Flat Press

The Federal Communications Commission could soon allow inflight cell phone use, but U.S. airlines aren't eager change their own rules - or equipment - to enable such calls.

The five largest U.S. airlines, which account for about 90% of the nation's air travel, all say their current plans do not include allowing for calls, even though they will look at the rules once they are passed.

"A clear majority of customers who responded to a 2012 survey said they felt the ability to make voice calls on board would detract from -- not enhance -- their experience," said Richard Anderson, CEO of Delta Air Lines last week.

Emerging from Los Angeles’s vast eastern sprawl, the freeway glides over a narrow pass and slips gently into the scrubby, palm-flecked Coachella Valley.

Turn south, and you head into Palm Springs with its megaresorts, golf courses and bustling shops. Turn north, and you make your way up an arid stretch of road to a battered city where empty storefronts outnumber shops, the Fire Department has been closed, City Hall is on a four-day week and the dwindling coffers may be empty by spring.

The city, Desert Hot Springs, population 27,000, is slowly edging toward bankruptcy, largely because of police salaries and skyrocketing pension costs, but also because of years of spending and unrealistic revenue estimates. It is mostly the police, though, who have found themselves in the cross hairs recently.

“I would not venture to say they are overpaid,” said Robert Adams, the acting city manager since August. “What I would say is that we can’t pay them.”

Though few elected officials in America want to say it, police officers and other public-safety workers keep turning up at the center of the municipal bankruptcies and budget dramas plaguing many American cities — largely because their pensions tend to be significantly more costly than those of other city workers.

Central Falls, R.I., went bankrupt in 2011 because its police and firefighters’ pension fund ran out of money. Vallejo, Calif., went bankrupt after more than 20 police officers suddenly retired from its force of 145, fearing that if they waited they would lose their contractual right to cash out their unused sick leave and vacation time; the payouts totaled several million dollars, and Vallejo did not have the money. Miami weathered such a run in September 2010, when 154 police and firefighters retired en masse after city commissioners voted to make it harder to retire before age 50, use intensive overtime to raise pensions, and earn cash payouts.

Some lucky fliers capitalized on a computer error Thursday to buy inexpensive flights on Delta Air Lines.

From about 10 a.m. to noon Eastern, certain Delta fares on the airline’s website and other booking sites were showing up incorrectly, offering some savvy bargain hunters incredible deals.

A round-trip flight between Cincinnati and Minneapolis for February was being sold for just $25.05 and a round trip between Cincinnati and Salt Lake City for $48.41. The correct price for both of those fares is more than $400.

Trebor Banstetter, a spokesman for the Atlanta-based airline, said that the problem had been fixed, but that “Delta will honor any fares purchased at the incorrect price.”

New Department of Transportation regulations, aimed at truth in advertising, require airlines to honor any mistake in fares offered.

Jackie Fanelli, 27, learned about the fares from a friend’s Facebook page. She tried to buy a $98 round-trip first-class ticket from her home city, Baltimore, to Honolulu on Priceline.com but the transaction did not process.

The governor of Connecticut arrived at ESPN’s expansive campus here to celebrate the groundbreaking of the sports media giant’s 19th building, a digital center that would be the new home of “SportsCenter.” It was August 2011, and this was the third visit in a year by Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, whose first was about three weeks before his election.

This time, Mr. Malloy brought a hard hat, a shovel and an incentive package for ESPN potentially worth $25 million.

ESPN is hardly needy. With nearly 100 million households paying about $5.54 a month for ESPN, regardless of whether they watch it, the network takes in more than $6 billion a year in subscriber fees alone. Still, ESPN has received about $260 million in state tax breaks and credits over the past 12 years, according to a New York Times analysis of public records. That includes $84.7 million in development tax credits because of a film and digital media program, as well as savings of about $15 million a year since the network successfully lobbied the state for a tax code change in 2000.

For Mr. Malloy and other public officials in Connecticut, the conventional wisdom is that any business with ESPN is good business. After all, ESPN is Connecticut’s most celebrated brand and a homegrown success story, employing more than 4,000 workers in the state.

In the United States, Lenovo is still best known as the Chinese company that bought IBM’s PC business in 2005.


