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Jolie Among 4 Recipients of Honorary Oscars

September 5, 2013 by

LOS ANGELES — Angelina Jolie will receive the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award for her philanthropic work, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced on Thursday.

The award is one of four honorary Governors Awards the academy will present this fall in connection with the Oscars.

Ms. Jolie, a best supporting actress winner in 1999 for “Girl, Interrupted,” has collaborated extensively with the Council on Foreign Relations and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and has visited many refugee camps. Her acting career has included films like “A Mighty Heart” that tackle humanitarian issues.

Other honorary Oscars will go to Angela Lansbury, who has garnered three Academy Award nominations over her career, for “Gaslight,” “The Picture of Dorian Gray” and “The Manchurian Candidate”; Steve Martin, a three-time Oscar host who is known for his versatility as a writer, actor, comedian and musician; and Piero Tosi, a costume designer who collaborated with the Italian director Luchino Visconti on films like “White Nights” and “Rocco and His Brothers.”

The academy’s Thalberg Award, which periodically honors a film producer for outstanding lifetime achievement, will not be presented, for the third year in a row. The last person to receive the Thalberg Award was Francis Ford Coppola in 2010.

The academy selected the honorees at a meeting on Tuesday night. The announcement was delayed until Thursday, the academy said, because the organization needed to notify the honorees privately before announcing their names publicly. It’s normally a relatively speedy process, but at midday Wednesday an academy spokeswoman warned in an e-mail, “We’re still trying to contact the honorees. Thanks for your patience.”

An academy official insisted there was nothing fishy afoot – an honoree refusing to accept an honor, for instance – and that it was simply a matter of tracking down people who were traveling, on vacation or otherwise determined not to be disturbed.

The Governors Awards will be presented at a dinner ceremony on Nov. 16. The Oscar ceremony will be held March 2.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/business/media/jolie-among-4-recipients-of-honorary-oscars.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Media Business Tagged With: , ,

Economix Blog: When Cheating Is Ignored

July 1, 2013 by Leave a Comment

FLOYD NORRIS

FLOYD NORRIS

Notions on high and low finance.

My Friday column, on deception by derivative, compared the latest disclosures about Italy’s deception in getting into the euro zone to Enron‘s balance sheet deceptions before it collapsed.

Turns out that the observation was less than original.

Back in 2002, Benn Steil of the Council on Foreign Relations made similar points in an op-ed article in The Financial Times, under the headline:

Enron and Italy: Parallels between Rome’s efforts to qualify for euro entry and the financial chicanery in Texas

He concluded:

Enron’s window-dressing of its public accounts should clearly be a matter of government concern, since it is governments that impose the accounting rules. But the problem of government accounting abuse may in fact be far more serious, bringing to the fore that age-old question: who shall guard the guardians?

Italy cheated. Enron cheated. Those who knew about it — Europe and the banks — either helped or looked the other way. They deemed it unimportant, confident that both the company and the country were solid, even if they were not quite as solid as they had been made to appear. It turns out they were wrong about that.

I asked Mr. Steil today about the reaction to his article in 2002. He replied, in part:

I had a heated argument with a prominent N.Y. Italian journalist at the time. I told him that he and his fellow Italian economics writers were not taking this seriously enough (the Italian press mostly just attacked me for being part of some Anglo-Saxon conspiracy). He told me I was just scandal-mongering, and asked: “Don’t you agree that it’s a good thing that Italy qualified for the euro?”

Hmm . . .

Article source: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/01/when-cheating-is-ignored/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Economy News Tagged With: , ,

Obama Bid for Trade Pact With Europe Stirs Hope

February 13, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Experts cited tough economic times on both sides of the Atlantic and a perceived need among European leaders for a cause to unify their frayed union as major reasons that an agreement might be reached now, where past efforts have failed. But an even greater consideration, they said, was the growing economic might of China.

“There will be an agreement in the end,” said Claudia Schmucker, head of the globalization and world economy program at the German Council on Foreign Relations. “This will be the first time in 20 years where something can happen.”

Proponents hope that a comprehensive trade agreement will not only raise economic growth, but also lower prices for European and American consumers and give new impetus to a relationship that has lacked forward momentum almost since the end of the cold war. Talks could begin in late May or early June.

Negotiations are not expected to be easy, with entrenched interests, especially in protected sectors of the agriculture industry, fighting to maintain their subsidies and preferences. European consumers have rejected the kinds of genetically modified crops that are commonplace in the United States but are known across the Atlantic as Frankenfoods.

Nevertheless, Mr. Obama’s announcement was applauded by leading politicians and business groups in Europe, especially here in Germany, and so far the news has not provoked the instant union opposition in the United States that free-trade talks with underdeveloped, low-wage countries do.

