WASHINGTON (Reuters) - JPMorgan Chase & Co has reached a tentative $13 billion agreement with the U.S. Justice Department to settle government agency investigations into bad mortgage loans the bank sold to investors before the financial crisis, a source said on Saturday.
The tentative deal does not release the bank from criminal liability for some of the mortgages it packaged into bonds and sold to investors, a factor that had been a major sticking point in the discussions, the source said.
As part of the deal, the bank will likely cooperate in criminal inquiries into certain individuals involved in the conduct at issue, the source, who declined to be identified, said.
Officials at JPMorgan and the Justice Department declined to comment.
Another source close to the discussions characterized a deal as likely, but cautioned that parts of the agreement are still being hammered out, and the settlement could conceivably fall apart.
The record settlement could help resolve many of the legal troubles the New York bank is facing. Earlier this month JPMorgan disclosed it had stockpiled $23 billion in reserves for settlements and other legal expenses to help cover the myriad investigations into its conduct before and after the financial crisis.
The deal is being hammered out by some of the most senior officials at the Department of Justice and the largest U.S. bank. Attorney General Eric Holder and JPMorgan Chief Executive Jamie Dimon spoke on the phone on Friday night to finalize the broad outlines of the broad deal, the first source said.
The bank's general counsel Stephen Cutler and Associate Attorney General Tony West are negotiating a statement of facts that will be part of a final agreement, the source said.
Long considered one of the best-managed banks, JPMorgan has stumbled in recent years, with run-ins with multiple federal regulators as well as authorities in several states and foreign countries over issues ranging from multibillion-dollar trading losses and poor risk controls to probes into whether it manipulated a power market.
In September, as the Justice Department prepared to sue the bank over mortgage securities that the bank sold in the run-up to the financial crisis, JPMorgan tried to reach a broader settlement with DOJ and other federal and state agencies to resolve claims over its mortgage-related liabilities stemming from the bust in house prices.
Dimon went to Washington to meet with Holder on September 25, and discussed an $11 billion settlement at that point.
Some of the problems relate to mortgage bank Washington Mutual and investment bank Bear Stearns, two failing firms that JPMorgan took over in 2008.
The bank and the Justice Department have been discussing a broad deal that would resolve not only the inquiry into mortgage bonds it sold to investors between 2005 to 2007 that were backed by subprime and other risky residential mortgages, but also similar lawsuits from the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the National Credit Union Administration, the state of New York and others.
The broader settlement is a product of a government working group created nearly two years ago to investigate misconduct in the residential mortgage-backed securities market that contributed to the financial crisis. Officials from the Justice Department, the New York Attorney General and others helped to lead the group.
Reuters reported late Friday that JPMorgan and FHFA had reached a tentative $4 billion deal. That agreement is expected to be part of the larger $13 billion settlement.
(additional reporting by David Henry and Karen Freifeld in New York)
(Reporting by Aruna Viswanatha; Editing by Doina Chiacu and Gunna Dickson)
Contact: David Ruth david@rice.edu 713-348-6327 Rice University
Common catalyst cerium oxide opens door to nanochemistry for medicine
Scientists at Rice University are enhancing the natural antioxidant properties of an element found in a car's catalytic converter to make it useful for medical applications.
Rice chemist Vicki Colvin led a team that created small, uniform spheres of cerium oxide and gave them a thin coating of fatty oleic acid to make them biocompatible. The researchers say their discovery has the potential to help treat traumatic brain injury, cardiac arrest and Alzheimer's patients and can guard against radiation-induced side effects suffered by cancer patients.
Their nanoparticles also have potential to protect astronauts from long-term exposure to radiation in space and perhaps even slow the effects of aging, they reported.
The research appears this month in the American Chemical Society journal ACS Nano.
Cerium oxide nanocrystals have the ability to absorb and release oxygen ions -- a chemical reaction known as reduction oxidation, or redox, for short. It's the same process that allows catalytic converters in cars to absorb and eliminate pollutants.
The particles made at Rice are small enough to be injected into the bloodstream when organs need protection from oxidation, particularly after traumatic injuries, when damaging reactive oxygen species (ROS) increase dramatically.
The cerium particles go to work immediately, absorbing ROS free radicals, and they continue to work over time as the particles revert to their initial state, a process that remains a mystery, she said. The oxygen species released in the process "won't be super reactive," she said.
Colvin said cerium oxide, a form of the rare earth metal cerium, remains relatively stable as it cycles between cerium oxide III and IV. In the first state, the nanoparticles have gaps in their surface that absorb oxygen ions like a sponge. When cerium oxide III is mixed with free radicals, it catalyzes a reaction that effectively defangs the ROS by capturing oxygen atoms and turning into cerium oxide IV. She said cerium oxide IV particles slowly release their captured oxygen and revert to cerium oxide III, and can break down free radicals again and again.
Colvin said the nanoparticles' tiny size makes them effective scavengers of oxygen.
"The smaller the particles, the more surface area they have available to capture free radicals," Colvin said. "A gram of these nanoparticles can have the surface area of a football field, and that provides a lot of space to absorb oxygen."
None of the cerium oxide particles made before Rice tackled the problem were stable enough to be used in biological settings, she said. "We created uniform particles whose surfaces are really well-defined, and we found a water-free production method to maximize the surface gaps available for oxygen scavenging."
Colvin said it's relatively simple to add a polymer coating to the 3.8-nanometer spheres. The coating is thin enough to let oxygen pass through to the particle, but robust enough to protect it through many cycles of ROS absorption.
