Windowkill. Photo: Susan Spear
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Diseases/Conditions News Headlines – Yahoo! News
On Friday the Republican Study Committee, a policy shop for congressional Republicans, published a memo on how to fix copyright law. By Saturday afternoon the group’s executive director had pulled the memo, which had evidently failed to approach the subject with “all facts and viewpoints in hand.” This is Washington’s way of saying that an interest group hit the roof, and indeed, Ars Technica reports that lobbyists from the “content industry”—Hollywood and recording companies—pressured the group to renounce the memo.
Copyright being in fact broken, you can still read copies of the memo online. It lays out what copyright reform advocates have been saying for years. Copyright protections now extend 70 years past the life of the author; for a corporation, 95 years after publication. This, along with punitive laws on copyright violation, hinders creativity and innovation. These facts aren’t new. What’s new is the tone. Derek Khanna, the memo’s author, writes like an unashamed free marketeer, and in doing so manages to latch on to a larger point: Laws that help businesses often harm markets. From the memo:
Today’s legal regime of copyright law is seen by many as a form of corporate welfare that hurts innovation and hurts the consumer. It is a system that picks winners and losers, and the losers are new industries that could generate new wealth and added value. We frankly may have no idea how it actually hurts innovation, because we don’t know what isn’t able to be produced as a result of our current system. (Emphasis in the original.)
Radical stuff. There’s no one in Washington to lobby for industries that don’t exist yet, and ever so briefly, Khanna and the Republican Study Committee stepped into that breach. Then they stepped back, to gather more facts and viewpoints. Here’s one: Pro-business and pro-market are not the same thing. The most pleasant place for a business is not elbows-out in the middle of a free market, but sitting alone, atop a fat monopoly. Ask your local cable provider. The larger a business gets, the more it has to protect from the companies and industries that might follow it with something better or cheaper. And the best way to protect what you have is to have it written into law.
Real markets, with real competition, are most helpful to newcomers. Small businesses and new industries create new value. Once created, they, too, move to Washington to protect it. Witness the growth of Google (GOOG) and Facebook’s (FB) lobbying operations in the Capitol. Khanna describes extended copyright protection as rent-seeking—in his words, “non-productive behavior that sucks economic productivity and potential from the overall economy.” What’s true of Hollywood and the recording industry could be said of any established industry.
Luigi Zingales, a professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and a regular contributor to Bloomberg View, points out that larger companies can lobby for special exemptions in the tax code. This creates complexity in the tax code, which punishes smaller businesses that can’t pay for tax lawyers and don’t have anyone’s buttonhole on Capitol Hill. Zingales prefers simple regulations and simple taxes, which are harder for lobbyists to game and easier for democracies to understand. He sees this as a bipartisan problem. The left is inclined toward more regulation, and the right is pro-business, rather than pro-markets.
The direction Khanna was headed—a defense of open, competitive markets at the expense of existing businesses—is still wide open space, claimed by no party. This summer, conservatives such as Timothy Carney at the Examiner and Yuval Levin at National Review urged Mitt Romney to back markets, not businesses. But he chose not to, even though he, in his day, disrupted existing markets of his own. Some enterprising Republican can still do it. Derek Khanna in 2016! He’s young. Maybe VP.
Businessweek.com — Top News
ATHENS, Greece (AP) — Greece has reacted with dismay to the European Union‘s failure to agree to release vital rescue loan funds for the debt-ridden country, with the prime minister warning it was not just Greece’s future that hangs in the balance.
The delay prolongs uncertainty over the future of Greece, which faces a messy default that would threaten the entire euro currency used by 17 EU nations.
Prime Minister Antonis Samaras stressed that Greece has done what its creditors from the EU and International Monetary Fund required. “Our partners, along with the IMF, also must do what they have committed to doing,” he said.
He said that “it is not just the future of our country, but the stability of the entire eurozone” that depend on the success of negotiations in coming days.