In China, it is better known as the world’s new No. 1 PC maker, a force to be reckoned with in smartphones and a bellwether for the nation’s economic and technological might.

The laptop maker is already the second-largest smartphone brand in China, after Samsung Electronics. Lenovo, which has never had modest plans, wants to build on that success and begin pushing into the United States and other wealthy markets in 2014.

“I’ll be very clear: Our aspiration is someday to be No. 1 in the mobile space,” said J. D. Howard, a Lenovo vice president who is in charge of developing the company’s smartphone business outside China. “I know it sounds crazy, but even five years ago, if I had said we’d be No. 1 in PCs, people would have said we were crazy.”

The company must balance — some would say blend — American and Chinese cultures. It has dual headquarters, in Beijing and Morrisville, N.C. Eighteen nationalities are represented among the top 100 managers. While it has had success worldwide in PCs and with its new smartphones in China, its good fortune in developed markets, dominated by entrenched Apple and Samsung, is anything but assured.

SOFIA, Bulgaria, Ervin Ivanov, a fourth-year medical student, is sure he’ll leave Bulgaria, and he is sure that most of his classmates will too.

“Probably most of them are thinking of working in other countries, working in European countries, but not in Bulgaria, definitely,” Mr. Ivanov, 22, said while standing in the hallway of a Soviet-era medical school here.

Even though he is debt-free because the state subsidizes much of the cost of education, he dreams of practicing in Switzerland or Germany because those countries offer far higher pay and more advanced and specialized medical systems.

“I think of myself as European,” said Mr. Ivanov, an aspiring oncologist.

On the first day of 2014, nine European Union states, including Germany, France, the Netherlands and Britain, will lift labor restrictions for Bulgarians and Romanians. But already, skilled and even many unskilled laborers have found many ways to work in those countries. A look at income data shows why Bulgarians and Romanians might continue to seek greener pastures.

The wealthiest one-fifth of society in Bulgaria and Romania, which joined the European Union in 2007, have a lower median income than the poorest one-fifth of society in Britain, France, Germany or other wealthy European states, according to a review of income data obtained from Eurostat, the statistics office.

Obviously, this does not necessarily mean that being poor in Britain, France or Germany is better than being in the top income bracket in Bulgaria or Romania: The cost of living is vastly lower in Sofia than in London.

But the lure of higher pay cannot be ignored when barriers come down, particularly as Bulgaria’s unemployment has increased sharply over the last half-decade. After bottoming out around 6 percent at the end of 2008, it has steadily risen to 13.2 percent in October.

Interviews in December with residents of Sofia, Bulgaria’s capital, revealed widespread frustrations with the succession of governments, corruption and the country’s inability to shake off its Soviet roots. It has also been unable to lift itself from being Europe’s poorest nation. (Bulgaria’s output, per capita, is last among the European Union’s 28 states, according to data from the International Monetary Fund.)

A common joke here goes like this: “There are two ways out of Bulgaria’s problems: Terminal 1 and Terminal 2,” referring to the two terminals at Sofia’s airport.

Despite that, many said they wanted to stay home, in part because joining the European Union brought a measure of hope. Some mentioned the unrest in Ukraine as a cautionary tale.

Polina Naydenova, 24, who is studying international law, said she wanted to stay where she had “my friends, my family and my life.” She hopes she will “somehow have the chance to change things constructively” in her native country. Another law student, Petar Kyosev, 24, said he hoped to move to Amsterdam, but also would eventually return. “I’m trying to do my best to stay here, but my country is not doing its best to make me stay,” he said.

Liliya Vlaeva, 26, an economics student, said she would stay. “The living standard here in Bulgaria is not so high as in Great Britain, in London for example,” she said. “The salaries for young people are enough, in my opinion, to live well — not as rich people, but to live O.K.”

But she said many of her classmates who study abroad opt not to return. “I know about 10 or 15 people from the last year that did this, in different countries,” she said. “They are people who are not coming back, but it is a personal decision.”

