A Los Angeles Superior Court Judge reversed Judge Elden Fox’s decision to keep Lindsay Lohan behind bars for a minimum of 30 days after failing two court-ordered drug tests.

But according to Santa Monica criminal defense attorney Steve Cron, being freed on $300,000 bail is simply just delaying the inevitable.

“I am, quite frankly, surprised by the reversed decision, but she will return to court on October 22 and Judge Fox will sentence her right back to jail again,” he told Pop Tarts. “But of course, due to prison overcrowding, she will only have to serve a portion of that sentence.”

In the meantime, the terms of Lohan’s probation remain in place and she will have to continue reporting to her probation officer and undergoing mandatory drug testing. And although the troubled starlet is 24 years old, there is a chance the courts could appoint a third party to act as a legal guardian over her affairs, given her behavior and parenting situation. According to multiple reports and experts, Lohan’s divorced parents, Dina and Michael, may be part of her continual drug and alcohol-related problems. Lohan has on numerous occasions spoken out about her father’s alleged abuse and the “hurt” he had caused over the years. And although she and her mom appear to have a close bond, Dina has been heavily criticized for denying that her daughter even has substance-abuse issues. “Under the California Welfare and Institute Code for Mental Disorders and Chronic Alcoholism, the courts may determine Lindsay unfit to care for herself even though she is an adult,” former California prosecutor, Robin Sax, told Pop Tarts. “This would be subject to another court hearing separate to the criminal case, and could be determined from a mental health evaluation made when and if she returns to rehab.” In 2007, Britney Spears was placed under the conservatorship of her father Jamie Spears to manage both her personal and business affairs following a long period of incredibly unruly behavior. "Like Britney, Lindsay would have to exhibit signs that she is incapable of caring for herself, and I’m not sure if she has reached that point yet," Sax said. “With Britney, she really reached rock bottom – shaved her head, locked herself in a bathroom, and she was doing these types of things not under the influence of drugs and alcohol." Los Angeles-based criminal defense lawyer and law professor, Jeffrey W. Steinberger, believes Lohan needs someone responsible to legally manage her personal affairs, although the process may take some time. "What she needs is an emotional conservator, she needs somebody to run the balance in her life and they (the courts) can appoint people to supervise where she is going,” he said. “They can probably do that after she does this one more stint in jail."

Steinberger said that Judge Fox, who is currently residing over Lohan’s DUI case, is known to be "compassionate," and may begin to look for an appropriate conservator between now and Lohan’s Oct. 22 hearing. “Judge Fox might get all the paperwork together and have motions taken and have the hearings as to whether or not she has the capacity to run her own life. It is really a significant move by courts to take away a person's decision-making abilities, so they have to take this all very seriously. They have to get in psychiatric reports, they have to get probation reports, and they have to do a lot of work on it,” he continued. If Lohan is appointed a conservator, she would be required to report to that particular person instead of a probation officer. The conservator would also handle all her finances, issues regarding court supervision and employment opportunities. "Lindsay just keeps going into contempt of court, which is a legal issue, and the judge can get irritated at that because she is violating his orders. The other issue is that she cannot control her own life. The first time we heard of this was three years ago with the Santa Monica arrest, and then it went to the Beverly Hills arrest, and she's been in six rehabs and she can't make it happen,” Steinberger added. “So the courts may just do this as a matter of fact because they don't want to waste the prison space, this girl doesn't need the prison space, she needs somebody to watch over her to keep her out of rehab and keep her on a straight line." Deidre Behar contributed to this report.

Summary: Lindsay Lohan Could Get Court Appointed Conservatorship, Experts Say


Derek Jeter might wear No. 2, but to baseball fans, he's No. 1. Even die-hard Yankee haters have a tough time hating Jeter, who somehow always manages to say the right thing. He's also done, um, pretty well as a ball player, with a .313 career batting average as of this writing. Jeter is currently ranked 13 on the all-time hits list, hopping over Cal Ripken Jr., and this year marks his 13th All-Star Game. Wow. Derek Jeter is so awesome, he managed to make the No. 13 lucky. That’s practically a superpower.

Summary:
By Brett Singer
Snakkle.com
They say baseball is America's pastime. (We don't know who


MINNEAPOLIS — Delta Air Lines is hinting that its frequent flier program will increasingly favor big spenders over travelers who simply rack up miles.

Such a change would generally reward business travelers, who often fly on short notice on more expensive tickets.

Air travelers have long complained that a $700 ticket buys them a seat next to someone who might be riding on a fare sale for, say, $200. More and more, the airlines are steering greater rewards to the traveler who spends more.

Delta announced last week that in 2014 frequent fliers will need to spend at least $2,500 to qualify for the lowest level of elite status. Previously, they could qualify on miles alone.

Travelers prize that status because it moves them to the front of airport lines and lets them qualify for upgrades to first class. Delta said the shift was to make sure ‘‘our most valued customers receive the best program benefits and a more exclusive experience.’’

Delta appears to be planning more changes in that direction. President Ed Bastian said on Tuesday that Delta wants to shift its SkyMiles rewards program ‘‘to drive the type of customer behavior that we would like to encourage.’’

Delta declined to say more about future changes to SkyMiles.

Summary: Delta Air Lines is hinting that its frequent flier program will increasingly favor big spenders over travelers who simply rack up miles. Such a change would generally reward business travelers, who often fly on short notice on more-expensive tickets, versus leisure travelers who might fly long distances but often on cheaper fares.


Ken Loach, the feisty, 76-year-old, left-leaning British director whose latest film, “The Angels’ Share,” opens Friday in Boston, released a statement on April 8 following the death of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. He described her as “the most divisive and destructive prime minister of modern times.” Then he added: “How should we honor her? Let’s privatise her funeral. Put it out to competitive tender and accept the cheapest bid. It’s what she would have wanted.”

His suggestion was not heeded — Thatcher’s state-sponsored funeral cost the British taxpayers $15 million. To be fair, Loach also might have extended his gratitude to Thatcher for providing him material for a fair share of the films he has made over a five-decade-long career, among them such classics of socially conscious cinema as “Kes” (1969), “Raining Stones” (1991), and “My Name Is Joe” (1998). “The Angels’ Share” is the latest in this lineage, drawing inspiration from the lingering aftermath of Thatcher’s draconian economic policies of the early 1980s.

Speaking over the phone from London last month, Loach discussed the origins of the new movie, which is about a group of disaffected Glasgow youths who, prompted by their resourceful leader, Robbie, come up with a scheme to purloin bottles of a priceless Scotch whiskey. “It started with the million unemployed kids [in Britain] who have no work and no prospect of a decent future,” he said. “And we wanted to do something that had a smile on its face because when you meet these kids in this situation they’re quite funny. And then Paul Laverty [Loach’s longtime collaborator and screenwriter] had the idea of engaging them in whiskey because whiskey is the tourist version of Scotland, along with the Highlands and the kilts and the heather and the bagpipes and all the rest.”

Two weeks ago at the Liberty Hotel, Laverty agreed that both he and Loach thought a lighter touch would work best despite the grim subject.

“The film we did before this [“Route Irish”] was a very tough, uncompromising film set in Iraq about mercenaries coming back to Liverpool,” he said. “It was a brutal tragedy. With this film we wanted to touch on a different tone. Something that would keep us sane. We wanted to take a group of kids and see the world through their eyes.”

That world consists of typical Loach themes: brutality, drunkenness, oppression, and desperation. But it also has its share of tenderness and slapstick. There is even a fart joke, a first in aLoach movie. Laverty doesn’t think that levity dilutes the seriousness of the subject. “I always find it strange when people make films about people in marginal communities and it emphasizes the misery,” he said. “That hasn’t been my experience. These people are full of mischief and fun. They’re angry and frustrated but you see talent and wit all around you. We wanted to capture a sense of the waste of such talent. So that became the tone of the film.”

Director Ken Loach (pictured, at Cannes last year) and longtime collaborator Paul Laverty center their new film on disaffected Glasgow youths who scheme to purloin bottles of a priceless scotch whiskey.

To that purpose Laverty did research in the poorer communities of his native Glasgow. There he came across Paul Brannigan, who ended up being cast as Robbie. Brannigan had much in common with his character, who is at first a hot-tempered young parolee who experiences a change of attitude when he learns his girlfriend is pregnant.

“Paul had just been released from prison and he was determined to change his life around,” Laverty said. “I noticed how good he was with people. He was smart. He had a steadiness I liked. And people held him in great respect. So I just made a mental note that when Ken came for the casting he should see Paul. It was a long story but eventually Paul got the part.”

In the film a sympathetic social worker takes Robbie and his friends on a trip to the Highlands to visit a distillery. There they catch a glimpse of an unknown world of refinement and luxury, where a bottle of whiskey can be bought for a hundred thousand pounds, a world that Robbie discovers he has a distinct taste for — literally. It turns out that he has the palate of a connoisseur, able to detect minute differences in the taste and aroma of Scotch, a talent that comes in handy in their heist.

Loach and Laverty both saw a sly metaphor in the film’s premise, especially in the contrast between the working-class Glasgow youths and the haughty millionaires who invest in this quintessential Scottish product. They agreed that the title, which is a term referring to the tiny percentage of whiskey that disappears during the aging process, might be a play on the so-called “trickle-down theory” of economics advanced by Thatcher during her years in office.

“The direct opposite of so much poverty is the absurdity of this expensive whiskey,” Loach said. “The price bears no relationship to its taste because it’s just a collector’s item. So we thought we could make a point of that by putting the kids into that world.”

Despite underscoring the brute facts of class conflict, the film nonetheless sustains an optimistic, fairy-tale quality. After half a century of uncompromising exposés of injustice and suffering, might Loach, like an 18-year-old Glenmorangie, be getting mellow with age? “The way it works is you get angrier rather than more mellow,” he said. “Especially when you see what’s happening with the economy and its consequences on people.”

