Consumers Win Some Mortgage Safety in New Rules

WASHINGTON — Banks and other lenders will be prohibited from making home loans that offer deceptive teaser rates or require no documentation from borrowers, and will be required to take more steps to ensure that borrowers can repay, under new consumer protections to be announced on Thursday.

The rules, being laid out by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and taking effect next January, will also set some limits on interest-only packages or negative-amortization loans, where the balance due grows over time. Banks can make such loans, but the new rules would not protect them from potential borrower lawsuits if they do so.

And mortgage originators will in most cases be restricted from charging excessive upfront points and fees, from making loans with balloon payments and from making loans that load a borrower with total debt exceeding 43 percent of income.

With the sweeping rules, financial regulators are trying to substantially overhaul the market for home mortgages by creating a legal distinction between “qualified” loans that follow the new rules and are immune from legal action, and “unqualified” mortgages that continue practices that regulators have frowned on. The new rules are also aimed at getting banks to lend again, something they have been slow to do since the financial crisis and since the Dodd-Frank Act required new limits on bank activities.

Gone, the regulators hope, will be the unbridled frenzy that encouraged lenders to ignore whether borrowers could repay as long as the lenders could sell the mortgages to third parties, usually investment firms that sliced them up and resold them as part of complex financial derivatives.

By following the new rules, banks will be given a “safe harbor,” which ensures that they cannot be successfully sued for reckless or abusive lending practices, federal officials said Wednesday. Lenders must document a borrower’s ability to repay a loan; one way of doing that is to follow several guidelines issued Thursday that make a loan a “qualified” mortgage.

“When consumers sit down at the closing table, they shouldn’t be set up to fail with mortgages they can’t afford,” said Richard Cordray, the director of the consumer bureau. “Our ability-to-repay rule protects borrowers from the kinds of risky lending practices that resulted in so many families losing their homes.”

Mortgage bankers generally applauded the new regulations, saying that they clear up uncertainty that has hung over the home lending business since the financial crisis. In fact, most of the types of loans now being restricted, which were rampant during the inflation of the housing bubble, have been relatively rare in the last couple of years because many banks have tightened lending since the financial crisis.

“These rules offer protection for consumers and a clear, safe environment for banks to do business,” David Stevens, chief executive of the Mortgage Bankers Association, said in an interview. “Now everybody knows if you stay inside these lines, you are safe.”

He added that he believed the consumer bureau “did a great job listening to stakeholders” in shaping the rule.

The new rules will not necessarily lead to an immediate expansion of credit, Mr. Stevens said, because nearly all mortgage loans being made currently are being sold to government-sponsored enterprises like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Their underwriting standards are not affected by the new rules.

In certain circumstances, the new lending rules can be bypassed for up to seven years, regulators said. New loans can be considered to be a “qualified loan” even if the borrower has a debt-to-income ratio of more than 43 percent as long as the loan is eligible for purchase or guaranteed by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, for example, or by one of several executive branch agencies, like the Department of Veterans Affairs.

The consumer bureau said that the exception was created “in light of the fragile state of the mortgage market as a result of the recent mortgage crisis.” Without the exception, the bureau said, “creditors might be reluctant to make loans that are not qualified mortgages, even if they are responsibly underwritten.”

Similarly, the new rules allow balloon payments in mortgages that are originated by and retained in the portfolio of small lenders that operate primarily in rural or underserved areas.

The legal protections offered to lenders by the qualified mortgage rule are not absolute. Lenders do not receive complete immunity from lawsuits in all circumstances. Some higher-priced loans, given to consumers with weak credit, can be challenged if the borrower can prove that he did not have sufficient income to pay the mortgage and other living expenses. And the rules do not affect the rights of consumers to challenge a lender for violating other federal consumer protection laws.

“We believe this rule does exactly what it is supposed to do,” Mr. Cordray said in a statement prepared for delivery Thursday morning in Baltimore, where the rules are being announced. “It protects consumers and helps strengthen the housing market by rooting out reckless and unsustainable lending, while enabling safer lending,” he said.

Read More..

Charlie Sheen downplays Baja encounter with L.A. mayor

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa found himself sucked deeper into the Charlie Sheen-TMZ-Hollywood gossip vortex Tuesday, with the actor speaking out again about the night they met up at a hotel in Mexico over the holidays.