Bulgaria also has a large and often impoverished minority of Roma, or Gypsies. “I don’t see any hope in the coming 20 years; the only way is working abroad,” said Minko Angelov, 57, a Rom who was laid off at a local Coca-Cola bottler, speaking outside a state employment center. Since he speaks only Bulgarian and Russian, he is reluctant to travel through Europe. “The language is a big problem,” he said.

“Dinosaur, go back to your cave!” the British conductor Sian Edwards said over the phone with a laugh, her eyes audibly rolling.

I had asked for her response to the bizarrely retrograde comments a few respected male musicians had made recently about female conductors. In August, the young Russian maestro Vasily Petrenko told an interviewer that players, presumably men, “react better when they have a man in front of them.” He added, “A sweet girl on the podium can make one’s thoughts drift toward something else.”

Not long after, controversy erupted over comments that Bruno Mantovani, a composer and the director of the Paris Conservatory of Music and Dance made on French radio. “Sometimes women are discouraged by the very physical aspect,” he said. “Conducting, taking a plane, taking another plane, conducting again.” Then the New Yorker critic Alex Ross provided a translation of an interview that the venerable Russian conductor Yuri Temirkanov, one of Mr. Petrenko’s mentors, gave last year. “The essence of the conductor’s profession is strength,” he said. “The essence of a woman is weakness.”

The ridiculousness of this flurry, in 2013, has rightfully drawn attention to the broader situation faced by women in the field. Female conductors no longer attract open-mouthed attention among music lovers or the news media, yet they remain far from being fairly represented. According to the League of American Orchestras, of the 103 ensembles with the biggest budgets, 12 have female conductors; just one of the top-tier 22 is led by a woman.

When he died in 1999, the philanthropist Paul Mellon left the National Gallery of Art in Washington the largest gift in its history: $75 million plus nearly 200 paintings, many of them masterpieces by artists like van Gogh, Manet, Cézanne, Monet and Renoir.

But not everything found its way to the museum. As stipulated in his will, some artworks would remain in his various homes under the stewardship of his wife, Rachel Lambert Mellon, during her lifetime. Now a spry 103, Mrs. Mellon, who lives in Upperville, Va., decided Christmas should come early to the National Gallery. She is giving the museum “Green Wheat Fields, Auvers,” from 1890, considered to be one van Gogh’s most important landscapes. The painting goes on view Friday with six other canvases by the artist.

Measuring about two-and-a-half by three feet, “Green Wheat Fields, Auvers” was thought to have been painted in Auvers-sur-Oise, France, following van Gogh’s voluntary confinement at the asylum in St.-Rémy. While there, he painted what are often described as his “pure landscapes,” capturing the countryside he saw around him. Devoid of figures, the painting is consumed by a windswept field, rendered in dramatic rich greens and blues, with his sweeping brushwork and thick impasto.

The couple bought the work from a New York dealer in 1955 and since then it has hung, unframed, above the fireplace in the Mellons’ Virginia living room. (During the Mellons’ ownership, the painting has only been publicly shown once, at the National Gallery in 1966, in an exhibition of their collection and that of Mr. Mellon’s sister, Ailsa Mellon Bruce.)

“In his letters, van Gogh talks about being absorbed in a sea of windy grass,” said Mary Morton, the gallery’s curator of French paintings. Within weeks after painting “Green Wheat Fields, Auvers,” van Gogh killed himself, yet the paintings he left from those last few months, Ms. Morton said, are “classic, great and super vibrant.”

In 2008, Dan Malloy, a professional surfer, received a package in the mail from Australia. In it was a thin, rectangular slab of wood with one rounded edge. It was a board like none he had ever seen, remarkable for being so slender and for lacking contours or fins.

Mr. Malloy, then living in Lompoc, Calif., took the board to a nearby surf break. He propelled himself into a wave, stood and then panicked. “I thought, ‘Oh, this wave is way too fast for me, and there’s no chance I can make it,’ ” said Mr. Malloy, who has surfed for decades. But he did make it, and soon was gliding effortlessly through the water — and really fast.

Mr. Malloy was riding a board called an alaia (pronounced ah-LIE-ah), descended from the original Hawaiian surfboards. He would begin riding its smaller but equally fast counterpart, the paipo (pronounced PIPE-oh), a year later.

