Steve Jobs' Superyacht Impounded in Payment Dispute

The megayacht that Steve Jobs commissioned in the final years of his life has been impounded in Amsterdam after a payment dispute by the designer, Philippe Starck.

The Venus, a 100-million-euro, 260-foot-long yacht, made its unofficial debut in late October. It’s currently stuck in the Port of Amsterdam after Starck hired a debt-collection agency to attempt to remit the final payment for his design.

According to lawyers at Ubik – Starck’s design company – speaking with Reuters, the designer has only received 6 million of the 9-million-euro commission and is seeking the rest of the payment before the Venus will be released.

“These guys [Jobs and Starck] trusted each other, so there wasn’t a very detailed contract,” Roelant Klaassen, a lawyer for Ubik, told Reuters.

The Venus is a floating ode to both Jobs and Starck’s minimalist aesthetic. Made entirely out of aluminum, with 40-foot-long floor-to-ceiling windows lining the passenger compartment and seven 27-inch iMacs making up the command center.

In Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs, the late Apple CEO is quoted as saying that, “I know that it’s possible I will die and leave Laurene with a half-built boat, but I have to keep going on. If I don’t, it’s an admission that I’m about to die.”

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“Les Miserables” movie relies on close-ups for emotional punch

NEW YORK (Reuters) – For British director Tom Hooper, the key to turning “Les Miserables” from the wildly popular stage musical to a cinematic experience both sweeping and intimate, was all in the close-up.

The stage musical has left audiences around the world wiping away tears with its themes of justice, redemption and romantic and familial love. So bringing it to life on screen for fans and filmgoers was “hugely daunting,” Hooper says.

Still, the Oscar-winning director of “The King’s Speech,” was ambitious, wanting to offer even more of the “intense emotional experience” that has kept fans returning to various stage productions since “Les Miserables” made its English language debut 27 years ago.

“I felt very aware of the fact that so many millions of people hold this close to their hearts and would probably sit in the cinemas in complete fear,” Hooper told reporters about his big screen take on the tale of French revolutionaries rising up against powerful forces.

Movie stars Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe and Anne Hathaway were all put through an intense audition and rehearsal process, to make sure they could sing take after take, live, with cameras positioned right in their face.

It also features a large ensemble including Amanda Seyfried and Eddie Redmayne, as well as Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter who lead the comic relief song, “Master of the House.”

“I thought the great weapon in my arsenal was the close up, because the one thing on stage that you can’t enjoy is the detail of what is going on in people’s faces as they are singing,” Hooper said. “I felt (that) having to do a meditation on the human face was by far the best way to bring out the emotion of the songs.”

That tactic may or may not have paid off for a movie that is seen as one of the front runners for Oscar awards in February. Early screenings of the film that opens on Christmas Day have moved some audiences. Critics have praised the performances, but given the movie as a whole less than top marks.

The movie reunites the same team that worked on the original musical, including French composer Claude-Michel Schonberg, lyricist Alain Boublil, and English language adapter Herbert Kretzmer. It adds one original song to the existing show, which includes the well-known “I Dreamed a Dream”.

Jackman plays petty thief Jean Valjean, the protagonist of the story based on French writer Victor Hugo’s epic 1862 historical novel “Les Miserables.” Valjean transforms himself into a respected businessman but struggles for decades to escape the clutches of his nemesis, police inspector Javert (Russell Crowe), and along the way encounters factory worker Fantine (Anne Hathaway).

TIMELY MESSAGE

Inspired by films such as 1991′s “The Commitments,” singing was filmed live rather than later recorded in a studio to give the movie a more authentic feel.

Hathaway lost 25 pounds (11.3 kg) for the role and cut her long brown hair. She spent six months perfecting the task of crying and singing at the same time for “I Dreamed a Dream” and is a hot favorite for a best supporting actress Oscar.

In a twist of fate, Hooper had initially seen Hathaway singing to Jackman a boisterous version of the “Les Miserables” song “On My Own” at the 2011 Academy Awards ceremony, just when he was trying to decide whether to direct the film and was thinking about casting.

