New Crowdfunding Site Seeks to Protect Backers of Industrial Design

Entrepreneur Jamie Siminoff wants to build more credibility into crowdfunding — so he’s launching a new platform that takes responsibility for ensuring the viability of new projects.

The crowdfunding process, pioneered by sites like Kickstarter, has had its share of huge successes, as well as failures. The problem, says Siminoff, is that when a venture fails, the funders are left holding the bag. That’s all well and good if you were investing in an artist’s crazy project. It’s much more of a problem if you thought you were pre-ordering a nearly finished gadget.

The biggest culprit for these kinds of issues are physical products. Witness the anger unleashed when Kickstarter darling Pebble announced a further delay alongside underwhelming color choices.

This kind of issue is why Kickstarter recently made some changes, undertaking a combination of education and rule revision. They reminded consumers that Kickstarter is not a store while requiring that all projects disclose risks and challenges, as well as forbidding renderings and concept videos in hardware products.

Siminoff’s answer is Christie Street, a crowdfunding site devoted exclusively to physical products. The promise of Christie Street is that it will vet the projects that it launches carefully, and provide guarantees of progress along the way. The idea is that these protections will make consumers feel safer about the products they’re backing. “We built something that we felt we needed,” he says.

Christie Street, named for the New Jersey road where Edison’s workshop was located, will require that all funders go through an auditing process before they are allowed to go live. Siminoff says that the idea will be to check for basic viability, a kind of sanity test.

“You look at the chips they say they want to use, the size of components that will need to fit in, and so on,” he says, “You check that things conform to what’s available on the market.” From there, they also perform third-party audits of the places where the product will be manufactured, and look at things like production cost and likely shipping time, to ensure that all of this seems realistic.

It’s an all-or-nothing audit. Either the new project meets Christie Street’s approval or it doesn’t. “Our feeling is that the customer that’s buying doesn’t have the sophistication to make the right decision [about whether a design's production targets are reliable],” says Siminoff, “The only way is create a place where you can trust to buy.”

Even after the initial approval, Christie Street stays involved in the project. Successfully funded projects get their money in stages, with Christie Street holding the rest in escrow. Inventors get one-third of the money on funding, one-third of the money once they have a production-ready prototype, and the final one-third when they have a golden prototype, which means they are ready for full manufacturing.

If at any time along the way the project fails, Christie Street will can the project and refund the remaining money to investors.

What constitutes failure? Siminoff ticks off four conditions.

First, the inventor could for whatever reason announce that they couldn’t finish.

Second, if the project ends up more than six months late. “This forces people to be more careful with their delivery dates,” says Siminoff.

Third, if the product falls short of what was promised. “If the pre-production sample is more than 15 percent worse than what was promised, we will not allowed you to manufacture the product,” says Siminoff. (For example, if you promised me 512GB and only delivered 256.)

Last, says Siminoff there are other nuances that they’ll have to work out as the site develops. For example, if a product ends up requiring significant redesign, then Christie Street might end up withholding funds. “Design is a tougher one to quantify,” he says, “but it’s important that the design overall fits what was promised to the customer.”

For the extra cautious, Christie Street goes even further than the refund of remaining money. For 10 percent of their pledge value, backers can insure their entire pledge. If the project goes wrong they’ll get all of it back. Combine that with a pledge from inventors that the product will retail for at least 10 percent more than the pledge amount, and you can either take a 10 percent discount for some additional risk or pay full retail, with a money-back guarantee.

In effect, Christie Street is navigating a space between crowfunding sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo, which expect backers to handle a lot of their own due diligence while allowing the inventors to be entrepreneurs, and crowdsourcing design sites like Quirky, which handles all of the business elements in-house.

Christie Street is an effort at drawing the lines of trust in a new way, one tied directly to the realities of post-industrial product design. Rather than a blanket ban on renderings and early designs, or a Wild West ‘anything goes’ approach, they instead seeks to tame the parts where production can go really wrong, in the devilish details of prototyping and manufacturing. It leaves questions of whether or not the thing is cool to the wisdom of the crowds, while taking on the question of whether or not the thing is possible.

This is obviously a lot more intervention between middleman and inventor than you’d see on a site like Indigegogo or Kickstarter. Siminoff says that they can still take the same 5 percent cut as their competitors because physical products tend to be involved higher dollar-value projects from the start. “If all goes well, we’ll be doing 10 to 15 live projects a months a year from now,” he says, “We think we can be profitable in the product world.”

“We’re not trying to make it where inventors are just be a name on a product,” says Siminoff, “We still want them to be entrepreneur and build this thing. We just want to make sure that they don’t fail in a way that hurts the customer.”