Both types of surfboards are made by Tom Wegener, an American living in Australia, and his brother, Jon, who is based in Encinitas, Calif. The brothers grew up surfing in Palos Verdes, Calif., and began shaping regular foam and fiberglass surfboards as a hobby when they were teenagers, and then professionally after college. They now operate separate businesses, Tom Wegener Surfboards and Wegener Surfboards, but they often share ideas and collaborate on designs.

In recent years, they have revived Hawaiian surfboard designs to innovate in a sport that had become increasingly reliant on factory production and on synthetic materials like foam and fiberglass. While resurrecting ancient innovation is not a new practice, “it tends to be very rare,” said Joel Mokyr, a professor of economics and history at Northwestern University. But he said some innovators, inspired by nostalgia and the belief that the wisdom of the past can trump what we know today, decide to look back in time.

Tom Wegener started making alaias after visiting the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum in Honolulu in 2004 and measuring traditional boards dating to the late 1800s and early 1900s. Captivated by their simplicity, he began creating his own versions using a lightweight, naturally water-resistant wood called paulownia.

In 2006, Jon Wegener visited his brother in Australia and saw the new designs. Almost on the spot, Jon began shaping alaias of his own. “You see something like that and you freak out,” he said. “You just want to instantly shape one.” And so the two began collaborating informally on designs.

After returning to California, Jon continued making alaias, and from 2008 to 2010 they grew to be roughly 80 percent of his business. Regular foam-and-fiberglass boards, which he had been shaping and selling for 15 years, made up the rest. Customers for the alaias included well-known professional surfers like Mr. Malloy and Rob Machado. The boards even landed roles in several surfing movies.

But there was a problem: Non-elite surfers found alaias hard to ride because they don’t float as well as modern boards. As the Wegeners experimented with different designs, they realized that the more diminutive paipo was easier to ride. It was also more fun, partly because it performs well in small waves. “Big waves are cool; small waves aren’t,” Jon Wegener said. “But small waves are what you have 90 percent of the time.”

The paipo ranges in length from three to five feet; some models are as slender as a half-inch thick. This allows riders to tuck into a wave’s sweet spot, he said, what surfers call the pocket.

Because the exact shapes of waves vary, the Wegeners have created various paipo designs for different types of surf, a common practice among modern surfboard shapers.

Unlike regular surfboards, which are a finished product by the time they first hit the water, the wooden boards can be refined and improved throughout their life span using simple tools like handsaws and sandpaper. They are also relatively impervious to dings and dents.

While demand for alaias has begun to decline because of their difficulty, paipo sales have increased, Jon Wegener said. He sells his boards through his website and Nalu Dry Goods, in Bay Shore, N.Y., and a handful of Southern California surf shops. The Patagonia store in Cardiff-by-the-Sea, Calif., north of San Diego, sells his paipos for $325 each.

Paipos also are made in South Africa, where designers at Wawa Wooden Surfboards shape them, and in Brazil, where Lasca Surfboards produces them. In Japan, Nobbywood Surfboards makes rectangular designs resembling kitchen cutting boards. The United States market also includes Grain Surfboards in Maine and several other shapers in California.

“It’s starting to get more traction for sure,” Roy Coffman, manager of the Cardiff Patagonia store, said of the paipo. Still, he considers it a niche product and sales remain modest, about 15 boards in the last year.

The main challenge is that the paipo is essentially an ancient boogie board — and in surfing circles, boogie boards are not considered cool. This stigma is a hurdle, but attitudes could be starting to change, Jon Wegener said.

He recently embarked on a new set of designs using both paulownia wood and foam. The boards are flat, like those of the traditional designs, but more buoyant — having the best qualities of each style of board.

“What’s so great about this wood movement is it’s a whole new book,” he said. “A whole new chapter for surfing.”

If a woman is physically active during pregnancy, she may boost the development of her unborn child’s brain, according to a heart-tugging new study of expectant mothers and their newborns. The findings bolster a growing scientific consensus that the benefits of exercise can begin to accumulate even before someone is born.

