Springsteen says “freaky” to be honored at pre-Grammys tribute

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Bruce Springsteen was honored as MusiCares Person of the Year on Friday at a star-studded pre-Grammys event where some of the biggest names in music like Sting, Alabama Shakes and Neil Young paid homage to “The Boss.”

The annual event, now in its 23rd year, celebrates a star’s musical achievements and philanthropic work, and is hosted by Grammy organizers to kick off the weekend of the awards show.

The 55th annual Grammy Awards will air this Sunday on CBS.

Past Musicares honorees include Bono, Tony Bennett, Aretha Franklin and ex-Beatle Paul McCartney.

“It’s kind of a freaky experience,” said Springsteen, 63, as he accepted the award, saying it was “like the Italian wedding” he never had with his wife Patti Scialfa, or a “huge Bar Mitzvah.”

Scialfa later accompanied Springsteen on vocals and guitar, along with other members of his band, as he performed a set of his hits, including “We Take Care of Our Own,” “Born to Run” and “Glory Days.”

Earlier in the night, he helped boost the value of an auctioned signed guitar. “With this guitar comes one free guitar lesson with me,” he said to the audience to trigger more bids. Then he threw in a ride in the sidecar of his Harley motorcycle, and his mom’s lasagna. The guitar sold for $ 250,000.

All of the proceeds from the show and silent auction go to Musicares, which provides support to struggling musicians in financial, medical and personal need.

Other artists including Ben Harper, Emmylou Harris, Jackson Browne, John Legend and Patti Smith performed songs to honor Springsteen.

Springsteen recently performed at the 12/12/12 Hurricane Sandy charity concert in Madison Square Garden to raise funds for the thousands affected by the superstorm.

The singer-songwriter from New Jersey has sold more than 120 million albums worldwide and is vying for three Grammys on Sunday, including best rock album for “Wrecking Ball.” His single “We Take Care of Our Own” is nominated for both Best Rock Song and Best Rock performance.

President Barack Obama used “We Take Care of Our Own” as one of his top campaign songs in last year’s election, in which he defeated Mitt Romney.

(Editing by Mark Trevelyan)

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In Nigeria, Polio Vaccine Workers Are Killed by Gunmen

At least nine polio immunization workers were shot to death in northern Nigeria on Friday by gunmen who attacked two clinics, officials said.

The killings, with eerie echoes of attacks that killed nine female polio workers in Pakistan in December, represented another serious setback for the global effort to eradicate polio.

Most of the victims were women and were shot in the back of the head, local reports said.

A four-day vaccination drive had just ended in Kano State, where the killings took place, and the vaccinators were in a “mop-up” phase, looking for children who had been missed, said Sarah Crowe, a spokeswoman for the United Nations Children’s Fund, one of the agencies running the eradication campaign.

Dr. Mohammad Ali Pate, Nigeria’s minister of state for health, said in a telephone interview that it was not entirely clear whether the gunmen were specifically targeting polio workers or just attacking the health centers where vaccinators happened to be gathering early in the morning. “Health workers are soft targets,” he said.

No one immediately took responsibility, but suspicion fell on Boko Haram, a militant Islamist group that has attacked police stations, government offices and even a religious leader’s convoy.

Polio, which once paralyzed millions of children, is now down to fewer than 1,000 known cases around the world, and is endemic in only three countries: Nigeria, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Since September — when a new polio operations center was opened in the capital and Nigeria’s president, Goodluck Jonathan, appointed a special adviser for polio — the country had been improving, said Dr. Bruce Aylward, chief of polio eradication for the World Health Organization. There have been no new cases since Dec. 3.

While vaccinators have not previously been killed in the country, there is a long history of Nigerian Muslims shunning the vaccine.

Ten years ago, immunization was suspended for 11 months as local governors waited for local scientists to investigate rumors that it caused AIDS or was a Western plot to sterilize Muslim girls. That hiatus let cases spread across Africa. The Nigerian strain of the virus even reached Saudi Arabia when a Nigerian child living in hills outside Mecca was paralyzed.