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New Whitney Houston book recalls singer’s musical magic

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – A new book on Whitney Houston by her early producer seeks to tell the story of the rise to stardom of the pop diva who died nine months ago.

Emmy and Grammy-winning producer Narada Michael Walden, who produced many of Houston‘s early hits, like “How Will I Know” and “I Wanna Dance With Somebody,” appeared at the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles on Wednesday to discuss the book and perform some of the songs he collaborated on.

“Her death was so shocking and sudden that I wanted to create something to keep alive the beautiful aspects of her life. The media was lashing out on the addiction and ignoring her musical genius,” Walden told Reuters.

Since she drowned in a bathtub on February 11 after taking cocaine, Houston‘s music and life have generated a TV tribute with Jennifer Hudson, Usher and others, a greatest hits CD, a coffee table book of photos and a TV reality show starring family members.

Walden’s book “Whitney Houston: The Voice, the Music, the Inspiration,” co-written with Richard Buskin, describes how Walden first met the singer when she was 13 and accompanied her mother to the studio. Walden was working on a record with her mom, soul and gospel singer Cissy Houston.

Walden said he all but forgot the young pretty girl until he got a call from Arista records in 1984, while working on an Aretha Franklin record, and was told to “make the time” to work on Houston‘s debut album.

Walden said Janet Jackson‘s management turned down the chance to record “How Will I Know” and that he rewrote it to make it catchier for Houston, who with her five-octave vocal range, recorded the 1985 No.1 song in only one take.

“The first take was the keeper. Instead of laboring on it for the better part of a day or even longer, we were done in a matter of minutes,” he said, noting Houston always worked fast.

Walden, who also produced for Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder and Barbra Streisand, collaborated with Houston on “So Emotional,” “One Moment in Time” and “I’m Every Woman” from the film, “The Bodyguard.”

Walden and Houston went in different directions by the late 1990s, but he would see her at the annual pre-Grammy party hosted by her long-time mentor, record industry mogul Clive Davis.

At the 2011 Davis party, Houston sat with her daughter, Bobbi Kristina – then 17 – who exclaimed she wanted to sing and work with Walden. “But Whitney gave me a look that said ‘Slow down. I’ve been down that road….and I’m not sure I want to curse her with that’,” he said.

Walden said he would now welcome the opportunity to work with Houston‘s daughter, who has become a fixture of gossip blogs and tabloids.

“If she wants to, I’d love to produce her and keep alive the professional image of her mother and focus on the positive,” he said.

(Reporting By Susan Zeidler, editing by Jill Serjeant and Andrew Hay)

Music News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Doping at U.S. Tracks Affects Europe’s Taste for Horse Meat

PARIS — For decades, American horses, many of them retired or damaged racehorses, have been shipped to Canada and Mexico, where it is legal to slaughter horses, and then processed and sold for consumption in Europe and beyond.

Christinne Muschi for The New York Times

A slaughterhouse in Saint-André-Avellin, Quebec, where meat is processed for sale in Europe.

Lately, however, European food safety officials have notified Mexican and Canadian slaughterhouses of a growing concern: The meat of American racehorses may be too toxic to eat safely because the horses have been injected repeatedly with drugs.

Despite the fact that racehorses make up only a fraction of the trade in horse meat, the European officials have indicated that they may nonetheless require lifetime medication records for slaughter-bound horses from Canada and Mexico, and perhaps require them to be held on feedlots or some other holding area for six months before they are slaughtered.

In October, Stephan Giguere, the general manager of a major slaughterhouse in Quebec, said he turned away truckloads of horses coming from the United States because his clients were worried about potential drug issues. Mr. Giguere said he told his buyers to stay away from horses coming from American racetracks.

“We don’t want them,” he said. “It’s too risky.”

The action is just the latest indication of the troubled state of American racing and its problems with the doping of horses. Some prominent trainers have been disciplined for using legal and illegal drugs, and horses loaded with painkillers have been breaking down in arresting numbers. Congress has called for reform, and state regulators have begun imposing stricter rules.

But for pure emotional effect, the alarm raised in the international horse-meat marketplace packs a distinctive punch.

Some 138,000 horses were sent to Canada or Mexico in 2010 alone to be turned into meat for Europe and other parts of the world, according to a Government Accountability Office report. Organizations concerned about the welfare of retired racehorses have estimated that anywhere from 10 to 15 percent of the population sent for slaughter may have performed on racetracks in the United States.

“Racehorses are walking pharmacies,” said Dr. Nicholas Dodman, a veterinarian on the faculty of Tufts University and a co-author of a 2010 article that sought to raise concerns about the health risks posed by American racehorses. He said it was reckless to want any of the drugs routinely administered to horses “in your food chain.”