Trade experts agreed that several new factors had converged to make an agreement more likely. The economic stagnation on both sides of the Atlantic has heightened the awareness that a prod to growth is needed. In a Democratic administration, free-trade agreements are much easier to reach with higher-wage, unionized countries like those in Europe that do not spook trade unions. And the cross-pollination between American and European companies, as in the auto sector, also is expected to blunt opposition from labor groups.

But China may present the single most compelling factor. There is an increasing awareness that to deal with the challenge of China’s rapidly growing economy, Europe and the United States will have to learn to cooperate better.

“In every trade negotiation that I know of between Europe and the U.S., China is on their minds in terms of how can we use trade negotiations to better compete,” said Jeffrey J. Schott, a senior fellow working on international trade policy at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington.

While trade deals often take years to negotiate, a senior Obama administration official said that a pact is possible in as little as 18 months — before the terms of the current European commissioners end. Even so, trade experts with experience from previous rounds say they are acutely aware of how often negotiations begin with optimism and grand plans and end with intractable fights between vested interests.

Karel De Gucht, the European Union’s trade commissioner, said completing a trade pact could take two years. In an interview, he said that a deal “will have a worldwide impact.” The talks were “about our place, and by our place I mean the United States and Europe, within a decade on the world economic scene,” Mr. De Gucht said.

Mr. Obama devoted a single sentence to the topic in his State of the Union address, but that was what proponents of a trade deal had been hoping for. His statement set the stage for talks to remove tariff barriers and regulatory hurdles between the United States and the European Union, which are already each other’s largest trading partners.

In his speech on Tuesday, Mr. Obama called the initiative the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, but the idea is an old one, much discussed during the Clinton administration under the name Tafta, something like a sequel to the Nafta deal.

Mr. Obama’s reference to talks about a possible free-trade pact with the European Union was a late addition to his State of the Union address, according to a senior administration official, because a working group of the United States and the European Union had sent recommendations to Washington only on Tuesday that the two sides were close enough on various issues to pursue talks toward a comprehensive free-trade agreement, rather than a more limited one.

Nicholas Kulish reported from Berlin, and Jackie Calmes from Washington. James Kanter contributed reporting from Brussels, Jack Ewing from Frankfurt, and Brian Knowlton from Washington.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/14/world/europe/obama-bid-for-trade-pact-with-europe-stirs-hope.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Global Business Tagged With: , ,

Green Column: Deep-Sea Drilling Muddies Political Waters

February 6, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Now, increasingly, the secrets of the seabed are being looked at by companies drilling for oil and minerals. International geopolitics and the environment are getting more muddled as a result.

“Deep-sea drilling is expensive and hard, and the technology wasn’t there until very recently,” said Sheila Smith, a senior fellow for Japan studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in the United States. Now, major powers are vying for drilling rights in places like the East China Sea, where the tussle is between the two largest energy consumers in Asia: China and Japan. Tensions there flared this week when Japan said China had recently aimed military targeting radar at one of its ships near disputed islands.

The drilling industry continues to move toward deeper waters and new deposits. In the Gulf of Mexico, drilling is now occurring beneath as much as 8,000 to 9,000 feet, or about 2,400 to 2,700 meters, of water, according to Mike Lyons, general counsel of the Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association. The Deepwater Horizon rig, by contrast, was drilling in about 5,000 feet of water in the gulf when it exploded after a blowout nearly three years ago.

Technology has accelerated the move toward deeper waters. “A lot of the drilling now in the Gulf of Mexico is done with drill ships, as opposed to conventional drilling platforms that people have used in the past,” Mr. Lyons said. The ships can inhabit deeper waters and be stabilized over a drill site with the aid of sophisticated computers, he said.

Amy Myers Jaffe, executive director for energy and sustainability at the University of California, Davis, said that the industry’s advances into deeper water had been steady but incremental.

With the increased capability comes increased scrutiny, especially after events like the 2010 Deepwater Horizon accident and a 2011 oil leak off of Brazil, as well as a natural gas leak last year at a North Sea drilling platform about 150 miles, or 240 kilometers, off Aberdeen, Scotland.

Ms. Jaffe said that drillers had perhaps viewed deep-water operations as too routine. “I think that we were a little blasé about how hard it is to do,” she said. “And maybe the industry is now grappling with the difference between 2 percent tolerance and 0 percent tolerance” for mistakes. Zero percent may be the new model, especially in places that have recently experienced public outcries over spills, including Australia, Brazil and the United States, she said.

Shell’s difficulty in drilling in Arctic waters off Alaska further illustrates the technological challenges of operating in new, often adverse settings.

The industry is eager to “get access to these fragile and complicated areas” like the Arctic, said Frederic Hauge, president of the Bellona Foundation, an environmental group based in Oslo. But the risks are immense, he said, adding that in Norway, he felt that companies lacked adequate emergency response plans for their far-afield rigs.