Heidi Larson, an anthropologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine who tracks vaccine issues, said the newest killings “are kind of mimicking what’s going on in Pakistan, and I feel it’s very much prompted by that.”

In a roundabout way, the C.I.A. has been blamed for the Pakistan killings. In its effort to track Osama bin Laden, the agency paid a Pakistani doctor to seek entry to Bin Laden’s compound on the pretext of vaccinating the children — presumably to get DNA samples as evidence that it was the right family. That enraged some Taliban factions in Pakistan, which outlawed vaccination in their areas and threatened vaccinators.

Nigerian police officials said the first shootings were of eight workers early in the morning at a clinic in the Tarauni neighborhood of Kano, the state capital; two or three died. A survivor said the two gunmen then set fire to a curtain, locked the doors and left.

“We summoned our courage and broke the door because we realized they wanted to burn us alive,” the survivor said from her bed at Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital.

About an hour later, six men on three-wheeled motorcycles stormed a clinic in the Haye neighborhood, a few miles away. They killed seven women waiting to collect vaccine.

Ten years ago, Dr. Larson said, she joined a door-to-door vaccination drive in northern Nigeria as a Unicef communications officer, “and even then we were trying to calm rumors that the C.I.A. was involved,” she said. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars had convinced poor Muslims in many countries that Americans hated them, and some believed the American-made vaccine was a plot by Western drug companies and intelligence agencies.

Since the vaccine ruse in Pakistan, she said, “Frankly, now, I can’t go to them and say, ‘The C.I.A. isn’t involved.’ ”

Dr. Pate said the attack would not stop the newly reinvigorated eradication drive, adding, “This isn’t going to deter us from getting everyone vaccinated to save the lives of our children.”

Aminu Abubakar contributed reported from Kano, Nigeria.

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Fair Game: Credit-Rating Club Is Tough to Get Into

Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times

Ann Rutledge and her husband, Sylvain Raynes, of R&R Consulting, which has been trying to gain S.E.C. recognition as a debt ratings agency.

That was probably a common response to the news last week that the Justice Department had filed a civil suit against Standard & Poor’s, one of the two big credit ratings agencies that were so central to the mortgage boom and bust. The department said that S.& P. misled investors by presenting its ratings as the product of objective analyses when, the suit says, they were more about generating revenue to the firm. S.& P. denied the allegations, saying it was prepared to go to trial. 

Many people have been disappointed that S.& P. and Moody’s Investors Service, the big and powerful companies that are supposed to assess the creditworthiness of bonds, have escaped culpability. Not only do these companies still hold sway in securities markets, they’ve also hung on to their lush profits from the glory days of mortgage origination. During 2005 and 2006, for example, Moody’s made $238 million by rating complex mortgage instruments. Investors who trusted those ratings lost billions.

Given that the financial crisis began unfolding more than five years ago, it is discouraging to see how entrenched the large and established ratings companies remain. Ratings are still used to determine bank capital requirements, and investors rely heavily on them.

Over the years, lawmakers have tried to open up the duopolistic world of ratings agencies to greater competition and, therefore, better performance. Legislation in 2006 encouraged the Securities and Exchange Commission to let new companies into the ratings club. The commission set up the Office of Credit Ratings to register new entrants and to monitor all participants’ activities. Today, 10 credit ratings agencies are recognized by the S.E.C.

But gaining regulatory approval to join the ratings arena is exceedingly burdensome. That, at least, has been the experience of R&R Consulting, a firm with a stable of highly respected credit analysts and an enviable record of having predicted the mortgage mess in 2003.

R&R has been trying to get recognition as a credit rating agency since 2011. Frustrated by what it perceives as roadblocks erected by the S.E.C., its executives are beginning to wonder if the commission really wants increased competition.

The firm was founded in 2000 by Ann Rutledge and Sylvain Raynes, experts in structured finance who previously worked at Moody’s. It is a small shop, with seven employees, but its clients include investors, small and medium-size banks, financial regulators and other institutions. R&R’s specialty is risk measurement for all asset types.

