Russian tycoon found dead: Boris Berezovsky was found in his Surrey, England, home, dead. Cause of death is not known yet. But there is speculation that the once-wealthy Russian tycoon committed suicide.
By David Clark Scott,?Staff writer / March 23, 2013
Boris Berezovsky in 2008 as he arrives at the Royal Courts of Justice in London for his hearing against Roman Abramovich. United Kingdom police have said that Berezovsky has been found dead Saturday March 23, 2013.
AP Photo/Sang Tan, File
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Boris Berezovsky, once a wealthy Russian oligarch, was found dead in his home in Surrey, England.
Skip to next paragraph David Clark Scott
Online Director
David Clark Scott leads a small team at CSMonitor.com that?s part Skunkworks, part tech-training, part journalism.
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The cause of death is unknown at this time. But speculation that Berezovsky committed suicide is rampant, especially in Russian media.
Two things are prompting the speculation. First, a Russian lawyer, Alexander Dobrovinsky, was among the first to announce his death and posted in social media the following, according to RT.com:
?Just got a call from London. Boris Berezovsky committed suicide. He was a difficult man. A move of disparity? Impossible to live poor? A strike of blows? I am afraid no one will get to know now,?
There's no indication of the quality of Dobrovinsky's source. Certainly, British police have not yet made public a cause of death.
The second factor fueling the suicide talk is the very public decline in Berezovsky's wealth. He had lost several court cases and was known to be selling off real estate, a yacht, and art to raise funds. As The Guardian of London reports:
"Berezovsky's death comes only months after he lost a high-profile and personally disastrous court case against fellow Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich. He had accused the Chelsea football club owner of blackmail, breach of trust and breach of contract in relation to a Russian oil company. After the claims were dismissed, he was ordered by the high court to pay ?35m of Abramovich's legal costs.
His financial difficulties were recently further exacerbated after his former mistress Elena Gorbunova, 43, claimed that Berezovsky owed her $8m (?5m) in compensation over the sale of their $40m residence in Surrey."
Just days ago, Berezovsky sold his Andy Warhol limited edition print of Vladimir Lenin, known as "Red Lenin," for just over $200,000, according to the Russian media outlet RIA Novosti.
Berezovsky's political and financial success follows the arc of recent Russian history. In the 1980s, with the political opening and rise of free enterprise, he went from a quiet mathematician to powerful oligarch. His first business foray? - which Russian prosecutors later said was? illegal profit skimming - involved car sales for the state auto giant AvtoVAZ. Berezovsky used his initial wealth to build a media empire that included partial ownership of two national television networks and several respected newspapers.
As his wealth grew, so did his political clout.
In 1996, Berezovsky was among a group of businessmen who helped Boris Yeltsin's career. "It is no secret that Russian businessmen played the decisive role in President Yeltsin's victory," Berezovsky later told Forbes magazine. "It was a battle for our blood interests."
In return, Yeltsin sold to his backers Russian national industries at a fraction of their actual value. By the late 1990s, Berezovsky had an 80 percent ownership share in Sibneft, an oil company.
But as Agence France Presse reports "his most significant political move was the one that inadvertently sealed his fate: helping Yeltsin choose then-secret services chief Vladimir Putin as Russia's second president.
Berezovsky quickly became a key target of Putin's crackdown on the oligarchs' political independence. He fled the country and fired back with his entire media arsenal, painting the new president as a budding dictator."
The Guardian notes that "Berezovsky is been on Moscow's most wanted list since 2001 on charges of fraud, money-laundering and attempted interference in the Russian political process. A Russian court sentenced Berezovsky in absentia for embezzling $2bn from two major state companies."
But in the past year, there are reports that Berezovsky was seeking to return to Russia. The Irish Times reports that he had recently written to Mr. Putin seeking a pardon, according to Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov.
Mar. 25, 2013 ? Scientists have confirmed the discovery of the first-ever, two-headed bull shark.The study, led by Michigan State University and appearing in the Journal of Fish Biology, confirmed the specimen, found in the Gulf of Mexico April 7, 2011, was a single shark with two heads, rather than conjoined twins.
?There have been other species of sharks, such as blue sharks and tope sharks, born with two heads. This is the first record of dicephalia in a bull shark, said Michael Wagner, MSU assistant professor of fisheries and wildlife, who confirmed the discovery with colleagues at the Florida Keys Community College.
