Jeffrey Zients was tapped to help fix problems with the Obama administration's heath care website.
J. Scott Applewhite/AP
Jeffrey Zients isn't exactly a household name. But if he can cure what ails the Affordable Care Act website, he'll be one of the best-known figures in the Obama administration.
Zients (rhymes with Heinz) is the professional manager President Obama turned to in order to solve the by-now-infamous problems with the federal government's health care exchange website.
Zients was settling into his job as the head of Obama's National Economic Council when the president tapped him to help rescue the site. The 46-year old is known as a brainy problem-solver with a knack for cutting through bureaucratic knots.
It was Zients, for instance, whom Obama turned to at an earlier point to unstick the "Cash for Clunkers" initiative. That 2009-2010 federal effort to lift auto sales out of the doldrums by underwriting dealer rebates to car buyers had stalled when the computer systems were overwhelmed with requests. Zients is credited with overseeing that fix.
Zients performed a similar managerial feat to break a bottleneck on GI Bill benefits for post-9/11 vets.
"Jeff Zients is a rock star," said Vivek Kundra, who served as the Obama administration's chief information officer from 2009 to 2011. "He has an amazing ability to convene the right people, to be pragmatic about problem-solving and to focus the energy of the administration on execution. He can close the gap between the theoretical and the ability to actually deliver something meaningful."
Besides being the administration's chief performance officer during Obama's first term, Zients served two stints as acting director of the Office of Management and Budget.
His OMB experience gave him plenty of experience testifying before Congress. That should come in handy since he's likely to find himself planted for hours on end at the many hearings Congress promises to have on problems with the Obamacare website.
Fred Malek, a long-time Republican fundraiser, adviser to presidents, corporate chieftain and Zients fan, said: "I think he's very well suited for the job. Look, he's not a technology expert but that's not what you need. You have a lot of technology experts being imported to help with this fix.
"What you need is somebody who can manage a team, lead a team, figure out what the most important aspects of things are and drive them toward a positive result," Malek said.
"Jeff is a very good CEO. He works very well with people. He's highly analytical but at the same time has a very nice personal touch which enables him to get buy-in to what he wants to do, to get followership and to get people moving in the right direction," he said. "He understands the world of business. He understands the world of government. He knows enough about technology. But above and beyond everything else, he's just a damn good manager."
That said, here are few more things to know about Zients:
He and Malek led an investor group (that included Colin Powell) that got Major League Baseball to agree to return a team to Washington. But in one of Zients' few high-profile failures, the MLB awarded the franchise to another group. Still, Malek credits Zients with getting city officials in Washington, D.C., on board with the effort, something Malek hadn't been able to achieve before Zients joined.
He honed his management chops early and hasn't let them dull. Shortly after graduating from Duke University (summa cum laude, of course, in political science), he became a management consultant, eventually holding the chief executive officer's job and other top posts at two firms that provided corporate clients with research and management advice.
He had a supersized payday when the two companies went public. In 2002, Fortune estimated his wealth at $149 million, which placed him 25th on its list of the richest Americans then under 40.
His mother, Debbie Zients, thinks the world of him, telling USA Today that he "has a lot of brains up there but he's very caring and very compassionate."
Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany, spoke to Barack Obama on Wednesday evening to demand explanations over reports suggesting that the NSA has been monitoring her mobile phone.
Contact: Kevin Stacey kevin_stacey@brown.edu 401-863-3766 Brown University
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] By tuning gold nanoparticles to just the right size, researchers from Brown University have developed a catalyst that selectively converts carbon dioxide (CO2) to carbon monoxide (CO), an active carbon molecule that can be used to make alternative fuels and commodity chemicals.
"Our study shows potential of carefully designed gold nanoparticles to recycle CO2 into useful forms of carbon," said Shouheng Sun, professor of chemistry and one of the study's senior authors. "The work we've done here is preliminary, but we think there's great potential for this technology to be scaled up for commercial applications."
The findings are published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
The idea of recycling CO2 a greenhouse gas the planet current has in excess is enticing, but there are obstacles. CO2 is an extremely stable molecule that must be reduced to an active form like CO to make it useful. CO is used to make synthetic natural gas, methanol, and other alternative fuels.
Converting CO2 to CO isn't easy. Prior research has shown that catalysts made of gold foil are active for this conversion, but they don't do the job efficiently. The gold tends to react both with the CO2 and with the water in which the CO2 is dissolved, creating hydrogen byproduct rather than the desired CO.
The Brown experimental group, led by Sun and Wenlei Zhu, a graduate student in Sun's group, wanted to see if shrinking the gold down to nanoparticles might make it more selective for CO2. They found that the nanoparticles were indeed more selective, but that the exact size of those particles was important. Eight nanometer particles had the best selectivity, achieving a 90-percent rate of conversion from CO2 to CO. Other sizes the team tested four, six, and 10 nanometers didn't perform nearly as well.
"At first, that result was confusing," said Andrew Peterson, professor of engineering and also a senior author on the paper. "As we made the particles smaller we got more activity, but when we went smaller than eight nanometers, we got less activity."
To understand what was happening, Peterson and postdoctoral researcher Ronald Michalsky used a modeling method called density functional theory. They were able to show that the shapes of the particles at different sizes influenced their catalytic properties.
"When you take a sphere and you reduce it to smaller and smaller sizes, you tend to get many more irregular features flat surfaces, edges and corners," Peterson said. "What we were able to figure out is that the most active sites for converting CO2 to CO are the edge sites, while the corner sites predominantly give the by-product, which is hydrogen. So as you shrink these particles down, you'll hit a point where you start to optimize the activity because you have a high number of these edge sites but still a low number of these corner sites. But if you go too small, the edges start to shrink and you're left with just corners."
Now that they understand exactly what part of the catalyst is active, the researchers are working to further optimize the particles. "There's still a lot of room for improvement," Peterson said. "We're working on new particles that maximize these active sites."
The researchers believe these findings could be an important new avenue for recycling CO2 on a commercial scale.