In testing with hydrogen peroxide, a strong oxidizing agent, the researchers found their most effective cerium oxide III nanoparticles performed nine times better than a common antioxidant, Trolox, at first exposure, and held up well through 20 redox cycles.
"The next logical step for us is to do some passive targeting," Colvin said. "For that, we plan to attach antibodies to the surface of the nanoparticles so they will be attracted to particular cell types, and we will evaluate these modified particles in more realistic biological settings."
Colvin is most excited by the potential to help cancer patients undergoing radiation therapy.
"Existing radioprotectants have to be given in incredibly high doses," she said. "They have their own side effects, and there are not a lot of great options."
She said a self-renewing antioxidant that can stay in place to protect organs would have clear benefits over toxic radioprotectants that must be eliminated from the body before they damage good tissue.
"Probably the neatest thing about this is that so much of nanomedicine has been about exploiting the magnetic and optical properties of nanomaterials, and we have great examples of that at Rice," Colvin said. "But the special properties of nanoparticles have rarely been leveraged in medical applications.
"What I like about this work is that it opens a part of nanochemistry -- namely catalysis -- to the medical world. Cerium III and IV are electron shuttles that have broad applications if we can make the chemistry accessible in a biological setting.
"And of all things, this humble material comes from a catalytic converter," she said.
###
Co-authors of the paper are Rice graduate students Seung Soo Lee, Wensi Song, Min Jung Cho and Hema Puppala; Rice alumna Phuc Nguyen; postdoctoral researcher Huiguang Zhu, and Laura Segatori, the T.N. Law Assistant Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and an assistant professor of biochemistry and cell biology. Colvin is vice provost for research at Rice and the Kenneth S. Pitzer-Schlumberger Professor of Chemistry and a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering.
Read the abstract at: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nn4026806?prevSearch=%2522rice%2Buniversity%2522&searchHistoryKey=
This news release can be found online at http://news.rice.edu/2013/10/15/rice-scientists-create-a-super-antioxidant-2/
Follow Rice News and Media Relations via Twitter @RiceUNews
Oleylamine (red dots) and oleac acid (blue) layers serve to protect a cerium oxide nanosphere that catalyzes reactive oxygen species by absorbing them and turning them into less-harmful molecules. The finding could help treat injuries, guard against radiation-induced side effects of cancer therapy and protect astronauts from space radiation. (Credit: Colvin Group/Rice University)
Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation's top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. With 3,708 undergraduates and 2,374 graduate students, Rice's undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice has been ranked No. 1 for best quality of life multiple times by the Princeton Review and No. 2 for "best value" among private universities by Kiplinger's Personal Finance. To read "What they're saying about Rice," go to http://tinyurl.com/AboutRiceU.
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Rice scientists create a super antioxidant
Public release date: 15-Oct-2013 [
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Contact: David Ruth david@rice.edu 713-348-6327 Rice University
Common catalyst cerium oxide opens door to nanochemistry for medicine
Scientists at Rice University are enhancing the natural antioxidant properties of an element found in a car's catalytic converter to make it useful for medical applications.
Rice chemist Vicki Colvin led a team that created small, uniform spheres of cerium oxide and gave them a thin coating of fatty oleic acid to make them biocompatible. The researchers say their discovery has the potential to help treat traumatic brain injury, cardiac arrest and Alzheimer's patients and can guard against radiation-induced side effects suffered by cancer patients.
Their nanoparticles also have potential to protect astronauts from long-term exposure to radiation in space and perhaps even slow the effects of aging, they reported.
The research appears this month in the American Chemical Society journal ACS Nano.
Cerium oxide nanocrystals have the ability to absorb and release oxygen ions -- a chemical reaction known as reduction oxidation, or redox, for short. It's the same process that allows catalytic converters in cars to absorb and eliminate pollutants.
The particles made at Rice are small enough to be injected into the bloodstream when organs need protection from oxidation, particularly after traumatic injuries, when damaging reactive oxygen species (ROS) increase dramatically.
The cerium particles go to work immediately, absorbing ROS free radicals, and they continue to work over time as the particles revert to their initial state, a process that remains a mystery, she said. The oxygen species released in the process "won't be super reactive," she said.
Colvin said cerium oxide, a form of the rare earth metal cerium, remains relatively stable as it cycles between cerium oxide III and IV. In the first state, the nanoparticles have gaps in their surface that absorb oxygen ions like a sponge. When cerium oxide III is mixed with free radicals, it catalyzes a reaction that effectively defangs the ROS by capturing oxygen atoms and turning into cerium oxide IV. She said cerium oxide IV particles slowly release their captured oxygen and revert to cerium oxide III, and can break down free radicals again and again.
Colvin said the nanoparticles' tiny size makes them effective scavengers of oxygen.
"The smaller the particles, the more surface area they have available to capture free radicals," Colvin said. "A gram of these nanoparticles can have the surface area of a football field, and that provides a lot of space to absorb oxygen."
None of the cerium oxide particles made before Rice tackled the problem were stable enough to be used in biological settings, she said. "We created uniform particles whose surfaces are really well-defined, and we found a water-free production method to maximize the surface gaps available for oxygen scavenging."
Colvin said it's relatively simple to add a polymer coating to the 3.8-nanometer spheres. The coating is thin enough to let oxygen pass through to the particle, but robust enough to protect it through many cycles of ROS absorption.
