Childhood memories : why so difficult to recall - Independent

Childhood memories: why are they so difficult to recall?
Early memories are powerful in shaping the adults that we become, and cultural differences in parenting style may have an impact on what we remember

Most of us don’t have any memories from the first three to four years of our lives – in fact, we tend to remember very little of life before the age of seven. And when we do try to think back to our earliest memories, it is often unclear whether they are the real thing or just recollections based on photos or stories told to us by others.
The phenomenon, known as “childhood amnesia”, has been puzzling psychologists for more than a century – and we still don’t fully understand it.
At first glance, it may seem that the reason we don’t remember being babies is because infants and toddlers don’t have a fully developed memory. But babies as young as six months can form both short-term memories that last for minutes, and long-term memories that last weeks, if not months. In one study, six-month-olds who learned how to press a lever to operate a toy train remembered how to perform this action for two to three weeks after they had last seen the toy. Preschoolers, on the other hand, can remember events that go years back. It’s debatable whether long-term memories at this early age are truly autobiographical, though – that is, personally relevant events that occurred in a specific time and place.

Of course, memory capabilities at these ages are not adult-like – they continue to mature until adolescence. In fact, developmental changes in basic memory processes have been put forward as an explanation for childhood amnesia, and it’s one of the best theories we’ve got so far. These basic processes involve several brain regions and include forming, maintaining and then later retrieving the memory. For example, the hippocampus, thought to be responsible for forming memories, continues developing until at least the age of seven. We know that the typical boundary for the offset of childhood amnesia – three and a half years – shifts with age. Children and teenagers have earlier memories than adults do. This suggests that the problem may be less with forming memories than with maintaining them.

But this does not seem to be the whole story. Another factor that we know plays a role is language. From the ages of one to six, children progress from the one-word stage of speaking to becoming fluent in their native language(s), so there are major changes in their verbal ability that overlap with the childhood amnesia period. This includes using the past tense, memory-related words such as “remember” and “forget”, and personal pronouns, a favourite being “mine”.
It is true to some extent that a child’s ability to verbalise about an event at the time that it happened predicts how well they remember it months or years later. One lab group conducted this work by interviewing toddlers brought to accident and emergency departments for common childhood injuries. Toddlers over 26 months, who could verbalise about the event at the time, recalled it up to five years later, whereas those under 26 months, who could not talk about it, recalled little or nothing. This suggests that preverbal memories are lost if they are not translated into language.
However, most research on the role of language focuses on a particular form of expression called narrative, and its social function. When parents reminisce with very young children about past events, they implicitly teach them narrative skills – what kinds of events are important to remember and how to structure talking about them in a way that others can understand.

Unlike simply recounting information for factual purposes, reminiscing revolves around the social function of sharing experiences with others. In this way, family stories maintain the memory’s accessibility over time, and also increase the coherence of the narrative, including the chronology of events, their theme, and their degree of emotion. More coherent stories are remembered better. Maori adults have the earliest childhood memories (age 2.5) of any society studied so far, thanks to Maori parents' highly elaborate style of telling family stories.
Reminiscing has different social functions in different cultures, which contribute to cultural variations in the quantity, quality and timing of early autobiographical memories. Adults in cultures that value autonomy (North America, Western Europe) tend to report earlier and more childhood memories than adults in cultures that value relatedness (Asia, Africa).
This is predicted by cultural differences in parental reminiscing style. In cultures that promote more autonomous self-concepts, parental reminiscing focuses more on children’s individual experiences, preferences, and feelings, and less on their relationships with others, social routines, and behavioural standards. For example, an American child might remember getting a gold star in preschool whereas a Chinese child might remember the class learning a particular song at preschool.

While there are still things we don’t understand about childhood amnesia, researchers are making progress. For example, there are more prospective longitudinal studies that follow individuals from childhood into the future. This helps give accurate accounts of events, which is better than retrospectively asking teens or adults to remember past events which are not documented. Also, as neuroscience progresses, there will undoubtedly be more studies relating brain development to memory development. This should help us develop other measures of memory besides verbal reports.
In the meantime, it’s important to remember that, even if we can’t explicitly remember specific events from when we were very young, their accumulation nevertheless leaves lasting traces that influence our behaviour. The first few years of life are paradoxically forgettable and yet powerful in shaping the adults that we become.
This article was first published in The Conversation. Jeanne Shinskey is a senior lecturer in the department of psychology at Royal Holloway, University of London

Trump convention takes on warlike atmosphere to emphasise threats - New York Times

Thunderstorms passed over Cleveland early Monday morning, but they reappeared Monday night inside Quicken Loans Arena, where the first night of Donald J. Trump’s coronation struck a dark and foreboding tone unmatched by any convention in recent history. Our takeaways:
We’re in grave danger
The lineup of speakers presented a United States in danger, threatened from abroad and from within, a once-proud nation on the very brink of chaos and dystopia. Six of the speakers were military veterans, including Marcus Luttrell, the celebrated former Navy SEAL, who bluntly warned that “the enemy is here.” A half-dozen more were relatives of Americans murdered by foreign terrorists or illegal immigrants — threats to the nation’s safety and cohesion that often mingle in the Trump worldview. Another was the former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who likened the country to a circa-1980s New York in need of a strong hand. “There is no next election,” Mr. Giuliani warned. “This is it!”

No time for soft notes
A night of doom and gloom was punctuated by the emergence of Mr. Trump’s media-shy wife, Melania, ostensibly in the traditional spousal role of humanizer. And yes, Ms. Trump spoke of her husband’s patriotism and how much he cared for their son, and urged Republicans to look past the rancor of the primary season. Yet Ms. Trump’s ably delivered address was strangely impersonal — devoid of colorful stories and anecdotes about this most colorful of candidates. (It also had parts strikingly similar to a 2008 Michelle Obama speech.) In the end, her message was the same as every other speaker’s: Mr. Trump is strong and resolute.
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The First Day of the Republican National Convention
The First Day of the Republican National Convention
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Doug Mills/The New York Times

Trump in charge
Scott Baio may have been an early speaker on Monday, but there was no question who was in charge. It is one thing for the presumptive nominee to make an early appearance at his own convention, as Mr. Trump did when he introduced his wife before her speech. It is quite another to step on one of the most putatively powerful moments of the night, as Mr. Trump did when he phoned in to Fox to attack Ohio’s popular governor, John Kasich, for skipping the convention in Cleveland. Mr. Trump’s tirade pre-empted the network’s coverage from the convention stage, where two American survivors of the 2012 attack in Benghazi, Libya, were recounting their experience.
Mechanics matter
With Mr. Trump fully in charge, the convention displayed many of the logistical creaks and misfires as did his winning primary campaign. Instead of building to a crescendo — with each speaker reinforcing the next — the night ebbed and flowed, from remarks by intense and high-energy speakers like Mr. Giuliani to the meandering, strained speech by a former general (and onetime potential running mate), Michael T. Flynn. Mr. Trump’s own Fox hit appeared to force the network to go to commercials during an emotional and heart-rending speech by Patricia Smith, the mother of the Benghazi victim Sean Smith.

Ms. Trump’s well-received speech seemed to signal an end to the night, and delegates soon began drifting out of the arena with more than an hour left to go. One of the party’s rising stars, Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa, ended the evening speaking to a mostly empty room. The house band’s closing performance of “Sweet Caroline” ended halfway through the song.
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Trump conquered the Republican Party now the protest - Telegraph

Donald Trump has conquered the Republican Party. Now come the protests
TIM STANLEY


19 JULY 2016 • 6:30AM



W
elcome to the Trump convention. Not the Republican convention: the Trump convention. And all he hath wrought.
On Monday night we watched a former Calvin Klein model warn us against socialism, Rudy Giuliani transform into Grandpa Simpson and Donald Trump emerge from the smoke machine fog like a contestant off Stars in their Eyes. "Tonight, Matthew, I'm going to be... a presidential nominee!"
He introduced his wife, Melania. Yet another former model. She was beautiful as this convention is ridiculous.
Some things you need to know. It’s hot here in Ohio. Really, really hot. Cleveland’s outskirts, where I’m staying, are a queer mix of industrial and rural; I spotted a deer wandering across the railway tracks. As you enter downtown, the buildings shoot up to the sky and the temperature grows more oppressive. Sunday night there was a terrible storm. Monday morning, the air was close and wet.
“I met a fat man with a thin man on a dog leash – the thin guy was walking around on all fours, barking. The fat guy screamed: “Kick ma dawg for Trump! Kick him, y’all!”
”
The entrance to the convention hall is down a long, narrow alley full of TV cameras and pork rib restaurants. It’s filled with preachers screaming about Jesus. I met a fat man with a thin man on a dog leash – the thin guy was walking around on all fours, barking. The fat guy screamed: “Kick ma dawg for Trump! Kick him, y’all!” I have no idea what the point was. There doesn’t have to be one. People have come here to be heard, no matter what they’re saying.
I took a detour down to the riverside, where there was an America First Unity Rally. Trump rallies are unusual because even the pro-Trump speakers get shouted down by the pro-Trump audience. The host, a large Iowan in a cowboy hat called Ken Crow, was trying to talk and a black guy started drowning him out by yelling: “Build that wall! Build that wall!” Mr Crow shouted back: “It's a long day patriot. Don't go horsesh*t.” Mr Crow was joined by a lady with an extreme tan and very blonde hair in a small skirt that kept lifting in the breeze. “I can feel a Marilyn Monroe moment coming on!” she joked. Luckily, she said, she was wearing panties underneath.