"This is certainly one of those interesting and rarely detected phenomena," Wagner said. "It's good that we have this documented as part of the world's natural history, but we'd certainly have to find many more before we could draw any conclusions about what caused this."
The difficulty of finding such oddities is due, in part, to creatures with abnormalities dying shortly after birth. In this instance, a fisherman found the two-headed shark when he opened the uterus of an adult shark. The two-headed shark died shortly thereafter and had little, if any, chance to survive in the wild, Wagner added.
"You'll see many more cases of two-headed lizards and snakes," he said. "That's because those organisms are often bred in captivity, and the breeders are more likely to observe the anomalies."
The shark was brought to the marine science department at Florida Keys Community College. From there, it was transported to Michigan State's campus for further examination.
Wagner and his team were able to detail the discovery with magnetic resonance imaging. Without damaging the unique specimen, the MRIs revealed two distinct heads, hearts and stomachs with the remainder of the body joining together in back half of the animal to form a single tail.
As part of the published brief, Wagner noted that some may want to attribute the deformed shark to exposure to pollutants.
"Given the timing of the shark's discovery with the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, I could see how some people may want to jump to conclusions," Wagner said. "Making that leap is unwarranted. We simply have no evidence to support that cause or any other."
Wagner's research is supported in part by MSU AgBioResearch.
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Michigan State University.
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Journal Reference:
C. M. Wagner, P. H. Rice, A. P. Pease. First record of dicephalia in a bull sharkCarcharhinus leucas(Chondrichthyes: Carcharhinidae) foetus from the Gulf of Mexico, U.S.A.. Journal of Fish Biology, 2013; DOI: 10.1111/jfb.12064
Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.
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If you?re eyeing your retirement savings in order to keep your head above water, turn your eyes instead to the multitude of tools you already have in your life for coming up with some quick cash or trimming back your spending for a while, Hamm writes.
By Trent Hamm,?Guest blogger / March 26, 2013
A money changer displays one-hundred US dollar bills at an exchange booth in Tokyo. Fixing a short term problem by pillaging your long term savings is never a good idea, Hamm writes.
Issei Kato/Reuters/File
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What mistake? According to the Arizona Star,?more than 25% of Americans are raiding their 401(k)s to stay afloat.
Skip to next paragraph Trent Hamm
The Simple Dollar is a blog for those of us who need both cents and sense: people fighting debt and bad spending habits while building a financially secure future and still affording a latte or two. Our busy lives are crazy enough without having to compare five hundred mutual funds ? we just want simple ways to manage our finances and save a little money.
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The only way this even looks like a good idea at all is if?you?re looking?only?at the very,?very?short term.?If you look beyond that, making this move is pretty clearly worse than using a high-interest credit card to pay your bills. In fact, if we?re comparing disastrously bad financial moves, I?d actually prefer to use a credit card cash advance to pay a bill than pull money out of my 401(k) early.
Why is it so bad to tap into your 401(k) early? Let?s use this?401(k) early withdrawal calculator?to see how big the disaster is.
Hello, I am trying something new. I have such a hard time picking a few favorites from my Wow Us Wednesday link up that I decided to devote a whole post to my favs. There are so many really wonderful post that they all deserve some attention!
4 recipes, DIY for your home, and 3 something new from something old projects! Keep reading for more!
I will start with the food. Looks so good!
Grits get a bad rap, but you know, they are really good! They just don't have a very?appealing?name. Yesterfood has a wonderful recipe, Down Home Grits Muffins that I think you should try. The recipe kinda reminds me of an old Malt O Meal muffin recipe I use to have. Remember Malt 'O Meal? My kids loved it. Give these Grits Muffins a try, I think you will love them!
Chocolate Chip Cookie Pie......I don't need to say anything else?because?that says it all! Be still my heart! Stop over at Your Home Based Mom for her recipe.
Don't you just love Marinated Artichoke Hearts? Let??Housewife How To's show you how easy it is to make your own. This would be a great hostess gift; and won't you look smart giving them! Check it out :)
Here's another great home made yummy food; Jam Butter from Caramel Potatoes. It would be a wonderful gift also. It doesn't get any easier than this to make; come on you know you want to taste it! It looks so great!