Horses being shipped to Mexico and Canada are by law required to have been free of certain drugs for six months before being slaughtered, and those involved in their shipping must have affidavits proving that. But European Commission officials say the affidavits are easily falsified. As a result, American racehorses often show up in Canada within weeks — sometimes days — of their leaving the racetrack and their steady diets of drugs.

In October, the European Commission’s Directorate General for Health and Consumers found serious problems while auditing the operations of equine slaughter facilities in Mexico, where 80 percent of the horses arrive from the United States. The commission’s report said Mexican officials were not allowed to question the “authenticity or reliability of the sworn statements” about the ostensibly drug-free horses, and thus had no way of verifying whether the horses were tainted by drugs.

“The systems in place for identification, the food-chain information and in particular the affidavits concerning the nontreatment for six months with certain medical substances, both for the horses imported from the U.S. as well as for the Mexican horses, are insufficient to guarantee that standards equivalent to those provided for by E.U. legislation are applied,” the report said.

The authorities in the United States and Canada acknowledge that oversight of the slaughter business is lax. On July 9, the United States Food and Drug Administration sent a warning letter to an Ohio feedlot operator who sells horses for slaughter. The operator, Ronald Andio, was reprimanded for selling a drug-tainted thoroughbred horse to a Canadian slaughterhouse.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency had tested the carcass of the horse the previous August and found the anti-inflammatory drug phenylbutazone in the muscle and kidney tissues. It also discovered clenbuterol, a widely abused medication for breathing problems that can build muscle by mimicking anabolic steroids.

Because horses are not a traditional food source in the United States, the Food and Drug Administration does not require human food safety information as it considers what drugs can be used legally on horses. Patricia El-Hinnawy, a spokeswoman for the agency, said agency-approved drugs intended for use in horses carried the warning “Do not use in horses intended for human consumption.”

She also said the case against Mr. Andio remained open.

“On the warning letter, the case remains open and no further information can be provided at this time,” Ms. El-Hinnawy said.

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U.S. now hindered by distance it kept on Syria conflict

WASHINGTON — With the Syrian civil war apparently near a turning point, Obama administration officials are finding their ability to influence the fast-moving events and growing violence hampered by their reluctance to become too deeply involved during the first 21 months of the conflict.

As the opposition has scored major gains against the regime of President Bashar Assad in recent days, U.S. officials have stepped up diplomatic efforts and begun weighing whether to start providing arms or other military assistance to the rebels.

But at a moment when the future of the strategically key nation may be up for grabs, Washington's power is limited by its weak ties to rebel field commanders who will have a major say in what comes next if Assad is toppled, say diplomats, opposition officials and regional experts.

"We don't have a presence on the ground and we haven't given assistance in any measure to these people," said James Jeffrey, a veteran U.S. diplomat who retired last summer after a final posting as U.S. ambassador to Iraq. "This is going to have an impact on our influence ... and it didn't have to be this way."

Though the administration has provided diplomatic pressure, humanitarian relief and nonlethal aid, it has been unwilling to supply arms or to use U.S. military force to set up a no-fly zone, as it did in the Libyan civil war last year. Officials fear that weapons would end up in the hands of extremists, and they want to limit U.S. military involvement at a time when Americans are war-weary and world powers and Arab states are divided on the conflict.

But it has become clear that, as they plan their approach to the next stage of the war, U.S. officials will have to try to overcome the unhappiness of rebel commanders who don't understand America's unwillingness to provide the military help it gave Libyan rebels last year.

The stakes are high. If the regime falls — by no means a certainty — the United States and its allies will want to move quickly to try to steer Syria toward a moderate, multiethnic government and away from a sectarian bloodbath. U.S. officials and allies are now busy formulating plans to help Syrians form a new government.

The number of extremist fighters in groups such as the Al Qaeda-linked Al Nusra Front has been rising, and if those groups take control of a new government, the geopolitical landscape of the region could change overnight in dangerous ways. Obama, who has been criticized by conservatives for failing to do more in Syria, could face accusations that his policy of limited engagement "lost" Syria.

The issue came up in the presidential campaign, with Republican challenger Mitt Romney saying he would supply arms to the Syrian opposition and Obama advocating a more cautious approach.

"We can't simply suggest that giving heavy weapons to the Syrians is a simple proposition that would lead us to be safer over the long term," the president said in the final debate of the campaign.

The rebel commanders' frustration with the United States has been apparent in recent weeks, in demonstrations that in some cases have shown up on YouTube.

One video shows a Nov. 30 demonstration in the village of Binish in which rebel fighters brandish their weapons and declare that they are fighting to create an Islamist Syria that would not be led by a Western-backed coalition of opposition groups, the newly formed National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces.

