New system will combine information from a wide range of sources
The Ad-Hoc Committee on University Communication has released a report detailing plans for a new universal communication system at the University.
The new system will be a hub where students can find information about campus events, University departments, class information, official University announcements, and more.
Joe Sevits, senior in science, technology, and society, is a co-chair for the committee. Sevits says there has been a demand on behalf of the student body for an easier way to become informed of what is happening on campus.
“[The system] will help student leaders and University units promote opportunities and students find those opportunities,” said Sevits.
According to Sevits, students will benefit by having a central location to find information from all groups at the University.
The key feature of the system will be a central calendaring system, which will pull event information from several sources. The system will be tailored to each student’s individual interests.
Vista, Moodle, and Webassign assignment announcements will all be compiled with information from popular networking sites such as Facebook, Orgsync, and Google calendar. Departmental calendars, official University announcements and personal events will also be included.
Other class information such as syllabi, schedules, and links to class websites will be available.
Students will also be able to subscribe to specific event and announcement updates, with options to receive information from a particular club, or from a specific genre, such as community service.
The committee was established by Jay Dawkins, junior in civil engineering and Student Body President, as a way to improve information flow among students, campus organizations, and the University.
“There hasn’t been a central source of information for what’s going on on campus,” said Dawkins.
According to Dawkins, the HOWL e-mail announcements were started as a way to help students become more informed.
“The HOWL fulfilled a little bit of that need, but there is so much more information out there,” said Dawkins.
Kat Wright, junior in psychology, is excited about the resources that the new system would offer. “As [resident advisors,] we’re expected to tell students about the broad spectrum of social and academic opportunities on campus,” said Wright. “But we’re only human, and we can’t be expected to tell our residents about everything that is going on.”
Wright says that it can be difficult to find out about events of interest unless students actively search for them.
“For example, there’s so much that Arts N.C. State has to offer, but people don’t know about it,” Wright said. “NC State should play a more active role in telling people about such events.”
Student opinion will play an important role in the development of the system.
“There will need to be focus groups set up throughout the process to gather student input on individual components,” said Sevits.
Students will work alongside the Office of Information and Technology (OIT), which will be in charge of developing and maintaining the new system.
Dawkins foresees a challenge ahead in order to produce a functional website.
“The biggest obstacle with technology is having to figure out the programming when you’re charting your own course,” said Dawkins.
However, he stressed the importance of timeliness.
“The longer we wait, the more students are in the dark, and the more opportunities are missed.”
http://technicianonline.com/news/new_university_communication_system_in_development-1.1482913
Friday, February 27, 2009
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Sverre Fehn (1924-2009)
Sverre Fehn, the celebrated Norwegian architect and 1997 Pritzker Prize winner, died in Oslo on 23 February at the age of 84
Born in Kongsberg, Norway, in 1924, Fehn graduated from Oslo School of Architecture in 1949. Over the next five years, he studied traditional architecture in Morocco and worked in Paris with Jean Prouvé, meeting Le Corbusier.
This period of his life had a profound influence on his outlook. Often classed as a modernist, Fehn acknowledged the work of Le Corbusier and other contemporaries including Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright, but rejected the preceding generation’s urban perspective.
‘I have never thought of myself as modern, but I did absorb the anti-monumental and the pictorial world of Le Corbusier, as well as the functionalism of the small villages of North Africa. You might say I came of age in the shadow of modernism,’ he later said.
Fehn made his name internationally with his design for the Norwegian Pavilion at the 1958 World Exhibition in Brussels. This was followed by the much-lauded Nordic Pavilion at the 1962 Venice Biennale (pictured) and the Hedmark Museum in Hamar, Norway.
In his work, Fehn attached great significance to the qualities of materials, the interplay of light and his buildings’ relationship to the landscape. ‘We work with our alphabet materials such as wood, concrete, bricks,’ he said. ‘With them, we write a story which is inseparable from the structure.
‘When I build on a site in nature that is totally unspoiled, it is a fight, an attack by our culture on nature. In this confrontation, I strive to make a building that will make people more aware of the beauty of the setting, and when looking at the building… to see the beauty there as well.’
Fehn became a professor of architecture at Oslo School of Architecture in 1971, and taught there until 1993 while lecturing and holding exhibitions across Europe.
In recent years, a clutch of Norwegian museums won him further plaudits, including his striking Norwegian Glacier Museum at the mouth of the Fjærland Fjord, the Ivar Aasen Centre in Ørsta and the Norwegian Museum of Photography in Horten.
Fehn was awarded the prestigious Pritzker Prize in 1997. A retrospective of his work was exhibited at the Venice Biennale last year.
http://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/sverre-fehn-(1924-2009)/1994311.article
Born in Kongsberg, Norway, in 1924, Fehn graduated from Oslo School of Architecture in 1949. Over the next five years, he studied traditional architecture in Morocco and worked in Paris with Jean Prouvé, meeting Le Corbusier.
This period of his life had a profound influence on his outlook. Often classed as a modernist, Fehn acknowledged the work of Le Corbusier and other contemporaries including Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright, but rejected the preceding generation’s urban perspective.
‘I have never thought of myself as modern, but I did absorb the anti-monumental and the pictorial world of Le Corbusier, as well as the functionalism of the small villages of North Africa. You might say I came of age in the shadow of modernism,’ he later said.
Fehn made his name internationally with his design for the Norwegian Pavilion at the 1958 World Exhibition in Brussels. This was followed by the much-lauded Nordic Pavilion at the 1962 Venice Biennale (pictured) and the Hedmark Museum in Hamar, Norway.
In his work, Fehn attached great significance to the qualities of materials, the interplay of light and his buildings’ relationship to the landscape. ‘We work with our alphabet materials such as wood, concrete, bricks,’ he said. ‘With them, we write a story which is inseparable from the structure.
‘When I build on a site in nature that is totally unspoiled, it is a fight, an attack by our culture on nature. In this confrontation, I strive to make a building that will make people more aware of the beauty of the setting, and when looking at the building… to see the beauty there as well.’
Fehn became a professor of architecture at Oslo School of Architecture in 1971, and taught there until 1993 while lecturing and holding exhibitions across Europe.
In recent years, a clutch of Norwegian museums won him further plaudits, including his striking Norwegian Glacier Museum at the mouth of the Fjærland Fjord, the Ivar Aasen Centre in Ørsta and the Norwegian Museum of Photography in Horten.
Fehn was awarded the prestigious Pritzker Prize in 1997. A retrospective of his work was exhibited at the Venice Biennale last year.
http://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/sverre-fehn-(1924-2009)/1994311.article
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Medicines From The Sea
For the first time, Norwegian scientists have managed to produce completely new antibiotics from bacteria found in the sea. The eleven species of bacteria that create substances that kill cancerous cells and three other bacteria that produce new antibiotics were discovered by scientists at NTNU and SINTEF.
In collaboration with research groups in Moscow and the University of Bergen, they have made breakthroughs in the field of biotechnology. Never before have Norwegian scientists carried out the entire process from gathering bacteria from the fjords to presenting completely new interesting substances in bottles.
Behind their success lies a long and painstaking process of screening, cultivation, isolation and testing. However, it will still take some time before they can be sure that the process will continue to the phases of commercialisation and medicine production.
A network is built up
The NTNU and SINTEF researchers have been bioprospecting for five or six years, searching for interesting substances that are produced by marine bacteria. The wide range of expertise of this research group makes it unique, as it brings together competence in physiology and genetics, and has access to modern screening and fermentation laboratories.
The pace of the process has risen during the past few months, since the recruitment of Professor Stein Ove Døskeland’s group at the University of Bergen. The scientists have also had bacterial fractions tested in Russia.
Ninety percent are of no interest
Many of the bacteria that have been brought up from the Trondheim Fjord have antibiotic functions, but most of these are already known, and are therefore of no interest. New compounds that can be patented are most interesting.
“Substances with a new chemical structure and, we hope, with a different mechanism of action than we already know of, could be extremely valuable, for example in fighting cancer. This is why we need more candidate structures. Not all of them can be developed into new medicines, but if we are successful with one or two of them, we will be quite happy,” says NTNU professor Sergey Zotchev.
Recent focus on a few selected bacteria has led to these exciting findings. In Bergen and Moscow, the 11 anti-cancer substances have been tested against leukemias and stomach, colon and prostate cancers.
“We have found that cancerous cells have been killed, while normal cells survive, and that individual extracts act on different types of cancer cells,” says senior scientist Håvard Sletta of SINTEF. “However, we still have not identified the active substances in the compounds produced by the bacteria”.
Much work still to be done
Meticulous laboratory experiments have enable the scientists to identify the chemical structure of one of the three substances that can be used as antibiotics, and which they now know act against multiresistant bacteria. Towards the end of January, this substance was due to be tested on animals in Moscow. If the results turn out to be positive, the way will be clear for a patent application.
“If it turns out that this substance does not work in animals, the worst that can happen is that there will be a pause in our efforts. However, in many cases, all that is needed to take us further is a chemical modification of the molecule, but that requires a lot of work, and we could be stopped for lack on funding,” says Sergey Zotchev.
“We need to remember that bacteria from the sea produce antibiotics in order to deal with their own natural competitors, rather than to act against infections in the human body”.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/02/090225073211.htm
In collaboration with research groups in Moscow and the University of Bergen, they have made breakthroughs in the field of biotechnology. Never before have Norwegian scientists carried out the entire process from gathering bacteria from the fjords to presenting completely new interesting substances in bottles.
Behind their success lies a long and painstaking process of screening, cultivation, isolation and testing. However, it will still take some time before they can be sure that the process will continue to the phases of commercialisation and medicine production.
A network is built up
The NTNU and SINTEF researchers have been bioprospecting for five or six years, searching for interesting substances that are produced by marine bacteria. The wide range of expertise of this research group makes it unique, as it brings together competence in physiology and genetics, and has access to modern screening and fermentation laboratories.
The pace of the process has risen during the past few months, since the recruitment of Professor Stein Ove Døskeland’s group at the University of Bergen. The scientists have also had bacterial fractions tested in Russia.
Ninety percent are of no interest
Many of the bacteria that have been brought up from the Trondheim Fjord have antibiotic functions, but most of these are already known, and are therefore of no interest. New compounds that can be patented are most interesting.
“Substances with a new chemical structure and, we hope, with a different mechanism of action than we already know of, could be extremely valuable, for example in fighting cancer. This is why we need more candidate structures. Not all of them can be developed into new medicines, but if we are successful with one or two of them, we will be quite happy,” says NTNU professor Sergey Zotchev.
Recent focus on a few selected bacteria has led to these exciting findings. In Bergen and Moscow, the 11 anti-cancer substances have been tested against leukemias and stomach, colon and prostate cancers.
