America’s largest public pension system quietly sold around 30% of its stake in tech-focused private equity firm Silver Lake Partners in early 2013, Fortune has learned.

The California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS) originally invested around $275 million in 2008 for a 9.9% stake in Silver Lake’s management company, similar to how it previously had bought into the management companies of The Carlyle Group CG and Apollo Global Management APO (when both firms were still privately-held).

CalPERS maintained almost the entire position for more than four years, revaluing its market price each year in its annual investment report. But in its most recent report– which already is more than a year out of date — the pension reports a book value of just under $194 million (i.e., 30% smaller than the original investment size).

A source familiar with the situation says that Silver Lake bought the “missing” units back from CalPERS in early 2013, but didn’t know the price paid. CalPERS does not appear to have disclosed the sale in any of its monthly investment reports, and Fortune is awaiting additional information from a pension spokesman.

CalPERS also has invested in several Silver Lake funds, including a $400 million commitment to its current flagship fund.

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Summary: Pension giant CalPERS doesn't own as much of Silver Lake as it used to.


Updated SEP 14, 2014 9:20a ET

Floyd Mayweather worked far too hard against Marcos Maidana their last time out to have to do it again in the rematch Saturday night.

Mayweather dominated Maidana from the opening bell, using his boxing skills to keep the Argentine off balance and pile up points on his way to a unanimous 12-round decision to retain his welterweight and super welterweight titles before a crowd at the MGM Grand that sometimes booed the lack of action.

It almost came at a cost, though, in a bizarre scene in the eighth round when Mayweather claimed that Maidana bit him on his wrist while they were in a clinch near the center of the ring.

"He bit me!" Mayweather yelled to the Showtime announcers working ringside.

Mayweather remained unbeaten in his remarkable 18-year pro career, winning for the 47th time and doing it with such dominance that about the only one complaining about the decision was Maidana.

"I was pressuring him and I was the aggressor," Maidana said. "I won the fight."

Mayweather earned at least $32 million for the rematch, bringing his total purses to more than $100 million in the last year. Though he wasn't marked up, he was upset over the bite.

"We were tangled in the center of the ring and I didn't realize what it was. Then I saw that he bit me," Mayweather said. "After the eighth round my fingers were numb, I couldn't use my left hand."

Maidana denied he bit Mayweather.

"How can he say I bit the glove with my mouthpiece?" Maidana asked. "I'm not a dog."

The fight was a marked contrast to their first bout in May, when Maidana roughed Mayweather up in a close fight. Mayweather won that bout, but it was close enough for Mayweather to offer an opponent only the second rematch of his career.

Maidana won't get a third fight after failing to land any big punches.

Two ringside judges scored it 116-111 for Mayweather, while the third had it 115-112. The Associated Press had it 117-110.

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"I felt sharper in the first fight, my rhythm was off," Mayweather said. "I got hit with some shots tonight I shouldn't have gotten hit with. But that comes with the sport."

Mayweather complained long after the first fight that Maidana was a dirty fighter, and complained even more when Maidana seemed to try to hit him below the belt in a clinch in the eighth round, then apparently tried to bite him.

Mayweather immediately jumped back and gestured to referee Kenny Bayless that Maidana bit him on the wrist. He went to his corner and showed Bayless where the bite was, then went over to the Showtime announcers table to complain.

Maidana would later be penalized a point for tackling Mayweather as he tried desperately to find something that would work.

By the end of the ninth round, Maidana was so out of sorts he went to the wrong corner when the bell rang.

Maidana spent many of the early rounds trying to figure out a way to get inside like he did in May. Mayweather kept him at a distance, circling around and landing left jabs and hooks, then scampering out of the way before Maidana could respond.

Punch stats showed Maidana throwing far more punches (572-326) while Mayweather landed more (166-128). Mayweather's was hit with only 22 percent of punches while landing 51 percent of his own.

"I do have some bumps and bruises," Mayweather said. "But I listened to my dad (trainer Floyd Mayweather Sr.) who always said hit and not get hit. That's the way you last in this sport."

Mayweather was a 6-1 favorite in the fight, even though Maidana gave him a tough time in their first bout. He showed why in the early rounds as he moved and boxed while Maidana chased him futilely around the ring.

Mayweather was determined not to let the fight become anything like the first, when Maidana went after him wildly and mauled him at every opportunity. For the second fight, Mayweather came out boxing and did so beautifully during the opening rounds.

Maidana was more cautious early than he was in the first fight, willing to take his time to find Mayweather. He finally began to pick up the pace in the fourth round, trapping Mayweather on the ropes and landing some shots to his body and head.

Mayweather, though, showed he learned his lessons from the first fight, when he was cut over his right eye and took a lot of shots to the top of his head. A defensive wizard, he fought moving sideways and backward, throwing his left jab out and slipping the big punches thrown by the Argentine challenger.

Summary: Floyd Mayweather Jr. refused to allow Marcos Maidana to turn their rematch into a brawl, boxing masterfully to win a 12-round unanimous decision Saturday night in their welterweight title fight.


For folks who like ice cream and tweets, the latest info on the whereabouts of the Ben & Jerry’s Scoop Truck may be of interest.

According to Vermont-based Ben & Jerry’s, it scoop truck is now free-ranging through the Boston area, giving away free scoops through Oct. 15. Fans can expect to be served up Salted Caramel or Hazed & Confused. This second flavor features such ingredients as hazelnut and chocolate ice creams, along with fudge chips and a hazelnut fudge swirl.

So what’s the best way to pin down the scoop truck’s latest location. Ben & Jerry’s has this advice: Follow @BenJerrysTruck on Twitter. (In other words, monitor some tweets, and a free scoop of Salted Caramel may be in your future.)

The local itinerary of the scoop truck will be partly guided by a Ben & Jerry’s “storyteller, ” who aims to ensure that the truck is “hitting up unique and local areas of the city, and engaging fans for their recommendations on where to go,” the Ben & Jerry’s press release said.

The release includes a statement from truck crew member Jana Steele, who can seemingly serve up Hazed & Confused and rhetorical fluff with the same effortless elan.

“For the past few years, we’ve been dishing out free scoops around the country to connect with our fans in local cities,” Steele said. “This year, our goal is to uncover what makes each city super cool. Since Boston is the home to so many colleges and universities, I’m excited to learn about where students hang out --- everywhere from local coffee shops, dive bars, bike paths, and the best restaurants. Touring all of the squares will be a must, and I can’t wait to check out the farmers market in Copley and the cafes in Davis. From the Freedom Trail to the Fenway Frank, I’m also excited to experience Boston’s historic side.”

Summary: The Ben & Jerry’s Scoop Truck is back in town, and according to the ice cream brand, the truck’s whereabouts can be followed on Twitter.


FORTUNE — For the past few years, economists have been waiting for the housing market to rebound so the job market can finally — crash? Wait, no. It’s the opposite. Right?

On Friday, we’ll get the latest look at how the job market is doing. Hiring is improving, but the unemployment rate has stayed stubbornly high. The go-to explanation among economists has been the weak housing market. Where are all those construction workers going to find work? Nursing? (That’s actually a pretty good idea.)

Housing prices are jumping again, and some people are even saying there’s a new bubble. We’ve pointed out you shouldn’t expect the economy to come roaring back just because the housing market is. But two economists are taking an even more extreme stance: that a good real estate market, where more people buy houses instead of rent, will throw more people out of work.

MORE: A housing era loan makes a comeback, with a twist

The paper by David Blanchflower of Dartmouth and Andrew Oswald of the University of Warwick titled “Does High Home-ownership Impair the Labor Market?”, has been out for a month or so but was only published by the National Bureau of Economic Research on Monday. Among the findings:

That makes the study interesting for another reason. Not only are the authors saying the conventional wisdom of a weak housing market and a weak job market improving in tandem is wrong. But also the reason we say such things.

Most people believe the reason high homeownership in a housing bust creates stubbornly high unemployment is because the out of work can’t afford to sell their houses — they owe too much — and move to an area of the country where their job prospects are better.

But Blanchflower and Oswald insist it’s not the homeowners who are the unemployed, or at least the overwhelming majority of them. So the “trapped in a house” storyline doesn’t work for them. Instead, they say homeownership creates a sort of economic rigidity that hurts the job market for everyone, but they don’t say how.

Homeownership, though, was rising throughout the 2000s, and yet the unemployment rate dipped below 4% in the middle part of the decade. Would it have gone lower? It’s only recently that homeownership seems to be holding us back.

Another funny thing about the study is that one of the first economists that Blanchflower and Oswald thank in the beginning of their paper is Dean Baker, co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and a prominent liberal economist. It’s odd because Baker disagrees with Blanchflower and Oswald, which he says he told the two authors before they published the paper.

MORE: This country needs another financial crisis

Blanchflower and Oswald touch on two prominent recent economic debates. First of all, whether we should be promoting and subsidizing homeownership. On that, Baker agrees with the authors that subsidies that push many people into houses, and the lax lending that comes with them, are a bad idea.

The second debate is the structural vs. cyclical debate about the job market. On that, they’re split. Baker believes that we are in a cyclical downturn and more stimulus will help the job market. The authors, however, seem to be siding with people who think there have been other things going on with the economy, like a rise in homeownership, that will make it very tough for the unemployment rate to fall.

Baker’s own research suggests the housing bust has had little effect on worker mobility, and, in general, is hard to pin down as the real reason for high unemployment, other than in construction or other jobs directly related to housing. People still move for new job opportunities. They just leave with less.

To be fair to the authors, they don’t say that a jump in home buying will immediately lead to a rise in unemployment. The effect develops with a lag. But the lag is also the problem with the paper.

In places were the economy is weak, renters tend to flee because it is easiest for them to do so, leaving high rates of homeownership behind. In areas were the economy is strong, workers show up, and many don’t immediately buy a house. That could explain why Blanchflower and Oswald get the results they do. Michigan, for example, shows up as a high homeownership state and a high unemployment state, and the two don’t necessarily go hand in hand.

Summary: A new study points to higher homeownership as the reason the unemployed aren't finding work.


FORTUNE — Remember bookstores? Those adorable little places of curated and whimsy and fanciful stories? The place where we purchased books?