"We will not leave the revolution to the coalition that is a game in the hand of America and serves the American project," one of the fighters says in Arabic. "Oh, Obama, listen and listen!"

Though his views may be more radical than those of most opposition fighters, there is widespread unhappiness that America has not done more.

"Syrians have been looking for U.S. leadership, but unfortunately the United States has chosen not to get involved and people here have gotten more and more upset," said Khalid Saleh, an executive board member of the Syrian National Council opposition bloc and a representative to the new coalition. He said he believes the United States could still take a lead role, but he has not seen signs that the administration wants to do so.

He noted that whereas France and Britain have recognized the new coalition as the legitimate government-in-waiting in Syria, the United States has been reluctant to do the same — a sign, in his view, that Washington still wants others to lead the way. U.S. officials are expected to formally recognize the group Wednesday at an international meeting on Syria in Marrakech, Morocco.

Dan Layman, an official with the Syrian Support Group, a Washington-based organization that sends nonlethal supplies to the opposition, said he understands the U.S. reluctance to send arms that could end up in the hands of extremists. But he said some Syrian commanders have complained that they have felt compelled to affiliate themselves with militant groups because those groups have access to weapons that are not being supplied by the West.

"We're concerned that some of these commanders may be moving to the wrong side of the street out of necessity," said Layman, whose group is licensed by the U.S. government and funded mostly by Syrian Americans.

U.S. officials have limited their ties to the rebels since the beginning of the conflict, when they urged demonstrators not to turn to arms.

Though they are in regular contact with military councils — provincial bodies that try to coordinate the patchwork of militias — relationships are not strong with individual groups, said Andrew Tabler, a leading Syria expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. The United States could have built a valuable relationship, for example, with Al Farouq brigade, a nationalist but mainline group, he said.

Though the new coalition has been praised in the West for its inclusiveness and leadership, diplomats acknowledge that it's not clear whether the umbrella group would be strong enough to issue orders to the militias that could hold the most power in a post-Assad Syria.

One unsettling possibility is that Syria could be filled with militias that retain their weapons, as in postrevolutionary Libya, but without goodwill toward the United States or loyalty to a transitional government.

"You could have dozens of militias, battle-tested and brimming with weapons, that don't necessarily consider the authorities in Damascus to be sovereign," said David Schenker, a Pentagon official in the George W. Bush administration who is now with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

paul.richter@latimes.com

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Feds Charge Anonymous Spokesperson for Sharing Hacked Stratfor Credit Cards

A Dallas grand jury has brought charges against Anonymous spokesman Barrett Brown stemming from the 2011 hack of intelligence vendor Stratfor Global Intelligence.

Brown isn’t charged with committing the hack; just with possessing and transmitting credit card numbers that were stolen in the incident.

He has been in prison since he was arrested in dramatic and public fashion three months ago after posting a threatening video to YouTube. Brown was talking with acquaintances during a Sept. 12 TinyChat session when the feds burst in and took him away. The chat session was later posted to the internet.

The Anonymous spokesman was charged the next day with threatening a federal officer.

This time the charges are are related to a different incident: the 2011 Stratfor hack where credit card numbers and internal e-mail messages were stolen.

According to the grand jury indictment, dated Tuesday, Brown posted a link to a zipped version of the documents stolen in the Stratfor hack on Christmas day 2011 — that counts as trafficking in “stolen authentication features,” the indictment claims. He’s also charged with possessing stolen credit card numbers, Card Verification Values, and other information related to those credit card numbers.

Brown, 31, has been in custody since his Sept. 12 arrest, the U.S. Department of Justice said Friday in a press release announcing the 12-count indictment. He could face a maximum of 15 years in prison if convicted on the most serious of these charges.

The self-proclaimed Anonymous spokesman said he was expecting to face fraud charges after his apartment was raided back in March. He mentioned them in a long, rambling video posted to YouTube the day on the same day he was arrested in September. “I bring in no money. I have $25,000 I brought in the last year from this fucking book deal. that’s it.” he said. “A fucking fraud charge for a fucking writer activist who has no fucking money.”

Later in the video, Brown railed against FBI Agent Robert Smith, saying that he was going to “ruin” Smith’s life “and look into his fucking kids.” The Anonymous activist said he was angry that feds were contemplating obstruction of justice charges against his mother.

The indictment is below.

Gov.uscourts.txnd.226354.1.0

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Viral rapper PSY apologizes for anti-US protests

South Korean rapper and Internet sensation PSY is apologizing to Americans for participating in anti-U.S. protests several years ago.

Park Jae-sang, who performs as PSY, issued a statement Friday after reports surfaced that he had participated in concerts protesting the U.S. military presence in South Korea during the early stages of the Iraq war.