“We have found that cancerous cells have been killed, while normal cells survive, and that individual extracts act on different types of cancer cells,” says senior scientist Håvard Sletta of SINTEF. “However, we still have not identified the active substances in the compounds produced by the bacteria”.
Much work still to be done
Meticulous laboratory experiments have enable the scientists to identify the chemical structure of one of the three substances that can be used as antibiotics, and which they now know act against multiresistant bacteria. Towards the end of January, this substance was due to be tested on animals in Moscow. If the results turn out to be positive, the way will be clear for a patent application.
“If it turns out that this substance does not work in animals, the worst that can happen is that there will be a pause in our efforts. However, in many cases, all that is needed to take us further is a chemical modification of the molecule, but that requires a lot of work, and we could be stopped for lack on funding,” says Sergey Zotchev.
“We need to remember that bacteria from the sea produce antibiotics in order to deal with their own natural competitors, rather than to act against infections in the human body”.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/02/090225073211.htm
Sunday, February 15, 2009
Cruising Norway’s Coast
My ship, the Vesteraalen, was bound up the North Atlantic coast of Norway, with 34 stops to the tiptop of Europe on the Arctic Sea — a voyage that promised snowy fjords, towering mountains, northern lights and tiny fishing villages. From the final village, I had heard, a person can even see Russia, but I didn’t feel like a vice president in the making; I felt like Zhivago embarking on one final glorious escape.
There’s more than one cheap way to go on a cruise, particularly in these darkening economic days. Some check in daily with travel agents, or bottom fish at CruiseCheap.com. But I, currently living in Florida and therefore in no need of sun, chose to sail north just as the days were growing noticeably short.
Every winter Hurtigruten, a Norwegian cruise fleet that is jammed to the gills with fjord frolickers in the summer, finds its ships undersubscribed. Since the line is under contract with the Norwegian government to deliver mail and cargo year round with its fleet — most of its ships follow the same route as the Vesteraalen — it cannot follow the other cruise lines to warmer waters and must cut its fares roughly by half. Periodically, it further offers a two-for-one ticket, promising room and board for two passengers for seven days (six nights) for about $1,500. And so it was that I found myself, with my sister, Bethany, in tow, stumbling through a snowstorm barely in time to make our 10:30 p.m. departure on the Vesteraalen.
We had skipped dinner aboard the ship to explore Bergen, a cheerful little city that wraps around both sides of a pair of fjords, in our last hours before sailing. We had feasted there at Beyer ’en, a warm and elegant restaurant that specializes in delicious local ingredients. It had given me inordinate pleasure to be able to look up from my menu and say to the waitress, “She’ll start with the lamb from Hardinglam, and I’ll have the lamb from Flaam." Bethany and I were still repeating this silly rhyme a couple of hours later as we stood out on the high aft deck of the Vesteraalen watching Bergen drop away, flakes swirling around us, and the twinkling lights of the city intermittently disappearing and reappearing behind gusts of snow. It was magical and epic to be sailing away in all that swirl. And really, really cold.
Back inside it was warm, but we soon discovered that the Vesteraalen was no floating pleasure palace. “What I would like to say very politely is that this is not a cruise ship,” Egbert Pijfers, the extremely tall officer in charge of keeping the passengers informed in Norwegian, English and German, told me. “We have no casino, and there is no shuffleboard. So very politely I’d like to say it is a sea voyage on a working vessel with cargo and local passengers.”
That’s just the way most of the people on the Vesteraalen seemed to like it. “We had been on a cruise with Hurtigruten once before,” explained a gentleman from Hamburg, who was one of several repeat passengers on the ship, “and we liked the no-nonsense atmosphere.” His wife nodded in affirmation.
As the only Americans aboard, my sister and I may have started out with a higher appetite for nonsense than any of the sturdy Northern Europeans who made up most of the passenger list. Very politely, I’d like to say that in our first prowl around the ship that would be our home for a week, the “no nonsense” seemed a dram overbearing.
We found a promising room called the Salong Vesteralstuen, with a miniature dance floor and ring of booths and bar tables, but it was dark and empty, and the curtains of the bar were tightly drawn. In the Salong Trollfjorden, or Troll Fjord Lounge, which was a sort of Naugahyde men’s clubroom with long-haired tapestries, several graying couples who had been speaking German to one another nodded at our hellos and then stared at us silently. In the glassed-in Panorama lounge, the observation salon at the top of the ship, there was another bar, but it was closed up tight.
The two-for-one sale obviously had failed to produce a windfall of takers. The Vesteraalen, 350 feet long and built to hold 540 people, with 147 cabins, was carrying fewer than 40 passengers staying in berths plus another few dozen locals who got on for a stop or two and mostly stayed put in the booths of the cafe, which was open all night.
This low occupancy was normal for the winter, Mr. Pijfers told us later, and is even more pronounced on Vesteraalen’s larger sister ships like the Midnatsol, which is built for 1,000 passengers. “Oh ja,” he said, towering over us from behind his desk. “Thirty or 40 people on a boat like Midnatsol is not so cozy. It is better to be on this boat in winter.”
Soon it occurred to us that an empty boat meant empty cabins that might be bigger than the one we’d paid for. Ours was perfectly clean and functional and the beds comfortable enough, and we would have thought nothing of it had the boat been full, or even if we had been with our respective partners rather than our disrespectful siblings. But neither pertained. “You could just ask,” Bethany said.
I screwed up my courage and headed out to the reception desk to talk to a fellow who looked in his uniform to be about 14 years old but could have been twice that age, and who cheerfully moved us into a triple. He wore his hair tight to his head except directly in front, where a patch of bangs stood straight up in the air like a snowdrift. Perhaps it was a mystical premonition of what we were to read later that evening, but as I thanked him, something made me think of an elf.
We celebrated by buying a nightcap in the cafeteria and repairing to our spacious new cabin where I read aloud “The Seeress’s Prophecy” from “The Poetic Edda,” a collection of Norse stories told in verse that was the only Norwegian literature besides Ibsen that was available in my home bookstore. It’s a hallucinatory tale of giants, elves, trolls and dwarves in a land deeply confused about its relationship to the sun. “Fili and Kili and Bivor and Bombur?” I mused, “Gee, I always thought Tolkien made up his own names for the dwarves in ‘The Lord of the Rings.’ ”
Overnight the snow broke up into squalls that came and went as the ship traveled through classic fjord land of otherworldly beauty. We’d seen pictures of the fjords as green canyons of summer, but with a winter fog hanging low and the water various shades of gray below, the views from the ship were surprisingly modernist. It was a world of clean horizontals — water meeting the land, vapors meeting the tops of the fjord walls — bisected occasionally by a plunging curve of cliff or the tumultuous vertical of a frozen waterfall. Add to this the snow that periodically blotted out the scene, and the total effect was mesmerizing. It was easy, we thought, to see where the Norwegian affinity for crisp and spare design found its inspiration.
Periodically we went out on deck, where the same view en plein (howling) air made it equally easy to see how locals of an earlier vintage might have found inspiration to say, “Hey, Harbard, what say we get your longboat and head south for a little, you know, heh, heh, heh, plunder?”
The vast and nearly empty Panorama lounge, with its long rows of comfortable booths along the windows on either side, was the perfect place to sit and revel in the passing scenery. The mountains plunging into the fjord waters were always changing enough to be interesting, but never so rapidly as to make you worry about missing something. The result was hypnotic in the same very good way that driving across the Painted Desert or the Dakotas can be. There was time to sit and watch and dream up all manner of stories about the people who might live in the improbable little dwellings that look weirdly like Midwest farmhouses, or the lives lived there in the distant past. There was time, too, for reading thick novels, for writing old-fashioned letters, or, in the case of some fellow passengers, knitting long scarves. There was time to let go of time.
Hurtigruten vessels don’t tarry; in most towns the ship docked for an hour or less, giving us just enough time to stroll up and down the main street. Every day, however, we docked in at least one town for a stretch of several hours.
On our first day we signed up for the architecture tour of Alesund, a major fishing town that burned to the ground in 1904 and was rebuilt almost entirely in the Art Nouveau style. The town’s sturdy stonework is gaily decorated, though in suitably restrained Norwegian fashion, but here and there it is a bit overwrought and fortresslike, and we decided that it might have been the work of Fili and Kili, the dwarves of the Edda.
By this line of reasoning, the next day’s town, Trondheim, had clearly been constructed by elves. There, beside the River Nid, ancient wooden houses of various hues huddled together in the intermittent snow. (A cargo of wood from Vinland, the Norse colony thought to have existed briefly on the shores of what is now eastern Canada, was sold here around A.D. 1000, according to the official Hurtigruten guidebook, and is said to have been the first American export to Europe.) Slim-hipped women wearing leggings and furry boots, tuniclike parkas and pointy Nordic caps walked on snowy streets in the company of handsome wiry men who were similarly attired. Even the cathedral fed our fantasy; from certain locations its magnificently simple cone of a spire, flanked on either side by smaller pointed towers, looked for all the world like a giant cap and ears peeking up over the rooftops. Imagining ourselves in a suburb of Santa’s Workshop, we stepped into the steamy Dromedar Kaffebar for a sweet and rich mocha.
We might have stayed in Trondheim happily for a day or forever, but the Vesteraalen was sailing. Not for the last time did we wish we had bought a ticket that allowed us to catch the next day’s boat, a service the line offers. We wished it again later that same night, in fact, when Mr. Pijfers announced that the ship would be delayed in the protected waters outside Trondheim because of the weather. There was a hurricane, he said, and swells in the seas that we needed to cross were predicted to be from 12 to 24 meters high.
“If you know that I am exactly two meters tall,” he said when we asked for details (that’s nearly 6-foot-8), “then you can imagine six of me.” That is a lot of wave, and he was being modest: the prediction put the seas as high as 12 Mr. Pijfers.
“A hurricane?” I asked, thinking like most North Americans of a late summer storm out of the Atlantic. “Did it come up the coast of America and across?”
“Oh no,” he said. “This is a hurricane from the North Pole.”
The storm caused us to skip the port where we could have gone ashore to a Viking re-enactment feast. We were not heartbroken; only six people had signed up, and as Mr. Pijfers said, “A Viking Feast with only so few is not very cozy.” We went instead in circles for 10 hours, surrounded on two sides by snowy mountains and on the third side, between us and the raging sea, by a band of low rocks. It was pitch black by 4 p.m., and we retreated to our cabin to sample the various aquavits we had bought in Trondheim.