Laverty, likewise, regards the future with uncertainty. It’s a future he sees rooted in the mistakes of the past. “The grandparents of Robbie would have had their communities devastated by the privatizations and destruction of the manufacturing industry in Scotland under Thatcher,” he said. “Three generations later the ill effects continue. I think we’re faced with great existential challenges if we’re going to have a proper functioning democracy.”

Can films help us meet that existential challenge? In the early 1980s, before he formed his partnership with Loach, Laverty worked as a lawyer in Nicaragua battling human rights abuses (his first film with Loach, “Carla’s Song,” in 1996 was based on Laverty’s experiences in Central America). Did he think that he made the right choice giving up that kind of activism to make movies?

“I was sick of writing human rights reports and journalistic works on Nicaragua,” he explained. “There comes a point when you feel like you’re banging your head against a brick wall and I wanted to explore a new way to touch upon what I’d been a witness to. Film offers ways to understand the world from different points of view. It can raise questions in people’s minds. But the big question is what do people do afterwards?”

Loach feels the same. “It’s nothing you can quantify,” he said. “Films can’t do much. They only work if there’s a movement you can tap into that has the same ideas you put in the film.”

Loach is putting some of those ideas into his newest project, “The Spirit of ’45.” “It’s an archival documentary about the origins of the welfare state in Britain after the war,” he said. “It was a time when people had a much greater sense of collective responsibility. It was a great time and so we thought this was the right moment to remember it.”

Did he think that this spirit might ever return?

“I think so,” he said. “Because things are real crap now, and if we don’t, we’ll be in real trouble.”

Summary: Ken Loach, the feisty, 76-year-old, left-leaning British director whose latest film, “The Angels’ Share,” opens Friday in Boston, released a statement following the death of Margaret Thatcher. He described her as “the most divisive and destructive prime minister of modern times.” Then he added: “How should we honor her? Let’s privatise her funeral.” His suggestion was not heeded — Thatcher’s state-sponsored funeral cost the British taxpayers $15 million. To be fair, Loach might have extended his gratitude to Thatcher for providing him material for many of the films he has made over a five-decade-long career, among them such classics of socially conscious cinema as “Kes” (1969), “Raining Stones” (1991), and “My Name Is Joe” (1998). “The Angels’ Share” is the latest in this lineage.


Andy Warhol painted all his subjects the same size so they could one day "fit together and make one big painting called Portraits of Society". But he couldn't have foreseen a row over pecking order.

Five days before the most important Warhol exhibition for 30 years, portraits of the late French fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent have been pulled after a spat over where they were hung.

The Grand Palais show in Paris hosts a vast cast of jet-set figures, politicians and Hollywood stars all arranged in different rooms under various themes, but yesterday it emerged Pierre Bergé, Saint Laurent's partner, had withdrawn the portraits from the "glamour" section.

Le Monde said Bergé told the curator, Alain Cueff, that "the rags mustn't be mixed with the serviettes". Cueff refused to move them, so Bergé pulled the works.

Summary: Yves Saint Laurent's partner withdraws portrait by Warhol from exhibition after spat over where they were hung


BOISE, Idaho — A local illustrator’s chalk portraits of workers hang inside the store, where the same artist’s murals decorate the wall behind the cheese case.

Meat and bakery cases feature exclusive foods made with the state fruit. Holding up a chain of sausages that include it, a worker joked: “We pick the huckleberries on our way in to work.”

In another aisle, Mary Cogswell, the owner of the Wildflour Bakery a few miles away, visits daily to restock the table where her cookies are sold.

At this time of year, the first Whole Foods Market in Idaho, population roughly 1.6 million, sells products from some 60 local vendors, including turkeys from the A+ Ranch that are billed as organic and certified as raised under humane conditions.

Two years ago, when Whole Foods announced that it wanted to expand to 1,000 stores from a little more than 300 and open in places where it was assumed that consumers had never heard of kale and wouldn’t dream of spending $6 for a pound of humanely raised pork, some investors scoffed.

Its traditional grocery store competitors snickered at the strategy. And even those on Wall Street enamored with the chain’s success expressed doubts that its forays inland into smaller, less urban markets would succeed.

Like most grocery chains, Whole Foods does not release sales data on individual stores. But two years after disclosing its plans, it turns out that more shoppers do want, say, soda pop with no artificial coloring and flavoring and specialty meats, more than the experts had banked on.

Cities like Boise, with its 212,000 residents, many of them college students and migrants from the cities where Whole Foods raised the bar on the grocery business, are embracing the company with an enthusiasm that has confounded the naysayers, propelled its stock price to heady highs, and surprised even its executives.

“I was so excited when I heard it was coming here I even bought the stock,” said Beth Brigham, who drives about a half-hour — a trek by Boise standards — to get to the store that opened here a year ago, combining the trip with her exercise schedule. “I really like organic, healthy stuff, and the selection in other stores here was much more limited.”

Anne Madsen had come hoping to find baby artichokes for a recipe she wanted to try. She was not disappointed.

“I do shop at regular groceries, but I like organic products and often am looking for things that are a bit unusual,” Madsen said.

The two shoppers exemplify the trends that Walter Robb, cochief executive of Whole Foods, said were driving the company’s success overall, and particularly in smaller markets where shoppers might once have rolled eyes at a store promoting the virtues of locally grown quince and fava beans.

Roughly one-third of the stores Whole Foods plans to open will be in cities like this one. This month, it opened one in Lincoln, Neb., population 260,000. (On Tuesday, it is opening its first store in Brooklyn, N.Y., population 2.6 million.)

One sign of the Boise store’s success: Trader Joe’s plans to open here next year.

“Farmers markets were nonexistent 10 years ago in most places, and no one was talking about local food,” Robb said. “There is a whole revolution going on around food now that isn’t limited to the coast. Consumers know more about food, where it comes from, what’s in it and the connection between diet and health.”

Boise is the most remote city of its size in the country, the closest metropolitan area being Salt Lake City roughly 340 miles southeast.

Summary: BOISE, Idaho — Two years ago, when Whole Foods announced that it wanted to expand to 1,000 stores from a little more than 300 and open in places where it was assumed that consumers had never heard of kale and wouldn’t dream of spending $6 for a pound of humanely raised pork, some investors scoffed. Its traditional grocery store competitors snickered at the strategy. And even those on Wall Street enamored with the chain’s success expressed doubts. But two years after disclosing its plans, it turns out that more shoppers do want, say, soda pop with no artificial coloring and flavoring and specialty meats, more than the experts had banked on.cities Cities like Boise, with its 212,000 residents, many of them college students and migrants from the cities where Whole Foods raised the bar on the grocery business, are embracing the company with an enthusiasm that has confounded the naysayers, propelled its stock price to heady highs, and surprised even its executives.


continues with george stephanopoulos and the politics of 2013. Reporter:2013 a first of first ladies. Michelle obama showing jimmy fallon she's got the moves. But for most of the year in politics, it...

continues with george stephanopoulos and the politics of 2013. Reporter:2013 a first of first ladies. Michelle obama showing jimmy fallon she's got the moves. But for most of the year in politics, it seem nod one would dance together -- my question is, who's going to jail? They're holding the everyone hostage. That's why we are where we are. Immigration reform died. The gun debate stalled. Finally at the very end of the year -- I am happy to report. A modest budget deal. It wasn't until america was pushed to the brink. We begin with a countdown to a partial government shutdown. America on edge in a deadline drama. Could the president and the speaker john boehner agree on a plan to fund the government. When is this going to end? If I knew, I would tell you. Government shutdown of 16 days. The house will be in order. Sending gop popularity plummeting. It was their fault. Reporter: A victory for president obama, but the effects would not last. There's no excuse for the problems. It was a disaster. The confusion the outrage of the obama care website and suddenly, all that had gone on with the government shutdown was forgotten, and it was the president and the democrats that were in the hole. Reporter: A self-inflected wound, probably the biggest political blunder of the year, it has 99 problems but a glitch is all of them. . I didn't say they're going down. And while health and human services secretary kathleen sibelius faced a relentless backlash over the government's failed website -- who in your agency is in charge? Reporter: Her boss took the biggest hit. Suffering from presidential depression. Reporter: It deepened a second term slump "snl" couldn't resist. Paxil second term strength treats a whole range of symptoms, like benghazi, the nsa scandal. The time jay-z and beyonce went to cuba and of course, the obama care website problems. Reporter: And along with those headaches for president obama, obama care also helped create one of 2013's biggest stars. I intend to speak in support of defunding obama care until i am no longer able to stand. Reporter: First term senator and chief obama care critic ted cruz became a marquee name for the gop. He is the lightning rod for the republican party. If he can have broad leadership -- another republican star game everyone something to chuckle for. He had comedians pouring it on. Don't worry, senator rubio, nobody notice that you gave a speech. Reporter: Twitter went wild. You tweeted out the water bottle yourself. Do you have anything to add? No. I needed water. It happens. Reporter: Democrats had their own stars to watch. Booker. And ray in north kree yas. Former nba bad boy, dennis rodman meet kim jong-un. Gosh, this north korea thing is a really touchy subject. What face do we put forward? Oh, how about that one that's tattooed and pierced? Good job, everyone. He wants obama to do one thing -- call him. You say you love kim and you think he's awesome. Were you aware of his threats to destroy the united states? And his regime's horrendous record on human rights? I didn't look at all that right there. He's my friend. Reporter: And some of the biggest political stars of 2013 were the ones with their eyes on 2016, and there were plenty. Two of the top contenders stole the spotlight -- new jersey governor chris christie made headlines with a blowout win in a blue state. Thank you, new jersey. For making me the luckiest guy in the world. Reporter: And he had the last laugh taking on those weightier issues, too. The thing about chris christie is he's really good at laughing at himself. I'm basically the healthiest fat guy you've ever seen in your life. And he went on letterman and ate a donut, which I thought was awesome. [Laught . Eknow this is going to be a song. Ladies and gentlemen, hillary clinton. Reporter: And for the democrats, look who is back. She closed the door at the state department. Does she now have her eye on the white house gates. Rush hour starting on the road to the white house with election day three years away.