They’re gone, mostly, and you can blame Amazon AMZN . The $157 billion company got its start selling books online, happy to lose money while driving prices down, waiting for its brick-and-mortar competitors, with their thin margins and high overhead, to starve. They did, and Amazon won. The company has repeated this process for a number of other categories, to varying degrees of success. (Electronics, yes. Fashion, not so much.)

With Amazon Fire TV, announced yesterday, Amazon has its sights set on the gaming industry. The company’s new Fire TV streaming system costs $99 and features, alongside ample video content, a suite of 100 games. That includes popular casual gaming titles like Minecraft and Monsters University, and other “high-quality, low-cost” hardcore games from Sega, EA EA , Ubisoft, Telltale Games, and Gamelot. Users have the option to play games with the standard Fire TV remote, a smartphone app, or Amazon’s newly revealed Fire game controller, which will retail for $39.99 starting in a month.

MORE: Amazon throws a firebomb in the battle for your living room

More meaningful than an inexpensive controller, or a game section in its service, is Amazon’s new gaming studio. Amazon Game Studios is developing games exclusively for Fire TV, with a growing team: In February the company acquired a gaming studio with 75 employees called Double Helix. Today reports revealed Amazon hired Kim Swift, a designer of Portal, and Clint Hocking, a designer of Far Cry 2. Amazon Game Studios’ first release is a game called Sev Zero, a third-person shooter game with the ability to go multiplayer. It looks and plays like the hardcore games from EA or Sega.

But in typical Amazon style, Sev Zero is a steal. The game only costs $6.99, and users who purchase the Fire game controller get it for free. Beyond that, the average price of paid games on Fire TV is just $1.85.

MORE: One big omission from the Fire TV announcement: No Amazon music

Compare that to the average price of videogames for Xbox MSFT or PlayStation SNE . The latest World of Warcraft edition costs $49.99, or $69.99 if you upgrade to the digital deluxe edition. Grand Theft Auto V costs $54.99 for PlayStation 3. It’s not clear if Amazon would convince those studios to include their games on Fire TV. Hardcore gamers will remain loyal to their systems and titles. But with Sev Zero and the host of low-cost games on Fire TV, Amazon is making a statement: The price of games will come down.

Compared with any other piece of digital media, from music, movies, and TV to news and books, games haven’t taken a price hit with the shift to digital. With its entrance into the category, Amazon is likely to change that. Your move, game studios.

Summary: We saw what Amazon did to the publishing industry. Now it's going after videogames.


For 40 years, Los Angeles’ building code has required all buildings 75 feet and taller to have a rooftop emergency helicopter landing facility in a location approved by the fire chief. The idea in 1974, when the law was passed, was to make skyscrapers safer, in part as a reaction to a catastrophic fire in Brazil. But we know now there are better ways to make structures like the landmark U.S. Bank tower safe. I, for one, am cheering for the recently announced end of a policy requiring flat-topped buildings in Los Angeles. It’s a policy that holds lessons for tall buildings everywhere.

As an urban planner and architect (before becoming a professor, I was an architect at SOM-Chicago, the former Skidmore, Owings & Merrill), I know safety is more critical in tall buildings than in low-rise structures because tall buildings host a greater number of inhabitants and are themselves expensive investments. I also know that, if appropriately designed and built, skyscrapers are safer in many respects than low-rise and mid-rise buildings. They have concrete cores that are designed to withstand the extreme lateral forces and loads that occur during high winds and earthquakes. Fire safety systems in skyscrapers include sprinklers and wet and dry standpipes, to which firefighting hoses can be connected.

Codes for tall building safety were found to be deficient following the World Trade Center collapse in 2001. The National Institute of Standards and Technology concluded it would have taken more than three hours to evacuate the buildings if they had been full of people at the time of the attacks. In the process, 14,000 people – 28% of the occupants – would have died because of insufficient stairwell capacity.

NIST stressed that time is of the essence in evacuation. And helipads have a very small impact on evacuation times. Helicopters take time to land, load people, and take off. They only take a small number of a skyscraper’s occupants each time. Research indicated that if the World Trade Center rooftops had been accessible (the helipad fell in disuse), helicopters couldn’t have landed because of the heat and smoke.

Our rarely used helipads may enhance the perception of safety but do little else. The NIST study called for a smarter strategy of using building design for safety. Among the key elements:

Assume that the full building will evacuate. Conventionally, builders of high-rises have assumed “staged evacuations” will occur. During a fire on one floor, occupants were supposed to evacuate to adjacent floors until it was safe to return. After the World Trade Center collapse, it became clear a tall building’s occupants would likely want to evacuate all at once in an emergency situation. NIST recommends that all non-residential skyscrapers that exceed 420 feet in height have three stairwells and fireproofing capable of withstanding a pressure of 1,000 pounds per square foot (in the event of a bomb, gas breakout, or something similar).

Allow some office workers to use elevators in an emergency. Conventionally, in an emergency situation, elevators in high-rise buildings are used by firefighters only. NIST recommends building elevators that can withstand fires and structural damage in the concrete core of a building.

Mark stairwells and exits with glow-in-the-dark signs. As simple as it sounds, not every building has such markings, especially those built before the 2000s. New York was the first large city to require luminous markings in stairwells, five years after the 9/11 tragic events. More than 1,500 buildings now have the markings, but that’s still a small fraction of America’s tall buildings.

If a city adopts these recommendations – and also asks tall buildings to include refuge floors, video-camera surveillance, and automatic sprinkler systems — the safety of the skyscrapers will increase significantly.

Relaxing the requirements of a helipad also will empower architects to create more interesting rooftops. A space 50-by-50-feet wide at minimum is required for a helipad spot, plus a typical additional 25 feet around it as a buffer. This has resulted in a repetitive, boxy roof shape in the Los Angeles skyline.

Beyond aesthetics, boxy rooftops with helipads are really a missed opportunity to create “green” roofs with sustainable features. Now Los Angeles can do something like the spiral form in the rooftop of Shanghai Tower in Shanghai that captures rainwater. Some towers’ tops are now designated for wind turbines to harness wind energy, such as the Strata Tower in London.

There’s nothing to fear – and much to gain – in relaxing the helipad requirement. I, for one, will be watching to see what inventive skyscrapers Angelinos come up with.

Kheir Al-Kodmany is a professor in the Department of Urban Planning and Policy at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He wrote this for Zocalo Public Square.

Summary: Glow-in-the-dark signs, not helipads, will help more occupants evacuate a building, an architecture professor argues.


FORTUNE — Gyft CEO and Co-Founder Vinny Lingham has one goal: eliminate the plastic gift card.

That idea animates San Francisco-based startup Gyft, an app that offers users the ability to buy and then give gift cards directly on their smartphones. Users can purchase gift cards from close to 150 vendors — including Amazon AMZN , Nike NKE and Old Navy GPS — and send them to any other user of the app. Having the card balance available on your phone, so goes the theory, is more convenient than physical cards.

Backed by Google Ventures GOOG , Gyft offers a few additional features to those who have already purchased plastic gift cards. Users can upload the balance of an existing gift card directly to their account, or even re-gift a card to one of their contacts. “We want Gyft to be the digital wallet that everyone has on their phone for receiving gift cards,” says Lingham. In the company’s first month, users uploaded more than $1 million in existing gift cards to the app.

Gyft hit the scene just in time for the holiday season, amassing more than 50,000 downloads in the company’s first 90 days, an important footnote considering the money at stake. A recent study by the National Retail Federation found that 81% of holiday shoppers plan to purchase gift cards this year. Total spending is predicted to reach more than $28.5 billion, and depending on the vendor, Gyft receives between 10% and 15% of the value of each gift card sold through its app.

MORE: Marc Andreessen: We’re in a tech depression

But spending isn’t the gift card industry’s problem — unused gift cards leave billions of dollars on the table every year. Research from Visa found that 40% of gift card owners fail to redeem the card’s full value, leaving more than $2 billion in gift cards unused in 2011. “It is clear that there is a tremendous amount of value trapped in stored value cards or gift cards,” says Joe Kraus, a general partner at Google Ventures. “[Gift cards are] so much more convenient by mirroring them into the device we carry with ourselves all the time.” Retailers aren’t the beneficiaries of this wasted cash, however. Federal regulations prohibit companies from listing gift card sales as revenue until the cards are redeemed, meaning both retailers and gift card owners want to eliminate the waste.

Gyft hopes to help by taking a narrow approach to solving a major problem. Gyft, unlike other gift-giving companies such as Giftly or Facebook’s FB Karma, deals exclusively with gift cards, minimizing its reach in the overall online shopping arena. But Lingham, alongside co-founders CJ MacDonald and Mark Levitt, wanted to avoid expanding too quickly. Gyft is Lingham’s third startup: in 2003, he co-founded Clicks2Customers, a search marketing company, and in 2007, Yola.com, a website builder. This time around, he decided to keep things simple. “One of the pitfalls of very creative people, particularly entrepreneurs, is you tend to see too far into the future,” says Lingham, 33, who grew up in South Africa. “The inherent nature that makes you what you are is also your biggest enemy.”

Lingham credits Apple AAPL for unintentionally helping ease Gyft’s product into the market. When Apple previewed its new iOS6 operating system in June, Passbook was highlighted as the iPhone’s new digital wallet feature. If retailers wanted to keep up with an influx of iPhone users trying to use coupons, loyalty cards or tickets straight from their phone, retail technology would need to be ready. Gyft, launched three months later, no longer needed to convince retailers to accept payments via smartphone. “Apple saved us in a big way,” says Lingham. “They saved us from having to educate the public on why this was a good solution.” With Gyft, gift cards can be integrated with Passbook if users wish to see all of their digital wallet items in one place.

MORE: Here’s why Apple doesn’t listen to its shareholders

Gyft’s digital gift card platform could fit nicely into other digital wallets already claiming a broader hold on the market — Google Wallet and Visa’s V.me for example. Given Gyft’s connection to Google Ventures, Google Wallet would be a logical suitor, although Kraus would not comment. Square Wallet, another mobile wallet offering, announced earlier this week that gift cards will now be part of its package. The announcement validates Lingham’s business idea but demonstrates how crowded the space is.