The savvy Hurtigruten traveler always tipples before meals. There is plenty of food in the dining room, much of it of the smoked fish variety and all of it very good. (A week will raise your omega oils to a level that will get you through next summer and beyond.) But no one orders drinks, or even sodas, which are absurdly priced. Instead, everyone disappears a half-hour before dinner to have a glass of wine or whatever in their cabin. We didn’t figure this out until Trondheim, where in a spirit of cultural exchange we bought the aquavit. “We drink this one with fish,” said the helpful sales-elf as she handed us a bottle of clear liquid. “And we drink this one with meat,” she said pointing to a beautiful amber bottle. “And this one is for after dinner.” When we asked, on the strength of the food recommendations, if we should have it actually with our meal, she said, “Oh, no, drink it like schnapps, in a shot or three, and chase it with beer.”
The aquavit was light and delicious and got us happily through the rest of the trip, though the Edda poetry we read that pre-hurricane evening told a cautionary tale of a beautiful giantess who drank too much and regretted it.
The hurricane rocked and rolled our ship to the point where we had to get up in the middle of the night and batten down the half-read novels that were banging around the cabin. But it also blew away the squalls and blizzards, and we awoke to a clear cloudless dawn sometime after 10 a.m., when the sun finally hauled itself over the horizon. The snowy peaks we had seen in the far inland distance the day before now rose only one row behind the fjord walls, and in some cases directly out of the sea. The glorious and forbidding North was upon us.
Sometime during the next few days we passed an astounding mountain with a hole right through the middle of it. It seemed impossible that it might be a natural phenomenon, and Mr. Pijfers explained that it was said to have gotten that way when an amorous troll was chasing a beautiful giantess and an arrow was shot, a hat was thrown and there was some defensive business with a rolling pin, and then the sun came up and it all turned to stone. It made perfect sense when he said it. No longer merely breathtakingly beautiful, the winter landscape on either side of the ship was now lovely and mysterious in the dangerous way that makes you yearn to know it better but wonder if you’re really up for what it might demand in exchange. We were happy to be safely aboard.
Everyone came out on deck as we passed a magnificent snowy range named the Seven Sisters and saw the crests of their braids catching the rays of a sun that by that point didn’t bother to come above the horizon at all. When the sun does that kind of thing — when dawn lasts a couple of golden hours followed by dusk lasting a couple of reddish hours with nothing in between — it’s hard to keep track of time. Somewhere along the way we had crossed the Arctic Circle, and in the Salong Vesteralstuen, were presented with certificates and shots of aquavit. Somewhere else we huddled against the warmth of the smokestack up on the aft deck and looked at the northern lights half the night — a blush of green that came and went over the ghostly winter landscape like a false promise of spring. We visited a little town where old lady elves kick-pushed themselves along the streets on personal standup sleds.
Near Tromso, we went dog sledding in the dark, flying over fresh snow, up and down hills, looking at the lights of the town spread along the water in the distance and laughing all the way at the good fortune that brought us here to sit under a reindeer skin behind a dozen relentlessly cheerful pups. Three hundred dogs howling and barking and baying and otherwise begging in the moonlight to be included in the sledding adventure was memorable, but the sledding itself was worth the trip all the way from America.
Back on board, by the time we were approaching the northernmost point of Europe, the almost comically dramatic cliffs overlooking the Arctic Ocean known as the Nordkapp, or North Cape, we’d made friends with many of our fellow passengers, even the Germans from the Troll Lounge, who as soon as they discovered we spoke a bit of their language were revealed to be huge fans of America.
Then there was the couple we called “the mysterious newlyweds,” a pair of cooing lovers from somewhere that doesn’t speak Norwegian, English or German. By apparent virtue of their romantic status they were the only passengers assigned to a private table every evening at dinner.
“Yes, we are just married,” the groom said when I cornered them at last in the cafe and asked how they came to be spending their honeymoon on the Vesteraalen in winter. The bride smiled in an adorable way. “We are engineers from Madrid, and we wanted not just to go to the beach or something. But somewhere different.”
I refrained from asking if the prospect of 20-hour-long nights had fit into the honeymoon calculus, instead inquiring whether they had found what they came for.
“Yes it has been ... ,” the groom began, and then stumbled a bit with the English. The bride picked up where he left off, saying, “All of our dreams of this trip have turned out to be true.”
Thinking about it later, I realized I could almost have said the same thing myself. Almost, because secretly I really would have liked to have seen an iceberg. But that will have to wait for next winter, when I just may go to the South Pole.
NORSE LEGEND AND ARCTIC REFLECTION
THE CRUISE
As a part of its contract with the government to deliver mail and freight along Norway’s Atlantic coast, the Hurtigruten ship line, which is primarily a passenger line, aims to have one northbound and one southbound ship visit each of the 35 ports along its route every day of the year. Because the boats are nearly empty of passengers in winter, a traveler at this time of year can count on finding a voyage on a compatible schedule.
At the home port of Bergen, the southernmost port on the route, many passengers board one of the 11 Hurtigruten ships that make this run and disembark, as my sister and I did, six days later at Kirkenes, the last stop. From Kirkenes, flights are available back to the south. Those who book passage for the full 12-day round trip on Hurtigruten are rewarded by seeing the ports that were visited in the middle of the night on the northbound voyage during the day on the southbound trip.
The current base price per person for a double berth is $654 one way and $1,194 round trip, but special promotions, like the two-for-one winter deal, are common. For information, call (866) 552-0371 or visit www.hurtigruten.us. Prices for trips that allow you to stay in various towns for a day or two of sightseeing and cross-country skiing must be individually calculated. (There may also be a fuel surcharge.)
Excursions on land can be booked on board the ship. A dog-sledding trip at Tromso was 900 kroner a person (about $130 at 7 kroner to the dollar) in October, and a trip to the North Cape was 665 kroner.
Some of the additional cost of the 12-day round-trip may be recouped in cheaper airfare, since a round trip on the ship allows you to buy a round-trip airline ticket to Bergen.
GETTING THERE
United/SAS recently offered fares from Newark to the Bergen airport for $602, and Northwest had one for $676. (Lufthansa, KLM, Continental and British Airways fly to Bergen from Kennedy Airport.) A search for flights from New York to Bergen one way and then back to New York from Kirkenes and connecting cities found a ticket on United for $730, but all of the other options were over $900.
FOOD AND DRINK
At Beyer’en in Bergen (Rosenkrantzgaten 8; 47-53-05-15-00), the Flaam lamb entree is 285 kroner and the Hardinglam appetizer is 130 kroner. In Trondheim, at Dromedar Kaffebar (Nedre Bakklandet 3; 47-73-502-502), the mocha, called kaffechoc, costs 42 kroner.
READING
“The Poetic Edda,” the ancient book of Norse mythology, is available in several versions, including a translation by Carolyne Larrington (Oxford, 1999).
http://travel.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/travel/15vesteraalen.html?pagewanted=all
There’s more than one cheap way to go on a cruise, particularly in these darkening economic days. Some check in daily with travel agents, or bottom fish at CruiseCheap.com. But I, currently living in Florida and therefore in no need of sun, chose to sail north just as the days were growing noticeably short.
Every winter Hurtigruten, a Norwegian cruise fleet that is jammed to the gills with fjord frolickers in the summer, finds its ships undersubscribed. Since the line is under contract with the Norwegian government to deliver mail and cargo year round with its fleet — most of its ships follow the same route as the Vesteraalen — it cannot follow the other cruise lines to warmer waters and must cut its fares roughly by half. Periodically, it further offers a two-for-one ticket, promising room and board for two passengers for seven days (six nights) for about $1,500. And so it was that I found myself, with my sister, Bethany, in tow, stumbling through a snowstorm barely in time to make our 10:30 p.m. departure on the Vesteraalen.
We had skipped dinner aboard the ship to explore Bergen, a cheerful little city that wraps around both sides of a pair of fjords, in our last hours before sailing. We had feasted there at Beyer ’en, a warm and elegant restaurant that specializes in delicious local ingredients. It had given me inordinate pleasure to be able to look up from my menu and say to the waitress, “She’ll start with the lamb from Hardinglam, and I’ll have the lamb from Flaam." Bethany and I were still repeating this silly rhyme a couple of hours later as we stood out on the high aft deck of the Vesteraalen watching Bergen drop away, flakes swirling around us, and the twinkling lights of the city intermittently disappearing and reappearing behind gusts of snow. It was magical and epic to be sailing away in all that swirl. And really, really cold.
Back inside it was warm, but we soon discovered that the Vesteraalen was no floating pleasure palace. “What I would like to say very politely is that this is not a cruise ship,” Egbert Pijfers, the extremely tall officer in charge of keeping the passengers informed in Norwegian, English and German, told me. “We have no casino, and there is no shuffleboard. So very politely I’d like to say it is a sea voyage on a working vessel with cargo and local passengers.”
That’s just the way most of the people on the Vesteraalen seemed to like it. “We had been on a cruise with Hurtigruten once before,” explained a gentleman from Hamburg, who was one of several repeat passengers on the ship, “and we liked the no-nonsense atmosphere.” His wife nodded in affirmation.
As the only Americans aboard, my sister and I may have started out with a higher appetite for nonsense than any of the sturdy Northern Europeans who made up most of the passenger list. Very politely, I’d like to say that in our first prowl around the ship that would be our home for a week, the “no nonsense” seemed a dram overbearing.
We found a promising room called the Salong Vesteralstuen, with a miniature dance floor and ring of booths and bar tables, but it was dark and empty, and the curtains of the bar were tightly drawn. In the Salong Trollfjorden, or Troll Fjord Lounge, which was a sort of Naugahyde men’s clubroom with long-haired tapestries, several graying couples who had been speaking German to one another nodded at our hellos and then stared at us silently. In the glassed-in Panorama lounge, the observation salon at the top of the ship, there was another bar, but it was closed up tight.
The two-for-one sale obviously had failed to produce a windfall of takers. The Vesteraalen, 350 feet long and built to hold 540 people, with 147 cabins, was carrying fewer than 40 passengers staying in berths plus another few dozen locals who got on for a stop or two and mostly stayed put in the booths of the cafe, which was open all night.
This low occupancy was normal for the winter, Mr. Pijfers told us later, and is even more pronounced on Vesteraalen’s larger sister ships like the Midnatsol, which is built for 1,000 passengers. “Oh ja,” he said, towering over us from behind his desk. “Thirty or 40 people on a boat like Midnatsol is not so cozy. It is better to be on this boat in winter.”
Soon it occurred to us that an empty boat meant empty cabins that might be bigger than the one we’d paid for. Ours was perfectly clean and functional and the beds comfortable enough, and we would have thought nothing of it had the boat been full, or even if we had been with our respective partners rather than our disrespectful siblings. But neither pertained. “You could just ask,” Bethany said.
I screwed up my courage and headed out to the reception desk to talk to a fellow who looked in his uniform to be about 14 years old but could have been twice that age, and who cheerfully moved us into a triple. He wore his hair tight to his head except directly in front, where a patch of bangs stood straight up in the air like a snowdrift. Perhaps it was a mystical premonition of what we were to read later that evening, but as I thanked him, something made me think of an elf.