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

Summary: Act 5: ABC's George Stephanopoulos reflects on 2013's political stars and scandals.


At least two people have died after super typhoon Saomai, the strongest to threaten

in 50 years, slammed into the country's southeast coast after forcing more than 1.5 million people from their homes.

Saomai, one of three storms to hit East Asia in the past few days, made landfall in Zhejiang province at 5.25pm (0925 GMT), hitting Cangnan county just after officials there declared a state of emergency, Xinhua news agency said.

In one town, Longgang, nearly empty streets were awash with water, all shops were closed and the storm had already battered down trees, walls and billboards, and overturned cabs, the report said.

Storm tracker Tropical Storm Risk (www.tropicalstormrisk.com) had graded Saomai a category five "super" typhoon - its highest category - but reduced that to category 4 once it came ashore.

There were no immediate reports of casualties and Saomai would move further inland at about 20km per hour (12 mph), Xinhua said.

Chinese state media said it was the most powerful storm to hit the country since August 1956, when a typhoon hit Zhejiang, triggering a tsunami that killed more than 3,000.

"Saomai is packing winds of 216kph (134 mph) and has outpaced forecasts," Xinhua quoted Li Yuzhu, head of the Zhejiang provincial observatory, as saying.

Residents in the Wenzhou area, where Cangnan is located, had reinforced windows and doors against the storm and stockpiled drinking water and food, state television said.

Wenzhou airport had closed and hundreds of passengers were stranded because of cancelled flights, one airport manager said.

"We don't know when we will open again," he told Reuters by telephone.

Wenzhou, once a prosperous port and now a manufacturing centre, has a central population of 1.3 million, but there are 7.4 million in the greater Wenzhou area.

Typhoon Prapiroon killed about 80 people last weekXinhua reported that Zhejiang had already evacuated nearly one million people, with another 569,000 people moved in the neighbouring province of Fujian, as heavy rain, strong winds and a high tide hit the area.

Typhoon Prapiroon killed about 80 people last week

Typhoon Prapiroon killed about 80 people last week

Schools, theatres and stadia had been turned into shelters for the displaced, a Wenzhou official said. Factories, shops and offices had been ordered to stop all activities "unrelated to battling the typhoon".

Authorities moved 100,000 people in Cangnan alone and declared a state of emergency at 5pm as Saomai brought winds as high as 184kph over land, Xinhua said.

Much of south China has been repeatedly battered by typhoons and tropical storms this year. Hundreds have been killed by rainstorms, mudslides and floods.

Tropical storm Bilis killed more than 600 in China last month and typhoon Prapiroon killed about 80 last week.

Tropical storm Bopha fizzled to the south of Taiwan this week and another veered towards the east of Japan.

Typhoons and tropical storms are common each year in Taiwan, southeast China and the Philippines between July and October.

Summary: At least two people have died after super typhoon Saomai, the strongest to threaten <?xml:namespace prefix = "st1" ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" /><st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">China</st1:place></st1:country-region> in 50 years, slammed into the country's&nbs


Brian McCann held many solo exhibitions across Europe and was a visiting lecturer at the Royal College of Art. Photograph: Terry New

The sculptor Brian McCann, who has died aged 61 of cancer, was an internationally recognised artist who left a legacy of sculptures, videos and drawings. His work is held in various collections around Britain, notably the British Museum, Dundee University fine art collections, and the Harris Museum in Preston. He held many solo exhibitions across Europe, including at the Richard Demarco Gallery in Edinburgh (1983), the Salo Uno Gallery in Rome (2001), and the Palazzo Crispi in Naples (2002).

I first met Brian when he was a postgraduate student at the Royal College of Art in 1983, and after only one day's teaching I was deeply impressed not only by his work, but also by the quiet, thoughtful manner in which he produced it. Years later, when I was able to employ him as a visiting artist at the Royal Academy Schools, I came to know him better, and to share in the delight he took in discussing the experience of making and looking at art.

It was always a delight to be with him; he had an enquiring and visually poetic imagination that endeared him to peers and students alike. A visiting lecturer at the Royal College of Art sculpture school, he was a consummate artist and an excellent teacher who had the ability to nurture the talents of others.

Brian lived and worked in London but was born in Govan, Glasgow, to William and Catherine McCann. On leaving Saint Aldred's school in Paisley, he trained as a graphic designer. He then studied at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee, and went on to postgraduate study at the Royal College of Art in London, where he received an MA in sculpture. This was followed by a Stanley Picker Fellowship at Kingston University, London.

He was also awarded a two-year Prix de Rome scholarship in sculpture at the British School in Rome (1984-86) and took up the first Tate Liverpool Momart Fellowship, which gives artists a large studio and access to the gallery's substantial facilities and archives. In 2008, he was elected as an associate of the Royal British Society of Sculptors, of which I am president, and in 2011 he became a fellow of the society.

Brian was also interested in film, completing in 2006 a second MA in film studies at Kingston University, where he was principal lecturer in fine art. At the time of his death, some of Brian's recent work was on show at the Royal British Society of Sculptors' Figuring exhibition in London, scheduled to run until 9 May. Brian had much more to give, but his legacy will be timeless.

He is survived by his wife, the artist Valerie Merlo McCann, and his brother, Desmond.

Summary: Other lives: Artist and sculptor who also nurtured the talents of many students


07/04/2014 at 01:40 PM EDT

Twitter hackers continue going after the stars of

One day after actor Chris Colfer's

with false news that he'd been fired from the show,

was forced to fend off her own

which claimed that she was pregnant.

"Before this gets out to the media, I would like to announce to my fans that I am pregnant. #babyboy," read a Tweet posted on Michele's feed on Friday. The actress's rep, however, confirms to PEOPLE that her account was hacked. The Tweet has since been pulled down.

Michele, 27, is happily in a

with Matthew Paetz, one year

posted a comment about the Twitter hoax on Friday, writing, "I was HACKED! Guess @chriscolfer and I should have known better then to make our passwords the names of our cats:)"

Colfer, 24, who was on a plane while his online drama ensued, also took his cyber attack in stride.

"Apparently I missed quite the INTERESTING day while aboard my flight," he

after FOX issued a statement explaining he was still on the show.

I was HACKED! Guess @chriscolfer and I should have known better then to make our passwords the names of our cats:)

Summary: The actress is not having a baby boy, as a false Tweet claimed on Friday


UPDATED 07/11/2014 at 05:30 PM EDT • Originally published 07/11/2014 at 06:40 AM EDT

Matt Bendik and Becca Tobin

star Becca Tobin's boyfriend, nightlife entrepreneur Matt Bendik, was found dead Thursday afternoon at a hotel in Philadelphia. His cause of death is unknown at this time, PEOPLE has confirmed.

Bendik, 35, was on a business trip with the actress, 28, and had a celebratory night out with friends on Wednesday,

The Philadelphia Medical Examiner confirmed to the site that Bendik's body was discovered at the couple's hotel. "The cause of death is pending further studies. The autopsy did not immediately establish a clear cause of death," the Medical Examiner tells PEOPLE.

"There was no evidence of trauma. As is the usual procedure in evaluating a sudden, unexpected death, the Philadelphia Medical Examiner we will be conducting additional studies."

Bendik was a managing partner of AV and Voyeur/DBA nightclubs in Los Angeles and also acted as

, on Wednesday, was a photo of Tobin, captioned "#WCW."

Summary: The body of nightlife entrepreneur Matt Bendik was discovered in a Philadelphia hotel room Thursday


He picked up a bass for

and a guitar at the end of

, so we all knew Michael Cera was musically inclined.

But his new, self-released collection of quiet, folky mostly-instrumentals (titled

) still caught the Internet off-guard when

, saying, "My great friend Michael Cera not only is a brilliant actor, he also makes great music."

Cera has not commented on

, which is adorned with pictures of the actor and the low-key summary, "Michael Cera was born in Canada in 1988 at the tender age of zero." But aside from his film roles, Cera's played bass for indie band Mister Heavenly on tour, and added guitar and backing vocals on Weezer's 2010 album

, so he's certainly got the chops for something like this.

The album seems to have garnered mostly positive reactions so far: One person writes on the page that it's "definitely the best thing that has happened to me this year." You can buy the album for $7, or stream it via the embed below.

It's certainly a little more nuanced than

Macaulay Culkin performs with The Pizza Underground in Nottingham, U.K.

Summary: The album, true that, contains sure-to-be hits like "Sexy Danger"


American Odyssey / Twins Manchester Art Gallery, until 5 September

Toddler dressed them up as convicts. Where did that idea come from? asked Mary Ellen Mark. 'My background, growing up,' Mike told her. 'Street-like stuff. Hookers. Prisoners.'

Over a 40-year career, American photographer Mark has documented the lives of the 'unfamous'. She has photographed New York transvestites, London heroin addicts, Indian circus workers, American runaways and destitutes. But she is also celebrated for less obviously harrowing, though no less provocative, images: Boca Raton pensioners vamping it up, teens falling in and out of love, children in a paddling pool taking a fag break.

This retrospective of Mark's work offers two strands. American Odyssey is a pick of works from 1963 on, while Twins is a recent series shot at a twins convention in Ohio. It would be easy to call Mark's motives into question, but she is remarkably clear-sighted about her subjects. The children, for example, are all the more believable for sometimes being shown as mannered little grotesques as well as victims. As she says: 'I don't make excuses for them being children.' Fascinating work, with a real edge of desolation.