While the app was previously exclusive to iPhone, Gyft launched its Android application this week and hopes to provide users with a desktop platform beginning early next year. (Non-iPhone users can still use Gyft through a mobile browser.) In the future, Lingham envisions the app will provide retailers with the opportunity to reward customers by giving them gifts or unique coupons through push notifications. As companies continue to fight for customer attention when it comes to digital payments, Gyft hopes to carve out a place among the giants — one plastic gift card at a time.

Summary: Startup Gyft, backed by Google Ventures, thinks it has found the right formula for digital gift cards.


10/29/2014 AT 08:00 AM EDT

has a three-part mantra these days.

"I don't have any fear now, I don't have a lot of rules for myself, and I don't take myself that seriously," she tells PEOPLE exclusively in this week's cover story.

And when it comes to her career, "I feel ready for new challenges," she says.

The star, 35, is poised to

and appears against type as a vigilante school teacher in the new black comedy

And Holmes will soon go behind the camera for her feature

made headlines around the world, but Holmes has long since moved on.

"I don't want that moment in my life to define me, to be who I am," she says of her post-split persona. "I don't want that to be what I'm known as. I was an actor before, an actor during and an actor now."

She is also a mom, and life with her 8-year-old daughter Suri "means everything to me," she says. "I'm learning every day, and I have been since the minute I became a mom."

Part of that learning curve is accepting that things don't always go smoothly at home, she admits.

"My patience has grown, but between 4 and 6 p.m. . . . I mean,

," she says. "Between tickle fights and glitter art, I try to throw in some manners along the way."

Summary: "I feel ready for new challenges," the actress tells PEOPLE


Imagine you are in a changing room at a Nordstrom JWN store trying on some clothes . You are looking for shoes to complete the look, or want to read product reviews, or maybe just summon an associate to bring you an item in a different color or size, rather than have to get decent again and go back out to the store floor (if you even decide not to leave).

At two Nordstrom locations, one in Seattle, the other in San José, the upscale retailer is about to provide customers with technology by eBay EBAY to do just that: next week, in select departments at those stores, Nordstrom will begin to test full-length mirrors that, with the tap of a customer’s finger, turn into interactive screens, effectively creating smart fitting rooms.

The idea is to bring tech to an untapped part of a store where many customers ultimately make their purchasing decisions: the fitting room.

“The way customers shop for clothes has evolved,” Jamie Nordstrom, the retailer’s head of stores and former leader of its Nordstrom Direct digital business, told Fortune. “How do we take all the information that’s available to customers while they’re sitting on the couch at home browsing and add that to the dressing rooms, so it’s the best of both worlds?”

Getting the best of both worlds is the holy grail for retailers eager to take full advantage of their physical stores in this e-commerce era. Nordstrom, widely considered a technology leader among brick and mortar retailers, plans between this year and 2018 to have spent $1.2 billion on tech, including e-commerce, fulfillment centers, and in-store service enhancements, such as these connected fitting rooms. Last quarter, comparable sales at its department stores were unchanged, showing how important it is to keep pushing to get more out of each shopper’s visit to the stores.

And Nordstrom is not alone in looking for what’s next in retail tech. Bloomingdale’s, the upscale chain owned by Macy’s Inc M , recently began trying out smart fitting rooms, equipped with wall-mounted iPads rather than Nordstrom’s interactive mirrors, at five of its stores.

“You have shoppers used to having all that content and help in the palm of their hand,” said Wendy Liebmann, CEO of WSL Strategic Retail. “Here, you have a literally captive audience, so there’s the opportunity.”

While Nordstrom’s smart fitting rooms build on what eBay also recently developed for fashion designer Rebecca Minkoff‘s two boutiques, it is a more complicated project given how much bigger Nordstrom department stores are and how much more inventory they hold. And so in that regard, this test will be more telling of how the smart fitting rooms can be adopted by retailers broadly. Nordstrom won’t say how much of a roll-out it is planning—the success of these tests will determine that.

Mirror, mirror on the wall-should I buy this?

In the Nordstrom smart fitting rooms, shoppers will be able to enter with items selected on the sales floor, along with suggestions from the associate. They will also be equipped with barcode scanning to identify what is in the store so if a customer needs an item in another size or color, she can see for herself if it is in stock and instruct the associate to bring it.

For eBay, the technology is yet another step forward in the capabilities it built for Minkoff, and before that for Kate Spade KATE , for which the tech giant created an interactive storefront at four Manhattan stores that allowed customers standing on the street to pick merchandise, and place an order. The Minkoff stores have the ability to remember what a customer tried on during a previous visit, a capability Nordstrom won’t have right out of the gate.

While one might think such a state-of-the-art technology and how it facilitates high-touch customer service would more suitable to upscale stores, eBay thinks the technology could work even in more value-oriented retail chains. It could takethe shape of a big screen on a wall on the sales floor, rather than a sleek mirror in a changing room. Indeed, Jamie Nordstrom said the tech could potentially work at the off-price Nordstrom Rack stores, though there are no firm plans for a pilot there.

The partnership with Nordstrom is also a way for eBay, best known by consumers for its marketplaces and PayPal payments service, to burnish its reputation as a retail tech innovator, including in physical stores, where more than 90% of sales still take place. Another new eBay initiative is the connected mall it has developed with Simon Property Group, SPG consisting of an interactive mall directory that among other things, highlights events and deals happening that day. Growth in tech services will also help as the company gets ready for life after the upcoming spin-off of PayPal in 2015.

“This is about us saying, ‘Hey, are we really just an e-commerce company, or are we really a partner to anyone who does commerce,” said Steve Yankovich, vice president of innovation and new ventures at eBay.

Summary: Nordstrom is testing out full-length dressing room mirrors that double as websites as tech invades yet another sphere of shopping.


The actor Shia LaBeouf has told of being raped while performing his work #IAMSORRY at a Los Angeles art gallery. Was this a case of performance art creating an atmosphere in which anything, including crime, can happen?

Ever since the first ancestral performance happenings in the early 20th century, this dynamic and unpredictable form of art has been associated with violence and danger. From riotous Futurist evenings and the chaos of notorious avant-garde premieres such as that of The Rite of Spring in Paris in 1913, to surrealists insulting priests on the street, the moment when art becomes a kind of drama has often been a moment of physical threat.

LaBeouf’s performance #IAMSORRY is reminiscent of a more recent tradition of performance art that started in the early 1970s and replaces the sadism of the surrealists with a masochism in which the performer is a victim. In 1971, Chris Burden got himself shot in the arm in the name of art. He was also crucified on the back of a Volkswagen. Marina Abramović nearly died in a performance in which she was trapped in a burning, petrol-drenched star. Vito Acconci assumed the humiliating role of masturbating under the floor of an art gallery as he fantasised about the visitors above him.

Was a female visitor’s apparent assault on LaBeouf a grotesque misinterpretation of the myths of self-exposure and suffering that surround performance art?

Regardless of that incident, #IAMSORRY stinks of bad art. It shows how hard it is to create good work in this strange and difficult genre. To work, a performance must create a genuinely special and intense atmosphere of intimacy and risk. LaBeouf’s show, in collaboration with artists Luke Turner and Nastja Säde Rönkkö sounds, to be honest, like a third-rate imitation of the works of Abramović or Yoko Ono, whose Cut Piece dramatises vulnerability perhaps more powerfully than any other. People queued to encounter LaBeouf in a gallery. Er, hasn’t that been done? This piece is highly reminiscent of Abramović’s event The Artist Is Present, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Like Abramović, the actor sat behind a desk waiting for visitors to interact with him. The difference was that he had a bag over his head bearing the words “I am not famous any more.”

It is the charisma and mystique of an Abramović that enables her to make such a performance powerful rather than pointless. LaBeouf’s exhibit sounds more like the kind of poorly conceived and basically silly event that gets performance art a bad name. Real artists rarely wear bags on their heads.

Clearly this does not excuse rape.

Yet it does put into perspective the romantic myth of “suffering for art”. People suffer for art all the time. Unfortunately, the art is rarely worth it. Pain alone does not make you an artist.

Summary: Performance art is a difficult genre that often exploits physical threat, but LaBeouf’s #IAMSORRY is simply bad


The European Union's top diplomat Federica Mogherini has said Jerusalem "should be the capital of two states", as tensions gripped the holy city hit by Israeli-Palestinian violence.

"I think Jerusalem can be and should be the capital of two states," Mogherini told reporters in the Israeli-occupied West Bank city of Ramallah, touching on a sensitive issue that has blocked peace efforts for decades.

Her appeal, at a joint news conference with Palestinian prime minister Rami Hamdallah, came hours after the killing of an Arab-Israeli by police fanned tensions between Israel and the Palestinians.

The shooting in northern Israel came after another night of clashes in east Jerusalem between youths hurling stones and firecrackers at police, who retaliated with rubber bullets, stun grenades and tear gas.

The violence has spiked as Israel has pushed ahead with its policy to build Jewish settlements on lands the Palestinians want for a future state and against the background of efforts by Jewish extremists to secure rights to pray at Jerusalem's Al-Aqsa mosque.

"Jerusalem is not just a beautiful city, the challenge is to show that Jerusalem can be shared in peace and respect," Mogherini said.

"The message is not for the people who live here, the message is to the rest of the world," she said.

"It is not a Palestinian-Israeli situation, it is a global issue."

On Friday, Mogherini met Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who dismissed her criticism of Israeli settlement building in annexed east Jerusalem and the West Bank.

"Jerusalem is our capital and as such is not a settlement," he insisted.

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Summary: The EU's top diplomat has called for Jerusalem to be the captial of two states, amid hightened tensions after the police killing of an Arab-Israeli.


The food industry is constantly reeling from one trend to the next. In the 1990s, milk was the defender of bones and the nectar of athletes. By the 2010s, it was a scourge. It was the opposite story for fat—once universally maligned, many experts now doubt the link between burgers and heart disease. So what will be hot this year? It depends on your tastes. Fortune put together a list of hot items for different types of discerning palates in the coming year. Say hello to cricket tacos.

