Few people have better inside knowledge of a city than taxi drivers. In his quest for authentic tango culture in Buenos Aires, Kevin Rushby enlists the help of Miguel the singing cabbie, who takes him to a traditional milonga – a dancehall where you can catch a glimpse of Argentina’s passionate past
//Press Association –
Google is launching an online advice clinic in the US where users will be charged fees for watching live video session from experts offering help on everything from cosmetics to the cosmos.
The service, called Helpouts, will offer to make connections between users and more than 1,000 merchants, websites and health care specialists who have cleared Google’s background checks. Users will be able to watch advice streamed onto their computers and smart.
For the initial stage of the launch, Helpouts is offering to connect people with experts in eight different categories: art and music; computers and electronics; cooking; education and careers; fashion and beauty; fitness and nutrition; health; and home and garden.
The fees for each live stream will be set by each expert, with 20 percent of the revenue going to Google f or almost all of the videos watched, except for those offering health advice, as Google is currently not taking a cut from that category.
When I first set foot in Vietnam, emerging from a small landing craft and surrounded by a greeting party of joyful, friendly children in a small fishing village, it felt as if the power of the soil galvanized me and instantly realigned my inner fibers.
A flood of associations with the word “Vietnam” from my whole life rushed over and overwhelmed me. I found myself breaking into tears. Forty or fifty years ago, the parents and grandparents of these radiantly beautiful children would have been the children living there as the Vietnam War ravaged the country. But today here they were welcoming me with smiles and laughter.
I arrived in Vietnam as a passenger on AmaWaterways’ Mekong river cruise on AmaLotus, and by the time I got to Vietnam I had already experienced Cambodia and had seen the Vietnamese countryside as we sailed down the river. I saw enough to know that the people of the rural region mostly subsisted on agriculture or fishing. The vast majority had nothing whatever to do with the war that tore apart their country.
Indeed, the war itself was the old story of colonialism, as described in this passage from “Gaspar Ruiz” by Joseph Conrad: “That long contest, waged for independence on one side and for dominion on the other, developed in the course of years and the vicissitudes of changing fortune the fierceness and inhumanity of a struggle for life. All feelings of pity and compassion disappeared in the growth of political hatred. And, as is usual in war, the mass of the people, who had the least to gain by the issue, suffered most in their obscure persons and their humble fortunes.”
In my lifetime, the word “Vietnam” resonated through my country as the central wedge that divided Americans into two bitterly opposed camps. No word screamed more loudly across the landscape as the United States erupted in social turmoil in the late 1960s. No one living in America could have been oblivious to it. The word meant many things to many people. In fact, it meant everything but what it actually referred to — the country of Vietnam itself.
Finally on AmaWaterways’ Mekong river cruise I got my chance to see and experience Vietnam directly for the first time. The impact it had on me is beyond description, and very personal because one of my closest friends growing up was killed in Vietnam by American supporting fire. Every American has his or her own personal experience of Vietnam, but no one who lived during that time, whether they know it or not, was untouched by the conflict.
That is why I believe all Americans should go to Vietnam and see it for themselves. The same is true for Cambodia. One of the passengers on my trip had been a soldier in Cambodia during President Nixon’s secret war on the country. He told me that American B-52s dropped more bombs on Phnom Penh on one night than on Japan during all of World War II. I later confirmed the horror story for myself when I discovered American bombing killed nearly 600,000 Cambodians during the war. The broken down society that was left after that destruction was easy prey for the insanity of the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime, which had only been a minority faction before the American war.
As the young Americans who were shipped off to Vietnam War discovered, Indochina is another world, an alternate universe. It has an exotic beauty all its own that goes along with its fierce independence.
The country’s resistance to foreign domination is at the core of its national identity. Vietnamese history is in part a series of struggles against foreign domination. The country fell under Chinese rule in 206 B.C., and struggled against Chinese domination for a millennium before winning independence in 938 A.D. The Vietnamese fought off another Chinese attempt at domination in 1077, resisted a Mongol invasion in 1283 and again in 1287, and then resisted another Chinese occupation from 1407 to 1427.
The French tried to take over in 1858 and by 1883 controlled most of the Indochina peninsula, including Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. But the country never rested easily under foreign domination. Many uprisings took place under the French colonial regime until the French were finally pushed out in the early 1950s only to be replaced by the Americans.
Today Vietnam represents an alternative culture, one brimming with wonders and revelations for visiting American travelers. If there is a list of required travel destinations for Americans, Vietnam must surely be on it!
Press Association –
Music fans listened to Pandora’s internet radio service for a collective 1.47 billion hours in October, up 18 percent from a year ago, in the face of the launch iTunes Radio.
The figure, released by Pandora Media chief financial officer Michael Herring at an investor conference in the US on Monday, is Pandora’s second-highest monthly level. It had 1.49 billion hours in March, the last month before it imposed a 40-hour-per-month cap on free listening on mobile devices.
Pandora lifted the cap on September 1, two weeks before Apple launched iTunes Radio.
Pandora’s active listeners fell to 70.9 million from 72.7 million in September.
About a month after its mid-September launch, Apple chief executive Tim Cook said that 20 million people had used iTunes Radio to listen to more than a billion songs.
By Liana B. Baker | Reuters –
By Liana B. Baker
(Reuters) – Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s wife MacKenzie on Monday used the online retail giant’s own website to criticize a new high-profile book about her husband as a “lopsided and misleading portrait of the people and culture at Amazon.”
In an online review posted on Amazon’s page for the new book “The Everything Store,” which is about Bezos and the online retailer, MacKenzie Bezos criticizes the account by author Brad Stone as having “way too many inaccuracies.”
An Amazon spokesman confirmed the authenticity of the online review. In a statement, a spokesman also accused Stone of not doing a thorough job of fact-checking the book and said he only let the company review specific quotes.
“He had every opportunity to thoroughly fact-check and bring a more balanced viewpoint to his narrative, but he was very secretive about the book and simply chose not to,” Amazon spokesman Craig Berman said in an e-mailed statement.