At a 2004 concert, the “Gangnam Style” rapper performs a song with lyrics about killing “Yankees” who have been torturing Iraqi captives and their families “slowly and painfully.” In another protest, he smashed a model of a U.S. tank on stage.

“While I’m grateful for the freedom to express one’s self, I’ve learned there are limits to what language is appropriate and I’m deeply sorry for how these lyrics could be interpreted,” he wrote in the statement. “I will forever be sorry for any pain I have caused by those words.”

The 34-year-old rapper says the protests were part of a “deeply emotional” reaction to the war and the death of two Korean school girls, who were killed when a U.S. military vehicle hit them as they walked alongside the road. He noted antiwar sentiment was high around the world at the time.

PSY attended college in the U.S. and says he understands the sacrifices U.S. military members have made to protect South Korea and other nations. He has recently performed in front of servicemen and women.

“And I hope they and all Americans can accept my apology,” he wrote. “While it’s important that we express our opinions, I deeply regret the inflammatory and inappropriate language I used to do so. In my music, I try to give people a release, a reason to smile. I have learned that thru music, our universal language we can all come together as a culture of humanity and I hope that you will accept my apology.”

His participation in the protests was no secret in South Korea, where the U.S. has had a large military presence since the Korean War, but was not generally known in America until recent news reports.

PSY did not write “Dear American,” a song by The N.E.X.T., but he does perform it. The song exhorts the listener to kill the Yankees who are torturing Iraqi captives, their superiors who ordered the torture and their families. At one point he raps: “Kill their daughters, mothers, daughters-in-law, and fathers/Kill them all slowly and painfully.”

PSY launched to international acclaim based on the viral nature of his “Gangnam Style” video. It became YouTube’s most watched video, making him a millionaire who freely crossed cultural boundaries around the world. Much of that success has happened in the U.S., where the rapper has managed to weave himself into pop culture.

He recently appeared on the American Music Awards, dancing alongside MC Hammer in a melding of memorable dance moves that book-end the last two decades. And the Internet is awash with copycat versions of the song. Even former Republican Sen. Alan Simpson, the 81-year-old co-chairman of President Barack Obama‘s deficit commission, got in on the fun, recently using the song in a video to urge young Americans to avoid credit card debt.

It remains to be seen how PSY’s American fans will react. Obama, the father of two pop music fans, wasn’t letting the news change his plans, though.

Earlier Friday, the White House confirmed Obama and his family will attend a Dec. 21 charity concert where PSY is among the performers. A spokesman says it’s customary for the president to attend the “Christmas in Washington” concert, which will be broadcast on TNT. The White House has no role in choosing performers for the event, which benefits the National Children’s Medical Center.

Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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The New Old Age Blog: A Son Lost, a Mother Found

My friend Yvonne was already at the front door when I woke, so at first I didn’t realize that my mother was missing.

It was less than a week after my son Spencer died. Since that day, a constant stream of friends had been coming and going, bringing casseroles and soup, love, support and chatter. Mom hated it.

My 94-year-old mother, who has vascular dementia, has been living in my home in upstate New York for the past few years. Like many with dementia, mom is courteous but, underneath, irascible. Pride defines her, especially pride in her Phi Beta Kappa intellect. She hates to be confronted with how she has become, as she calls it, “stupid.”

The parade of strangers confused her. She had to be polite, field solicitous questions, endure mundane comments. She could not remember what was going on or why people were there. It must have been stressful and annoying.

That night, like every night since the state troopers brought the news, I woke hourly, tumbling in panic. As if it were not too late to save my son. Mom knew something was wrong, but she could not remember what. As I overslept that morning, she must have decided enough was enough. She was going home.

In a cold sky, the sun blazed over tall pines. As I opened the door, the dogs raced out to greet Yvonne and her two housecleaners. Yvonne often brags about her cleaning duo. They were her gift to me. They were going to clean my house before the funeral reception, which was scheduled for later that week. This was a very big gift because, like my mother before me, I am a very bad housekeeper.

Mom’s door was shut. I cautioned the housecleaners to avoid her room as I showed them around. Yvonne went to the kitchen to listen to the 37 unheard messages on my answering machine; the housecleaners went out to their van to get their instruments of dirt removal.

I ducked into Mom’s room to warn her about the upcoming noise. The bed was unmade; the floor was littered with crumpled tissues; the room was empty.

Normally, I would have freaked out right then. I knew Mom was not in the house, because I had just shown the whole house to the cleaners. Although Mom doesn’t wander like some dementia patients, she does on occasion run away. But I could not muster a shred of anxiety.

“Yvonne,” I called, “did you see my mother outside?”