"Because we're using nanoparticles, we're using a lot less gold than in a bulk metal catalyst," Sun said. "That lowers the cost for making such a catalyst and gives the potential to scale up."
###
The work was funded by a National Science Foundation grant to the Brown-Yale Center for Chemical Innovation (CCI), which looks for ways to use CO2 as a sustainable feedstock for large-scale commodity chemicals. Other authors on the paper were nder Metin, Haifeng Lv, Shaojun Guo, Christopher Wright, and Xiaolian Sun.
Editors: Brown University has a fiber link television studio available for domestic and international live and taped interviews, and maintains an ISDN line for radio interviews. For more information, call (401) 863-2476.
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Gold nanoparticles give an edge in recycling CO2
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:
24-Oct-2013
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Contact: Kevin Stacey kevin_stacey@brown.edu 401-863-3766 Brown University
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] By tuning gold nanoparticles to just the right size, researchers from Brown University have developed a catalyst that selectively converts carbon dioxide (CO2) to carbon monoxide (CO), an active carbon molecule that can be used to make alternative fuels and commodity chemicals.
"Our study shows potential of carefully designed gold nanoparticles to recycle CO2 into useful forms of carbon," said Shouheng Sun, professor of chemistry and one of the study's senior authors. "The work we've done here is preliminary, but we think there's great potential for this technology to be scaled up for commercial applications."
The findings are published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
The idea of recycling CO2 a greenhouse gas the planet current has in excess is enticing, but there are obstacles. CO2 is an extremely stable molecule that must be reduced to an active form like CO to make it useful. CO is used to make synthetic natural gas, methanol, and other alternative fuels.
Converting CO2 to CO isn't easy. Prior research has shown that catalysts made of gold foil are active for this conversion, but they don't do the job efficiently. The gold tends to react both with the CO2 and with the water in which the CO2 is dissolved, creating hydrogen byproduct rather than the desired CO.
The Brown experimental group, led by Sun and Wenlei Zhu, a graduate student in Sun's group, wanted to see if shrinking the gold down to nanoparticles might make it more selective for CO2. They found that the nanoparticles were indeed more selective, but that the exact size of those particles was important. Eight nanometer particles had the best selectivity, achieving a 90-percent rate of conversion from CO2 to CO. Other sizes the team tested four, six, and 10 nanometers didn't perform nearly as well.
"At first, that result was confusing," said Andrew Peterson, professor of engineering and also a senior author on the paper. "As we made the particles smaller we got more activity, but when we went smaller than eight nanometers, we got less activity."
To understand what was happening, Peterson and postdoctoral researcher Ronald Michalsky used a modeling method called density functional theory. They were able to show that the shapes of the particles at different sizes influenced their catalytic properties.
"When you take a sphere and you reduce it to smaller and smaller sizes, you tend to get many more irregular features flat surfaces, edges and corners," Peterson said. "What we were able to figure out is that the most active sites for converting CO2 to CO are the edge sites, while the corner sites predominantly give the by-product, which is hydrogen. So as you shrink these particles down, you'll hit a point where you start to optimize the activity because you have a high number of these edge sites but still a low number of these corner sites. But if you go too small, the edges start to shrink and you're left with just corners."
Now that they understand exactly what part of the catalyst is active, the researchers are working to further optimize the particles. "There's still a lot of room for improvement," Peterson said. "We're working on new particles that maximize these active sites."
The researchers believe these findings could be an important new avenue for recycling CO2 on a commercial scale.
"Because we're using nanoparticles, we're using a lot less gold than in a bulk metal catalyst," Sun said. "That lowers the cost for making such a catalyst and gives the potential to scale up."
###
The work was funded by a National Science Foundation grant to the Brown-Yale Center for Chemical Innovation (CCI), which looks for ways to use CO2 as a sustainable feedstock for large-scale commodity chemicals. Other authors on the paper were nder Metin, Haifeng Lv, Shaojun Guo, Christopher Wright, and Xiaolian Sun.
Editors: Brown University has a fiber link television studio available for domestic and international live and taped interviews, and maintains an ISDN line for radio interviews. For more information, call (401) 863-2476.
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| E-mail
Share
]
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.
Citizens inspect the site of a car bomb attack in the capital's eastern Mashtal neighborhood, Iraq, Sunday, Oct. 27, 2013. Insurgents on Sunday unleashed a new wave of car bombs in Shiite neighborhoods of Baghdad, killing and wounding dozens of people, officials said. (AP Photo/ Khalid Mohammed)
Citizens inspect the site of a car bomb attack in the capital's eastern Mashtal neighborhood, Iraq, Sunday, Oct. 27, 2013. Insurgents on Sunday unleashed a new wave of car bombs in Shiite neighborhoods of Baghdad, killing and wounding dozens of people, officials said. (AP Photo/ Khalid Mohammed)
Citizens are seen through a broken window of a bus destroyed in a blast at a bus station in the capital's eastern Mashtal neighborhood, Iraq, Sunday, Oct. 27, 2013. Insurgents on Sunday unleashed a new wave of car bombs in Shiite neighborhoods of Baghdad, killing and wounding dozens of people, officials said. (AP Photo/Khalid Mohammed)
Citizens inspect the site of a car bomb attack at a bus station in the Baghdad's eastern Mashtal neighborhood, Iraq, Sunday, Oct. 27, 2013. Insurgents on Sunday unleashed a new wave of car bombs in Shiite neighborhoods of Baghdad, killing and wounding dozens of people, officials said. (AP Photo/ Khalid Mohammed)
Citizens and security forces inspect the site of a car bomb attack at a bus station in the Baghdad's eastern Mashtal neighborhood, Iraq, Sunday, Oct. 27, 2013. Insurgents on Sunday unleashed a new wave of car bombs in Shiite neighborhoods of Baghdad, killing and wounding dozens of people, officials said. (AP Photo/Khalid Mohammed)
Citizens gather at the site of a car bomb attack at a bus station in the Baghdad's eastern Mashtal neighborhood, Iraq, Sunday, Oct. 27, 2013. Insurgents on Sunday unleashed a new wave of car bombs in Shiite neighborhoods of Baghdad, killing and wounding dozens of people, officials said. (AP Photo/Khalid Mohammed)
BAGHDAD (AP) — A new wave of car bombs hit Shiite neighborhoods of Baghdad on Sunday, killing at least 42 people and wounding dozens, officials said. It was the latest in a series of coordinated attacks targeting civilian areas that has killed hundreds in recent months.