Summary: Photography:  Rose Jennings on American Odyssey / Twins at the Manchester Art Gallery


This week an august body with a marathon title, the International Olympic Committee's Evaluation Commission, arrives in London. These grandees, whose assessment of London's current and future international sporting venues will determine whether or not the 2012 Olympic Games are held in the capital, will be relayed around a dizzying galaxy of plans, projects and exhibitions promising to transform the Smoke within just seven years into a strong and joyful city of Parisian "boulevards" (the traffic-blighted Euston and Marylebone roads, would you Adam and Eve it?) and Barcelona-style "ramblas" (stolid Portland Place).

Members of the committee will each be presented with a small library of ambitiously designed documents, produced by a Dolly Mixture selection of quangos, local authorities, pressure groups, think tanks and learned institutions, to underline London's official commitment to the Olympic bid, and to undermine treacherous talk - started by the Queen - of the games being best held in gay Paree.

Capital Spaces: Transforming London is just one of these heroic Olympic publications, produced by a shotgun marriage of the Royal Institute of British Architects and English Heritage. It documents 40 new "transformations" promising to make London gleam in the global eye. "It shows," writes Richard Caborn, minister for sport and tourism, "how the opportunity to host the Olympic Games could reinforce and enrich these changes, and illustrates how the built environment can help London to retain its status as a world-class city in 2012 and beyond."

Jude Kelly chairs the culture, arts and education committee of London 2012, the body that's coordinating the British bid. She is even more gung-ho: "The beauty and boldness of the ideas for new urban landscapes show Britain's instinct and flair for melding heritage with contemporary aesthetic and civic purpose. The Olympics would bring the whole world to London, a city where every nation has a resident community whose influence has helped to sculpt our culture. In 2012, the renaissance of the east of the capital would be mirrored by new visions across the whole capital. It's a thrilling gift to the next generation."

Number four on this list of 40 breathtaking architectural and urban planning initiatives is everyone's favourite - the, er, congestion charge. This universally loved "design" on the city outranks the proposed Nash Ramblas (aka Portland Place)designed by Terry Farrell, at number five, and is streets ahead of Le Euston Road Boulevard (Farrell, again) at number eight. The redevelopment of King's Cross, where, from 2007, Eurostar trains will whizz from under the renovated roof of Barlow and Scott's St Pancras station to Paris in just two hours, is well down the field at number 32. The regeneration of the Lea Valley, where the Olympic Stadium is to be built, struggles into town at number 40.

My own clear favourite is number six, the Jan Gehl Study. This is a report by a firm of Copenhagen architects whose mind-blowing recommendations for improving London between now and 2012 include: "remove obstacles on the pavements", "invite people to stop, stand, sit and enjoy in the city [sic]", "create a good environment" and "improve main tenance". Eat your heart out, Richard Rogers - could you ever have dreamed up such priceless wonders?

The aim of this exhaustive list is to show that London's architects have projects aplenty to wow visitors in 2012, projects that will, even more importantly, trigger ever more long-term investment in vast new development programmes that will, in turn, create new jobs, new homes, whizzy new buildings and, above all, a kind of New Jerusalem. It's all enough to leave Paula Ratcliffe gasping for breath.

And yet there is even more for the committee to absorb. It will tour the Lower Lea Valley, a threadbare ribbon of cockney London and home to some of Britain's most inventive and endearing enterprises. This was where, on July 13 1909, the first all-British-powered aircraft, designed by Alliott Verdon Roe, took off from the Walthamstow Marshes. Further upriver at Tottenham, London's famous B-type double-decker, the Routemaster of its day, first turned a spoked wheel the following year. Now the area is scheduled to become an "Olympic park".

Proposals here are on a titanic scale, promising to transform the egret-haunted Lea Valley lock, stock and dumped fridge. Here are schemes for an 80,000-seat stadium designed by Foreign Office Architects, an aquatics centre by Zaha Hadid, along with a hockey centre, velopark and multi-sport arenas for fencing, volleyball, basketball and handball. An Olympic village by Allies and Morrison has been designed to house some 17,000 athletes and, afterwards, those in search of "affordable" London homes. Full planning permission and government funding guarantees for the Olympic park have been secured.

In turn, the Olympic village is designed to dovetail with the looming Stratford City, or Canary Wharf 2, a 21st-century Gotham rising high above the new Stratford Eurostar station, 15 minutes from St Pancras, or an hour and 45 minutes to Gare du Nord and the seductive Olympic wiles of Paris.

In fact, the London Olympics are intended to be staged not just in "iconic" new buildings flowering exotically along the banks of the Lea, but in venues the length and breadth of the city, reached along boulevards and ramblas by privatised public transport that may or may not include the long-awaited Crossrail main line through and under central London. Should this fail to appear, London 2012 offers a "240km designated Olympic road network" designed to transport the "Olympic family" quickly between destinations thanks to lane enforcement and changes to traffic lights, including "green waves" designed to keep red lights to a minimum.

"The route between Hyde Park and the proposed Olympic village," seven congested miles away, we are assured, "has been completed in just 21 minutes and 45 seconds using green wave technology". And blue-sky thinking.

It will certainly require the stamina of a marathon runner to get to and from the Olympic stadium in east London, the archery events at Lord's cricket ground in the centre, badminton at the Greenwich Arena in the southeast, football at the new, Norman Foster-designed Wembley stadium in the northwest, and tennis at Wimbledon in the southwest.

London 2012, the Riba, English Heritage, the GLA and the many bodies backing the London Olympic bid hope that somehow all these venues will be woven neatly together, enhanced by the 40 regeneration projects on show at the Riba Gallery in London, aimed at impressing visitors on their way to and from hotels, sporting events, bars, cinemas, parks, art galleries and riverside walks.

Meanwhile, Jude Kelly's committee at London 2012, which includes such luminaries as actor Ian McKellen, Neil McGregor (director of the British Museum) and artist Anish Kapoor, is busily promoting London's undisputed cultural wealth and frenzied creativity.

High-flying ideas are always welcome, yet what visitors to London need to see is a city happy in its skin. It will take many years to reintegrate and update London's public transport, to shape decent new low-cost housing, and to civilise the wilds of Thames Gateway.

This Olympic bid, like the Games, is a catch-all, aiming to connect culture, architecture, urban planning, employment, homes, and sport itself. It's well intended, but seems a little too breathless.

· Building the Bid - London 2012: Designing the Olympic Bid on London's Landmarks and Next Generation Venues is at the Riba Gallery, London W1, until March 5. Details: 020-7580 5533.

Summary: This week London must show the world it can be transformed by 2012. Jonathan Glancey is not convinced.


Trees line the arrow-straight roads that lead through Flanders to Antwerp. Battered over the years by the wind, many of them have been bent into a stoop. In the city, there is the sight of ships sailing in and out of Flanders port, their masts, funnels and sails animating the banks of the River Scheldt as it stretches to the North Sea. Looming over this busy landscape is the tower of the Cathedral of Our Lady, still the tallest building in Belgium's second city. It all has the air of a 17th-century oil painting - or would, were it not that the old Flanders roads and their arched trees give way to one of Europe's nastiest and most frustrating urban motorway ring road systems, an unholy gyration of hissing articulated lorries cut up by swerving cars.

It is this dismal southern entrance to the city that Antwerp has spent the past decade addressing. Over the next five years the area will be transformed by the arrival of a big new public square, Bolivarplaats, and an urban park. The first building to be completed is the city's ambitious new £86m Law Courts, opened by King Albert II last week.

Designed by Richard Rogers Partnership, the Law Courts echo the characteristics of the landscape around Antwerp: the expansive, complex roof variously resembles sails, bent trees and church towers, as if seen through squinting eyes. The hope, says Ivan Harbour, project architect for the new building, is that it will "stir some curiosity and draw people in to this special, fast-developing city".

Antwerp is certainly special. A city made rich over time through pepper, textiles, silver, shipping, diamonds and fashion, it has been ruled over by a confusing array of monarchs and dynasties, Catholic and Protestant, from all over Europe. Heavily targeted by the Nazis - in 1944-45, more V2 missiles fell on Antwerp than London - it is home today to a large population of Hassidic Jews, as well as to the recently formed extreme rightwing Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest) party. The city's architecture ranges from piously ambitious medieval gothic, burghers' baroque and art nouveau extravaganza to zealous early modernism.

What Rogers' new Law Courts brings to this mix is transparency. When the design was commissioned, through an international competition in 1998, the Belgian legal system was under attack, accused of corruption following the arrest of the paedophile and murderer Marc Dutroux. So the new building offers a clear statement on the part of city and national government that justice, here, is as open as possible.

Designed in cooperation with VK Studio, Belgium, and Arup/VK Engineering, the building has at its heart an enormous new public space whose roof is a web of white painted steel and acres of glass. Known as the Salle des Pas Perdus, this space is like a cross between a handsome new railway station and a favourite covered market; when security is relaxed, it is possible to walk right through the building as if it were a regular pedestrian route through the city.

Fanning out from the Salle des Pas Perdus are the eight courts, arranged in six wings, which between them cover all aspects of local law. The largest is the criminal court; others deal with civil, family and employment law. There is also an industrial tribunal and a court for minors. Adding to the openness of the building are a public cafe, a library, meeting rooms and any number of spots where you can imagine arranging to meet.

This is the third law court that the Rogers office has designed in recent years; the other two are in Bordeaux and Strasbourg. The Antwerp building is a development of the former two, but much grander - five times bigger than the already impressive Bordeaux design. And yet it isn't overbearing. Although the roof cones peak at 51m, the building is essentially low-lying, stretching like a giant's hand over Amerikalei, the four-lane road leading from the ring road to the city centre. Surrounding it, new parkland is being laid out and planted, right up to and between the six wings of the Law Courts.

