Jerry Lewis Out as MDA Host, National Chairman

Jerry Lewis Hosting MDA Telethon

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6:55 p.m. PDT, August 3, 2011

NEW YORK -- The Muscular Dystrophy Association has announced that legendary host Jerry Lewis will be not be back as master of ceremonies at the annual telethon.

In fact, according to a statement released Wednesday, Lewis is also no longer the national MDA chairman.

"Jerry Lewis is a world-class humanitarian and we're forever grateful to him for his more than half century of generous service to MDA," MDA Chairman of the Board of Directors, R. Rodney Howell, M.D., said in a statement on Wednesday.

"We will not be replacing him as MDA national chairman, and he will not be appearing on the Telethon."

Last month, the 85-year old comedian and actor announced he would be retiring after one final telethon.

"I'll be making my final appearance on the show this year by performing my signature song, 'You'll Never Walk Alone,'" Lewis said.

"I'll continue to serve MDA as its national chairman as I've done since the early 1950s. I'll never desert MDA and my kids."

But, it now appears things have changed.
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Jerry Lewis out as Muscular Dystrophy Association chairman

By the CNN Wire Staff

August 3, 2011 10:02 p.m. EDT

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• The 85-year-old comedian had said in May that he was planning to continue as chairman
• He said then that next month's telethon would be the last one he would host
• But the MDA says he will not host this year's telethon

(CNN) -- The Muscular Dystrophy Association announced Wednesday that comedian Jerry Lewis is no longer serving as the organization's national chairman.
Lewis, 85, and MDA had announced in May that he was retiring as host of the MDA Labor Day Telethon in September. But he said then in a statement that he was planning to continue to serve as the organization's national chairman.
"As a labor of love, I've hosted the annual telethon since 1966," Lewis said in the news release issued in May by the association. "And I'll be making my final appearance on the show this year, by performing my signature song, 'You'll Never Walk Alone.'"
Jim Brown, vice president of public relations for the MDA, told CNN in a telephone interview that Lewis will not be replaced in his role as national chairman.
He also said that Lewis will not host this year's telethon, which is scheduled for September 4. Instead, it will be hosted by Nigel Lythgoe, Nancy O'Dell, Allison Sweeney and Jan Carl, Brown said.
No explanation was offered for the change of plans -- either about his position as national chairman or about the plan to replace him in next month's telethon.
For 45 years, Jerry Lewis and the organization's annual Labor Day fundraiser have been synonymous, so much so that it became known as the Jerry Lewis MDA Telethon.
Lewis hit it big at age 20 in 1946, teaming up with Dean Martin to become one of the most popular comedy partnerships in history. Together, they headlined thousands of sold-out performances, 16 hit movies and two dozen top-rated television shows.
After the break-up of the Martin and Lewis team, Lewis made a successful solo career. In 1959, he signed a seven-year, $10 million contract with Paramount -- at the time, the largest contract ever between a studio and performer.
His solo film career included classics such as "The Nutty Professor," "The Bellboy" and "The Geisha Boy."
Still, for several generations since, Lewis has been known as much as a philanthropist as a movie star. That's because of his work with the Muscular Dystrophy Association, a nonprofit dedicated to curing that disease, ALS and related ailments as well as providing support, education and other services.
Lewis joined the cause in the early 1950s, and he gave it star power in 1966 when he became the host of what would be the charity's first of many telethons over Labor Day weekends.
In between occasional songs, comic bits and passionate pitches for people to donate, his biggest challenge was keeping the variety show lively and engaging for as long as 21.5 consecutive hours.
Scores of television stations across the country picked up the program, while volunteers stood by to take calls from people pledging donations.
The 2010 edition raised $58,919,838 after performances by the likes of acrobatic dancers from Cirque du Soleil, "American Idol's" David Archuleta, and a host of comedic performers. Still, throughout the acts, the one constant over 900 hours of programming has remained Lewis.

This year's event will be shorter than many of years past at six hours.

Actress Says She Can’t Be Evicted Because She Moved Out

By CHRISTINE HAUGHNEY

Published: August 3, 2011

The day after court records revealed that Faye Dunaway would be joining the masses of New Yorkers braving housing court for a landlord-tenant showdown, it was time for the Oscar-winning actress to share her side of the story.