Sheen made news last month after he tweeted a picture of himself with his arm around Villaraigosa the night of Sheen's bar opening in Baja California, Mexico. The former star of "Two and a Half Men" praised the mayor as a man who "knows how to party." But Villaraigosa downplayed the significance of the image, telling KNBC's Conan Nolan over the weekend that he had only "bumped into" Sheen and engaged in a three-minute conversation.

On Tuesday, Sheen challenged Villaraigosa's account, telling celebrity website TMZ that the mayor was drinking in Sheen's hotel suite in a room full of beautiful women, including at least one porn star. "I memorize 95 pages a week, so the last thing that I am is memory challenged," Sheen told the website. "We hung out for the better part of two hours."

Hours later, Sheen issued a more muted account, saying the mayor had spoken to many other people at the opening of the bar. "I am a giant fan of the mayor's and apologize if any of my words have been misconstrued," the statement said.

By then, however, Villaraigosa found himself fending off related questions at a news conference meant to be devoted to billionaire Eli Broad's new downtown art museum. "Can you just set the record straight for us?" asked one reporter. "What was it? Two hours or three minutes?" asked another. Then came the zinger: "Does what happens in Cabo stay in Cabo?"

Villaraigosa cackled at the Cabo crack but refused to take the bait. "I've said what I'm going to say on that, everybody," Villaraigosa declared. "You had fun. Let's talk about the important things, like a thousand jobs today" — a reference to construction work going on at Broad's museum.

Villaraigosa has frequently bristled at media questions about his personal life, going silent on some occasions and becoming visibly angry on others. Last week, he told KNBC's Nolan that Nolan had asked a "bozo question" about the Sheen photograph. He also noted that Nolan and other newsroom staffers have, like Sheen, asked the mayor to pose for pictures with them.

Sheen has been a TMZ staple, using the website as a platform to talk up his $100,000 gift to celebrity Lindsay Lohan and his porn star "goddesses." And Villaraigosa has glided easily between the world of politics and the entertainment industry since being elected in 2005.

"He's a celebrity mayor. And he's always wanted to be that," said Jaime Regalado, professor emeritus of political science at Cal State L.A. "If you're going to be a celebrity mayor, you have to take the good and the bad and everything in between" when it comes to news coverage.

david.zahniser@latimes.com

kate.linthicum@latimes.com

Read More..

Kickstarter Campaigns Reap $319M in 2012

While Kickstarter’s hardware projects made headlines in 2012, film and gaming ideas (of both the video and board variety) were the real cash magnets for the crowdfunding site, raising a combined $176 million.

That’s just one of the many stats Kickstarter recently released on its crowdfunding activity in 2012, arguably the year the online service, and the notion of crowdfunding, went mainstream. In 2012 Kickstarter attracted more than 2 million backers who pledged a combined $319 million on everything from one-woman comedy shows to iPhone-enabled watches and electronic banana pianos. The money total blew away 2011 by 221 percent, and the number of backers grew a corresponding 238 percent.

But just because a campaign launched didn’t mean it was successful, in fact, it got harder as the year went on (especially for hardware projects), both by Kickstarter’s design and as the public wised up to beautiful-looking renderings of gadgets that would never get shipped. Of the 41,765 projects launched on Kickstarter, only 18,109 campaigns (about 43 percent) were successful.

Across project categories, gaming projects took in the most money, $83 million, thanks in large part to the Ouya gaming console, which raised $8.6 million in August. Film and video projects raised close to $58 million, the second-highest amount of cash, and Kickstarter notes that 10 percent of films at the January 2012 Sundance film festival were funded on the site. In third place were design projects (including furniture, iPhone cases, and bike accessories), which raised $50.1 million.

The single biggest Kickstarter star last year was the Pebble watch, which pulled in a record-shattering $10 million in May. However, in Kickstarter’s 50 slide “Best of 2012” presentation, there’s no mention of the e-paper watch nor hardly any other physical goods. The spotlight is clearly on art and performance campaigns; a not so subtle hint at Kickstarter’s growing fatigue with design and technology projects, which caused the crowdfunding site considerable pain in 2012.

Here was the problem: fully 84 percent of the top physical product-based projects were delayed. That in turn led to a wave of unhappy backers who mistakenly thought pledging amounted to online shopping. As a result, Kickstarter laid out stricter guidelines for campaigns in the design and technology categories, where you find nearly all of the non-food consumer products on the site.