Four police officers said the bombs, placed in parked cars and detonated over a half-hour, targeted commercial areas and parking lots. The deadliest blast was in the southeastern Nahrwan district where two car bombs exploded simultaneously, killing seven and wounding 15 others.
Two other explosions hit the northern Shaab and southern Abu Dshir neighborhoods, each of which killed six people. Other blasts hit the neighborhoods of Mashtal, Baladiyat and Ur in eastern Baghdad, the southwestern Bayaa and the northern Sab al-Bor and Hurriyah districts.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but such systematic attacks are a favorite tactic of al-Qaida's local branch. It frequently targets civilians in markets, cafes and commercial streets in Shiite areas in an attempt to undermine confidence in the government, as well as members of the security forces.
Six medical officials confirmed the casualty figures. All officials spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to release information.
In Mashtal, police and army forces sealed off the scene as ambulances rushed to pick up the wounded where pools of blood covered the pavement. The force of the explosion damaged number of cars and shops. At one restaurant, wooden benches were overturned and broken eggs were scattered on the ground.
Violence has spiked in Iraq since April, when the pace of killing reached levels unseen since 2008. Today's attacks bring the death toll across the country this month to 531, according to an Associated Press count.
Over the last few days there has been a lot of talk about Apple’s new direction for iWork, especially when it comes to the OS X versions of its productivity suite. At an event on Tuesday, the company announced that they would be making iWork free with purchase of a new device — but it also announced a redesign that many are seeing as a regression of the product.
Specifically, many who use Pages, Numbers and Keynote heavily are remarking on the loss of what they characterize as ‘pro’ features. These power users are lamenting the changes, many of which mimic the look and feel of the suite on Apple’s iOS platform.
The thing is: they’re right. Apple did ‘walk back’ the features and feel of iWork slightly across the board, and significantly in some niche cases. But it’s far too early in this new era of a free iWork to begin panicking about its future.
From what I understand, the fact that this new version of OS X iWork looks and feels a lot like the iOS version is no coincidence. It’s actually a re-write that’s founded on the code base of the (now 64-bit) iOS apps. And a decision was made to unify the visual look and interactive feel of the apps across all platforms — with the far more prolific iOS used as inspiration.
iWork is handled under the supervision of Apple’s Eddy Cue, not the OS X chief Craig Federighi, but it’s boggling to think that this kind of decision wouldn’t have been very carefully considered by the senior staff at Apple. There are easy parallels to draw here to Apple’s ‘back to the Mac’ initiative, which brought features and feel from its enormously popular iPhone and iPad to the Mac — largely in order to make them more familiar to ‘halo’ adopters who may have started their Apple experience with a portable device, not a traditional desktop or laptop.
Lots of folks are getting all worked up about iWork being ‘dumbed down’ but it feels like a reset to me. I can see this playing out pretty much like Apple’s recent Final Cut Pro X re-thinking. That app was introduced in a radically simplified and streamlined form that caused immediate outcry. Over time, Apple has steadily added back features that were missing from the early dramatic redesign of the pro video editing suite. A handful of mis-handled decisions like pulling the old version of FCP too soon caused unnecessary friction there, but recent updates to FCPX have made it a very viable choice for professionals again.
If we can ascribe anything to Apple’s recent efforts to bring iOS sensibilities to its Mac software it’s that it likes to start extremely tight and zoom out as it adds features back into the mix.
Now, you can (rightly) argue that this is incredibly inconvenient to people who use iWork all day to do stuff that has been hampered or made impossible by the changes. And you could argue that Apple could have worked in all of the features that iWork had before, and maybe even more. These are not strange and unusual viewpoints. But that’s simply not the way Apple works, and it’s definitely not in its playbook lately as it goes through a big re-vamp in product direction and design.
There are some serious bugs and upsetting omissions in the latest iWork, but that’s the price of a dramatic break with the past. And Apple has shown a willingness to take the heat on this stuff before. It’s unfortunate that users must share in the growing pains, but there it is.
Note, though, that this isn’t about free software getting fewer features, it’s specifically about re-focusing the product. Making iWork free has nothing to do with the latest versions (or future versions) having less functionality. These don’t feel like ‘lite’ editions of the apps, and Apple would not have put as much effort as it did into improving the quality and feature-set of iWork for iCloud if it planned on making the native apps just so much ‘freeware’.
As with many of Apple’s product decisions lately, this is about serving the majority of users as well as possible. And if that means short-term pain and perhaps even something we could call ‘regression’, then so be it. In the end, I expect iWork to move forward to the point at which it was and beyond in the coming months.
With the drama of the 17-day government shutdown over, the spotlight this week turned to the troubled rollout of the federal health insurance exchanges. Host Scott Simon talks to NPR's Ron Elving about the frustrations from both parties over the crippled HealthCare.gov website.
This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Scott Simon. With the drama of the 17-day government shutdown over, the spotlight returned this week to the troubled rollout of the Obamacare insurance exchanges. Both Republicans and Democrats expressed anger over the crippled HealthCare.gov website during hearings that were conducted this week, but of course there are competing agendas, as there always are.
To help us sort through these political implications is our own Ron Elving, senior Washington editor. Ron, thanks very much for being with us.
RON ELVING, BYLINE: Good to be with you, Scott.
SIMON: How big a deal might these problems be?
ELVING: It's a big deal because, you know, it casts doubt on the basic practical viability of what has been the President's signature legislative achievement, the Affordable Care Act. And just at the moment when it had survived all of these other big political tests, you know, passage and enactment and the Supreme Court test, and then the big shutdown showdown, just when we get through all of those traps, well, how ironic that a faulty website could seemingly be the undoing of Obamacare at this point.