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Faye Dunaway, who won an Oscar for the 1976 movie “Network,” at the Cannes Film Festival this spring.

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Ms. Dunaway, a Florida native, spoke with the inflection of a trained actor and the imperiousness of a seasoned celebrity as she staunchly denied that the landlord of the Upper East Side apartment that she began renting in 1995 had ordered her to leave.
“I have not been evicted,” she said in one of three voice mail messages for a reporter with The New York Times in response to phone messages and a Times article on Wednesday about a lawsuit seeking to evict her from a rent-stabilized apartment. “I have chosen to leave because of the state of the apartment, and also because I am spending less and less time in New York.”
Ms. Dunaway said she had finally given up the apartment in May because it was in such bad condition. She said her landlord “refused to paint the house, and bugs were everywhere.”
In the lawsuit, filed Tuesday, her landlord claimed that Ms. Dunaway, whose monthly rent was $1,048.72 for a one-bedroom walk-up apartment in an old tenement on East 78th Street, did not actually live there, but rather lived in California. Rent stabilization rules require that an apartment be the tenant’s primary residence.
In her voice mail messages and in previous messages left with her landlord, Ms. Dunaway accused him of being greedy — prompting a retort by the landlord’s lawyer that those statements were made by an actress whose credits include “Mommie Dearest.”
Ms. Dunaway, 70, who at the peak of her career had a lavish apartment at the Eldorado, said she got the one-bedroom apartment in a walk-up building from her mentor, the playwright William Alfred, who died in 1999. She said that Mr. Alfred had stayed in the apartment and that she had been working on donating some of the last of his possessions to Brooklyn College, where he did his undergraduate work.
Ms. Dunaway said Mr. Alfred had taught her “everything that I know about my art.”
“He was the most important person in my life, with the exception of my son,” she said. “I stayed there out of my deep, deep affection for William Alfred.”
Ernesto Mora, a Brooklyn College spokesman, said Mr. Alfred, a Harvard professor best known for the play “Hogan’s Goat,” had stayed at the apartment “for stretches when he had plays in New York.” In the last year, Ms. Dunaway donated to Brooklyn College some of Mr. Alfred’s books, play posters and collection of eight cuckoo clocks, Mr. Mora said. As recently as last week, Ms. Dunaway contacted the college about donating more items.
Craig Charie, the lawyer representing the landlord, Henry Moses Jr., known as Skip, said Ms. Dunaway had not handed back her keys and appeared to still have some belongings there.
He provided three voice mail messages that Ms. Dunaway left for Mr. Moses on Wednesday morning in which she offered to hand back the apartment keys, told the landlord that she had moved out in May and informed Mr. Moses that she was arranging for a moving company to pick up some papers.
Mr. Charie said he would not remove her items without formal consent from her.
“As of now, I don’t have legal possession; she hasn’t put a thing in writing,” Mr. Charie said. “What if she goes in there and later claims, ‘I had the Hope Diamond there and my Oscar in there and you took it’?”
As for Ms. Dunaway’s complaints about the apartment’s condition, Mr. Moses said, “I have no record of her asking for it to be painted, and the fact that bugs are everywhere is nonsense because we have an exterminating service that comes by once a month and tenants can ask in addition to that for special visits.”
While Ms. Dunaway appears ready to hand back the keys, she took a final swipe at her landlord in one of her voice mail messages.
“He is a slum landlord,” she said. “He has no class.”
Mr. Moses responded by replaying the messages left by Ms. Dunaway.
“I hope you need that money like crazy and you’ll give it to poor people,” she said to Mr. Moses. “I hope you have a terrible life.”

A version of this article appeared in print on August 4, 2011, on page A18 of the New York edition with the headline: Actress Says She Can’t Be Evicted Because She Moved Out.