The height of the building reflects the desire, on the part of the municipal and national governments, to make the law appear to be less domineering and opaque than it was. The contrast with the old Palais de Justice in Brussels could not be more clear. This theatrical, 105m-high behemoth was built on top of a hill, cleared of homes for the purpose, so that it could command the city. Designed by Joseph Poelaert and built between 1866 and 1883, it was the largest European building of its day. Even now, it evokes the nightmare of heavy-handed justice dished out in colonnaded halls of such monumental power that they would make even Nebuchadnezzar quake.

The Rogers team were not only reacting against this building, but also striving to create a major city building that is lit as far as possible by available light, and that makes as little use of energy as possible. The roof sails, says Ivan Harbour, were designed to "bring fresh air into the courts" as well as identify the key parts of the building and attract the attention of visitors. At one stage, he adds, the hope was to "have the sails turning with the wind, scooping and funnelling fresh air into the building at all times of day, weather and season". Although that didn't happen, the building is largely naturally ventilated - and where that hasn't been possible, he says, the Rogers team have "used a low-velocity cooling system very different from the powerful air-conditioning systems you'll find in many public buildings of recent decades. We've also tried to recycle water wherever possible, and to keep internal spaces shaded from sun and protected from heat."

Close attention has also been paid to the approaches to the building. From the great glass windows looking out down the main stairs to the Bolivarplaats below, trams appear to head straight towards the Law Courts. This sight proves to be a delightful illusion: just before they seem about to enter the building, the trams are deflected to one side or the other. Their tracks then loop under the stairs of the Law Courts, where they stop to let off and pick up judges, advocates, defendants, families, reporters and the merely curious.

The trams are very much a part of the design and planning of the Rogers' building. Running like clockwork directly to the main entrance, they have eliminated the need for the big underground car park that was originally planned. As studies have found across Europe, it is hard to attract seasoned car drivers on to buses - yet they will give up commuting if the alternative is a tram.

This, then, is a building that marries high technology, ambitiously stretched structural geometries and new materials, with images of artifice and nature drawn from around Antwerp. And it is thoroughly modern. The courtrooms are lined and floored throughout in warm timber but with nothing in the way of old symbolism. Their distinctive roofs project up and out to keep the glare of the sun at bay. Elsewhere, although there are characteristic Rogers touches - yellow-painted steelwork here, exposed steel struts and beams there - the overall feel is comfortably muted. This, after all, is a court of law, not a leisure centre or a shopping mall.

"We would have liked to have made it even more a part of the fabric of the existing city," says Harbour. "I think everyone likes the idea of civic buildings that rise from a cluster of older and other buildings, each seen as a sequence of glimpses, but each with its special skyline and its own character. We hope that the whole area around the Law Courts will grow up as planned over the next five years, and that our building is increasingly a part of a bigger and richer urban picture."

A new and improved gateway to Antwerp, an intent to make law transparent, a catalyst in an ambitious redevelopment plan - this is a hard-working and special building that does much to get the balance right. Not just between Justice's scales, but between showing off and serving its public.

Summary: Antwerp's soaring new law court, designed by Richard Rogers, will bring some much-needed light and  air into the Belgian legal system. By Jonathan Glancey.


Detail from The Blue Rigi by JMW Turner. Photograph: © Tate Britain

The Tate gallery in London has succeeded in raising £4.95m to keep a Turner watercolour, The Blue Rigi, in the country, it announced today.

The view of the Rigi mountain from Lake Lucerne in Switzerland at sunrise was sold to an anonymous foreign bidder for £5.8m last June - a record sum for a British work on paper. However the government temporarily suspended its sale to give the gallery time to raise the money to buy it.

Under British law, the culture department can impose a temporary ban on the export of a work considered to be a national treasure. Today, the gallery said it had raised the £4.95m purchase price set by the government ahead of March 20, the day the export bar was due to run out.

The money includes £1.95m from the National Heritage Memorial Fund, £2m from the Tate's trustees and £550,000 from more than 11,000 members of the public who responded enthusiastically to the gallery's "buy a brushstroke" appeal launched five weeks ago.

Commenting on the success of the public appeal David Barrie, director of The Art Fund, said: "We have been overwhelmed by the popularity of this appeal, both with the public and with our own members, who generously contributed 70% of the total raised in the past five weeks."

The Blue Rigi is one of four watercolors produced by JMW Turner after a visit to Switzerland in 1841, and features the artist's characteristically bold play of light and shadow. Tate director Nicholas Serota called the painting "a truly extraordinary work of ineffable beauty."

This year, the Tate failed in an attempt to obtain another painting in the series, The Dark Rigi: Lake of Lucerne, which remains in private ownership but is currently on show at Tate Britain, alongside its companion pieces, The Blue Rigi and The Red Rigi as part of the fundraising campaign.

Turner is considered one of Britain's greatest landscape painters. Last year, a Venice canal scene by the artist, Giudecca, La Donna della Salute and San Giorgio, sold for $35.8m (£18.2m) in New York - an auction record for a work by a British artist.

Summary: The Tate gallery has succeeded in raising £4.95m to keep a Turner watercolour, The Blue Rigi, in the country, it announced today.


Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty’s magnum opus on inequality, ends with a rousing call to save democracy by confiscating the wealth of the very rich. I’m inclined to agree – but I would offer a one-time exemption for cosmetics magnate Leonard Lauder, whose numerous billions have been put to rare good use.

Lauder has spent much of his life assembling an unparalleled collection of works of cubism, the difficult and revolutionary art movement that set the stage for modern and contemporary art. Last year, he gave all 79 paintings – 34 by Pablo Picasso, 17 by Georges Braque, the remainder by Juan Gris and Fernand Léger – to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, instantly elevating the museum’s early modern collection to the level of MoMA or the Pompidou. Goodness knows there are other rich folks who collect art as a social sport and then flog it as a tax write-off, but Lauder’s collection, which goes on display next week, was always intended to land at a museum. The donation is a milestone in the history of the Met, and a supreme act of philanthropy that is all too uncommon in this second Gilded Age, when a stingy new class of toxic mortgage vendors and smartphone app merchants have proven far less generous than last century’s more civic moguls.

One of the best features of Lauder’s gift, which I wish all plutocrats would take as a model, is that it comes without restrictions. It’s up to the curators, not the billionaire, to determine what should be displayed and how. Even better, Lauder’s paintings will be integrated into the Met’s larger collection rather than exiled to a dedicated wing. This inaugural presentation – organised by Emily Braun, a professor at Hunter College who also served as Lauder’s private curator, and Rebecca Rabinow, the Met’s star of early modern art – presents the Lauder works in isolation, but even this way the magnitude of the collection is overpowering. All on their own, they add up to the single most important exhibition of cubism since MoMA’s renowned Picasso/Braque two-hander of 1989.

Among this show’s many virtues, it offers a reminder that Braque was the equal of Picasso, maybe even the better painter, in the years before the first world war. Once you get past the wall-sized images of Lauder’s living room (I could have done without those), the exhibition opens with two Braques from the very first cubist exhibition, in Paris in 1908. One is a slightly traditional landscape of a village near Marseille, with trees and a building in the distance behind an ornamental balustrade. The other, painted just a few months later, is of the same village – but now Braque has broken the landscape into sharp, rectangular, brown and tan facets, overlapping in a shallow picture plane rather than receding into the distance. The illusion of three-dimensional space is giving way. Two-dimensional frankness is almost here. Abstraction beckons in the distance.

Neither Braque nor Picasso invented cubism on his own, and the movement has no single breakthrough painting. Cubism cohered over time, with trial and error, as Picasso and Braque played off of each other’s insights and drew on two sources that, at first, make an unlikely pair. The first was the art of Paul Cézanne, with its fractured perspectives and analytical style of observation. His example infuses those early Braques and most of the other paintings here, such as Picasso’s Oil Mill of 1909, which depicts a suite of industrial buildings as a jumble of flat planes.

The second, somewhat more strangely, was African sculpture. Lauder’s collection includes two studies for Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Picasso’s grand fetishistic blast of 1907, whose nude prostitutes are disfigured with threatening, pseudo-barbaric faces deriving from West African masks the artist saw in a Paris museum, booty from one bloody colonial enterprise or another. (An earlier generation of art historians used to call this “primitivism”, grossly shortchanging the sophistication and complexity of African sculpture that appealed to “western” artists in the first place.) When Braque saw the Spanish painter’s masterpiece, he compared his shock to “having to swallow rope or drink kerosene”. But the stylised figuration of African art – even if they understood it only partially – offered first Picasso, then Braque the means to break out of the confines of western representation and shake the foundations of western painting.

Looking at the two painters side by side here, it’s clear that Braque was ahead of the game in applying Cézanne’s lessons about perspective and flatness – but that Picasso’s study of African forebears was necessary for both artists to go for broke and invent a new pictorial language. By 1909 their art had become a forest of overlapping, only partially legible signs. The curators have staged the development of analytical cubism in a stupefying, heart-quickening room of seven Braques and Picassos (so close in style you can barely tell who painted which), all of which feature musical instruments and all of which offer a radically new approach to seeing the world. In Braque’s Still Life with a Clarinet, for example, the instrument is depicted as just an outline amid a panoply of interlocking panels. The table it sits on appears as a large diamond spanning the canvas, with no attempt to simulate three-dimensionality via one-point perspective. A wine glass and a desk drawer are simply overlaid on the composition, with no spatial relationship between them. Representation has not gone away, but simulation is over. Now painting is an end in itself, and it speaks a language of its own.

Yet just as Picasso and Braque seemed to be headed for total abstraction – a development that Kandinsky was experimenting with at the same time, and that Malevich would finalise a few years later in Moscow – they pulled back. The hermetic puzzles of analytic cubism gave way in 1910, as the artists introduced what Braque called “certainties”: painted words, collaged papers, musical notations or labels from branded products. Chief among their obsessions were newspapers. Picasso and Braque were the media junkies of their day, thrilling to the speedy circulation of information and the cacophony of advertising. One masterful Picasso head is drawn on a page of stock prices. A Braque still life of a glass and bottle from 1914 features printed wallpaper, then cracks the composition with a jarring newspaper clipping about a patricide.