Europe News Headlines – Yahoo! News
SEATTLE (Reuters) – A Google expert witness testified on Tuesday that Microsoft will make roughly $ 94 billion in revenue through 2017 from its Xbox game console and Surface tablet that use Google‘s patented wireless technology.
Michael Dansky, an expert for Google‘s Motorola Mobility unit, testified on the last day of a high stakes trial over patents between Microsoft and Google in Seattle. The $ 94 billion figure he cited also includes a wireless adapter that Microsoft no longer sells. It was not clear how far back he was counting past revenues.
Microsoft declined comment on the figure.
The week-long trial in a Seattle federal court examined how much of a royalty Microsoft Corp should pay Google Inc for a license to some of Motorola‘s patents. Google bought Motorola earlier this year for $ 12.5 billion, partly for its library of communications patents.
Motorola had sought up to $ 4 billion a year for its wireless and video patents, while Microsoft argues its rival deserves just over $ 1 million a year.
If U.S. District Judge James Robart decides Google deserves only a small royalty, then its Motorola patents would be a weaker bargaining chip for Google to negotiate licensing deals with rivals.
The rapid rise of smartphones has sparked an explosion of litigation between major players disputing ownership of the underlying technology and the design of handsets.
Apple Inc and Microsoft have been litigating in courts around the world against Google and partners like Samsung Electronics Co Ltd, which use the Android operating system on their mobile devices.
Apple contends that Android is basically a copy of its iOS smartphone software, and Microsoft holds patents that it contends cover a number of Android features.
In return, Motorola and some other Android hardware makers launched countering legal action.
Before trial, Robart said testimony about patent license agreements between Microsoft, Motorola and other tech companies could be disclosed to the public, along with other sensitive financial information.
However, the judge reversed himself this week and said he was bound by appellate precedent to keep that information secret. On Tuesday he cleared the courtroom and heard two hours of testimony in secret.
During the open session, Dansky said Motorola‘s video patents are crucial to Microsoft and other tech companies, and deserve a high royalty.
“You will have a difficult time selling smart phones or tablets,” Dansky said, without Motorola‘s technology.
Robart is not expected to release a ruling for several weeks as both companies must file further legal briefs.
The case in U.S. District Court, Western District of Washington is Microsoft Corp. vs. Motorola Inc., 10-cv-1823.
(Reporting by Lisa Dembiczak; Writing by Dan Levine; Editing by Richard Pullin)
Tech News Headlines – Yahoo! News
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – The estate of “The Lord of the Rings” author J.R.R. Tolkien and publisher HarperCollins have filed an $ 80 million lawsuit against Warner Bros. studios over the licensing of characters and plots in online and gambling games derived from the films.
The lawsuit, which was filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles on Monday, alleges that Warner Bros. and its subsidiary New Line Cinema – which own the merchandising rights to the “Lord of the Rings” and “The Hobbit” brands – infringed on copyrights by licensing to casino slot machines, online gambling, games and downloads.
Tolkien‘s estate accuses Warner Bros., a unit of Time Warner Inc., of “infringing conduct.”
“Not only does the production of gambling games patently exceed the scope of defendants’ rights, but this infringing conduct has outraged Tolkien’s devoted fan base, causing irreparable harm to Tolkien’s legacy and reputation and the valuable goodwill generated by his works,” the lawsuit stated.
The suit claimed Warner Bros. earned millions of dollars from legal merchandise licensing revenue related to “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy of films, which have grossed nearly $ 3 billion at the global box office.
The estate of the late English author and HarperCollins, a division of News Corp., are asking for at least $ 80 million in damages.
Representatives for Warner Bros., Tolkien’s estate and HarperCollins were not immediately available for comment.
The lawsuit comes a week ahead of the New Zealand premiere of “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey,” the first of a new trilogy of films returning to Tolkien’s world of elves, goblins and wizards of Middle Earth, based on the “Lord of the Rings” prequel novel “The Hobbit.”