We celebrated by buying a nightcap in the cafeteria and repairing to our spacious new cabin where I read aloud “The Seeress’s Prophecy” from “The Poetic Edda,” a collection of Norse stories told in verse that was the only Norwegian literature besides Ibsen that was available in my home bookstore. It’s a hallucinatory tale of giants, elves, trolls and dwarves in a land deeply confused about its relationship to the sun. “Fili and Kili and Bivor and Bombur?” I mused, “Gee, I always thought Tolkien made up his own names for the dwarves in ‘The Lord of the Rings.’ ”
Overnight the snow broke up into squalls that came and went as the ship traveled through classic fjord land of otherworldly beauty. We’d seen pictures of the fjords as green canyons of summer, but with a winter fog hanging low and the water various shades of gray below, the views from the ship were surprisingly modernist. It was a world of clean horizontals — water meeting the land, vapors meeting the tops of the fjord walls — bisected occasionally by a plunging curve of cliff or the tumultuous vertical of a frozen waterfall. Add to this the snow that periodically blotted out the scene, and the total effect was mesmerizing. It was easy, we thought, to see where the Norwegian affinity for crisp and spare design found its inspiration.
Periodically we went out on deck, where the same view en plein (howling) air made it equally easy to see how locals of an earlier vintage might have found inspiration to say, “Hey, Harbard, what say we get your longboat and head south for a little, you know, heh, heh, heh, plunder?”
The vast and nearly empty Panorama lounge, with its long rows of comfortable booths along the windows on either side, was the perfect place to sit and revel in the passing scenery. The mountains plunging into the fjord waters were always changing enough to be interesting, but never so rapidly as to make you worry about missing something. The result was hypnotic in the same very good way that driving across the Painted Desert or the Dakotas can be. There was time to sit and watch and dream up all manner of stories about the people who might live in the improbable little dwellings that look weirdly like Midwest farmhouses, or the lives lived there in the distant past. There was time, too, for reading thick novels, for writing old-fashioned letters, or, in the case of some fellow passengers, knitting long scarves. There was time to let go of time.
Hurtigruten vessels don’t tarry; in most towns the ship docked for an hour or less, giving us just enough time to stroll up and down the main street. Every day, however, we docked in at least one town for a stretch of several hours.
On our first day we signed up for the architecture tour of Alesund, a major fishing town that burned to the ground in 1904 and was rebuilt almost entirely in the Art Nouveau style. The town’s sturdy stonework is gaily decorated, though in suitably restrained Norwegian fashion, but here and there it is a bit overwrought and fortresslike, and we decided that it might have been the work of Fili and Kili, the dwarves of the Edda.
By this line of reasoning, the next day’s town, Trondheim, had clearly been constructed by elves. There, beside the River Nid, ancient wooden houses of various hues huddled together in the intermittent snow. (A cargo of wood from Vinland, the Norse colony thought to have existed briefly on the shores of what is now eastern Canada, was sold here around A.D. 1000, according to the official Hurtigruten guidebook, and is said to have been the first American export to Europe.) Slim-hipped women wearing leggings and furry boots, tuniclike parkas and pointy Nordic caps walked on snowy streets in the company of handsome wiry men who were similarly attired. Even the cathedral fed our fantasy; from certain locations its magnificently simple cone of a spire, flanked on either side by smaller pointed towers, looked for all the world like a giant cap and ears peeking up over the rooftops. Imagining ourselves in a suburb of Santa’s Workshop, we stepped into the steamy Dromedar Kaffebar for a sweet and rich mocha.
We might have stayed in Trondheim happily for a day or forever, but the Vesteraalen was sailing. Not for the last time did we wish we had bought a ticket that allowed us to catch the next day’s boat, a service the line offers. We wished it again later that same night, in fact, when Mr. Pijfers announced that the ship would be delayed in the protected waters outside Trondheim because of the weather. There was a hurricane, he said, and swells in the seas that we needed to cross were predicted to be from 12 to 24 meters high.
“If you know that I am exactly two meters tall,” he said when we asked for details (that’s nearly 6-foot-8), “then you can imagine six of me.” That is a lot of wave, and he was being modest: the prediction put the seas as high as 12 Mr. Pijfers.
“A hurricane?” I asked, thinking like most North Americans of a late summer storm out of the Atlantic. “Did it come up the coast of America and across?”
“Oh no,” he said. “This is a hurricane from the North Pole.”
The storm caused us to skip the port where we could have gone ashore to a Viking re-enactment feast. We were not heartbroken; only six people had signed up, and as Mr. Pijfers said, “A Viking Feast with only so few is not very cozy.” We went instead in circles for 10 hours, surrounded on two sides by snowy mountains and on the third side, between us and the raging sea, by a band of low rocks. It was pitch black by 4 p.m., and we retreated to our cabin to sample the various aquavits we had bought in Trondheim.
The savvy Hurtigruten traveler always tipples before meals. There is plenty of food in the dining room, much of it of the smoked fish variety and all of it very good. (A week will raise your omega oils to a level that will get you through next summer and beyond.) But no one orders drinks, or even sodas, which are absurdly priced. Instead, everyone disappears a half-hour before dinner to have a glass of wine or whatever in their cabin. We didn’t figure this out until Trondheim, where in a spirit of cultural exchange we bought the aquavit. “We drink this one with fish,” said the helpful sales-elf as she handed us a bottle of clear liquid. “And we drink this one with meat,” she said pointing to a beautiful amber bottle. “And this one is for after dinner.” When we asked, on the strength of the food recommendations, if we should have it actually with our meal, she said, “Oh, no, drink it like schnapps, in a shot or three, and chase it with beer.”
The aquavit was light and delicious and got us happily through the rest of the trip, though the Edda poetry we read that pre-hurricane evening told a cautionary tale of a beautiful giantess who drank too much and regretted it.
The hurricane rocked and rolled our ship to the point where we had to get up in the middle of the night and batten down the half-read novels that were banging around the cabin. But it also blew away the squalls and blizzards, and we awoke to a clear cloudless dawn sometime after 10 a.m., when the sun finally hauled itself over the horizon. The snowy peaks we had seen in the far inland distance the day before now rose only one row behind the fjord walls, and in some cases directly out of the sea. The glorious and forbidding North was upon us.
Sometime during the next few days we passed an astounding mountain with a hole right through the middle of it. It seemed impossible that it might be a natural phenomenon, and Mr. Pijfers explained that it was said to have gotten that way when an amorous troll was chasing a beautiful giantess and an arrow was shot, a hat was thrown and there was some defensive business with a rolling pin, and then the sun came up and it all turned to stone. It made perfect sense when he said it. No longer merely breathtakingly beautiful, the winter landscape on either side of the ship was now lovely and mysterious in the dangerous way that makes you yearn to know it better but wonder if you’re really up for what it might demand in exchange. We were happy to be safely aboard.
Everyone came out on deck as we passed a magnificent snowy range named the Seven Sisters and saw the crests of their braids catching the rays of a sun that by that point didn’t bother to come above the horizon at all. When the sun does that kind of thing — when dawn lasts a couple of golden hours followed by dusk lasting a couple of reddish hours with nothing in between — it’s hard to keep track of time. Somewhere along the way we had crossed the Arctic Circle, and in the Salong Vesteralstuen, were presented with certificates and shots of aquavit. Somewhere else we huddled against the warmth of the smokestack up on the aft deck and looked at the northern lights half the night — a blush of green that came and went over the ghostly winter landscape like a false promise of spring. We visited a little town where old lady elves kick-pushed themselves along the streets on personal standup sleds.
Near Tromso, we went dog sledding in the dark, flying over fresh snow, up and down hills, looking at the lights of the town spread along the water in the distance and laughing all the way at the good fortune that brought us here to sit under a reindeer skin behind a dozen relentlessly cheerful pups. Three hundred dogs howling and barking and baying and otherwise begging in the moonlight to be included in the sledding adventure was memorable, but the sledding itself was worth the trip all the way from America.
Back on board, by the time we were approaching the northernmost point of Europe, the almost comically dramatic cliffs overlooking the Arctic Ocean known as the Nordkapp, or North Cape, we’d made friends with many of our fellow passengers, even the Germans from the Troll Lounge, who as soon as they discovered we spoke a bit of their language were revealed to be huge fans of America.
Then there was the couple we called “the mysterious newlyweds,” a pair of cooing lovers from somewhere that doesn’t speak Norwegian, English or German. By apparent virtue of their romantic status they were the only passengers assigned to a private table every evening at dinner.
“Yes, we are just married,” the groom said when I cornered them at last in the cafe and asked how they came to be spending their honeymoon on the Vesteraalen in winter. The bride smiled in an adorable way. “We are engineers from Madrid, and we wanted not just to go to the beach or something. But somewhere different.”
I refrained from asking if the prospect of 20-hour-long nights had fit into the honeymoon calculus, instead inquiring whether they had found what they came for.
“Yes it has been ... ,” the groom began, and then stumbled a bit with the English. The bride picked up where he left off, saying, “All of our dreams of this trip have turned out to be true.”
Thinking about it later, I realized I could almost have said the same thing myself. Almost, because secretly I really would have liked to have seen an iceberg. But that will have to wait for next winter, when I just may go to the South Pole.
NORSE LEGEND AND ARCTIC REFLECTION
THE CRUISE
As a part of its contract with the government to deliver mail and freight along Norway’s Atlantic coast, the Hurtigruten ship line, which is primarily a passenger line, aims to have one northbound and one southbound ship visit each of the 35 ports along its route every day of the year. Because the boats are nearly empty of passengers in winter, a traveler at this time of year can count on finding a voyage on a compatible schedule.
At the home port of Bergen, the southernmost port on the route, many passengers board one of the 11 Hurtigruten ships that make this run and disembark, as my sister and I did, six days later at Kirkenes, the last stop. From Kirkenes, flights are available back to the south. Those who book passage for the full 12-day round trip on Hurtigruten are rewarded by seeing the ports that were visited in the middle of the night on the northbound voyage during the day on the southbound trip.
The current base price per person for a double berth is $654 one way and $1,194 round trip, but special promotions, like the two-for-one winter deal, are common. For information, call (866) 552-0371 or visit www.hurtigruten.us. Prices for trips that allow you to stay in various towns for a day or two of sightseeing and cross-country skiing must be individually calculated. (There may also be a fuel surcharge.)
Excursions on land can be booked on board the ship. A dog-sledding trip at Tromso was 900 kroner a person (about $130 at 7 kroner to the dollar) in October, and a trip to the North Cape was 665 kroner.
Some of the additional cost of the 12-day round-trip may be recouped in cheaper airfare, since a round trip on the ship allows you to buy a round-trip airline ticket to Bergen.