Product inventors must now have photographs of their working prototypes instead of computer renderings, and clearly articulate to backers the risks of their project. Even if you follow these guidelines perfectly, the odds you’ll get your product accepted on Kickstarter have diminished. The startup’s widely-discussed “Kickstarter is Not A Store” blog post from September made it clear that Kickstarter doesn’t know how to handle million-dollar hardware projects and has no desire to figure it out.

In many ways, the decisions about what to include and exclude in its 2012 roundup are an indication of where Kickstarter wants to place its emphasis going forward. It’s projects like this video game proposal, the XOXO Festival (one of the first major festivals funded on the site), and a community hackerspace in Baghdad.

As cool as the Pebble watch may be, it’s not likely you’ll see the likes of it rise up again on Kickstarter, especially as other crowdfunding sites emerge and start to specialize in the categories and projects with which Kickstarter would rather not bother.

Read More..

TV drama production in L.A. plunges by 20% in 2012

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – The filming of TV dramas and reality shows in Los Angeles plummeted in 2012, according to figures released Tuesday by FilmL.A., the non-profit agency that coordinates location shoots in the region.

TV drama shoots were off by 20 percent from 2011, while the filming of reality shows dropped by 11.8 percent. Those numbers overshadowed the report’s good news on overall location shooting, movie production and commercial filming, all of which were up from the previous year.

The TV drama number is critical to the overall health of local filming, because those shows — mainly hour-long, high-end and multiple episodes – employ more people and bring more economic benefits than other types of productions. A typical 22-episode-a-year network series has a budget of $ 60 million and generates 840 direct and indirect jobs, according to the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp.

The numbers confirm what many had feared since a midyear FilmL.A. report indicated that L.A. was losing its grip on this critical production sector.

Of 23 TV drama pilots launched last year, just two were based in L.A., with the rest being shot in Canada, and other U.S. states including New York and North Carolina.

The TV drama figures clouded the otherwise positive report. Paced by upticks in feature film and commercial shoots, overall on-location production in 2012 rose 4.7 percent from the previous year, to its highest level since 2008.

FilmLA measures filming activity by permitted production days. Last year there were 46,254, compared to 45,484 in the previous year.

Overall TV production was dragged down by the drama and reality losses, falling 3.4 percent for the year (16,762 PPD in 2012 vs.17,349 in 2011). It would have been worse, but for a surge in sitcom production that powered an 11.9 percent fourth quarter increase.

L.A. still dominates in terms of sitcom production, but those are mainly half-hour shows shot primarily on soundstages. Comedy pilots employ fewer people and cost about $ 2 million to produce, compared to $ 5.5 million for drama pilots, the agency said.

“We know that part of the decline in our TV drama figures stems from producers’ desire to cut costs by filming more on studio back-lots and soundstages,” said FilmLA president Paul Audley. “Unfortunately, last year we also saw a record number of new TV drama series shot out of state, resulting in negative economic consequences.”

On-location movie production increased 3.7 percent for the year (5,892 PPD in 2012 vs. 5,682 PPD in 2011). This was the category’s best year since 2008, the year before feature production declined precipitously and state lawmakers enacted the California Film & Television Tax Credit Program.

The Warner Bros.’ movie “Gangster Squad,” which qualified for the state tax credit, provided a bright spot for the program.

The film, which opens Friday, was shot entirely in the city of Los Angeles and prominently features a number of local landmarks including City Hall and Union Station.

It reversed a trend that had seen L.A.-set period films “Hollywoodland” and “Black Dahlia” go elsewhere to film. Those 2006 movies shot some exteriors in Los Angeles, but “Hollywoodland” was produced mainly in Toronto and “The Black Dahlia” was filmed in Bulgaria.

In all, projects that qualified for the state tax credit accounted for 5.9 percent of the total movie shoots last year. Among the films that were shot utilizing the program were “10 Things I Hate About Life,” “Baggage Claim,” “The Bling Ring,” “Dark Skies,” “The Hive,” “Jesus in Cowboy Boots,” “Look of Love,” and “Plush.”

“Last year saw our industry rocked by dramatic changes in the local production landscape,” Audley said. “If we seek a more secure future for filming in Los Angeles, we must continue to innovate and expand upon the programs proven to attract new projects to California.”

Lawmakers last year voted to extend the program, which has been over-subscribed and provides lesser breaks than several competing states, through the 2016-17 fiscal year. New York in particular has become a major lure for producers, having added post-production tax credits last year, on top of filming incentives.