(Reporting By Eric Kelsey; Editing by Piya Sinha-Roy and Mohammad Zargham)
Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News
LONDON (Reuters) – A United Nations report said on Tuesday that eradicating AIDS was in sight, owing to better access to drugs that can both treat and prevent the incurable human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes the disease.
An aim to eventually end the worldwide AIDS epidemic is not “merely visionary” but “entirely feasible”, the report said.
Success in fighting the disease in the past decade has allowed the “foundation to be laid for the eventual end of AIDS” by cutting the death toll and helping stabilise the number of people infected in the pandemic, UNAIDS said its annual report.
Some 34 million people had HIV at the end of 2011.
Worldwide, the number of people newly infected with the disease, which can be transmitted via blood and by semen during sex, is falling. At 2.5 million, the number of new infections in 2011 was 20 percent lower than in 2001.
Deaths from AIDS fell to 1.7 million in 2011, down from a peak of 2.3 million in 2005 and from 1.8 million in 2010.
Sub-Saharan Africa is the most severely affected region with almost one in every 20 adults infected, nearly 25 times the rate in Asia, there are also almost 5 million people with HIV in South, South-East and East Asia combined.
“Although AIDS remains one of the world’s most serious health challenges, global solidarity in the AIDS response during the past decade continues to generate extraordinary health gains,” the report said.
It said this was due to “historic success” in bringing HIV programmes to scale, combined with the emergence of new combination drugs to prevent people from becoming HIV infected and from dying from AIDS.
Since 1995, AIDS drug treatment – known as antiretroviral therapy – has saved 14 million life-years in poorer countries, including 9 million in sub-Saharan Africa, the report said.
Some 8 million people were being treated with AIDS drugs by the end of 2011, a 20-fold increase since 2003. The U.N. has set a target to raise that to 15 million people by 2015.
Scientific studies published in recent years have shown that getting timely treatment to those with HIV can also cut the number of people who become newly infected with the virus.
UNAIDS said the sharpest declines in new HIV infections since 2001 were in the Caribbean and in sub-Saharan Africa – where new infections were down 25 percent in a decade.
Despite this, sub-Saharan Africa still accounted for 71 percent of people newly infected in 2011, underscoring the need to boost HIV prevention efforts in the region, UNAIDS said.
HIV trends are a concern in other regions also, it said.
Since 2001, the number of new HIV infections in the Middle East and North Africa was up more than 35 percent from 27,000 to 37,000, it said, and evidence suggests HIV infections in Eastern Europe and Central Asia began increasing in the late 2000s after being relatively stable for several years.
Medications/Drugs News Headlines – Yahoo! News
On Oct. 11, Jack Welch took the stage before a standing-room-only crowd at the North Ridge Country Club in Raleigh, N.C., and doubled down. “In order for the employment numbers to be where they were said to be, the economy would have to be operating at breakneck speed,” Welch, the former chief executive officer of General Electric (GE), said in defense of his widely derided Twitter message alluding to a partisan bias in a U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics report. The previous week he’d written: “Unbelievable jobs numbers..these Chicago guys will do anything..can’t debate so change numbers.” Welch looked out at the 400 executives attending the North Carolina CEO Forum. “Do you think the economy is operating at breakneck speed? All I’m trying to do is show this number is nonsense!”
“These people,” he went on, referring to the workers who conduct the employment survey, “they may have a soul Christ would be happy with, but do you really think they’re Romney supporters? Everyone has bias, and that influences what you do.”
Photo illustration by Justin Metz; Head: Peter Foley/Bloomberg; Body: Blend Images/Corbis; Couple: Abel Mitja Varela/Getty Images
Welch wore a dark suit and striped tie, and as he shared his conspiracy theory in exchange for his standard six-figure fee, he excitedly wiggled his 5-foot, 7-inch frame around in a red armchair on stage. But Welch, who just turned 77, wasn’t finished. “If I were president,” he declared, according to Lauren Ohnesorge of the Triangle Business Journal, who was present, “I would raise the retirement age!” And: “The trouble with government is, it has no competition—it is bloated beyond belief!”