GETTING THERE
United/SAS recently offered fares from Newark to the Bergen airport for $602, and Northwest had one for $676. (Lufthansa, KLM, Continental and British Airways fly to Bergen from Kennedy Airport.) A search for flights from New York to Bergen one way and then back to New York from Kirkenes and connecting cities found a ticket on United for $730, but all of the other options were over $900.
FOOD AND DRINK
At Beyer’en in Bergen (Rosenkrantzgaten 8; 47-53-05-15-00), the Flaam lamb entree is 285 kroner and the Hardinglam appetizer is 130 kroner. In Trondheim, at Dromedar Kaffebar (Nedre Bakklandet 3; 47-73-502-502), the mocha, called kaffechoc, costs 42 kroner.
READING
“The Poetic Edda,” the ancient book of Norse mythology, is available in several versions, including a translation by Carolyne Larrington (Oxford, 1999).
http://travel.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/travel/15vesteraalen.html?pagewanted=all
Economy Stifles Prison Expansion
The sluggish economy is having a big impact on Tennessee prisons.
The new Morgan County Correctional Complex is set to open this summer, when the old Brushy Mountain facility closes. That was expected to increase capacity by some 1,400 inmates, but now, because of budget concerns, fewer than half of the units in the complex will be available.
Also, Nashville Based, Corrections Corporation of America is suspending work for now on a new 2,000 bed prison in Hartsville.
http://www.newschannel5.com/Global/story.asp?S=9849767
The new Morgan County Correctional Complex is set to open this summer, when the old Brushy Mountain facility closes. That was expected to increase capacity by some 1,400 inmates, but now, because of budget concerns, fewer than half of the units in the complex will be available.
Also, Nashville Based, Corrections Corporation of America is suspending work for now on a new 2,000 bed prison in Hartsville.
http://www.newschannel5.com/Global/story.asp?S=9849767
Saturday, February 7, 2009
Jeter Says Teammates will Support Rodriguez
Derek Jeter, the Yankees’ captain, said Alex Rodriguez has the support of his teammates and defended his former manager, Joe Torre, for controversial statements in his new book, “The Yankee Years.”
On Wednesday, Jeter said the former bullpen catcher Mike Borzello, in a kidding manner with Rodriguez, sometimes called him A-Fraud, a nickname Torre discusses in the book. “I’ve never heard someone on the team say that,” Jeter said after working out at the team’s minor league complex in Tampa, Fla.
“Knowing Mr. Torre, he’s never going to intentionally try to hurt somebody,” Jeter said. “He’s like a second father to me. Everyone knows how close we are. He’s not going to intentionally go out and do harm to somebody. That’s not the kind of person he is.”
But Jeter acknowledged that the fallout from the book was unfortunate for the team. “The only thing that you’d like to see, going into spring training, is you’d like to see everyone talking about the excitement of the season and getting ready for the season,” he said. “That’s the unfortunate thing.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/05/sports/baseball/05sportsbriefs-JETERSAYSTEA_BRF.html
On Wednesday, Jeter said the former bullpen catcher Mike Borzello, in a kidding manner with Rodriguez, sometimes called him A-Fraud, a nickname Torre discusses in the book. “I’ve never heard someone on the team say that,” Jeter said after working out at the team’s minor league complex in Tampa, Fla.
“Knowing Mr. Torre, he’s never going to intentionally try to hurt somebody,” Jeter said. “He’s like a second father to me. Everyone knows how close we are. He’s not going to intentionally go out and do harm to somebody. That’s not the kind of person he is.”
But Jeter acknowledged that the fallout from the book was unfortunate for the team. “The only thing that you’d like to see, going into spring training, is you’d like to see everyone talking about the excitement of the season and getting ready for the season,” he said. “That’s the unfortunate thing.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/05/sports/baseball/05sportsbriefs-JETERSAYSTEA_BRF.html
Obama Says Any Delay on Stimulus ‘Irresponsible’
President Barack Obama said rising U.S. unemployment shows the urgent need for government action on the economy and any delay of his stimulus plan in Congress would be “inexcusable and irresponsible.”
Obama used the jobs data and the announcement of a panel of outside advisers led by Paul Volcker to help chart a course out of the recession to prod Congress toward finishing legislation providing more than $800 billion in spending and tax cuts.
Voters “did not choose more of the same in November,” Obama said at the White House with former Federal Reserve Chairman Volcker and the other 15 members of his Economic Recovery Advisory Board behind him. “They sent us here to make change, on the expectation that we would act.”
Obama cited government figures showing the nation’s unemployment rate hit 7.6 percent in January, the highest since 1992. The U.S. has lost 3.6 million jobs since the recession started in December 2007, the biggest employment slump of any economic contraction in the postwar period.
The loss of jobs “is an unmitigated disaster,” said Christopher Rupkey, chief economist at Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ Ltd. “The scary thing is that there is no end to the soaring jobless rate in sight,” he said in an e-mailed statement.
Congressional Debate
The stimulus plan has come under fire from Republicans in Congress who have criticized the amount of spending and the size of tax cuts in the plans passed by the House and being debated in the Senate. Some Democrats have also questioned the size of the plan. Senators may vote tonight, and Democratic leaders vow to get legislation to Obama’s desk by the end of next week after reconciling the House and Senate versions.
Unless the government acts, “we’ll continue to get devastating job reports like today’s, month after month, year after year,” the president said. “This is not some abstract debate. It is an urgent and growing crisis.”
Christina Romer, who heads the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said the economy may begin a recovery in the second half of this year if the stimulus passes quickly.
“There’s a good chance that it’s going to do the trick, that we will see us turn around in the second half of this year and that we’ll be back on the path to growth before we get to 2010,” she said in a Bloomberg Television interview.
Board Members
Obama tapped Volcker to lead the newly created advisory board, which includes former Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman William Donaldson, former Fed Vice Chairman Roger Ferguson, UBS Americas Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Robert Wolf, General Electric Co. CEO Jeffrey Immelt and Service Employees International Union Secretary-Treasurer Anna Burger.
Also on the board are David Swensen, chief investment officer at Yale University; Mark Gallogly, founder and managing partner of Centerbridge Partners LP; Penny Pritzker, chairman of Pritzker Realty Group; John Doerr of Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers; Jim Owens, chairman and CEO of Caterpillar Inc.; Monica C. Lozano, publisher and CEO of La Opinion, the largest Spanish- language newspaper in the U.S.; Charles Phillips, president of Oracle Corp.; Richard L. Trumka, secretary-treasurer of the AFL- CIO labor federation; Laura Tyson, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley; and Harvard University Professor Martin Feldstein.
Volcker said he agreed that lawmakers must move swiftly.
“The figures this morning simply reinforce that,” Volcker said. “And I can’t imagine that the Congress won’t share this sense of urgency.”
Multiple Views
Obama said he has recruited a cross-section of experienced leaders, Republicans and Democrats, from veterans of government and private industry to labor union advocates. It’s modeled on the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board created by the late former President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
“I’m not interested in groupthink,” he said. “We want to ensure that our policies have the benefit of independent thought and vigorous debate.”
Several of the board’s members played a role in Obama’s campaign as donors and advisers, including Donaldson, Ferguson, Gallogly, Wolf, Burger and Tyson. Pritzker was the finance chairwoman of Obama’s campaign.
While the stimulus legislation is making its way through Congress, Obama plans to make an appeal for quick action directly to the public with events next week in Elkhart, Indiana, and Fort Myers, Florida.
White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said the cities were chosen because they’ve been hit hard by the recession. In Elkhart, for example, the unemployment rate has risen over the past year to 15.3 percent from 4.7 percent.
Obama also plans to hold a televised news conference at 8 p.m. on Feb. 9 from the White House.
“This is another chance for the president to talk directly to the American people about what’s at stake,” Gibbs said.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aDrbRSNNgQcg&refer=home
Obama used the jobs data and the announcement of a panel of outside advisers led by Paul Volcker to help chart a course out of the recession to prod Congress toward finishing legislation providing more than $800 billion in spending and tax cuts.
Voters “did not choose more of the same in November,” Obama said at the White House with former Federal Reserve Chairman Volcker and the other 15 members of his Economic Recovery Advisory Board behind him. “They sent us here to make change, on the expectation that we would act.”
Obama cited government figures showing the nation’s unemployment rate hit 7.6 percent in January, the highest since 1992. The U.S. has lost 3.6 million jobs since the recession started in December 2007, the biggest employment slump of any economic contraction in the postwar period.
The loss of jobs “is an unmitigated disaster,” said Christopher Rupkey, chief economist at Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ Ltd. “The scary thing is that there is no end to the soaring jobless rate in sight,” he said in an e-mailed statement.
Congressional Debate
The stimulus plan has come under fire from Republicans in Congress who have criticized the amount of spending and the size of tax cuts in the plans passed by the House and being debated in the Senate. Some Democrats have also questioned the size of the plan. Senators may vote tonight, and Democratic leaders vow to get legislation to Obama’s desk by the end of next week after reconciling the House and Senate versions.
Unless the government acts, “we’ll continue to get devastating job reports like today’s, month after month, year after year,” the president said. “This is not some abstract debate. It is an urgent and growing crisis.”
Christina Romer, who heads the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said the economy may begin a recovery in the second half of this year if the stimulus passes quickly.
“There’s a good chance that it’s going to do the trick, that we will see us turn around in the second half of this year and that we’ll be back on the path to growth before we get to 2010,” she said in a Bloomberg Television interview.
Board Members
Obama tapped Volcker to lead the newly created advisory board, which includes former Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman William Donaldson, former Fed Vice Chairman Roger Ferguson, UBS Americas Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Robert Wolf, General Electric Co. CEO Jeffrey Immelt and Service Employees International Union Secretary-Treasurer Anna Burger.
Also on the board are David Swensen, chief investment officer at Yale University; Mark Gallogly, founder and managing partner of Centerbridge Partners LP; Penny Pritzker, chairman of Pritzker Realty Group; John Doerr of Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers; Jim Owens, chairman and CEO of Caterpillar Inc.; Monica C. Lozano, publisher and CEO of La Opinion, the largest Spanish- language newspaper in the U.S.; Charles Phillips, president of Oracle Corp.; Richard L. Trumka, secretary-treasurer of the AFL- CIO labor federation; Laura Tyson, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley; and Harvard University Professor Martin Feldstein.
Volcker said he agreed that lawmakers must move swiftly.
“The figures this morning simply reinforce that,” Volcker said. “And I can’t imagine that the Congress won’t share this sense of urgency.”
Multiple Views
Obama said he has recruited a cross-section of experienced leaders, Republicans and Democrats, from veterans of government and private industry to labor union advocates. It’s modeled on the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board created by the late former President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
“I’m not interested in groupthink,” he said. “We want to ensure that our policies have the benefit of independent thought and vigorous debate.”
