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(06/07/10 12:09am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>MIAMI — An apologetic advertising campaign by BP for causing the biggest oil spill in U.S. history has earned the company more criticism than sympathy as the pollution spreads across the Gulf Coast from Louisiana into Alabama and Florida.The new radio, TV, online and print ads feature BP CEO Tony Hayward pledging to fix the damage caused by a gusher of crude oil unleashed by an April 20 drilling rig explosion that killed 11 people. He says the company will honor claims and “do everything we can so this never happens again.”The ads, which began appearing last week, have been criticized by President Barack Obama, who said the money should be spent on cleanup efforts and on compensating fishermen and small business owners who have lost their jobs because of the spill, as well as to help residents and visitors of the Gulf Coast, where some beaches have been blackened by the oil and others remain threatened.“Their best advertising is if they get this cap (in place) and they get everything cleaned up. All you’ve got to do is do your job, and that’s going to be plenty of good advertising,” said Grover Robinson IV, chairman of the Escambia County Commission in the Florida Panhandle. He was referring to BP’s efforts to place a cap over the gushing pipe to capture some of the flow of oil.BP PLC spokesman Robert Wine said in an e-mail Saturday that “not a cent” has been diverted from the oil spill response to pay for the ad campaign. He said he didn’t know its cost.“All available resources are being deployed and efforts continue at full strength,” he wrote. BP estimates that it will spend about $84 million through June to compensate for lost wages and profits caused by the spill. The company has promised to pay all legitimate claims, and no claim has yet been rejected, Wine said.Shortly after the one-minute television and online version of the ad begins, Hayward speaks to the camera, saying “The Gulf spill is a tragedy that never should have happened.”Hayward then narrates over images of boom laid in clear water before uncontaminated marshes and healthy pelicans. Cleanup crews walk with trash bags on white sand beaches as he touts the oil giant’s response efforts: more than 2 million feet of boom, 30 planes and more than 1,300 boats deployed, along with thousands of workers at no cost to taxpayers.The ad’s imagery clashes with disturbing news photographs published recently of pelicans coated in oil, some immobilized by the gunk, others struggling with crude dripping from their beaks and wings.“To those affected and your families, I’m deeply sorry,” Hayward says in the ad.As the ad fades out to show BP’s website and volunteer hotline, he says, “We will get this done. We will make this right.”In the Florida Panhandle, the ads have been received about as well as the sticky tar balls and rust-colored froth that began washing ashore Friday.Picking up tar Saturday with her parents on Pensacola Beach, 13-year-old Annie Landrum of Birmingham, Ala., called Hayward’s apology a joke.“It’s a lame attempt a month and half after the disaster. It’s too late,” she said.On Sunday, Hayward told BBC television that he had the “absolute intention of seeing this through to the end.”He said he believed the cap is likely to capture “the majority, probably the vast majority” of the oil gushing from the well. Hayward also told the BBC his company had been left devastated by the disaster and conceded that safety standards must dramatically improve.Public-relations experts said BP’s ad blitz seems premature and a little shallow. BP missed an opportunity to shift focus away from criticism of the company and toward BP’s strategy for cleaning up the spill, said Gene Grabowski, a senior vice president with Levick Strategic Communications.“The one element they seem to be missing is laying out a plan for what they’re going to do. Usually in ads like these you apologize; he’s doing that in the ad. You talk about your resolve to fix the situation; that’s also included. But what’s missing is a concrete plan or vision for what they plan to do next,” he said.