SIMON: Politically speaking, is this the kind of thing that can be fixed and move on, or could there be something more permanent here?
ELVING: Well, we just had a briefing from the former director of the Office of Management and Budget who is a very well-respected crisis manager, Jeff Zients, and the President has brought him in and put him in charge of trying to straighten all of this out. And he says, look, we've had 700,000 people create accounts on these websites in the first couple, three weeks, troubled as they have been. Problem is, of course, only a minor fraction of those people have actually managed to get through to enrolling for health insurance, private health insurance.
About half the people who've gotten through got through on state exchanges, as opposed to the federal ones that most of the states essentially defaulted to. So the program is unquestionably troubled. But if it is possible to bring it around, and Jeff Zients says by the end of November - give us four or five weeks - the vast majority of people, he says, will have a smooth experience when they go to HealthCare.gov.
If that's true then the Obama Administration will have a reason for thanksgiving.
SIMON: With the advantage of a few days hindsight, did Republican critics of the program miss an opportunity during the shutdown to be able to talk about this?
ELVING: Surely if there had been no shutdown crisis, the first days in October when this site was struggling would have been the biggest story, the only story in Washington. Instead, they were overshadowed by this other crisis. So now that we're through the woods on the one hand, we suddenly have this focus on the health care site, then that's an opportunity for the Republicans really to make a comeback, although they have to be kicking themselves that they weren't able to do this right from the beginning.
And right now they're trying to make up lost ground on that and we'll have to see in the weeks ahead which way this goes. Is there more resentment over the shutdown crisis? Is there more of a lingering bruise on their brand from that? Or are people still focused week after week on the inadequacies of this particular website?
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio.
WASHINGTON (AP) -- For nearly five years, Republicans have struggled to make a scandal stick to President Barack Obama's White House. One by one, the controversies — with shorthand names such as Solyndra, Benghazi, and Fast and Furious — hit a fever pitch, then faded away.
But some Republicans see the disastrous rollout of Obama's health law as a problem with the kind of staying power they have sought.
The health care failures are tangible for millions of Americans and can be experienced by anyone with Internet access. The law itself is more closely associated with Obama personally and long has been unpopular with the majority of the American people.
The longer the technical problems persist, the more likely they are to affect the delicate balance of enrollees needed in the insurance marketplace in order to keep costs down.
"There's no question the issue has legs, in part because it affects so many Americans very directly and in part because the glitches with the website are simply one of many fundamental problems with this law," GOP pollster Whit Ayres said.
The cascade of computer problems began Oct. 1, when sign-ups opened for the marketplaces at the center of the law. Administration officials blamed the problems on high volume, but have since acknowledged more systemic issues with HealthCare.gov.
White House officials contend the website is just one piece of the broader law offering an array of benefits. They say that when the online issues are fixed — the latest estimate is the site will be working normally for most users by the end of November — few people will remember the problems that have marred the opening weeks of the six-month enrollment window.
"It says a lot about Republicans that their focus here is not on helping Americans get insured, but on making political hay of this mess," said Dan Pfeiffer, Obama's senior adviser.
There's another mess the White House is dealing with that could have long-lasting implications, too: U.S. government spying on foreign leaders. The scope of the surveillance programs was first made public in June and the revelations keep coming. The latest concern the alleged monitoring of German Chancellor Angela Merkel's cellphone communications.
But unlike with the health law, many Republicans support the government surveillance policies, making it more difficult for the party to create a political furor over the revelations.
For GOP lawmakers, the White House's stumbles on the Affordable Care Act have come at an optimal time, just one week after their strategy to shut down the government in exchange for concessions on health care imploded.
The health care debacle has overshadowed some of the Republican missteps and the GOP appears more than happy to keep the spotlight where it is.
Republicans have scheduled a series of congressional hearings on the program's shortcomings, and have called for officials, including Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, to be fired. She is set to testify this coming week before a House committee.
Kevin Madden, a GOP strategist, said Republicans should be wary of overreach, and he urged the party to "focus on the basics" in the hearings. If they do, he said, "they can really align themselves with a lot of public anxiety about what's wrong with Washington."
Anxiety about the website's problems also appears to be on the rise among members of the president's own party, a worrisome sign for the White House.
Ten Democratic senators urged Sebelius in a letter to extend the insurance enrollment window beyond the March 31 deadline; White House officials say they don't believe that will be necessary. Also, Democratic leaders have been critical about the seeming lack of preparedness for the sign-up rollout.
"As far as I'm concerned there is no excuse for that," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., told Las Vegas radio station KNPR. "I think the administration should have known how difficult it was going to be to have 35 million or 40 million people to suddenly hook up to a place to go on the Internet."
The health care law has been unpopular with large swaths of the American public ever since Obama signed it into law in 2010. A CBS News survey taken last week found that 43 percent of Americans approve of the law, compared with 35 percent in May.
Crisis management expert Eric Dezenhall said that if the White House wants to prevent the current troubles from being a long-term problem, it will have to do some basic damage control.
"There has to be a component of hand-holding, clarity and bedside manner with the early stages of Obamacare," he said.
The White House appeared to start taking a page from that playbook this past week.
On Thursday, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services began holding daily briefings to address technical problems with the website, though the many of the issues still remain shrouded from the public.
Republicans are turning to a familiar tactic, congressional hearings. It's the same tactic they took as they're looked to connect Obama to wrongdoing in the deaths of Americans in Benghazi, Libya, the bankruptcy of the solar energy company Solyndra, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives' failed gun-smuggling sting operation known as "Fast and Furious," and a number of other problems that have arisen since the president took office.
Dezenhall said that while investigations may help Republicans do some damage to the health care law, "there's a difference between roughing up your enemy and defeating them."
"They can certainly put some points on the board but I don't see a great Republican coup anytime soon," he said.
___
AP News Survey Specialist Dennis Junius contributed to this report.