R&R’s approach differs from traditional ratings agencies because, in addition to being able to rate new issues, it analyzes risks in securities that are trading in the secondary, or resale, market, after they are issued. By contrast, S.& P. and Moody’s became known for giving mortgage securities high ratings and downgrading them only when defaults were soaring. 

 “In the primary market, everyone prices a security around the credit rating,” Ms. Rutledge says. “In the secondary market, no one cares about the credit rating; what they want is valuation. We connect primary-market ratings with secondary-market valuations.”

THE R&R distinction between a rating and a valuation, however, seems to pose a problem when it comes to getting S.E.C. approval as a ratings agency, Ms. Rutledge says.

By law, many requirements must be met before a firm can become a ratings agency. Chief among them is that the applicant must provide letters from 10 “qualified institutional buyers” that have used the company’s ratings over the previous three years.

R&R has had difficulties with its letters. One was rejected because its writer identified the firm’s work as ratings or valuations, not simply as ratings, Ms. Rutledge says. Another letter failed to pass muster because it was from a German institution that characterized itself as the equivalent of a qualified institutional buyer. When a foreign institution could not get its letter notarized as required — notaries are not as common overseas — it was not good enough for the S.E.C.

And not all clients want to write such a letter for use by the S.E.C. Instead, some said they would discuss the company’s work by telephone. The S.E.C. rejected the idea.

“It’s extremely difficult for us to satisfy the ‘10 qualified institutional buyers’ requirement,” Ms. Rutledge says. “Proof that you’ve done business with them is not enough; it says you must have letters. And they have a suggested text for the letter. When we changed the text slightly they said it was not in conformity.”

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Big Bear locked down amid manhunt

The bustling winter resort of Big Bear took on the appearance of a ghost town Thursday as surveillance aircraft buzzed overhead and police in tactical gear and carrying rifles patrolled mountain roads in convoys of SUVs, while others stood guard along major intersections.

Even before authorities had confirmed that the torched pickup truck discovered on a quiet forest road belonged to suspected gunman Christopher Dorner, 33, officials had ordered an emergency lockdown of local businesses, homes and the town's popular ski resorts. Parents were told to pick up their children from school, as rolling yellow buses might pose a target to an unpredictable fugitive on the run.

By nightfall, many residents had barricaded their doors as they prepared for a long, anxious evening.

PHOTOS: A tense manhunt amid tragic deaths

"We're all just stressed," said Andrea Burtons as she stocked up on provisions at a convenience store. "I have to go pick up my brother and get him home where we're safe."

Police ordered the lockdown about 9:30 a.m. as authorities throughout Southern California launched an immense manhunt for the former lawman, who is accused of killing three people as part of a long-standing grudge against the LAPD. Dorner is believed to have penned a long, angry manifesto on Facebook saying that he was unfairly fired from the force and was now seeking vengeance.

Forest lands surrounding Big Bear Lake are cross-hatched with fire roads and trails leading in all directions, and the snow-capped mountains can provide both cover and extreme challenges to a fugitive on foot. It was unclear whether Dorner was prepared for such rugged terrain.

Footprints were found leading from Dorner's burned pickup truck into the snow off Forest Road 2N10 and Club View Drive in Big Bear Lake.

San Bernardino County Sheriff John McMahon said that although authorities had deployed 125 officers for tracking and door-to-door searches, officers had to be mindful that the suspect may have set a trap.

"Certainly. There's always that concern and we're extremely careful and we're worried about this individual," McMahon said. "We're taking every precaution we can."

PHOTOS: A fugitive's life on Facebook

Big Bear has roughly 400 homes, but authorities guessed that only 40% are occupied year-round.

The search will probably play out with the backdrop of a winter storm that is expected to hit the area after midnight.

Up to 6 inches of snow could blanket local mountains, the National Weather Service said.

FULL COVERAGE: Sweeping manhunt for rampaging ex-cop

Gusts up to 50 mph could hit the region, said National Weather Service meteorologist Mark Moede, creating a wind-chill factor of 15 to 20 degrees.