“I was sitting there, going: ‘There is something very strange happening’,” he joked. “Whatever happened, it certainly worked, because I ended up casting both of them.”

Hooper said he took his inspiration mostly from Hugo’s novel rather than any one stage production, and thus saw Crowe’s Javert more as a “deeply honorable” character than a simplistic “bad guy” as portrayed in some productions.

The time also felt right, he said, to bring the story to a larger audience on the big screen.

“There are so many people hurting around the world because of social, economic, inequality and inequity. There is such anger against the system,” he said, “whether it’s the protests on Wall Street or in London at St Paul’s, or the seismic shifts happening in the Middle East.”

“‘Les Miserables’ is the great advocate of the dispossessed,” Hooper said. “It teaches you the way to collective action is through passionate engagement with the people around you. It starts with love for the person next to you.”

(Editing by Jill Serjeant and David Storey)

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Wealth Matters: An Argument for Focusing Charity Dollars

Myra Biblowit, the president of the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, and Larry Norton, the scientific adviser to the foundation, say it is dependent on donors who give regularly and generously.

THIS is a time of year when solicitations for donations are coming at you from every direction, and for good reason: the end of the year is when people make most of their gifts to charity.

But these requests for money, from the checkout line to the mailbox, can pull well-intentioned people in too many directions and turn an act of generosity that should lift the spirits of the donor and help a worthy cause into another stressful obligation.

This onslaught and a story I was told this week — more about that later — got me thinking about the argument for focused giving, for picking an area that you care about and putting most of your philanthropic dollars into it. This is something my wife and I have done for many years and have found very rewarding: it has made us more knowledgeable, passionate and involved in the area we support.

Patrick Rooney, associate dean for academic affairs and research at Indiana University’s School of Philanthropy, said he did not want to deter people from giving away their money however they wanted. But he added, “You’re better off to target three, four or five charities and give larger gifts to a small number of charities as opposed to giving a large number of small checks.”

Part of the reason is that a single larger gift could do more good. But that was not the only benefit. “From the recipient organization’s perspective, having a gift from $1, $100, $1,000, to $100 million, there are some transaction costs,” Mr. Rooney said. “You’ve got to book it, deposit it, acknowledge the donor and cultivate the donor for future gifts. If you have a lot of checks for $5 and $10, you have a lot of transaction costs for a relatively small gift.”

The other side of this debate is equally valid: it’s your money, and if you want to give a little bit to 27 different groups, that’s your choice. As Melissa Berman, president and chief executive of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisers, told me: “Philanthropy is voluntary. When someone tells you how your money is supposed to be used and in what proportion, that’s called a tax.”

I can appreciate both sides. But I spent this week talking to a group of people focused on one cause — breast cancer research. Their desire to support this cause, which has had great success, made an interesting argument for being more selective with donations. Here’s the story.

THE LUNCH Addressing about two dozen women over lunch in late November, Leonard A. Lauder, chairman emeritus of Estée Lauder, told how he had bought his wife, Evelyn, a piece of jewelry every time she finished a round of chemotherapy and they thought she was better.

Mrs. Lauder, who learned she had breast cancer in 1987 and survived it, started the Breast Cancer Research Foundation in 1993, with the goal of raising funds for research that would eradicate the disease. Last year, she died of ovarian cancer.

A few weeks before she died, Mr. Lauder said, he found her standing in their kitchen one night wearing a ring he had bought her.

“She said, ‘I’ll never have a chance to wear this ring. so I’m wearing it tonight,’ ” Mr. Lauder told me. “When she died, I had all this jewelry. I didn’t feel right giving it to someone. I thought, ‘What should I do with the jewelry?’ ”

He decided to auction it off and give all the money to the foundation. He said he got Sotheby’s to waive the commission it charges sellers so that any money raised would go to a new fund at the foundation to focus on the genetic links between different types of cancers.