In testing with hydrogen peroxide, a strong oxidizing agent, the researchers found their most effective cerium oxide III nanoparticles performed nine times better than a common antioxidant, Trolox, at first exposure, and held up well through 20 redox cycles.
"The next logical step for us is to do some passive targeting," Colvin said. "For that, we plan to attach antibodies to the surface of the nanoparticles so they will be attracted to particular cell types, and we will evaluate these modified particles in more realistic biological settings."
Colvin is most excited by the potential to help cancer patients undergoing radiation therapy.
"Existing radioprotectants have to be given in incredibly high doses," she said. "They have their own side effects, and there are not a lot of great options."
She said a self-renewing antioxidant that can stay in place to protect organs would have clear benefits over toxic radioprotectants that must be eliminated from the body before they damage good tissue.
"Probably the neatest thing about this is that so much of nanomedicine has been about exploiting the magnetic and optical properties of nanomaterials, and we have great examples of that at Rice," Colvin said. "But the special properties of nanoparticles have rarely been leveraged in medical applications.
"What I like about this work is that it opens a part of nanochemistry -- namely catalysis -- to the medical world. Cerium III and IV are electron shuttles that have broad applications if we can make the chemistry accessible in a biological setting.
"And of all things, this humble material comes from a catalytic converter," she said.
###
Co-authors of the paper are Rice graduate students Seung Soo Lee, Wensi Song, Min Jung Cho and Hema Puppala; Rice alumna Phuc Nguyen; postdoctoral researcher Huiguang Zhu, and Laura Segatori, the T.N. Law Assistant Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and an assistant professor of biochemistry and cell biology. Colvin is vice provost for research at Rice and the Kenneth S. Pitzer-Schlumberger Professor of Chemistry and a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering.
Read the abstract at: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nn4026806?prevSearch=%2522rice%2Buniversity%2522&searchHistoryKey=
This news release can be found online at http://news.rice.edu/2013/10/15/rice-scientists-create-a-super-antioxidant-2/
Follow Rice News and Media Relations via Twitter @RiceUNews
Oleylamine (red dots) and oleac acid (blue) layers serve to protect a cerium oxide nanosphere that catalyzes reactive oxygen species by absorbing them and turning them into less-harmful molecules. The finding could help treat injuries, guard against radiation-induced side effects of cancer therapy and protect astronauts from space radiation. (Credit: Colvin Group/Rice University)
Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation's top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. With 3,708 undergraduates and 2,374 graduate students, Rice's undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice has been ranked No. 1 for best quality of life multiple times by the Princeton Review and No. 2 for "best value" among private universities by Kiplinger's Personal Finance. To read "What they're saying about Rice," go to http://tinyurl.com/AboutRiceU.
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| Share
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Fitch Ratings, one of the big three credit ratings agencies, issued a warning shot today, saying that while it affirmed the United States' AAA credit rating, it was placing it on "rating watch negative."
In other words, it was placing the country's long-term credit rating under review for a potential downgrade.
"The prolonged negotiations over raising the debt ceiling (following the episode in August 2011) risks undermining confidence in the role of the U.S. dollar as the preeminent global reserve currency, by casting doubt over the full faith and credit of the U.S.," Fitch said in a statement. "This 'faith' is a key reason why the U.S. 'AAA' rating can tolerate a substantially higher level of public debt than other 'AAA' sovereigns."
Reuters reports the U.S. Treasury said the threat from Fitch is a reminder of just how close the country is from defaulting for the first time in history.
"The announcement reflects the urgency with which Congress should act to remove the threat of default hanging over the economy," a Treasury spokesperson told Reuters.
In the last couple of years, there's been a surge of what you might call "cool PBS," by which I just mean social-media-friendly stuff like Sherlock and Downton Abbey that sort of expands people's ideas of what public television is and especially what its relationship to pop culture is.
But that's not a reason to overlook classic, documentary-making, nature-liking, animal-hugging PBS, which brings us to tonight's return of Nature, produced by WNET in New York, which debuts its new season Wednesday night with "Saving Otter 501." (8:00 pm in many places, but check your local listings, as always.)
This is the story of how the Monterey Bay Aquarium makes its 501st attempt to save an orphaned otter and release her back into the wild. They feed her, they teach her, they even place her with a surrogate mother. (The whole thing is narrated by Daniel Stern, which, for children of the '80s, gives it a whole nostalgic Wonder Otter Years quality that's downright diabolical.) While the special contains more adorable, awesome otter footage than you can shake a ... flipper? ... at, it doesn't take a monster to ask the question: Is this worth it, for one baby otter?
Well, as it turns out, California's wild otter population is pretty tiny and heavily concentrated, and there's that funny thing about ecosystems: otters are one of the few predators that urchins have, and urchins eat kelp, so if you follow the math, otters are necessary to protect kelp from being overrun in the creation of — no kidding — "urchin barrens." Yikes.
There's a nice line-straddling here between "Look at nature; nature is cool!" and "Look how much we're having to do just to keep from wiping out this entire animal, like, as a thing that exists." The scientists are careful to stress that this is only worth doing if it ultimately benefits the wild population, not if it results in a bunch of hand-raised otters being released into Monterey Bay to take food out of the mouths of the wild otters that remain.
They've been making Nature for 30 years; long enough that I remember griping about my parents using our first VCR to tape it when I undoubtedly was desperate to tape something else (probably something terrible). It might not be slick, but it's entertaining and informative, and if you're wildlife-minded, it's worth remembering that it's still there, as lovely as ever.