Stone said in an interview that Bezos did not cooperate with him on fact-checking. He said he stands by his book and spoke to hundreds of people about the events described in the book, and also fact-checked with employees, partners and rivals of Bezos.
“They made it clear that Jeff (Bezos) wasn’t going to participate in the fact-checking. So when it came to the moments in the story that only he would have had knowledge of, there was nothing I could do,” Stone said.
He added that the company did not make MacKenzie Bezos available for interviews. Stone, who works at Bloomberg, said he has been covering technology for 20 years. The book, which came out on October 15, has garnered positive reviews. The New York Times called it “an engrossing chronicle.”
Stone said that Amazon has not threatened any legal action.
Reagan Arthur, publisher of Little, Brown, which released the book, said in an e-mail that Stone “scrupulously sourced and reported his book about Jeff Bezos and Amazon over the course of 300 interviews and two years of research.”
The book has been “reviewed widely and praised for its evenhandedness,” she added.
MacKenzie, who met Bezos in 1992 when she worked at hedge fund D.E. Shaw, said she had firsthand knowledge of many of the events in the book and has been married to Bezos for 20 years. She also said the book stretches the boundaries of non-fiction and uses narrative tricks to misrepresent the culture of Amazon.
Stone said he was making minor changes to his book based on the MacKenzie Bezos review, including changing the date when Bezos read the novel “Remains of the Day” by Kazuo Ishiguro.
Stone called these changes small tweaks and added that “in an account of this size, some mistakes were inevitable.”
(This story corrects the fifth paragraph to say Bezos, not Amazon, did not cooperate on fact-checking)
(Reporting by Liana B. Baker; Editing by Ken Wills)
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Barack Obama told a small group of supporters on Monday that he wants to address federal procurement rules for information technology in the wake of a problematic launch of the website for his signature healthcare insurance program.
“There are a whole range of things that we’re going to need to do once we get this fixed to talk about federal procurement when it comes to IT and how that’s organized,” Obama told an invitation-only group of activists, community organizers at donors at an Organizing for Action meeting.
(Reporting by Roberta Rampton and Steve Holland; Editing by Eric Walsh)
When the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced on Oct.31 that it was ending its ban on personal digital assistants (PDAs) in flight, several airlines rushed to become the first to get FAA approval to offer that option to passengers. Indeed, JetBlue Airways over the weekend said it had received approval for gate-to-gate PDA service from the FAA at 4:15 p.m. EDT on Nov. 1, and claimed to be the first to implement that policy immediately.
JetBlue said the first commercial flight of any U.S. airline to allow gate-to-gate PDA use was its own Flight 2302 from New York’s JFK to Buffalo, scheduled departure time 4:30 p.m. EDT All JetBlue customers were immediately allowed to start using PDAs during all phases of flight on all flights. That means smartphones, tablets and other small PDAs.
There was only one problem: If you thought you could connect to the Internet on your PDA on a JetBlue flight, think again. JetBlue has yet to install its new Wi-Fi system on its fleet and may not do so until the end of the year, though at one time it was supposed to begin offering Wi-Fi as early as this month.
In addition, if you are on another domestic carrier, you still can’t access Wi-Fi when your flight is below 10,000, because Gogo, the main Wi-Fi provider for most U.S. airlines, features a ground-based system that doesn’t operate below 10,000 feet. Gogo now has a satellite-based system too, so that could change. But for now, passengers will have to content themselves with using PDA features that do not require Internet access, at least if they are on a JetBlue flight or are flying below 10,000 feet.
When JetBlue finally gets its own Wi-Fi system, however, it should be able to offer Internet service throughout the flight, since it has partnered with ViaSat to offer a new satellite-based broadband service. As for other airlines, Gogo furnishes Wi-Fi service for American Airlines (most flights), Delta (all flights), United (some flights), US Airways (some flights), AirTran (some flights), Virgin America (all flights), Alaska Airlines (all flights) and Frontier Airlines (all flights). Another in-flight Wi-Fi vendor, Global Eagle, provides service for Southwest and Allegiant.
A Dominican Republic-based company is making the controversial claim that its scorpion venom drug can help fight cancer, but some oncologists in the United States warn it may provide nothing more than a stiff dose of false hope.
Russian émigré Dr. Arthur Mikaelian and his company, Medolife, produce a drug called Escozine, whose sole active ingredient is blue scorpion venom. Medolife said Escozine is an effective cancer treatment because a peptide in the venom called chlorotoxin — the same chemical that paralyzes prey — also happens to target and kill cancer cells.
Despite the fact that the unproven drug is not approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, thousands of desperate Americans are betting their lives on it.
Watch the full story on “Nightline” TONIGHT at 12:35 a.m. ET, in which ABC’s Matt Gutman travels to Medolife’s scorpion reservation in the Dominican Republic.
Dr. Len Lichtenfeld, the deputy medical director of the American Cancer Society, is skeptical of the cancer-curing properties of Escozine and cautioned against patients substituting alternative medicines for traditional cancer treatments, such as radiation and chemotherapy.
“There’s no reasonable scientific evidence to show that this drug works in treating patients with cancer,” Lichtenfeld said.
He said he has seen too many claims about alternative medicines, such as scorpion venom, that turn out not to work and leave patients in despair.
“Cancer patients have enough to deal with,” he said. “To have to deal with unverified, undocumented hope is a burden that no one should have to bear.”
Peggy Howe is one of those people who swear by Escozine. The Kansas grandmother said she was diagnosed with stage-four breast cancer in 2011. Despite heavy chemotherapy and radiation, Howe’s cancer spread to her liver and lungs. She said doctors told her and her husband Larry that she had just two months to live.
“We started making funeral arrangements, but I wasn’t ready to die,” Howe said.
As a last-ditch effort, Howe started taking Escozine. Without FDA approval, Escozine cannot be not sold in U.S. stores, but can be purchased online through Medolife’s website.
“Within four days, I was starting to have more energy and then within six months it was gone,” she said.
She also apparently took guidance from the company’s website, and its “Escozine Success Calculator,” which gave her a 76 percent chance of success, she wrote on a cancer survivor message board.