Several of the board’s members played a role in Obama’s campaign as donors and advisers, including Donaldson, Ferguson, Gallogly, Wolf, Burger and Tyson. Pritzker was the finance chairwoman of Obama’s campaign.
While the stimulus legislation is making its way through Congress, Obama plans to make an appeal for quick action directly to the public with events next week in Elkhart, Indiana, and Fort Myers, Florida.
White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said the cities were chosen because they’ve been hit hard by the recession. In Elkhart, for example, the unemployment rate has risen over the past year to 15.3 percent from 4.7 percent.
Obama also plans to hold a televised news conference at 8 p.m. on Feb. 9 from the White House.
“This is another chance for the president to talk directly to the American people about what’s at stake,” Gibbs said.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aDrbRSNNgQcg&refer=home
Final tragic days of Dr David Kelly in 5:15 series
His controversial death was a defining moment of the Blair era, almost bringing the Government to its knees. Now the suicide of David Kelly, the Iraq weapons inspector, is to take centre stage at Scottish Opera, with a provocative production examining the fraught moments before he took his own life.
Death of a Scientist, by the award-winning Edinburgh playwright Zinnie Harris, with music by her composer husband John, is part of Scottish Opera's Five:15 series. The scheme pairs leading writers with composers to create 15-minute chamber pieces, which may be developed into longer productions.
Last year's productions, featuring work by writers such as Ian Rankin and Alexander McCall Smith, were a critical and commercial hit, with Scottish Opera adding an extra night to satisfy audience demand. The latest works will be premiered in Glasgow this month.
Dr Kelly killed himself after being exposed as the source of a BBC report which claimed that the Government had “sexed up” a dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD). His body was found in a woodland area close to his home in Oxfordshire on July 18, 2003, a few days after he had appeared before a Commons select committee. He had taken an overdose of painkillers and cut his left wrist.
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Death of a Scientist is Ms Harris's first opera. She said that she hoped to convey the inner turmoil of a man making “a deeply difficult decision” against the complexities of the Iraq war, George Bush and Tony Blair's search for WMD, and the hunt for the source of the leak.
“The backdrop of how one man's actions affected the world was well known, and we thought what was missing from that was the emotional decision-making,” she said. “The opera starts with him walking into the sunshine and ends with his death. His story may be familiar, but what happened in between those points is totally conjecture.”
Ms Harris, 36, whose diverse body of work includes plays for the Royal Shakespeare Company and scripts for the BBC drama Spooks, is aware that the contentious subject matter is likely to raise eyebrows. “There has been a lot of plays and books about David Kelly, but there is a feeling that it is not for opera,” she said.
Despite the sensitivities surrounding the issue, she did not contact Dr Kelly's family to discuss the opera. Last year relatives condemned Cherie Blair for writing about his death in her memoirs. “We didn't approach the family because we have not exposed anything that was not in the public domain, and I think we have handled it responsibly,” Ms Harris said.
She said that the Iraq war had become a key theme for the arts world. “I don't think I am setting out to be controversial,” Ms Harris said. “As a writer living through the last five years it is difficult not to be ruminating on this territory. I think most of my contemporaries are trying to make moral sense of it too.”
The new Five:15 series has produced a diverse range of works. Louise Welsh, the novelist, has teamed up with Stuart MacRae to create Remembrance Day, about an elderly couple who relive their past with terrifying consequences, while White, written by Margaret McCartney, a national columnist, and composed by Gareth Williams, tackles the question of when it is appropriate to share confidences.
Happy Story, by David Fennessy, the musician and composer, and Nicholas Bone, the artistic director, is an adaptation of a Peter Carey short story, and The Lightning Rod Man is an adaptation of a short story by Herman Melville by Amy Parker, an emerging young music critic and Martin Dixon, the Glasgow composer.
Ms Welsh, whose opera is also her first, said that it had been an enjoyable experience. She said that she hoped to unsettle audiences with what she described as the shocking and dark content of her piece. She also wanted to challenge preconceptions about the elderly and ageing.
“There is an idea now that opera is something people get dressed up for, and pay lots of money, but traditionally it dealt with strong subjects, with lots of passion and lots of death, so perhaps we are just getting back to its popular roots,” she said.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/scotland/article5679754.ece
Death of a Scientist, by the award-winning Edinburgh playwright Zinnie Harris, with music by her composer husband John, is part of Scottish Opera's Five:15 series. The scheme pairs leading writers with composers to create 15-minute chamber pieces, which may be developed into longer productions.
Last year's productions, featuring work by writers such as Ian Rankin and Alexander McCall Smith, were a critical and commercial hit, with Scottish Opera adding an extra night to satisfy audience demand. The latest works will be premiered in Glasgow this month.
Dr Kelly killed himself after being exposed as the source of a BBC report which claimed that the Government had “sexed up” a dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD). His body was found in a woodland area close to his home in Oxfordshire on July 18, 2003, a few days after he had appeared before a Commons select committee. He had taken an overdose of painkillers and cut his left wrist.
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Death of a Scientist is Ms Harris's first opera. She said that she hoped to convey the inner turmoil of a man making “a deeply difficult decision” against the complexities of the Iraq war, George Bush and Tony Blair's search for WMD, and the hunt for the source of the leak.
“The backdrop of how one man's actions affected the world was well known, and we thought what was missing from that was the emotional decision-making,” she said. “The opera starts with him walking into the sunshine and ends with his death. His story may be familiar, but what happened in between those points is totally conjecture.”
Ms Harris, 36, whose diverse body of work includes plays for the Royal Shakespeare Company and scripts for the BBC drama Spooks, is aware that the contentious subject matter is likely to raise eyebrows. “There has been a lot of plays and books about David Kelly, but there is a feeling that it is not for opera,” she said.
Despite the sensitivities surrounding the issue, she did not contact Dr Kelly's family to discuss the opera. Last year relatives condemned Cherie Blair for writing about his death in her memoirs. “We didn't approach the family because we have not exposed anything that was not in the public domain, and I think we have handled it responsibly,” Ms Harris said.
She said that the Iraq war had become a key theme for the arts world. “I don't think I am setting out to be controversial,” Ms Harris said. “As a writer living through the last five years it is difficult not to be ruminating on this territory. I think most of my contemporaries are trying to make moral sense of it too.”
The new Five:15 series has produced a diverse range of works. Louise Welsh, the novelist, has teamed up with Stuart MacRae to create Remembrance Day, about an elderly couple who relive their past with terrifying consequences, while White, written by Margaret McCartney, a national columnist, and composed by Gareth Williams, tackles the question of when it is appropriate to share confidences.
Happy Story, by David Fennessy, the musician and composer, and Nicholas Bone, the artistic director, is an adaptation of a Peter Carey short story, and The Lightning Rod Man is an adaptation of a short story by Herman Melville by Amy Parker, an emerging young music critic and Martin Dixon, the Glasgow composer.
Ms Welsh, whose opera is also her first, said that it had been an enjoyable experience. She said that she hoped to unsettle audiences with what she described as the shocking and dark content of her piece. She also wanted to challenge preconceptions about the elderly and ageing.
“There is an idea now that opera is something people get dressed up for, and pay lots of money, but traditionally it dealt with strong subjects, with lots of passion and lots of death, so perhaps we are just getting back to its popular roots,” she said.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/scotland/article5679754.ece
Thursday, February 5, 2009
Ginsburg's cancer prompts talk of who's next on Supreme Court
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had surgery Thursday for what apparently is early stage pancreatic cancer, the court's public information office announced.
The 75-year-old Ginsburg underwent the surgery at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. She probably will remain in the hospital for seven to 10 days, according to her attending physician, Dr. Murray Brennan.
In theory, that schedule means Ginsburg could return to the bench when oral arguments resume Feb. 23. In practice, the National Cancer Institute notes that most patients who undergo surgery for pancreatic cancer "need to rest at home for about a month."
More broadly, Ginsburg's diagnosis with a dangerous form of cancer underscores the fragility of the court's current makeup and the likelihood that, for one reason or another, it could change as early as this year.
"We obviously would love to have her stay on the court," Kathryn Kolbert, the president of People for the American Way, a liberal-leaning interest group, said in an interview. "She's probably the most liberal justice on the court, and she is also the only woman on the current court."
Even before Ginsburg's diagnosis became public, Kolbert added, "the new administration has obviously been thinking about who a new court nominee might be."
Simple demographics help explain why.
Five of the court's nine justices are at least 70 years old. A sixth, Justice David Souter, turns 70 this year. Several months after Souter's birthday, Justice John Paul Stevens turns 89.
None of the justices have hinted that they might retire this year, and Stevens remains vitally engaged during oral arguments even as he approaches the record that Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. set for court longevity. Nonetheless, general aging, recurring illnesses and, in Souter's case, a reported dissatisfaction with Washington itself have contributed to a consensus thought that President Barack Obama could have several court vacancies to fill.
"We need somebody who's got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it's like to be a teenage mom . . . to understand what it's like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old," Obama told Planned Parenthood in 2007. "And that's the criteria by which I'm going to be selecting my judges."
Ginsburg fit that bill for then-President Bill Clinton when he elevated her from the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to the Supreme Court in 1993. The graduate of Cornell University and Columbia University Law School, who left Harvard Law School when her husband moved, previously had helped start the American Civil Liberties Union's Women's Rights Project.
On the Supreme Court, Ginsburg has hewed consistently, although not universally, to the left. She voted with the majority 75 percent of the time last term, according to an analysis by Scotusblog.com. This sounds like a lot, but no justice was in the majority less often than she was.
Still, Ginsburg has maintained good relations with her fellow opera lover, conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, and she's scored some notable victories, as with her 1996 opinion striking down male-only admissions restrictions governing the Virginia Military Institute.
"Generalizations about 'the way women are,' estimates of what is appropriate for most women, no longer justify denying opportunity to women whose talent and capacity place them outside the average description," Ginsburg wrote in the 1996 United States v. Virginia case.
http://www.kansascity.com/444/v-print/story/1019568.html
The 75-year-old Ginsburg underwent the surgery at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. She probably will remain in the hospital for seven to 10 days, according to her attending physician, Dr. Murray Brennan.
In theory, that schedule means Ginsburg could return to the bench when oral arguments resume Feb. 23. In practice, the National Cancer Institute notes that most patients who undergo surgery for pancreatic cancer "need to rest at home for about a month."
More broadly, Ginsburg's diagnosis with a dangerous form of cancer underscores the fragility of the court's current makeup and the likelihood that, for one reason or another, it could change as early as this year.