Extra patrols were brought in to check vehicles coming and going from Big Bear, McMahon said, but no vehicles had been reported stolen.

"He could be anywhere at this point," McMahon said. When asked if the burned truck was a possible diversion, McMahon replied: "Anything's possible."

Dorner had no known connection to the area, authorities said.

Craig and Christine Winnegar, of Murrieta, found themselves caught up in the lockdown by accident. Craig brought his wife to Big Bear as a surprise to celebrate their 28th wedding anniversary. Their prearranged dinner was canceled when restaurant owners closed their doors out of fear.

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How a Charming Doodling App Arose From the Web's Wildest West

Christopher Poole, the man behind some of the web’s biggest hits like 4Chan and Canvas, launched a new iPad app today. DrawQuest is a painting app that lets you doodle on templates to create cartoon scenes and share them with others. The idea, says Poole, is to give people not only the tools but also the inspiration to have fun drawing.

Fire up the app, and you’re presented with a daily “quest,” basically just a template to doodle on that gets you started. For example, yesterday’s was “draw a superhero” and featured an outline of a figure in a cape, set against a blue sky. You can also go back and doodle on previous quests. There’s a color palette to work with, a brush, marker and pen tool, plus an eraser. It’s enough to get you started, but the tools also let you color over the template itself and create something wholly original. The idea is to give some direction and inspiration, but also leave as much room as people need to get creative. “We didn’t just want it to just be color-in-the-lines,” Poole told Wired.

Here, for example, is yesterday’s Draw a Superhero template, and my subsequent drawing. It’s quite awful! But I had fun making it, which, really, is the point.

DrawQuest isn’t a game, exactly, although you can score points (largely for participation) that let you buy in-game tools, like additional colors for your paint palette. There’s a social component that lets you follow other people and see their drawings, but you could certainly use it in complete isolation as well. And one of its most interesting features isn’t creative at all, but a feature that lets you play back videos of others’ drawing processes, showing artworks as they are made from start to finish.

What’s maybe most interesting about DrawQuest, however, isn’t its canvas tools. It’s that it’s not just a drawing app, but an attempt to kick-start the creative process for people who don’t think of themselves as creatives. Both 4Chan and Canvas rely completely on user-generated content. But Poole tells Wired that a small minority of people who visit either site are actually creating content — most just consume. It’s a classic one-percent rule situation. “People think of creativity as binary, like its either on or its off,” Poole explained, “but that’s not true.”

Instead, he argues, creativity is a continuum. And while one person may be able to sit down to a blank slate and come away with something utterly amazing, others need lots of direction. DrawQuest is an attempt to inspire both of those types of people, and everyone in between. The result is a quirky and charming little app. It’s free, and currently only available on iOS for the iPad.

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HMV boss Moore axed as one of 60 redundancies: source

LONDON (Reuters) – Administrators at HMV, the British music and video retailer which hit the rocks last month, have made the group’s chief executive Trevor Moore redundant, according to a source familiar with the situation.

Deloitte, which was appointed as administrator by HMV after the firm struggled against competition from online retailers, supermarkets and streaming sites, had on Friday announced 60 redundancies across HMV’s head office network.

It would not comment on whether Moore was one of those leaving the firm. He joined HMV in 2012 from camera specialist Jessops, which also went into administration this year.

The redundancies follow a move on Thursday to close 66 loss-making HMV stores over the next two months, putting almost 1,000 jobs at risk. The group currently operates from 220 stores in the UK and employs around 4,000 people.

Deloitte is seeking a buyer for all or parts of the business, with analysts expecting it to survive in a much smaller form with an online offering.

In January restructuring specialist Hilco bought HMV’s debt, giving the firm a big say in the fate of the 92-year-old group.

(Reporting by Neil Maidment; Editing by Kate Holton)

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The New Old Age: The Executor's Assistant

I’m serving as executor for my father’s estate, a role few of us are prepared for until we’re playing it, so I was grateful when the mail brought “The American Bar Association Guide to Wills and Estates” — the fourth edition of a handbook the A.B.A. began publishing in 1995.