Ex-Googlers Flock 35 Miles North to Twitter

August 2, 2011 at 6:00 am PT

A significant portion of Twitter employees — something like 13 percent — used to work at Google.
According to LinkedIn, 87 of the 641 people who say they currently work at Twitter were formerly employed by Google. (Twitter said this week that it has 600 employees, so that number’s a bit off, but probably in the general neighborhood.)
Early Google employees don’t get as much credit as those of, say, PayPal, for founding and funding a new generation of start-ups. But former Googlers seem to have made a practice of infiltrating promising new tech companies as they look for the next big thing.
At one point last year, it was noted that 200 former Googlers worked at Facebook, making up 12.5 percent of its staff at the time, including top executives like Sheryl Sandberg and many of the product people Facebook brought in through acquisitions.
Something similar seems to be happening at Twitter, though it’s still much smaller. CEO Dick Costolo was with Google after it acquired his start-up FeedBurner (but some say that means he’s not truly born-and-bred Google). Co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone (both no longer in operational roles) were also formerly at Google, though again, Williams came in through an acquisition (of his Pyra Labs, which made Blogger).
The Google influence seems especially prevalent on Twitter’s product team. Satya Patel, who is director of product management, was formerly a well-respected Googler, and nearly every Twitter product manager seems to have had some history at the Plex — save for the four who were recently let go.
Twitter creative director Doug Bowman came from Google (in fact, he left in a huff), as did general counsel Alex Macgillivray and VP Katie Jacobs Stanton, who leads international strategy.
Glenn Otis Brown, Twitter’s newly added director of business development for media, was formerly products counsel at Google and head of music partnerships at YouTube.
Twitter spokeswoman Carolyn Penner, who herself came to Twitter from Google, said she could not provide any specific numbers about how many of her coworkers matched that description.
A Twitter insider said that Twitter’s Googliness is less apparent than Facebook’s, because fewer members of the core leadership team came from Google. Even if head honcho Costolo did stop through Mountain View en route to hipper San Francisco, execs Jack Dorsey (executive chairman in charge of product), Adam Bain (revenue), Ali Rowghani (CFO) and Michael Abbott (engineering) did not work at Google.
Google isn’t entirely happy to be spawning other people’s workforces. The company has famously paid dearly to keep its top employees from departing to take roles at Facebook, and more recently, Twitter. Twitter and Google have been partners in the past, but more recently have had testy relations over renegotiating a data distribution deal.
Thomas Korte, the ringleader of start-up incubator AngelPad and an early Googler, noted in a recent conversation that following former Googlers’ successful infiltration of Twitter, Square and Foursquare seem likely to be the next ex-Googler targets.
Korte pointed out that Foursquare recently hired the well-connected and respected former Googlers Morgan Missen and Benjy Weinberger (both actually worked at Twitter en route!) and Square recently appointed former Googler Megan Quinn as its director of products.
Besides the beginnings of strong referral networks, Korte added, these up-and-coming companies have one other thing going for them: “They’re the only ones that can cough up the salaries to match Google,” he said.

2 August 2011 Last updated at 12:17 ET

Internet Explorer users have lower IQ says study

 

 

Does your choice of browser determine intelligence?

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Internet Explorer users have a lower than average IQ, according to research by Consulting firm AptiQuant.

The study gave web surfers an IQ test, then plotted their scores against the browser they used.
IE surfers were found to have an average IQ lower than people using Chrome, Firefox and Safari. Users of Camino and Opera rated highest.
The report has sparked anger from IE supporters, who have threatened AptiQuant with legal action.
Researchers gave over 100,000 web surfers a free online IQ test. Scores were stored in a database along with each person's web browser data.
The results suggested that Internet Explorer surfers had an average IQ in the low eighties. Chrome, Firefox and Safari rated over 100, while minority browsers Opera and Camino had an "exceptionally higher" score of over 120.
AptiQuant stressed that using IE doesn't mean you have low intelligence. "What it really says is that if you have a low IQ then there are high chances that you use Internet Explorer," said AptiQuant CEO Leonard Howard.
The findings have been treated with scepticism by Professor David Spiegelhalter of Cambridge University's Statistical Laboratory: "They've got IE6 users with an IQ of around eighty. That's borderline deficient, marginally able to cope with the adult world.
"I believe these figures are implausibly low - and an insult to IE users."
However, Mr Howard said he didn't feel threatened by a lawsuit: "A win in a court would only give a stamp of approval and more credibility to our report."

3 August 2011 Last updated at 04:44 ET

Malaysia's 8TV pulls 'racist' Ramadan adverts

 

About a quarter of Malaysia's population are ethnic Chinese

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A Malaysian TV channel has withdrawn a series of public-service messages about the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, after viewers complained they were racist.