In case it wasn’t clear, Welch “reviles” President Obama, as Welch’s interviewer, Ken Eudy, says. “Our event is actually nonpolitical,” says Rick Deckelbaum, one of the event’s organizers, chuckling a little. “Welch even joked that on the flight down to Raleigh his people told him not to talk about politics.”
Welch didn’t care. By all indications, he was soaking up the attention he’d generated using his social media bully pulpit. His suggestion that the Obama administration had fudged the employment report for political gain made headlines around the world—most of them negative. According to a person close to him, Welch was hurt by some of the mockery that rained down. The detractions ranged from calling Welch a “crazy-old-man-on-twitter” (Reuters’s (TRI) Felix Salmon) to a has-been who has “lost his game” (Fortune’s Allan Sloan). It was not the kind of attention he was used to—but it was still better than no attention at all.
On the North Carolina stage, Welch turned to Eudy, the public-relations executive and local Democrat who was questioning him: “Your party likes to divide,” Welch scolded. “I know about division—my daughters are out right now with Obama signs. … So we’ve chosen not to discuss the subject.” It was clear he relished his status as a free agent. “If I were still a CEO, I wouldn’t be saying all these controversial things.”
In conversations with friends, Welch calls himself retired, but retirement Jack Welch-style is very different than retirement for most business moguls. At one end of the spectrum is Bill Gates, who quit running Microsoft (MSFT) to battle malaria and poverty in the developing world; at the other are entrepreneurs who found wellness centers, ex-chiefs who bankroll the search for extraterrestrial life, and John McAfee, the antivirus software pioneer on the lam in Belize. In between are dozens of less colorful lives lived by corporate elder statesmen, such as former IBM (IBM) Chairman Lou Gerstner, who hold part-time consulting gigs or business school professorships. Since September 2001, when he left GE, Welch has forged his own, singular path, a sort of unretirement-as-reality-show cast by himself and his third wife, Suzy. Says Jimmy Lee, vice chairman of JPMorgan Chase (JPM) and Welch’s close friend and longtime business associate: “His agenda is being Jack.”
Welch left the corporate sector with more than $ 400 million and enjoys a gilded standard of living, flitting between his Manhattan apartment with skyline views and oceanside spreads on Nantucket and in North Palm Beach, Fla. “He plays golf, he enjoys that,” says Larry Bossidy, one of Welch’s lieutenants at GE and a former CEO of Honeywell (HON) who socializes with Welch. “But what keeps him vital and alive is his engagement in various activities. He’s not a guy who sits around and worries about things. He enjoys life in many dimensions.” Says Home Depot (HD) founder Ken Langone: “Jack has a chance now to be more of a free spirit.”
Welch declined to be interviewed for this article but has no shortage of opportunities to speak. In the last few weeks, Welch held forth at the Shale Gas Insight conference in Philadelphia and the World Business Forum in New York. After North Carolina, he went to Peru and Ecuador for the 2012 Business Decision Makers Program. He most recently appeared in Toronto at the Art of Management gathering on Nov. 20, where a $ 799 “platinum pass” granted guests access to an “exclusive cocktail reception” with Welch. In between, he’s grilled executives during the biannual operating reviews he leads for private equity firm Clayton, Dubilier & Rice (CD&R), and he and Suzy have entertained friends including Langone in Florida, where Suzy is learning to play golf. “I think Jack doesn’t want to be pigeonholed as the guy who ran GE,” says Bob Nardelli, once a contender to replace Welch at GE who went on to run Home Depot and Chrysler. “He loves GE, but he wants his impact to be bigger, broader, and more global than that.”