It has long been suspected that a mother-to-be’s activity — or lack of it — affects her unborn offspring, which is not surprising, given how their physiologies intertwine. Past studies have shown, for example, that a baby’s heart rate typically rises in unison with his or her exercising mother’s, as if the child were also working out. As a result, scientists believe, babies born to active mothers tend to have more robust cardiovascular systems from an early age than babies born to mothers who are more sedentary.

Whether gestational exercise similarly shapes an unborn child’s developing brain has been harder to quantify, although recent studies have been suggestive. An experiment presented this month at the Society for Neuroscience’s annual meeting in San Diego, for instance, reported that pregnant rats allowed to run on wheels throughout their pregnancies birthed pups that performed more dexterously in early childhood on a tricky memory test — having to identify unfamiliar objects in a familiar environment — than pups born to sedentary moms. These clever rats retained their cognitive advantage into adulthood (meaning, for rats, weeks later).

Mushroom ragoût accepts chipotles willingly. I made a delicious and substantial quesadilla dinner with the ragoût, two tortillas and a bit of cheese in under three minutes.

6 tablespoons mushroom ragoût

1 teaspoon chopped canned chipotle in adobo (more to taste)

4 corn tortillas

1 1/2 ounces grated Monterey Jack or Gruyère (about 1/3 cup)

1. Stir the chopped chipotles into the mushroom ragoût. Taste and add more if you want more spice.

2. Using a microwave: Place a corn tortilla on a plate. Top with a heaped tablespoon of the grated cheese. Add half the mushrooms and spread in an even layer. Sprinkle another heaped tablespoon of the cheese over the mushrooms and top with another tortilla. Press down gently. Repeat with the remaining ingredients. Microwave for 1 to 1 1/2 minutes, until the cheese has melted. Remove from the microwave, cut into quarters, and serve.

Using a pan: Place a corn tortilla in a pan. Top with a heaped tablespoon of the cheese and half the mushrooms and spread in an even layer. Sprinkle on another heaped tablespoon the cheese. Turn the heat on medium-high and heat until the cheese begins to melt. Place the remaining tortilla on top of the cheese and press down lightly. Flip the quesadilla over in the pan and heat for about 30 seconds, or until the cheese has melted. Flip back over and remove to a plate. Cut into quarters or sixths, and serve. Repeat with the remaining ingredients.

Variation: You can also make these quesadillas with wheat tortillas.

Yield: 2 quesadillas

Advance preparation: The mushroom ragoût will keep for 3 or 4 days in the refrigerator.

Nutritional information per quesadilla: 172 calories; 8 grams fat; 4 grams saturated fat; 1 gram polyunsaturated fat; 1 gram monounsaturated fat; 19 milligrams cholesterol; 17 grams carbohydrates; 2 grams dietary fiber; 239 milligrams sodium (does not include salt to taste); 8 grams protein

Editor's note: Mireille Schwartz is the founder and executive director of the Bay Area Allergy Advisory Board, an organization that promotes education and awareness, and provides no-cost medical care and medication to San Francisco Bay Area families with severely allergic children. She is the author of "The Family Food Allergy Book."

Holidays are a particularly challenging time for us food-allergic individuals with so many desserts and homemade treats, casseroles and dips laid out on the table -- largely without ingredient labels.

Food-allergic children can feel left out of the traditional festivities, many of which center around food, and allergies can present a challenge for hosts, as they frequently must tend to a wide range of preferences and needs behind the scenes.

All the excitement and good cheer makes it more difficult to be informed about the ingredients in each and every party food. There are ways, however, to reduce anxiety through the holidays while staying happy, healthy, and allergy free.

More young men in California rise in pitch at the end of their sentences when talking, new research shows.

This process is known as "uptalk" or "valleygirl speak" and has in the past been associated with young females, typically from California or Australia.

But now a team says that this way of speaking is becoming more frequent among men.

The findings were presented at the Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in California.

"We found use of uptalk in all of our speakers, despite their diverse backgrounds in socioeconomic status, ethnicity, bilingualism and gender," said Amanda Ritchart, a linguist at the University of California who led the research.

"We believe that uptalk is becoming more prevalent and systematic in its use for the younger generations in Southern California," she added.