One of the adverts showed an ethnic Chinese girl acting in a rude manner towards Muslims, followed by a message saying: "Do not be loud or obnoxious."
In another of the adverts the girl is wearing a vest-top and is told: "Do not wear tight and revealing clothes."
The station, 8TV, apologised for any "inconvenience or uneasiness" caused.
"It is with much regret that there were misinterpretations in the PSA [public service announcement] that were meant to serve only as a message of respect for the Ramadan month," the channel said in a message on its Facebook page.
"The message was not meant to offend anyone, race or creed in any way. This is an honest mistake involving a very small amount of humour that was misinterpreted which led to concerns."
The station, which aims largely at Malaysia's sizeable Chinese minority, pulled the messages from its schedules and also moved quickly to delete them from video-sharing websites.
Its Facebook page was inundated with critical messages.
One web user, Jules Yap, said the channel had shown "disgusting, arrogant behaviour".
"Can't believe how arrogant the higher-ups in 8TV are, coming out with a defensive, insincere 'apology' which at the same time blames the viewers for misinterpreting the offensive PSA ads, when the ads are clearly in poor taste," he said.
Boon Hun said: "Gosh, you keep using the word misinterpretations, like it's our fault!"
Ethnic Chinese make up about one quarter of Malaysia's population.
They often complain of being discriminated against by the country's laws, which they say give ethnic Malays preferential treatment.

Officials: 4 killed in two bomb blasts in Baghdad

Officials: 4 killed in two bomb blasts in Baghdad

By SINAN SALAHEDDIN, Associated Press – 24 minutes ago 

BAGHDAD (AP) — Police and health officials say four Iraqis have been killed in two successive bombings targeting a liquor store in western Baghdad.
A police officer said Wednesday that 13 people were also wounded in the attack, which took place late Tuesday night in the capital's Rissala neighborhood.
He says the first bomb went off near the liquor store, while the second came a few minutes later as police and residents rushed to the scene. Three policemen were among the killed.
The casualties were confirmed by a medical official at the nearby al-Yarmouk hospital.
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief the media.