The Warner Bros. astronaut adventure starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney landed in the top spot at the box office for the second weekend in a row, earning $43.2 million and raising its domestic total to $122.3 million.
Sony's pirate drama "Captain Phillips" starring Tom Hanks launched in second place with a $25.7 million.
The animated Sony movie "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2" rolled into third place in its third weekend with $13.7 million, bringing its domestic haul to $77.6 million.
The weekend's only other new wide release, the gun-filled sequel "Machete Kills," opened in fourth place with $3.8 million.
___
The top 20 movies at U.S. and Canadian theaters Friday through Monday, followed by distribution studio, gross, number of theater locations, average receipts per location, total gross and number of weeks in release, as compiled Monday by Rentrak, are:
Detroit (AFP) - Mike Napoli's seventh-inning solo homer off Detroit ace Justin Verlander was the only run Boston needed to beat the Tigers 1-0 Tuesday and edge ahead in the American League Championship Series.
John Lackey and the Boston bullpen made the run stand up and the Red Sox took a 2-1 lead in the best-of-seven set that will send the winners to Major League Baseball's championship World Series.
Detroit will try to get back on even terms when they host game four on Wednesday. Detroit will send Doug Fister to the mound and the Red Sox will give the ball to Jake Peavy.
Boston managed only four hits and struck out 10 times in eight innings against Verlander, but shut down the potent Tigers lineup.
Detroit sluggers Miguel Cabrera and Prince Fielder both struck out with runners at first and third in the eighth inning.
The Tigers went 0-for-7 with runners in scoring position, in a game that was delayed for 17 minutes in the second inning because a power problem that saw the floodlights go out.
Lackey was superb in his 6 2/3 innings. He surrendered four hits and struck out eight without a walk.
"He just never gave in," said Red Sox catcher Jarrod Saltalamacchia of Lackey. "He got in some situations, first and third, and never gave in, never wanted to leave anything over the plate. Some big at-bats we were able to keep in our favor."
Three Red Sox relievers finished the shutout, with Japanese pitcher Koji Uehara getting the last four outs for the save.
Verlander kept Boston's bats at bay through the first six innings, giving up just two hits and a walk.
Lackey matched him, allowing only a double to Jhonny Peralta between the second and sixth.
David Ortiz, whose game-two grand slam sparked Boston's come-from-behind 6-5 game-two victory, grounded to short to open the seventh.
Verlander then got ahead in the count against Napoli, who launched a high fast ball into the bullpen behind left center field.
"He's tough," said Napoli, whose blast came on Verlander's 100th pitch of the game. "He was on his game tonight and he was keeping us all off balance. I got a 3-2 fastball and put a good swing on the pitch."
Boston's bullpen thwarted a Tigers' rally bid in the eighth after a walk to Austin Jackson and Torii Hunter's single off Junichi Tazawa put runners at first and third with one out.
Tazawa came up with a huge strikeout of AL batting champion Cabrera and Uehara struck out Fielder to preserve the one-run lead.
"The eighth inning, Taz, that was huge," Saltalamacchia said. "Cabrera's such a great hitter. One out, those are situations he thrives in. He gets in situations where he can get an RBI and it's tough to get him out, let alone strike him out."
Martinez led off the bottom of the ninth with a single, but Uehara induced Peralta to hit into a double play then struck out Avila to end it.
NEW YORK (AP) — Google's stock surpassed the $1,000 mark for the first time, helped by strong third-quarter results.
Shortly after the markets opened Friday, Google Inc. shares jumped 14 percent to $1,015.46 and closed a day heavy trading at $1,011.41. The gains marked Google's biggest one-day jump in more than five years.
The stock had never been higher than $928 in regular market trading since Google went public at $85 per share nine years ago.
Late Thursday, Google reported a 36 percent jump in third-quarter net income that beat Wall Street's predictions. The numbers showed that while the company's average ad prices continue to decline, they're being offset by a larger number of people clicking on ads.
Over the years, Google has expanded its reach far beyond the powerful search engine that made it famous. It now includes the video sharing site YouTube, along with the Android operating system that runs on close to 1 billion smartphones and tablets. The company ranks as the No. 1 digital ad company by revenue, leaving rivals such as Yahoo Inc. and Facebook Inc. far behind.
Google's stock has climbed steadily in the last five years, more than doubling in value. But the stock slipped slightly in recent months, while the overall market has risen, amid worries about deteriorating ad prices.
Google's average ad price has fallen from the prior year in each of the last eight quarters, primarily because advertisers aren't paying as much for mobile ads because the screens on smartphones and tablet computers are smaller than those on laptop and desktop computers.
As more people rely on mobile devices to connect to Google's search engine and other services, the trend is driving down the company's average ad price, or "cost per click."
But the number of so-called "paid clicks" on Google's ads helped offset the lower prices in the third quarter. The clicking volume increased 26 percent from last year, an indication that Google's data analysis is doing a good job matching ads with the interests of its services' users.
Friday's stock surge takes Google's market capitalization to about $333 billion, which still pales in comparison to that of technology industry rival Apple Inc. The iPhone and iPad maker ranks No. 1 in the world with a market capitalization of $462 billion.
It's unlikely that Google shares will stay above $1,000 for very long. The Mountain View, Calif., company plans to issue a new class of stock that will likely cut the value of the shares in half, though its market capitalization will be unaffected.
___
AP Technology Writer Michael Liedtke in san Francisco contributed to this report.