Culinary mashups are all the rage. (Witness the success of the doughnut-croissant combo, the cronut.) Now a 22-year-old UCLA student has created the king of all mashups: the ramen doughnut, or the Ramnut, the love child of the ramen burger bun (it’s a thing) and the cronut. Expect long lines.

Insects are already part of the diets of 2 billion people. But to feed the expected 9 billion–strong global population in 2050, they might soon be part of yours too. Insects emit fewer greenhouse gases than cattle and require far less feed. Startups are already using crickets in flour and protein bars.

Soylent, introduced this year, aims to deliver all your nutritional requirements in a drink. Part of a trend toward convenience for those with no time for food, Soylent will take off with the workaholic set. If you can get past the taste (and initial havoc on your intestines), you’ll never have to eat real food again.

For almost a decade, the health world has been demonizing pasta. Research firm Mintel says gluten-free everything is now an $8.8 billion market, with 22% consumer adoption. The kicker: Only about 1% of the population actually needs to avoid the grain protein. Increasingly experts are warning against the diet for the other 99%, saying it can strip out good sources of nutrition. Expect a gluten comeback in 2015. Today, Mintel says 44% of people think gluten-free is a fad—up from 33% last year. Pasta lovers, rejoice.

Want a healthy snack for those in sunny climes? Stick with ice cream. While frozen yogurt’s growth has exploded since TCBY brought the soft-serve stuff to malls near you in the 1990s, today we’re in the middle of a froyo bubble—and it could begin to deflate next year. A growing aversion to high-sugar foods is partly to blame. Though the dessert’s popularity (and revenue) has been trending way up in recent years, according to IBISWorld research, froyo sales in the U.S. will soon begin to grow more slowly, and by as early as 2019 begin to shrink.

Fortune’s Crystal Ball predictions for 2015:

Washington, reshuffled: What to expect from politics in 2015

Vote: What does the future hold for business in 2015?

The beginning of the end for email

Summary: We've put together a list of hot items for different types of discerning palates in the coming year. Say hello to cricket tacos.


Ryan Paevey; the Fifty Shades of Grey movie poster

02/19/2015 AT 08:50 AM EST

Before Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson took on

, casting directors had the enviable/difficult job of auditioning other wannabe Christians and Anas.

Until now, it was a mystery what went down behind closed doors of those auditions. But lucky for us, actor Ryan Paevey – you know him from

– is now sharing details.

The very good-looking Paevey went on

Tuesday to talk about his tryout for the role of Christian Grey and answered such burning questions as, "So, do you have to get naked?"

Here are the three things that go down at a

Sounds obvious, sure, but with a movie like this, you never know. As

cohost Whoopi Goldberg explained it, "When he walks in, yeah. He can't be naked coming down the street." (Hey, a person can dream, Whoopi.)

That's right: You go into it having no idea who you'll be running lines with. Think of it as the Hollywood equivalent of a blind date. Only you have to all hang out beforehand. "You sit in a long line in a hallway with a bunch of strangers," says Paevey of waiting to get called in. "Everybody knowing that one of us is going to molest one of us." (Note: When he says "molest," he's referring to acting out a scene with Ana.)

Once you get into the room, things move pretty fast. "She says something about how she wants to introduce herself to me," says Paevey of his co-auditioner – and then it quickly transitions into naked time. "But I don't do it," he explains of ditching his clothes. "She does it."

aren't quite as steamy as the movie itself, but they're not exactly PG-13, either. Note to other dudes and ladies who tried to get the role: We wanna hear more – please share. And note to casting directors: If you ever need someone to fill in for you, we're available.

Summary: Actor Ryan Paevey reveals just how, um, revealing the process was (spoiler: very)


FORTUNE — David Crane, CEO of NRG Energy, has been been in Haiti a lot since the 2010 earthquake that killed an estimated 300,000 and left 1.5 million homeless, and he never goes alone. In June he led a posse of volunteers drawn from NRG’s 8,000 employees via an essay contest. In August he went back with his teenage daughter and some of her classmates from Choate. In mid-September, he brought along a group of wealthy friends, NGO leaders, corporate executives — and me.

We spent two days traveling around in a caravan of black and white SUVs visiting humanitarian projects where NRG NRG and Crane are involved. Later we all got an email from a member of the group, Bechtel CFO Mike Adams, listing concrete ways we could help at one of the schools we saw: $14,000 for toilets; $4,000 so kids can wash their hands before they eat; $3,500 to construct a rainwater collection facility. Adams, the Crane family, and Christina Weiss Lurie, co-owner of the Philadelphia Eagles, came up with $25,000 to outfit the kitchen and pay for the high fence that surrounds the school. The biggest item on the wish list was $100,000 to build and stock a tilapia fish farm. Crane, who has lots of friends in the NFL, is hoping four teams will pony up $25,000 each; so far two have.

NRG’s focus is electricity, naturally. Since it first pledged $1 million to Haiti relief in 2010, the company has installed solar power systems in an orphanage, a hospital, a fish farm, a vegetable farm, and 21 schools.

MORE: A billionaire’s solution to income disparity

Haiti’s grid is spotty and unreliable. Like most Caribbean countries, it relies heavily on fossil fuels to generate electricity. NRG does, too; measured by carbon emissions, it’s among the dirtiest power producers in the world.

But lately Crane has been leading a big push toward renewables. NRG Solar, a wholly owned subsidiary, is partners with Google GOOG , BrightSource and Bechtel in the largest solar thermal power plant in the world, a massive complex in California’s Mojave Desert that passed an important milestone in September when it tied in to the grid for the first time. Once fully operational, it will provide enough electricity for 140,000 homes.

NRG is still betting big on traditional, centralized power production. But it’s also placing a side bet on what’s known as distributed generation — small, smart, sustainable systems that connect to a mini-grid or no grid at all. And here’s where NRG’s Haiti mission moves beyond mere charity to strategic self-interest: Haiti is a testing ground for distributed solar.

MORE: Business leaders should stay out of the culture wars

One of the stops we made was at Union Des Apotres (Union of Apostles), an elementary school in Cité Soleil, a vast slum on the coastal plain west of Port-au-Prince. The school has a beautiful new campus for 300 students, partly paid for (and brightly painted in shades of yellow, rose, and blue) by NRG, Happy Heart’s Fund (supermodel Petra Nemcova’s charity; she spoke briefly, in Creole), and Urban Zen (that’s Donna Karan’s; she couldn’t be there). Because the sun was unbearable, the ceremony took place outside the kindergarten building beneath a metal canopy that serves two purposes: shade below, solar-panel mounting structure above. The 17-killowatt system NRG installed at Union Des Apotres generates more than enough power to run the school. A battery back-up system stores enough overflow to keep things running at least 36 hours without sunlight.

After the ceremony, I spoke to Robyn Beavers, an energetic young engineer with a Stanford MBA who was working on water purification systems for Segway inventor Dean Kamen when she quit last spring to join NRG. Crane set her up at an old power plant building in San Francisco, far from the company’s headquarters in Princeton, N.J. There Beavers leads a small team of engineers working on a project code-named Station A. Her mission: To develop a viable non-grid future for NRG. “We’re not just, like, playing around to increase valuation,” Beaver told me. “We’re trying to overhaul the energy infrastructure.” And what better place to experiment than where the need is greatest. “This is not a theoretical market assessment,” she said about the work NRG is doing in Haiti. “It’s tangible technologies. You need to build stuff to learn how to make it better.”

Solar holds great promise not only for Haiti, whose skies are clear on average 71% of daylight hours, but for its region — and beyond. Building on lessons learned in Haiti, NRG just announced a partnership with Bermudian telecom Digicel to develop renewable energy projects throughout the Caribbean.

MORE: Japan’s green energy revolution

Beavers sees the present as “a beautiful moment in time, ” a 10-20-year period during which the developing world’s need to build an energy infrastructure from scratch intersects with the developed world’s need to replace the aging infrastructure it already has. “You can have that Bam! impact,” she says excitedly. “You can reinvent power around the world in various markets, settings and places, and you can do it by looking at a set of modular systems and solutions. It’s so exciting, but it’s a fleeting window.”

Did you hear that? What helps Haiti might one day help us all. That would be beautiful indeed.

If you’re so-moved, check out PRODEV Haiti, a locally led non-profit that partners with NRG, the Clinton Foundation, and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. PRODEV’s focus is education in a country where more than one-third of the population are school-age children, though half of them are not in school, and 60% who do enroll never make it to the end of sixth grade.

Summary: On the road with NRG CEO David Crane, who is working to revive the hurricane-wracked country -- and using it to develop power ideas for the rest of the world.


Iceland Naturally, along with the MIT Media Lab and the City Science Initiative, will be hosting an energy innovation discussion to talk about Boston and Reykjavik’s innovations around sustainable energy. Thursday, 8:15 to 11 a.m., MIT Media Lab, 75 Amherst St., Multi-Purpose Room E14-674, Cambridge. Free.

After rising for a few weeks, mortgage rates fell last week to 3.75 percent for the average national rate for a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage, from 3.8 percent the week before. FreddieMac releases the latest numbers Thursday at 10 a.m.

The Harvard School of Public Health and the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis are holding a workshop on the science of risk assessment and how to prepare your business for inevitable occupational hazards. 8:30 a.m. Monday through 5 p.m. Thursday, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, FXB Building, 651 Huntington Ave., Boston. $2,300.

The second monthly meeting of the Boston Blogging Meetup will focus on effective strategies for search engine optimization. Thursday, 6 to 8 p.m., Impact Hub Boston, 50 Milk St., Boston. $8 to $25.

501Partners is hosting a workshop for nonprofits who want to recruit and implement an effective sales force. Friday, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., CIC-Boston, 50 Milk St., Boston. $149 to $249.

Summary: Icelandic energy, blogging, and more notable events and things to know.


Boston Medical Center is preparing to break ground soon on a $270 million construction and renovation project that it says will consolidate the hospital’s two South End campuses and eliminate 60 beds while maintaining the same level of services.