Jack’s WorldPhotos: Welch: Spencer Heyfron/Redux; Others: Bloomberg (5); Getty Images (4); Michael Indresano
To better wield his influence, Welch has cultivated a large audience through Twitter (1.4 million followers); on television (CNBC, NBC (CMCSA), CNN (TWX), Fox (NWS)); on the editorial page of his friend Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper (the Wall Street Journal); on the speaker’s circuit, where he commands at least $ 150,000 for a Q&A (he doesn’t do speeches); and through other channels. Much of his energy is devoted to weighing in on whatever subject interests him—from presidential politics to the Boston Red Sox. A verbatim sampling: “Daughters home so I am watching Bachelor. What a stupid awkward show. Maybe age is my problem” (March 14, 2011); “Congratulations to Piers Morgan on new baby !!!!!!!!!!!!!!” (Nov. 26, 2011); and “Solar plus wind.….energy independence..,,”BAD ARITHMATIC” (Sept. 6).
“Your yield curve crests the day you retire,” says Steve Miles, a leadership consultant and founder of the Miles Group. “The further you get from the CEO job, the more provocative you have to be to get attention.”
Welch’s ongoing argument for his own relevance draws upon his legendary business reputation. He was born in Peabody, Mass., the only child of Irish immigrants, with a father who worked as a train conductor and a famously tough mother. After earning a Ph.D. in chemical engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Welch joined GE’s plastics division in 1960. By the time he left 41 years later, he was credited with transforming the conglomerate into a lean and much more profitable company. At the peak of his influence, in 1999, Fortune named him “Manager of the Century.” That Welch’s methods could be crude and controversial—eliminating more than 100,000 jobs at GE, dumping waste into the Hudson River, and often keeping the financial operations of GE opaque—was mostly obscured by his ability to keep shareholders happy. Riding the bull market of the 1990s, he grew accustomed to worshipful press coverage. “CEOs were idolized,” says Bill George, a former CEO of Medtronic (MDT) who teaches at Harvard. “We were treated, frankly, as heroes, and Jack was right at the top of the list.”
The foundation for his next phase began before his departure from GE with a $ 10 million deal for his memoir, Jack: Straight from the Gut, one of the highest nonfiction advances ever. The book’s Sept. 11, 2001, publication had been planned as a sort of coronation to coincide with his retirement. After the terrorist attacks, sales didn’t meet expectations, although the book still became a bestseller. The month after its release, CD&R announced that Welch would be joining as a “special partner” to help analyze companies. Welch realizes that his role has changed. Donald Gogel, CEO of CD&R, recalls one company review Welch conducted that ended with the chief executive telling Welch that he’d go home and mull over his advice. Welch sat back in his chair and said: “ ‘What has become of me?’ ” according to Gogel. “ ‘I give all of my ideas, and people used to say, You’re right, Jack. And now they say, I’ll think about it?’ ”
Welch also obliged chief executives who wanted to bring him on as a consultant—a sort of CEO shrink. William Harrison, then the head of JPMorgan Chase, and Barry Diller, chairman of IAC/InterActive (IACI), signed up. “We call on him a lot,” Diller says. Bill Conaty, who served as GE’s head of human resources from 1993 until 2007 and is now an adviser with Welch at CD&R, says Welch never planned to retire in the conventional sense. “I know he hated the word ‘retirement.’ ”
Welch’s personal life underwent a complete transformation in October 2001, when Suzy Wetlaufer, the 42-year-old editor of the Harvard Business Review, came to his office to interview him. The encounter led to an affair, a scandal, a divorce, and a marriage. Welch’s split from Jane, his second wife, caused the public revelation of his lavish GE retirement contract. Chastened by the outcry, Welch offered to modify the contract to eliminate most of the continuing perks on the list, giving up free use of GE’s corporate jet and access to its Fenway Park skybox.