However, the medical records that Howe provided to ABC News don’t indicate when Howe stopped or started taking Escozine, and therefore could not prove that Escozine affected her health. So did scorpion venom make her cancer go away?
Escozine isn’t the first natural remedy purported to cure diseases. Some have turned out to have significant medicinal value. Lichtenfeld said the first chemotherapy drugs came from the bark of the Pacific yew tree, which were first used as folk medicines in China. But most of these remedies, such as snake oil and rhino horn, have been resoundingly debunked.
But Mikaelian and his partner Sebastian Serrel Watts attribute to Escozine almost miraculous powers. In addition to attacking cancer cells, Medolife says that scorpion venom might also combat auto-immune diseases, everything from HIV to hepatitis, and even male impotence.
When asked why large pharmaceutical companies, which spend billions of dollars on cancer research each year, haven’t marketed scorpion venom, Mikaelin said, pharmaceutical companies don’t study “natural compounds because you can’t patent [a] natural product.”
Medolife breeds a giant colony of scorpions — 83,000 strong – at a scorpion reservation in the Dominican Republic. Turn over any rock, or peer down a bamboo segment designated as the scorpion’s home, and you’ll find a scorpion about as long as a credit card.
The scorpion’s venom is extracted in a modest rented lab in Santo Domingo. Each scorpion yields only five to seven drops of venom a month, and only a tiny amount is inserted into small bottles, which go for $ 700 each, a month’s supply for the average customer.
Although he said he is “more than convinced” his drug can fight cancer, Mikaelian agreed that the drug needs significantly more testing.
“We never use ‘cure cancer,’” he said.
“To ‘fight, fight cancer,’” Watts added. “Obviously we want to help the maximum ability that this medicine can possibly help. It’s a natural product, if we can take it to the absolute maximum to help and if we can eradicate those cancer cells in as many people as we can, that is our goal.”
But on its website, Medolife said Escozine is a “natural medicine approved and certified for oncological treatments.” It is only when you click on the word “certified” that you find out it received this approval not in the United States but in the Dominican Republic.
“We’re also registered in Russia, Belarus, Kasazkstan and Vietnam,” Watts said.
The company’s website has an “Escozine Success Calculator,” offering its users the probability of remissions. But every scenario ABC News plugged in, including cases of the most severe forms of cancer, the calculator still promised some possibility of “major results.”
When ABC News alerted Medolife that its website might violate FDA regulations against marketing drugs on the Internet without FDA approval, the company conceded it was rapidly making changes to its website.
But the more important issue was that Medolife could not produce a single peer-reviewed study showing that Escozine works.
In the company’s eight-year clinical study, which enrolled 8,302 cancer patients with varying disease type and severity, Escozine was found to have a near 90 percent success rate in improving quality of life, which included everything from decreased pain to increased survival rates. But the company acknowledged that the study was not peer-reviewed, and the results of their trial are not accepted by the American standards of science.
It is one reason several American doctors say they warn patients to be wary of unproven remedies.
“You never say never. You never say that something can’t possibly work, that it would never work,” Lichtenfeld said. “We’ve all seen situations where we have jumped to conclusions too early, but unfortunately, many more times than not, the original claims for drugs like this don’t work out.”
But Howe continues to swear by the treatment and even got a scorpion tattoo on her ankle. She also said her cancer returned after she stopped taking Escozine and was now putting her faith once again into scorpion venom, hoping it would save her life.
//By Andrew M. Seaman
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Driven by an aging population and increased access to health insurance, the U.S. will need more doctors by 2025, says a new study.
The expected rise in demand varies by state and medical specialty, according to the study’s lead author.
“What’s happening at the state level can be very different than what’s happening at the national level,” Timothy Dall told Reuters Health. He is a managing director at the research and information service firm IHS in Washington, D.C.
The new study, published in Health Affairs, looks at future demands for primary and specialized healthcare providers. Those specialists include cardiologists, neurologists and urologists.
The researchers used a computer model to estimate future healthcare demand by taking into account a growing and aging population and increased access to health insurance due to the Affordable Care Act – commonly known as Obamacare.
The U.S. Census Bureau projects the country’s population will increase by 9.5 percent between 2013 and 2025. The Congressional Budget Office also estimates that an additional 28 million people will have health insurance by 2023.
The researchers found the expected increase in doctor demand was largely attributed to a growing number of diseases among an older population. Obamacare, on the other hand, was only linked to an increase of a few percentage points.
Overall, the researchers found the demand for primary care or family doctors will grow by 14 percent by 2025. That’s less than the expected growth among some medical specialties.
Dall and his colleagues estimate that demand for vascular surgeons – who perform bypass surgeries and insert stents, for instance – will increase by about 31 percent and demand for cardiologists will increase by 20 percent.
But those estimates vary by state.
For example, though the demand for cardiologists is estimated to grow by 51 percent in Nevada, demand in West Virginia is only estimated to grow by 5 percent.
Dall cautioned that the estimates are subject to change based on healthcare delivery systems and behaviors.
For example, Dr. Reid Blackwelder, president of the American Academy of Family Physicians, said conditions that would drive people to see specialists are largely preventable with adequate primary care. Focusing on prevention and primary care would be expected to shift demand toward family doctors.
“As we start to recognize the foundational nature of true primary care and prevention, we’re going to need more primary care providers to be that foundation,” Blackwelder told Reuters Health.
Blackwelder, who was not involved with the new study, is also affiliated with East Tennessee State University’s James H. Quillen College of Medicine in Johnson City.
“The bottom line is that care delivery patterns will change,” Dall said.
He told Reuters Health the new study can’t say whether the U.S. will experience a shortage of doctors by 2025.
Previously, the Association of American Medical Colleges estimated that the U.S. doctor shortage will grow to more than 130,000 by 2025.