These are people who were with Trump from the very beginning, the people who – in their own words – cling passionately onto guns and bibles. Nothing wrong with that. I go to Mass every Sunday and I’m pretty smart with an air-gun. What’s striking among the America First crowd, is their sense not of potential – that old American dream – but of anger at the attempt to take away what little they have. Mr Crow told us about his first meeting with The Donald. He’d asked Trump why he was running and Trump said: “Why do you think I’m running?” Crow replied: “To preserve what you’ve built.” And Trump said: “To preserve what everybody’s built.”

Note: preserve. Not build more, not expand, not create – but preserve. You might argue that Trump is conservatism in its purest sense, the sense of being about conserving the best of the past. You might also argue that this represents a break from Reaganism, which is optimistic and about growing the economy to the advantage of the individual. I’ve been a US conservative convention goer for eight years and I can tell that a change has come over them. You used to hear a lot about defending the Constitution and shrinking the government. Not so much anymore.

The people who are interested in those things are here. On Monday afternoon, God bless them, they tried to kick Trump off the ticket with a rules challenge on the convention floor. They failed and stormed off. They never had the numbers necessary to do it and the Republican establishment has reconciled itself to Trump anyway – so no dice. I visited the Never Trump HQ and it was, at that particular moment, just two guys with laptops. Nevertheless, while the anti-Trump forces are small in number they are powerful with the punditocracy and the talk shows are brimming with movement intellectuals denouncing the nominee of their party.
This creates the false sense that the Republican opposition is way bigger than it really is. For a sense of how Trumpism has captured the heart of the GOP, one only had to watch Rudy Giuliani's remarkable speech – which capped an evening of anti-foreigner rhetoric that included two army guys detailing how to kill an enemy combatant. Giuliani was all teeth and fists. Mad as Hell. Not. Going. To. Take. It. Any. More. The convention loved it. How strange to see people I know, and rather like, transformed suddenly into an audience of pure rage – people who are middle-class, small town, hard-working, Christian. I cannot stress how pleasant the Trump supporters really are to speak to. But presented with the possibility of Hillary Clinton entering the White House and they become wild and angry. One can feel the philosophical disagreements with Trump just melting away.
So any real opposition will come from outside the convention, and that’s where things get scary. The cops are policing the demos with a rapid response team that rides around with guns and mace on black bicycles – like postmen in the age of the apocalypse – and they generally outnumber the protesters. The saddest sight in the world was an individual Muslim woman in the main square pleading through a microphone that she was an American, too. Around her was a ring of cops on bikes, holding back about twelve Christians shouting that Mohammed is the Devil. Back down the alley leading to the convention hall, I ran into Geert Wilders – leader of the Dutch far-Right. He said Trump was the kind of "strong leader" than Americans and Europeans are looking for.

What happens with the Black Lives Matter folk arrive in big numbers? The liberals, the hippies, the environmentalists, the professional trouble-makers, the people who believe they can bring down Trump by showing him up by encouraging violence? I await their arrival with genuine fear, and with – dare I say it – nervous excitement. Someone has to dissent seriously in Cleveland. Someone has to say Trump is wrong.
In the train station on the way home there was a brass band playing Happy Days are Here Again. And an old guy with a t-shirt that read: “Jesus Rebukes Those He Loves.” Amen.

Why This Mobile Tech Company Was Just Acquired for $32 Billion - Fortune

Why This Mobile Tech Company Was Just Acquired for $32 Billion

Posted: 18 Jul 2016 06:18 AM PDT

SoftBank’s impending takeover of ARM Holdings means the Japanese firm is buying the most important company in the world of mobile processors.
ARM’s processor designs power more than 95 percent of the smartphones out there (Intel has never been able to replicate its desktop success in this space). From the iPhone and AppleWatch down to the cheapest Nokia phone out there, you can be pretty sure that your mobile device has an ARM-based chip inside.
The 25-year-old British company has the crucial advantage of not having to make its own chips—it just designs the processor architecture and licenses it to companies such as Qualcomm, Samsung and Apple.

In fact, ARM’s genesis dates back to the collaboration between Apple and Acorn, the computer company whose Acorn RISC Machine (ARM) processor powered Apple’s Newton personal digital assistant in the early 1990s.
The SoftBank deal is worth around $32 billion, and the Japanese communications conglomerate is promising to make its new baby flourish like never before.
SoftBank said Monday that it would at least double ARM’s U.K. headcount and to grow its employee numbers outside the country over the next five years. The business model will stay the same, as will the company’s organizational structure and senior management.
ARM’s headquarters will remain in Cambridge, in the east of England. Much as Intel and Stanford University have been essential to Silicon Valley, ARM and the University of Cambridge have been central in the development of the smaller “Silicon Fen”—a cluster that also gave birth to big data outfit Autonomy (disastrously purchased by Hewlett-Packard) and Bluetooth chip firm CSR (now owned by Qualcomm).
Of course, ARM’s potential future does not just lie in mobile. Because the company’s architecture is designed to use as little power as possible (a must-have in phones), it is also well-placed for the nascent Internet of things—the new world of everyday devices that have processors and radios embedded in them to give them some smarts and connect them with the Internet.
While the Internet of things has a lot of buzz about it, it still has yet to reach the ubiquity enjoyed by smartphones. That said, smartphone growth is slowing as the market saturates, and companies such as ARM need to diversify.
In May, ARM said more than half of the 4.1 billion ARM-based chips that shipped in the first quarter of this year had been for non-mobile markets—though mobile did account for two-thirds of ARM’s royalties for the period.
SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son was clear in his Monday statement about where he sees ARM’s value. “ARM will be an excellent strategic fit within the SoftBank group as we invest to capture the very significant opportunities provided by the Internet of things,” he said. “This is one of the most important acquisitions we have ever made.”
SoftBank said it would not only invest in more engineers for ARM, but also look for “complementary acquisitions” to maintain the firm’s “R&D edge.”
ARM has recently been no slouch on this front anyway. Last year alone it bought Internet-of-things security firms Sansa (which it is using as the basis for a new development hub in Israel) and Offspark, Bluetooth technology companies Wicentric and Sunrise (which will again aid its Internet-of-things efforts on the communications side), and virtual-prototyping outfit Carbon Design Systems.
The British company is developing its own operating system for the Internet of Things, called mbed. The idea here is to make it easier for companies entering the space to pick up an ARM-based chip and quickly set up a working connected device.
SoftBank, meanwhile, last week announced a joint venture with Internet-of-things technology and services company Aeris. The joint venture will push Aeris’s network and platform in Japan, India, Europe and the U.S., targeting markets such as the automotive industry.
It’s not hard to see how a big beast such as ARM will fit into such a strategy.
“This move by ARM is recognition of the limits of this current market and the need to invest to expand beyond PC and mobile into the multitude of consumer home, building, car and other platforms emerging in the Internet of things,” said Mark Skilton, a professor at Warwick Business School.
“This needs bigger pockets to take on completion to scale these markets…Telecoms companies have had an interesting challenge to position the vital network ‘glue’ to connect all these devices and services, but seek a bigger part of the market share through similar integration into the delivery device end.”
As some have noted, SoftBank’s timing on the ARM acquisition has been fortunate, thanks to the impact of the Brexit vote on the pound.