The project, expected to be completed in 2017, is a belated culmination of the 1996 merger of Boston City Hospital and University Hospital, which created Boston Medical. While the hospitals have integrated departments over the past 18 years, and closed one of the two emergency rooms in 2010, they have continued to offer medical care at both campuses, often shuttling patients admitted at one to specialists at the other — a two-block ambulance ride.

That would end under the consolidationplan. It has been approved by Boston Medical’s directors and the Boston Redevelopment Authority but awaits a “determination of need” certificate from the state Department of Public Health.

“We’re positioning ourselves for the next phase of health care,” said Dr. Ravin Davidoff, chief medical officer at Boston Medical. “We’re creating a patient-centered clinical campus.”

The plan calls for eight additional operating rooms and about 70 single rooms on the former Boston City Hospital site, expanding outpatient facilities and the gastroenterology department, and creating an updated, consistent feel throughout a sprawling campus dotted with aging buildings. It would also expand by a third Boston Medical’s congested emergency department, the busiest in Massachusetts with nearly 130,000 patient visits last year.

But it will also mean closing the Newton Pavilion on the former University Hospital campus. Those two adjoining buildings will be sold.

Proceeds from the sale, along with money raised through philanthropy and bond financing, will bankroll construction and renovations at the Menino, Yawkey, and Moakley buildings on the remaining campus, plus a transport bridge that will ferry patients from a helipad over Albany Street to the medical center.

Overall, the hospital’s footprint will shrink by about 329,000 square feet to just under 2.1 million square feet.

The consolidation is expected to save at least $25 million a year through energy efficiencies and the elimination of “workarounds,” such as the short ambulance trips to bring patients admitted in the emergency department to neurosurgery and cardiac specialists at Newton Pavilion.

Beyond the savings, there will also be larger and more efficient space for mothers and babies, for intensive care, and for doctors to collaborate.

“It’s caring for the patients in the right setting, in the most efficient manner,” said Bob Biggio, vice president for facilities and support services.

Some of Boston Medical’s competitors acknowledge privately that its redevelopment plan is a bold response to a changing health care environment in which hospitals face cuts in government payments for Medicaid and Medicare — the top sources of revenue for Boston Medical, the state’s largest safety net hospital.

Despite those reductions and a national decline in the number of inpatient procedures, most hospitals have been reluctant to eliminate beds.

That may be changing in such cities as Boston, however, where academic medical centers also are grappling with reduced funding for research and must adapt to new insurance contracts that reward them for positive health outcomes and for keeping patients out of the hospital.

“Hospitals are going to have to work more efficiently, like other industries,” said Harry Glorikian, managing partner at the Cambridge consulting firm Scientia Advisors. “If that means they don’t need as many beds, they can apply the savings to optimizing their plants and improving their services.

“They will have to manage care more efficiently outside hospitals to reduce admissions, and they will have to do what they do internally more efficiently, as well,’’ he said.

Leaders of the Massachusetts Nurses Association have protested the decision to close the former University Hospital campus, where more than 450 of its members work as registered nurses. Boston Medical officials say they anticipate their staffing needs will remain constant, so the nurses will be able to move to the consolidated campus. But to do so, they may have to switch their affiliation to the Service Employees International Union, which represents nurses there.

“While management has stated publicly that there will be positions for everyone following the consolidation, they have refused to put that guarantee in writing for the East Newton Campus nurses,” said association spokesman David Schildmeier. “These nurses have years of experience providing care to the patient population served by the hospital and they and their patients deserve that the new consolidation will ensure the same level of care.”

The issue is under negotiation but is not expected to delay the hospital’s consolidation.

During the three-year redevelopment project, Boston Medical would operate on both campuses.

Summary: Boston Medical Center is preparing to break ground in the coming weeks on a $270 million construction and renovation project that will consolidate its two campuses in the city’s South End and eliminate 60 beds while keeping the same level of services. Executives say the project, which is expected to be completed in 2017, is a belated culmination of the 1996 merger of Boston City Hospital and University Hospital that created Boston Medical. While the two hospitals have integrated departments over the past 18 years, and closed one of their two emergency rooms in 2010, they have continued to operate at both campuses, often shuttling patients admitted at one to specialists based at the other. That will be changing under the consolidation plan.


Sharna Burgess and Noah Galloway of Dancing with the Stars

04/03/2015 AT 08:00 AM EDT

, they took for granted just

challenging the show would be for the 33-year-old Army veteran.

Galloway lost his left leg above his knee and his left arm above the elbow during his second tour in Iraq. Though he isn't the first amputee to appear on

preceded him – he's the first to do it with only one knee.

"Most people take it for granted," Galloway told PEOPLE. "Before I was injured, I wouldn't have thought about it either. I don't take offense to that. Anytime that I brought it up to my friends that I don't have a knee, it clicks with people, like, 'Oh, that

different.' But I also felt like that was an opportunity to put me on a larger platform to show how different is is for me. Every amputation is different. Where it is changes everything."

The prosthetic leg that Galloway uses for

does bend – but not in a way that makes dances like the jive or even the samba easy.

"When people lunge onto their legs, they can push back up. I can't. If I lean into it, then I'm going down," explains Galloway. "This prosthetic has a micro-processor that can add resistance as I'm bending that can slow me down. There's just no coming back up. It just helps with how fast I am going to go to the floor – either really fast or I'm going to ease down to it."

for "adapting to my injuries."

"The judges said the male leads with his left hand, and they were talking about how amazing it was how we put everything together, and that's all Sharna. She designs the dances so I won't have to lead with the left arm, but I am still leading the dance."

"All I know about dancing is what Sharna has taught me. She is teaching me how to dance while missing an arm and a leg. It's been amazing."

airs Mondays (8 p.m. ET) on ABC.

Summary: The army vet talks about how DWTS has taught him how to dance with one arm and one leg


Jill Dillard and baby Israel David

04/10/2015 AT 11:05 AM EDT

They say it takes a village to raise a child – luckily, the expansive Duggar family is a village all on its own.

Since giving birth to Israel David,

has seen her family pitching in where they can as she recovers from

that weighed in at nearly 10 lbs. and measured 23 in. long.

"We are so blessed to have such a great family and such great support here at the hospital with the doctors and the nursing staff," Jill, 23, tells PEOPLE. "My sisters and my mom and

's mom have all been in to help!"

star adds that the entire Duggar clan has yet to meet Israel, but "everyone is over the moon and so excited about him being born."

When Derick, 26, had to cut away from dad duty for an orthodontist appointment – where he had braces put on, by the way – patriarch

, 49, gave him a lift and

, 48, stopped by to care for Jill and Israel both. Michelle and Derick have been "tag-teaming" to take care of Jill.

Even Joy Anna, 17, pitched in with some sisterly bonding time – she spent a night at the hospital and braided Jill's hair. After all,

enlisted by Jill and Derick to make Israel feel welcome in the Duggar clan. (James, 13, and Jennifer, 7, are also part of the buddy team.)

Though Derick is relatively new at being around children, he is already "doing amazing at being a dad,"

airs Tuesdays (9 p.m. ET) on TLC.

Summary: "We are so blessed to have such a great family and such great support," Jill tells PEOPLE


The Wellcome Collection in London is about to open a peep show – and of a kind not seen in Britain for well over a century, since the last public museum of medical waxworks was smashed to pieces by the London Metropolitan police. The Wellcome's normally chaste white galleries have been transformed for a new show called Exquisite Bodies, which gathers together centuries of anatomical models of human bodies and body parts, created to educate, terrify and titillate.

The exhibition's designers say it will be part university lecture, part artist's anatomy lesson, part Victorian fairground booth. The oldest pieces, works made in ivory or wood in the 17th and 18th centuries, come from private collections in Europe. But most of the pieces, made in tinted wax, have a rowdier history, often conveying physical deformity or grotesque disease in lurid detail, and displayed in crowd-thrilling museums and travelling fairs from the 19th century onwards. The Roca museum, the original home of many of the pieces in the show, survived in the red-light district of Barcelona until 1935, and was considered so educational, particularly as a warning against the horrors of venereal disease, that at one point it was maintained by the Red Cross.

"We wanted to convey the atmosphere of these displays," curator Kate Forde says. "They were certainly about educating people, but they were also hugely popular entertainment, at a time before x-rays when the inner workings of their own bodies were a profound mystery to most people."

Most of the pieces are now fragile, and very rare. As these museums fell out of favour, the exhibits were destroyed. Forde has spent years tracking down specimens for the exhibition, adding to those collected in the early 20th century by Henry Wellcome, founder of the Wellcome Trust.

The rooms have been painted dark blue, and filled with extraordinary objects, from a two-headed calf – probably faked – to a cutaway model of a pregnant woman, her serene face betraying nothing of the midwife's hand groping inside her.

Especially arresting are supine naked women, known as "anatomical Venuses", made from the 18th century onwards. They were constructed of wax, wood or ivory so that their stomachs could be opened and internal organs displayed, usually including a pregnant uterus. Most have beautiful faces resembling traditional images of the Madonna, and luxuriant real hair. Although originally modelled for private collections, when any scholarly gentleman's study would include scientific instruments and anatomical treatises, some were also made to educate medical students.

There are also miniature ivory models in the same style. "It used to be thought that these were made to aid women consulting doctors, who could point to the models to show what their problem was, but I think that's most unlikely," says Forde. "They are far too small, and the detail is too crude to be useful. They are luxury objects, and I wonder if they aren't a kind of executive desk toy, where you would amuse yourself by taking them to pieces and reassembling them."

Draw aside the crimson velvet curtains of the side alcoves, and you expose ever more striking things: human genitalia in extreme stages of disease modelled in flesh-coloured wax featuring real pubic hair, for instance. Whether these are intended to terrify the viewer into virtuous living or offer a curious form of titillation is open to debate.

The Wellcome has always been interested in the permeable membrane between art and science. Generations of art students learned anatomy directly from models originally intended for medical students; dissection was either illegal or specimens difficult to obtain. Detailed watercolour illustrations and engravings were made of dissections, and centuries-old specimens survive preserved in alcohol – but the unique advantage of the model was that it preserved a three-dimensional image with its original colour.