___
Follow Bree Fowler on Twitter at https://twitter.com/APBreeFowler
Davion Navar Henry Only has been waiting for a family all of his life and he recently decided to take matters into his own hands. He has only one desire for his prospective family: "to love me forever."
Davion, 15, has been in foster care his whole life, but has never had a family. On a recent Sunday, he stood in front of St. Mark Missionary Baptist Church in St. Petersburg, Fla., and made a public plea for a family.
"I'll take anyone," Davion said. "Old or young, dad or mom, black, white, purple. I don't care. And I would be really appreciative. The best I could be."
The plea has garnered national attention that Davion hopes will help him finally find a family.
"If you can, reach out and get me and love me until I die," Davion told ABC News.
"I'm praying and still hoping," he said. "I know God hasn't given up and I'm not either."
Davion wants a bed to call his own and to be able to participate in school sports and clubs without having to move all the time when he changes foster homes.
He hopes his story will raise awareness for all foster children.
"I just want people to know that it's hard to be a foster kid. People sometimes don't know how hard it is and how much we try to do good."
Forget North, Kim Kardashian had us looking south at her latest Instagram photo — a revealing selfie-in-a-swimsuit that even drew boyfriend Kanye West into the spirited online reaction.
The photo, simply captioned #NoFilter, has more than 650,000 likes and 57,000 comments on Instagram, and shows the now-blonde reality TV star in a white bathing suit with her famous backside pointed at a mirror.
After the image hit Kardashian's Twitter feed, West responded early Thursday with an all-caps shout-out to the mother of his 4-month-old baby girl (and his 10 million followers): "HEADING HOME NOW."
A week ago, West was on "Jimmy Kimmel Live" discussing Twitter, his recent rant against the talk-show host and how people feel it's "OK to treat celebrities like zoo animals."
DuJour magazine profiled Kardashian in March, saying she was "fearless in the face of scrutiny and a hopeless romantic in a cynical age" — good thing, considering some of the comments on her new photo. In that article, Kardashian, 32, said, "My boyfriend has taught me a lot about privacy. I’m ready to be a little less open about some things, like my relationships. I’m realizing everyone doesn’t need to know everything. I’m shifting my priorities."
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — The South by Southwest Music Festival released its first list of artists for 2014 on Wednesday, featuring acts ranging from New Orleans rapper Vockah Redu to Texas country singer Rodney Crowell and Swedish rock band INVSN.
The first batch of 183 acts from 27 countries will only be the first of many, said Elizabeth Derczo, publicist for the six-day festival and music conference. South by Southwest was created to showcase up-and-coming acts, build industry contacts and include a handful of established talent.
In 2013, more than 25,000 people saw 2,278 acts during the festival that takes over downtown Austin every spring.
INVSN is one of the important European acts, featuring Dennis Lyxzen, lead singer of punk bands Refused and International Noise Conspiracy. INVSN is currently on a U.S. tour promoting their new self-titled album.
Other international acts include Germany's Hyenaz, Belgium's Sold Out and England's Glass Animals.
Dum Dum Girls drummer Sandra Vu brings her new genre-stretching band SISU to the festival. Other American bands include Brooklyn's Deidre and the Dark, Avi Buffalo from Los Angeles and Ohio's Jessica Lea Mayfield.
The festival also features fringe and experimental acts unlikely to ever make the charts or appear on TV. Austin's punk-rock drag queen Christeene is among the artists performing in 2014, mixing a homeless woman's appearance with explicit lyrics.
The music portion of South by Southwest lasts from March 11-16. South by Southwest also includes a film festival from March 7-15 and an interactive festival from March 7-11.
With her hotly anticipated album Prism due out next Tuesday, Oct. 22, the timing was right for another big announcement from Katy Perry. On Wednesday, she confirmed that she will serve as a celebrity spokeswoman for CoverGirl Cosmetics. Perry dropped the news over Twitter.
The singer will be promoting CoverGirl looks for its spring 2014 campaign.
Although this is Perry's first cosmetics partnership, she's previously had an eyelash line and several fragrances.
Recent CoverGirls from the music world include Janelle Monae, and a pair of fellow Billboard Woman of the Year Recipients (Perry won in 2012), Taylor Swift and this year's winner, Pink. Could some interesting collaborations be in store? We'll have to wait and see.
"In addition to music, I've always considered makeup to be a powerful creative avenue of self-expression," Perry said in a statement.
"I'm honored to partner with CoverGirl and share more colors and textures of my approach to beauty to inspire my audience."
Seeing as how iOS rules the roost as far as mobile games go, smaller competing platforms like Windows Phone don’t get too many exclusive games worth noting. Windows Phone has had some high profile Xbox-branded exclusives now and then, but they often end up migrating to Apple’s pastures as well. Wordament, Kinectimals, and Tentacles are a few such titles to jump ship from Windows Phone.
Chalk another one up for iOS. Chickens Can’t Fly from developer Amused Sloth has long been considered one of the best Xbox games for Windows Phone. Recently the game got pulled from that platform due to an In-App Purchase formatting bungle on Microsoft’s part, though it will return without Xbox features in the future. At the same time, Chickens Can’t Fly has migrated to iOS – currently the only place to get it!
Staying out of the fryer
In Chickens Can’t Fly, you play as a chicken who must navigate a variety of obstacles courses. The chicken is always falling downward, making for a sort of reverse Doodle Jump. Tilting the device left and right steers the avian hero.
