometimes — ‘Spirits of yesterday, take me where the coins appear’ — but on that day I changed ‘coins’ to ‘gold.’ I don’t know why I said it that day, but I think somebody was listening.”

From the Birmingham museum, the Staffordshire treasure, much of it still encrusted with dirt, will go to the British Museum in London, where the artifacts will undergo months, possibly years, of study by archaeologists and historians. A court ruling this week declared the finds to be treasure, meaning that they belong to the British crown, which is expected to offer them for sale.

The crown’s practice, established in part by the many shipwrecks recovered off Britain’s shores, is that a reward equal to the value of the items — likely to be set in a bidding war among British museums — will be divided between Mr. Herbert as the finder and the farmer who owns the field where the discovery was made. His name and the location of the farm — beyond the fact that it is around Lichfield, north of Birmingham — have not been disclosed, to allow archaeologists to continue searching the area for more treasure.

At the news conference, experts said that Mr. Herbert’s initial discovery, which he reported to a Staffordshire County official responsible for archaeological discoveries, was followed by a dig that was strictly supervised by professional archaeologists. They were assisted, the experts said, by a team from Britain’s Home Office that normally works on crime scene forensics.

The experts said that a painstaking search of the area had turned up no trace of a grave, a building or anything else that suggested a careful plan to bury the objects for later recovery. They said that information, and the fact that none of the discoveries appeared to be jewelry or other feminine items, added to the likelihood that the treasure was war bounty. It may have been seized by one of the seventh-century Mercian kings — men like Penda, Wulfhere and Aethelred — who pursued an aggressive, plundering policy toward neighboring kingdoms.

One of the features that led specialists to suggest the items might have been seized in battle and prized for their value in precious metal and jewels rather than as trophies was that many appeared to have been decorative pieces ripped from other objects. The three Christian crosses in the find had been bent into folds, as had a strip of gold with a biblical inscription in Latin of a kind likely to have been favored by an ancient warrior: “Rise up, O Lord, and may thy enemies be dispersed and those who hate thee be driven from thy face.”

Archaeologists, anthropologists and historians who participated in the Staffordshire dig, or who have studied the finds at the Birmingham museum, competed in the superlatives they used in describing the treasure. “My first view of the hoard brought tears to my eyes; the Dark Ages in Staffordshire have never looked so bright nor so beautiful,” Deb Klemperer, an expert on Staffordshire artifacts of the Anglo-Saxon period, told the British newspaper The Guardian.

Kevin Leahy, an expert on Anglo-Saxon metallic objects who has been helping catalog the items, described their craftsmanship as “consummate” at Thursday’s news conference. He added: “All the archaeologists who have worked with the finds have been awestruck. It’s actually been quite scary working on this material to be in the presence of greatness.”

A version of this article appears in print on September 25, 2009, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Amateur With Metal Detector Strikes Ancient English Treasure. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe

Summary: An amateur treasure hunter prowling English farmland with a metal detector found a massive collection of gold and silver.


The Greens senator pushing for a major clamp down on political donations is now a member of the parliamentary committee that investigates electoral matters.

Lee Rhiannon is the newest member of the joint standing committee on electoral matters after beating Liberal Democrat David Leyonhjelm in a Senate ballot.

She'll be seeking to move a motion in the Senate later on Tuesday calling for a ban on foreign donations as well as donations from property developers, tobacco, alcohol, gambling, mining companies and industry lobby groups.

Summary: Greens senator Lee Rhiannon, who has long campaigned for donation reform, is the newest member of the joint standing committee on electoral matters.


More evidence of possible water plumes erupting from the surface of Jupiter's icy moon Europa has been spotted using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, the US space agency has announced.

Europa, one of more than 50 moons circling the gas giant, is considered by NASA as a "top candidate" for life elsewhere in the solar system because it is believed to possess a massive, salty, subsurface ocean that is twice the size of Earth's.

The latest finding has given scientists fresh hope that a robotic spacecraft could one day fly past these potential plumes and learn about their contents without having to drill miles deep into the moon's icy shell.