Welch’s new wife was photogenic and press savvy. It was Suzy, people close to the couple say, who pushed Welch to become more of a pop culture personality and embrace social media. The chairman emeritus of Corporate America was suddenly part of a celebrity partnership, Jack & Suzy. They moved into a townhouse in Boston’s Beacon Hill with Wetlaufer’s four children. “With his marriage to Suzy, he’s reinvented himself. Without her ignition, I don’t think he would be as productive,” says Warren Bennis, founding chairman of the Leadership Institute at the University of Southern California and a friend of Welch’s. “They’re co-leaders. She’s part of the energy behind that brand. Their relationship is a key to who he’s become.”
Their joint branding exercise included a book contract with HarperCollins to write Winning, a management guide, and a series of business advice columns, first for Businessweek from 2006 to 2009 and later for Reuters, which syndicated the series to Fortune. They were moves that seemed designed, in part, to bolster Suzy’s credentials, as she had to leave her Harvard Business Review job under a cloud after getting involved with her famous subject. The couple proved that not every brand spinoff is destined to succeed. In 2009 they tried their hand at reality TV. It’s Everybody’s Business with Jack & Suzy Welch was a takeoff on Donald Trump’s The Apprentice. Sponsored by Microsoft, the show featured the Welches doling out business advice to executives from a real company. An episode appeared on MSN.com and later on CNBC, but no more were produced.
Welch’s unretirement took another surprising turn when he was approached by Michael Clifford, an online education entrepreneur, with the idea of launching an Internet-based business school. Clifford was interested in taking the traditional business school model and creating something “more current,” as he put it, and “less controlled by academics who had never run a company.” The Welches invested $ 2 million alongside Clifford and others in the Jack Welch Management Institute, established as part of Chancellor University, a struggling for-profit college in Cleveland. Clifford describes Jack and Suzy as “totally focused and totally passionate” about the startup. “Suzy was the ball bearing that made it happen,” he says.
“Great day working on Jack Welch MBA curriculum + finalizing staffing,” Welch wrote on Twitter on June 30, 2009, as the school was preparing to launch. And then: “Blew out back today.” On July 5, 2009, Welch was admitted to New York-Presbyterian Hospital with discitis, a serious spinal infection that he attributed to the cortisone shot he’d taken for his back. He spent 92 days in the hospital, an ordeal that both he and his wife documented in real time. Once he was past the worst of it, Suzy tweeted: “That sound you hear is me exhaling for the first time in 22 days.”
Welch returned home diminished and frail. Despite the setback, the Jack Welch Management Institute opened in January 2010, one semester later than planned. In April that year, Bloomberg News reported that Chancellor and other for-profit colleges had been recruiting students from homeless shelters and registering them so they could obtain federal student loans, which formed the bulk of the schools’ revenue. Congressional hearings on the merits of for-profit higher education followed. Welch moved his institute to a larger, publicly traded for-profit college with a better reputation called Strayer University, in Herndon, Va. Strayer agreed to pay $ 7 million to Chancellor to buy the Jack Welch Management Institute, with 40 percent of the funds contributed by Welch. Strayer also entered a licensing agreement with Welch and agreed to pay him a royalty for use of the curriculum he and Suzy had designed. Welch’s name is a major selling point for the school, which targets midlevel executives willing to pony up $ 30,960 for 12 courses leading to an executive MBA. The institute has yet to turn a profit, but Welch has said he hopes it will one day produce more graduates than Harvard Business School. (Strayer declines to give specific numbers, but says several hundred are currently enrolled.) “Jack’s videos bring the curriculum to life,” reads the school’s promotional copy. “Additionally, all executive MBA and certificate students now have the opportunity to speak with Jack directly through a live video conference at the end of each term.”
In his video addresses, Welch riffs on topics of the day and applies them to the business world. In one featured spot, he discusses WikiLeaks: “As you go to business … err on the side of transparency internally,” he declares, “but make it clear to everybody who works in your unit that trade secrets are trade secrets!”