Yvonne popped her head into the living room, eyebrows raised.“Outside? No!” She was alarmed. “Is she missing?”

“Yeah,” I said wearily, “I’ll look.” I stepped out onto the front porch, tightening the belt of my bathrobe and turning up the collar. Maybe she had walked off into the woods. The dogs danced around my legs, wanting breakfast.

I had no space left in my body to care. Either we would find her, or we would not. Either she was alive, or she was not. My child was gone. How could I care about anything ever again?

Then I saw my car was missing. My mouth fell open and my eyeballs rolled up to the right, gazing blindly at the abandoned bird’s nest on top of the porch light: What had I done with the keys?

Mom likes to run away in the car when she is angry. She used to do it a lot when my father was still alive — every time they fought. Since Mom took off in my car almost a year ago, after we had had a fight, I’d kept the keys hidden. Except for this week; this week, I had forgotten.

I was reverting to old habits. I had left the doors unlocked and the keys in the cupholder next to the driver’s seat. Exactly like Mom used to do.

“Uh-oh,” I said aloud. Mom was still capable of driving, even though she did not know where she was going. I just really, really hoped that she didn’t hurt anybody on the road. I pulled out my cellphone, about to call the police.

“Celia!” Yvonne shouted from the kitchen. She hurried up behind me, excited. “They found your mother. There are two messages on your machine.”

At that very moment, Mom was holed up at the College Diner in New Paltz, a 20-minute drive over the mountain, through the fields, left over the Wallkill River and away down Main Street.

Yvonne called the diner. They promised to keep the car keys until someone arrived. By that time, Yvonne had to go to work. She drove my friend Elizabeth to the diner, and Elizabeth drove Mom home in my car.

Half an hour later, they walked in the front door. Mom’s cheeks were rouged by the chill air and her eyes sparkled, her white hair riffing with static electricity. “Hello, hello,” she sang out. “Here we are.” She was wearing the flannel nightgown and robe I had dressed her in the night before. It was covered by her oversized purple parka, and her bare feet were shoved into sneakers.

I started laughing as soon as I saw her. I couldn’t help it. Elizabeth and Mom started laughing too. “You had a big adventure,” I said, hugging them both. “How are you?”

“I’m just marvelous,” said my mother. Mom always feels great after doing something rakish. We settled her on the sofa with her feet on the ottoman. By the time I got her blanket tucked in around her shoulders, she had fallen asleep.

Elizabeth couldn’t stop laughing as she described the scene. “Your mother was holding court in this big booth. She was sitting there in her nightgown and her parka, talking to everybody, with this plate of toast and coffee and, like, three of the staff hovering around her.”

The waitress said Mom seemed “a little disoriented” when she got there. Mom said she was meeting a friend for breakfast, but since she was wearing a nightgown and didn’t know whom she was meeting or where she lived, the staff thought there might be a problem. They convinced Mom to let them look in the glove compartment of the car, where they found my name and number.

It was then that I realized I was laughing – something I’d thought I would never be able to do again. “Elizabeth, Elizabeth, I’m laughing,” I said.

“Ha, ha, ha,” laughed Elizabeth, holding her belly.

“Ha, ha, ha,” I laughed, rolling on the floor.

And she who gave me life, who had suffered the death of my child and the extinction of her own intellect, snoozed on: oblivious, jubilant, still herself, still mine.

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Off the Charts: European Banks Thriving as Investor Fears Ease

THE European bank crisis was one of the major worries of 2012. There were forecasts that the euro zone would break up, that various countries would default on their debts and that undercapitalized banks would fail because national governments could not afford to keep them alive.

The bank crisis is not yet resolved, but it “appears to have been put on the back burner of investor concerns,” Jeffrey Yale Rubin and Kevin Pleines of Birinyi Associates said in a research bulletin sent to clients this week.

The accompanying charts show what has happened to the share prices of an index of euro zone bank stocks, and to each of the 28 members in the index, since June 30. In early July, the index kept falling, but by late in the month it turned around. Anyone who bought all the banks at the end of June is up by about 25 percent. Anyone with the good fortune to buy at the exact bottom has a profit of about half the money invested.

The bank stocks have outperformed other European stocks and they have outperformed American bank stocks, although the shares of most American banks also have risen.

The reasons for the relaxation of investor fears are simple enough. There is a growing confidence that euro zone institutions will succeed in their support efforts. Finance ministers are still arguing about the details of a single regulator for banks throughout the zone, but the European Central Bank’s promise to lend money to banks that need it is widely accepted, and investors believe that Germany will put up whatever money is needed to keep the euro zone from breaking up.