“It’s important that we continue to update projections and not wait a decade before we update them because things are continually changing,” Dall said.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/17C3yj7 Health Affairs, online November 4, 2013.
http://www.sandals.com/main/royal/rj-crystal.cfm
http://www.sandals.com/tas/
//
Every year, Americans spend roughly $ 5 billion thinking that unproven herbal supplements will heal them in some magical way that traditional medicine cannot. But the truth is, they are being had.
A group of Canadian researchers recently conducted DNA barcoding tests on 44 bottles of popular supplements from 12 anonymous companies. They found that many bottles contained very diluted versions of the advertised herb, or were replaced entirely by cheap fillers.
Even more disturbing is that one-third of the bottles tested had none of the herb they advertised. These bottles contained fillers like soybean, wheat, and rice, which were not listed on the label. This inaccuracy creates a potentially dangerous situation for unwitting customers who have gluten allergies.
Who would've thought that there are people taking advantage of a health craze that has very little, if any, medical backing? Companies can slap an herbal supplement label on anything, since the Food and Drug Administration does not conduct testing. (The industry is expected to operate on the honor code.)
Luckily, concerned scientists have taken up the cause to expose herbal supplements, and the perpetual fraud these companies pull on customers. Dr. David A. Baker, who performed a similar study last year with black cohosh supplements, said, "If you had a child who was sick and three out of 10 penicillin pills were fake, everybody would be up in arms. But it's O.K. to buy a supplement where three out of 10 pills are fake. I don't understand it. Why does this industry get away with that?"
By David Ingram
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – In one of the largest health care fraud settlements in U.S. history, Johnson & Johnson will pay $ 2.2 billion to end civil and criminal investigations into kickbacks to pharmacists and the marketing of pharmaceuticals for off-label uses, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said on Monday.
The resolution of the long-running case with the company and its subsidiaries covers the marketing of the anti-psychotic drugs Risperdal and Invega and the heart drug Natrecor over several years.
From 1999 through 2005, J&J and its subsidiary Janssen Pharmaceuticals Inc promoted Risperdal for unapproved uses, including controlling aggression and anxiety in elderly dementia patients and treating behavioral disturbances in children and in individuals with disabilities, according to the complaint.
The off-label marketing cost U.S. government insurance programs hundreds of millions of dollars in uncovered claims, the complaint said.
Meanwhile, the company paid millions of dollars in kickbacks to Omnicare Inc, the nation’s largest pharmacy specializing in dispensing drugs to nursing home patients, under various guises including “educational funding.”
Johnson & Johnson’s conduct “recklessly put at risk” the health of children, dementia patients and others to whom the drug was prescribed at a time it was only approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to treat schizophrenia, Holder said.
Janssen’s sales representatives “aggressively” promoted Risperdal to doctors and other prescribers who treated elderly dementia patients, and through a special “ElderCare sales force” targeted nursing home operators.
“The company also provided incentives for off-label promotion” and based sales representatives’ bonuses on total sales, not just sales for FDA-approved uses, the DOJ said.
Under FDA regulations, doctors may prescribe drugs for unapproved, or off-label, use. But pharmaceutical companies are allowed to market their drugs in the United States only for FDA-approved uses.
The FDA said it had delivered repeated warnings to Janssen about “misleading marketing messages” to doctors, and later initiated a criminal complaint.
“Our investigators devoted considerable time and resources to this case, to help ensure that pharmaceutical companies do not mislead healthcare providers and the general public,” John Roth, director of the FDA’s Office of Criminal Investigations, said in a statement.
As part of the settlement, Justice Department lawyers filed a civil complaint against Johnson & Johnson in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania on Monday.
Monday’s settlement also resolved allegations that J&J and a subsidiary, Scios Inc., marketed Natrecor for off-label uses not approved by the FDA and not covered by federal healthcare programs.
J&J disclosed in a securities filing in 2011 it had reached an agreement to resolve criminal penalties related to the promotion of Risperdal, which was once one of the company’s biggest sellers, but that certain issues remained open.
The company on Monday said no additional charges will be recorded to earnings in connection with the settlement. J&J shares were down about 0.9 percent in midday trading on the New York Stock Exchange.
“We reached closure on complex legal matters spanning almost a decade,” said Michael Ullmann, general counsel of Johnson & Johnson.
(Additional reporting by Ros Krasny; Editing by Howard Goller, Nick Zieminski, Jeffrey Benkoe and Leslie Adler)
By Elyse Betters | Pocket-lint –
The US Department of Transportation’s Federal Aviation Administration approved gate-to-gate use of portable electronic devices last week, and now Amazon is celebrating the new policy with a one-day only sale in the US for its Kindle e-reader line.
The online retailer has publicly thanked the US FAA, and it reduced the price tag of its Kindle, Kindle Fire HD and Kindle Fire HDX 7-inch. Specifically, all three tablets received a 15 per cent discount on 4 November.
With Amazon’s special discount, the Kindle is now $ 59 (£37), and the Kindle Fire HD and Kindle Fire HDX 7-inch are $ 118 and $ 195 respectively. You’ll have to enter “ThnksFAA” at checkout through Amazon to get the savings.
“We’ve been fighting for our customers on this issue for years, and we are thrilled by the FAA’s recent decision—this is a big win for customers,” said Drew Herdener, vice president of Amazon, in a press release.
Read: Here’s what your next flight will look like since US FAA approved gadget use
Delta and JetBlue have become the first two US airlines to permit electronic devices. Following the FAA’s announcement that travellers can use them from gate to gate, both companies revealed that they had put in applications for approval.
A JetBlue Corporate Communications manager even posted an image to Facebook while on a flight from JFK to Buffalo, showing off the passengers and airline personnel’s newly granted ability to use gadgets during all phases of flight. In the image, which went viral, everyone can be seen happily holding up their devices.
It seems Amazon is just as elated by the new policy: “Happy flying!” Amazon added, though it’s worth mentioning that today’s sale could just be a case of clearing out stock and using the FAA’s announcement as an ideal opportunity.