Most were made by highly skilled specialists, of whom the finest was undoubtedly Joseph Towne, born in 1806 in Royston, near Cambridge. As a teenager, he modelled a full-size human skeleton working from observation and book illustrations alone, eventually being directed to London, and then to Guy's hospital in his attempts to find out if it was accurate. Guy's needed an assistant model maker, and the extraordinary model hand Towne made to demonstrate his skill is still in the hospital collection.

He ended up spending his entire working life at Guy's, living and working in the hospital basement. He was so secretive, particularly of his technique for colouring the wax, that he sometimes worked draped in a cloth, and blocked the keyhole of his room.

The most startling aspect of Towne's models is that they are unmistakably portraits of real people, including the head of a child dying of syphilis and a yelling man with a stubbled chin and broken teeth. Many contemporary artists must have been aware of Towne's peculiar genius. He craved recognition for his skill, and his work was often shown in exhibitions that included conventional works of art. His model of a dissected head – included in the Wellcome show – won a Royal Society of Arts gold medal in 1825, and he was included in the Great Exhibition in 1851.

There are many other overlaps with art history in the show. The Belgian surrealist painter Paul Delvaux, who repeatedly visited a Venus in the Spitzner Museum at the Brussels Fair, was only one of many artists fascinated by such figures. Delvaux might even be one of those captured in a photograph from the 1930s, on display here, which shows crowds poring over display cases in a tent in Brussels, their faces in various states of shock or hilarity.

The grotesquely dismembered figures that populate many early surrealist exhibitions strikingly recall these fairground creations, as does the work of many contemporary artists including Louise Bourgeois, the Chapman Brothers and Marc Quinn. Quinn's own sculpture of a naked woman, an eerie body cast of a real woman, Silvia Petretti, in polymer wax mixed with the anti-HIV drugs she was taking, was bought when the Wellcome Collection opened three years ago, and lies on permanent display in a glass case just inside the main door of the building.

The exhibition reflects an aspect of scientific history in which the gallery's founder himself was hugely interested – the meeting point of art and science, and of the academic and the popular. Indeed, Henry Wellcome collected the most beautiful of the Venuses, originally commissioned by a Florentine aristocrat, and the ivory miniatures. Forde is confident he would have loved this show.

Summary: Part fairground attraction, part science lesson, a new exhibition of grotesquely lifelike waxworks lifts the curtain on the hidden history of medicine and art


American Crafts Festival, Lincoln Center.

The fifth annual exhibition will be held this Saturday and Sunday and next Saturday and Sunday from noon to 9 P.M. Sponsored by the American Center for Art and Craftsmanship in cooperation with Consolidated Edison and Lincoln Center, the festival is one of the largest and most comprehensive expositions of American crafts.

Included are displays of handmade creations in wood, stained and blown glass, jewelry, scrimshaw, pottery, designer apparel, doys, musical instruments and home furnishings.

Crafts demonstrations, entertainment and a wide variety of foods will also be available. Admission is free. Antiques Show and Sale, Hope Com- munity Center, Walnut Street, Hope, N.J.

Exhibitors from New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Connecticut will feature country furniture, cast iron toys, quilts, brass items, early china and glass at the 24th annual show. Visitors are also invited to view the exteriors of 18th-century stone buildings and homes of the Warren County town's early Moravian settlers.

The show will be held Friday from 10:30 A.M. to 9 P.M. and Saturday from 10:30 A.M. to 6 P.M. Admission is $1.25, and proceeds will benefit the Hope Historical Museum.

The community center is one mile south of Exit 12 of Interstate 80. Big Bash Antiques Show and Sale, Ke- nisco Dam Plaza, Valhalla, N.Y.

Representatives from 12 states will exhibit a wide range of antiques and collectibles, rain or shine, on Saturday from 10 A.M. to 5 P.M.

The event will benefit the burn treatment center at the Grasslands Medical Complex in Valhalla. Admission and parking are free. Kenisco Dam is at the crossroads of Route 22, the Taconic State Parkway and the Bronx River Parkway. ''Cool Flowers for a Hot Day,'' lecture at the Horticultural Society of New York, 128 West 58th Street.

Barry Ferguson will demonstrate how to use wildflowers, foliage and found natural materials from the shore and fields to make refreshing summer arrangements.

Mr. Ferguson will speak at 7 P.M. on Thursday. The fee is $2, and $1 to horicultural society members. ''American Decorative Arts,'' lecture at the New York School of Interior Design, 155 East 56th Street.

The School of Interior Design's new lecture course will begin Monday and will be taught by Elizabeth Stillinger, author of ''The Antiquers,'' and Sarah Sherrill, associate editor of Antiques magazine. Although the emphasis will be on furniture and floor coverings, there will be some discussion of glass, silver, ceramics and other accessories used in Colonial and Federal interiors from 1620 to 1820.

For further information, get in touch with Jonathan Boorstein at the school, 753-5365.


BOSTON, Aug. 22— Urging patients out of bed to exercise just days after a coronary does not improve the health of their hearts, a study shows.

The report found that the condition of patients who walked and did calisthenics soon after their heart attacks was identical with that of people who took it easy in the hospital.

''We were unable to demonstrate any significant beneficial or deleterious effects of an early, in-hospital exercise program,'' the researchers wrote.

The study conducted at seven Seattle hospitals and directed by researchers at the University of Washington School of Nursing was published in the issue published Thursday of the New England Journal of Medicine. 84 Patients in Study

The purpose of prompt exercise after a heart attack is to keep the patient's cardiovascular system from getting out of shape while he is bedridden.

In this study, 84 patients began exercising an average of four and a half days after their admission to the hospital and continued to work out until they were sent home five days later. These men and women exercised with weights and pulleys over their beds and did calisthenics and took walks after they were able to get out of bed.

Before their discharge, their health was compared with that of 174 people who did not exercise. The patients walked on treadmills while doctors conducted electrocardiograph tests and measured their heart rates, blood pressure and fatigue.

Even though there was no difference in the two groups, the researchers said the early exercise may still have a positive effect. ''If one assumes that a sedentary lifestyle is a risk factor and that exercise is a desirable preventive measure, then starting an exercise program during hospitalization when patients are highly motivated may well help to establish a habit of exercise,'' they wrote.


WASHINGTON, Dec. 30— Thursday is the last day for most people to sign up for Social Security and get the minimum monthly payment if their contributions do not qualify them for a bigger benefit.

A bill that restricts eligibility for the minimum payment, now $122, for people who retire at a future date was signed into law on Tuesday by President Reagan.

Those who became eligible before last Jan. 1 but who have not signed up will still be permitted to do so after Thursday. In addition, certain members of religious orders will remain eligible for the $122 minimum. The legislation maintains the minimum benefit for about three million people, reversing a decision that Congress made earlier at the request of the President.


Dow Jones & Company said yesterday that it had asked a Federal court to block the Chicago Board of Trade from trading futures contracts based on the Dow Jones stock indexes.

Among stock market index contracts submitted to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission by the board of trade are indexes composed of the same stocks that are included in the Dow Jones average of 30 industrial stocks, the Dow Jones average of 20 transportation stocks and the Dow Jones average of 15 utility stocks.

''Dow Jones will take all actions necessary to protect its proprietary interest in the Dow Jones averages,'' said Ray Shaw, president of the company, which publishes The Wall Street Journal and is a provider of business, financial and economic news.

The lawsuit contends the proposed contracts constitute copyright and trademark infringement.Jean Tippins, vice president for administration at the board of trade, declined comment on the lawsuit until lawyers review it. In early March, the board filed a lawsuit in circuit court in Cook County, Ill., seeking a ruling that the carrying out and offering of the proposed contracts would neither violate the legal or proprietary rights of Dow Jones. Dow Jones said yesterday that it had asked that the Illinois lawsuit be dismissed on jurisdictional grounds.


GREENSBORO, N.C., March 7— The Atlantic Coast Conference championship basketball game started as a thriller between two fine teams today, but became a bore when North Carolina used its four-corner stall in the last eight minutes to preserve a 1-point lead and beat Virginia, 47-45.

By winning the title, North Carolina, ranked No. 1 in the nation in the weekly wire-service polls, earned an automatic bid to the National Collegiate Athletic Association tournament that starts Thursday. The Tar Heels, with a 27-2 record, are seeded first in the East regional and will begin play in a second-round game Saturday at Charlotte.

Virginia (29-3), which was ranked No.3 last week, received an atlarge spot and was seeded first in the Mideast regional. It plays a second-round game Sunday in Indianapolis.

Coach Dean Smith, whose trademark is the four-corner setup he favors as a means of holding a lead, said: ''You saw a great game until eight minutes to play. It could have been great if they came out and chased us, and then we shot some layups.''

But Virginia did not go out, and the Tar Heels, in possession with a 44-43 lead and 7:34 remaining, called time and went into their stall. They did not shoot for 7 minutes 6 seconds.

The four-corner stall was once called the four-corner offense, but no offense appeared to be intended today. James Worthy, Mike Jordan, Jimmy Black, Matt Doherty and Sam Perkins played catch until Virginia committed its seventh foul of the half, which sent Doherty to the line with 28 seconds left. He made the first shot and missed the second in a one-and-one situation, putting the Tar Heels up by 45-43.

Virginia then went upcourt with time to tie the game. But the Cavaliers lost their last chance when the freshman Jim Miller, pressured by Black, lost the ball out of bounds. Doherty was then fouled again and hit both free throws. Ralph Sampson, Virginia's 7-foot-4-inch center, made an uncontested stuff at the buzzer.

Doherty did not mind the four corners, saying: ''I don't care about the image of the sport. It was good for Carolina basketball because we won the game.''

''I'm not getting involved in that controversy,'' said Terry Holland, Virginia's coach, when asked about the tactic. ''North Carolina did what it thought it had to do to win.''

The finish was in stark contrast to the start. Worthy, the all-America forward, set the pace when he took the opening tip and went in for a stuff basket. Carolina quickly ran off 8 straight points. Worthy Controls Offense

Worthy was a terror on offense, scoring 14 of his 16 points in the first seven and a half minutes. He made five of his first seven shots and was credited with the other two when Sampson was charged with goaltending twice.

Virginia began to come back as both teams kept up a fast pace that had the 16,034 fans in Greenboro Coliseum screaming. A transition battle was waged into the second half.