Among those in the audience of prospective bidders that day was Cindy Citrone. Mrs. Citrone’s mother and father died of cancer, and she is active in various cancer charities in Connecticut, where she lives. She also sits on the board of visitors of M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Cancer charities are something she and her husband, Rob, who runs a hedge fund, support in many different ways.

She was moved by Mr. Lauder’s account of how he wanted his gifts to his wife to be passed on as part of a continuing contribution to the fight against cancer. “After hearing him tell this story of love and the legacy of joy,” she said, “I came home and wanted to be part of it.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 21, 2012

A picture caption with an earlier version of this column misspelled the surname of the Breast Cancer Research Foundation’s scientific adviser. He is Larry Norton, not Nortan.

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New York Stock Exchange operator agrees to be sold for $8.2 billion

A flag flies on the facade of the New York Stock Exchange. (Richard Drew / Associated Press / December 20, 2012)

By Andrew Tangel

December 20, 2012, 6:30 a.m.

NYSE Euronext, operator of the New York Stock Exchange, has agreed to sell itself to the IntercontinentalExchange in an acquisition that would reshape Wall Street.

ICE, a 12-year-old electronic exchange operator based in Atlanta, will pay $33.12 a share for NYSE Euronext in a stock-and-cash deal worth $8.2 billion.

The companies announced the acquisition early Thursday, saying both of their boards or directors unanimously approved the deal. The acquisition is slated to close in the second half of 2013, pending the blessing of U.S. and European regulators and both companies' shareholders.

Quiz: How much do you know about the 'fiscal cliff'?

"This transaction leverages the strength of our iconic brand and the value we have created in our global equity and derivatives franchises -- positioning the business for solid long-term growth and development," Duncan Niederauer, chief executive of NYSE Euronext, said in a statement.

Although the New York Stock Exchange is the most public window into Wall Street, the Big Board's share of equities trading has declined sharply in recent years, as NYSE Euronext has expanded its trading venues in an increasingly electronic and fragmented marketplace.

Founded in 2000, ICE has grown into a leading venue for commodities and energy futures exchanges and derivatives clearinghouses.

NYSE Euronext's stock closed at $24.05 a share, with a market cap of $5.84 billion. The NYSE's stock was surging $10 a share, or 42%, in pre-market trading.

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Citizen Smart-Kites Check China's Air

Xiaowei Wang (center) and workshop participants prepare a FLOAT kite for flight. "The hardest part was probably figuring out how to publicize the projects to locals and draw a diverse group of people to our workshops," says Guler. "We were afraid that no one would come to the first one, but that was probably the best attended." Photo: Screenshot from Stars in the Haze.

Designers Deren Guler and Xiaowei Wang are using sensor-laden kites to monitor China’s air.

Beijing’s air quality is notoriously terrible. It’s so bad that China’s leaders have begun to seal themselves off, all the while producing air-quality reports of extremely dubious accuracy. Earlier this summer, Guler and Wang took to the skies of Beijing to begin challenging the official story, attaching air-quality sensors to kites and publishing the results.

Joining them was documentarian Joshua Frank. Today, they’ve released a documentary about the project, called Stars in the Haze. The project itself is called FLOAT_beijing.

Guler says the project began when Wang, living in Beijing’s “crazy bad” air, began testing out a simple air-quality sensor. “Inspired by the decorative lights they put on kites, we set out to make an air-quality-sensing kite.”

Frank had met Wang in 2011 while on a trip to China filming a documentary about experimental music. When he heard that the team had received funding for FLOAT, “Immediately I got in touch with Xiaowei and told her that someone needed to make a documentary about the project — I wanted to be that person.”

The design of the kite sensors is based on Carnegie Mellon’s Air Quality Balloons project, with some changes to make the sensor module simpler and easier to build from parts they could source locally in Beijing. The team worked with kite masters and local citizens, running a series workshops to teach everyone how to build and fly the kites. Participants soldered the components on to a circuit board and then learned how to attach them to the kites so that their weight wouldn’t disrupt their ability to fly.