Other projects driving a significant amount of location filming in the L.A..area in 2012 included “Bad Words” and “Star Trek Into Darkness” from director J.J. Abrams.

Commercials production was another bright spot. Commercial shoots increased 14.1 percent for the year (8,078 PPD in 2012 vs. 7,079 in 2011), driven in part by a surge in the number of locally produced Internet commercial projects. Their production accounted for 7.9 percent of the commercials total, well up from the 1.7 percent web-based commercials generated when FilmL.A. first began tracking them in 2008.

Roughly 585,850 jobs directly or indirectly tied to the entertainment industry brought in $ 43.3 billion in labor income in 2011, according to the most recent figures from the Los Angeles County Economic Development Commission. That’s equivalent to 17.6 percent of L.A. County’s 3.3 million jobs. The industry generated $ 5.6 billion in state and local taxes that year.

TV News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Title Post: TV drama production in L.A. plunges by 20% in 2012
Url Post: http://www.news.fluser.com/tv-drama-production-in-l-a-plunges-by-20-in-2012/
Link To Post : TV drama production in L.A. plunges by 20% in 2012
Rating:
100%

based on 99998 ratings.
5 user reviews.
Author: Fluser SeoLink
Thanks for visiting the blog, If any criticism and suggestions please leave a comment

Read More..

Recipes for Health: Cauliflower and Tuna Salad — Recipes for Health

Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times

I have added tuna to a classic Italian antipasto of cauliflower and capers dressed with vinegar and olive oil. For the best results give the cauliflower lots of time to marinate.

1 large or 2 small or medium cauliflowers, broken into small florets

1 5-ounce can water-packed light (not albacore) tuna, drained

1 plump garlic clove, minced or pureéd

1/3 cup chopped flat-leaf parsley

3 tablespoons capers, drained and rinsed

1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice

3 tablespoons sherry vinegar or champagne vinegar

6 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

Salt and freshly ground pepper

1. Place the cauliflower in a steaming basket over 1 inch of boiling water, cover and steam 1 minute. Lift the lid for 15 seconds, then cover again and steam for 5 to 8 minutes, until tender. Refresh with cold water, then drain on paper towels.

2. In a large bowl, break up the tuna fish and add the cauliflower.

3. In a small bowl or measuring cup, mix together the garlic, parsley, capers, lemon juice, vinegar, and olive oil. Season generously with salt and pepper. Add the cauliflower and toss together. Marinate, stirring from time to time, for 30 minutes if possible before serving. Serve warm, cold, or at room temperature.

Yield: Serves 6 as a starter or side dish

Advance preparation: You can make this up to a day ahead, but omit the parsley until shortly before serving so that it doesn’t fade. It keeps well in the refrigerator for up to 5 days.

Nutritional information per serving: 188 calories; 15 grams fat; 2 grams saturated fat; 2 grams polyunsaturated fat; 10 grams monounsaturated fat; 10 milligrams cholesterol; 8 grams carbohydrates; 3 grams dietary fiber; 261 milligrams sodium (does not include salt to taste); 9 grams protein

Martha Rose Shulman is the author of “The Very Best of Recipes for Health.”

Read More..

Safety of Boeing 787 Dreamliner Called Into Question

NEW YORK — For Boeing, much rides on the success of its newest and most sophisticated jet, the 787 Dreamliner. But a spate of mishaps is reviving concerns about the plane’s reliability and safety.

The plane had a new problem Wednesday, when the Japanese carrier All Nippon Airways canceled a domestic flight after a computer on board erroneously showed problems with the aircraft’s brakes. A spokeswoman for the airline, Megumi Tezuka, said the computer glitch was similar to one that appeared when the carrier first started flying the Dreamliners in 2011.

The flight, NH698, had been due to depart from Yamaguchi Ube airport in southern Japan for Tokyo’s Haneda airport at 4:50 p.m. local time. The flight’s 98 passengers were transferred to a later flight.

On Tuesday, a fuel leak forced a 787 to return to its gate minutes before taking off from Boston. On Monday, an electrical fire had broken out on another plane. Both of those incidents affected planes operated by Japan Airlines at Logan International Airport in Boston.

The three events were the latest in a series of problems with the 787, which entered commercial service in November 2011 and has had technical and electrical malfunctions since then. Boeing delivered 46 planes last year, more than any analyst had predicted, and has outlined ambitious plans to double its production rate to 10 planes a month by the end of this year.