"We obviously would love to have her stay on the court," Kathryn Kolbert, the president of People for the American Way, a liberal-leaning interest group, said in an interview. "She's probably the most liberal justice on the court, and she is also the only woman on the current court."
Even before Ginsburg's diagnosis became public, Kolbert added, "the new administration has obviously been thinking about who a new court nominee might be."
Simple demographics help explain why.
Five of the court's nine justices are at least 70 years old. A sixth, Justice David Souter, turns 70 this year. Several months after Souter's birthday, Justice John Paul Stevens turns 89.
None of the justices have hinted that they might retire this year, and Stevens remains vitally engaged during oral arguments even as he approaches the record that Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. set for court longevity. Nonetheless, general aging, recurring illnesses and, in Souter's case, a reported dissatisfaction with Washington itself have contributed to a consensus thought that President Barack Obama could have several court vacancies to fill.
"We need somebody who's got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it's like to be a teenage mom . . . to understand what it's like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old," Obama told Planned Parenthood in 2007. "And that's the criteria by which I'm going to be selecting my judges."
Ginsburg fit that bill for then-President Bill Clinton when he elevated her from the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to the Supreme Court in 1993. The graduate of Cornell University and Columbia University Law School, who left Harvard Law School when her husband moved, previously had helped start the American Civil Liberties Union's Women's Rights Project.
On the Supreme Court, Ginsburg has hewed consistently, although not universally, to the left. She voted with the majority 75 percent of the time last term, according to an analysis by Scotusblog.com. This sounds like a lot, but no justice was in the majority less often than she was.
Still, Ginsburg has maintained good relations with her fellow opera lover, conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, and she's scored some notable victories, as with her 1996 opinion striking down male-only admissions restrictions governing the Virginia Military Institute.
"Generalizations about 'the way women are,' estimates of what is appropriate for most women, no longer justify denying opportunity to women whose talent and capacity place them outside the average description," Ginsburg wrote in the 1996 United States v. Virginia case.
http://www.kansascity.com/444/v-print/story/1019568.html
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
Madoff Tipster Markopolos Cites SEC’s ‘Ineptitude’
Harry Markopolos, a former money manager who sought to convince regulators for nine years that Bernard Madoff was a fraud, said the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission suffers from “investigative ineptitude.”
Markopolos told Congress today that he contacted the SEC in 2000 after examining Madoff’s investment strategy and determining in four hours that returns exceeding 10 percent weren’t possible. Markopolos, in almost a decade of communication, said only one SEC staff member understood Madoff’s scheme and “the threat it posed to the public.”
“My experiences with other SEC officials proved to be a systemic disappointment and lead me to conclude that the SEC securities lawyers, if only through their investigative ineptitude and financial illiteracy, colluded to maintain large frauds such as the one to which Madoff later confessed,” Markopolos said. Madoff “had a lot of help,” Markopolos said.
U.S. lawmakers, who began investigating Madoff’s case last month, are hearing from Markopolos for the first time as they try to determine how regulators missed his alleged $50 billion Ponzi scheme, the biggest in history. The proceeding may shape the SEC’s fate as Congress debates whether to bolster the regulator or turn its responsibilities over to another agency.
Investors “expected regulators to perform their roles effectively,” Representative Paul Kanjorski, the Pennsylvania Democrat and chairman of the House Financial Services Committee’s capital markets panel, said as he began the hearing. “We need to pursue long-scale reforms.”
SEC Officials
Markopolos, 52, testified along with SEC directors Linda Thomsen, enforcement; Andrew Donohue, investment management; Erik Sirri, trading and markets; Lori Richards, compliance and inspections; and Acting General Counsel Andy Vollmer.
The officials, in joint testimony, said the regulator may stiffen audit requirements for money managers and inspect firms more frequently. The SEC is also examining how it evaluates risk and may require investment advisers to provide more information than it currently requires, according to the testimony.
Claims filed against Madoff by the SEC and prosecutors may result in billions of dollars in liability and “decades of incarceration,” the officials said.
SEC Inspector General David Kotz told lawmakers Jan. 5 that he was investigating whether Madoff’s clout and relationships with regulators helped the money manager avoid detection. Madoff sat on an SEC advisory committee and was chairman of the Nasdaq Stock Market.
‘Great Danger’
Markopolos, in his written testimony, said Madoff’s resume and connections on Wall Street made him fear for his life as he and a team of advisers scrutinized Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC. His testimony included 310 pages of e-mails and financial documents.
“Our analysis lead us to conclude that Mr. Madoff’s fund and the secret walls around it posed great danger to those questioning and investigating them,” he said in the document. “He was one of the most powerful men on Wall Street and in a position to easily end our careers or worse.”
Markopolos described repeated meetings with SEC investigators in Boston and New York, saying they appeared to lack the financial expertise needed to understand his warnings or brushed them off. He later tried to alert the media, without success, he said.
“BM’s math never made sense, his performance charts were clearly deceiving, and his return stream never resembled any known financial instrument or strategy,” he said, referring to Madoff by initials. “To believe in BM was to believe in the impossible.”
New York Office
Markopolos in 2005 shared his concerns with Meaghan Cheung, a branch chief in the SEC’s New York office. Markopolos said he gave Cheung with a 21-page report alleging that Madoff was paying off old investors with money from fresh recruits.
“Ms. Cheung never expressed even the slightest interest in asking me questions,” Markopolos said. “She never initiated a call to me. I was the one always calling her. She was unresponsive and mostly uncommunicative when I did call.”
SEC spokesman John Nester declined to comment.
Cheung approved an internal memo in November 2007 to close an SEC investigation of Madoff without bringing any claim. She later left the agency.
No active telephone number was listed for her in two Internet directories. On Jan. 7, she told the New York Post she had worked hard to pursue fraud at the agency for 10 years.
‘Behaved Ethically’
“Everyone in the New York office behaved ethically and responsibly and did as thorough an investigation as we could do,” she told the newspaper.
After more interactions with SEC officials, Markopolos said by last year he had “truly given up on the BM investigation.” Federal prosecutors arrested Madoff Dec. 11 after he allegedly confessed to his sons that his investment-advisory business was “one big lie.”
SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro, sworn in Jan. 27, should assess the staff and determine what skills it lacks, Markopolos said.
“My bet is that Ms. Schapiro will find that she has too many attorneys and too few professionals with any sort of financial background,” he said.
The regulator will only attract employees who understand balance sheets, income statements, derivatives and complex trading strategies if it adopts the “industry’s compensation guidelines,” Markopolos said.
Schapiro should set up a central office to respond to all whistleblower complaints, which are handled by the agency’s regional bureaus on an “ad hoc basis,” he said. Markopolos also said the new chairman should consider relocating the SEC to a city in the U.S. Northeast from Washington.
“Washington is a political center not a financial center,” he said. “If the SEC wants to attract the top talent, relocating its headquarters to somewhere between Rye, New York, and New Haven, Connecticut, is where this agency will best attract the foxes with industry experience it so desperately needs.”
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aqv1P7nD7vpM&refer=home#
Markopolos told Congress today that he contacted the SEC in 2000 after examining Madoff’s investment strategy and determining in four hours that returns exceeding 10 percent weren’t possible. Markopolos, in almost a decade of communication, said only one SEC staff member understood Madoff’s scheme and “the threat it posed to the public.”
“My experiences with other SEC officials proved to be a systemic disappointment and lead me to conclude that the SEC securities lawyers, if only through their investigative ineptitude and financial illiteracy, colluded to maintain large frauds such as the one to which Madoff later confessed,” Markopolos said. Madoff “had a lot of help,” Markopolos said.
U.S. lawmakers, who began investigating Madoff’s case last month, are hearing from Markopolos for the first time as they try to determine how regulators missed his alleged $50 billion Ponzi scheme, the biggest in history. The proceeding may shape the SEC’s fate as Congress debates whether to bolster the regulator or turn its responsibilities over to another agency.
Investors “expected regulators to perform their roles effectively,” Representative Paul Kanjorski, the Pennsylvania Democrat and chairman of the House Financial Services Committee’s capital markets panel, said as he began the hearing. “We need to pursue long-scale reforms.”
SEC Officials
Markopolos, 52, testified along with SEC directors Linda Thomsen, enforcement; Andrew Donohue, investment management; Erik Sirri, trading and markets; Lori Richards, compliance and inspections; and Acting General Counsel Andy Vollmer.
The officials, in joint testimony, said the regulator may stiffen audit requirements for money managers and inspect firms more frequently. The SEC is also examining how it evaluates risk and may require investment advisers to provide more information than it currently requires, according to the testimony.
Claims filed against Madoff by the SEC and prosecutors may result in billions of dollars in liability and “decades of incarceration,” the officials said.
SEC Inspector General David Kotz told lawmakers Jan. 5 that he was investigating whether Madoff’s clout and relationships with regulators helped the money manager avoid detection. Madoff sat on an SEC advisory committee and was chairman of the Nasdaq Stock Market.
‘Great Danger’
Markopolos, in his written testimony, said Madoff’s resume and connections on Wall Street made him fear for his life as he and a team of advisers scrutinized Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC. His testimony included 310 pages of e-mails and financial documents.
“Our analysis lead us to conclude that Mr. Madoff’s fund and the secret walls around it posed great danger to those questioning and investigating them,” he said in the document. “He was one of the most powerful men on Wall Street and in a position to easily end our careers or worse.”
Markopolos described repeated meetings with SEC investigators in Boston and New York, saying they appeared to lack the financial expertise needed to understand his warnings or brushed them off. He later tried to alert the media, without success, he said.
“BM’s math never made sense, his performance charts were clearly deceiving, and his return stream never resembled any known financial instrument or strategy,” he said, referring to Madoff by initials. “To believe in BM was to believe in the impossible.”
New York Office
Markopolos in 2005 shared his concerns with Meaghan Cheung, a branch chief in the SEC’s New York office. Markopolos said he gave Cheung with a 21-page report alleging that Madoff was paying off old investors with money from fresh recruits.
“Ms. Cheung never expressed even the slightest interest in asking me questions,” Markopolos said. “She never initiated a call to me. I was the one always calling her. She was unresponsive and mostly uncommunicative when I did call.”
SEC spokesman John Nester declined to comment.
Cheung approved an internal memo in November 2007 to close an SEC investigation of Madoff without bringing any claim. She later left the agency.
No active telephone number was listed for her in two Internet directories. On Jan. 7, she told the New York Post she had worked hard to pursue fraud at the agency for 10 years.
‘Behaved Ethically’
“Everyone in the New York office behaved ethically and responsibly and did as thorough an investigation as we could do,” she told the newspaper.
After more interactions with SEC officials, Markopolos said by last year he had “truly given up on the BM investigation.” Federal prosecutors arrested Madoff Dec. 11 after he allegedly confessed to his sons that his investment-advisory business was “one big lie.”
SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro, sworn in Jan. 27, should assess the staff and determine what skills it lacks, Markopolos said.
“My bet is that Ms. Schapiro will find that she has too many attorneys and too few professionals with any sort of financial background,” he said.
The regulator will only attract employees who understand balance sheets, income statements, derivatives and complex trading strategies if it adopts the “industry’s compensation guidelines,” Markopolos said.
Schapiro should set up a central office to respond to all whistleblower complaints, which are handled by the agency’s regional bureaus on an “ad hoc basis,” he said. Markopolos also said the new chairman should consider relocating the SEC to a city in the U.S. Northeast from Washington.
“Washington is a political center not a financial center,” he said. “If the SEC wants to attract the top talent, relocating its headquarters to somewhere between Rye, New York, and New Haven, Connecticut, is where this agency will best attract the foxes with industry experience it so desperately needs.”
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aqv1P7nD7vpM&refer=home#
Crews snuff blaze at Chicago's Holy Name Cathedral
CHICAGO — Crews have extinguished fire at Holy Name Cathedral, a 134-year-old Chicago landmark and the seat of Cardinal Francis George.
Flames shot through the church's blackened roof for about an hour before they were replaced by plumes of white smoke. The fire was struck at around 8 a.m.
There were no injuries.
Church officials say there was extensive water damage and fire officials were pumping water out of the basement. The fire also burned gaping holes into the roof.
Chicago Archdiocese Chancellor Jimmy Lago expects the church to be closed for months.
He says sacramental records that were kept in a fire proof vault in the rectory are believed to be safe.
http://www.foxnews.com/wires/2009Feb04/0,4670,ChicagoChurchFire,00.html
Flames shot through the church's blackened roof for about an hour before they were replaced by plumes of white smoke. The fire was struck at around 8 a.m.
There were no injuries.
Church officials say there was extensive water damage and fire officials were pumping water out of the basement. The fire also burned gaping holes into the roof.
Chicago Archdiocese Chancellor Jimmy Lago expects the church to be closed for months.
He says sacramental records that were kept in a fire proof vault in the rectory are believed to be safe.
http://www.foxnews.com/wires/2009Feb04/0,4670,ChicagoChurchFire,00.html
Monday, February 2, 2009
Small Earthquake Rattles New Jersey
A small earthquake hit central New Jersey late Monday night, according to seismologists. No one was reported to have been injured.
Residents likened the earthquake, which struck just after 10:30 p.m., to everything from “a bomb” to an underground explosion to “a thump.”
The epicenter of the quake, which had a preliminary magnitude of 3.0, was reported at Victory Gardens, although it could be felt in Rockaway, Dover and Morris Plains, according to Won-Young Kim, a seismologist for the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, in Palisades, N.Y.
The communities near the earthquake’s epicenter are in Morris County, about 35 miles west of Midtown Manhattan.
While 3.0 is a rather large earthquake for the metropolitan New York region, a temblor of that magnitude is unlikely to cause any major damage, Mr. Kim said.
Workers at an Exxon Station in Rockaway, N.J., said that the night was going along normally when the earthquake struck.
“It was like a bomb, a strong one,” said Cafer Sahin, 40, an attendant.
Tom Smaga, 27, was working inside the station when, he said, he first heard and then felt the earthquake.
“It was a loud boom and after that it shook the whole building,” Mr. Smaga said. He said the vibrations lasted for about two or three seconds.
Toni Dellamonica, a dispatcher for the Rockaway Township Police Department, said that there had been no reports of injuries or major damage.
Ms. Dellamonica said the earthquake felt like “a rolling rumble,” as if someone was dragging something across the ground.
In Dover, N.J., near the quake’s epicenter, Francis Rodriguez was playing cards with a friend when, she said, “it felt like something exploded underground.”
The shaking did not damage her house, she said, but her friend, Cheryll Post, who was visiting Ms. Rodriguez, said “it was very scary.” Patricia Avila, was in her second-floor apartment in Rockaway, N.J., when she felt what she described as “a loud thump.”
“It was just a bang,” Walter Michalski, a police officer in Dover, N.J., said of Monday’s earthquake. “That’s it. A bang.”
Peter Johnson, a dispatcher for the Morris Plains Police department, said “I wasn’t sure what it was. It was just a shaking.”
Mr. Kim of Lamont-Doherty said that low-level earthquakes are not unusual near that area.
An earthquake with a magnitude of 2 hit Phillipsburg, N.J., on July 28. A 2.6 magnitude quake struck Sussex County, N.J., on Feb. 17, 2006, and another quake, with a magnitude of 2.1, hit Morris County on Dec. 10, 2005.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/03/nyregion/new-jersey/03njquake.html?ref=us
Residents likened the earthquake, which struck just after 10:30 p.m., to everything from “a bomb” to an underground explosion to “a thump.”
The epicenter of the quake, which had a preliminary magnitude of 3.0, was reported at Victory Gardens, although it could be felt in Rockaway, Dover and Morris Plains, according to Won-Young Kim, a seismologist for the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, in Palisades, N.Y.
The communities near the earthquake’s epicenter are in Morris County, about 35 miles west of Midtown Manhattan.
While 3.0 is a rather large earthquake for the metropolitan New York region, a temblor of that magnitude is unlikely to cause any major damage, Mr. Kim said.
Workers at an Exxon Station in Rockaway, N.J., said that the night was going along normally when the earthquake struck.
“It was like a bomb, a strong one,” said Cafer Sahin, 40, an attendant.
Tom Smaga, 27, was working inside the station when, he said, he first heard and then felt the earthquake.
“It was a loud boom and after that it shook the whole building,” Mr. Smaga said. He said the vibrations lasted for about two or three seconds.
Toni Dellamonica, a dispatcher for the Rockaway Township Police Department, said that there had been no reports of injuries or major damage.
Ms. Dellamonica said the earthquake felt like “a rolling rumble,” as if someone was dragging something across the ground.
In Dover, N.J., near the quake’s epicenter, Francis Rodriguez was playing cards with a friend when, she said, “it felt like something exploded underground.”
The shaking did not damage her house, she said, but her friend, Cheryll Post, who was visiting Ms. Rodriguez, said “it was very scary.” Patricia Avila, was in her second-floor apartment in Rockaway, N.J., when she felt what she described as “a loud thump.”
“It was just a bang,” Walter Michalski, a police officer in Dover, N.J., said of Monday’s earthquake. “That’s it. A bang.”
Peter Johnson, a dispatcher for the Morris Plains Police department, said “I wasn’t sure what it was. It was just a shaking.”
Mr. Kim of Lamont-Doherty said that low-level earthquakes are not unusual near that area.
An earthquake with a magnitude of 2 hit Phillipsburg, N.J., on July 28. A 2.6 magnitude quake struck Sussex County, N.J., on Feb. 17, 2006, and another quake, with a magnitude of 2.1, hit Morris County on Dec. 10, 2005.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/03/nyregion/new-jersey/03njquake.html?ref=us
Yo-Yo Ma Brings Remix Culture to Music's Ivory Tower
SOURCE: All About Jazz Publicity
Yo-Yo Ma Viewer's Cut: Interactive Film Gives Editing Tools to You
Pop artists have welcomed others to remix their songs online. Now classical music aficionados can get in on the act.
Renowned cellist and 15-time Grammy winner Yo-Yo Ma is hosting an online competition, inviting listeners to add their own accompaniment to his performance of the traditional hymn “Dona Nobis Pacem," from his latest album, Songs of Joy & Peace. “Just releasing a CD is constraining to an artist," Ma says. “You know: 'I'm the product, you're the consumer'it's no longer like that."
In October, he posted his cello solo to the online site Indaba Music. Since then, scores of Indaba's 125,000 usersamateur noodlers, music teachers, and pros alikehave used the site's free Flash-based mixing board to add their own variations and countermelodies.
In January, Indaba users will vote for their favorite arrangements, with the winner scoring a coveted recording session with Ma that will be featured on both Indaba and the cellist's own site. “Technology lets you share ideas," Ma says. “By sharing and learning and teaching, you expand your imagination." Not to mention your repertoire.
http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/news.php?id=28122
Yo-Yo Ma Viewer's Cut: Interactive Film Gives Editing Tools to You
Pop artists have welcomed others to remix their songs online. Now classical music aficionados can get in on the act.
Renowned cellist and 15-time Grammy winner Yo-Yo Ma is hosting an online competition, inviting listeners to add their own accompaniment to his performance of the traditional hymn “Dona Nobis Pacem," from his latest album, Songs of Joy & Peace. “Just releasing a CD is constraining to an artist," Ma says. “You know: 'I'm the product, you're the consumer'it's no longer like that."
In October, he posted his cello solo to the online site Indaba Music. Since then, scores of Indaba's 125,000 usersamateur noodlers, music teachers, and pros alikehave used the site's free Flash-based mixing board to add their own variations and countermelodies.
In January, Indaba users will vote for their favorite arrangements, with the winner scoring a coveted recording session with Ma that will be featured on both Indaba and the cellist's own site. “Technology lets you share ideas," Ma says. “By sharing and learning and teaching, you expand your imagination." Not to mention your repertoire.
http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/news.php?id=28122
What did Phil see?
The world's most famous groundhog has seen his shadow which, legend has it, means this already long winter will last for six more weeks.
Punxsutawney Phil's forecast was announced in front of thousands of revelers gathered at Gobbler's Knob in Punxsutawney, about 65 miles northeast of Pittsburgh. They gathered Monday morning in near freezing temperatures, with many revelers buoyed by the Super Bowl victory by the Pittsburgh Steelers Sunday night.
German tradition holds that if a hibernating animal casts a shadow on Feb. 2, the Christian holiday of Candlemas, winter would last another six weeks. If no shadow was seen, legend said spring would come early.
Since 1887, Phil has seen his shadow 97 times, hasn't seen it 15 times, and there are no records for nine years, according to the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club.
http://www.kypost.com/news/national/story/What-did-Phil-see/1475kBX4SUy92NQIFrmPQw.cspx
Punxsutawney Phil's forecast was announced in front of thousands of revelers gathered at Gobbler's Knob in Punxsutawney, about 65 miles northeast of Pittsburgh. They gathered Monday morning in near freezing temperatures, with many revelers buoyed by the Super Bowl victory by the Pittsburgh Steelers Sunday night.
German tradition holds that if a hibernating animal casts a shadow on Feb. 2, the Christian holiday of Candlemas, winter would last another six weeks. If no shadow was seen, legend said spring would come early.
Since 1887, Phil has seen his shadow 97 times, hasn't seen it 15 times, and there are no records for nine years, according to the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club.
http://www.kypost.com/news/national/story/What-did-Phil-see/1475kBX4SUy92NQIFrmPQw.cspx
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