The two most famous creations of late crime novelist Robert B. Parker will live on. His estate will allow two writers to continue the Spenser and Jesse Stone novels, reports Publishers Weekly . Michael Brandman will take over the Spenser series, which debuted in 1974 and now number 39. Ace Atkins…
Continue reading …The jury didn’t spend long considering the case of John Richardson, who was on trial for stealing a 99-cent hot dog. The chilling true crime tale goes like this: The Eastern Washington University student walked into a grocery store, grabbed a hot dog from the self-serve counter, and ate it…
Continue reading …The White House release of President Obama’s birth certificate won’t satisfy all the birthers, with charges of the document being a Photoshopped forgery already surfacing, notes Alex Pareene at Salon . Other diehards will accept it but develop new lines of attack, arguing that Obama is disqualified by his father being…
Continue reading …Tibetans in exile elected Harvard-educated academic Lobsang Sangay as their new prime minister today, hoisting him into the role of political leader that the Dalai Lama is vacating, the Wall Street Journal reports. Until now, the prime minister, or “Kalon Tripa,” of Tibet’s government in exile has had primarily administrative…
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He failed as a footballer, but David Leon will be playing to millions in new primetime TV series Vera Northumberland in November can be bleak, but a more perfect backdrop for a crime drama you will not find. Happily for local lad David Leon, his days off from filming Vera here provided the opportunity to introduce his dog to the wild, empty beaches of his childhood. This is the lull, you sense, before prime-time ITV drama makes him famous. In Vera, based on Ann Cleeves ‘s Vera Stanhope novels, Brenda Blethyn plays the dishevelled but brilliant detective inspector; Leon is Sergeant Joe Ashworth, her young colleague. “They have this mother-son dynamic,” he says over tea in the Savoy hotel in London. “They bicker, but there’s a mutual respect.” Blethyn is as marvellous as you would expect, her accent perfected by watching Cheryl Cole on The
Continue reading …Budget cuts have forced the SETI Institute in California to shut down its famous search for extraterrestrial life, reports the San Jose Mercury News . The institute can no longer afford to operate its Allen Telescope Array, which has been scanning outer space for sign of communication since 2007. As a…
Continue reading …As the health reform debate reached a fever pitch last year, so too did the threats against lawmakers. The FBI investigated at least 26 threats last year, according to documents obtained by the Hill, a significant upswing from the previous year, and more than any other year on record. Nearly…
Continue reading …Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell may be on its way out, but it’s not gone yet: West Point won’t let a lesbian former cadet get back in because the law remains in place, reports the AP . Katherine Miller left the military academy after her sophomore year last August in protest over…
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Janek Schaefer missed out the all-important banter in his meditation on the locker-room experience I felt a bit let down by this. Sound artist Janek Schaefer has made an installation inside Bath University , inspired by his exploration of sports changing rooms: what they look like, what they sound like, what they signify. I was really interested to see what he’d come up with – most changing-rooms I’ve used are pretty disgusting – so I took three of the people I coach: a rugby player, a runner, and my seven-year-old son. The first problem we had was that we couldn’t actually find the exhibition – Schaefer has installed his changing room (just two walls, some pegs and a locker) in an empty space between the foyer and the cafe. We got there and thought, “Is this it?” Two doors in one of the exhibition’s walls lead to the toilets: my girlfriend went to the loo without realising it was meant to be part of the show. Most people were wandering past oblivious, but we stayed and pressed the buttons Schaefer has installed, each of which emits a different sound. Press one, and you hear a woman talking about training on her bike; press another, and you hear a motivational slogan: “Winners finish when they finish; losers finish when they’re tired.” I imagine that is the kind of slogan coaches use with elite stars, though I wouldn’t try it on the young people I coach – they’d find it too off-putting. I like the idea of using sound in art, and the changing room is a really interesting place for an artist to explore – but I think Schaefer could have done much more. I’d have liked to see the show installed in a real changing room: there’d have been more of an atmosphere. He could have compared the way a changing room feels when a team has just won a match, with how it feels when they’ve just lost. Or he could have recorded all the sounds you’d hear over one whole day. Changing rooms are all about the people, the smells, and the banter – all of which are
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David Sokol stepped down from board of Berkshire Hathaway after disclosure of controversial share deal Warren Buffett’s former heir apparent misled the investment guru’s senior management and violated company policies, according to a report from the audit committee of the board of Berkshire Hathaway. David Sokol, once seen as the executive most likely to succeed Buffett, stepped down last month after the disclosure of a controversial share deal involving chemicals firm Lubrizol. Sokol bought shares in the firm shortly before recommending that Berkshire acquire the company outright. Buffett originally said that neither Sokol nor he felt that “his Lubrizol purchases were in any way unlawful” and that they were not a factor in Sokol’s decision to resign. “I don’t believe I did anything wrong,” Sokol told CNBC. “I made an investment that I believed in. If I didn’t believe in the company, I wouldn’t have invested in it.” After an internal investigation, Berkshire said Sokol could face legal action from the board. The report examined Sokol’s disclosures to the Berkshire chairman, who is the world’s most famous investor. Buffett said in March that Sokol bought $10m of Lubrizol shares about a week before he suggested it as a potential takeover target for Berkshire. The value of Sokol’s shares rose by about $3m when Berkshire bought the firm. Sokol met investment bankers representing Lubrizol before his share purchase and told them that Berkshire was interested in a takeover. After the deal was done, a Citigroup banker phoned Buffett to congratulate him on the deal. “This was the first time Mr Buffett heard that investment bankers played any role in introducing Lubrizol to Mr Sokol, and did not square with Mr Sokol’s remark in January that he had come to know Lubrizol by owning the stock,” the report said. The report concludes: “His misleadingly incomplete disclosures to Berkshire Hathaway senior management concerning those purchases violated the duty of candor he owed the company.” Sokol’s remarks “did not satisfy the duty of full disclosure inherent in the Berkshire Hathaway policies and mandated by state law,” the report added. “His remark to Mr Buffett in January, revealing only that he owned some Lubrizol stock, did not tell Mr Buffett what he needed to know … [I]ts effect was to mislead: it implied that Mr Sokol owned the stock before he began considering Lubrizol as an acquisition candidate, when the truth was the reverse.” The internal report follows the threat of legal action from Berkshire shareholders. Last week, shareholder Mason Kirby filed the lawsuit in Delaware seeking to recover any allegedly improper gains that Sokol made on the Lubrizol shares. “Sokol’s trades and Buffett’s failure to fully inform himself about these trades are in direct violation of the company’s policy and amount to a breach of the duty of loyalty and due care owed to Berkshire and its shareholders,” the lawsuit said. Sokol had been viewed as a top contender to take over from Buffett, 80. Sokol has said that the disclosure of the purchases of Lubrizol shares and his resignation were unrelated. He has also said that he was not a decision maker on the Lubrizol purchase and did nothing wrong. The report comes ahead of Berkshire Hathaway’s annual genneral meeting in Omaha, Nebraska, where Buffett is expected to face more questions about the affair. Warren Buffett Banking United States Dominic Rushe guardian.co.uk
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