This is a legal universe, I’m learning, in which every step — even with a small, simple estate that owes no taxes and includes no real estate or trusts — turns out to be at least 30 percent more complicated than expected.

If my dad had been wealthy or owned a business, or if we faced a challenge to his will, I would have turned the whole matter over to an estate lawyer by now. But even then, it would be helpful to know what the lawyer was talking about. The A.B.A. guide would help.

Written with surprising clarity (hey, they’re lawyers), it maps out all kinds of questions and decisions to consider and explains the many ways to leave property to one’s heirs. Updated from the third edition in 2009, the guide not only talks taxes and trusts, but also offers counsel for same-sex couples and unconventional families.

If you want to permit your second husband to live in the family home until he dies, but then guarantee that the house reverts to the children of your first marriage, the guide tells you how a “life estate” works. It explains what is taxable and what isn’t, and discusses how to choose executors and trustees. It lists lots of resources and concludes with an estate-planning checklist.

In general, the A.B.A. intends its guide for the person trying to put his or her affairs in order, more than for family members trying to figure out how to proceed after someone has died. But many of us will play both these parts at some point (and if you are already an executor, or have been, please tell us how that has gone, and mention your state). We’ll need this information.

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Paula Span is the author of “When the Time Comes: Families With Aging Parents Share Their Struggles and Solutions.”

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Media Decoder Blog: Macmillan Settles With Justice Department on E-book Pricing

11:58 a.m. | Updated Macmillan said on Friday that it had agreed to settle a lawsuit brought by the Department of Justice over the pricing of e-books, asserting that the potential costs of continuing to fight the action were too high.

The agreement means that all five major publishing houses have settled the charges brought by the government last spring.

Apple, which is also a defendant, will continue to trial in June, according to the Department of Justice. A company spokeswoman declined to comment on Friday.

In a letter addressed to authors, illustrators and agents, Macmillan’s chief executive, John Sargent, said that the risks were too great to go it alone.
“Our company is not large enough to risk a worst case judgment,” he said. “In this action the government accused five publishers and Apple of conspiring to raise prices. As each publisher settled, the remaining defendants became responsible not only for their own treble damages, but also possibly for the treble damages of the settling publishers (minus what they settled for). A few weeks ago I got an estimate of the maximum possible damage figure. I cannot share the breathtaking amount with you, but it was much more than the entire equity of our company.”

In a suit filed last April, the Justice Department accused the publishers and Apple of conspiring in e-mails and over lavish dinners to set the price of e-books at an artificially high level. The publishers had moved from a wholesale pricing model, which allowed retailers to charge what they wanted, to a system that allowed publishers to begin setting their own e-book prices, a model known as “agency pricing.”

The defendants said they were trying to protect themselves from Amazon, which was pricing e-books below their actual cost, putting financial pressure on the publishers that they said would drive them out of business.

Nevertheless, three publishing houses, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster and Hachette, settled with the government immediately. Penguin, Macmillan and Apple decided to fight the charges. But in December, to clear the way for its merger with Random House, Penguin settled too.

The terms of the Macmillan settlement mirrors that agreed to by the other publishers. Macmillan will immediately lift restrictions it has imposed on discounting and other promotions by e-book retailers and will be prohibited until December 2014 from entering into new agreements with similar restrictions. The publisher must also notify the government in advance about any e-book ventures it plans with other publishers.

Macmillan had been holding firm that it wouldn’t settle, and analysts offered varying explanations for the sudden turnabout. James McQuivey, an analyst for Forrester Research, said that potential merger talks might be one motivation. The publishing industry has begun to consolidate to respond to the threat from Amazon, and when Penguin and Random House announced last October that they would merge, it fueled speculation that more alliances would follow.

“This was a fight not worth fighting in the first place,” Mr. McQuivey said of the lawsuit, “and given the likely nature of merger conversations behind the scenes, that’s where you finally decide the litigation is an obstacle to those talks, which are much more important.”