Cubism was an art of collisions, and so one of its ideal mediums was collage – which rammed together multiple pictorial planes on to a flat surface, and also allowed newspaper, sheet music and other offcuts from real life to infect the supposedly pure act of picture-making. Picasso and Braque were masters of collage, but it’s a pleasure to see here that Juan Gris, Picasso’s fellow expat Spaniard and a later member of the cubist fraternity, was just as extraordinary. Most of his compositions retain a bit more spatial realism than the other cubists, but their wealth of materials, such as wallpapers pasted one of top of the other, fractures any pictorial unity.

Fernand Léger, whose rhythmic and colorful syncopations stand at a slight distance from the other three artists here, learned from the other cubists how to break space open, building his paintings out of repeated and recombined forms. This show concludes with several of Léger’s splintered compositions; in The Smoker, from 1914, a person’s head is just barely intelligible in the clash of striped circular elements floating in a flat picture plane. But that summer war came, and Léger was conscripted. Braque was too. By the late teens the artists were moving in different directions: Picasso to swooping figuration, Léger to mechanistic scenes of city-dwellers, Braque to Matisse-like interiors. Reassembled here, in a collection that now belongs to all of us, they offer a lesson too frequently forgotten a hundred years since their creation: things may look stable, but in a flash they can explode.

Summary: Consisting of a collection given to the Met by the cosmetics magnate Leonard Lauder, this is the single most important exhibition of cubism since MoMA’s Picasso/Braque show in 1989, writes Jason Farago


FORTUNE — There is little doubt that today’s smartphones offer room for improvement. Ubiquitous and beloved though they may be, the portable devices are fragile, offer limited choice, and generate a growing mass of e-waste that’s been called nothing short of a “global time bomb.”

Google’s Project Ara aims to change all that. With a modular, open-source approach to smartphone design, Project Ara phones will be based on a structural frame — dubbed the “endoskeleton,” or “Endo” — on which to attach smartphone modules of the owner’s choice, such as a display, keyboard, camera, or even specialized components such as a glucose monitor. In other words, you design the phone you want, and don’t pay for parts that you don’t care about.

The concept is notable for its customizability and overall do-it-yourself appeal, but modular phones are also anticipated with much enthusiasm for the reductions in replacement costs and e-waste they could bring. Fry a component? No need to exchange or throw out the whole phone — just replace the part that’s broken. The result, as some have suggested, could be that the modular smartphone is “the only phone you’ll ever need.”

That’s the thinking, anyway. The reality, however, is that modular phones have a long way to go. The first Project Ara phones are expected in January for around $50, but a lot has to happen first. And even if the pieces do fall into place — so to speak — it’s not at all clear that consumers are ready.

Google’s modular approach may be the best-publicized so far, but it’s not unique. The Chinese manufacturer ZTE offers the quasi-modular Eco-Mobius. And preceding the October announcement of Project Ara was the launch of the Phonebloks project, led by Dutch designer David Hakkens. Created to address the e-waste problem, Phonebloks envisions an “app store” of sorts for hardware through which users can buy new and used components as well as sell their old ones.

Phonebloks has since thrown its support behind Project Ara. Before that, it conducted an online campaign on “crowdspeaking”platform Thunderclap, where it garnered more than 950,000 supporters and attained a social reach of more than 380 million people.

“We didn’t know what the demand for this was — that’s why we did an online campaign,” Hakkens told Fortune. “Turned out quite a lot of people are pretty sick of throwing out their phones every couple of years.”

There has been no shortage of critics for the modular concept. (A taste: the writer John Brownlee, who penned a piece for Fast Company shortly after Phonebloks’ launch entitled, “Why Lego Design Principles Don’t Work On Smartphones.”)

Hakkens admits there are significant market challenges to such a phone.

For one, “current phone manufacturers aren’t really interested in this phone,” he said. “Currently, they are in charge and decide which components are in the phone. They prefer to see an open market where they can sell straight to the consumer.”

With regard to Ara, there remains a lack of clarity around the project since Google sold much of Motorola to Lenovo in January 2014. “Who’s going to do it?”asked Ramon Llamas, a research manager for mobile phones at IDC. “Is it a Motorola thing? A Google thing? This has Google’s fingerprints all over it, but with Motorola heading to Lenovo, there’s reason to question. Does Google want to get into the hardware business again?”

Even if it does — which is unlikely — it will need an ecosystem of partners to make modules for the phone, said Peter Semmelhack, founder and CEO of Bug Labs, which makes a “Lego-like” hardware platform of its own for digital devices. “Every module is a product with its own life cycle and road map,” he said. “It becomes a geometric problem.”

As for retailers and carriers, a modular device could — albeit briefly — offer a modicum of much-needed differentiation, Llamas said. But the investment required could be significant.

“Think about training your sales force, how much inventory you’ll have to carry, all the different colors and designs you may have to have,” he said. “The last thing you want is to hang onto inventory that’s just not moving.”

And then there’s the question of whether such a device is feasible from an engineering perspective.

“I’m not an engineer, but I know if you take two objects and slide them on top of each other again and again, eventually they won’t lock as well as they used to,” Llamas said. “For this to really come together, the parts have to be able to withstand shock, drops, the elements, and that’s a huge thing for me.”

One of the most compelling arguments? Cost. The inability for consumers to service their own devices today is hardly an oversight; it takes a variable out of the equation.

“I have a soft spot in my heart for what they’re trying to do,” Semmelhack said. “They’re trying in essence to provide consumers with what they’re missing right now, which is choice.” At the same time, “the countervailing problem will be cost. Modularity comes with a lot of complexity on the hardware level, the software level, the mechanical design level — even aesthetics. In a mass market, cost is probably the most important factor, and the only way to get the price down is to make the same thing in large quantities.”

With the modular approach, Semmelhack said, “you lose that scale.”

The modular concept isn’t without precedent, most notably in the PC category.

“We’re seeing, through Ara, an attempt to make smartphones much more like PCs in the sense that when you go to Dell or HP or Lenovo, you get to tell them what to put in -– processor, memory, disk, display, etc.,” said Jack Gold, principal of research firm J. Gold Associates. “Ara is an attempt to take this model down to smartphones and probably tablets eventually.”

Will consumers bite? Llamas said it’s too early to tell.

“It’s hard to build demand when there’s no product currently out there,” he said.

Gold said appeal could be generational. “Being able to offer a ‘customized’ phone, particularly to twenty- and thirtysomethings, could be enough of a differentiator to make it very popular,” he said. “Of course, Moto tried this before, with marginal success, albeit with far less customization.”

Semmelhack sees potential in certain industries, rather than the broader consumer market.

“There’s all this emphasis in mass-market solutions to try to find ‘the killer app,'” Semmelhack said. “There are some out there, but there’s also a category of lesser killer apps within communities and subcategories — medical is a great example.”

With a modular approach to smartphones, he said, it would be more feasible to address users with diabetes or juvenile asthma, for example, in economical ways. “Say there are 100 markets with idiosyncratic needs,” Semmelhack said. “That isn’t economically feasible to serve in a mass-market way.”

Done right, it can make economic sense for Google or any other phone-maker. “Instead of selling 10 million of one thing, from Google’s perspective, you sell a million of 10 things,” Semmelhack said. “You can do it economically because you have invested in the platform.”

Summary: Project Ara promises a customizable mobile phone with swappable components. Is the concept more alluring than the reality?


Cameron Mackintosh can’t sit still. Fresh off a plane from London and on his way to the first preview performance of the reimagined “The Phantom of the Opera” in Rhode Island, Mackintosh is squeezing in a stop at the Opera House for a wide-ranging conversation about his role as a producer, his commitment to quality, and his astonishment at the continued global reach of his power trio of blockbuster musicals: “Les Miserables,” “Miss Saigon,” and “The Phantom of the Opera.”

In addition to shepherding the new production of “Phantom,” the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical that opens Thursday at the Opera House, Mackintosh is overseeing 50 productions that will be opening around the world over the next three years. In the wake of the successful film version of “Les Miserables,” five more touring productions of his revamped 25th-anniversary version of that show are going out on tour, and a new production of “Miss Saigon” opened in London last month. As if that weren’t enough, he also owns seven historic theaters in London and is co-owner of Music Theatre International, which has licensing rights to many musicals.

“I’m 67,” he says, sounding almost surprised. “I never thought I’d be this busy, working this hard, staying so involved at this age.”

But Mackintosh’s pace has barely slowed since “Cats” opened in London’s West End in 1981, followed by “Les Miserables” in 1985, “The Phantom of the Opera” in 1986, and “Miss Saigon” in 1989.

“I never imagined that nearly 30 years after ‘Les Miz’ and ‘Phantom’ opened, they would still appeal to people,” Mackintosh says during his November stop at the Opera House. “It’s impossible to predict why something will become a phenomenon, but I will say I have been most successful with productions based on classic source material.”

“Phantom” is based on the Gaston Leroux novel, “Les Miserables” on Victor Hugo’s novel, “Miss Saigon” on the opera “Madame Butterfly,” and Mackintosh’s hit musical revues, “Five Guys Named Moe” and “Tomfoolery,” were based on the songs of Louis Jordan and Tom Lehrer, respectively. In addition to his skill at choosing material, Mackintosh is a hands-on producer, one who not only controls the purse strings but is also directly involved in creative decisions, from the writing of the scripts through the supervision of the touring productions.

“I’m not involved in everything,” he says with a twinkle in his eye. “I interfere with everything.”

His particular kind of interference has involved convincing Stephen Sondheim to add songs to “Follies” for a 1987 production in London’s West End, reworking the script to “Barnum,” the Cy Coleman musical about the famous showman (which he says is perfect for Neil Patrick Harris “if his schedule ever opens up”), or working with the design team to reimagine a musical like “The Phantom of the Opera.”