At the same time, the company where the Welch legend began has been suffering. The soaring GE stock price that turned Welch into a star has since fallen to $ 20, one-third its high in August 2000. GE Capital, the finance unit that Welch made an earnings powerhouse, had a near-death experience during the financial crisis and was forced to turn to Warren Buffett for a $ 3 billion bailout. GE’s uncanny ability to deliver steady earnings growth became less a sign of Welch’s genius than his knack for moving money around and drawing on a richly funded pension plan. Some of the most famous Welch management edicts—from cutting the bottom 10 percent of the workforce to being No. 1 or No. 2 in every business—turned out to be as elusive a practice within GE as in the rest of the world. To some, the so-called Welch Way didn’t just seem silly but wrong.
The analysis of Welch’s accomplishments splintered into two camps: his fans who still regard him as the business world’s General Patton—“His wisdom and his experience are second to none,” says former Campbell Soup (CPB) CEO Doug Conant—and those more critical of the imprint he left. “You can’t evaluate a CEO’s legacy in the time he was CEO. You have to look at what was laid at the successor’s feet,” says Thomas O’Boyle, author of At Any Cost: Jack Welch, General Electric, and the Pursuit of Profit. “And on that criteria, the market cap is less than half of what it was when he left. Doesn’t that somehow count toward the consideration of what he did while he was CEO?”
There’s no shortage of old CEOs with expertise, nor, for that matter, of old CEOs with books to flog and speaking agents. None, though, has managed to turn the revelation of his expertise into an event quite like Jack Welch has. When he plays his greatest management hits for audiences around the world—“Sense early, move fast, and energize your people!”—he’s doing more than cashing a check. He’s advancing the syllogism at the heart of his post-GE success: Jack Welch was a great manager; I want to be a great manager; if I listen to Jack Welch, I, too, will be a great manager.
True or not, it’s hard to argue with the crowds. Ten thousand Chinese manufacturing representatives came to see a man who doesn’t speak a word of Mandarin in September 2011. In 2013 he’s already booked in Atlanta, Finland, and China again. The Twitter incident doesn’t appear to have harmed his appeal; on the contrary, it’s gained him followers. “When he tweeted, that was almost more of a Donald Trump move,” says Gary Koops, a managing director of Burson-Marsteller, the global PR firm. “An entire generation of MBA students and aspiring leaders still want to hear from Jack Welch. What strikes me is that he’s still viewed as a significant figure that people pay attention to.”
That’s because he’s as much a professional personality now as he ever was a CEO—a profile he and Suzy are managing as deliberately as he ever did a GE earnings presentation. The irony is that the Chinese manufacturing students could study his every tweet, audit every Jack Welch Management Institute class, and trail Welch on the speaker’s circuit for all his remaining days without mastering the secret of his retirement act. That’s because it’s not replicable.
Businessweek.com — Top News
TORONTO (Reuters) – Any fiscal problems that would significantly slow the U.S. economy would be of great concern to Canada, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said on Monday.
The United States needed a credible medium-term fiscal plan, Harper said at a business forum in Ottawa, adding that he was following the U.S. fiscal debate with “great interest.”
(Reporting by Solarina Ho)
Canada News Headlines – Yahoo! News
NEW YORK (Reuters) – A New York City police officer pleaded not guilty on Monday to conspiring to kidnap, torture, cook and eat women.
Gilberto Valle, 28, of Forest Hills, Queens, was charged and arrested in October with conspiring to cross state lines to kidnap the women and with illegally accessing a federal database.
Prosecutors said some of the women were acquaintances of Valle but it was not clear if he knew or had met all of them. Valle, who an official said had no prior criminal record, was not charged with carrying out any of his suspected plans.
At a brief hearing Monday in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, Valle’s attorney, Julia Gatto, told the judge she would again seek to have her client freed on bail after two other judges previously denied her request.
Investigators uncovered a file on Valle’s computer containing the names and pictures of at least 100 women, and the addresses and physical descriptions of some of them, according to the criminal complaint. It said he had undertaken surveillance of some of the women at their places of employment and their homes.
Gatto argues that Valle, a 6-1/2 year NYPD veteran, was all talk and should be released on bail.