"Today, we are presenting new Hubble evidence for water vapor plumes being expelled from the icy surface of Europa," William Sparks, astronomer with the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, said.

Using ultraviolet images taken by Hubble, a space telescope that was launched in 1990, the potential plumes are seen around the southern edge of Europa and appear as "dark fingers or patches of possible absorption", Mr Sparks said.

They were spotted on three separate occasions over the course of 15 months in 2014, when scientists observed Europa passing in front of Jupiter.

The potential plumes were only observed three out of 10 times when Europa passed by Jupiter, suggesting that the eruptions are intermittent, he said.

They also appeared to emerge near the same places, mostly along Europa's southern edge, where a previous team of scientists in 2012 - using a different instrument aboard Hubble - detected evidence of water vapor reaching more than 160km into space.

"If plumes exist this is an exciting finding because it potentially gives easier access to the ocean below," said Mr Sparks.

However, he cautioned that more evidence is needed for scientists to be certain, whether by more Hubble observations, or by some independent observing technique.

"I do want to stress that the observations are at the limit of what Hubble can do," he added.

"We do not claim to have proven the existence of plumes but rather to have contributed evidence that such activity may be present."

NASA announced last year that it intends to send a robotic spacecraft, equipped with a suite of scientific instruments, to circle Europa in the 2020s.

This mission will not seek to find life, but will measure the habitability of Europa, to see if conditions exist that could sustain living organisms on the moon which orbits Jupiter every three and a half days.

Last year, data from Hubble confirmed that Jupiter's largest moon, Ganymede, has an underground ocean that contains more water than Earth's, broadening the hunt for places in the solar system where life might be able to exist.

Only one other moon is known in the solar system - Saturn's moon Enceladus - to have icy plumes, based on data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft.

NASA's latest mission to Jupiter, known as Juno, slipped into orbit around the fifth planet from the Sun in July, but will stay away from Europa in order to avoid the risk of Earthly contamination, NASA said.

NASA's next generation space telescope, known as the James Webb Space Telescope, launches in 2018, and it will also hunt for signs of water on Europa using infrared wavelengths of light.

"For a long time, humanity has been wondering whether there is life beyond Earth, and we are lucky to live in an era when we can address questions like that scientifically," Paul Hertz, director of the Astrophysics Division at NASA headquarters, said.


WATCH: The three-term Republican congressman from Wichita, Kansas, is a member of the House Energy Committee and the Intelligence Committee, which is responsible with conducting oversight of U.S. intelligence agencies and practices.

Rep. Mike Pompeo, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, has been offered the position of CIA director, the Trump transition team said today.

The three-term Republican congressman from Wichita, Kansas, is a member of the House Energy Committee and the Intelligence Committee, which is responsible with conducting oversight of U.S. intelligence agencies and practices.

“I am honored to have been given this opportunity to serve and to work alongside President-elect Donald J. Trump to keep America safe," Pompeo said in a statement. "I also look forward to working with America’s intelligence warriors, who do so much to protect Americans each and every day."

As a member of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, Pompeo and fellow conservative Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, published a supplement to the majority report that was more sharply critical of Hillary Clinton's State Department and the administration's handling of the 2012 attacks on U.S. facilities in Libya. The report also accused the administration of misleading the public about events in Libya.

A West Point graduate who graduated first in his class in 1986, Pompeo attended Harvard University Law School after leaving active duty, and was also an editor at the Harvard Law Review.

Pompeo, 52, initially supported Sen. Marco Rubio's presidential campaign, and considered challenging Kansas Sen. Jerry Moran in his Senate primary this year.

He is a staunch critic of President Obama's foreign policy and, particularly, of the Iran nuclear deal, which President-Elect Donald Trump has criticized.

Pompeo traveled to Trump Tower for a meeting with the GOP president-elect earlier this week, as Trump continues to fill out his cabinet and incoming administration.

Pompeo will have to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate.

ABC News’ Katherine Faulders and Devin Dwyer contributed to this story.

Summary: Rep. Mike Pompeo, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, has been offered the position of CIA director, the Trump transition team said today. The three-term Republican congressman from Wichita, Kansas,  is a member of the House Energy Committee and the Intelligence Committee, which is...