© copyright Pocket-lint 2013
Three years after since saying goodbye to LCD Soundsystem, James Murphy is busier than ever. He just released Little Duck – a short film he directed for Canon’s Project Imaginat1on. Mentored by Ron Howard, Murphy picked ten photos out of thousands submitted on the internet to inspire scenes from the film, filming with three actors over about a month in Japan. In this exclusive Q&A, Murphy discusses making the film while co-producing Arcade Fire’s Reflektor. “I was writing the script in Montreal working on the Arcade Fire record. I would wake up, like, at 6 a.m., get on conference calls, write the script, go to Arcade Fire, come home at night, more conference calls and then go get a fucking glass of wine and go to sleep and start all over again,” Murphy says. “There was such a good wine bar in Montreal that I felt okay.”
See Where LCD Soundsystem’s ‘Sound of Silver’ Ranks on Our 100 Best Albums of the 2000s
What’s it like working with Ron Howard on the first film you’ve ever directed?
He’s incredibly sweet. Really not scary. Not scary is a weird description. He’s just super polite and sweet and nice. I guess it isn’t that surprising, because he seems super nice. I’m always surprised by how optimistic and open sometimes people who are very successful are. I think sometimes people like that are successful because they are optimistic. I think sometimes a certain level of optimism is essential.
The first time we met was in Los Angeles. He’d done his homework. I was stunned. I’m much more lazy. I don’t prepare very well. I’m always sort of wrapped up in what I’m supposed to be doing in the moment and then I suddenly appear some place and I’m really not prepared. But he was really prepared.
You had thousands of photos to choose from. How did you pick them?
I decided not to think of any kind of story before picking them. I didn’t think about anything until I sat down at the pictures. So I guess images and stories emerged from certain pictures. So I had to pick things that started helping me get ideas for a story, as well as pictures that I liked aesthetically. I wanted photos as close to snapshots as I possibly could, as simple as I could. Because I feel like with the advent of computers, that’s a missing element to photography, even just amateur photography, taking a picture. Aiming a camera at something and pressing snap and that being the end of it, you know? So I don’t know. I just sort of took that seriously and I went through it. Everything had some sort of a story and I went from there.
Is directing anything like producing records?
Well, making films is a lot easier than my other job, I’ve found. As a director, people ask you questions all the time, like, “Which socks?” And that’s kind of the way everything is. In my band, nobody asks me anything. You’ve got a producer or somebody’s going, like, “9 o’clock, we gotta know this, because the lights are going.” If I don’t do something with the band, literally nothing happens. Which is half the battle, I think. I’ve found answering questions is great. “What do you think about over here?” I’d be like “No, over here” and nobody argued with me. I really liked it.
I recently interviewed Win Butler and he had a lot of great things to say about what you contributed to Reflektor.
We’d been talking about working together since their second record. I remember when Neon Bible was getting made, I went up to visit them when they were at the church and I was trying. But by the time they got around to getting going, I was gonna make a record. After that, I took a year off but then they did as well, which is infuriating. So they went back and made The Suburbs when I went and made Sound of Silver. So it was like the same timing problem again.
We’re in regular communication, so it’s not like one day I got a call out of the blue from Win Butler. Initially, we both felt that the best thing to do was to be like, “Work on a couple of songs, see what happens?” Because you never know. It could be like we could spend months on me planning, get there and figure out this is a terrible mistake. Yeah, it can be. It’s like a marriage, man. I have a process for working that I think was just not that intrusive. It wasn’t a hugely creative role in my mind.
This is a nice situation where they have tended to say very nice things about the work I did and I have tended to say that I didn’t do that much. All I needed to do was just help provide clarity in a different way, so it was pretty fun and nice and everyone was remarkably respectful of one another.
He told me that by the the time the band left Jamaica at the beginning of the process, they had 50-60 songs.
Yeah, they had a ton of songs. But they were mostly whittled down. By the time I came in, they were down to, I think, focusing on the 20 or 25 songs. In the end, though, a couple songs that were not on their list, got pulled out. Like, there was one that got pulled out ’cause I loved it, that kind of everyone had forgotten about for a while. [Laughs.]
What surprised you about the songs when Win played them for you?
I mean, crap. I’m so inside it that it’s hard to remember what I felt when I heard them. Everything I feel is pretty workmanly. Like, when we get to listening to things, I’m like, “Oh, well, the drums need to get recorded more dryly” or “That’s too cloudy.” Regine’s super focused on rhythm and that’s something I tend to be really focused on. I kind of had these times where I worked with one person at a time. I’d have, like, a Regine day, I’d have a Win day, a Jeremy day, a Tim day, you know. To me, it always seems like, with a band, it’s always a continuum and it doesn’t seem that crazy to me. It just seems like a good record. But then again I always feel that way about my own music, too, So. Someone will be like, “This is crazy!” and I’ll be like, “It doesn’t seem crazy to me.”
A lot of songs, like “Reflektor” or “You Already Know,” sound influenced by disco and dance music. Were you guys playing that stuff in the studio or listening to some of your favorite records?
Not too much. I mean a little tiny bit for background sounds but not disco and stuff really. “You Already Know” just sounds like a really, like a happy/sad pop song of my own youth. We honestly barely had time to listen to anything really. What did we listen to? I was pretty conscious not to bring too much in to listen to unless it was basic piano loops, super ambient techno sounds and stuff like that, super ambient works that they could channel, and hear the way white noise works.
Which Arcade Fire song took the longest to perfect?
The song that I worked the hardest on was “Awful Sound.” It’s three different songs in one. You’re kind of working on them in pieces and it’s the song that I you know that I feel like the most labor and attachment in some ways. There was a lot of different textures on it and you know big stuff and small stuff that was all happening at different times. There was something quite Seventies about it, which was nice.
As a fan, why are you excited about Reflektor?
I’m not excited about it for being different. I’m just excited about it for being a good record. I’m excited and proud because I worked on it so I feel connected to it in a different way. I grew up in the cassette times, I put one record on one side of the cassette and another record on the other side of the cassette by one band and when I bought the second record I always feel it sounds so crazily different from the first record, and then years later I wouldn’t know which record I was listening to. They just kind of merge and make sense.