The charges carry a maximum sentence of life in prison.
The case is U.S. v. Gilberto Valle, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, No. 12-cr-847.
(Reporting by Basil Katz; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)
Internet News Headlines – Yahoo! News
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Making a movie about Elizabeth Taylor takes courage. Casting wayward starlet Lindsay Lohan as the Hollywood screen legend was both daring and asking for trouble.
And indeed, trouble is what producers got during the shooting of Lifetime TV movie “Liz & Dick” – but they say the payoff made it all worthwhile.
“Let’s say that producing a movie with Lindsay Lohan is not for the faint of heart,” said executive producer Larry Thompson. “I turned 50 shades of white during production…But the risk was worth the rewards; the pain was worth the pleasure.”
“Liz & Dick,” which premieres on November 25, recounts the scandalous and tumultuous romance between Taylor and British actor Richard Burton in the 1960s and 70s. Lohan is one of the few people ever to have portrayed the diamond-loving, larger-than-life, two-time best actress Oscar winner on screen.
The idea was irresistible. Who better than Lohan, 26, a former child star herself, would know the pressures of having her every move scrutinized by the media, the allure of drink and drugs, and the thrills and risks of living life on the edge?
“I think Lindsay Lohan…literally knows no boundaries and that becomes dangerous and exciting. And she has the ability to bring to the screen and her performance that danger, that raw emotion,” Thompson told reporters ahead of the premiere.
“If you are going to make a movie about Taylor, you damn well want some great magic. And we felt that Lindsay Lohan could bring that.”
Some reviews for “Liz & Dick” have been savage. The Hollywood Reporter called Lohan “woeful as Taylor from start to finish” and the TV movie “an instant classic of unintentional hilarity.” Variety was kinder, calling Lohan “adequate” and the film “hammy” but “pretty good, all things considered.” Both noted casting Lohan was a sound publicity move.
Thompson however is proud of the 90-minute TV film. “I think people will see (New Zealand actor) Grant Bowler as Richard Burton just steals your heart, and Lindsay Lohan breaks it.”
PAGES OF ‘WHAT IFS’
After five years of legal troubles, numerous trips to jail, rehab, and courtrooms, the “Mean Girls” star was looking for a project that could re-establish the credentials that had once made her among the most promising young actresses in Hollywood.
But her past brought problems with insurance for the movie, shooting schedules and the personal setbacks Lohan faced during the making of the TV film earlier this year.
Thompson said the deal with Lohan included “pages and pages of ‘what if’ clauses. What if there is a car accident? What if there is a violation of probation and she would be incarcerated? She might be the most insured actress to ever walk on a soundstage.”
The clauses were needed. During shooting, Lohan was involved in a serious car crash in the California beach city of Santa Monica, and on a separate occasion she was rushed to the hospital suffering from what as described as “exhaustion and dehydration.”
And just as Taylor and Burton were hounded by (and sometimes courted) the media during their highly public extra-marital affair, Lohan and the production staff had the paparazzi to deal with.
“There were paparazzi following us around, hanging out of trees every day. And while we were making a movie about Elizabeth Taylor being followed by paparazzi, we had real paparazzi following our paparazzi following Elizabeth Taylor. So it was life imitating art, art imitating life,” said Thompson.
Thompson acknowledged that fans of Taylor, who died in 2011 at age 79 after eight marriages – two of them to Burton – will believe there is no actress who could possibly play her. Burton died in 1984 at the age of 58.
Yet Lifetime chose Lohan also in the hope she would bring a younger generation of her own fans to the movie.
“A lot of young people today think Liz Taylor is an old woman sitting in a wheelchair next to Michael Jackson, whereas our movie is about the young, vibrant, highest-paid movie star in the world at the height of her beauty and power,” Thompson said.
As for whether he would work again with Lohan despite the challenging shoot?
“Sure,” Thompson said.
(Reporting by Jill Serjeant; Editing by Christine Kearney and Lisa Shumaker)
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