Softbank acquiring ARM (a UK company) is very well timed – saved ~20% compared to start 2016 thanks to brexit pic.twitter.com/vA8H3s6xwq

— Hugh Stephens (@hughstephens) July 18, 2016

The British government, of course, is leaping on this spot of good post-Brexit news. “Just three weeks after the referendum decision, it shows that Britain has lost none of its allure to international investors,” said chancellor of the exchequer Philip Hammond.
Hammond also said the deal—the largest-ever investment from Asia in the U.K.—would “turn this great British company into a global phenomenon.”
It already is that, by any measure. Though if SoftBank plays its cards right, and if the Internet of things explodes as predicted, ARM could indeed become even more important than it already is.
This article originally appeared on Fortune.com

Turkish coup failed but troubles ahead - Independent

As a botched attempt at an undemocratic military coup took place in Turkey on Friday night, confusion reigned, jets flew overhead, and military vehicles took to the streets of Istanbul and Ankara. Soon, however, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan delivered a live FaceTime address to the nation, calling on people to take to the streets to overturn the coup and defend democracy. The result left 265 dead, 1,440 wounded and the return of Erdoğan’s democratically elected government.
This reads like a people’s success story: unlike the jubilant crowds that met the tanks in Turkey’s 1960, 1971 and 1980 coups, this time, the Turkish public responded with a firm “no”. Turkey’s opposition parties – usually vehemently opposed to Erdoğan’s AK Party – hurriedly rallied to denounce the coup attempt and state their commitment to democracy on Saturday. Many international heads of state, the UN, and NATO called for the continuation of Turkey’s democratically elected government. The people’s will had triumphed over militarism.
But while the Turkish government congratulates itself and its loyal 51 per cent for a historical night of defending democracy, this feels far from a victory for Turkey’s secular and minority groups. Secular Turkish Muslims, non-Muslims, non-Sunnis, Kurds, LGBT individuals, dissenting journalists, academics, and others who wish to see Erdoğan step down through due democratic process after 12 years of rule fear that Friday’s events will only sow deeper division in Turkish society.

No one wants the instability and civilian oppression that martial law brings, but many Turks have long been hoping in vain for a truly democratic government, one that, in the true definition of the term, listens to the 49 per cent who happen to disagree with the Islamist and authoritarian direction of the ruling party. It has now long been the case in Turkey that, when the word “democracy” is used by the state, the calling card is coming out: it directly means their sustained electoral majority, and this justifies whatever is next to come. Democracy has become shorthand for a majority with homogenous values having the right to decide the fate of a diverse and increasingly demoralised minority.
Yesterday’s show of democracy was therefore not only questionable in label, but its aftermath looks set to be, too. The government’s heavy-handed clampdown has already begun. A remarkable 2,839 army members, and 2,745 judges and prosecutors have been detained within 24 hours: assuming all arrests are based on solid impartial evidence, it is an intelligence feat of astounding accuracy and speed, which Turkey’s recent failures to detect terrorist plots suggests unlikely. The sheer numbers bear the hallmarks of a purge, as any unlawful arrests fall through the cracks. Erdoğan has also regained some international sympathy, while bolstering a domestic support base that had temporarily waned due to tensions about Syrian refugees.

The frightening violence of Erdoğan’s supporters in their so-called caretaking of democracy on Friday night; the rhetoric of democracy and majoritarianism that Erdoğan uses interchangeably without qualm; and the pursuit of vengeance over mercy in the aftermath marks this failed coup as the start of darker days for Turkish democracy.

The Ultimate Job Seeker’s Guide to LinkedIn - TIME

The Ultimate Job Seeker’s Guide to LinkedIn Posted: 13 Jul 2016 03:00 AM PDT As of June 2016, the unemployment rate sits at 4.9% — roughly where it was ten years ago today. But in the decade since, much has changed. The Great Recession took the economy on a wild ride, making job seekers clutch their resumes close to their chests. The “Gig Economy” came into being, and many who were once employed in their career of choice found new jobs as drivers, errand runners, and temps of all stripes. And of course the process of finding jobs changed radically, too. The dominance of big job boards like Monster and CareerBuilder is no more. Now the most sought-after gigs go to people who know people. This is where the LinkedIn comes in. Born in 2002 in co-founder Reid Hoffman’s living room, the social network is now the de facto career destination on the web. Neither a job board, company review website, nor an online gossip mill, LinkedIn is the go-to portal for professional networking, offering a variety of tools toward that end. Job seekers (both active and passive) who once regarded every turn of phrase on their CV as a competitive secret now post their job experience online with pride. LinkedIn currently has 433 million members from more than 200 countries. According to comScore, the site’s age demographics are the most balanced in all of social media. As of late 2014, 35% of its users were between 18-34 years old, 40% were 35-54, and 25% were age 55 and over. It’s also a user base that’s consistently growing — two people join LinkedIn per second, with recent college graduates representing the bulk of the site’s new members. But why are they coming? That is the big question behind the popularity and utility of LinkedIn. With cash-strapped employers offering fewer benefits and people feeling simultaneously overworked and under-employed, the loyalty that once shored up the workforce has eroded. Now workers make lateral move after lateral move like a real-world Frogger, occasionally leaping up another level in their professional life. And to move up — or over — they need to have connections. That’s where LinkedIn comes in. Here’s what you need to know to master it. The LinkedIn Homepage After you sign up for LinkedIn and build your profile (more on that below), the LinkedIn homepage serves as the starting point for your business-oriented online dealings. Structured like the infinitely scrolling news feeds of Facebook and Twitter, LinkedIn’s interface is designed for interaction. It wants you to give virtual high-fives and pats on the back to your colleagues and contacts — and to help you connect you with even more of them. At the top of the homepage in black is the navigation bar, which serves as the launch pad for many interactions on the site. The search window takes up a lot of space on this strip. That’s because LinkedIn wants its users to seek out former (and future) colleagues, companies, and other organizations. The advanced search link next to the search windows lets users further tap the vast amounts of professional data that people plug into this social network. On a related note, this user data is what makes LinkedIn so valuable, both professionally and financially. In fact, partly because of this vast trove of professional information, Microsoft recently purchased LinkedIn for about $26 billion, one of the largest technology acquisitions ever. But back to the navigation bar. On the top right you’ll also find icons (with alert badges) for messages from other users, notifications from LinkedIn, and connection invitations. If you’re an active LinkedIn user, clearing the alerts on these three icons can be a Sisyphean task — especially because the social network will throw some suggestions in them to keep your account whirring. If you’re an “inbox zero” type, you might want to unsubscribe from that philosophy while using this site. And finally, in the right corner of the navigation bar is the account and settings icon. This is where you can adjust things like privacy preferences, languages, and account types. LinkedIn is free to use, but it also offers a “premium” version for $30 per month. That may seem like a steep rate, but it’s a popular offering — the social network raked in $532 million in LinkedIn Premium fees in 2015 alone. Below the navigation bar is the dashboard, a not-so-subtle prompt by the company for users to plug more information into their personal page. Within this panel you’ll see how many connections you have, as well as a link to information about how many people have viewed your profile recently. Yes, unlike Facebook and Twitter, on this social network you can see who has been scoping you out — well, some of them. For a complete list, you’ll need to subscribe to LinkedIn Premium. (Now you can see why so many people pay up.)  Below the dashboard are the usual social media tools, which let users add content to the site’s feed, including status updates, photos, and posts. On LinkedIn, status updates and posts are distinctly different pieces of information. A status update is a good way to say whatever is on your mind, or to share links that you think your professional contacts would find interesting. Posts are articles that you can publish on LinkedIn. Clicking on “publish a post” opens a text editing page that lets users add rich media including images, videos, presentations, tweets, and even podcasts to your LinkedIn feed. It’s a very good professional publishing tool. Once you create and share these updates, images, or other media, they all go into that infinite scroll that your contacts see on their LinkedIn homepages. Finally, in the right-hand column of the LinkedIn homepage is the “keep in touch” box. A horizontally scrolling carousel of your contacts, this is LinkedIn’s way of encouraging interaction among its users. The idea is that liking a recent update or sending a quick message to a former colleague can be a great way to get you two working together again. Hey, it can’t hurt, right? Your LinkedIn Profile The secret to getting the most out of your LinkedIn experience is straightforward: you’ve got to put your best effort into making a rich and vibrant LinkedIn profile. If you don’t believe me, take recruiters’ word for it. According to a 2014 survey by recruiting platform Jobvite, 93% of hiring managers look at people’s social profiles before deciding to hire them. So set all your Facebook posts to private, delete any inadvisable tweets, and let LinkedIn be your face to the professional world. The first step in doing that actually involves your face — make sure to post a profile picture on your account. According to LinkedIn, people are 14 times more likely to open a profile with a photo attached to it. As for what makes a good profile picture (should you smile or not?), there are different schools of thought. Recruiters spend lots of time looking at LinkedIn and have excellent advice for crafting attention-getting profiles.  Beyond the photo, there’s still much to be done in crafting an effective LinkedIn profile. Just as important as including a profile photo and your name is writing a headline for your profile. Found just below your name on your profile, the headline — along with your current job title — is one of few bits of information shown when your profile is found by LinkedIn’s search engine, so make it a good one. Just make sure not to repeat your job title there. Instead, use the headline like a newspaper editor would: to grab a person’s attention and compel him or her to read on. One way to do this is to write your headline (and as much of your profile as possible) around keywords specific to the job you want (not necessarily the job you’ve got). To do this, pull up a job listing you may be interested in, note the important terms, and then weave them into your profile, starting with the headline. So, for instance, you may feel like you’re just a lowly staff accountant, but in the headline, you become a “Experienced Corporate Accountant With Experience Handling Millions in Billables.” Lo and behold, lowly no more. Next on the profile is the summary panel. Similar to the “objectives” area at the top of a resume, this is where LinkedIn users can write a brief blurb about who they are and what they do. But unlike on a resume, this spot is a good place to get creative and let your personality show. In other words, feel free to write in the first person here (it comes across as friendly and engaging) and go ahead and mix in personal and volunteer passions to paint a full, vivid portrait of who you really are. The idea is to give people more reasons to interact with you online, and eventually — hopefully — in person, too. Another major element of your LinkedIn Profile is the experience panel. This is more or less your resume, repackaged for the web. And don’t just stop with your current gig — fill this out as far back as it’s applicable. Profiles are 12 times more likely to be viewed if they list more than one job, says LinkedIn. But don’t make it difficult on yourself. Feel free to copy and paste as well as elaborate or curtail the keystrokes you’ve already painstakingly pecked out for your resume. But again, mind the tip above about keywords. If you want to be the person that people find on LinkedIn, you need to promote yourself as the person they are looking for. And if you’re good at your job (or even if you aren’t), don’t hesitate to brag. Listing your various skills is another way to get eyeballs coming your way. As easy as clicking a box, listing your skills will prompt your contacts to endorse your talents. And these endorsements look great to hiring managers when they check out your profile. Rather than cramming everything onto an 8.5×11-inch page, LinkedIn lets its users go much further in promoting themselves, especially through the other various sections that the profile allows. Beyond the typical resume section headers for education, outside activities, and awards the site lets users include other important information like test scores, advice for contacting, and even causes you care about. And the more information that you include on your profile, the more likely it is to be served up in other users’ search results. So grab that keyboard and start writing. Making Connections A connection, LinkedIn’s version of Facebook’s friends and Twitters followers, is what happens when two people on LinkedIn acknowledge they know each other in some capacity. And this makes an important difference between LinkedIn and those other sites — you don’t have to agree with or like your LinkedIn connections, since they aren’t your friends or followers. You merely need to know them. (And really, that’s not even an official requirement.) Connections are important to LinkedIn for the reasons they are important in the physical world: The more you have, the more opportunities become available to you. For example, say you work in sales and want to sell your wares to someone at Acme Corp. Searching for Acme Corp. on LinkedIn, you discover that you don’t know anyone who works there. But you do know someone who knows someone who works there (what LinkedIn calls a “second degree” connection). And now you can ask your connection for an introduction to that person. So, it pays to know people. As involved as the profile-making process on LinkedIn can be, all that effort pays off when you start making connections. For instance, if you told LinkedIn you went to a particular school, it will use that information to help you find fellow classmates. Likewise, if you worked at a certain company for a period of time, LinkedIn will cross-reference its database to help you connect with co-workers from your tenure there. So, the more information you give LinkedIn, the more connections it can help you make. Another way to bulk up on your connections is to simply click the “grow your network” link on the LinkedIn homepage. LinkedIn has an impressive suggestion engine that mines lots of online data to figure out the people you are interacting with. To do this, LinkedIn documents who you search for online and even in your email. Is it creepy? It sure can be. But the service is also free — and of course you know that nothing is truly free. (Note: There are ways to minimize the data you share with LinkedIn, but they also reduce the service’s effectiveness. To access these, select the “privacy” link on the account and settings icon on the righthand side of the navigation bar.) Other ways to make more connections on LinkedIn is to be active on the site. Posting frequent status updates and commenting or liking others will circulate your name on other peoples’ LinkedIn feeds, potentially helping your profile to catch their eye. Likewise, publishing posts on LinkedIn will circulate content with your name attached to it, helping to promote you as a thought leader in your line of work. You can also bolster your LinkedIn network by joining groups there. A way for users to share news and have discussion with other users who aren’t necessarily connections, LinkedIn’s groups feature is an excellent way to do some old fashioned networking on a newfangled social network. However, there is a minor challenge in using this feature: You have to find quality groups. As with many new social media features, people rushed to make groups, and then, in many cases, users didn’t follow. But active groups can be a great way to make connections that you might otherwise miss. The Future of Work When Microsoft announced its plans to acquire LinkedIn, it said its goals were to “accelerate the growth of LinkedIn as well as Microsoft 365.” That means that the LinkedIn we see today most likely will not be the same as the LinkedIn of tomorrow. But then again, nothing successful ever stands pat in the business world. And neither do ambitious LinkedIn users. There are many more features to LinkedIn than were mentioned in this guide. But the ones mentioned here serve as a solid foundation for getting the most out of your experience on the professional social network. But to use it right, you need to use it frequently, and in that, LinkedIn can be a bit of a rat race. If it sounds like a lot of work, it is. But if you can’t work hard at improving yourself professionally, what does that say about the effort you put in on the job?