Sampson, who had been standing around, began to get involved in the action. And the Cavaliers slowed down Worthy by crowding him. Virginia, which had started so poorly, finally got the lead, 35-34, at 1:21 of the second half when Tim Mullen broke in for a backdoor basket. A few minutes later, Jordan, the freshman forward, hit four long shots to give the Tar Heels a 44-41 edge. Jeff Jones's 25-footer cut the lead to 44-43.

It was then that Smith called time and installed the four corners. ''A coach thinks to win a game under the rules,'' he said afterward. ''We were just trying to win, and did. They have a 7-4 guy you want to get out from under the basket, and he won't come out. If Sampson had come out, it might have been different. When I use the four corners and win, I'm a genius. When I use it and we lose, I'm all wrong.''

Sampson did come out and challenge the Tar Heels late in the game, when Virginia knew it had to foul for a chance to get possession. But for more than five minutes he had been standing under the basket.

Worthy, who had all his 16 points in the first half, was voted the outstanding player of the playoffs. The slow finish resulted in some unusual statistics: This was first A.C.C. title game since 1970 to have totaled fewer than 100 points; North Carolina had only three turnovers, and each team attempted only nine shots in the second half. Sampson Held to 12 Points

Sampson did not have an impressive playoff; he scored 12 points today for a total of 31 in three games. He had five rebounds, only one in the second half, for a total of 18.

Virginia was without Othell Wilson, its playmaker and secondhighest scorer, who suffered a thigh injury in the first-round victory over Clemson Friday night.

This was North Carolina's 10th A.C.C. title, more than any of the seven other teams in the league, and its second straight. It was the ninth under Smith, who has been coach since 1962. Smith has taken six North Carolina teams to the Final Four of the N.C.A.A. tournament, but has not won the championship. Memphis State 73, Louisville 62

MEMPHIS, March 7 (AP) - Keith Lee, a 6-10 freshman, scored 27 points as Memphis State won the Metro Conference tournament. Lee also had 15 rebounds and was named the tournament's most valuable player.

Memphis State (23-4), the league's regular-season champion, never trailed, opening a 4-0 lead and extending it to 35-28 at halftime. Louisville (20-9) opened the second half with a scoring spurt and pulled to 39-37 at 17:23, but Memphis State outscored the Cardinals, 22-7, to take a 61-45 lead at 9:33.

It was the third meeting this year between the Cardinals and the Tigers. Each won at home during the regular season.

Illustrations: photo of NC's James Worthy and VA's Craig Robinson


06/30/2015 AT 11:30 AM EDT

in his latest movie is 100 percent real. And his costar

The 35-year-old actress made a

to talk about the comic-book adventure movie

, and she assured the late-night host that Rudd's shirtless moment on-screen was as real as it gets.

"I have to ask you a question, because I've known

a long time, and there's one scene in the movie where he doesn't have his shirt on,"

, 52, said in the clip.

"Yes, he's straight," quipped the

"Are those real abs? Or are those CGI-injected abs?" O'Brien wondered as the audience roared at a torso-baring screenshot of the actor from the Marvel movie, out July 17.

Lilly went on to poll the audience about whether they believed Rudd's physique to be au naturel, receiving a very divided response.

"They're real," Lilly then confirmed. "[Paul] jokingly tells people he didn't eat for a year for five seconds on camera, but they're real."

Looking radiant in a yellow maxi dress, the

, who is seven months along, also updated the comedian about baby

, assuring that he or she will be full of surprises.

"It's a surprise. We don't know this time; we didn't know last time," Lilly said of her baby's sex.

This is the second child for the very private actress and her longtime partner

, who are parents to 4-year-old Kahekili. She debuted her baby belly in a black-and-white one-shoulder gown on the red carpet at the Los Angeles premiere of

Summary: The expectant mom showed off her baby bump in a summery yellow dress on Conan on Monday night


On its first birthday, Slack is already a "unicorn," the term reserved for start-ups with a valuation $1 billion or more. Even more newsworthy is Slack's growth rate during the first year.

Over half a million daily active users earned Slack the title of "fastest-growing business app ever" in Forbes. The founder, Stewart Butterfield, attributed Slack's success to pouncing at the perfect time for the service, which provides an instant messaging specifically for work colleagues.

Read MoreTen British startups with super-fast growth rates

Summary: Slack, a messaging app for the workplace, celebrated its first birthday by releasing statistics that reveal its super-fast growth.


08/26/2015 AT 12:45 PM EDT

. It was painted in 1941 by Warner Sallman, and it's one of the most recognizable portraits of a religious figure in the world, having been reproduced over 500 million times,

For more than 50 years, one of those copies hung in Royster Middle School in Chanute, Kansas. Last week, it came down.

Superintendent Richard Proffitt was contacted by a lawyer from the Freedom from Religion Foundation, who referred to the picture as "an egregious violation of the First Amendment." Proffitt subsequently removed it. "I anticipated some negative reaction,"

. "However, we just had to act in accordance with the law."

The law, specifically, is the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, which bars the government from supporting any religion – a publicly funded school falls under the umbrella of a government institution and thus cannot support a specific religion.

This is actually the second instance of Freedom from Religion battling the

. The same painting hung in an Ohio school, and the organization sued, resulting in the painting's removal. (The district also had to pay $95,000 in fees and court costs.) In this instance, the group is maintaining it was motivated by a complaint from a Chanute resident.

A local waitress, who remembered the painting from her time in the school in the 1960s,

"This is still the United States, under God indivisible."

Erika Semey, who graduated from Royster Middle 10 years ago, told the paper, "Oh man, it's getting bad," Semey said. "That's what's wrong with this world. Not enough people have Christ in their lives."

have offered to "take in" the painting, which Proffitt told the

is "being stored in a place where it's not visible."

Summary: The district was approached by a group called the Freedom from Religion Foundation


FORTUNE — The Wall Street Journal , quoting the usual unnamed “people familiar with the matter,” reported Friday that the new iPhone that Apple AAPL is expected to unveil next week will work on the fastest wireless 4G LTE networks in Europe and Asia.

That’s news because there are at least three dozen flavors of LTE (for long-term evolution), and the first Apple device to support the technology, the new iPad introduced last March, was only compatible with the bands used by U.S. and Canadian carriers.

What the Journal’s sources didn’t say is whether the iPhone 5’s LTE modem is compatible with the biggest carrier of them all: China Mobile CHL , with 655 million wireless subscribers — three times as many as Verizon Wireless VZ and AT&T Mobility T combined.

It’s a critical question — one that could break the impasse that has prevented Apple from signing a contract with China Mobile for more than four years.

The answer depends on which chipset Apple has decided to use. There are several on the market that will do the trick; Qualcomm QCOM has been making them for more than a year (see here). If the new iPhone uses one of them, it could triple its addressable user base in the world’s largest mobile phone market.

Not that those 655 million subscribers will get to enjoy those 4G speeds — at least not at first. Although China Mobile controls 70% of the Chinese mobile market, it has been slow to deploy the faster network protocols. The lion’s share of its network is still running at 2G speeds; less than 20% has been upgraded to 3G. And although it has begun testing 4G hotspots, as of last May they were up and running in only six Chinese cities.

But it almost doesn’t matter. The Chinese love their cell phones, and they like to have the latest model. The crushing demand for the iPhone 4S that forced Apple to shut down sales in Beijing last January was fueled largely by scalpers snapping them up for resale to China Mobile users. Earlier this year, the carrier announced that even without a contract with Apple — or an iPhone that could communicate with its home-grown 3G protocol — there were already 12 million iPhones on its network running at sluggish 2G speeds.

Summary: That's the 655-million-user question


While the retirement of Tesla Motors' CFO, Deepak Ahuja, is important, there is one piece of news that may have been overlooked by many, Stifel Nicolaus analyst Jamie Albertine said Wednesday.

"The thinner charging cable is coming to the power charging network," Albertine said in an interview with CNBC's "Squawk Alley." "If they can get that [car] charging time down considerably, that's going to change the whole buying matrix that consumers are going to go through when considering an electric vehicle."

Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced both Ahuja's retirement and the thinner charging cable at the automaker's annual shareholders meeting Tuesday.

Ahuja's exit comes after seven years at the company and as Tesla is about to enter a period of intensive growth and equally intensive spending. Musk reiterated the company's anticipation of 50 percent annual growth over the next several years.

Read MoreDon't buy into Tesla's battery biz: Bob Lutz

Musk also confirmed the first deliveries of the new Model X crossover will begin "in three to four months." He said the gull-wing utility vehicle "is shaping up to be five stars in every category" in terms of safety ratings, making it one of the safest SUVs on the road.

Tesla shares were down more than 2 percent midday Wednesday.

—Reuters contributed to this report.

Summary: While Deepak Ahuja's retirement is important, there is one piece of news that may have been overlooked by many, Jamie Albertine said.


09/14/2015 AT 04:25 PM EDT

"Yankee Doodle keep it up, Yankee Doodle ahhh!"

, we don't think that's how the song goes.

Blunt sure has been put to the test since becoming an official U.S. citizen. First she epically failed when Jimmy Kimmel

on popular American knowledge like what a Big Gulp is and what MLB stands for, and now

is giving the actress an exam of her own.

, she bragged about how much she knew about American history, saying, "I know more about the constitution and government than most Americans."

Emily Blunt with a surprise guest

Michael Rozman / Warner Bros

But DeGeneres didn't pay attention too much to the hard facts – she wanted to know if Blunt knew patriotic songs.

"I feel like this is going to get me in trouble," Blunt said nervously.

actress, 32, to dress up like Lady Liberty and sing patriotic songs in celebration of her new status.

As Blunt attempted to sing along to "Yankee Doodle Dandy," a man dressed as Uncle Sam walked up to her and shouted in her face, basically scaring the American out of her.

Blunt screamed back in his face before falling into a pit of laughter.

"I think I just peed myself," she exclaimed as DeGeneres cracked up in her seat.

Blunt should probably refuse to take any more tests from here on out.