Boeing expects to sell 5,000 of the planes in the next 20 years. The basic model has a list price of $206.8 million, but early customers typically received deep discounts to make up for the production delays and teething problems. All this means it could be years before Boeing starts recouping its investment costs and turning a profit on the planes.

Shares of Boeing dropped 2.6 percent to $74.13 Tuesday, extending the drop of 2 percent Monday.

The 787 makes extensive use of new technology, including a bigger reliance on electrical systems, and is built mostly out of lightweight carbon composite materials. While the problems so far do not point to serious design problems with the airplane, they represent an embarrassment to Boeing’s manufacturing ability.

“None of this is a showstopper, and none of this should signal this product is fundamentally flawed,” said Richard Aboulafia, an aerospace analyst at the Teal Group, a consulting firm. “But whether these are design glitches or manufacturing glitches, either way it’s a serious hit to Boeing’s image.”

The fuel leak Tuesday was spotted by another pilot as JAL Flight 007, bound for Tokyo, was taxiing and getting ready to take off, said Richard Walsh, a spokesman for the Massachusetts Port Authority. The plane was towed back to its gate and the leak of about 40 gallons, or about 150 liters, was cleaned up.

The flight with 178 passengers and 11 crew members, scheduled to take off at noon, eventually left Boston at 3:47 p.m.

An electrical fire Monday on a 787 was traced to a battery connected to the plane’s auxiliary power unit, which runs electrical systems when the plane is not getting power from its engines.

The fire broke out about 30 minutes after the flight landed from Tokyo, and all 183 passengers and crew members had left. The smoke was first detected in the cabin by maintenance and cleaning personnel who were on the parked plane and notified the airport’s fire department.

The National Transportation Safety Board, which is investigating the electrical fire, said the battery had “severe fire damage.”

New planes often experience problems in the first few years of production. But the succession of issues with the 787, which has already been marred by production delays of years, has revived concerns about the plane’s reliability and safety.

Last month, the Federal Aviation Administration ordered inspections of fuel line connectors on all 787s, warning of a risk of leaks and fires. Separately, a United Airlines 787 was also diverted in December after one of six electrical generators failed in flight.

In a statement Tuesday, Boeing said that it saw no relationship between the battery problem and previous incidents with the 787’s power system, which involved faults in power panels elsewhere in the electrical equipment bay.

“Boeing is cooperating with the N.T.S.B. in the investigation of this incident,” the company said. “Before providing more detail, we will give our technical teams the time they need to do a thorough job and ensure we are dealing with facts, not speculation.”

A Boeing spokesman, Marc Birtel, said the plane maker was aware of the fuel leak incident but declined to comment.

A spokeswoman for Japan Airlines in Tokyo said that the company was still gathering the details about the two incidents and that there were no plans to change its orders for 787s. The airline has seven 787s already in service, and 38 more on order. The spokeswoman declined to be named, citing company policy.

All Nippon Airways, which also operates Dreamliners, likewise said there were no plans to change its orders for the aircraft. Ms. Tezuka, the spokeswoman for ANA, said the airline had 17 787s in service and another 49 on order.

United Airlines, currently the only airline in the United States operating 787s, said it had performed inspections on all six of its 787s after the electrical fire Monday. It did not cancel any of its flights today, said Mary Ryan, a spokeswoman for the airline. She said United “continues to work closely with Boeing on the reliability of our 787s.”

But she declined to comment on a report in The Wall Street Journal that said the airline had found improperly installed wiring in components associated with the auxiliary power unit.

Bettina Wassener reported from Hong Kong.

Read More..

LAPD force exceeds 10,000 for the first time, officials say

For the first time in the city's history, Los Angeles' police force now exceeds 10,000 officers, city officials said Monday.

Appearing with LAPD Chief Charlie Beck to discuss the continued drop in crime last year, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said the department is budgeted for 10,023 officers, up from the 9,963 authorized over the last three years, during a deep budget crisis.

The staffing increase took effect Jan. 1, when 60 sworn officers moved into the LAPD from the General Services Department, which patrols parks, libraries and other municipal buildings, said Villaraigosa spokesman Peter Sanders. Those officers will continue to patrol city facilities, budget officials said.

Some questioned the significance of the staffing milestone, since the overall number of sworn officers employed by the city hasn't grown.