Chicken literally can’t stop falling, but you can at least slow him down in a couple of ways: touching walls cause shim to slide, while tapping the screen flaps his wings. Still, he continually gains speed the longer he stays alive, so even with those moves at your disposal, things get pretty hectic. Thankfully his speed resets whenever you pass a checkpoint.
Science gone wrong
The game’s 80+ experiments (levels) are divided up into six labs: Hatchery (tutorial levels), Butchery, Cemetery, Military, Physics, and Aquarium.
These labs are more than just different backdrops. Each one has unique powerups, powerdowns, and obstacles, making for a nice bit of variety. New items are usually introduced in their own specific experiment, with creative titles like “Does Chicken like 8-bit?” which involves the Pixelizer item. This teaches players what the items do organically.
Experiments can have a variety of different goals. Sometimes Chicken just needs to survive until the end. Other times he’s fighting against time or has to pick up a certain number of items by the time he reaches the end of the level. If you reach the bottom without meeting the experiment’s criteria, you fail and have to retry it.
Extra modes
Once you’ve completed a certain number of experiments within a lab, you’ll unlock that lab’s Survival mode. Rather than ending after a certain number of checkpoints, Survival is made up of endless checkpoints, so it lasts as long as you can stay alive. Passing checkpoints gives Chicken an extra life, so skilled players can potentially play for quite a while.
Weekly Challenges are specific Survival levels that change every week. This mode has its own global leaderboard, so players can compete against each other for high scores.
In-App Purchases
Chickens Can’t Fly packs a ton of content for $1.99. But players who want even more Chicken have a few optional purchases to choose from. The first is the Dojo set of levels for $1.99. The Dojo adds 10 new experiments and a ninja outfit for Chicken to wear.
Speaking of outfits, the game includes three skins automatically: naked, Girlie, and Diver. Players who need more variety to their wardrobes can pick up the Knight, Vampire, and Alien skins for 99 cents each.
Tastes like chicken
Chickens Can’t Fly is just as engaging now as when it debuted on Windows Phone last year. More so, in fact, thanks to some minor balance tweaks and fixes. Amused Sloth’s game features a charming art style, quirky sense of humor, and catchy music to boot. And GameCenter Achievements, why not. Give it a try and save the Chicken from the fryer.
For a glimpse of how financial markets may view the deal by Congress to reopen the federal government and raise the debt ceiling, Renee Montagne speaks to HSBC's chief U.S. economist Kevin Logan.
It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
And I'm Renee Montagne.
The last-minute move by Congress that reopened the federal government and raised the debt ceiling has brought some relief to the markets. Stocks are mixed in Asia, but some investors are already worrying about the prospects of another fiscal showdown in Washington early next year, saying Congress is merely kicking the can down the road.
Joining us now is Kevin Logan. He is the chief U.S. economist at the banking giant HSBC. Good morning.
KEVIN LOGAN: Good morning.
MONTAGNE: How relieved are investors with the deal that was made, after all, at the 11th hour?
LOGAN: Well, they're quite relieved, particularly investors in the Treasury market. That's where all the risk was, whether or not the U.S. Treasury would actually default or delay payment on some of its obligations. I think away from the Treasury market, it wasn't quite as much an anxiety. We saw that in the stock market, for example. Gains slowed down, but by and large the market held in. And then there was a small relief rally once the deal was struck.
But the big relief, the big change within the Treasury market, were particularly the short-term securities that were due to mature in the next month or so. Those, which had sold off severely, rallied once the deal was made.
MONTAGNE: Well, when you talk about that market - in fact, you are talking about, in a way, the whole world, certainly world leaders were urging the U.S. Congress and the president to make some kind of deal, you know, saying that the U.S. cannot, if it came to that, default on its debt. And China - now China holds something like $1.3 trillion in American public debt. How has this whole thing affected China?
LOGAN: Well, it certainly made them start to think about the safety and security of their international reserve holdings. China has, over the last two decades, been driven by their economic growth, they've been driven by exports to a large extent. They've run current account surpluses that have piled up quite a treasure trove of international reserves. The place they invest most of those are in U.S. government securities, the deepest, most liquid and most easily transacted market in the world. Now they have to think a little bit more about the risk of that market in a way that they hadn't before.
MONTAGNE: Which, of course, would not necessarily be good for the U.S. I mean, China - there was a point at which coming out of China were calls for the international community to move away from the dollar.
LOGAN: Well, yes. Right now we have international monetary arrangements that are based on the relative strength and the quality of the financial markets in different economies. And over time it's shifted. We know that early in the last century it was U.K. with sterling. More recently, the evolution and development of the euro provided a substitute for the dollar and sterling. Things will keep changing over time. Certainly the emergence of China as a strong and potentially dominant economic power will eventually lead to changes in global monetary arrangements. This little episode we've just been through is probably just one more step on the way of making people think about how these changes will take place in the future.
MONTAGNE: Let's get back to regular folks here in the United States. The housing market took a hit momentarily. What do you think this deal will do for that and just largely such things as interest rates?
LOGAN: Well, the main thing is the end of the government shutdown. Housing was bothered by all of this because the processing of loans was slowed down. A lot of loans depend upon FHA approvals or paperwork that might go through to forming the mortgage pools that are backed by Fannie May or Freddie Mac, and all the uncertainty about the government shutdown delayed all of that processing and so held up mortgages that people might get. Hopefully the backlog will be cleared quickly, and the housing market will return to normal.