___
Follow Julie Pace at http://twitter.com/jpaceDC and Nancy Benac at http://twitter.com/nbenac
FILE- In this May 14, 2012 file photo, entertainer Shawn "Jay-Z" Carter arrives at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The rap mogul is taking some heat over his relationship with the luxury store Barneys New York, amid allegations the store racially profiled two customers. Jay-Z plans to partner with the store for an upcoming holiday collection of items. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File)
FILE- In this May 14, 2012 file photo, entertainer Shawn "Jay-Z" Carter arrives at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The rap mogul is taking some heat over his relationship with the luxury store Barneys New York, amid allegations the store racially profiled two customers. Jay-Z plans to partner with the store for an upcoming holiday collection of items. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File)
File- This July 26, 2013 file photo shows the Rev. Al Sharpton gestures as he takes part in a panel discussion during the National Urban League's annual conference in Philadelphia. Sharpton is threatening to boycott luxury retailer Barneys over allegations by shoppers that they were racially profiled there. Sharpton said Saturday Oct. 26, 2013, that black New Yorkers "are not going to live in a town where our money is considered suspect and everyone else's money is respected." (AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File)
NEW YORK (AP) — Jay-Z — under increasing pressure to back out of a collaboration with the luxury store Barneys New York after it was accused of racially profiling two black customers — said Saturday he's being unfairly "demonized" for just waiting to hear all of the facts.
The rap mogul made his first statement about the controversy in a posting on his website. He has come under fire for remaining silent as news surfaced this week that two young black people said they were profiled by Barneys after they purchased expensive items from their Manhattan store.
An online petition and Twitter messages from fans have been circulating this week, calling on the star to bow out of his upcoming partnership with Barneys for the holiday season, which will have the store selling items by top designers, inspired by Jay-Z, with some of the proceeds going to his charity. He is also working with the store to create its artistic holiday window display.
But Jay-Z — whose real name is Shawn Carter — defended himself, saying that he hasn't spoken about it because he's still trying to figure out exactly what happened.
"I move and speak based on facts and not emotion," the statement said. "I haven't made any comments because I am waiting on facts and the outcome of a meeting between community leaders and Barneys. Why am I being demonized, denounced and thrown on the cover of a newspaper for not speaking immediately?" he said, referring to local newspaper headlines.
The two Barneys customers, Trayon Christian and Kayla Phillips, said this week they were detained by police after making expensive purchases.
Christian sued Barneys, saying he was accused of fraud after using his debit card to buy a $349 Ferragamo belt in April. Philips filed a notice of claim saying she would sue after she was stopped by detectives outside the store when she bought a $2,500 Celine handbag in February.
As the criticism grew, Barneys said Thursday it had retained a civil rights expert to help review its procedures. The CEO of Barneys, Mark Lee, offered his "sincere regret and deepest apologies."
Kirsten John Foy, an official with the Rev. Al Sharpton's National Action Network, said he would meet with Barneys officials on Tuesday to discuss the racial profiling allegations.
Jay-Z — who rose from a life of crime in Brooklyn to become one of the most heralded rappers and one of entertainment's biggest superstars — has in the past called for a boycott of labels perceived to be racist, and has become more political in recent years, from speaking out about the killing of black teenager Trayvon Martin to campaigning for President Barack Obama.
Jay-Z said in this case, he's still trying to find out what happened —which is why he was silent.
"The negligent, erroneous reports and attacks on my character, intentions and the spirit of this collaboration have forced me into a statement I didn't want to make without the full facts," he added.
He also dismissed reports that he would profit from the collaboration. He said he's "not making a dime" from working with Barneys. Instead, his Shawn Carter Foundation, which provides college scholarships to economically challenged students, will get 25 percent of all sales from the collaboration.
"This money is going to help individuals facing socio-economic hardships to help further their education at institutions of higher learning," he said. "My idea was born out of creativity and charity... not profit."
He also said that "making a decision prematurely to pull out of this project wouldn't hurt Barneys or Shawn Carter but all the people that stand a chance at higher education," he said. "I have been working with my team ever since the situation was brought to my attention to get to the bottom of these incidents and at the same time find a solution that doesn't harm all those that stand to benefit from this collaboration."
Jay-Z said he understood what it felt like to be racially profiled — but also didn't want to jump to unfair conclusions.
"I am against discrimination of any kind but if I make snap judgments, no matter who it's towards, aren't I committing the same sin as someone who profiles?" he asked. "I am no stranger to being profiled and I truly empathize with anyone that has been put in that position. Hopefully this brings forth a dialogue to effect real change."
Earlier Saturday, Sharpton held a rally at his National Action Network headquarters in Harlem, saying black New Yorkers should put shopping at Barneys "on hold" if the retailer's response is inadequate.
But it is not the only retailer accused of racially profiling its customers.
Some Sharpton supporters who attended Saturday's rally said they had been profiled in other stores, too. Shane Lee, 51, said he went to the high-end store Bergdorf Goodman to buy shirts last year and the sales staff would not assist him.
"Instead of helping me, they were staring at me," said Lee, who is black. "I felt so uncomfortable that I just left."
A Bergdorf Goodman official did not return a call seeking comment Saturday.
On Friday, Rob Brown, a black actor on the HBO series "Treme" said he was stop because of his race while shopping at Macy's flagship Manhattan store. Brown said in his lawsuit that he was detained nearly an hour by police June 8 after employees contacted authorities about possible credit card fraud.
Macy's didn't comment on the litigation but said in a statement it was investigating.
Earlier this week, VH1 aired their biopic film CrazySexyCool: The TLC Story which I loved, Shannon loved … EVERYONE loved. Billboard magazine reports that people loved the biopic so much that they were inspired to rush out and by TLC‘s greatest hits album 20 (which was released earlier this month but didn’t really enjoy massive sales until after the biopic aired on VH1). Sales of the album jumped 200% this week from the modest number of albums sold when the album was first released on October 15. I guess the made-for-TV movie did an excellent job of reminding people how much they really love TLC.