August 2, 2011

AAA Rating Is a Rarity in Business

By ERIC DASH

Hanging over the debt ceiling negotiations in Washington has been the threat that the United States could lose its AAA credit rating, a coveted measure of the federal government’s financial strength. But in corporate America, the top rating long ago became an anachronism.
Scores of big corporations have lost their AAA status in recent years — only four non-financial companies continue to hold the rating — as it became seen in board rooms as more of a straitjacket than a path to riches. Just as many consumers relied on their credit cards to finance a higher standard of living, companies took on more debt to reap bigger returns.
The choice did not appear to hurt them. The borrowing costs of companies with AAA ratings and those one level below are not that far apart. Investors, in other words, do not see much difference in quality.
“It’s like you are going from a Rolls-Royce to a Mercedes — not from a Rolls-Royce to a Yugo,” said Chris Orndorff, a senior portfolio manager for the bond giant Western Asset Management. “That’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
More and more, in fact, companies have found that a AAA credit rating is not something worth aspiring to if a more conservative approach means lower profits.
Today, markets often render credit judgments before the rating agencies can take out their pens, so a downgrade has a less noticeable effect. By that time, many of the traditional benefits of being deemed AAA, like lower borrowing costs and reputational glow, have evaporated.
In the early 1980s, around 60 companies had AAA credit. By 2000, the number of AAA companies was about 15. Today just four corporations— Automatic Data Processing, Exxon Mobil, Johnson & Johnson and Microsoft — can claim those once-coveted three initials. (Five big insurers and several government affiliated organizations can too.)
Analysts say corporate buyouts and acquisitions accelerated the trend. Many AAA companies lost their ratings when they were taken over and their new owners loaded them with cheap debt to help pay for the deal. Other strategic decisions also triggered downgrades.
UPS, for example, struck a long-term agreement with its union workers in fall 2007 that raised pay and benefits but froze certain pension obligations. Soon after, the ratings agencies started knocking down the company’s credit rating to AA because of the new pension arrangement.
“Maintaining a AAA rating is not a financial goal of this company,” a UPS spokesman said at the time. Investors barely reacted. In the three months after the downgrade, yields on UPS bonds responded by increasing about 0.4 percentage point from 5.32 percent. Today, with borrowers enjoying ultra-low interest rates, the bond yields are back to their levels in late 2007.
Meanwhile, the financial crisis and deep recession laid into several of the sturdiest pillars of American capitalism. Berkshire Hathaway, General Electric and Pfizer all lost their AAA ratings.
Still, a funny thing happened when these companies were sent down to AA. Investors shrugged off the change; the markets had already rendered their verdict. Borrowing costs for General Electric and Berkshire actually fell in the weeks after they were downgraded in spring 2009, amid a broader market rally.
“The rating agencies were late to the party,” said Mr. Orndorff, the bond investor.
Ratings for companies and countries are viewed differently, even if they are evaluated in much the same way.
For most Americans, the prospect that the government could lose its AAA credit rating is almost unthinkable — a blow to national pride and consumer confidence that could turn out to be more damaging than any increase in borrowing costs.
That is why even after President Obama signed a law on Tuesday that lifted the debt ceiling, some in Washington were worried that the plan’s spending cuts were not deep enough to appease all the major rating agencies.
For now, all three major rating firms continue to give the United States a AAA rating. But on Tuesday, Moody’s said its outlook was negative after putting the government on notice last month that it could be downgraded. Fitch said on Tuesday that it planned to complete another review of the government’s finances by the end of this month, and Standard & Poor’s has warned that the United States might lose its rating if it did not sharply rein in the deficit.
It helps, of course, that the dollar remains the world’s leading currency, ensuring that demand for United States debt is strong in spite of the nation’s myriad financial challenges.
But the truth is, even as the government maintained its AAA grade, the markets suggested long ago that the United States was no longer deserving of such a high rating.
The credit-default swap market provided one clue. During the financial crisis in early 2009, the price of insurance that would pay off if the United States government defaulted on its debt was similar to that offered for companies ranked just above junk. Even today, the price of insurance on a government default has been higher than that for Colgate Palmolive, the global toothpaste giant, which has a rating two notches below AAA.
The economic data also suggests that the United States has higher debt levels than most AAA corporate borrowers. Today, the United States debt as a percentage of the nation’s economic output is 75 percent and could top 84 percent by 2013, according to Standard & Poor’s research. The typical AAA-rated country has a ratio of about 11.4 percent.
By contrast, Exxon Mobil and Microsoft each had debt-to-income ratios exceeding 20 percent, while Automatic Data Processing had a ratio of 1.8 percent, according to Capital IQ, a business owned by Standard & Poor’s. Johnson & Johnson had a ratio of 92 percent.
But unlike Washington, there is no threat to the AAA credit rating of Johnson & Johnson. That Johnson, the 125-year-old maker of Tylenol and Listerine, could have a better rating than the country in which it resides would be unusual but not a first
Toyota retained its AAA rating for several years after a sluggish economy led the rating agencies to start downgrading Japanese government debt in 1998.
Today, a handful of European corporations, like Portugal Telecom or Helecom of Greece, have received higher ratings than their fiscally troubled homelands. That is because a big portion of their revenue comes from foreign customers. In the last few weeks, the ratings agencies have made it clear that lowering the AAA rating of the United States government was unlikely to cause any AAA-rated American company to lose its rating— at least in the coming months.
But longer-term, top-flight ratings for American companies could be jeopardized if the government’s effort to get its own finances under control caused a slowdown in economic growth.
“What agreement there is on the deficit, and what spending is going to be or not be, will have an impact,” said John J. Bilardello, the head of corporate ratings at Standard & Poor’s.
A downgrade of a country rating can ripple through other entities that rely on the government for support, potentially raising borrowing costs across the economy. These include mortgage bonds issued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, as well as debt sold by dozens of states and counties whose local economies have strong ties to Washington. It also could affect about a dozen insurance companies and too-big-to-fail banks, whose ratings benefit from the perception that the government would bail them out if they ran into trouble again.
But could an American company’s credit really be more solid than the full faith and credit of the United States? The ratings agencies may say so one day, but lawmakers and citizens might have a reaction like that of Warren E. Buffett, after his Berkshire Hathaway lost its prized AAA status in 2009.
“We’re still AAA in my mind,” he said.