6 Things Recruiters Look For in Your LinkedIn Profile - TIME Business

6 Things Recruiters Look For in Your LinkedIn Profile

Posted: 13 Jul 2016 03:00 AM PDT

The saying, as it goes, is that you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression. Most people in the job market barely even get a first chance. 

According to an eye-tracking study by The Ladders, recruiters spend six seconds on average looking at a resume. LinkedIn profiles get even less time. According to Heather Whaley, a principal with Hunt Executive Search, these six things stand out when scanning through profiles to fill positions:

1. Are You Smiling In Your Photo? 

Though it’s not mandatory for your profile photo, a smile will help more than it hurts. “I definitely recommend smiling in a photo,” says Whaley. Flashing some teeth can make you seem more approachable, and that, after all, is the name of the job hunting game. 

But don’t worry about getting professional headshots done, she says. Whaley’s own profile photo was taken using an iPhone while on a date a couple years ago. But it’s key that you still look like your image. “Don’t use a military photo from 15 years ago,” she says.

2. Write a Meaningful Headline

In many ways, the profile’s headline is its most important element, because it’s the one piece of information, other than your photo and current position, that shows up on LinkedIn searches. 

“It should say something about who you are professionally,” says Whaley. That means it shouldn’t say “actively seeking opportunities,” even if you are. Instead, it should say something like “an experienced warehouse manager in the beverage industry.”

3. Treat Your Career History Like a Resume, Sort Of

Whaley points out that LinkedIn is actually not a job hunting or recruiting site — it’s a professional networking site. So, not only should you not worry about being there, you should also populate it with your most current job history. That said, keep in mind that it’s a public forum, so if there’s information in your CV that should remain private (like how much revenue a department you managed brought in), simply leave it out. 

Also unlike your resume, you don’t have to sweat over formatting very much. And if you’re unsure of how to word your profile or if you should even be on the site, just look up your boss. Whaley almost guarantees he or she is on there.

4. Who Are Your Connections?

Who you connect with on LinkedIn can be a challenging thing to wrap your head around. On the one hand, users may be reluctant to connect with people that they hardly know (or don’t regard well) because they feel that their professional reputation is tied to it. On the other hand, the more connections you make on LinkedIn, the more opportunities may flow your way. 

Whaley looks at people’s connections on the site for a couple of reasons. “I would never discredit somebody because they don’t have any shared connections of mine, but there is an instant level of confirmation or comfort when I see that we share a first- second- or third-degree connection,” she says. “If I know that they are in my circle of connections . . . that tells me that if I really cared to, I could check them out.” Also though, if she does share connections with a person, it’s a great icebreaker when striking up a conversation, either online or in person.

5. Keep Your Education Up to Date

Here’s a behind-the-scenes LinkedIn hack that worth taking note of. When searching for perspective job candidates on LinkedIn, recruiters can ask the site’s search engine to only return results of people with certain educational degrees. So if you typically lop off that M.A. in Art History, you might want to put it (or any other educational information) back in. Otherwise you risk losing out.

6. Endorsements Versus Recommendations

There are two ways that people can praise your work on LinkedIn. Endorsements are quick hits, something that LinkedIn prompts users to do on the site. Whaley says endorsements tend to have more weight in filling the lower- and mid-level jobs, because HR generalists are using LinkedIn exclusively to fill open positions. It’s easier to find people with the necessary skills when they’ve been endorsed for them.

Recommendations, meanwhile, take a little more initiative to attain — either someone will write one for you because they are so impressed with your work, or they’ll write one for you because you asked them to (and hopefully they were also still impressed with your work). Because recommendations take more effort, they carry more weight with recruiters, says Whaley. “A recommendation is synonymous with a reference,” she says.

This Company Just Became the Biggest IPO of 2016 - Fortune

This Company Just Became the Biggest IPO of 2016

Posted: 14 Jul 2016 01:52 PM PDT

Call it a big fish in a small pond: With 2016 on track to record the fewest U.S. IPOs since the Great Recession, Line Corp. is officially the biggest of the bunch. The Japanese messaging app maker began trading Thursday after raising $1.14 billion in its highly anticipated IPO earlier this week, making Line the biggest company to go public on a U.S. stock exchange so far this year.
Line stock, which is listed under the ticker symbol “LN,” surged as much as 36% in its debut—one of the best first-day performances of this year’s IPOs. The stock was up nearly 26% near market close.

