Twitter's Ev Williams started Medium to simplify and socialize online article writing, but the service's invitation-only nature has kept many folks on the sidelines. Today, things are opening up: Medium's now accessible to anyone willing to sign into Twitter and verify an email address. Would-be ...By Maggie Fick
CAIRO (Reuters) - Egypt is planning a charm offensive to persuade Gulf Arab entrepreneurs to invest in its economy, battered by political upheaval, protests and violence.
Investment Minister Osama Saleh told Reuters Cairo would host a conference in early December, and had already contacted thousands of businessmen, to try to sell the region's most populous nation to wealthy Arabs.
Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates promised Egypt more than $12 billion in loans, grants and petroleum product shipments after Islamist President Mohamed Mursi was deposed by the army on July 3.
Now Egypt is hoping private investors from the Gulf will pour in money as well, Saleh said, despite ongoing unrest.
"All of the Gulf in general is standing by Egypt ... We are already discussing the projects they will bring," Saleh told Reuters in an interview.
He said his ministry had set up country-specific desk officers to deal with interested investors. Delegations from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain, and possibly Oman would attend the conference he added.
Ministry officials face a tough sell. Gulf Arab tourists who once spent big money at hotels are now rarely seen in Cairo.
OBSTACLES
The government has launched a fierce crackdown on Mursi's Muslim Brotherhood, killing hundreds of people during protests. Mursi and other top Brotherhood leaders have been arrested.
Cairo has run through more than $20 billion in reserves and delayed payments to oil companies since an uprising toppled Mursi's predecessor, veteran autocrat Hosni Mubarak, in 2011, scaring off tourists and investors.
Other potential obstacles to investment include cumbersome and shifting regulations, fears the Egyptian pound may be devalued and protracted lawsuits against local and foreign companies.
The economy is in a "very challenging period ... How do we start again to achieve high growth rates and at the same time work hard to reduce the budget deficit?" Saleh said on Wednesday.
The Mubarak-era bureaucrat who served in the same post under Mursi, also acknowledged instability posed a challenge.
"There is a problem that I can't resolve and that takes time. It is the problem of security. It comes above all the problems," he added.
Militant attacks on security forces in the Sinai Peninsula that borders Israel have also risen sharply since Mursi's ouster.
Fears are growing that an Islamist insurgency will take hold beyond the Sinai. In September, a Sinai-based group claimed responsibility for a failed suicide bombing attack on the interior minister.
Egypt's interim government has said it is working to get the economy back on track.
The cabinet approved a 22.3 billion Egyptian pound stimulus package in August, mainly for infrastructure projects, and plans another package for early next year.
But it is avoiding politically sensitive measures needed to get control of the budget deficit, which has jumped since the beginning of the year to nearly half of all government spending.
Many of Egypt's 85 million citizens are highly dependent on costly food and energy subsidies, which account for a quarter of all state spending.
(Additional reporting by Ali Abdelatti and Omar Fahmy; Editing by Michael Georgy and Andrew Heavens)
FILE - In this Jan. 17, 1996 file photo, Lou Reed takes the podium as the Velvet Underground, the group he once headed, is inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame during a ceremony in New York s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Band mate John Cale is at left, and at right is Martha Morrison, accepting for late band member Sterling Morrison. Punk-poet, rock legend Lou Reed is dead of a liver-related ailment, his literary agen said Sunday, Oct. 27, 2013. He was 71. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan, File)
FILE - In this Jan. 17, 1996 file photo, Lou Reed takes the podium as the Velvet Underground, the group he once headed, is inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame during a ceremony in New York s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Band mate John Cale is at left, and at right is Martha Morrison, accepting for late band member Sterling Morrison. Punk-poet, rock legend Lou Reed is dead of a liver-related ailment, his literary agen said Sunday, Oct. 27, 2013. He was 71. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan, File)
FILE - In a Wednesday, Jan. 17, 1996 file photo, members of the band the Velvet Underground, from left, Maureen Tucker; Martha Morrison, attending for her late husband, Sterling Morrison; John Cale and Lou Reed pose backstage after their induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in New York s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Punk-poet, rock legend Lou Reed is dead of a liver-related ailment, his literary agen said Sunday, Oct. 27, 2013. He was 71. (AP Photo/Joe Tabacca, File)
FILE - In a June 24, 2003 file photo, music icon Lou Reed has his hands imprinted as supporters cheer in the background as he is inducted into Hollywood's Rockwalk, in the Hollywood section of Los Angeles. Punk-poet, rock legend Lou Reed is dead of a liver-related ailment, his literary agen said Sunday, Oct. 27, 2013. He was 71.(AP Photo/Ric Francis, File)
FILE - In this Sunday, Aug. 9, 2009 file photo, Lou Reed performs at the Lollapalooza music festival, in Chicago. Punk-poet, rock legend Lou Reed is dead of a liver-related ailment, his literary agen said Sunday, Oct. 27, 2013. He was 71. (AP Photo/John Smierciak, File)
NEW YORK (AP) — Lou Reed, the punk poet of rock n' roll who profoundly influenced generations of musicians as leader of the Velvet Underground and remained a vital solo performer for decades after, died Sunday age 71.