Once the kites were ready, they took them out and flew them, then retrieved their SD cards loaded with air quality data that they could use as a basis for comparison with the official readings. The comparison was rarely good.

“Air pollution is a huge issue in Beijing and in many other Chinese metropolises,” says Frank, “It seems to me that more people—especially more Chinese citizens—are becoming conscious of air quality issues and beginning to organize and take matters in their own hands when it comes to the reporting of pollution levels.”

“Our primary goal is citizen science,” Guler says. She acknowledges that there are a lot of similar projects, “but many of them are more like products, or methods of communicating wirelessly. We hope our project instills a DIY ‘you can build your own’ mentality.”

Filming the project introduced its own set of challenges, says Frank. “From a visual standpoint—and this is kind of odd—it’s actually not that easy to film people flying kites.” The problem is that the kites are so far away that it’s difficult to get them in the frame with the people flying them and they are so large that once they’re in the air, it doesn’t take much movement to keep them aloft. “It’s relaxing in a fishing-like way,” he says, “The problem is, a person holding a spool of line and craning his neck to the sky tends to look at little crazed if you can’t see a kite in the frame.”

Looking ahead, the team plans to return to Beijing next year, and Guler says she’s involved in testing the same sensors for a different air quality project in Brazil, and another project to bring the kites to Boston. “It doesn’t sound as compelling to tell people what a great job was done laying the groundwork for future development,” says Frank, “However, I am very excited to see what can be accomplished in future FLOAT installments.”

Frank sees a lot of potential in the lighting system that the team saw on the kites of dedicated hobbyists. “It seemed to me that there would be great potential to ‘hack’ these light systems and rig them up to the DIY sensors,” he says, “To have that degree of spectacle is really where citizen science, art, activism and performance can intersect for FLOAT in what I think would be a pretty revelatory way.”

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“Gangnam Style” in line for UK dictionary inclusion

LONDON (Reuters) – He has the most-watched video in Youtube history, become a pop sensation with a horse-riding dance craze that has swept the world and now Korean singer Psy may cement his place in popular culture with recognition from a British dictionary.

“Gangnam Style,” Psy’s signature song, has been chosen along with “fiscal cliff” and “Romneyshambles” as some of Collins Dictionary‘s words of the year.

“We were looking for words that told the story of the year,” said Ian Brookes, the dictionary‘s consultant editor.

“Some words are from events that have been and gone and so are not likely to stick around … but others are probably here to stay.”

Other headline entries centered on American politics.

“Fiscal cliff” has drawn a lot of attention as the deadline for Congress and President Obama to agree on government spending and tax plans draws nearer.

While the term “Romneyshambles” entered the British public’s consciousness after Mitt Romney‘s gaffe-ridden visit to London in July in which he questioned Britain’s readiness to host the Olympics.

The inclusion of “47 percent” on the list after a leaked video showed Romney telling donors that 47 percent of Americans would definitely vote for Obama because of their dependency on the government capped off a bad year for the losing presidential candidate.

Collins received over 7,000 submissions on its online database.

Twelve words of the year – one for each month – were then selected on the basis of the frequency with which they were spoken, how many places they appeared and their longevity in public discourse.

Appearing on the Collins words of the year list is no guarantee of insertion in the next dictionary.

But Gangnam Style stands a very good chance, Brookes said.

“It’s obviously a craze, so there’s the possibility it will go away. But it’s been heard by so many people that I think it’s probably earned the right to go into the dictionary.”

Other words of the year include “mummy porn” after the popularity of the “Fifty Shades of Grey” books, and “superstorm” after Superstorm Sandy wreaked havoc along the east coast of America in October.

(Reporting By Peter Schwartzstein, editing by Paul Casciato)

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U.N. Suspends Polio Campaign in Pakistan After Killings of Workers

B.K. Bangash/Associated Press

A Pakistani woman administered polio vaccine to an infant on Wednesday in the slums of Islamabad. Militants have killed nine polio workers this week.