(10/26/06 4:21am)
MIAMI -- Another former altar boy says he was sexually abused in the 1970s by the same retired Catholic priest who acknowledged fondling former Rep. Mark Foley when Foley was a teenager, the man's attorney said Wednesday.\nThe new allegations against the Rev. Anthony Mercieca were made by a man who lived in North Miami and was an altar boy at St. James Catholic Church, where Mercieca worked, attorney Jeffrey Herman said.\nHerman said he planned to file a lawsuit Wednesday against the Archdiocese of Miami. His client, now 40 and identified in the lawsuit only as John Doe No. 26, says Mercieca abused him when he was about 12 years old.\n"He had been thinking about it before Foley came forward, and then when Foley came out and the church encouraged other victims to come forward, he decided to come forward," Herman said.\nThe man said "all of my nightmares came back" when Mercieca's picture appeared on the news last week amid Foley's claims that the priest had molested him. Foley had resigned amid accusations that he sent sexually explicit messages to teenage boys who had worked on Capitol Hill.\nMercieca, 69, now lives on the Maltese island of Gozo in the Mediterranean. No one answered the phone at his home Wednesday. His lawyer, Alfred Grech, did not return calls placed to his cell phone.\nArchdiocese of Miami spokeswoman Mary Ross Agosta, asked about the latest allegations, said: "Any of this type of behavior by Father Mercieca was unknown to the archdiocese, and we had absolutely no information to indicate that the father did or would engage in any type of inappropriate or abusive behavior."\nThe Miami Archdiocese barred Mercieca from all church work as it investigates Foley's claim that the clergyman molested him when Foley was an altar boy at Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Lake Worth in 1967.\nMercieca is now retired and does not serve in any parish, but he regularly celebrates Mass and hears confession in the cathedral on Gozo, according to the Archdiocese of Malta.\nIn multiple interviews last week, Mercieca denied having sexual intercourse with Foley, but he did acknowledge being nude with him when Foley was a boy.\nMercieca also denied having sex with any underage children.\nHerman said his client and Mercieca took a bicycle ride together one day after altar boy practice and then returned to the church where the abuse occurred.\n"It was fondling, and he performed oral sex on the boy," Herman said. "He attempted on another occasion following altar boy practice, but the boy declined to go on this bike ride, and he never went back to the church after that."\nMercieca served as an assistant pastor at the church from 1975 to 1985, according to church records.\nFoley resigned from Congress last month after he was confronted with sexually explicit computer communications he had sent to male teenage pages who worked on Capitol Hill. He has since entered a 30-day rehabilitation program for alcoholism, according to his attorneys.
(10/26/06 1:20am)
Another former altar boy says he was sexually abused in the 1970s by the same retired Catholic priest who acknowledged fondling former Rep. Mark Foley when Foley was a teenager, the man's attorney said Wednesday.\nThe new allegations against the Rev. Anthony Mercieca were made by a man who lived in North Miami and was an altar boy at St. James Catholic Church, where Mercieca worked, attorney Jeffrey Herman said.\nHerman said he planned to file a lawsuit Wednesday against the Archdiocese of Miami. His client, now 40 and identified in the lawsuit only as John Doe No. 26, says Mercieca abused him when he was about 12 years old.\n"He had been thinking about it before Foley came forward, and then when Foley came out and the church encouraged other victims to come forward, he decided to come forward," Herman said.\nThe man said "all of my nightmares came back" when Mercieca's picture appeared on the news last week amid Foley's claims that the priest had molested him. Foley had resigned amid accusations that he sent sexually explicit messages to teenage boys who had worked on Capitol Hill.\nMercieca, 69, now lives on the Maltese island of Gozo in the Mediterranean. No one answered the phone at his home Wednesday. His lawyer, Alfred Grech, did not return calls placed to his cell phone.\nArchdiocese of Miami spokeswoman Mary Ross Agosta, asked about the latest allegations, said: "Any of this type of behavior by Father Mercieca was unknown to the archdiocese, and we had absolutely no information to indicate that the father did or would engage in any type of inappropriate or abusive behavior."\nThe Miami Archdiocese barred Mercieca from all church work as it investigates Foley's claim that the clergyman molested him when Foley was an altar boy at Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Lake Worth in 1967.\nMercieca is now retired and does not serve in any parish, but he regularly celebrates Mass and hears confession in the cathedral on Gozo, according to the Archdiocese of Malta.\nIn multiple interviews last week, Mercieca denied having sexual intercourse with Foley, but he did acknowledge being nude with him when Foley was a boy.\nMercieca also denied having sex with any underage children.\nHerman said his client and Mercieca took a bicycle ride together one day after altar boy practice and then returned to the church where the abuse occurred.\n"It was fondling, and he performed oral sex on the boy," Herman said. "He attempted on another occasion following altar boy practice, but the boy declined to go on this bike ride, and he never went back to the church after that."\nMercieca served as an assistant pastor at the church from 1975 to 1985, according to church records.\nFoley resigned from Congress last month after he was confronted with sexually explicit computer communications he had sent to male teenage pages who worked on Capitol Hill. He has since entered a 30-day rehabilitation program for alcoholism, according to his attorneys.