The team recorded and analysed the voices of 23 native Californians aged between 18 and 22. The researchers were therefore not able to infer similar language patters in older Californians.

Researchers say that some monkeys in South and Central America eat as many as 50 different species of fruit a day.

A team from the University of East Anglia said that primate size and diet are closely connected.

They found that mid-sized species including Saki monkeys were the biggest fruit consumers.

Larger primates including Woolly Spider monkeys were more likely to eat leaves and foliage, they said.

The research has been published in the journal Oikos.

It’s a tried and tested technique used by writers and poets, but can psychology explain why first moments after waking can be among our most imaginative?

It is 6.06am and I’m typing this in my pyjamas. I awoke at 6.04am, walked from the bedroom to the study, switched on my computer and got to work immediately. This is unusual behaviour for me. However, it’s a tried and tested technique for enhancing creativity, long used by writers, poets and others, including the inventor Benjamin Franklin. And psychology research appears to back this up, providing an explanation for why we might be at our most creative when our minds are still emerging from the realm of sleep.

The best evidence we have of our mental state when we're asleep is that strange phenomenon called dreaming. Much remains unknown about dreams, but one thing that is certain is that they are weird. Also listening to other people's dreams can be deadly boring. They go on and on about how they were on a train, but it wasn't a train, it was a dinner party, and their brother was there, as well as a girl they haven't spoken to since they were nine, and... yawn. To the dreamer this all seems very important and somehow connected. To the rest of us it sounds like nonsense, and tedious nonsense at that.

Researchers say they have found the first direct evidence that female sharks return home to breed.

In the study, scientists tracked lemon sharks in the Bahamas for 17 years to prove the case.

Even though this species is highly migratory, pregnant females prefer to give birth where they themselves were born.

The researchers say it strengthens the argument for restrictions on fishing at specific sites.

The idea of females returning to their own place of birth to reproduce has been observed in a number of marine species most notably in salmon but it has also been seen in sea turtles.

The Chancellor has announced £90m a year for five years for research collaboration with emerging nations.

There is also £10m for a "Higgs Centre" to support high technology business start-ups.

And George Osborne said there would be £270m to develop a network of quantum technology centres, as well.

But critics point out that science funding has been eroded over the past three years and is not keeping pace with that of competitors.

Ahead of the Autumn Statement, Mr Osborne said: "Science is a personal priority of mine. This government will continue to prioritise the long-term investments that are needed to compete in the global race."

Usually the Grand Canyon offers stunning views stretching for miles, deep into valleys etched by the Colorado River. But that vista has changed over the past few days, as a rare weather event has filled the canyon with fog, offering an even more stunning view than is typical.

The weather event is known as a temperature inversion, and it only happens every few years, according to the National Park Service, who wrote about the event and posted photos of it on its Facebook page.

Spotify has millions of active users who don't pay a cent for the service, they just opt to hear advertising on the streaming music service instead of paying a monthly fee.
The one catch is that free listening is only available on computers. However, this could soon change.
Spotify is reportedly in the midst of planning free, ad-supported, mobile music streaming, according to The Wall Street Journal. This means users will be able to listen to music on the go via their smartphones and tablets.
According to the Journal, the purported free mobile service will let users play a few songs on demand, but will mostly act as a radio station, much like Pandora and Rdio. For their part, Pandora has long offered free, ad-supported, mobile music streaming, and Rdio introduced a similar feature in October.

When most people lose a dog, they put up posters, call the local animal shelters, and perhaps post an ad on Craigslist. Reddit contributor p1percub turned to the massive online community earlier this week and posted to the Houston subreddit with a plea for help.

Jack the pit/lab mix got away from p1percub, ran into the street, was hit by a truck, and took off at a pace the redditor couldn't keep up with. She posted an Imgur photo that generated nearly 40,000 views. Local redditors got busy sharing the image around, creating a digital dragnet for the lost pooch.

This is where redditor Hominine comes in. He saw the post and later spotted Jack in a grocery store parking lot. He followed the wandering pup as Jack ran back to the exact location he was lost from in the first place. A third party, who had been on the lookout after a Reddit-induced alert sent out to animal groups, made the actual call to the owner with the dog's location.