Summary: A man dressed as Uncle Sam scared Emily Blunt while she sang "Yankee Doodle Dandee" on The Ellen DeGeneres Show


08/24/2014 AT 05:40 PM EDT

have won an Emmy yet. At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, that is a crime greater than any the show addressed during its three-season run. Elba picked up a Golden Globe in 2012 for it, but considering the most recent season of

is the last, the time is now to reward the actor and the show.

For three seasons, Elba so fully inhabited Luther's gray car coat that we're not really sure where the character began and where Elba ended, which is really worrisome, because that's also what we thought about his portrayal of Baltimore drug lord Stringer Bell in

The scene above is gripping, unsettling and must have been taxing to film. In short, it's everything great TV is supposed to be, and the perfect example of why

, showrunner Neil Cross and Elba all deserve to walk home with Emmys on Monday night.

Chris Pizzello / Invision / AP

Summary: Idris Elba should take home a statue as well


If the Supreme Court rules for the plaintiffs in King, only people in the 16 states and the District of Columbia that set up their own Obamacare exchanges would be eligible for tax credits that would reduce the cost of their monthly health plan premiums. Those tax credits are available to people with low and moderate incomes.

Read MoreObamacare plan prices to jump an average of 12%

In states that have not set up their own exchanges, 55 percent of respondents told the Kaiser poll that their state should create their own exchanges to protect subsidies for residents if the Supreme Court rules they cannot be given to HealthCare.gov customers.

The next day that the Supreme Court could issue a decision in the case is Thursday. Experts agree that if the subsidies are ruled illegal in HealthCare.gov states, up to 8 million people would become uninsured by next year, and premium prices for individual health plans would rise dramatically.

But advocates for the plaintiffs in the case argue that the Affordable Care Act is clear in saying that subsidies can only be given to customers of a state-created exchange, and that any extension of the subsidies beyond those markets results in an illegal burden on the taxpayers forced to pay for that assistance.

The Kaiser poll also found that public opinion overall on Obamacare remains almost evenly split. A total of 42 percent have an unfavorable view of the law, and 39 percent have a favorable view.

Summary: Just 27% of people know about King v. Burwell, a Supreme Court case that threatens to cripple Obamacare in 34 HealthCare.gov states.


NEW YORK, Aug 12 (Reuters) - Bashing China is a time-honored tradition among U.S. candidates for higher public office, and no one has done that with more zest in this election cycle than billionaire Donald Trump.

Beijing handed the Republican presidential hopeful more ammunition to rail against China when it devalued the yuan on Tuesday, and Trump did not miss a chance.

"(China) continuously cuts their currency, they devalue their currency," Trump said on Wednesday during a campaign stop in Birch Run, Michigan. "They've been doing this for years - this isn't just starting."

Short-term events aside, though, data shows China's yuan has in fact been strengthening over the last 10 years, dramatically so. And while its appreciation against the dollar has abated in the last couple of years, the yuan has continued rising against the currencies of most of its trade partners, including Japan and the euro zone.

A weak currency lowers the price of a country's exports, making them more attractive to international buyers.

"It is hard to call the yuan weak. It is less strong," said Marc Chandler, global head of currency strategy at Brown Brothers Harriman in New York.

Over the last decade, the trade-weighted yuan index, a measure of its value against the currencies of China's main trading partners, has risen by 43 percent, according to data from the Bank for International Settlements.

A Trump spokesperson was not immediately available to comment. Trump was not the only Republican candidate to weigh in on the yuan, as Senator Lindsay Graham of South Carolina called China's actions "just the latest in a long history of cheating." Other U.S. elected officials from both parties have criticized China's moves as well.

The yuan has fallen 2.9 percent against the U.S. dollar over the last two days, 3.0 percent against the yen in the same period, and 1.6 percent against the Korean won, currencies of three of China's largest trading partners. Markets worldwide have been roiled for the last two days since Beijing devalued its currency.

But the currency's fall thus far only offsets some recent trade-weighted gains. Against the euro, for instance, the yuan has strengthened 5 percent in 2015. It is up more than 4 percent against the Korean won, and nearly 13 percent against the Malaysian ringgit.

The yuan's trade-weighted index is constructed as follows: 31.7 percent is weighted to emerging Asia - countries such as Malaysia and Indonesia - 18.5 percent to the United States, 17.4 percent to Japan and 16.2 percent to the euro zone. Other industrial countries, central and eastern Europe and Latin America make up the remaining 16 percent.

"So China has weakened more than 2 percent in the last two days, big deal, does that really take away Malaysia's competitiveness?" said Chandler.

In fact, the U.S. dollar is one of the few spots where the yuan has failed to gain headway in 2015, sliding 3 percent. The dollar has strengthened against almost all currencies for most of 2014 and 2015 as investors factored in expectations of a Federal Reserve interest rate hike.

But in 2013, the yuan had gained 2.8 percent against the dollar, and in 2012, had risen 1 percent.

Still, if what is still a modest decline in the yuan turns into a full-blown slump, a "broader part of the political spectrum in the U.S. will voice concern," wrote Jens Nordvig, global currency strategist at Nomura. Given that the change in China's policy makes its currency more sensitive to market movements, the Obama administration may not react negatively initially.

"If we get 5 percent quickly, then Congress can turn quickly," Nordvig told Reuters.

Late on Wednesday, the dollar was up 1 percent against the yuan at 6.3870.

Chandler urged market participants to wait and see how all this would play out. "It may not be that bad after all."

(Reporting by Gertrude Chavez-Dreyfuss; Editing by David Gaffen and Tomasz Janowski)

Summary: Beijing handed the Republican presidential hopeful more ammunition to rail against China when it devalued the yuan on Tuesday, and Trump did not miss a chance. Short-term events aside, though, data shows China's yuan has in fact been strengthening over the last 10 years, dramatically so. Over the last decade, the trade-weighted yuan index, a measure of its value...


Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg delivers the opening kenote at the Facebook f8 conference on April 30, 2014 in San Francisco, Calif.

So far, more than 55,000 people have liked the page, and some of them have even started to discuss the club's first selection: "The End of Power" by Moisés Naím. Many of the early commenters, however, are asking where to find it (ahem).

More from Re/code:How to watch (and understand) some of the world's fastest video game playersYou can finally get ESPN on the web, for $20 a monthGogoro plans scooters, battery-swap kiosks for cities

The thing I personally want to know after seeing this club: With so many people seeing Zuck's post in their Facebook timelines, will Naím's book get a "Zuckerberg bump" and rise in the various sales charts? To be determined!

Read MoreFacebook's key to success in 2015 is...

Update: The paperback version of "The End of Power" is "temporarily out of stock" at Amazon. Hat tip to Tom Martin for flagging this.

"This could quite possibly be the largest collective reading of a single book to ever take place," commenter Charlie Bailey said. "Pretty powerful."

Read MoreNot just for nerds: Comic books are big business

CNBC's parent NBCUniversal is an investor in Re/code's parent Revere Digital, and the companies have a content-sharing arrangement.

Summary: Zuckerberg invited his 30 million Facebook followers to read a book with him every other week. Re/code reports.


12/07/2015 AT 10:10 AM EST

was recognized for his contribution to American culture through the arts on Sunday night at the Kennedy Center Honors celebration – but with a bit of a

As Lucas, 71, was being feted, the crowd was asked to welcome

to the stage. But in true

fashion, instead of Fisher, one of Lucas' most beloved creations, R2-D2, took the stage to project her image.

"I wanted to be there to help celebrate your Kennedy Center honor in person, but hey, since you invented video voicemail, I don't have to be," Fisher joked.

Fellow filmmaker and movie pioneer

paid tribute to Lucas for the technological impact he's had on film, and his dedication to profound storytelling.

"He's a pathfinder and a pioneer like Edison and Bell and Tesla and Jobs," said Spielberg. "George Lucas'

, who arrived late to the ceremony due to his Oval Office address

, also took the stage to praise Lucas for the

legacy, which he believes will continue to live for the generations to come.

"Think about how many children have been raised, at least in part, by George Lucas," he began. "Think about how many young people searching for their place in the universe have thought to themselves, 'If a kid from Tatooine moisture farm can go from bulls-eyeing womp rats in his T-16 to saving the galaxy, then maybe I can be something special too?'

"George, I don't know if you've heard, but they might even make a brand-new

movie soon. It's very low-key, it's not getting a lot of promotion," Obama joked. "But it's also pretty remarkable that nearly 40 years after the first Star Destroyer crawled across the screen, we are still obsessed with George's vision of a galaxy far, far away. And we'll be raising our children on his stories for a long, long time to come."

Lucas was honored alongside Carole King, Seji Ozawa,

and Rita Moreno at the ceremony.

The next installment of the

, will mark the first made without Lucas' involvement, but is expected to be one of the highest-grossing films of all time.

Lucas' lack of involvement certainly doesn't mean The Force isn't with him anymore. According to Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy, Lucas will not only attend the premiere of

in Los Angeles and London, but he joins a small, exclusive circle of people who have seen the movie.

"He really liked it," Kennedy told

officially hits theaters Dec. 18.

Summary: "I wanted to be there to help celebrate your Kennedy Center Honor in person, but hey, since you invented video voicemail, I don't have to be," Fisher joked as R2-D2 took the stage in her place


12/29/2015 AT 09:10 AM EST

's holiday style game is still going strong.

The reality star stepped out in a chic winter-white shirt, jeans and strappy heels Monday to grab coffee in Malibu, California.

Caitlyn, 66, spent Christmas with the Kardashians and daughters

in a video posted to stepdaughter

Caitlyn Jenner in a holiday onesie

embroidered with her name at ex-wife

's Calabasas mansion, where the momager hosted her annual Christmas Eve bash.

"Probably the biggest tradition I have along with the rest of the family, is Kris – for the last 30 years – her Christmas Eve party is over-the-top spectacular,"

in during a fan Q&A on Wednesday. "She does such a beautiful job with decorating the house. We've had the same Santa Claus for 25 years."

"It's a great time for our family, a great time for all our close friends," she added. "It just really kicks off our holiday season perfectly, and it certainly is a lot of fun."

Summary: The reality star has called ex-wife Kris Jenner's annual Christmas Eve bash her favorite holiday tradition