Troubled governments like Italy and Spain are still paying much more than Germany to borrow, but their rates have fallen. Costs have declined even in Portugal, which is in the weakest position of countries other than Greece. The French banks led the way up in late 2012, but even the price of Banco Espirito, a Portuguese bank, has soared by about half since midyear. There are still major concerns about troubled Spanish banks, and two of those join an Italian institution in being the only stock market losers over the period. But the National Bank of Greece managed a small gain.

None of this means that those banks have served long-term shareholders well. Only one of them, a Finnish institution, has a share price higher than it did at the end of 2007, before the financial crisis.

But, for now at least, investors seem to have growing confidence that the banks will survive. Given the fears of a few months ago, that is reason for celebration.

Floyd Norris comments on finance and the economy at nytimes.com/economix.

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An actor despairs in Tinseltown

Seth Burnham sat in a dim corner of Kaldi Coffee & Tea, clutching a mug as he tried to conjure some confidence.

Being here in L.A., I'm giving it everything, he thought.

But after three years of living in Los Angeles, he hadn't had a single role he could be proud of. In a cable TV comedy, he played Percy the Carjacker, a dimwit blown to shreds by an air hose. For an independent film, he had been the best friend of a beautiful woman — a role the script called Small Gay Man.

Hollywood is one big lottery. You have to play it if you want a career in movies or TV....You have to be here. You have to believe.

Sometimes that was tough. Take STARmeter, the entertainment insider's website that measures the popularity of Hollywood actors.

"I was No. 80,000," Burnham said, "for a while."

Frustrated and fatigued, he would retire to this worn, cave-like cafe in Atwater Village.

He had found his surrogate Los Angeles family here, a group of a dozen or so who eased his loneliness and shared his Hollywood ambition: Amy, the animator who had worked on "South Park," Nicholas, whose latest film was well received at the Sundance Film Festival, and Amad, a rising African American actor who worried about being typecast in criminal roles.

They stayed for hours, talking, typing, hunched hard over laptops, nursing lattes. They were actors, writers and directors; stragglers, success stories and hard-luck cases like Burnham.

Many days, he sat in a torn leather chair reading through newspapers and memorizing scripts. He seemed swallowed in the furniture — brown-haired, bearded, not much more than 5 feet tall, with worry lines marching from the corners of his eyes.

Time was against him. Asked his age back in February, Burnham paused. "Mid 30s-ish, early 40s-ish," he said.

Outside of the cafe, he had few Los Angeles friends. His wife, a medical student, moved to St. Louis last year for a residency, but he stayed here. They decided that if she was going to devote herself fully to her dream, then he would too.

But how much more rejection could he handle? And was the unrelenting struggle worth more to him than his marriage?

::

Since his college days in the early 1990s, the acting quest had taken Burnham to several cities. He lived in San Francisco and London, where he trained at a drama school in the classical English style and started a theater company. He lived in Portland, Ore., and Seattle, where he got good reviews for his role in a modern adaptation of Chekhov's "The Seagull."

Everywhere he put down roots he found a place like Kaldi. "The anti-Starbucks," he said. "Just my style."

In Los Angeles, he developed a cafe routine. Each morning, he awoke in his cramped apartment, fed kibbles to his cats, threw on his sneakers and walked across Glendale Boulevard.

He drank two iced coffees a day, no more. He couldn't afford more, not when he didn't have a job — he had to be free for auditions. He relied on credit cards and his wife's salary to pay his bills.

Burnham didn't want fame; he wanted to simply be a journeyman, a working actor, appreciated for his skill, making roughly the same yearly salary as a union electrician.

He sat in the cafe for entire mornings and sometimes entire days. "Wrestling demons," he said.

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How Trusting in Vice Led to John McAfee's Downfall



By now, you are aware of John McAfee. If there’s one thing that the sexagenarian millionaire antivirus founder seems to love more than teenage girls, it’s publicity. And he is extremely adroit at getting it. His misadventures in Central America have eaten the media whole. Even now, in the hospital where he was taken after suffering chest pain, he is surrounded by a crush of media.

He’s a natural story, as I learned firsthand earlier this year. Charming and good-looking, he peppers his speech in Virginia-accented “sirs.” It’s disarming, like some patrician version of neuro-linguistic programming. Combined with his wild stories, it means reporters love to talk to him.

And of course, he is a media magnet for other reasons too, all related to his bizarre lifestyle. His relocation to Belize. His fights with that nation’s government. His coterie of young women. The armed gang members he associates with. The allegations of drug use. The McAfee story, with its drugs and guns and prostitutes and allegations of police corruption, seemed tailor-made for Vice, a publication that revels in all of those subjects on a regular basis. It is as if some hipster god reached down and extended a smelly, fickle finger of fate to Vice editor-in-chief Rocco Castoro, muttering “here’s a cool story, bro.”