Reuters –
(Reuters) – U.S. computer software company Microsoft Corp said on Monday it signed a 20-year power purchase agreement for wind energy in Texas.
The company said in a blog the agreement was part of its commitment last year to become carbon neutral.
Microsoft said it will buy all of the energy from RES Americas’ 110-megawatt Keechi wind project, which is under development near Jacksboro, about 70 miles (113 km) northwest of Fort Worth. RES Americas is a unit of privately held, UK-based renewable energy developer RES Ltd.
Microsoft said the wind farm is on the same electric grid that powers its San Antonio data center.
RES will begin construction of Keechi in early 2014 and will begin delivering power in 2015. The wind farm will include 55 wind turbines manufactured mostly in Colorado by a unit of Danish wind turbine manufacturer Vestas Wind Systems A/S.
Microsoft said in the blog, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has recognized the company as the second largest purchaser of green power in the United States.
The company said the Keechi wind power purchase “will certainly not be our last.”
Microsoft is not alone among technology companies buying renewable power. Google Inc, Apple Inc, Facebook Inc, Rackspace Hosting Inc and Salesforce.com Inc have all committed to powering their data centers with more renewable power.
(Reporting by Scott DiSavino; Editing by Nick Zieminski)
Don Stranathan and Penny Blume, both battling terminal lung cancer, found love in an online support group and now that community is rallying around them after the couple was not allowed to board a US Airways flight as they were headed for a clinical trial for a new medication that could save Blume’s life.
The couple set out from New York on Oct. 24, but with multiple airline delays and a dispute over the oxygen tanks they were carrying, it took them three days to get to San Francisco.
For the last two years, Stranathan, 61, and Blume, 51, have juggled bicoastal cancer treatments and cross-country flights. He lives in Santa Rosa, Calif., and she lives in Sullivan County, N.Y.
Couple Shares Deadly Lung Cancer and Undying Love
“Penny is so traumatized she will never fly again,” Stranathan told ABCNews.com by phone from the Stanford University Medical Center cancer unit. “She gets so winded now we couldn’t even get her to the (airplane) bathroom, which was just a short walk.”
Blume, who has been fighting the most virulent form of lung cancer for the last two and a half years, told ABCNews.com, “It was the fear of not being able to breathe and run out of oxygen. I had to keep turning it off.”
With medical trials around the country, those with disabilities have special challenges flying, especially when airline delays are at an all-time high.
“More and more people are flying with oxygen and no one was clear on requirements,” said Stranathan.
Lung cancer patients expressed outrage over the couple’s ordeal in more than 100 Facebook and Twitter posts on the research and advocacy site LUNGevity. “I have been praying for you,” wrote Audrey Davina Krahne. “And that this whole nightmare will end now.”
According to the National Home Oxygen Association, for those who require oxygen must “negotiate many obstacles” and traveling can be “challenging.”
Each airline has its own rules, policies are subject to change, and it’s up to passengers to make their own arrangements.
US Airways said they were only following regulations and that the couple didn’t have enough battery life on Blume’s oxygen device for the six-hour flight. Regulations for portable oxygen concentrators (POCs) are clearly stated on the airline’s website: “You should have enough battery power to run the device for at least 150 percent of the expected maximum flight duration, taking into consideration the possibility of delays or a damaged battery.”
The couple said they set off from Newburgh, N.Y., Oct. 24, heading for San Francisco with a connection in Philadelphia. They said they had an oxygen device with more than five hours of battery life, which they thought was adequate.
“We got all the paperwork from her doctor to take it on the airplane,” said Stranathan. “All was in order.”
Neither the airline nor the couple dispute what happened next.
The first flight from Newburgh, N.Y., to Philadelphia for a connecting flight was cancelled and they were rebooked three hours later. But when they boarded the flight in Philadelphia, the flight attendants questioned their device, and when it did not meet regulation, they asked the couple to deplane. It was now 11 p.m.
Airline staff had suggested a company that could overnight the oxygen batteries to Philadelphia, but the cost, at $ 1,000, was prohibitive, said Stranathan.
US Airways put the couple up for the night in a hotel and flew them back to Newburgh to get more batteries the next day. They were rebooked via Philadelphia to San Francisco.
The couple’s clothing and medical supplies were in bags that had been checked in. Blume has a golf ball-sized external tumor that needed medical attention and they said they could not find dressings or ointments at the airport.
“We were not prepared for this … expected to be in Santa Rosa tonight,” wrote Stranathan on his Facebook. “We have Penny’s pain medication but were not prepared to change the dressing on her tumor – all that stuff is in SFO with her clothes.”
Stranathan said US Airways should have informed them of the battery-life regulation on the first leg of their trip, not once they had arrived in Philadelphia and boarded the plane.
The volume of tweets and Facebook posts caught the attention of the airline’s customer service department and they sent the couple an apologetic email, which Stranathan provided to ABCNews.com, with two $ 50 vouchers for future travel.
But Stranathan has called that an “insult” and said he plans to file a complaint under the 1990 Americans With Disabilities Act.
His friends from the lung cancer community were similarly upset.
“Seriously, that’s all they valued a passenger at?” wrote Debby Marcus Fonseca on Facebook.
US Airways expressed sympathy for the couple’s anguish, but told ABCNews.com that their regulations protect passenger health.
“We apologize to Ms. Blume for any inconvenience she may have experienced as a result of us not realizing the battery limits of her portable oxygen container at the beginning of her trip from Newburgh to San Francisco,” U.S. Airways spokesman Andrew Christie told ABCNews.com.
“They were booked from Newburgh to San Francisco, but when they arrived in Philadelphia, we discovered Ms. Blume had only four hours of battery time on her oxygen container,” he said. “The flight time was six hours and 20 minutes, and the letter from her doctor stated she could only be out of oxygen for five minutes maximum, so we had to deny boarding for her own safety until she could find more batteries.”
Allowing time for connections and delays, the batteries were “totally inadequate,” Christie said. “She had a pretty narrow safety window.”