MONTAGNE: Kevin Logan is chief U.S. economist at HSBC. Thank you very much for joining us.
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Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may be out as president of Iran, but Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, above, is still in charge.
Photo by Maysam Dehghani/AFP/Getty Images
In Geneva this week, an Iranian delegation has been holding talks with six other nations about its country's nuclear program. These negotiations—the first to take place under the auspices of Iran's new president, Hassan Rouhani—inspired little bursts of positive rhetoric. The BBC reported an "upbeat mood" in Geneva. A European diplomat spoke of "cautious optimism." Rouhani himself had pledged to "resolve" the nuclear problem within the next six months.
After years of no progress with Iran, why the sudden good cheer? It's certainly not because Rouhani represents a radical new strand of Iranian thinking about nuclear power. After all, he was Iran's nuclear negotiator from 2003 to 2005. Parts of the nuclear program were temporarily suspended during that time, but it was never eliminated.
Iran has returned to negotiations for only one reason: The new president wants economic sanctions lifted because they have taken a powerful toll on the Iranian economy.
Nor does Rouhani's new Cabinet mark a profound break from those who have run the Islamic Republic since its inception. As his justice minister, Rouhani has appointed Mostafa Pourmohammadi, a former high official in the Ministry of Information in the bloody and violent 1980s. Among other things, Pourmohammadi was one of those primarily responsible for the mass execution of thousands of political prisoners in 1988. He moved on to the ministry's foreign intelligence operations in the 1990s, when its "achievements" included the bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires and the assassination of dissidents in Iran and around the world.
No one is denying this bit of history. After appointing Pourmohammadi, Rouhani went out of his way to praise his "numerous experiences in the government" and his record: "He has been successful, wherever he has been." Little appears to have changed: In the week of Sept. 23, when Rouhani was at the U.N. General Assembly in New York, more than 30 Iranians were reportedly executed without due process of law.
Rouhani's team, in other words, has not gone to Geneva after a process of profound internal transformation. On the contrary, Iran has returned to negotiations for only one reason: The new president wants economic sanctions lifted because they have taken a powerful toll on the Iranian economy. At a recent conference in London, I heard Iranian diaspora economists return again and again to that theme: Sanctions have destabilized Iran's currency, oil and gas industry, international trade, and investor confidence. Of course the shortcomings of sanctions are well-known: They are a blunt and inefficient instrument; plenty of people defy them; and illicit trade goes on all the time. And, yes, they distribute economic pain over the entire population and don't necessarily hit hardest the people who make the decisions. Nevertheless, three decades' worth of overlapping unilateral and multilateral sanctions on Iran, organized at different times by the United States, the United Nations, and the European Union, are, at least in a narrow sense, "working": They have forced Iran's leaders back to a negotiating table they had largely abandoned some years ago.
The sanctions' success has also persuaded the Iranians to try a tactic that has worked well for many other countries, including Russia: Persuade the West to keep its foreign policy concerns in silos—separating economics, human rights, and nuclear weapons, as though they have nothing to do with one another. Iran's oil ministry has even launched a kind of outreach campaign, declaring that "Iran welcomes any oil cooperation, even with American companies." Presumably the Iranians believe that those U.S. oil companies would lobby the Obama administration, hard, to lift sanctions altogether.
Such lobbying would be extremely short-sighted. If Iran is able to make concrete, verifiable nuclear proposals, some changes could of course be made to the sanctions regime. Some have suggested unfreezing Iranian assets held abroad as an option. But while negotiations continue, let's be clear about why the world cares about Iran's nuclear program in the first place.
Certainly we in the United States aren't overly worried about Britain's nuclear arsenal or about India's. The United States is hardly in a position to oppose nuclear weapons in principle, since we and several of our allies have them. No, we oppose Iran's nuclear ambitions for one reason: because we object to the Islamic Republic of Iran, a quasi-totalitarian state that since 1979 has been led by brutal, volatile men with no respect for the rule of law. Their regime is a "domestic" problem for many Iranians, and it's a major problem for Iran's neighbors and the rest of the world.
To put it differently: As long as men like Pourmohammadi are still running Iran's courts and prisons, as long as the Iranian judicial system is subverted by a politicized version of Shariah, there will always be a limit to what can be achieved through any conversations with Tehran. Talking is fine. But the negotiators in Geneva should leave any optimism at the door.
Windows 8.1 is here–it launched at 4 a.m. Pacific time and is rolling out globally.
Do you use Windows 8? If so, then get the new version. It’s a solid, necessary update (and a free one to boot). It has features that will please longtime Windows users who were uncomfortable with 8, as well as features that push the concepts behind Windows 8 even further. It’s a recommitment to the touch-based future of Windows Store apps, while making more room and allowance for the desktop and a tacit recognition that some people will only want to operate in that old familiar environment.
It’s only been 12 months since Windows 8 shipped. It has not been a triumphant year.
It’s only been 12 months since Windows 8 shipped. It has not been a triumphant year. Steven Sinofsky, Microsoft’s longtime Windows chief, is gone. He got the axe just after Windows 8 shipped. Given Microsoft’s woes over the past decade, you could make a compelling case that they fired the wrong Steve. But just this August, on the cusp of Windows 8.1’s release, the company fixed the error: Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s longtime CEO, is now on his way out too.