TLC’s new greatest hits album “20″ is set to fly into the top 20 of the Billboard 200 chart next week. Industry sources say the set might sell around 15,000 to 20,000 copies by the end of the tracking week on Sunday, Oct. 27. That could represent at least a 200% gain over last week’s sales, when it debuted at No. 72 with 5,000 sold (according to Nielsen SoundScan). The gain was triggered by VH1′s premiere of its biopic “CrazySexyCool: The TLC Story” on Oct. 21. Its bow scored nearly 4.5 million viewers, according to Nielsen, making it VH1′s highest-rated original movie ever. According to VH1, “CrazySexyCool” is also the No. 1 original cable movie of the year among adults and women 18-49. It also logged a 2.9 rating in the 18-49 demo. “20″ was released on Tuesday, Oct. 15, and features 13 previously-released hits, along with one new song, “Meant to Be.” The act was last in the top 20 with 2002′s “3D” album, which debuted and peaked at No. 6 on the Nov. 30, 2012 chart.
I can’t say that I’m at all surprised by this news. A commercial for 20 aired a couple of times during the airing of CrazySexyCool and I remember picking up my phone to see about downloading the album from iTunes myself. Since there is only one new song on the album and I already have all of TLC‘s stuff, I decided not to … but the power of advertising, especially from biopics like this, is very strong. I’m happy to see that TLC is benefiting from the telling of their story. They did such a great job producing the film, they deserve every bit of success that comes their way. Did any of y’all pony up and buy a copy of 20 this week?
Paramount and MTV Films' Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa scored a strong $1.4 million as it began rolling out in North American theaters Thursday night.
Pointing out that Bad Grandpa is a spinoff, Paramount is predicting an opening in the $20 million-plus range -- well below the last two Jackass films -- while rivals believe the movie could approach $30 million, considering the strength of the gross-out franchise.
One Paramount insider counters that Bad Grandpa is tracking relatively in line with Carrie, which debuted to $16.1 million last weekend (many also thought Carrie would cross $30 million).
This summer, This Is the End played to much the same audience, collecting $2.2 million on its first Tuesday night on its way to a $20.7 million domestic debut. And R-rated comedy We're the Millers collected $1.7 million on Tuesday night (both movies debuted midweek) on its way to a $26.4 million debut.
The big question is whether Bad Grandpa can unseat Gravity. The 3D space epic, heading into its fourth weekend with a domestic cume of $177.2 million, could earn $20 million or more. The Warner Bros. film has turned into a box-office sensation, earning north of $300 million to date.
Bad Grandpa, the first Jackass film to have any sort of plot, stars Johnny Knoxville as signature character Irving Zisman, a crotchety 86-year-old, and Jackson Nicoll as 8-year-old grandson Billy. The outrageous duo embark on a hidden-camera road trip across America, performing stunts and punking people. Along the way they encounter, among others, male strippers, disgruntled child beauty pageant contestants and bikers.
JeffTremaine returns to direct and produces alongside Knoxville, Spike Jonze and Derek Freda.
Knoxville is the only Jackass regular to appear in the film, which cost a modest $15 million to produce. It opens three years after Jackass 3D debuted to a sizzling $50.4 million. Jackass: Number Two opened to $29 million in late September 2006. The first Jackass, opening in late October 2002, debuted to $22.8 million.
Another Hollywood marriage, done. Clint Eastwood's wife, Dina, has filed for divorce, citing "irreconcilable differences."
Us Weekly first broke the news of the couple's separation in late August. Dina subsequently filed for legal separation on Sept. 9, only to withdraw the documents just two days later on Sept. 11. On the same day Dina dismissed her separation filing, Clint Eastwood was photographed in Los Angeles with his girlfriend, Erica Tomlinson-Fisher.
The former TV news reporter, 48, is requesting full physical custody of the couple's 16-year-old daughter Morgan. Mrs. Eastwood also wants her soon-to-be ex-husband, 83, to pay for all legal fees.
The couple wed in March 1996. Eastwood is also dad to eight other kids from five different relationships, although he has only been married once before to Maggie Johnson. The actor has one son, Kyle, and daughter, Alison, from that marriage.
Morgan appeared alongside her mother and half-sister Francesca Eastwood in Mrs. Eastwood & Company, a reality series that followed the family's daily adventures in Carmel-by-the-Sea, Calif., where Eastwood was mayor from 1986-88. Although the E! show was short-lived (it only aired for one year), the Million Dollar Baby director, who prides himself upon privacy, was unhappy about exposing his family on the small screen.
MAIDUGURI, Nigeria (AP) — Extremists from neighboring Chad, Niger and Cameroon are fighting in Nigeria's northeastern Islamic uprising, according to a man presented by Nigeria's military as a captured member of the Boko Haram terrorist network.
His account tallies with reports from politicians and survivors of attacks, and it reinforces fears that Boko Haram, once a machete-wielding gang, now poses the greatest security threat to Nigeria's unity and may be growing closer to al-Qaida affiliates in Africa.
It comes the same week Justice Minister Mohammed Adoke charged that Boko Haram is being influenced from abroad. "Nigeria is experiencing the impact of externally-induced internal security challenges, manifesting in the activities of militant insurgents and organized crime groups which has led to the violation of the human rights of many Nigerians," he said, defending the country's record at a meeting of the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva.
An Associated Press report last week, based on mortuary records from Maiduguri's main hospital, supported Amnesty International charges that hundreds of detainees are dying in military detention, many taken out of their cells and shot.
The government has failed to respond to requests for comment, but on Thursday night, for the first time, presented an alleged Boko Haram detainee to journalists at a news conference in the northern city of Maiduguri.
The 22-year-old, walking on crutches because of a bullet wound suffered when he was captured in a recent attack, said he was forced to join Boko Haram but that the movement has many willing and educated members.
"We have qualified doctors who are active members . they were not forced to be in the group, they are more elderly than us," the 22-year-old told reporters at a news conference Friday night in Maiduguri, the Borno state capital that is the birthplace of Boko Haram.
"We have mechanics, we have welders, we have carpenters, we have professional drivers, we have butchers, security experts, gun instructors and so on," he said, displaying his lack of education by his poor use of Hausa, the local language most common in Maiduguri, where he used to live with his parents. He refused to give his name because he was afraid his former colleagues would target his family.