There have only been 43 U.S. IPOs, including Line, so far in 2016, 59% fewer than there were at this time last year, according to Renaissance Capital. In total, the 2016 deals have raised only $7.4 billion, down 60% from the same period in 2015. Jitters about the economy and a rocky stock market scared off many companies from going public earlier this year. For the first time in years, not a single tech company held a U.S. IPO in the first quarter of this year. There were no tech IPOs in the first quarter of this year, with many potential candidates waiting to see the outcome of the U.K.’s Brexit vote in June. Now, as U.S. stocks are hitting new record highs, more private companies may decide to brave the public markets.
Line is the third billion-dollar IPO in the U.S. in 2016, according to Dealogic. The others include MGM Growth Properties, a casino real estate company that went public in April, and US Foods Holding, a food service distributor that raised more than $1 billion in May.
Worldwide, Line is the largest IPO of a technology company since First Data FDC 2.30% went public in October in a $2.8 billion deal. But among all industries, there were three IPOs larger than Line’s on foreign stock exchanges to date in 2016, including Dong Energy, a Danish utility that last month raised the equivalent of $2.6 billion in Copenhagen; China Zheshang Bank, which raised $1.7 billion in Hong Kong in March; and Dutch insurer ASR Nederland, which raised $1.2 billion in June.
There are several other major upcoming IPOs in the U.S., but none as big as Line. Tomorrow, AdvancePierre Foods Holding, a ready-made sandwich producer, is expected to begin trading after an IPO that seeks to raise nearly $460 million, potentially cracking the top 10 offerings this year. And next week Patheon, a drug development services company, aims to go public in an IPO that could raise almost $719 million, which would put it among the top five deals.
Shares of Line will also trade on the Tokyo stock exchange starting Friday.
This article originally appeared on Fortune.com

Turkish president to crush opponents & purge military after failed coup - Independent

A striking feature of the failed military coup in Turkey is that President Erdogan and his government did not know that there was an extensive conspiracy within the armed forces aiming to seize power.
It was widely assumed that the era of military coups in Turkey was over and the army has recently had good relations with Mr Erdogan.
It may only have been a faction within the military, but it was able to strike in multiple places in Istanbul, Ankara and elsewhere, even detaining the Turkish chief-of-staff Gen Hulusi Akar for several hours until he was freed by anti-coup troops.

    His headquarters in Ankara were still being reportedly held by pro-coup forces on Saturday morning.
At the height of the coup, tanks closed the bridges over the Bosphorus and members of parliament in Ankara were hiding in the cellars of their assembly building in Ankara as it came under fire.
Pro-coup helicopters were strafing the intelligence headquarters and one was shot down by an F-16. The government was eager to declare that the coup had been smashed, but there are still signs of official nervousness with Turkish airspace around Istanbul being closed, opened and then closed again.
The coup was never likely to succeed once it had lost the advantage of surprise, which it did fairly rapidly as news spread of what had happened.
The plotters failed to eliminate, detain or isolate President Erdogan who was on holiday in Marmaris from which he was able to use a reporter’s phone to communicate with a television studio and call for people to take to the streets in opposition to the coup.
He followed this up by flying to Ataturk Istanbul airport, where he was well placed to show that he was still in command.

What to Know About This Year’s Biggest-Yet Tech IPO - TIME

What to Know About This Year’s Biggest-Yet Tech IPO

Posted: 14 Jul 2016 01:06 PM PDT

Line, the company behind one of Asia’s most popular messaging apps, completed its initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange Thursday. Trading opened at $42 per share under the ticker LN, making it the largest tech IPO Wall Street has seen so far this year.
While Line has become a major force in the messaging space since its debut in 2011, the name is likely unfamiliar to many outside of Asia. Here’s an overview of Line and some key facts about the company.
Who’s Using It
Line has 218.4 million monthly active users, the company said in its most recent earnings report. Most of those users are based in Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, and Indonesia, although the company says it’s also seeing growth in the Middle East. By comparison, Facebook Messenger has more than 900 million monthly active users, while popular Chinese messenger WeChat has more than 700 million and WhatsApp boasts 1 billion.

Stickers 
Stickers and games are an important part of the Line experience and the company’s business model. The Tokyo-based corporation earns more than $270 million from selling packs of stickers, according to CNBC. Line has called stickers — which come in themed packs featuring characters — the “main pillar” of its communications business. More recently, apps like Facebook Messenger and Apple’s iMessage have followed suit by incorporating stickers into their services.
Apps and Services
Line’s platform reaches far beyond basic messaging and calling. The company operates its own mobile wallet service called Line Pay, as well as a news service called Line News, which allows media outlets to create accounts to distribute content. It has also experimented with grocery delivery in Thailand and launched an Uber-like ride hailing service in Tokyo. Content also accounts for a chunk of Line’s popularity, with the company’s mobile games racking up a cumulative 628 million downloads, according to CNBC. Line also operates its own music and video streaming services.
How it Started
Line was created to provide communication during the aftermath of the natural disasters that struck Japan in 2011. Employees of NHN Japan, which runs the country’s Naver search engine, created Line after a tsunami and earthquake disrupted phone service. Line eventually became a unit of the company and reached 50 million users in just over one year, according to Reuters. By comparison, it took Facebook more than three years to hit 58 million users.

Terrorist truck attack killed 84 so far in Nice, France - Financial Times

At least 84 people have died after a truck driver ploughed into a crowd celebrating France’s national holiday in the French Riviera city of Nice late on Thursday.
“France has been struck on the day of her national holiday — July 14, Bastille day — the symbol of liberty, because human rights are denied by fanatics and France is clearly their target,” François Hollande, the French president, said in an address to the nation.
“The terrorist nature of this attack cannot be denied,” he added, saying that all of France was “under the threat of Islamist terrorism”.
Dead and injured victims were scattered along 2km of the Promenade des Anglais seafront, local officials said, estimating that another 100 were injured at the Bastille day celebrations. Mr Hollande said the dead included several children and as many as 20 of the injured were in critical condition.
Mr Hollande extended for three months the state of emergency that was imposed after November’s Isis-inspired attacks on Paris and had been due to end on July 26. France would step up its strikes in Syria and Iraq, he said. “We will continue to hit those who threaten us.”

The truck was loaded with grenades and guns, according to Christian Estrosi, president of the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region and mayor of Nice until last month.

“The driver was behaving in a manner that by all evidence was structured and premeditated,” he told a press conference. He said the attack happened at 10.30pm local time.
“This is the worst tragedy in the history of Nice,” Mr Estrosi wrote on Twitter.
The French interior ministry confirmed that the driver had been shot and killed but denied early reports of a hostage crisis.
The driver had driven at high speed into the mass of spectators on the Mediterranean city’s seaside walkway, Sebastien Humbert, a regional sub-prefect, told France Info radio.
Mr Hollande did not reveal the identity of the driver, saying investigators needed to establish whether he had any accomplices. The president, who had been in Avignon in the south of France at the time of the attack, was flown to Paris.
Mr Hollande said he would fly to Nice after a meeting with his defence council on Friday. Bernard Cazeneuve, interior minister, arrived in Nice on Thursday night to help co-ordinate the response.
In a statement, US President Barack Obama condemned “what appears to be a horrific terrorist attack” and said he had directed his team to offer French officials “any assistance that they may need to investigate this attack and bring those responsible to justice”.
Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential candidate, said: “We will never allow terrorists to undermine the egalitarian and democratic values that underpin our very way of life. This cowardly attack only strengthens our commitment to our alliance and to defeating terrorism around the world.”