Between the two Steve slayings, it took a $900 million write down on Surface RT, the computer that was meant to be the physical embodiment of its new, stripped down Windows operating system. Disgruntled PC Manufacturers have been in revolt, openly criticizing the company and its next generation OS. If Windows 8 has had a defining cultural moment, it wasn’t its lavish launch, or any number of commercials, but this YouTube video of a befuddled gentleman trying to use Windows 8 for the first time.
And so now we have Windows 8.1 — in an earlier era this would have been called Windows 9 because it is not what you might think of as a point-one upgrade. Sure, it makes cosmetic concessions to its seething user base, who just wanted their Start button back and the ability to never, ever have to use the system formerly known as Metro. It gave them both of those things, kind of. But it is more than anything else a step further along the road away from the traditional desktop PC. It is even more cloud-focused. More touchable. Better able to embrace a wide variety of form factors and devices.
People hated it. But it was the right thing to do. As I’ve previously argued, Microsoft is a lumbering giant, but with Windows 8 it began lumbering in the right direction. Windows 8.1 represents another plodding, yet massive, step forward.
Search has become the dominant feature of the operating system.
Let’s start with the ways it goes back to the past. There is a button where the Start button used to be, and clicking on it will do a vaguely Start-button like thing, which is to take you to your Start Screen where your applications live. You can boot to the desktop now with a simple settings change (although it took two Microsoft representatives multiple tries on a total of three devices to demonstrate how to do this). Because you can make your Desktop background mirror your Start Screen background, swapping between the two is less jarring now, although you still get a sense of transition. It feels more like diving into a warm pool and less like being ripped from a moving car.
But the meat of Windows 8.1 is in the way it moves forward, not how it looks back. The most notable change is to the way Search has become the dominant feature of the operating system.
One of the Charms (think: software buttons) that you can access from a right-side swipe is a Search function, and in 8.1 Search has become universal. It queries your local files and folders as well as Bing, and gives you the results in a graphic-heavy manner designed to make it easy to find what you need at a glance. You get previews of web pages, photos pulled from the web, and even the ability to pull up songs and other media that you can play with a single click. Search for a person or a place, and it will show big, graphic-heavy cards with automated information about the query.
Windows 8.1 Bing Smart Search. Image: Microsoft
The cloud is the other dominant organizing principle, or even connective tissue. Make changes in one place, and they are reflected across all your devices. Microsoft pushes you to save everything to SkyDrive by default, so you can access everything from anywhere. You can set devices to sync in various ways so that, for example, your desktop has a local copy of all your photos, while your smaller tablet only has a subset. While you’ll get some SkyDrive storage for free (7 GB) if you really use this, you’re going to have to buy more.
The other major thing you’ll notice is that you can personalize Windows 8.1 to a greater degree, especially around applications. Live Tiles are even more alive—make one for a web page and it can pipe information from that site’s RSS feed. They offer more sizing options, and organizing them into groups is much easier. You can reorganize your windows too. While Windows 8 only allows you to use set fractionals of the screen for multi-window (Snap state) views, 8.1 allows you a greater degree of flexibility to alter the number and position of those windows.
Meanwhile, the company has given its default applications—especially Mail and Music—real and needed overhauls. Both felt like beta releases in Windows 8, and both have finally gotten up to speed in 8.1.
Should you upgrade? Yes. It’s a solid update. The people who hated Windows 8, however, likely aren’t going to be much more pleased with 8.1. While it makes concessions to the desktop, Microsoft clearly is thinking more about touch and a future where devices are mere screens meant to reflect data stored on a server somewhere.
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama is thanking Democratic and Republican leaders in the Senate for passing a deal to end the partial government shutdown and avert a default.
Obama says if and when the House approves the bill, he'll sign it immediately. He says the U.S. will start reopening the government right away.
Obama says now it's time to win back the trust of Americans that's been lost during the crisis.
Obama spoke at the White House minutes after the Senate passed the measure. The bill calls for opening the government through Jan. 15 and extending the nation's borrowing authority through Feb. 7.
Obama says once these issues are resolved, he wants to move forward this year on immigration, farm legislation and a larger budget deal.
If you're selling your iPhone or iPad or passing it on to someone else, the first thing you'll want to do is make sure they won't have access to any of your personal data. Fortunately, iOS makes it very easy to wipe all your data off your old iPhone or iPad, no computer required. Here's how:
Before doing this, you obviously want to make sure you either have an iCloud backup or an iTunes backup of your data. Otherwise, you won't be able to get your stuff back. Once you're sure you have a backup for your own use, proceed on.
Turn off Find My iPhone
If you're on iOS 7 already and you have an iCloud account linked to your iPhone or iPad, you'll need to sign out of Find My iPhone before you can truly wipe the device.
Launch the Settings app from the Home screen of your iPhone or iPad.
Scroll down and tap on iCloud.
Scroll down once more and turn Off the Find My iPhone option.
You will be prompted to enter your iCloud password. Once you're done entering your password, tap Turn Off.
That's it, you can now proceed to wiping your iPhone or iPad. The above steps are only necessary if the iPhone or iPad you're trying to restore is on iOS 7.0 or above.
Erase all data from your iPhone or iPad
Launch the Settings app from the Home screen of your iPhone or iPad.
Now tap on General.
Scroll all the way to the bottom and tap on Reset.
Tap on Erase All Content and Settings.
You will be prompted to confirm your selection, tap on Erase iPhone.
Once more you will be reminded that you can't undo this action, tap Erase iPhone one more time to confirm.
That's it. Your iPhone or iPad will reboot after a few minutes and all your personal data should be gone and again look like the day you pulled it out of the box.
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