Reed died in Southampton, N.Y. of an ailment related to his recent liver transplant, according to his literary agent, Andrew Wylie, who added that Reed had been in frail health for months. Reed shared a home in Southampton with his wife and fellow musician, Laurie Anderson, whom he married in 2008.
Reed never approached the commercial success of such superstars as the Beatles and Bob Dylan, but no songwriter to emerge after Dylan so radically expanded the territory of rock lyrics. And no band did more than the Velvet Underground to open rock music to the avant-garde — to experimental theater, art, literature and film, to William Burroughs and Kurt Weill, to John Cage and Andy Warhol, Reed's early patron.
Indie rock essentially begins in the 1960s with Reed and the Velvets; the punk, New Wave and alternative rock movements of the 1970s, '80s and '90s were all indebted to Reed, whose songs were covered by R.E.M., Nirvana, Patti Smith and countless others.
"The first Velvet Underground record sold 30,000 copies in the first five years," Brian Eno, who produced albums by Roxy Music and Talking Heads among others, once said. "I think everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band!"
Reed's trademarks were a monotone of surprising emotional range and power; slashing, grinding guitar; and lyrics that were complex, yet conversational, designed to make you feel as if Reed were seated next to you. Known for his cold stare and gaunt features, he was a cynic and a seeker who seemed to embody downtown Manhattan culture of the 1960s and '70s and was as essential a New York artist as Martin Scorsese or Woody Allen. Reed's New York was a jaded city of drag queens, drug addicts and violence, but it was also as wondrous as any Allen comedy, with so many of Reed's songs explorations of right and wrong and quests for transcendence.
He had one top 20 hit, "Walk On the Wild Side," and many other songs that became standards among his admirers, from "Heroin" and "Sweet Jane" to "Pale Blue Eyes" and "All Tomorrow's Parties." Raised on doo-wop and Carl Perkins, Delmore Schwartz and the Beats, Reed helped shape the punk ethos of raw power, the alternative rock ethos of irony and droning music and the art-rock embrace of experimentation, whether the dual readings of Beat-influenced verse for "Murder Mystery," or, like a passage out of Burroughs' "Naked Lunch," the orgy of guns, drugs and oral sex on the Velvets' 15-minute "Sister Ray."
An outlaw in his early years, Reed would eventually perform at the White House, have his writing published in The New Yorker, be featured by PBS in an "American Masters" documentary and win a Grammy in 1999 for Best Long Form Music Video. The Velvet Underground was inducted into the Rock and Roll of Fame in 1996 and their landmark debut album, "The Velvet Underground & Nico," was added to the Library of Congress' registry in 2006.
Reed called one song "Growing Up in Public" and his career was an ongoing exhibit of how any subject could be set to rock music — the death of a parent ("Standing On Ceremony), AIDS ("The Halloween Parade"), some favorite movies and plays ("Doin' the Things That We Want To"), racism ("I Want to be Black"), the electroshock therapy he received as a teen ("Kill Your Sons").