LAHORE, Pakistan — The front-line heroes of Pakistan’s war on polio are its volunteers: young women who tread fearlessly from door to door, in slums and highland villages, administering precious drops of vaccine to children in places where their immunization campaign is often viewed with suspicion.

Now, those workers have become quarry. After militants stalked and killed eight of them over the course of a three-day, nationwide vaccination drive, the United Nations suspended its anti-polio work in Pakistan on Wednesday, and one of Pakistan’s most crucial public health campaigns has been plunged into crisis.

The World Health Organization and Unicef ordered their staff members off the streets, while government officials reported that some polio volunteers — especially women — were afraid to show up for work.

At the ground level, it is those female health workers who are essential, allowed privileged entrance into private homes to meet and help children in situations denied to men because of conservative rural culture. “They are on the front line; they are the backbone,” said Imtiaz Ali Shah, a polio coordinator in Peshawar.

The killings started in the port city of Karachi on Monday, the first day of a vaccination drive aimed at the worst affected areas, with the shooting of a male health worker. On Tuesday four female polio workers were killed, all gunned down by men on motorcycles in what appeared to be closely coordinated attacks.

The hit jobs then moved to Peshawar, the capital of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province, which, along with the adjoining tribal belt, constitutes Pakistan’s main reservoir of new polio infections. The first victim there was one of two sisters who had volunteered as polio vaccinators. Men on motorcycles shadowed them as they walked from house to house. Once the sisters entered a quiet street, the gunmen opened fire. One of the sisters, Farzana, died instantly; the other was uninjured.

On Wednesday, a man working on the polio campaign was shot dead as he made a chalk mark on the door of a house in a suburb of Peshawar. Later, a female health supervisor in Charsadda, 15 miles to the north, was shot dead in a car she shared with her cousin.

Yet again, Pakistani militants are making a point of attacking women who stand for something larger. In October, it was Malala Yousafzai, a schoolgirl advocate for education who was gunned down by a Pakistani Taliban attacker in the Swat Valley. She was grievously wounded, and the militants vowed they would try again until they had killed her. The result was a tidal wave of public anger that clearly unsettled the Pakistani Taliban.

In singling out the core workers in one of Pakistan’s most crucial public health initiatives, militants seem to have resolved to harden their stance against immunization drives, and declared anew that they consider women to be legitimate targets. Until this week, vaccinators had never been targeted with such violence in such numbers.

Government officials in Peshawar said that they believe a Taliban faction in Mohmand, a tribal area near Peshawar, was behind at least some of the shootings. Still, the Pakistani Taliban have been uncharacteristically silent about the attacks, with no official claims of responsibility. In staying quiet, the militants may be trying to blunt any public backlash like the huge demonstrations over the attack on Ms. Yousafzai.

Female polio workers here make for easy targets. They wear no uniform but are readily recognizable, with clipboards and refrigerated vaccine boxes, walking door to door. They work in pairs — including at least one woman — and are paid just over $2.50 a day. Most days one team can vaccinate 150 to 200 children.

Faced with suspicious or recalcitrant parents, their only weapon is reassurance: a gentle pat on the hand, a shared cup of tea, an offer to seek religious assurances from a pro-vaccine cleric. “The whole program is dependent on them,” said Mr. Shah, in Peshawar. “If they do good work, and talk well to the parents, then they will vaccinate the children.”

That has happened with increasing frequency in Pakistan over the past year. A concerted immunization drive, involving up to 225,000 vaccination workers, drove the number of newly infected polio victims down to 52. Several high-profile groups shouldered the program forward — at the global level, donors like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the United Nations and Rotary International; and at the national level, President Asif Ali Zardari and his daughter Aseefa, who have made polio eradication a “personal mission.”

On a global scale, setbacks are not unusual in polio vaccination campaigns, which, by dint of their massive scale and need to reach deep inside conservative societies, end up grappling with more than just medical challenges. In other campaigns in Africa and South Asia, vaccinators have grappled with natural disaster, virulent opposition from conservative clerics and sudden outbreaks of mysterious strains of the disease.