"It's an increase for show," said Kevin James, a candidate for mayor in the March 5 election who has questioned Villaraigosa's LAPD hiring goals. "The mayor really wanted to get to 10,000 one way or the other before he left office, and this was the way he could do it under the current budget constraints."

Los Angeles experienced a 10.5% decrease in gang crime and an 8.2% drop in violent crime last year, compared with 2011. The city had the lowest number of violent crimes per capita of any major city, including New York and Chicago, Villaraigosa said.

The mayor attributed those numbers — and a decade-long decline in crime — in large part to the expansion of the police force.

Villaraigosa originally promised to add 1,000 new officers to the department during the 2005 election campaign, criticizing then-Mayor James K. Hahn for failing to do so. Since then, he has succeeded in adding 800 officers, Sanders said. On Monday, Villaraigosa suggested that the addition of the final 200 will not be achieved until after June 30, when he leaves office.

"I would hope that the next mayor would, as we get out of this economic crisis, increase our Police Department to that 1,000," he said.

While Villaraigosa has been pushing for continued hiring at the LAPD, Beck has warned in recent weeks that the LAPD would lose 500 officers if voters fail to approve Proposition A, a half-cent sales tax measure on the March 5 ballot. That would represent more than half of the LAPD buildup accomplished by Villaraigosa.

Despite Beck's warnings, Villaraigosa said he is not ready to endorse Proposition A until the council makes a series of cost-cutting moves, such as turning over operation of the city zoo to a private entity.

Since Villaraigosa took office, homicides have decreased 38% and gang crime has dropped by a similar amount. The number of slayings has stayed largely the same over the last three years, with 297 homicides in 2010, 297 in 2011 and 298 last year. Overall crime dropped 1.4% last year. Property crimes, which are more numerous than violent crimes, increased for the first time in several years — driven in part by a 30% increase in cell phone thefts, officials said.

With little money to pay officers for overtime, the department has been compensating them with time off. The resulting staffing loss has been the equivalent of about 450 officers at any given time, according to department figures — a hit that has complicated crime-fighting strategies.

Preserving LAPD funding has become increasingly challenging for council members. For nine months they have debated whether to lay off dozens of civilian LAPD employees while continuing to hire enough police officers to maintain current staffing levels.

Councilman Paul Koretz, who opposed the layoffs, said the movement of the 60 building patrol officers to the LAPD was "a little smoke and mirrors." He questioned whether the LAPD buildup in the Villaraigosa era was financially sustainable.

"It just seems like we really never did the analysis to see if we could afford it," he said.

A defeat of the sales tax increase, which is projected to generate roughly $215 million in new revenue, would leave council members no choice but to roll back the size of the LAPD, Koretz said.

But Villaraigosa warned that would be dangerous, saying other California cities have seen upticks in crime after cutting back on officers.

"I know some people think that 10,000 cops is a magical illusion, a meaningless number, that more officers don't necessarily lead to a reduction in crime," said the mayor, adding: "Those critics talk a lot, but they're just plain wrong."

david.zahniser@latimes.com

richard.winton@latimes.com

Read More..

Bare-Bones Photo Tour of London Squat Proves Content Is King

While flashy animations and interactions are fun to play with on the web, photographers don’t always need to think big-budget to tell their story online. With just a little bit of HTML and jQuery, photographer Adrian Nettleship has churned out a timely and purpose-built web experience that lets users explore a London squat and meet its inhabitants.

Nettleship’s photos and audio are combined into a simple choose-your-own-adventure walk-through of the squat that lacks gloss, but is nonetheless captivating.

“I’ve sometimes found the medium of photography slightly frustrating, almost limiting, in its ability to show the relation of one image to another,” he says. “I’ve never liked to use captions to [solely] explain context.”

Occupy and Explore is a response to new amendments to U.K. law that re-categorize squatting as a criminal offense, punishable by a six-month jail term and fines up to £5,000 ($8,000). The new laws increase the power of property owners in legal dispute with squatters, who according to the U.K. government number 20,000. Squatting groups say the real number is more. 

Pro-squatter campaign group Squatters’ Action for Secure Homes (SQUASH) says there are an estimated 650,000 empty properties, that it is society’s most vulnerable who squat and that the new laws will lead to increased homelessness. Furthermore, SQUASH says the new laws will, over five years, cost $790 million to enforce and that mass evictions and prosecution of peaceful squatters will burden the police, courts and charities for years to come.