The couple eventually made it to their clinical trial at Stanford University Medical Center, which is Blume’s last shot at treatment for her cancer, according to Stranathan. Her condition is now critical, and she requires constant oxygen to breathe. The former waitress has exhausted all radiation and chemotherapy therapies and hopes to get some benefit from a new antidepressant that has shown promise in treating her small-cell cancer type.
In an email to US Airways, Stranathan wrote about their trial and the dashed plans: “… if it didn’t work we were considering palliative care and getting her back to New York to be with family. Do you really feel $ 50.00 is compensation for being separated from family in your final months?
“Your whole Twitter page is pink for breast cancer month, but your employees treat people with lung cancer and compromised immune systems like they are lepers. No one deserves cancer or to be treated the way we were the first day of this ordeal.”
Christie said the airline, “tried to work with her,” trying to find additional batteries and eventually flying her back to Newburgh “for no additional fee.”
“We wish the best for Ms. Blume in her cancer treatments,” he said.
In 2009, Stranathan was diagnosed with non-small-cell adenocarcinoma, a much more treatable cancer that has responded to radiation and chemotherapy. He has been taking the oral medication Tarceva and his cancer remains stable. Blume, on the other hand, has three lesions on her brain and a large-cell lesion on her breast.
The couple, both divorced and with adult children, met on the health and wellness website Inspire.
The couple credits LUNGevity as lung cancer survivors helped to bring their frustration to the attention of airline officials.
“I got updates all over Facebook and Twitter from Don about all the difficulties they were having and my heart just broke for them,” said Katie Brown, director of support and advocacy for the foundation LUNGevity..
“I wanted to help,” said Brown. “The only way I knew how to do that was to repost their story and hope that it would get some attention and someone would help them get to their destination safely.”
//Breaking up is hard to do – throw a pet into the mix, and it's even tougher. Whether married, living together or just dating, it's easy for both parties to get attached to a mutual pet.
One of the best options after a breakup is to discuss a fair way to split custody of the pet with your ex. Jennifer Keene, author of the book, We Can't Stay Together for the Dogs: A Dog-Friendly Divorce and Break-up Guide, notes that there are several ways to split the time – but says that one of the best ways is to do a week-on/week-off or even a month-on/month-off schedule, which "usually gives each parent fairly equal time with the dog and is structured enough to allow the dog to develop a routine."
As for custody battles that get taken to the legal level, David Favre, a professor of law at Michigan State University College of Law and a national officer of the Animal Legal Defense Fund and ABA Committee on Animal Law, says that he would urge couples to "work it out among themselves and do what is best for the animal…The occasional judge will, never the less, take it under advisement, but the vast majority of cases need to be worked out between the parties."
Favre points out that legal options are very limited and have varied legal provisions for awarding pet custody according to state, and most law still considers animals as "chattel," or property. J. Michael Kelly, a divorce lawyer in California (where the law still says that pets are chattel) and part of the California Family Law Institute, confirms this, and says that because the animal is grouped in with "the silver or the table," the divorce suits can get complicated.
"If the pet is bought during the course of marriage, then that pet is community property, period," explains Kelly. "But if either one of the parties bought the animal before the marriage, then unquestionably that is separate property, no matter what."
But if the ruling isn't so simple, then each half of the couple needs to supply the most evidence in order to gain custody. "People will hand the judges long declarations about their relationships with the animal and why they're the best person to keep it," Kelly says, "Who took it to the vet, who didn't, who fed it, who didn't. Some people with a lot of money will bring in an animal psychologist and deal with it that way."
Whether you choose to share custody, take custody, or forfeit custody to your ex, keep in mind that the ideal situation will always be what's best for your pet, even if that means stretching your own comfort level.
For more info on Jennifer Keene, pick up We Can't Stay Together for the Dogs: A Dog-Friendly Divorce and Break-up Guide, or visit: jenniferkeene.com. For Professor David Favre, check out his books, visit: animallaw.info. For J. Michael Kelly, Esq, visit: cfli.com.
For the Best that Pet Lifestyle has to offer follow Wendy Diamond on Facebook, Twitter, and right here at AnimalFair.com!
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A man reads a paper on a London Underground train. Photograph: Peter Johns/Other
Not long after the first journey beneath the capital by rail, on January 9, 1863, the Underground began expanding rapidly. People wanted more. In its first year of existence 11.8 million journeys were taken on the Metropolitan Railway’s revolutionary new service, despite the steam and smoke and smell of sulphur. Things moved very fast. The first section of what became the District Line opened in 1868 and by 1884 the Circle Line was complete. Demand was vast. Entrepreneurs jostled to supply.
An appetite for more and better subterranean rail rides also rages today, but the forces driving it have changed. The great selling point of the earliest underground railways was that they (literally) undercut the congestion of the city’s streets. They then fulfilled and fed a desire for fast travel links above and below ground between the city and the cleaner, quieter life of the burgeoning suburbs.
Those sorts of factors continue to be in play, but the big, 21st century push factor is London’s booming population, predicted to soar from the present 8.3 million to around 10 million by 2030. The capital continues to buzz as a global business hub, its economic fortunes and its peoples’ prosperity bound up with this key part of its public transport system. How will all those people get in to London, through it and move around it? How can the Tube and the approaching advent of Crossrail best contribute to making a bigger London a better one too?
Among the planners, underestimates are not an option. Transport for London’s protracted Tube upgrade and improvement programme is still in part a catch-up operation following decades of under-investment. Just keeping pace with rapid change is described as a massive task: earlier this year, TfL commissioner Sir Peter Hendy predicted that when Crossrail opens for business in 2018 “it will be immediately full.”
That’s a daunting thought and raises some large questions. How is TfL running the great race to keep the city’s underground rail services up to speed? What are its ideas and options for coping with the challenge of providing so much more capacity? How large a part of the answer is underground rail compared with other transport modes, notably the London bus? Are the right questions being asked in the first place?
Over the coming weeks, as the London Underground’s 150th anniversary year approaches its end, I’ll be writing a string of articles about its future. Some parts of that future will start unfolding within weeks, others are already underway – have you been to Tottenham Court Road lately? – while some long-term solutions aren’t, as yet, much more than twinkles in visionaries’ eyes.