The young man shed an interesting light on life as a Nigerian Islamic warrior, saying religion had little to do with it and that his leaders "had never once preached Islam to us."
He said the name of Allah was invoked only when "we are running out of food supply in the bush. Our leaders will assemble us and declare that we would be embarking on a mission for God and Islam.
"I did not see any act of religion in there. We are just killing people, stealing and suffering in the bush," he added. The movement has been blamed for the killings of hundreds of civilians, mainly Muslims, in recent months.
The prisoner, who wore military fatigue pants exactly like those of his captors — many recent Boko Haram attacks have been perpetrated by fighters wearing Nigerian army uniforms — said foreigners fight in his group of 150 but did not say how many. "We have no members from Mali or Libya that I know of ... But we do have members from Chad, Niger and Cameroon who actively participate in most of our attacks."
He said he and many other fighters would like to surrender but are scared to do so.
"Each time they declare an attack, I feel sick and terrified, so were most of my younger colleagues, but we dare not resist our leaders: They are deadly, our punishment for betrayal is slaughtering of our necks."
According to him, Boko Haram had moved on from targeting security forces and politicians to attacks on soft targets such as school students, villagers and travelers because of the formation of vigilante groups "who now reveal our identities and even arrest us."
Analysts see a more nuanced evolution.
The latest brutal attacks on mainly Muslim civilians "offer vital and disturbing insights" that "not only confirm many of the group's earlier developments but also al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb's, or AQIM's, growing influence over it," Jonathan Hill, senior lecturer at the Defence Studies Department of King's College, London, wrote in an analysis published online this month at africanarguments.org.
"These atrocities bear many striking similarities to those carried out by AQIM and its various forbears in Algeria," wrote Hill, who is the author of "Nigeria Since Independence: Forever Fragile?"
Nigeria's security forces claim to have won the upper hand in the northeast, saying they have driven Boko Haram out of most of the region's cities and towns since a May 14 military crackdown on three northeastern states covering one-sixth of the sprawling West African country that is Africa's largest oil producer.
But Hill noted that "despite the extraordinary efforts of the security forces, Boko Haram appears unbowed and its campaign undimmed."
TESLA HIRES APPLE VP DOUG FIELD TO LEAD VEHICLE PROGRAMS THURSDAY, OCTOBER 24, 2013 PALO ALTO, Calif.-- Tesla Motors has hired Doug Field to be its Vice President of Vehicle Programs, responsible for driving development of new vehicles. Doug is an accomplished leader and engineer of innovative, high-technology products, most recently serving as Vice President of Mac Hardware Engineering at Apple. Doug led the development of many new products at Apple including the latest MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and iMac. Doug began his career as an engineer at Ford Motor Company.
"Doug has demonstrated the leadership and technical talent to develop and deliver outstanding products, including what are widely considered the best computers in the world," said Elon Musk, Tesla co-founder and CEO. "Tesla's future depends on engineers who can create the most innovative, technologically advanced vehicles in the world. Doug's experience in both consumer electronics and traditional automotive makes him an important addition to our leadership team."
"Until Tesla came along, I had never seriously considered leaving Apple," said Field. "I started my career with the goal of creating incredible cars, but ultimately left the auto industry in search of fast-paced, exciting engineering challenges elsewhere. As the first high tech auto company in modern history, Tesla is at last an opportunity for me and many others to pursue the dream of building the best cars in the world-while being part of one of the most innovative companies in Silicon Valley."
Doug has a Masters in Mechanical Engineering and Management from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a BS in Mechanical Engineering with highest distinction from Purdue.
ABOUT TESLA
Tesla Motors' (NASDAQ: TSLA) goal is to accelerate the world's transition to electric mobility with a full range of increasingly affordable electric cars. California-based Tesla designs and manufactures EVs, as well as EV powertrain components for industry partners. Tesla has delivered over 15,000 electric vehicles to customers in 31 countries.
President Obama discusses the error-plagued launch of the Affordable Care Act's online enrollment on Oct. 21, 2013 in Washington, D.C.
Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
An IT problem has never escalated faster than the president's Rose Garden speech Monday addressing the problems with healthcare.gov. He could no longer outsource responding to user complaints. At first, the White House had said the headaches signing people up for health care coverage were just technical glitches, but now the sheer number of those glitches defies that explanation. Reporting about deeper systemic problems suggest that fixes will not come quickly. As my colleague Matthew Yglesias explains, adding more bodies to the problem adds more complexity, which may exacerbate the problem. It's hard to untangle Christmas lights by committee.
Barack Obama doesn’t like to play the action-hero president where the application of his overwhelming will is supposed to directly correlate with a snappy solution. There are too many constraints on the presidency—Congress, a fickle public, world leaders, a $17 trillion economy, and the vagaries of time and space. But with the botched Obamacare rollout, the president was applying all the rhetorical torque he could muster. "Nobody's madder than me about the fact that the website isn't working as well as it should," Obama said on Monday, "which means it's going to get fixed."
Rhetoric and will isn't going to solve this problem. That helped the president triumph over the government shutdown and debt limit crisis, when through determination and superior political positioning he out maneuvered his Republican opponents. Now he has a different kind of challenge—an operational challenge—where his talent for politics and persuasion are less useful and may even make matters worse. Putting a good spin on things only sets expectations that can then be dashed by reality.
More than any other domestic challenge, his administration should have been able to anticipate the problems they’re now scrambling to fix.
It’s a challenge of the president's own making. Unlike his battle with Republicans over the serial budget crises or the economic mess or smoldering wars he inherited from the Bush administration, the president is not reacting to uncontrollable events. He can't blame BP or Halliburton. The Affordable Care Act is his baby. Republicans made the rollout harder, but more than any other domestic challenge, his administration should have been able to anticipate the problems they’re now scrambling to fix.
