- Here’s hoping the trendy young professionals of New York
City feel good about themselves this weekend. These high-earning,
Manhattan-dwelling folks have developed a social conscience and turned their
collective focus on the 2 million young people across the United States who are
homeless. At a time when the problem of homelessness is on the rise and funding
to combat the problem is at a critical low in so many cities, hundreds of local
young professionals from New York and New Jersey are taking a whopping one
night of their time to bring temporary awareness to the issue. On Friday night,
these do-gooders are staging a kinder sort of Occupy Movement by sleeping on
the streets of Manhattan to show their solidarity with homeless youth. Dubbed
the Sleep-Out, the event will have the dual purpose of raising awareness while
also raising funds for a local homeless shelter, Covenant House. Todd Monaghan,
vice president of development at Covenant House, said his organization and
others like it will see 4,000 homeless children at shelters in Manhattan and
Newark this year. “These are kids who have spent time living on the streets,”
Monaghan said. “They’re kids who’ve survived child abuse, parental abandonment.
They’ve survived human trafficking. They’re victims of domestic violence. So
they’ve been through a whole lot.” He added that Covenant House’s vision is to
train and educate these children so they can get back to school, graduate and
go on to become productive citizens who work at high-earning jobs and pretend
to be activists once a year so they can feel better about themselves. Keep it
up, temporary do-gooders…….
- Rock out with your ‘80s c*ck out. For fans who believe
today’s bands just do not rock out hard enough and are yearning for the 1980s
to return with a vengeance, there is wonderful news. Past-their-prime rockers Kiss and Def
Leppard will team up this summer for a 42-city North American tour that will
"deliver good news and excitement," according to Kiss guitarist Paul
Stanley. The tour, as any truly lecherous and debaucherous rock and roll
endeavor should, will begin in the den of hedonism that is West Valley City,
Utah. It will wind its way across the United States and find its way to
Woodlands, Tex. for the final show on Aug. 31. The two legendary bands that
will make the tour go announced their plans Monday at the House of Blues in Los
Angeles at a press conference that was streamed live via the Live Nation
website. Def Leppard front man Joe Elliott said he and Gene Simmons first
discussed the idea of the two bands touring together when he teamed up with
Kiss for a handful of South American dates two years ago as part of a
rock-and-roll all-stars tour. "It's finally happened, which is
fantastic," Elliott said. Although Elliott shared a stage with Simmons and
his crew on another continent, this will be the first time the two bands have
played together. "We've run into each other at festivals. It just seemed
to be a natural fit,” Stanley said. He recalled a time when one of guitarist
Phil Collen's pre-Def Leppard bands, Girl, opened for Kiss in the U.K. during
the early ‘80s. Kiss has turned into an over-the-hill band that tours with
other over-the-hill bands like Def Lep or Motley Crue, with which it
co-headlined a tour in 2012. The tour is also a chance for Kiss to commemorate
the 40th anniversary of its first two albums, “Kiss” and “Hotter than Hell,”
and to sell more copies of the 34-LP vinyl box set and a two-CD compilation
called “Kiss 40” it is pimping around
its induction into the
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame April 10……….
- Facebook always keeps its promises, right? Not really,
unless that promise is to drive everyone under the age of 18 off the site because
they want no part of hanging out – digitally or otherwise – in a place where
their parents and grandparents spend copious amounts of time and can further
embarrass them. But when the social networking giant announced it would acquire messaging app
WhatsApp for a whopping $19 billion, there were promises from both sides what
everything users loved about WhatsApp would stay the same. While many observers
and users expressed shock at the sheer size of the deal and/or fretted that
there would be a litany of privacy concerns on account of the merger, both
sides in the deal scoffed at those suggestions. Still, no official statements
were made and that remained the case until Monday, when WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum
boldly lashed out….in a company blog post titled “Setting the record straight.”