Look at this beautiful entry way from Carissa Miss. She created a beautiful and functional space and you need to click over there and see how she?accomplished?it all. ?A great DIY project. Callie's Crafts had me laughing while I read her post about painting this headboard! She did something I have been known to do to cleaning it up! I love that! Great job on refinishing it too :)
Denise on a Whim?is a creative gal! Look what she made out of a piece of wood most of us would throw out! Head over there to see how she did it. Ellen at?Creative Passage?took at thrift store find and made something beautiful to decorate her home with. Look what you can do with paint, it didn't look like that before! So great! Thanks everyone who linked up! Here's a button if you want one. See you on Wednesday!
If you have been featured, please choose the button you like best. If you are reading this post anywhere else but at www.FamilyHomeandLife.com then it was used without permission! Please report it! Copyright ? Family Home and Life 2010-2013 All Rights Reserved
The Academy Award-winning actress and recent Davide Bowie music video star is performing art on an unexpected display at New York?s Museum of Modern Art. The display is called ?The Maybe? and involves Swinton sleeping in a glass box in front of museum attendees.
RELATED: David Bowie: New Music a Decade Later
MoMA said in a statement, ?An integral part of The Maybe?s incarnation at MoMA in 2013 is that there is no published schedule for its appearance, no artist?s statement released, no museum statement beyond this brief context, no public profile or image issued. Those who find it chance upon it for themselves, live and in real-shared-time: now we see it, now we don?t.?
The display includes cushions and a water jug for Swinton and if you don?t happen to catch her asleep, you can see the live art here.
Rumors about Windows Blue, the next iteration of Microsoft's flagship operating system, have been juiced up with the release of leaked screen shots and videos over the weekend. The new system lets users personalize the screen from the side and swipe in from any edge. Windows Blue offers a variety of color choices for the screen background and includes several new apps.
Predictions of climate impacts on fisheries can be a miragePublic release date: 25-Mar-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Mario Aguilera or Robert Monroe scrippsnews@ucsd.edu 858-534-3624 University of California - San Diego
New mathematical tool developed by a Scripps scientist can help avoid misleading conclusions for species management
In the early 1940s, California fishermen hauled in a historic bounty of sardine at a time that set the backdrop for John Steinbeck's "Cannery Row" novel. But by the end of the decade the nets came up empty and the fishery collapsed. Where did they all go? According to a new study led by scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, the forces behind the sardine mystery are a dynamic and interconnected moving target.
Publishing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Scripps graduate student Ethan Deyle, professor George Sugihara, and their colleagues argue that problems lie in seeking answers one factor at a time, as scientists have done for decades. What is the impact of climate on sardines? What is the effect of overfishing on sardines? Focusing on single variables in isolation can lead to misguided conclusions, the researchers say.
"Studying ecosystems in this piecemeal way makes it hard to find quantitative relationships, the kind that are useful for management and stand the test of time," said Deyle.
Instead, using novel mathematical methods developed last year at Scripps, the researchers argue that climate, human actions, and ecosystem fluctuations combine to influence sardine and other species populations, and therefore such factors should not be evaluated independently.
The technique developed by Sugihara and his colleagues, called "convergent cross mapping," takes multiple variables into account and avoids the centuries-old "correlation does not imply causation" issue that has plagued single-factor studies (see: http://scrippsnews.ucsd.edu/Releases/?releaseID=1292). For example, based on data from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography Pier, studies in the 1990s showed that higher temperatures are beneficial for sardine production. By 2010 new studies proved that the temperature correlation was instead a misleading, or "mirage," determination.
"Mirages are associations among variables that spontaneously come and go or even switch sign, positive or negative," said Sugihara. "Ecosystems are particularly perverse on this issue. The problem is that this kind of system is prone to producing mirages and conceptual sand traps, continually causing us to rethink relationships we thought we understood."
By contrast, convergent cross mapping avoids the mirage issue by seeking evidence from dynamic linkages between factors, rather than one-to-one statistical correlations.
"Sustainable sardine fishing based on ecosystem-based management should adapt to dynamic changes in the ocean environment, and future policies should incorporate these effects to avoid another 'cannery row,'" said Deyle.
###
The investigation into the cause of the 1940s sardine collapse spawned the launch of the California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations (CalCOFI), one of the world's longest and most valuable marine research programs that continues today with support from Scripps, NOAA's National Marine Fisheries Service (Southwest Fisheries Science Center), and the California Department of Fish and Game.