In the Rose Garden on Monday morning, the president had a tough balancing act. On the one hand, he wanted to show that he was personally peeved, but he also had to simultaneously argue that the problems that made him so angry weren't threatening the underlying health of the product. That's a proposition that has yet to be tested. There are substantive ways in which the rollout can damage the fundamental enterprise. If the problems are as systemic as some reporting suggests, then they will not be fixed easily or anytime soon. The premise of the website was that its rollout would initiate a wave of social media success stories that would reach those younger applicants who are so vital to Obamacare’s success. Younger, healthy people must sign up to keep the insurance pools from being dominated by older sicker Americans, an outcome that would make prices soar. But those great sign up stories are not filtering through social media to this hard-to-reach group. Instead, they're hearing that the program is a mess. If enough young people don’t sign up, then the death-spiral scenario kicks in.
The president's speech was just the latest attempt to put the problems with healthcare.gov into perspective—a job that is not going well. Before the site was launched, the president said it would make signing up for health care as easy as making a plane reservation. When, after a few rocky days that turned out to be too rosy, the administration dropped the airline analogy. Now the experience more closely approximates the saga of having your flight delayed. First, the airline tells you it will be a half hour, then it stretches it to an hour, then two, then you're offered a voucher for a drink. After four hours, it dawns on you that the plane is never taking off. They continue to assure you it will—just before they cancel your flight.
The stories keep shifting. Administration officials said the site had been tested as thoroughly as the IRS computer systems that handle electronic tax returns. Now Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius admits the system wasn't tested enough. In the first several days, administration officials spoke of "glitches," and Secretary Sebelius asked that people give the government the same amount of slack Apple gets when it launches a new product. But the administration dropped that analogy because, unlike Apple's quick admission that Apple Maps was a mess, the government can't just let users install Google Maps (and there have been no quick firings for the mess, as there were at Apple). The president and his team then said the website snafus were the result of huge traffic, but that explanation doesn't explain the considerable technical problems now being reported. Reports of the extraordinary number of people who have accessed the site are themselves full of fuzzy claims that seek to oversell the success.
There's a dangerous spiral that can take hold in these situations, as spin intended to distract from the current mess becomes its own problem. That is especially true when the facts demonstrate that the story the administration was selling is too optimistic: Either the White House knew how bad things were and wasn’t playing it straight or it didn’t know how bad things were and is just inept. Which one the public chooses—or whether they forgive the launch pad mishaps when everything is repaired—depends on the administration’s operational, rather than its political, skill. The customer support ticket has reached the highest level; now the country must wait.
This combination of photos provided by the family via The Press Democrat and the Sonoma County Sheriff's Department shows an undated photo of 13-year-old Andy Lopez and the replica assault rifle he was holding when he was shot and killed by two Sonoma County deputies in Santa Rosa, Calif. on Tuesday, Oct. 22, 2013. (AP Photo/Family via The Press Democrat, Sonoma County Sheriff's Department)
This combination of photos provided by the family via The Press Democrat and the Sonoma County Sheriff's Department shows an undated photo of 13-year-old Andy Lopez and the replica assault rifle he was holding when he was shot and killed by two Sonoma County deputies in Santa Rosa, Calif. on Tuesday, Oct. 22, 2013. (AP Photo/Family via The Press Democrat, Sonoma County Sheriff's Department)
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The Federal Bureau of Investigation is conducting an independent investigation of the fatal shooting of a popular 13-year-old boy by a sheriff's deputy in Northern California.
Sheriff Steve Freitas said in a statement Friday afternoon that he will cooperate fully with federal investigators and welcomes their participation in the probe of Andy Lopez's killing on Tuesday afternoon. The shooting has generated numerous protests and marches in the suburban town of Santa Rosa, with many residents questioning the deputy's decision to fire on the youth.
Freitas also expressed sympathy to the Lopez family and thanked the Santa Rosa community for keeping protests peaceful.
Police say Lopez was carrying a pellet gun that looked like an AK-47 assault rifle.
A timeline released Thursday by the Santa Rosa police shows that only 10 seconds passed from the moment that the sheriff's deputy and his partner called dispatch to report a suspicious person to the moment they called back to say shots had been fired.
FBI spokesman Paul Lee said he did not know why his agency decided to get involved or whether local authorities had requested its help.
More than 100 angry middle and high school students walked to City Hall on Friday, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat reported. Hundreds of people protested earlier in the week.
City police and the Sonoma County district attorney's office are also investigating.
The Santa Rosa Police Department said two deputies in a squad car encountered the hoodie-wearing Lopez just after 3:14 p.m.
Witnesses say at least one of the deputies took cover behind an open front door of the cruiser, and one yelled twice "drop the gun."
Ten seconds after their initial report to dispatch, one of the officers called in "shot have been fired."
Sixteen seconds later, the deputies were calling for medical help. Cruz was later pronounced dead at the scene. The Sonoma County coroner said he found seven "apparent entry wounds," two of them fatal.
The deputies, who have not been identified, have been placed on paid administrative leave, which is standard after a shooting, officials said.
Assistant Sheriff Lorenzo Duenas told the Press Democrat that the deputy who shot the teen is a 24-year veteran and his partner, who did not fire his weapon, is a new hire.
Santa Rosa police Lt. Paul Henry told the newspaper the deputy who opened fire later told investigators he believed his life as well his partner's was in jeopardy. The deputy said the teen didn't comply with commands to drop the gun and was turning toward the deputies while raising the barrel.
"The deputy's mindset was that he was fearful that he was going to be shot," Henry said at a Wednesday news conference.
Geoffrey Alpert, a professor of criminology at the University of South Carolina, said officers are typically justified in the use of deadly force when they sincerely believe lives are at stake.
If the teen was raising the barrel of the gun toward officers, they had little choice about firing, Alpert said.
"If it's a pink bubble gum gun and an obvious fake to most, then there is no reason to shoot," he said. "But if the gun looks real the barrel is being pointed at you ... it's unfortunate, but a perceived threat trumps age and the officers have to protect themselves."
Hundreds of community members marched Wednesday night to remember the teen and protest the shooting.
They covered more than three miles from Santa Rosa City Hall to the field where Andy Lopez was killed. Some lit candles and placed flowers at a makeshift memorial with printed pictures of the victim, stuffed animals and a balloon that read "RIP Andy L."
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