(10/08/03 4:59am)
ALLENTOWN, Pa. -- Smoking on a fire escape, a railroad brakeman's rule book stuck in his jacket pocket, Jack Kerouac looks as though he just stepped from the pages of "On the Road." The image is seen in a 1953 photograph taken by fellow Beat writer Allen Ginsberg.\nGinsberg photographed the best minds of the Beat Generation in between bursts of creativity. An exhibit of 34 black-and-white photographs taken by Ginsberg and annotated with the poet's handwritten captions is on view at the Allentown Art Museum.\nKerouac is caught mid-conversation while walking down a New York street. He makes what Ginsberg called a "Dostoyevsky mad face," mugging for the camera. Neal Cassady Kerouac's model for Dean Moriarty in "On the Road" is seen on a bus trip; William Burroughs squints in the sun; Lawrence Ferlinghetti is photographed outside his City Lights bookstore in San Francisco, shortly before publishing Ginsberg's graphic poem, "Howl."\nThe word "beat" came from the streets of Times Square and jazz musicians of the 1940s and was embraced by Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs and their friends. It came to symbolize an alternative community, a rejection of rigid literary conventions and the repressive social mores and politics of the 1950s.\nPoet Anne Waldman, who co-founded with Ginsberg the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colo., said the photographs embody his ethic of "snapshot poetics," capturing the details of a single moment.\nThe first half of the exhibit shows the young Beats moving among New York, San Francisco, India and Morocco from 1953-1964.\nThe photographs, most enlarged to 16 inches by 20 inches, are candid, but Ginsberg focused on his subjects' faces staring back at him. The intimate images look as though they were snapped after Ginsberg said, "Hey, look at me for a second."\nA photograph from 1984 shows Waldman and Burroughs squeezed into the corner of a booth in a Mexican restaurant behind a table full of bottles and empty glasses. As they turn toward the camera, Burroughs' metallic tie glints in the light.\nCurator Jacqueline van Rhyn compared Ginsberg's photographs to portraits by Richard Avedon. "The prints are high quality, but what contributes to their popularity is the personalities they capture," she said.\nA 1956 photograph of Ginsberg retyping "Howl" on a portable typewriter in friend Peter Orlovsky's apartment opens the exhibit. Ginsberg is the subject of several photographs. In run-on sentences he scrawled beneath each image in the 1980s, he notes whose hands held his camera.\nThe handwritten captions set Ginsberg apart from other documentary photographers, said David Sestak, a collector whose family owns the Ginsberg photographs on display.\n"I thought it was very unique in that there are very few fine art photographers who express themselves with the visual combined with the word," he said.\nGinsberg records not only people's names, but also their drug use and published writings.\nThe later photographs from 1984-1991 are more self-conscious, as the Beats grow into their roles as cultural icons. By this time, Ginsberg had invested in a medium-format camera, resulting in crisper images.\nTwo photographs taken through the kitchen window of Ginsberg's apartment on New York's Lower East Side close the show, offering a last view of the world as the poet saw it. Ginsberg died in his apartment in 1997 at age 70.\n"Allen Ginsberg: Beat Generation Photographer" runs through Nov. 2 and will not travel.
(04/03/03 5:42am)
PHILADELPHIA -- At age 50, TV Guide is showing signs of maturity. Circulation is down amid competition from newspapers that offer their own listings and TV shows that provide a steady stream of celebrity news.\nBut TV Guide has also adapted to the changes in the media business in recent years, with online listings, an interactive program guide and a television channel that make the most of its instantly recognizable name and logo.\nFounded by Philadelphia publisher Walter Annenberg, the television viewer's bible debuted April 3, 1953 in 10 Midwest and East Coast cities with Lucille Ball's young son Desi Arnaz Jr. on the cover. Now owned by Gemstar--TV Guide International Inc., it has 209 regional editions nationwide and just over 9 million subscribers, according to the latest figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulations.\nThe magazine is now just one part of TV Guide's domain. The company estimates that it reaches about 100 million users each week, when all of its various formats are considered -- the Web site, www.tvguide.com; the TV Guide Channel on cable and the TV Guide Interactive digital program listings.\nAs more home technology develops around the television screen, TV Guide's mission is to help readers make the most of their leisure time, not just tell them what to watch, said John Loughlin, president of the TV Guide Publishing Group.\nTo that end, the company plans a redesign of the magazine to make the listings easier to read. It will also have shorter stories and expanded coverage of home-entertainment products, such as DVDs and high-definition TV sets, Loughlin said.\nIt will also direct readers to the Web site and on-screen guides for the latest news.\n"The magazine, because of its history and its size, it's at the heart of the brand, and we've got to be sure that these different platforms, these different media reinforce the same set of messages," Loughlin said.\nTV Guide has a place in the heart of baby boomers who grew up in the early days of TV, and that nostalgia has helped make issues of TV Guide collectors' items. Vintage editions can command up to $100 on the Internet auction site eBay.\n"You would come to know the cover of that thing because it would stay with you for a week," said Robert Thompson, director of Syracuse University's Center for the Study of Popular Television.\nBut by expanding to other media, TV Guide is appealing to younger readers who are more drawn to online and interactive formats than many boomers are.\nMost consumers are already looking to multiple sources for news and entertainment, said Rebecca McPheters, head of the New York magazine consulting firm McPheters & Co. Inc.\n"What TV Guide has going for it is its utility, and that goes for all parts of the brand," she said.\nThe magazine and the TV Guide channel generated about $803 million in revenues last year, the company said. During the fourth quarter of 2002, ad revenues were up 33 percent over a year earlier.