“In the theater we’re never quite satisfied,” Mackintosh says. “We get a production to the best it can be under the time and budget constraints, and I hope that these new versions provide another step forward for the creative team. Plus, so many years later, technology has changed and there are opportunities to do things in different ways that we simply couldn’t in 1986.”

Mackintosh says he started thinking about reconceiving “The Phantom of the Opera” with the original designer, Maria Bjornson, more than a decade ago. “We wanted to find ways to create more of the sense of the Phantom’s world, to make that more realistic,” he says. “In the original version, the audience travels into his lair, but it’s very dark and vague in a way.”

But when Bjornson died in 2003, Mackintosh says he dropped the idea until he met designer Paul Brown. “Paul spent most of his career in opera, as Maria had, and his first job was working for Maria, so he was sensitive to the kinds of things she also had an eye for,” he says. “Maria’s sense of the show revolved around the proscenium, but in this production the driving force isn’t the frame. You really can’t do that in a touring production.”

Despite the time and budget constraints of moving a show as big as “The Phantom of the Opera” from one city to another, Mackintosh has built his reputation on tours that don’t skimp on production values.

Cooper Grodin as the Phantom and Julia Udine as Christine in “The Phantom of the Opera.”

“I don’t believe in cutting corners when you’re preparing a show for a tour,” he says. “I’d much prefer to reconceive it so that an audience in any city will have the same experience an audience member had when they went to the West End or Broadway.”

Brad Oscar, who joined the “Phantom” tour in March, says that when the company picked up and moved to another city, he was overwhelmed by the size of the production. “We fill 22 trucks with equipment!” he says by phone from the tour. “We’re bringing Broadway across the country.”

Mackintosh says it’s important that the iconic moments people are expecting are still there, including that crashing chandelier. “Those moments are equally breathtaking, but different. The Act Two opening, for example, is ‘Masquerade,’ and it’s stunning in a new way.”

But, he says, it’s also important the characters exist believably in their own world. “This new version has allowed us to bring the Phantom on stage more,” he says. “The Phantom has gained some grit because he’s more realistic.”

Oscar says it’s exciting and intimidating to join a show he and audiences have known for a long time. “There are expectations,” he says, “But I think our characters have more balance and definition in this production.”

Oscar, a Boston University graduate last seen on Boston stages in “Young Frankenstein” and “The Producers,” plays Monsieur Richard Firmin, co-owner, with Monsieur Gilles Andre, of the theater the Phantom is haunting. “We are able to play off each other,” he says. “Firmin is the successful businessman baffled by the whole world of opera, while Andre is the artist, enamored of the world we’re going into.”

Although Mackintosh seems equally at home with character development and financial forecasts, he says his real strength is not coming up with the idea, it’s putting the right creative team together.

“Producing is a lot like cooking,” he says, “and I believe I’m a very good amateur chef. You can have all the right ingredients and something still won’t taste good, or it will simply be adequate. A good chef’s role is to balance the ingredients so that they work together.”

Over the years, Mackintosh has built a core of people who work on the five or six shows in his production company.

“I’m grateful to work with so many brilliant creative people,” he says. “My job is to create an atmosphere of trust. Of course, I’ve been friends with some of these people now for 30 years, but what we have to do is be able to sit in a room and say anything to each other. And if we don’t agree on something, it’s because we didn’t get the right answer.”

Correction: Because of a reporting error, an earlier version misidentified Mackintosh’s production company.

Summary: Nearly 30 years after its debut, a reimagined “Phantom” arrives in Boston this week with an updated look.


FORTUNE — When cubicles start to feel like prison bars, it’s a problem. Unfortunately, a downside of the sluggish economy is that many of us lucky enough to have a job can feel like we are trapped in it.

Some data suggests people are still acting trapped. In a good economy, more people quit their jobs than are laid off. But that relationship flipped during the recession, which could indicate that people were less willing or able to leave. While more people are leaving voluntarily now than not, according to a report published this month by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, that gap is closer than it was before the recession.

Often, people stay at jobs they don’t want because of very real external circumstances — there are bills and loans to pay off, families to support, and your job can feel like the only means to get affordable healthcare. Many of us have skills (ahem, journalism) that are closely tied to industries in flux.

“The reality is objectively worse than in other times; the economic crisis is real,” says Gilad Chen, a professor of management and organization at the University of Maryland. Yet, feeling trapped might not match our actual situations. Our brains process information in ways that, sometimes, can amplify those feelings.

MORE: 5 questions to ask your next boss

People often feel trapped when it seems like circumstances are out of their control, says Chen. Conversely, “the people who adapt in these and other economic conditions are those who take ownership.”

But certain events make it tough to shake the notion that we are slaves to the office. “Usually that amounts to something that changes at work,” says Bill Becker, a management professor at Texas Christian University’s Neeley business school. “You get a new boss, and they’re just impossible to work for, you get some kind of new assignment and it doesn’t fit, or you realize the culture is just so different.” So the nature of the job changes for the worse, yet employees feel like they can’t leave.

Our brains don’t help matters. “We have this self-serving bias, that I think is our worst enemy in these kinds of situations,” says Becker. The self-serving bias goes like this, he explains: “When things go good, we attribute them to ourselves and say, ‘Of course they’re going well, I’m awesome.’ When things go poorly, on the other hand, we are much more likely to blame it on the company or the economy.”

Blaming external forces actually serves a purpose: it’s a protective mechanism. Some evidence suggests that people with depression have very low self-serving bias — they think everything is their fault.

But there is a limit to the benefits of this approach. Shifting responsibility from oneself to external forces can make it difficult to build up the drive it takes to change your act. If the outside world is the problem, the thinking goes, why should you change?

Fear of the unknown is another powerful psychological factor that can trap us, Becker says. “Even if we’re unhappy, there is always a bias to stay where we are.”

Yet where we are is relative to where we have been before, Chen says. People tend to compare their situations to their past. Our mind draws a trend line: if we were doing well at work, then something bad happens, we process that information to mean that things are getting worse. We also tend to think that if work is getting worse, or better, it will continue on that track.

Employees who start that spiral on the negative side can become toxic to a company.

One way to pull out of it is to stop and reexamine the data, says Chen. Maybe work feels worse compared to six months ago, but what about two years ago?

MORE: Why Harvard MBAs overwhelmingly favor Obama

Employers can use our tendency to view our experience as part of a larger trend to their advantage, Chen says. You can see this happen in the presidential race, as both President Obama and Governor Romney try to cut different pieces from the same data points to convince voters that we are either better or worse off than we were four years ago. “What leaders at companies as well as politicians should do is frame things in terms of where things could go,” Chen says. “Frame it as, ‘Maybe we’re not in the situation we wanted to be, but we have been improving.’”

Apple AAPL is a master of this, he adds. The company’s shareholder meetings always emphasize how far the company has come. It probably helps that Apple has crafted a solid, chronological narrative based on a string of new devices, each one flashier than the next. People believe Apple when it cries progress.

We — employees, consumers — eat that stuff up. Not hot air, but substantive claims, Chen says. “People would like to believe that things are better than they were and will be better than they are.”

Ironically, that doesn’t mean that we should aim to feel ecstatic about our jobs all the time, Becker says. That’s a common misconception. “Happiness is a temporary state in the brain, it’s only an emotion, so it can only last for a short period of time.” When people shoot for constant happiness, they often fall short, which makes them feel like they’ve failed, spinning them further away from their goals.

MORE: Inside Romney’s fuzzy energy jobs math

What our brains really like is contentment — a sustained push towards a steady, pleasant state. Bursts of happiness, Becker says, are merely movement towards that endpoint.

So perhaps, when we retool how we think about where we have been, put the potency of our negative experiences in perspective, and give ourselves realistic goals about how we should feel at work, those prison bars might start to come down. If they don’t, though, employees who feel truly trapped and unhappy might need to buck the status quo and start laying down a plan to make a break for it.

“I would guess,” Becker says, “we’re never really as trapped as we think we are.”

Summary: In a sluggish economy, it’s natural to feel like you have little control over your working life. But people have more power over how they feel at work than they may realize.


FORTUNE — Jonathan Silver was hired in November 2009 to run the U.S. Department of Energy’s $34 billion loan guarantee program, which was started under President Bush but super-charged under President Obama as part of the economic stimulus.

This was the program whose best-known success story to date is electric automaker Tesla Motors, while solar panel producer Solyndra stands as its most notable failure.

Fortune recently had the opportunity to catch up with Silver, who has not done any formal media interviews since leaving DOE in October 2011 (although he tweets regularly). He currently is a distinguished visiting senior fellow at public policy think tank Third Way.

What follows is a transcript of our interview, which was conducted via email:

FORTUNE: You had been a venture capitalist before joining DOE in November 2009. What did you believe that the clean energy loan program could do for America’s economy that VCs and other private market forces could not?

SILVER: Government guaranteed debt is a tool that has been used to support many federal policy objectives over the years. Similarly, the DOE loan program invested in projects in support of a set of public policy goals that are not typically part of the private sector’s investment decision-making process, which is generally driven by expected returns.

The government, on the other hand, has an interest in objectives like global economic competitiveness, national security, environmental protection and job creation. Those goals can only be achieved in a relevant time-frame through the rapid, widespread and large-scale deployment of both innovative and commercial clean energy technologies. Given the financial crisis at the time, it was unlikely that these projects, which would help meet these policy goals and help invigorate the clean energy sector, could be brought forward.

You came to the job after the loan program already had been established. How would you have changed the structure/parameters, had you been able to?