Reviewing Reed's 1989 topical album "New York," Village Voice critic Robert Christgau wrote that "the pleasure of the lyrics is mostly tone and delivery — plus the impulse they validate, their affirmation that you can write songs about this stuff. Protesting, elegizing, carping, waxing sarcastic, forcing jokes, stating facts, garbling what he just read in the Times, free-associating to doomsday, Lou carries on a New York conversation — all that's missing is a disquisition on real estate."
He was one of rock's archetypal tough guys, but he grew up middle class — an accountant's son raised on Long Island. Reed was born to be a suburban dropout. He hated school, loved rock n' roll, fought with his parents and attacked them in song for forcing him to undergo electroshock therapy as a supposed "cure" for being bisexual. "Families that live out in the suburbs often make each other cry," he later wrote.
His real break began in college. At Syracuse University, he studied under Schwartz, whom Reed would call the first "great man" he ever encountered. He credited Schwartz with making him want to become a writer and to express himself in the most concrete language possible. Reed honored his mentor in the song "My House," recounting how he connected with the spirit of the late, mad poet through a Oiuja board. "Blazing stood the proud and regal name Delmore," he sang.
Reed moved to New York City after college and traveled in the pop and art worlds, working as a house songwriter at the low-budget Pickwick Records and putting in late hours in downtown clubs. One of his Pickwick songs, the dance parody "The Ostrich," was considered commercial enough to record. Fellow studio musicians included a Welsh-born viola player, John Cale, with whom Reed soon performed in such makeshift groups as the Warlocks and the Primitives.
They were joined by a friend of Reed's from Syracuse, guitarist-bassist Sterling Morrison; and by an acquaintance of Morrison's, drummer Maureen Tucker, who tapped out simple, hypnotic rhythms while playing standing up. They renamed themselves the Velvet Underground after a Michael Leigh book about the sexual subculture. By the mid-1960s, they were rehearsing at Warhol's "Factory," a meeting ground of art, music, orgies, drug parties and screen tests for films that ended up being projected onto the band while it performed, part of what Warhol called the "Floating Plastic Inevitable."
"Warhol was the great catalyst," Reed told BOMB magazine in 1998. "It all revolved around him. It all happened very much because of him. He was like a swirl, and these things would come into being: Lo and behold multimedia. There it was. No one really thought about it, it was just fun."
Before the Velvets, references to drugs and sex were often brief and indirect, if only to ensure a chance at radio and television play. In 1967, the year of the Velvets' first album, the Rolling Stones were pressured to sing the title of their latest single as "Let's Spend Some Time Together" instead of "Let's Spend the Night Together" when they were performing on "The Ed Sullivan Show." The Doors fought with Sullivan over the word "higher" from "Light My Fire."
The Velvets said everything other bands were forbidden to say and some things other bands never imagined. Reed wrote some of rock's most explicit lyrics about drugs ("Heroin," ''Waiting for My Man"), sadomasochism ("Venus in Furs") and prostitution ("There She Goes Again"). His love songs were less stories of boy-meets-girl, than ambiguous studies of the heart, like the philosophical games of "Some Kinda Love" or the weary ballad "Pale Blue Eyes," an elegy for an old girlfriend and a confession to a post-breakup fling:
___
It was good what we did yesterday
And I'd do it once again
They fact that you are married
Only proves you're my best friend
But it's truly, truly a sin
___
Away from the Factory, the Velvets and were all too ahead of their time, getting tossed out of clubs or having audience members walk out. The mainstream press, still seeking a handle on the Beatles and the Stones, was thrown entirely by the Velvet Underground. The New York Times at first couldn't find the words, calling the Velvets "Warhol's jazz band" in a January 1966 story and "a combination of rock 'n roll and Egyptian belly-dance music" just days later. The Velvets' appearance in a Warhol film, "More Milk, Yvette," only added to the dismay of Times critic Bosley Crowther.
"Also on the bill is a performance by a group of rock 'n roll singers called the Velvet Underground," Crowther wrote. "They bang away at their electronic equipment, while random movies are thrown on the screen in back of them. When will somebody ennoble Mr. Warhol with an above-ground movie called 'For Crying Out Loud'?"