In the U.K., squatters’ lifestyles have long divided opinion, but Nettleship feels some sections of the British media leading up to the law change demonized squatters.

“There was a huge amount of misinformation about the subject, such as tabloid stories about eastern European home invaders seizing houses while their owners were away for the weekend,” says Nettleship. “It has always been illegal to invade someone else’s home, but this was being omitted from the discussion. I wanted to counter the stereotype, to show how squatters can be thoughtful people who maintain and improve abandoned buildings.”

Nettleship’s use of software tools is as resourceful as his subjects’ use and reuse of spaces and materials. Over a number of weeks, he taught himself to use Dreamweaver and jQuery to complement his basic HTML knowledge. For those photographers balking at tackling an interactive project, Occupy is an example of basic navigation enriching a simple story — a success due in no small part to the way it addresses the context of the issue. It’s more difficult to unfairly lambast a population in the abstract after meeting its individual people.

The project also comes at a time of larger political shifts. Since coming to power, the coalition Conservative/Liberal Democrat government has steadily lost public support. Repeated austerity measures and service cuts have hit some communities hard and not since the ’80s has talk of class division been so prevalent.

“There’s so much to say at the moment,” says Nettleship. “The balance of power between government, people and large organizations is undergoing adjustment, as is the United Kingdom’s role in world affairs. We need to be clear on what values are important to us, and defend them. As with the changes of the Thatcher years, the effects will be felt for many years to come.”

Nettleship admits that he was only able to make it through the early years of his photography career by living with his parents and eating their food. From looking at the lives of his friends, he says his longish route to self reliance was not — and increasingly is not — unusual.

“Divisions [between the haves and have-nots] seem to lie along who your parents were, and most importantly how much they accumulated during the prosperous years of North Sea oil and property growth,” says Nettleship. “It’s not uncommon for people to live at home into their 30s enabling them to study or work an unpaid internship in order to get the job they want. My friends who didn’t take or didn’t have those opportunities are finding it much harder. People are starting to buy houses, but I know very few who have done it without a helping hand on the deposit. The baby-boomer generation are soaking up the impact of austerity on their children. The middle classes won’t feel the full impact until a generation down the line, when the money runs out.”

Nettleship is exhibiting a physical adaptation of Occupy and Explore, whereby his photographs will be sectioned out in space and joined by colored string to show paths through the squat.

Read More..

David Bowie breaks long silence with new music release

LONDON (Reuters) – British singer David Bowie released his first new song in nearly a decade on Tuesday in a surprise launch coinciding with his 66th birthday.

“Where Are We Now?”, produced by his long-term collaborator Tony Visconti, is a mournful look back to the time he spent in Berlin in the 1970s with an accompanying video featuring black-and-white footage of the city when it was still divided.

The song, available on iTunes and free to view on his re-launched website, was recorded in New York and will be followed by his first studio album since 2003, “The Next Day”, due to hit shelves in March.

Bowie’s label Columbia Records said the new song was a “treasure” that appeared “as if out of nowhere”, underlining the element of surprise from a release that ends years of speculation among fans over whether he would record again.

“Throwing shadows and avoiding the industry treadmill is very David Bowie despite his extraordinary track record that includes album sales in excess of 130 million not to mention his massive contributions in the area of art, fashion, style, sexual exploration and social commentary,” the label said.

The album will consist of 14 songs, and a deluxe edition will feature three bonus tracks.

The glam-rock star shot to fame with “Space Oddity” in 1969, and later with his alter ego Ziggy Stardust, before establishing himself as a chart-topping force in the early 1980s.

Known for his constant desire to re-invent and experiment with different musical genres, Bowie is considered one of the most influential, and unusual stars of the pop era.

(Reporting by Mike Collett-White)

Music News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Title Post: David Bowie breaks long silence with new music release
Url Post: http://www.news.fluser.com/david-bowie-breaks-long-silence-with-new-music-release/
Link To Post : David Bowie breaks long silence with new music release
Rating:
100%

based on 99998 ratings.
5 user reviews.
Author: Fluser SeoLink
Thanks for visiting the blog, If any criticism and suggestions please leave a comment

Read More..

The New Old Age Blog: Who Should Receive Organ Transplants?

Joe Gammalo had been contending with pulmonary fibrosis, a scarring of the lungs, for more than a decade when he came to the Cleveland Clinic in 2008 seeking a lung transplant.