Tomorrow’s Tube will be shaped by everything from TfL developing new approaches to presenting and sharing information it holds about passenger preferences and behaviour to finding different ways of funding new infrastructure; from the recently-published proposals for re-modelling Bank station to the drawing board development of Crossrail 2 and the zygote notion of Crossrail 3; from managing the introduction of new train and ticketing technology to imagining how Tube stations might further evolve into something other than only transport destinations.
All these things, I think, merit reporting and exploring. But there are, I’m sure, many other angles I haven’t thought of. What aspects of the Underground’s future interest you most? Which parts of the story of Tomorrow’s Tube are you most excited or perturbed by? Is there specialised knowledge, far beyond my expertise, that you can share? The comment thread is open below. My email address is dave.hill@guardian.co.uk. I look forward to hearing from you.
Just beachy … a sea view from a room at the Arennas Mancora hotel, Peru
New tour operator Miraviva is tipping Máncora, a small fishing village in northern Peru, as a hotspot. Surfers and backpackers dominate the centre, but Las Pocitas, 10 minutes’ drive away, has sophisticated hotels such as honeymoon-friendly Arennas Mancora.
• From £1,125pp (based on two sharing) for four nights including flights from London, internal flights, transfers and breakfast with miravivatravel.com
A bubble tent at Cabanes de la Romaningue
Accommodation
Sleep among the trees at Cabanes de la Romaningue – a new collection of caravans, pods and cabins in the Gironde vineyards near Bordeaux, France. Futuristic bubble tents with a terrace start from €130 a night. There are also three treehouses, one accessed via zipwire, also from €130.
• cabanes.laromaningue.fr
Flight connection
The little-known international airport at Cambridge is now offering one-stop connections to a number of US destinations, including LA and New York, via Paris or Amsterdam. And thanks to an agreement between Cambridge carrier Darwin Airline and Air France, passengers can check their bags in at Cambridge and have them sent straight to a final destination airport in America, with just a short layover in Paris.
• cambridgeairport.com
Reinefjorden, Norway. Photograph: Ethan Welty/Getty Images
Website
The fjords, ski resorts and northern lights of Norway have long made the country popular with tour groups. But a new website aims to help make its attractions easier to access for independent travellers too. Flydrivenorway.co.uk lists restaurants, hotels, car hire companies and weather forecasts for the whole country, and offers discounts on partner accommodation, car hire and flights booked through the site.
Hot on the heels of acro-yoga and yog-aqua comes ski-yoga, a dubious-sounding mix of meditation and stretching carried out atop a mountain – while still on your skis. Four-day packages at the swish Grand Hotel Kronenhof in the Swiss resort of Pontresina cost from £885, including daily indoor and outdoor yoga sessions, lift pass and massages in the hotel’s spa, but not flights.
Starboard is a new collection of luxury boats from self-catering specialist Hoseasons. The 20 vessels – at four bases in Norfolk and Oxfordshire – come with a champagne welcome pack, binoculars, iPod docks, nice linen, and even space for your bikes, all from £549 a week for four people, £365 for a short break. Booking from December.
• 0844 847 1100, hoseasons.co.uk
Don’t forget to pack your Sled Buddies if you’re taking the kids somewhere snowy this winter. The cute penguin- and polar bear-shaped sledges are light (500g), fit into a suitcase (they’re 90cm long) and, crucially, feature “Arctic Groove Technology”. Whatever that might be.
• For ages eight and over, £24.99, atbshop.co.uk
The Guardian Cottages and Villas website, which lists more than 1,400 self-catering properties in the UK and Europe, is offering three readers a cottage stay worth up to £350. Winners can take their prize at any property on the site. Enter now at theguardian.com/cottage-competition.
CEO of Irish low-cost airline Ryanair, Michael O’Leary, during a media conference in Germany. The airline has cut its profit forecast for the full year. Photograph: Thomas Frey/EPA
Ryanair is on course for its first fall in profits in five years, saying that increased competition and a weak economic backdrop will force it to cut fares by up to 10% for the winter months.
The budget airline issued its second profit warning in as many months after average fares fell 2% during the first half of the financial year. It said fares were likely to fall by up to 10% by the end of the financial year to 31 March 2014, despite slightly higher forward bookings.
The Irish budget airline cut its full-year profit guidance to around €510m (£432m) from €570m, “due entirely to this lower fare environment”. It would be Ryanair’s first fall in profit since 2009.
“People have less money to spend,” chief financial officer Howard Millar told Bloomberg. “We had a strong August, since then we’ve started to see a weakening environment.”
The bad news sent its shares down 10% and hit the wider airline sector, with easyJet and British Airways group IAG shares both sharply lower.
Ryanair had already hit investors with a surprise profits warning in September, cautioning at that time that profits might fall at the lower end or below its previous range.
Chief executive Michael O’Leary told shareholders at the company’s annual meeting in the same month that he recognised the need to address the “abrupt culture” at the airline, known for its no frills service and raft of additional charges.
“We should try to eliminate things that unnecessarily [annoy customers]. I am very happy to take the blame or responsibility if we have a macho or abrupt culture. Some of that may well be my own personal character deformities,” he said at the time.
O’Leary said on Monday that the airline had responded to the dip in forward fares and yields by lowering it full year traffic target to just under 81 million from over 81.5 milliob.
“We also released a range of lower fares and aggressive seat sales to stimulate traffic, load factors and bookings across all markets,” he added.
“Market pricing remains weak, so we will continue to promote low fare seat sales throughout the remainder of both Q3 and Q4.
“Forward bookings are running slightly ahead of last year, but the softness in fares and yields continues.”
Profit after tax rose 1% to €602m in the first six months of the year to 30 September, with passenger numbers up 2% at 49m.
Revenue increased 5% to €3.25m.
Ryanair completed €177m of share buy-backs in the first half, and said it would press ahead with its plan to return up to €600m to shareholders through buy-backs and special dividends before the end of the 2015 financial year.
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