"If partnering with Facebook meant that we had to change our values, we
wouldn’t have done it," Koum wrote. "Instead, we are forming a
partnership that would allow us to continue operating independently and
autonomously. Our fundamental values and beliefs will not change. Our
principles will not change. Everything that has made WhatsApp the leader in
personal messaging will still be in place." Koum added that Facebook did not
ask for legal names, e-mail addresses, birthdays, workplaces, or home addresses
and explained that her company does not know personal Internet usage data about
its users. Her post was clearly in response to criticisms from the Electronic
Privacy Information Center and the Center for Digital Democracy, both of which publicly
urged the FTC to block Facebook's acquisition of WhatsApp. The groups noted
that in the past, WhatsApp had promised not to "collect user data for
advertising revenue” and postulated that under Facebook’s leadership, that might
change. "Users provided detailed personal information to the company
including private text to close friends," reads the complaint the groups
filed with the FTC. "Facebook routinely makes use of user information for
advertising purposes and has made clear that it intends to incorporate the data
of WhatsApp users into the user profiling business model." This debate
clearly isn't over and likely won't be any time soon…….
- It’s France v. Germany, Round….a lot. The two European
neighbors have faced off a lot and the battles typically end with Germany
either marching down the Champs Elysees and taking over or the Germans piling
on goal after goal for another win in a major international soccer match. Right
now, the two nations are squabbling over who should foot the bill for Europe’s banking union,
with the French fretting that its banks will shoulder the majority of the 55
billion euros that will go to the European Union’s rescue fund. This is a big
week for the EU in its ongoing discussions on a central system for handling
bank crises, of which it seems to have an abundance these days. France is
fighting against plans to make its sector of big universal banks the leading contributors
to the common insurance plan and with a Wednesday deadline looming for new legislation
with the European parliament, time is of the essence. The deadline is intended
to allow the legislature to pass a bill before upcoming European elections. The
other central issues are which EU member’s banking system is the riskiest, whose
lenders should pay more for insurance and whether the rescue system is
genuinely European or actually partly national. France, Spain and Portugal have
all submitted papers on the topic and experts have expressed concern that Germany,
the EU’s biggest economy, is leading resistance to increasing the heft of the
rescue fund or accelerating its generalization. Some officials believe it is
fitting for big banks to pay more and Germany is at the front of that army. Depending
on how the fund is set up, German banks could pay as little as 21 percent or as
much as 35 percent and when billions are on the line, that is a key difference.
If neither side budges, it will make for some tense moments in Brussels this
week………
- The NCAA is not a well-liked or respected organization. It
should surprise no one that the NCAA is now being sued, even if the plaintiff
is slightly unexpected. The men leading this charge are Clemson defensive back Martin Jenkins, Rutgers basketball player J.J.
Moore, UTEP tight end Kevin Perry and Cal tight end Bill Tyndall, who are the
faces of a class action suit that proposes to represent all scholarship players
in FBS football and Division I basketball. The players are represented by high-profile
sports labor attorney Jeffrey Kessler, who filed an antitrust claim Monday in a
New Jersey federal court, arguing the association has unlawfully capped player
compensation at the value of an athletic scholarship. Kessler and his clients
believe the NCAA’s restrictions on athletes in Division I basketball and the
top tier of college football are not fairly compensated for the billions of
dollars in revenues that they help generate. “In no other business -- and
college sports is big business -- would it ever be suggested that the people
who are providing the essential services work for free,” Kessler said. “Only in
big-time college sports is that line drawn.” Kessler is sharp, which explains
why he skipped right over the debate over whether college athletes are in fact
student-athletes or employees in a big, corporate machine. The target of the
lawsuit is the five largest conferences (the Southeastern, Big Ten, Pacific-12,
Atlantic Coast and Big 12) and the end game is an end to NCAA-style amateurism.
All of the plaintiffs but Jenkins are seniors who have exhausted their eligibility
and have nothing directly to gain from the suit. Former West Virginia running
back Shawne Alston filed a similar lawsuit earlier this month, but the new suit
is not seeking any damages and is aimed only at removing any cap by ordering an
injunction against the NCAA ending the practice. "We're looking to change
the system. That's the main goal," Kessler said. "We want the market
for players to emerge." In other words, treat college sports like the
business they already are………..
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