Donald Trump, the Republican presidential candidate, postponed the planned announcement of his vice-presidential running mate at an event on Friday in Manhattan “in light of the horrible attack in Nice, France”.
In response to the news from Nice, he expressed his prayers and condolences and tweeted: “Another horrific attack, this time in Nice, France. Many dead and injured. When will we learn? It is only getting worse.”
In depth

The attack came eight months after Isis militants killed 130 people in Paris, the bloodiest in a number of attacks in France and Belgium in the past two years. On Sunday, France had breathed a sigh of relief as the month-long Euro 2016 football tournament it hosted ended without an attack.
Hours before the attack Mr Hollande had said the state of emergency imposed in November would not be extended beyond July 26.
“We can’t extend the state of emergency indefinitely, it would make no sense. That would mean we’re no longer a republic with the rule of law applied in all circumstances,” he had told journalists in a traditional Bastille day interview.
Mr Estrosi had warned in the past of the risk of Islamist attacks in the region, following the Isis bloodshed in Paris and Brussels.
Officials were cautious about accounts from bystanders that the lone man driving the truck had also opened fire. Police called on people not to propagate rumours that were hampering their work.
One woman told France Info that she and others had fled in terror: “The lorry came zigzagging along the street. We ran into a hotel and hid in the toilets with lots of people.”
The Negresco hotel on the Promenade was turned into a makeshift hospital for the wounded.
Another woman told the station she was sheltering in a restaurant on the promenade with about 200 people, where things had calmed down about two hours after the incident.
Nice Matin, a regional newspaper, published a photograph of a damaged, long-distance delivery truck, which it said was riddled with bullets, and images of emergency services treating the many injured.
Damien Allemand, the paper’s correspondent, was quoted as saying: “People are running. It’s panic. He rode up on to the Prom and piled into the crowd . . . There are people covered in blood. There must be many injured.”
Social media carried images of people lying apparently lifeless in pools of blood and video of panicked people running through the streets to the sound of gunfire.
US government agencies have received regular reports of Isis threats to attack France and those threats are regarded as current, a US security official said. However, two US officials said they had no information at this point about whether militants were involved in the Nice incident.

Philip Hammond appointed as UK Chancellor of the Exchequer - Independent

Philip Hammond has been appointed as the new Chancellor of the Exchequer.
Mr Hammond previously served as Foreign Secretary and is Theresa May’s first Cabinet appointment as Prime Minister.
He replaces George Osborne, who resigned from the Government, a Downing Street spokesperson said.

Mr Hammond served in the Conservatives’ Treasury team while in opposition, where he gained a reputation as the party's "axeman" with a perchant for making public spending cuts.
In government he swung his axe at the Ministry of Defence, helping to bear down on the department's financial pressures.
He has since taken a number of other Cabinet level roles while the party has been in government.
The minister also served as Transport Secretary under David Cameron.
He is now Britain's chief finance minister, in charge of economic policy and spending.
Ms May has ruled out holding an emergency Budget in the wake of her appointment as PM.

Mr Hammond served in the Conservatives’ Treasury team while in opposition, where he gained a reputation as the party's "axeman" with a perchant for making public spending cuts.
In government he swung his axe at the Ministry of Defence, helping to bear down on the department's financial pressures.
He has since taken a number of other Cabinet level roles while the party has been in government.
The minister also served as Transport Secretary under David Cameron.
He is now Britain's chief finance minister, in charge of economic policy and spending.
Ms May has ruled out holding an emergency Budget in the wake of her appointment as PM.

She has said any changes in economic course will be made in the scheduled Autumn Statement later this year.
Ms May is unveiling her first Cabinet after being appointed Prime Minister by Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace earlier this evening.
The first four top jobs are expected to be unveiled this evening, with the rest of the front bench due to be announced over the next few days.
She has pledged to create a fairer economy and create a government that works in the interests of "ordinary people" rather than the "privileged few".

Boris Johnson appointed as UK foreign secretary - Independent

More than anything, as you might imagine, we're consumed by a sense of embarrassment.
We never really expected Johnson to bounce back from political ignominy eight years ago to become mayor of London, let alone lead us out of the European Union and now inexplicably be bought back in from the cold as foreign secretary.
He's a man John Oliver quipped has the "the look and the economic insight of Bam-Bam from The Flintstones", and he's not exactly renowned for his diplomatic candour, either.
Johnson has insulted almost as many of you over the years as Prince Philip.
As far as world leaders go, in the not-so-distant past he's accused Barack Obama of having an "ancestral dislike" of the UK because he's half-Kenyan, praised Bashir al-Assad, and written a poem in which he called Recep Tayyip Erdoğan a goat wankerer.
He almost prematurely announced a trade deal when visiting Iraqi Kurdistan, has said Africans have "watermelon smiles", rugby tackled a Japanese 10-year-old, and is fond of coming out with inglorious generalisations about women.
Theresa May herself said last week that she has every faith in Johnson as a foreign negotiator. After all, when he was mayor of London, he came back with three almost new water cannons from Germany, she joked.

We can only assume that our new PM must have her reasons. (The obvious one being that if he's off gallivanting abroad, at least we don't have to deal with him.)
The only solace to be taken from this appointment is the fact that Johnson might actually hate the job. Endless meetings and long haul flights - not to mention regular visits to Brussels - sounds a bit like punishment to us.
But: that doesn't change the fact that we are basically making him your problem as well as ours now. And for that we are truly, sincerely, sorry.
We don't really have anything else to say that will make this better. But hey, at least he's not prime minister.
Yet.

Donald Trump's birtherism attack on Obama - New York Times

Joseph Farah, a 61-year-old author, had long labored on the fringes of political life, publishing a six-part series claiming that soybeans caused homosexuality and fretting that “cultural Marxists” were plotting to destroy the country.
But in early 2011, he received the first of several calls from a Manhattan real estate developer who wanted to take one of his theories mainstream.
That developer, Donald J. Trump, told Mr. Farah that he shared his suspicion that President Obama might have been born outside the United States and that he was looking for a way to prove it.
“What can we do to get to the bottom of this?” Mr. Trump asked him. “What can we do to turn the tide?”
Mr. Farah recalled that Mr. Trump even proposed dispatching private investigators to Hawaii, Mr. Obama’s birthplace, to resolve the debate.
Mr. Trump’s eagerness to embrace the so-called birther idea — long debunked, and until then confined to right-wing conspiracy theorists — foreshadowed how, just five years later, Mr. Trump would bedevil his rivals in the Republican presidential primary race and upend the political system.
In the birther movement, Mr. Trump recognized an opportunity to connect with the electorate over an issue many considered taboo: the discomfort, in some quarters of American society, with the election of the nation’s first black president. He harnessed it for political gain, beginning his connection with the largely white Republican base that, in his 2016 campaign, helped clinch his party’s nomination.




Donald J. Trump in 2011 in Portsmouth, N.H., on the same day that President Obama released his long-form birth certificate after pressure from people like Mr. Trump.
Credit
Cheryl Senter for The New York Times
Joseph Farah, a 61-year-old author, had long labored on the fringes of political life, publishing a six-part series claiming that soybeans caused homosexuality and fretting that “cultural Marxists” were plotting to destroy the country.
But in early 2011, he received the first of several calls from a Manhattan real estate developer who wanted to take one of his theories mainstream.
That developer, Donald J. Trump, told Mr. Farah that he shared his suspicion that President Obama might have been born outside the United States and that he was looking for a way to prove it.
“What can we do to get to the bottom of this?” Mr. Trump asked him. “What can we do to turn the tide?”
Mr. Farah recalled that Mr. Trump even proposed dispatching private investigators to Hawaii, Mr. Obama’s birthplace, to resolve the debate.
Mr. Trump’s eagerness to embrace the so-called birther idea — long debunked, and until then confined to right-wing conspiracy theorists — foreshadowed how, just five years later, Mr. Trump would bedevil his rivals in the Republican presidential primary race and upend the political system.
In the birther movement, Mr. Trump recognized an opportunity to connect with the electorate over an issue many considered taboo: the discomfort, in some quarters of American society, with the election of the nation’s first black president. He harnessed it for political gain, beginning his connection with the largely white Republican base that, in his 2016 campaign, helped clinch his party’s nomination.


“The appeal of the birther issue was, ‘I’m going to take this guy on, and I’m going to beat him,’” said Sam Nunberg, who was one of Mr. Trump’s advisers during that period but was fired from his current campaign. “It was a great niche and wedge issue.”
And starting in March 2011, when he first began to test the idea that a reality television star with no political experience could mount a campaign for the presidency, Mr. Trump could not stop talking about it.
“Why doesn’t he show his birth certificate?” he asked on ABC’s “The View.” “I want to see his birth certificate,” he told Fox News’s “On the Record.” And on NBC’s “Today Show,” he declared, “I’m starting to think that he was not born here.”
The more Mr. Trump questioned the legitimacy of Mr. Obama’s presidency, the better he performed in the early polls of the 2012 Republican field, springing from fifth place to a virtual tie for first.
That frenzied period culminated six weeks after it began in a surreal televised split screen between Mr. Trump and the White House briefing room, where aides released an image of the president’s birth certificate proving he was born in Honolulu and Mr. Obama directly addressed the issue.
It was a remarkable moment that Mr. Trump celebrated as a political victory.
Then Mr. Trump did something decidedly un-Trump-like: He dropped the issue and rarely spoke of it publicly again.
According to people apprised of the conversations, people close to him had been worried about the negative attention. Officials at NBC had also been concerned that he was alienating the large black audience of his hit show, “The Apprentice.”