(12/03/02 4:35am)
PHILADELPHIA -- With its loose, tabloid-sized pages and bold cover photographs, American Poetry Review takes poetic license with newsprint. \nSince it began publishing the experimental work of young writers in 1972, APR has bucked the austere tone set by formal literary criticism. \n"Like Whitman, it contains multitudes. It's a little ragged, but it's very rich and very deep," said poet and longtime contributor Edward Hirsch. \nFounder Stephen Berg, a poet himself, said he chose APR's tabloid format because he wanted readers to approach it as they would a newspaper -- at their leisure, perhaps over coffee, checking for the latest words in literature. The magazine's rejection of most formal criticism makes poetry accessible for even casual readers. \n"I would call it doing social work. Of all the poetry journals, it's the one most socially active in terms of reaching many people. It's popularized poetry more than any other magazine, even though the quality of poetry remains high," Berg said. \nBerg and editors David Bonanno and Arthur Vogelsong -- who both joined Berg in the first year of publication -- still read submitted poetry, fiction, reviews and essays. Poets say their openness to unknown writers makes APR essential reading, equal to the prestigious Poetry, The New Yorker or The Atlantic Monthly. \nAPR's populist format foreshadowed poetry's revival as an informal art form. Berg said he finds more people are writing poetry now, and the number of writing workshops has grown to 600 from just three in the 1950s. \nThe popularity of poetry slams, open mic nights and Russell Simmons' Broadway production, "Def Poetry Jam," reflects writing styles liberated from traditional strictures. While up-and-coming writers still read the classics, their generation also knows poetry through live performances. \n"There's this verbal energy that's similar to what goes on in other kinds of poetry. I don't know exactly how that's going to connect or change the audience for poetry, or if it will, but it's very interesting to watch," Bonanno said. \nAs APR published younger poets such as Sharon Olds, Robert Pinsky and Marilyn Hacker with such literary stars as T.S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop and Joyce Carol Oates, it became known as a magazine where new writing could reach critical acclaim. \n"In 1975, it almost created John Ashbery as a figure in poetry. He didn't become really famous with critics until the mid-'70s and it was APR that published 'Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,"' the title poem in Ashbery's Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, said poet Gerald Stern. \nA National Book Award winner who writes from his home in Lambertville, N.J., Stern is included in a group of poets who rose to prominence after APR began publishing their work. \n"It struck me as a place ... that you really wanted to be," said Hirsch, the newly elected president of the Guggenheim Foundation. "The very first thing that I started as a young poet reading in the '70s was the work of Gerald Stern. He had these wild, exuberant, energetic poems. I discovered him, I think everyone did, through the magazine." \nAPR celebrated its 30th anniversary in Philadelphia with an online auction featuring signed first editions, corrected manuscripts, and correspondence between writers such as Allen Ginsberg, Seamus Heaney, W.S. Merwin and John Updike. \nAPR publishes six issues a year, and has a circulation of 17,000 worldwide. In the small arena of poetry publishing, it's a relatively large success; many poetry reviews published by universities have circulations of just a few thousand. \nAPR stays afloat with advertising revenue, subscriptions and bookstore sales, but its editors worry about their long-term financial stability. \n"I think many of our readers in the first decades or so were kind of post-Vietnam era and baby boomers, and I don't know exactly how that's going to be replaced," Bonanno said.