At Warhol's suggestion, they performed and recorded with the sultry, German-born Nico, a "chanteuse" who sang lead on a handful of songs from their debut album. A storm cloud over 1967's Summer of Love, "The Velvet Underground & Nico" featured a now-iconic Warhol drawing of a (peelable) banana on the cover and proved an uncanny musical extension of Warhol's blank-faced aura. The Velvets juxtaposed childlike melodies with dry, affectless vocals on "Sunday Morning" and "Femme Fatale." On "Heroin," Cale's viola screeched and jumped behind Reed's obliterating junkie's journey, with his sacred vow, "Herrrrrr-o-in, it's my wife, and it's my life," and his cry into the void, "And I guess that I just don't know."
"'Heroin' is the Velvets' masterpiece — seven minutes of excruciating spiritual extremity," wrote critic Ellen Willis. "No other work of art I know about has made the junkie's experience so horrible, so powerful, so appealing; listening to 'Heroin' I feel simultaneously impelled to somehow save this man and to reach for the needle."
Reed made just three more albums with the Velvet Underground before leaving in 1970. Cale was pushed out by Reed in 1968 (they had a long history of animosity) and was replaced by Doug Yule. Their sound turned more accessible, and the final album with Reed, "Loaded," included two upbeat musical anthems, "Rock and Roll" and "Sweet Jane," in which Reed seemed to warn Velvets fans — and himself — that "there's even some evil mothers/Well they're gonna tell you that everything is just dirt."
He lived many lives in the '70s, initially moving back home and working at his father's office, then competing with Keith Richards as the rock star most likely to die. He binged on drugs and alcohol, gained weight, lost even more and was described by critic Lester Bangs as "so transcendently emaciated he had indeed become insectival." Reed simulated shooting heroin during concerts, cursed out journalists and once slugged David Bowie when Bowie suggested he clean up his life.
"Lou Reed is the guy that gave dignity and poetry and rock n' roll to smack, speed, homosexuality, sadomasochism, murder, misogyny, stumblebum passivity, and suicide," wrote Bangs, a dedicated fan and fearless detractor, "and then proceeded to belie all his achievements and return to the mire by turning the whole thing into a monumental bad joke with himself as the woozily insistent Henny Youngman in the center ring, mumbling punch lines that kept losing their punch."
His albums in the '70s were alternately praised as daring experiments or mocked as embarrassing failures, whether the ambitious song suite "Berlin" or the wholly experimental "Metal Machine Music," an hour of electronic feedback. But in the 1980s, he kicked drugs and released a series of acclaimed albums, including "The Blue Mask," ''Legendary Hearts" and "New Sensations."
He played some reunion shows with the Velvet Underground and in 1990 teamed with Cale for "Drella," a spare tribute to Warhol. He continued to receive strong reviews in the 1990s and after for such albums as "Set the Twilight Reeling" and "Ecstasy" and he continued to test new ground, whether a 2002 concept album about Edgar Allan Poe, "The Raven," or a 2011 collaboration with Metallica, "Lulu."
Reed fancied dictionary language like "capricious" and "harridan," but he found special magic in the word "bells," sounding from above, "up in the sky," as he sang on the Velvets' "What Goes On." A personal favorite was the title track from a 1979 album, "The Bells." Over a foggy swirl of synthesizers and horns, suggesting a haunted house on skid row, Reed improvised a fairy tale about a stage actor who leaves work late at night and takes in a chiming, urban "Milky Way."
___
It was really not so cute
to play without a parachute
As he stood upon the ledge
Looking out, he thought he saw a brook
And he hollered, 'Look, there are the bells!'
And he sang out, 'Here come the bells!
Here come the bells! Here come the bells!
Here come the bells!'
Associated PressSource: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/3d281c11a96b4ad082fe88aa0db04305/Article_2013-10-27-Obit-Lou%20Reed/id-8d9f6625af7d48ec8144fe39baee9fe4
When a nation sends its citizens to war, there are few things more important than providing the best treatment possible after they get injured in the line of duty.
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When a nation sends its citizens to war, there are few things more important than providing the best treatment possible after they get injured in the line of duty.
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It was the most succinct -- and graphic -- analysis yet offered of the political implications of the Obamacare rollout.
"There's no way Democrats can spin this ----," said comedian Jon Stewart. That it was Mr. Stewart who said this is significant, because he has a big following among healthy young people, who must sign up for Obamacare in the millions to keep what so far has been mostly farce from becoming a fiasco.