Indeed, damage had already been done. Some black leaders denounced him, with Jesse Jackson accusing Mr. Trump of appealing to the president’s detractors with “coded and covert rhetoric for stirring up racial fears.”
Several days later, Mr. Obama relished his own chance to belittle Mr. Trump with a string of taunts at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, as Mr. Trump, seated in the audience, grew increasingly stone-faced. “But no one is happier, no one is prouder, to put this birth certificate matter to rest than the Donald,” he said to laughter. “And that’s because he can finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter: Like, did we fake the moon landing?”
Mr. Trump, who declined to be interviewed about the subject, was not the first to question Mr. Obama’s birthplace. The narrative that Mr. Obama, whose father was Kenyan and mother American, might not meet the requirement that the president be a “natural-born citizen” first arose during his 2008 bid.
Mr. Obama’s aides initially decided it was better to ignore the questions; addressing them, they reasoned, would just given them credibility.
Continue reading the main story


And Mr. Trump, too, at first seemed uncertain about just how much skepticism to express over the president’s place of birth. “The reason I have a little doubt, just a little, is because he grew up and nobody knew him,” he said in a March 2011 interview. “The whole thing is very strange.”
Yet, quickly, the world took notice. One headline referred to Mr. Trump going “Birther Lite.” Another said he was a “Teeny Bit Birther.” And MSNBC’s “Hardball” replayed the comments, with the intro: “Let’s listen to how he joins the birthers.”
If Mr. Trump was offering a political trial balloon, he appeared to like the results. He started making the rounds, offering interviews on the topic and stoking public interest in the birther claims.

Mr. Trump was egged on by one key adviser — Roger J. Stone Jr., a dapper dresser and political operative known for mischief and mayhem. Mr. Stone said that he did not plant the idea with Mr. Trump, but that once Mr. Trump came to him with it, he extolled what he saw as the political upside.
“He was suspicious about it, or at least interested in it,” Mr. Stone said. Among Republican base voters, he added, “many of them believe the president is foreign-born, and Trump has an ability to interject any idea that is outside of the mainstream into the mainstream.”
A Gallup poll from that period showed that only 38 percent of Americans surveyed believed that Mr. Obama was “definitely” born in the United States. That number rose to 47 percent after Mr. Obama released his long-form birth certificate.
Mr. Trump also continued to reach out to Mr. Farah, founder of WorldNetDaily, a conservative website, as well as to Jerome Corsi, another conservative writer and author of “Where’s the Birth Certificate? The Case That Barack Obama is Not Eligible to Be President.” (The book came out shortly after Mr. Obama released his birth certificate, but shot to the top of Amazon.com’s best sellers before it was even officially published.)
“He was looking for affirmation that he was on the right track,” Mr. Farah said. “He was looking for a smoking gun kind of sound bite that would resonate with people.”
But what most impressed Mr. Farah was just how many hours Mr. Trump was willing to devote to the question. “This was a busy guy, this was a multibillionaire, and I was surprised that he was willing to spend that kind of time on it,” he said.
Mr. Farah also stressed to Mr. Trump that the issue was one of “transparency,” and Mr. Trump began using the phrase.


Document: Obama’s Long-Form Birth Certificate
“He started saying ‘transparency,’” said Mr. Nunberg, Mr. Trump’s former adviser. “It’s code for, ‘This guy is the Manchurian candidate.’”
Mr. Trump also said repeatedly that he had sent a team of investigators to Hawaii to unearth information about Mr. Obama’s birth records. “They cannot believe what they are finding,” Mr. Trump told ABC’s “The View.”
But as the issue exploded, people close to Mr. Trump were growing nervous.
Some people in Mr. Trump’s orbit were discomfited by the line of attack, which had already been examined and rejected by many conservative news outlets. Among them was an informal political adviser, Kellyanne Conway, a Republican pollster, who cautioned that if he did run, he would need to beat Mr. Obama “on the merits.”
Even executives at NBC, which aired “The Apprentice,” privately called on him to tone down his remarks, fearing he would hurt ratings at a time when more than a million African-Americans tuned in every Thursday night, according to a former executive with knowledge of the discussions, speaking anonymously to share candid conversations.
The White House, too, had growing concerns. Once reserved to the fringe, the issue had now begun popping up at town-hall-style events around the country.
The turning point came in mid-April 2011, when the president delivered a major speech on the budget, only to find his remarks obscured by questions about his birth certificate.
“It was basically a message blocker that was preventing us from talking about the issues we needed to talk about because the press was chasing Donald Trump around for the next crazy thing he was going to say,” said Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director then.

The White House counsel dispatched someone to Hawaii to find the president’s original long-form birth certificate from 1961. (Years before, the president had released the “short form,” an official computer-generated document that contains the information from the original.) With the document finally in hand, aides quickly scheduled a news conference.
They worried that having Mr. Obama himself release his birth certificate from the White House briefing room would undermine the dignity of the office. So they first passed out copies to reporters, and then had the president deliver remarks, in which he warned the nation about getting distracted by “sideshows and carnival barkers.”
Then, almost as quickly as it began, the controversy subsided. And several weeks later, Mr. Trump decided not to seek the Republican nomination. Though he continued to do well in polls, he seemed to be more focused on his reality television pursuits.
Now, Mr. Trump almost assiduously refuses to discuss the topic, which, according to several people close to him, was always more about political performance art than ideology.
“I don’t talk about that anymore,” Mr. Trump told the MSNBC host Chris Matthews after a Republican debate last year.
Raising questions about the president’s birth certificate — and even threatening to send a team of investigators to Hawaii — had served its purpose, raising Mr. Trump’s political profile and, whether he knew it or not at the time, providing him with the rudimentary foundation upon which he built his 2016 campaign.
He even skirted close to birther innuendo after the massacre in Orlando, Fla., last month, calling into “Fox & Friends” to insinuate that Mr. Obama might sympathize with Islamic extremists. “He doesn’t get it or he gets it better than anybody understands,” Mr. Trump said.
But for all of his fascination with the president’s birth certificate, Mr. Trump apparently never dispatched investigators or made much of an effort to find the documents.
Dr. Alvin Onaka, the Hawaii state registrar who handled queries about Mr. Obama, said recently through a spokeswoman that he had no evidence or recollection of Mr. Trump or any of his representatives ever requesting the records from the Hawaii State Department of Health.
Michael M. Grynbaum and Maggie Haberman contributed reporting. Kitty Bennett contributed research.
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A version of this article appears in print on July 3, 2016, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: How Trump’s ‘Birther’ Claims Helped to Stir Presidential Bid. Order Reprints|  Today's Paper|Subscribe

European Economist Warns U.K. Pound Could Fall to Parity With Dollar - Financial Times

European Economist Warns U.K. Pound Could Fall to Parity With Dollar

Posted: 07 Jul 2016 08:21 AM PDT

A leading economist warned that the pound sterling could slump to the same value as the dollar if lawmakers cannot quickly establish a post-Brexit financial arrangement that involves free trade with the European Union.
Mohamed El-Erian, the chief economic adviser to insurance company Allianz, told Reuters that lawmakers need to come up with a sound Plan B — and they need to do it fast. He made the comments as sterling fell to $1.28 on Wednesday, its lowest point in 30 years. It had been $1.50 on June 23, the day of the referendum.
“After the Brexit referendum, the U.K. has to urgently get its political act together,” El-Erian told Reuters, “‘Plan B’ depends on the politicians in London and across the Channel, but so far they have not stepped up to their economic governance responsibilities.”
International Monetary Fund head Christine Lagarde also discussed the dangers of not moving ahead swiftly in the talks with Brussels.
“Do we have a forecast and scenario with prolonged uncertainty, total lack of clarity, no triggering of Article 50, things staying in limbo for a long period of time?” Lagarde said to theFinancial Times. “No. We don’t have that. We doubt that it would be sustainable politically, geopolitically.”

Donald Trump-Style Protectionism Could Hurt World Economy, IMF Chief Says - TIME

Donald Trump-Style Protectionism Could Hurt World Economy, IMF Chief Says Posted: 07 Jul 2016 10:16 AM PDT Donald Trump’s anti-trade policies and isolationist attitude could have dangerous consequences for the global economy, IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde warned in an interview with the Financial Times on Thursday. The International Monetary Fund chief said that new trade barriers between countries could add to concerns in the wake of the United Kingdom’s vote to leave the European Union last month. Trump has said he wants to get rid of U.S. trade deals such as the North American Free Trade Agreement, and has suggested tariffs on goods from Mexico and China. “I think it would be quite disastrous, actually. Well I don’t think I should say disastrous because that is an excessive word and I should refrain from excessive words. But it would certainly have a negative impact on global growth,” Lagarde told the Financial Times. Other world leaders criticized Trump’s behavior and his policy suggestions throughout the Republican primary season, but since the New York businessman became his party’s presumptive nominee, many foreign politicians have become more cautious. Lagarde, who is just beginning her second five-year term as head of the IMF, was careful to avoid naming Trump or singling out any specific politician. She did say that policies that go against globalization could create economic problems like those caused by the start of World War I. “I hope it is not a 1914 moment and I hope that we can be informed by history to actually address the negative impact of globalization in order to leverage the benefits that it can deliver. Because it has historically delivered massive benefits and it can continue to do so,” Lagarde said. She did not want to comment on the specifics of the U.S. election but did add that “waves of protectionism” had preceded other wars and that protectionism “hurts growth, hurts inclusion and hurts people.” Trump has taken to using the phrase “America First” and gave his support for Britain’s decision to leave the EU, which many have seen as another sign that he would push forward with similarly isolationist policies.