Two Taiwanese men have faced court charged with attempting to import $20 million worth of crystal meth hidden in household electrical appliances into Australia.

Chun-Hao Kuo, 31, and Chia-Cheng Ku, 27, were arrested in Brisbane after Australian Federal Police intercepted an air freight package containing 20.6kg of methamphetamine.

The package allegedly arrived via Hong Kong on Friday and had an estimated street value of $20.6 million.

The two men were arrested on Tuesday after police carried out a controlled delivery to an address in Sunnybank, south of Brisbane.

Kuo has been charged with attempted possession while Ku is accused of importing a commercial quantity of a border controlled drug.

They appeared in Brisbane Magistrates Court on Wednesday but were ordered to reappear on Thursday as there was no Mandarin interpreter available.

Summary: Two Taiwanese men have been arrested after police found $20 million worth of crystal meth hidden in household electrical appliances.


CHICAGO - Niners wide receiver Quinton Patton is inactive for today’s game against the Bears after he sustained a concussion in last week’s loss at Miami.

Patton returned to practice on a limited basis Thursday after he missed the first two sessions. He will be one of six wideouts who are active today. The forecast calls for a high of 36 degrees with rain or snow.

Meanwhile, outside linebacker Aaron Lynch will miss his fifth straight game with a high ankle sprain that he sustained Oct. 23. Lynch, who served a four-game suspension to open the season, has played just three games in 2016.

Defensive tackle Quinton Dial (knee, neck) will play today after missing his only start of the season last week. Chris Jones, who started in place of Dial in Miami, is active and Tony Jerod-Eddie is inactive.

The 49ers’ other inactives are: QB Christian Ponder, CB Marcus Cromartie, RB Mike Davis, T John Theus and TE Je’Ron Hamm.

Summary: CHICAGO - Niners wide receiver Quinton Patton is inactive for today’s game against the Bears after he sustained a concussion in last week’s loss at Miami.  [...] outside linebacker Aaron Lynch will miss his fifth straight game with a high ankle sprain that he sustained Oct. 23.  Defensive tackle Quinton Dial (knee, neck) will play today after missing his only start of the season last week.


That is substantially stronger than the 20pc figure forecast by economists.

It also represents a very sharp turnaround from the gloom of the summer, when businesses had expected the Brexit vote to lead to falling sales.

Almost all parts of the retail sales market reported growth, particularly clothing, grocery and hardware shops performing strongly.

“It’s encouraging to see retailers reporting another month of healthy sales growth leading up to the festive season, which rounds off a fairly solid quarter,” said CBI principal economist Ben Jones.

“While we still expect to see decent growth in the near term, the pressures on retail activity are likely to increase during 2017, as the impact of sterling’s depreciation feeds through. With higher inflation beginning to weigh on households’ purchasing power, consumption patterns are likely to shift, creating winners and losers across the retail landscape.”

James Knightley, senior economist at ING, said the numbers “highlight the resilience of the UK economy despite the Brexit uncertainty”.

Summary: Shoppers are spending even more than normal this Christmas, as the spending splurge which has boosted the economy in recent months shows no sign of ending.


Operating earnings rose 4 percent from the year-ago quarter, to $59 million.

Contributing to the bottom line was a deal to manufacture and distribute ice cream to Baskin-Robbins stores, as well as higher sales for refrigerator-case goods such as Milk Chugs, dips and salad dressings.

"We are extremely pleased with our second quarter results given the difficult economic environment," said Chairman Howard Dean in a statement.

This month, Dean said it would sell four of its dairy plants to National Dairy Holdings. Suiza is selling seven plants to National, a joint venture between the Dairy Farmers of America Inc. cooperative and three former industry executives, to sidestep antitrust concerns.

Dean and Suiza expected the merger to be completed by the end of the year.

Summary: Franklin Park-based Dean Foods' profit fell 9 percent for the quarter ended last month, to $27 million. The dairy charged $3.7 million in pre-tax costs to its merger with rival Suiza Foods.