And he was spot on. Most of the "mainstream" media have treated Democratic spin as news, and -- if it reflected poorly on the Obama administration -- played down or ignored genuine news.
The media shield has protected the president from failures in foreign policy, in which most Americans have little knowledge and less interest, and has limited blowback from scandals which most Americans don't think concern them.
But no amount of spin can cloak reality for Americans whose health insurance policy has been canceled, or whose premiums have doubled. Those who've spent hours fruitlessly trying to access Obamacare websites find it harder to believe the president is on top of things, his administration competent.
Obamacare screwups are too big, too obvious, too close to home for journalists to ignore. Despite the welcome distraction of the government "shutdown" -- whose mostly imaginary consequences could be blamed on Republicans -- more negative stories have been written and broadcast about the Obama administration in the last three weeks than ever before.
And now, with the "shutdown" over, Obamacare's botched rollout is the No. 1 story.
Most media attention has been directed at the "glitches" which cause Obamacare websites to crash under volumes of traffic many blogs handle with ease. They won't be fixed for months, IT experts say. If the sites aren't up and running by the middle of November, it'll be all but impossible to sign up enough people to keep Obamacare from going into a financial "death spiral." But IT problems are the least of Obamacare's troubles.
* The websites were deliberately designed backward, some suspect, to hide for as long as possible how much more people will have to pay for health insurance. There is no fix for sticker shock.
* Many who filled out application forms likely will learn the hard way that the websites have made them easy marks for identity thieves.
* Obamacare will exacerbate a massive shortage of primary care physicians, doctors predict. It will be especially difficult for Medicare patients to get timely treatment.
* If plaintiffs win any of four pending lawsuits, many of the Obamacare subsidies could be junked. Plaintiffs have the wording of the law on their side.
The administration needs 2.7 million healthy young people to sign up to subsidize those who are older and sicker. Because even "low information" voters blanch at the prospect of paying 9 percent to (in Vermont) 600 percent more for health insurance (pre-subsidy) -- especially when so few have jobs, so many have student loans to pay off -- I doubt that many would sign up under any circumstances. Website problems make it all but impossible.
"The healthy young man who sees an ad during a baseball game will not keep trying 25 times over a week if the site is not working," wrote health care expert Yuval Levin for National Review.
Most persistent will be those with health problems and no insurance. Insurance for a pool comprised chiefly of the sick and indigent would be prohibitively expensive. That's the "death spiral."
Obamacare has so many egregious, apparently insoluble problems some suspect it was designed to fail, to usher in a "single payer" system. I doubt a president with so much self-regard would deliberately subject himself to ridicule.
Since so many in the administration knew Obamacare wasn't ready for prime time, why didn't Mr. Obama accept the lifeline Republicans offered and delay implementation for a year?
The president's counterfactual insistence at his much-lampooned news conference/infomercial Monday that Obamacare has brought down health costs suggests his enormous self-regard has made him unwilling to acknowledge flaws in his "signature achievement."
Or maybe he's so partisan he couldn't bear to make a concession to the GOP.
It was a big mistake. The ugly reality of Obamacare is shattering Mr. Obama's carefully contrived image and clobbering his credibility. White House spin is now unconvincing even to former White House spinners.
It won't be long before Democrats regret they won the shutdown showdown and Republicans rejoice they didn't.
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Police say a roadside bomb has killed 18 civilians and wounded five as they rode a small bus home after attending a wedding in a lawless district of eastern Afghanistan's Ghazni province.
Deputy provincial police chief Col. Asadullah Ensafi said the blast occurred Sunday in the Andar district as the bus travelled from one village to another.
He says the dead include 14 women, three men and a child. Ensfai says the wounded are all women and two are in critical condition.
Roadside bombs are the Taliban's weapon of choice and are responsible for the overwhelming majority of civilian casualties.
Andar is one of the few districts in Ghazni where the Taliban retain some measure of control and often attack security forces, mostly by laying bombs along roads.
Associated PressSource: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/cae69a7523db45408eeb2b3a98c0c9c5/Article_2013-10-27-AS-Afghanistan/id-4cf09e128c324701a182a5a83d9cc984