As technology helps propel the industry further offshore, geopolitical difficulties are intruding. Many countries have overlapping maritime boundaries. Lebanon and Israel have disputed claims in the natural-gas-rich eastern Mediterranean Sea. The United States and Mexico have also had differences over rights in the Gulf of Mexico, though they signed a cooperation agreement a year ago on drilling.

In the East China Sea and the South China Sea, disputes continue as China, with its rising energy appetite, clashes with its neighbors over drilling rights and sovereignty claims.

“If these were uncontested regions, I’m sure people would have gone forward already” with drilling, said Ms. Smith of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Should the drilling industry venture into even deeper waters, additional political complications await. The U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, signed by more than 150 countries — though not by the United States — gives the International Seabed Authority, based in Jamaica, oversight of mineral exploration in waters that lie beyond a country’s so-called exclusive economic zone, which typically extends 200 nautical miles, or 370 kilometers, from shore.

Adam Cook, a marine biologist with the seabed agency, said that while the group had agreed to 17 exploration contracts with companies, most of those companies were looking for minerals like manganese nodules, which are rock formations. So far, none are after oil or natural gas, and the consensus is that there is “unlikely to be any drilling for oil and gas beyond national jurisdiction in the near future,” Mr. Cook said in an e-mail.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/07/business/energy-environment/07iht-green07.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Global Business Tagged With: , ,

Off The Shelf: In A.&P.’s Story, Parallels to Retail Battles of Today

September 4, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Sound familiar? But this is not the story of Wal-Mart Stores. Rather, it is the story of a company that preceded it by about a century: the A. P. grocery chain.

In “The Great A.P. and the Struggle for Small Business in America” (Hill Wang, $27.95), Marc Levinson tells of A. P.’s expansion and the powerful backlash it engendered in a way that draws unmistakable parallels to the retail battles of today.

The rise of mass retailing is one of the most fascinating aspects of American business history. Beginning in the 19th century, the railroad and the telegraph helped create the means for products to be sold on a much larger scale.

Mr. Levinson, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, describes how A. P. expertly exploited these developments. But its success contributed to a clamor of anti-chain sentiment that dogged the company for decades and culminated in a 1946 antitrust ruling against it.

“A. P. was at the center of a bitter political struggle that lasted for nearly half a century — a struggle that went far beyond economics,” he writes. “At its root were competing visions of society.”

One vision favored the rationalism of big business, with its cost-cutting and wealth-creation possibilities. The other vision “harked back to a society of autonomous farmers, craftsmen and merchants in which personal independence was the source of individual opportunity and collective prosperity.”

Today, more than 60 years after the government ruled against A. P.’s size and market power, we remain caught between these contrasting archetypes. We want “everyday low prices,” but we feel great affinity for small, local businesses and, as recent controversies about Wal-Mart opening stores in big cities attest, we are often hostile to the large enterprises that make such prices possible.

Mr. Levinson, a clean and careful writer, opens his story around 1860, when George Gilman, a tanner, opened a tea and coffee trading business in New York. He aggressively marketed his products, and his business prospered.

In 1869, Mr. Gilman founded a related business, the Great Atlantic Pacific Tea Company, which was destined to become what the author calls “one of the greatest agents of creative destruction in the United States.”

But Mr. Gilman did not oversee A. P.’s transformation. In the late 1870s, he passed the reins to his colleague George H. Hartford, who, with his sons, George L. Hartford and John Hartford, continued the strategy of aggressive growth. In the early 1880s, A. P. broadened its product line and began selling sugar, baking powder and canned goods, branding some as its unique offerings.

The next three decades were heady ones for A. P. Buoyed by swift store expansion and the Hartfords’ astute attention to cutting costs, the chain grew to more than 9,200 outlets by the mid-1920s. In a 12-month period ended in 1925, it chalked up what was then an astonishing $352 million in sales.

Other retailers, like Kroger, Grand Union and F. W. Woolworth, also grew during this period and used their size to achieve considerable cost savings. But as Mr. Levinson convincingly argues, no large retailer pursued the strategic advantages of scale as forcefully as A. P.

By the 1920s, the company was exploiting its heft to command volume discounts and charge ever lower prices. From 1925 to 1929, food prices fell 2 percent nationally, but prices at A. P. dropped 10 percent. Small wonder that Americans flocked to it and other chains. As they did, their shopping and eating habits changed, too, since chains put more emphasis on variety and convenience.

Many mom-and-pop stores and small wholesalers became road kill in the transformation wrought by mass retailing. These players would fight back, enlisting state and federal governments to help curtail the large retailers’ power. A. P. became a main target.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=a90ed2c701dd022cd5b1eff14441a642

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