But Mike Shatzkin, the founder and chief executive of the Idea Logical Company, a publishing consultant, downplayed the role of a potential merger. “There have been no rumors and no signs that Macmillan is merging,” he said. “I would actually take their statement at face value.”

He said he thought it was more likely that Macmillan realized that their stand on pricing was having no effect on the market. E-book prices have been declining steadily but not precipitously since the settlement with the first three publishers went into effect last September. “Their settling doesn’t change the overall market, and it looks much more that way to them now than when they were originally fighting,” Mr. Shatzkin said.

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Women delivering papers shot by police during manhunt

By Los Angeles Times staff

February 7, 2013, 9:09 a.m.

Two women delivering newspapers were shot in Torrance early today by LAPD officers involved in a manhunt for an ex-LAPD officer suspected of shooting three police officers and an Irvine couple, sources say.

The women, shot in the 19500 block of Redbeam Avenue, were taken to area hospitals, police said. One of the women was shot in the hand, and the other in the back, according to witness Jesse Escochea.

Police said the women were riding in a truck similar to the one that suspect Christopher Jordan Dorner is believed to be driving.

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Magnetic Memories May Guide Salmon Home

After years at sea, sockeye salmon returning to their freshwater homes may be guided by an early memory of the Earth’s magnetic field, encoded at the site where natal streams empty into the Pacific Ocean, according to a study published today in Current Biology.

“Lots of folks have been wondering for decades how salmon and other animals, like sea turtles or seals and whales, go out in the ocean for a couple of years and then return with remarkable accuracy back to their home,” said study coauthor Nathan Putman, a marine biologist at Oregon State University. “The magnetic field is an important part of the [salmon's] migratory decision.”

To study salmon navigation, Putman and his colleagues took advantage of a serendipitous natural experiment. Near the mouth of British Columbia’s Fraser River is 460-kilometer-long Vancouver Island. Salmon returning from sea and aiming for the river face a choice: swim north around the island, or go around to the south. Putman pored over 56 years of data from federal fishery scientists who tracked salmon in both waterways, then matched that up with measurements of the Earth’s geomagnetic field, which shifts predictably in strength and orientation over time. He found that fish tended to choose the path where the field strength was more similar to that of the river mouth when they’d left, two years before.

“The magnetic field at each route predicts the proportion coming in,” Putman said. He speculates that reaching saltwater triggers the fish to remember the magnetic field at the river’s mouth when they first head to sea — and then seek that same field on the return journey.

Scientists hope the finding will help solve the mystery of how salmon find their way home from thousands of miles away, across an ocean with no lanes or landmarks. It’s already accepted that in the final stages of the journey to their breeding grounds, salmon use odors to guide them back to the stream or inlet where they hatched. But how the fish find their target river is still a mystery, although scientists have suspected for a while that magnetic cues play a role. Last summer, a team reported that rotating magnetite crystals in a fish nose responded to magnetic field orientation, providing a possible biological mechanism for this sensory capability.

“In general, we know much less about how salmon complete the ocean part of their migration compared to fresh water,” said quantitative ecologist Chloe Bracis, a graduate student at the University of Washington who also studies geomagnetic salmon navigation. “The authors cleverly take advantage of spatial differences in a salmon migration route to provide the first solid evidence that salmon use geomagnetic cues to direct their oceanic migration.”

Putman now hopes to investigate this correlation in experiments with captive fish subjected to artificial magnetic fields.

But even if those experiments bolster the case that salmon use geomagnetic cues, these cues can’t be the whole story. The new study also revealed that sea surface temperature is an important guide for the fish — but even the interaction of water temperature and magnetic cues can’t explain all of the fishes’ knack for navigation. Temperature, olfaction and magnetoreception, while clearly important, may be just some of the tools salmon use to find their way home.  “They might use … a sun compass or other cues,” Bracis said. “Geomagnetic cues could guide them to the vicinity of the river, then they would need to switch to other local cues to navigate the rest of the way to the river mouth or through the estuary.”

Photo: Current Biology, Putman et al.; Map: Oregon State University/NSF

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