Naturally, Vice scuttled down to Belize, and traveled with McAfee as he fled the country, penning a blog post titled “We Are With John McAfee Right Now, Suckers.”

Vice is just the most recent media crew McAfee has latched onto. And if the past is prologue, it won’t go well. The chummy relationship McAfee tends to enjoy with his contacts in the media almost always goes south. He’s previously attached his media ambitions on Jeff Wise, only to then smear him, and then subsequently apologize. Wired’s own Joshua Davis also enjoyed his attentions, and when McAfee first went on the lam, he gave Davis exclusive interviews. This lasted until Davis wrote stories McAfee didn’t like, at which point the old man in the jungle claimed it had all been a ruse and quit talking to Davis.

So now he’s with Vice. In a blog post he later deleted, he claimed they would tell his real story. That Vice would show once and for all whether or not he is a drug-crazed madman. Instead, he’s in a hospital in Guatemala after having been detained by police, and facing likely deportation.

Oddly, Vice directly contributed to McAfee’s capture by revealing his location in the metadata of a photo it published. This was deeply stupid. People have been pointing out the dangers of inadvertently leaving GPS tags in cellphone pictures for years and years. Vice is the same publication that regularly drops in on revolutions and all manner of criminals. They should have known better.

Then, it followed up this egregiously stupid action with a far worse one. Vice photographer Robert King apparently lied on his Facebook page and Twitter in order to protect McAfee. Like McAfee, he claimed that the geodata in the photo had been manipulated to conceal their true location.

This explanation, of course, made no damn sense at all. If McAfee and King were trying to conceal their location by spreading disinformation, why immediately admit to it?

Shortly thereafter, McAfee copped to lying, and admitted to being in Guatemala. King deleted his tweet and Facebook status update. McAfee blamed the disclosure on a Vice “technician,” but regardless of whether it was a technician who screwed up, or King, or Castoro, or some intern, the photo that revealed his whereabouts in Guatemala appeared in Vice. And that photo, effectively, forced McAfee out of hiding.

But the coverup, as always, is worse than the crime. In claiming the geodata had been manipulated when it had not, Vice was no longer just documenting. Now it was actively aiding a fugitive wanted for questioning in the murder investigation of his neighbor Gregory Faull, who was shot dead at his own home.

McAfee had claimed that his plan was to leave the country temporarily, to get his traveling companion and lover Sam out, and then to return to Belize to fight from the inside without turning himself in. But once his location was blown, he had to get a brand-new plan. He would seek asylum in Guatemala. He hired a lawyer, Telésforo Guerra, formerly the attorney general of Guatemala. Vice crowed that McAfee had “just hired the best lawyer in the country.” Take that, suckers.

Vice documented how this attorney, also Sam’s uncle, was able to hook McAfee up with a tailor. He promised McAfee he could make the tailor actually sew faster. McAfee promised publicity in return. Vice rolled cameras.

And then, like that, it was over. King again took to social media to report the arrest, claiming McAfee had been taken into custody by “Guatemalan Federalizes.” Vice posted footage of McAfee being taken into police custody by Guatemala’s National Civil Police and Interpol.

Today, Guatemala’s president denied McAfee asylum. Guatemala is kicking McAfee out of the country, back to Belize. Afterwards, his lawyer claimed McAfee had two heart attacks. ABC reports he has been hospitalized. It’s hard not to wonder if this, too, is part of the plan. If there is a plan.

Though his offer of a $25,000 reward for information about the real killers strikes obvious O.J. Simpson chords, there’s so far no public evidence — aside from his flight — that he anything to do with the murder.

He may have shot his neighbor in the head. He may have ordered one of the gangsters in his employ to do so. He may have had a “will no one rid me of this troublesome priest” moment that caused one of his hangers-on to take it upon himself or herself to kill Faul. He and his entourage may have had nothing to do with it whatsoever. He may be completely innocent.

Nobody knows.

McAfee is clearly sleazy, likely crazy, and possibly even a murderer. But he also would be a free man right now were it not for Vice’s screw up.

As Alan Rules pointed out on Twitter, Vice could come out of this looking good either way. If McAfee turns out to be innocent, it is there to document it and even attempted to help him win his freedom. If he’s guilty, they helped bring him to justice, and have an action-packed documentary to boot. And if he dies? Well. The camera is ready.

Vice promises more footage. That it will continue to pick over John McAfee until he is free or dead or imprisoned, all of which now seem equally likely. And ultimately it offers an implicit promise that it can play by a different set of rules, one that allows it to burn sources and lie to readers. Maybe this is the media partner McAfee has truly wanted all along. Cool story, bro.

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