The effort to encourage the commercial deployment of innovative forms of clean energy is important and Congress recognized that in creating the loan programs. The mechanics, however, are significantly more cumbersome than they should be. For example, it is unnecessarily hard to hire people, particularly those with a specific expertise that is needed only for a short period of time. The legislation does not permit the use of the full range of financial tools readily available in the private sector, particularly in asset management. The underwriting does not, in fact, create a portfolio, since each project must meet essentially the same criteria and stand on its own merits. Winners don’t offset losers. A sunset date makes sense, but this one was set too soon and did not give applicants whose projects would have benefited from more development, an opportunity to do so. Inter-agency reviews of transactions make sense, but only when the reviewers have sufficient experience to add value to the process.

One of the program’s requirements was that applicants secure private equity co-investment. From your perspective, was this mostly to better ensure applicant solvency/success, or was it more about market validation. And on that last point, did the investor “names” matter? In other words, did DoE give more credence to portfolio companies of an established top-tier VC firm like Kleiner Perkins than to a new VC firm without much of a track record?

To be clear, requirements include the need to raise substantial equity in the project but not necessarily “private equity.” There are numerous sources of capital, such as corporate sponsor equity, etc. that meet the requirement. The source of the capital is relevant, but not from a brand-name perspective. Instead, what matters is the estimated capacity of the capital source to continue to support the company financially if it becomes necessary. Most importantly, each applicant had to show a clear path to a fully-funded business plan before a transaction could be approved, and before the government would fund along the way. In most cases, it was necessary for applicants to raise additional outside capital. If institutional equity investors were involved, their original due diligence was included in the government’s review and also provided some insight into the project’s capacity for additional capital should it have been necessary.

Many of the loans were given to company that had existing long-term offsets, thus likely making them better credits. Why, for the companies without offsets, were there no “outs” for DOE besides the issuer not meeting technical milestones. Perhaps something like a MAC tied to severe changes in solar energy prices (if not with a clawback, at least to stop future payments)? Obviously not common in the private loan market, but you were the lender of last resort.

While each of the projects has robust technical milestones, they also have stringent financial and operational performance milestones as well. These loans were tightly negotiated and included numerous provisions, covenants, reserve accounts, gating functions and milestones. Many of the term sheets run to 50 pages or more.

The most powerful “out” is, of course, to stop funding. It is important to remember, however, that these are debt instruments, and often it is in the lender’s own best interest to work with a borrower before foreclosing on a loan. In addition, if a company is not in breach of a covenant, there is little recourse to stop funding.

Finally, the government is not the lender of last resort. The government is a low-cost source of capital intended to encourage private capital into the sector when the private markets were unable to do so. Projects that could not raise sufficient outside capital simply did not get done.

But what about Solyndra’s fundamental business model? Why was DoE convinced that customers would pay large up-front costs for long-term savings, particularly from a new technology?

While I was not in the government when the Solyndra deal was done, the company clearly qualified for the program. The company’s very innovative technology (the Wall Street Journal called it the country’s top cleantech company in 2010) solved numerous problems, including the costs of both the materials used to build solar panels and the cost of installing them. In addition, panel costs drop as more are produced. Finally, it wasn’t a question of what DOE thought customers would do; real customers bought hundreds of millions of dollars of product. As I recall, revenues grew between 50-100% a year, each year.

Would you have okayed the Solyndra loan, had you been in charge when it was granted?

I can’t comment on transactions I did not work on. I can say that the transaction went through numerous reviews by career professionals and independent review teams and was approved by all of them. I will say that it makes sense for the government to encourage domestic manufacturing, but there are financing tools better calibrated to those kinds of loans than project finance, which was all the program had to work with.

There have been allegations that the DOE loan program was, in part, affected by political considerations — either around the loans themselves, or related activities like layoffs. Are you aware of any actions that were motivated by, or significantly informed by, political considerations?

This issue has been thoroughly vetted and it is compellingly clear that political considerations did not, and do not, play a role in the decision-making process.

Why do you believe Tesla has survived and thrived, while other electric car startups like Coda and Fisker have failed?

You can ask that question about any industry – why do some companies succeed and others fail? Electric vehicles are likely to play a critical and, indeed, leading role, in the future of automotive transportation. Some of them will succeed and some fail. There were once over 200 automobile manufacturers in this country. The vast majority failed or were absorbed by bigger, stronger, more successful companies, yet the automotive industry in the United States was, for decades, one of the great economic success stories of the world. Hybrids and EVs will be an important part of that continued success.

How do you currently view the loan program’s performance? Leaving aside the politics and PR, do you believe the performance justifies renewal?

The program has been a significant success. That success has, unfortunately, been obscured a bit by some of the politics around the program. To date, something like 95% or 98% of the funds invested are money good. Less than 10% of the funds Congress appropriated to pay for loan losses has been tapped and several detailed , independent reviews of the program suggested that it would never tap the full amount (even in a worst-case scenario). Much of the technology and construction risk embedded in these transactions is now largely gone and nearly half the projects are already operational. The first few successes, like Tesla TSLA , are now coming to fruition.

Markets will always have difficulty deploying innovative technologies at scale. Fundamentally, a program like this is necessary to address that market failure. In an ideal world, the federal government would leverage these programs to create a long-term, self-sustaining infrastructure bank, to provide low-cost loans to innovative technologies on a consistent basis and on a schedule which reflects when both the technology and the company are ready. Other countries are already doing this and have provided meaningful funding for institutions with a much longer time horizon. That approach makes more sense than ours and we are at a comparative disadvantage as a result. It should not be easier to build a clean energy project, particularly with US funding, in India than in Indiana.

As you know, the flow of dollars to U.S. green energy companies hasn’t only slowed from the public sector. VCs also have cut way back, particularly in capital-intensive markets like solar generation and vehicle manufacturing. From your perspective, does this matter – particularly as the natural gas boom makes the U.S. more energy independent?

The flow of dollars into the sector does matter, of course, since capital is required to move any business or industry forward. We need to think hard about how to incentivize private capital flows into clean energy. Venture capital is not a perfect fit. Power generation projects are generally capital intensive, illiquid and provide bounded returns, which makes them more appropriate for tax equity and debt. VCs are more likely to continue to focus on more targeted, smaller dollar opportunities with potentially higher returns.

Unfortunately, available tax equity is insufficient to support the market, and debt capital is only available to a certain number of large-scale, conventional projects. Right now these projects don’t really have access to the equity or debt capital markets. We should encourage that, either through REITs or Master Limited Partnerships. Both have a potentially hugely import role to play in bringing private capital into the industry.

Summary: It's been nearly two years since Jonathan Silver stepped down as head of the U.S. Department of Energy's loan program. Now he's talking about it.


Kevin Hart. Inset: Brandon T. Jackson, who played Alpa Chino in Tropic Thunder

01/17/2015 AT 06:50 PM EST

to play a gay character anytime soon.

In an interview with the hosts of

on New York's Power 105.1, the

funnyman talked about the role that got away – Alpa Chino in 2008's

. Hart explained that he passed on the role because the character was gay. (The part went to Brandon T. Jackson.)

In an early draft of the script, Hart said the character was flamboyant. "The dude, he was doing a lot of stuff in the draft that I read," he told the radio station. "It was real flagrant."

When asked whether he'd play any other gay roles, Hart said no. "I can't," he said. "Not because I have any ill will or disrespect, but because I don't think I'm really going to dive into that role 100 percent, because of insecurities about myself trying to pay that part. Does that make sense?"

Hart, 35, explained that he doesn't have a problem with gay people, even if he won't play one on screen. "To the gay community, I respect and appreciate everything you do," he said. "As people, I love you."

Summary: The comedian says that "insecurities" would keep him from accepting the role


Earlier this week, former Florida governor Jeb Bush released online a cache of emails sent and received by his personal email address during his time in office. His attempt at transparency turned sour after it was realized that some emails contained personally identifiable information of Floridians, including social security numbers, names, and dates of birth.

Todd Feinman, CEO of data protection firm Identity Finder, ran an analysis of the data and determined that nearly 13,000 unique social security numbers were released. His software, which uses natural language processing to identify sensitive information through contextual clues, found that about 12,500 of those were contained in a spreadsheet embedded in a PowerPoint slide attached to an email dated October 2003.

Kristy Campbell, a spokesperson for Bush, could not confirm that number.

When Feinman and his team first inspected the heavily flagged email, they were unable to locate the data. Initially suspecting it might have been a bug in the code—they had just released a new version of their software—they eventually determined that the information was contained in so-called hidden Excel columns, obscured from view.

Bush’s email address, along with about 50 others (including aol.com and hotmail.com addresses), had been copied on that email. The spreadsheet in question, as the AP reports, concerned “tracking the number of people on a state family service waiting list.” The relevant slide is titled, “Developmental Disabilities Home and Community-Based Waiver Waitlist Data.”

“We’ve redacted the emails that were brought to our attention that contained personally identifying information,” Campbell said. Bush’s team has also removed the downloadable archive, raw data “.pst” files. (Another site, americanbridgepac.org, which hosted the data since December, took the files down Thursday.)

There are, however, social security numbers represented in a non-standard format (e.g. not XXX-XX-XXXX) still visible on copies posted to the web on jebbushemails.com. Feinman estimates that there are 100 still publicly accessible.

A May letter obtained by Fortune shows that Bush’s attorney had asked the Florida Department of State to scrub sensitive information from the archive of jeb@jeb.org, so that the emails could be released:

We hope these emails will be available permanently to the public, provided the records are first reviewed by state officials in accordance with with Florida Statute to ensure information exempt from public disclosure is redacted before release, including social security numbers of Florida citizens who contacted Governor Bush for assistance; personal identifying information related to victims of crime or abuse; confidential law enforcement intelligence; and other information made confidential or exempt by applicable law.

“Our site contains the public records made available by the State of Florida,” Campbell said. (Florida’s “sunshine law” opens up the records of public officials by request.)

“The Department of State is currently reviewing our process for redacting confidential information from documents given to the State Archives,” said Florida Department of State spokesperson Mark Ard.

Summary: With transparency in mind, the former Florida governor released his email correspondence from his term in office. With it: personally identifiable information of his constituents.