Obama says CEOs should quit complaining: Economist - Yahoo Finance

Obama says CEOs should quit complaining: Economist - Yahoo Finance: "WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama said corporate America has done well under his economic policies, telling the Economist magazine that chief executive officers should stop complaining about regulations and show greater social responsibility.

"If you look at what's happened over the last four or five years, the folks who don't have a right to complain are the folks at the top," Obama said in an interview conducted last week and posted on the magazine's website late on Saturday.

Republicans have sought to portray Obama as anti-business, and businesses have complained that Obama's signature healthcare law and the Dodd-Frank financial reforms have raised costs.

Business groups are lobbying against his new plan to curb climate-changing carbon emissions from power plants."



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If it ain’t broke, don’t prefix it

If it ain’t broke, don’t prefix it: "When that Paddy Power data-breach story broke this week, it was reassuring to hear how the bookmakers were “proactively contacting” the 650,000 customers affected. I don’t know what the alternative would have been - some kind of passive contact, presumably – but that sounds time-consuming, and probably a bit creepy for those on the receiving end. N o, all things considered, proactively contacting customers was the right approach.
Of course, some linguists might quibble with the unnecessary prefix, arguing that the old-fashioned word “active” does a more than adequate job on its own. And that if Paddy Power had confined itself to “actively contacting” people, they wouldn’t have noticed anything different.
In fact, I’m reminded of my own most recent involvement with the company – a €20 bet on Brazil’s Fred to win the World Cup Golden Boot – which only reinforced my respect for the un-prefixed term.Alas, even in a team of incompetents, Fred’s immobility and general uselessness at the tournament was of lighthouse-in-a-bog proportions. Far from expecting him to be proactive, I would have settled eventually for signs of a pulse."



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I was Victoria Beckham’s ghost | Hadley Freeman | Comment is free | The Guardian

I was Victoria Beckham’s ghost | Hadley Freeman | Comment is free | The Guardian: "I’ve since been asked to ghost a few other books but I lack the capacity for self-surrender, so I always say no. But not a week has gone by since without someone asking me about it. That ghostwriters exist proves we live in an era obsessed with fame; that people are interested in ghostwriters proves how ridiculous this obsession is."



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Indian parliament hires monkey impersonators to restore order | World news | The Guardian

Indian parliament hires monkey impersonators to restore order | World news | The Guardian: "India's new government won an overwhelming mandate in the recent elections, and now it has taken on another parliamentary foe: marauding monkeys.

India's housing and urban development minister, Venkaiah Naidu, told MPs that 40 professional monkey impersonators would be deployed around government buildings to police the cheeky rhesus macaque monkeys who regularly trespass in the corridors of power, terrorising senior bureaucrats, stealing files and snatching food.

The human monkey scarers will disguise themselves as the macaque's natural nemesis, the larger, black-faced langur, Naidu said.

Reports suggesting the scarers will dress up as langurs are not true, said PK Sharma, the chief health officer for the New Delhi Municipal Corporation (NDMC).

"These are men who are village performers and some of them have played monkeys on stage," Sharma said. "So they mimic the sound of the langur and it scares the smaller, red-faced macaques away."

If that doesn't work, authorities will use rubber bullets, Naidu said."



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