“It had gotten to the point where I was on oxygen all the time and in a wheelchair,” he told me in an interview. “I didn’t expect to live.”

Lung transplants are a dicey proposition, involving a huge surgical procedure, arduous follow-up, the lifelong use of potent immunosuppressive drugs and high rates of serious side effects. “It’s not like taking out an appendix,” said Dr. Marie Budev, the medical director of the clinic’s lung transplant program.

Only 50 to 57 percent of all recipients live for five years, she noted, and they will still die of their disease. But there’s no other treatment for pulmonary fibrosis.

Some medical centers would have turned Mr. Gammalo away. Because survival rates are even lower for older patients, guidelines from the International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation caution against lung transplants for those over 65, though they set no age limit.

But “we are known as an aggressive, high-risk center,” said Dr. Budev. So Mr. Gammalo was 66 when he received a lung; his newly found buddy, Clyde Conn, who received the other lung from the same donor, was 69.

You can’t mistake the trend: A graying population and revised policies determining who gets priority for donated organs, have led to a rising proportion of older adults receiving transplants.

My colleague Judith Graham has reported on the increase in heart transplants, but the pattern extends to other organs, too.

The number of kidney transplants performed annually on adults over 65 tripled between 1998 and last year, according to data from the Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients. In 2001, 7.4 percent of liver transplant recipients were over 65; last year, that rose to 13 percent.

The rise in elderly lung transplant candidates is particularly dramatic because, since 2005, a “lung allocation score” puts those at the highest mortality risk, rather than those who’ve waited longest, at the top of the list.

In 2001, about 3 percent of those on the wait list and of those transplanted were over 65; last year, older patients represented almost 18 percent of wait-listed candidates and more than a quarter of transplant recipients. (Medicare pays for the surgery, though patients face co-pays and considerable out-of-pocket costs, including for drugs and travel.)

The debate has grown, too: When the number of adults awaiting transplants keeps growing, but organ donations stay flat, is it desirable or even ethical that an increasing proportion of recipients are elderly?

Dr. Budev, who estimated that a third of her program’s patients are over 65, votes yes. As long as a program selects candidates carefully, “how can you deny them a therapy?” she asked. So the Cleveland Clinic has no age limit. “We feel that everyone should have a chance.”

At the University of Michigan, by contrast, the age limit remains 65, though Dr. Kevin Chan, the transplant program’s medical director, acknowledged that some fit older patients get transplanted.

“You can talk about this all day — it’s a tough one,” Dr. Chan said. Younger recipients have greater physiologic reserve to aid in the arduous recovery; older ones face higher risk of subsequent kidney failure, stroke, diabetes and other diseases, and, of course, their lifespans are shorter to begin with.

Donated lungs, fragile and prone to injury, are a particularly scarce commodity. Last year, surgeons performed 16,055 kidney transplants, 5,805 liver transplants and 1,949 heart transplants. Only1,830 patients received lung transplants.

“What if there’s a 35-year-old on a ventilator who needs the lung just as much?” Dr. Chan said. “Why should a 72-year-old possibly take away a lung from a 35-year-old?” Yet, he acknowledged, “it’s easy to look at the statistics and say, ‘Give the lungs to younger patients.’ At the bedside, when you meet this patient and family, it’s a lot different.”

These questions about who deserves scarce resources — those most likely to die without them? or those most likely to live longer with them? — will persist as the population ages. They’re also likely to arise when the International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation begins working towards revised guidelines this spring. (I’d also like to hear your take, below.)

Lots of 65- and 75-year-olds are very healthy. Yet transplants themselves can cause harm and there’s no backup, like dialysis. Without the transplant, they die. But when the transplant goes wrong, they also die.

More than four years post-transplant, the Cleveland Clinic’s “lung brothers” are success stories. Mr. Conn, who lives near Dayton, Ohio, can’t walk very far or lift more than 10 pounds, but he works part time as a real-estate appraiser and enjoys cruises with his wife.

Mr. Gammalo, a onetime musician, has developed diabetes, like nearly half of all lung recipients. But he went onstage a few weeks back to sing “Don’t Be Cruel” with his son’s rock band, “a highlight of both our lives,” he said.

Yet when I asked Mr. Conn, now 73, how he felt about having priority over a younger but healthier person, he paused. “It’s a good question,” he said, to which he had no answer.

---

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

Read More..