UK property fund suspended - first victim of Brexit - Economist

Safe as office blocks
British property funds suspend redemptions
Jul 9th 2016




THE first concrete signs of post-Brexit financial stress in Britain emerged this week. The asset-management arm of Standard Life, an insurer, suspended redemptions from its £2.9 billion ($3.8 billion) British property fund. It was followed by a flurry of rivals: Aviva, Canada Life, Columbia Threadneedle, Henderson and M&G. Another fund, run by Aberdeen, said it would apply a 17% discount to redemptions.
The decisions highlighted the mismatch between the open-ended nature of such funds—allowing retail investors to buy and sell on a daily basis—and the illiquid assets they hold: office blocks and shopping centres. But the announcements also reflected the shock to the property market caused by the Brexit vote. London has attracted lots of businesses both because of its perceived openness and because it provides an English-speaking base for doing business in the EU; the vote has caused a reassessment of its attractiveness as a corporate home.

According to the Financial Times, German and Spanish buyers pulled out of £650m-worth of property deals in the week after the referendum. Russell Chaplin of Aberdeen says many deals had a “Brexit clause” allowing purchasers to walk away if Britain voted to leave. This has happened to Aberdeen’s property fund in two cases: one buyer abandoned a purchase altogether while another asked for a discount, which has not been accepted.
Mutual property funds tend to have monthly valuations (conducted by outsiders) to determine the “fair value” of their assets. Given the uncertainties after the referendum, valuers thought it prudent to apply a discount and fund-management groups took their advice. Henderson reduced its fair-value estimate by 4%, M&G by 4.5%, and Standard Life by 5%.
The funds keep some liquid assets on hand in order to meet the kind of redemptions they face in normal circumstances; as of May 31st, Standard Life had 13% of its assets in this form. Some of these liquid assets will be stakes in big property companies like British Land and Land Securities, so the big falls in their share prices (see chart) may in part be a contagion effect from funds meeting redemption requests.
There may be other knock-on effects. In a report on financial stability published on July 5th, the Bank of England worried that forced sales of assets by property funds may exacerbate the market’s weakness; it has eased capital requirements for banks to encourage lending.
Problems have been growing for a while. The central bank said that foreign capital inflows into British property fell by almost 50% in the first quarter, perhaps as investors waited for the Brexit vote to be resolved. The purchasing managers’ index for the construction industry fell in June to its lowest level since 2009.
Mike Prew of Jefferies, an investment bank, has been predicting a commercial-property downturn since last year. Two areas stand out. Central London has been on a building spree, with 26m square feet of offices currently being added (or refurbished) in a market with around 200m square feet of space. Mr Prew thinks 100,000 jobs in London are at risk of moving to the EU—enough to free up 10m square feet. Office rents could fall by as much as 18% in central London, he warns.
The second problem area is retail premises, to which the Standard Life fund was heavily exposed (its five biggest tenants were all retailers). High-street shops have been squeezed by the rise of the internet; BHS, a department-store chain, recently went under. If the economy does slow in the wake of the referendum, retailers’ troubles will intensify.
Comparisons with the financial crisis of 2007-08 are inevitable; that too saw property-fund suspensions in its early stages. But they should not be overdone. For a start, open-ended property funds do not borrow and own only around 5% of British commercial property. Few investors are likely to have devoted a large part of their savings to this asset; they will have known that they might lose money. The systemic risk is limited.
Furthermore, with interest rates near zero and ten-year bond yields below 1%, property funds still offer a decent income; even in London, prime rental yields are 4-4.5%. Vacancies are below the historical average, according to Jones Lang LaSalle, an estate agent. A big sell-off would surely attract some bargain-hunters.
Still, fund suspensions are not a good sign. At the very least, they should make regulators question whether open-ended funds are suitable for property investing. There is nothing liquid about bricks.
Economist.com/blogs/buttonwood

Airbus 380 is running out of buyers - Bloomberg

Since its commercial introduction in 2007, the Airbus A380 has brought a long-lost sense of glamour back to travel. Its first-class cabins feature private showers and buttery leather armchairs. It sports in-flight lounges where bartenders mix bespoke cocktails. A broad staircase reminiscent of a 1920s ocean liner links the two decks. Financially speaking, it’s a disaster of similarly grand proportions.
An initial flood of interest from airlines has turned into a slow drip, and Airbus is leaning heavily on one customer, Emirates, for sales. Not a single U.S. carrier has bought one, and Japanese airlines, among the biggest cheerleaders for huge planes, have taken just a handful. Airbus has delivered 193 A380s—early on it predicted airlines would buy 1,200 supersize planes over two decades—and has only 126 in its order book, to be built over the next five years or so. Worse, many orders appear squishy, because airlines are shifting away from superjumbos. As the aviation world starts gathering on July 11 for the Farnborough International Airshow in England, where carriers often announce big orders, there’s little indication any A380 contract will be unveiled.
Airbus concedes its timing was off with the A380, which lists for $433 million but almost always sells at a discount. The financial crisis hit just as production was picking up in 2008, and soaring oil prices made airlines reluctant to buy the four-engine behemoth. The company only last year managed to start breaking even on production, and it’s acknowledged it will never recoup the €25 billion ($32 billion) it spent on development. Zafar Khan, an analyst at Société Générale, says the concern is that if production slips far below 30 planes a year, the program could fall back into the red. “The crying happens when it’s losing money,” Khan says.

Axing the A380 outright is hard to do. Besides the embarrassment of admitting defeat on the program, Airbus would need to write off factories across Europe and redeploy thousands of workers. Airlines would see the resale value of their A380s plummet, and the plane’s demise would leave airports worldwide questioning the wisdom of facilities constructed to accommodate it; Dubai, for instance, built a dedicated terminal for the A380.

Airbus says 10 years is too short a time to determine its fate. While Chief Executive Officer Thomas Enders said in December the company would assess the plane’s future “in cold blood,” sales chief John Leahy has pledged to continue the program. “The A380 is here to stay,” he says. “We are maintaining, innovating, and investing in it.”
With its short snout and upper deck crouching above the cockpit, the A380 can’t match the distinctive profile of Boeing’s humpbacked 747. Nonetheless, the A380 has largely sucked the life out of Boeing’s jumbo—perhaps the biggest Airbus success with its plane. Since 2012, when Boeing started deliveries of the latest passenger version, the 747-8, it has done far worse than the Airbus double-decker, with just 40 sold and 11 more on order.
Four-engine planes have become a tough sell because of their high fuel consumption. Airbus in 2011 scrapped the A340, its other four-engine model, as carriers gravitated to smaller, more economical widebodies such as the Airbus A330 or Boeing 777; and adding more fuel-efficient engines to the A380, an upgrade Airbus has pulled off for smaller planes, remains risky with so few orders coming in. Although the A380 is popular with passengers for its spacious interior and smooth flight, carriers find it tough to fill in turbulent economic times. Malaysia Airlines learned this the hard way when, in the wake of a pair of fatal crashes involving other aircraft, it couldn’t draw enough traffic to fill the half-dozen A380s it had bought. The airline is trying to offload two of them but can’t find buyers.

Lately, Airbus has seen a hemorrhaging of contracts that once seemed solid. In the past two years, three A380 customers have dropped their orders because of financial difficulties or shifts in strategy. Leasing company Amedeo three years ago announced plans to buy 20 A380s, but it’s failed to find a single airline willing to lease them and has delayed deliveries. The plane’s biggest fan by far is Emirates, with 81 flying and an additional 61 reserved, which adds up to 45 percent of the A380s Airbus has delivered or has on order. The carrier is fretting about the jumbo’s future. “I think the size of the plane scares most of the airline world,” says Emirates President Tim Clark.

The A380 was a prestige-fueled project for Airbus and the European governments that backed the program. The company had been successful with its A320 single-aisle jet introduced in the 1980s, but it wanted a bigger piece of the lucrative long-range market. With the managers who hatched the plan two decades ago long gone, the ardor has abated, says Richard Aboulafia, a longtime critic of the plane and vice president of aviation consultant Teal Group. “Nobody seems to want this plane other than Emirates,” he says. “The A380 might just make it until 2020, but even that’s almost optimistic at this point.”

The bottom line: A decade after the Airbus A380’s debut, its future is in doubt as airlines shift to more efficient planes.