In addition to Deyle and Sugihara, coauthors of the paper include Michael Fogarty of the National Marine Fisheries Service, Northeast Fisheries Science Center; Chih-hao Hsieh of National Taiwan University; Les Kaufman of Boston University; Alec MacCall and Stephan Munch of the National Marine Fisheries Service, Southwest Fisheries Science Center; and Charles Perretti and Hao Ye of Scripps.
The research was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), NSF-National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Comparative Analysis of Marine Ecosystem Organization (CAMEO) program, Environmental Protection Agency Science to Achieve Results, NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program, National Marine Fisheries Service/Sea Grant Population Dynamics, the Sugihara Family Trust, the Deutsche Bank-Jameson Complexity Studies Fund, the McQuown Chair in Natural Sciences, UC San Diego, National Taiwan University, and National Science Council of Taiwan.
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Predictions of climate impacts on fisheries can be a miragePublic release date: 25-Mar-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Mario Aguilera or Robert Monroe scrippsnews@ucsd.edu 858-534-3624 University of California - San Diego
New mathematical tool developed by a Scripps scientist can help avoid misleading conclusions for species management
In the early 1940s, California fishermen hauled in a historic bounty of sardine at a time that set the backdrop for John Steinbeck's "Cannery Row" novel. But by the end of the decade the nets came up empty and the fishery collapsed. Where did they all go? According to a new study led by scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, the forces behind the sardine mystery are a dynamic and interconnected moving target.
Publishing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Scripps graduate student Ethan Deyle, professor George Sugihara, and their colleagues argue that problems lie in seeking answers one factor at a time, as scientists have done for decades. What is the impact of climate on sardines? What is the effect of overfishing on sardines? Focusing on single variables in isolation can lead to misguided conclusions, the researchers say.
"Studying ecosystems in this piecemeal way makes it hard to find quantitative relationships, the kind that are useful for management and stand the test of time," said Deyle.
Instead, using novel mathematical methods developed last year at Scripps, the researchers argue that climate, human actions, and ecosystem fluctuations combine to influence sardine and other species populations, and therefore such factors should not be evaluated independently.
The technique developed by Sugihara and his colleagues, called "convergent cross mapping," takes multiple variables into account and avoids the centuries-old "correlation does not imply causation" issue that has plagued single-factor studies (see: http://scrippsnews.ucsd.edu/Releases/?releaseID=1292). For example, based on data from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography Pier, studies in the 1990s showed that higher temperatures are beneficial for sardine production. By 2010 new studies proved that the temperature correlation was instead a misleading, or "mirage," determination.
"Mirages are associations among variables that spontaneously come and go or even switch sign, positive or negative," said Sugihara. "Ecosystems are particularly perverse on this issue. The problem is that this kind of system is prone to producing mirages and conceptual sand traps, continually causing us to rethink relationships we thought we understood."
By contrast, convergent cross mapping avoids the mirage issue by seeking evidence from dynamic linkages between factors, rather than one-to-one statistical correlations.
"Sustainable sardine fishing based on ecosystem-based management should adapt to dynamic changes in the ocean environment, and future policies should incorporate these effects to avoid another 'cannery row,'" said Deyle.
###
The investigation into the cause of the 1940s sardine collapse spawned the launch of the California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations (CalCOFI), one of the world's longest and most valuable marine research programs that continues today with support from Scripps, NOAA's National Marine Fisheries Service (Southwest Fisheries Science Center), and the California Department of Fish and Game.
In addition to Deyle and Sugihara, coauthors of the paper include Michael Fogarty of the National Marine Fisheries Service, Northeast Fisheries Science Center; Chih-hao Hsieh of National Taiwan University; Les Kaufman of Boston University; Alec MacCall and Stephan Munch of the National Marine Fisheries Service, Southwest Fisheries Science Center; and Charles Perretti and Hao Ye of Scripps.
The research was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), NSF-National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Comparative Analysis of Marine Ecosystem Organization (CAMEO) program, Environmental Protection Agency Science to Achieve Results, NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program, National Marine Fisheries Service/Sea Grant Population Dynamics, the Sugihara Family Trust, the Deutsche Bank-Jameson Complexity Studies Fund, the McQuown Chair in Natural Sciences, UC San Diego, National Taiwan University, and National Science Council of Taiwan.
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
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Public release date: 25-Mar-2013
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