Declan Walsh reported from Lahore, and Donald G. McNeil Jr. from New York. Ismail Khan contributed reporting from Peshawar, Pakistan.

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Tool Kit: Equipment for the Mayan Apocalypse, or a Lesser Emergency

We may have only a few hours to live. On Friday, the Mayan calendar will come to an end, leading some to predict that the world will spiral into chaos. It could be the end of days. Locusts could swarm the earth, destroying crops. Tornadoes the size of Florida could shred Europe. Thousand-foot waves could crash over Idaho. Zombies! Flesh-eating viruses, human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together.

Or just maybe, as with every other predicted apocalypse before it, nothing will happen. We could just wake up on Friday, roll out of bed, grab our coffee and go to work. Another day in the life.

Either way, it’s probably better to be safe than sorry. You’ll want to be prepared for the end. And if it’s not the end, these supplies will help you when the next subapocalyptic event happens: another hurricane, perhaps, or a blackout, earthquake, blizzard or typhoon.

Given that most of our lives are now hyperdependent on things that require power, you should stock up on batteries. Lots of them. Amazon sells packs of 20 or 48 AA or AAA batteries for as little as $10. Solar panels, or at least devices that incorporate them, are a must too. The WakaWaka solar lamp, $40, can provide up to 16 hours of light on a full charge.

Sometimes sunlight is in short supply. The Etón BoostTurbine 1000 is a power generator that can be hand-cranked to charge a cellphone or other gadgets. If you’re hiding from zombies in a basement and your iPad is about to die, just plug it in and crank the wheel, and you can finish that game of Angry Birds. Cranking for one minute will give your cellphone enough power for a 30-second call.

There is, of course, a chance that your phone will not work, so if you want to get around and communicate with people, be prepared to travel back in time. Before cellphones, there were these things called maps that were made of paper, or plastic. Be sure to have a few showing your local city and state highways. If the power is out, there might not be any Twitter or Facebook either — gasp! — so you’ll have to leave notes the old-fashioned way: with a pen and paper. Don’t forget tape. Duct tape or electrician’s tape has a multitude of uses.

You might want to pick up a pair of two-way radios too. The Motorola MH230R has an astounding range of 23 miles and can operate for up to 10 hours on a charge. These walkie-talkies can also pick up 11 weather channels from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

You will want some canned food: tuna, spaghetti, fruit, pinto beans, vegetables and some soups. (Buy a hand can opener, too, as your electric one needs electricity.) You can also order freeze-dried foods from a camping store. Don’t forget food for your lovable pets.

Studies show that humans can last a couple of weeks without food, but most people can last only three to five days without water.

If you have the money, invest in a Lifesaver Bottle, $230, which can filter out bacteria, chemicals and toxins from your water supply. A less expensive alternative is the LifeStraw Personal Water Filter, $25, which is essentially a fancy straw that, it is claimed, removes 99.9 percent of waterborne parasites. Some people swear by tomato juice, which will quench your thirst while providing nutrition.

You will need a stove to warm up all of those wonderful canned foods. Jet Boil Sol Advanced Cooking Stoves, $100, are go-to items for campers these days. They have an all-in-one top from which you can both cook and eat. They also have a one-button starter, and are compact for easy storage. Get a few extra fuel canisters.

Cash is king in a catastrophe. In 2003, during the New York City blackout, I was caught in the subway when the power went out. When I finally emerged from the tunnels, escorted by the police, I realized I had only $14 in cash on me. Credit cards and A.T.M.’s were useless. Keep a wad of bills and change in your apocalypse kit.

In case you have to hit the road to flee a zombie invasion, grab some Mylar thermal blankets, $10 for a pack of 10. They look like tinfoil, but can actually hold in 90 percent of your body heat. There are also Hothands hand warmers, which can be purchased in packs of 40 for $20.

In the unlikely event of a nuclear emergency, it would be good to have some potassium iodide tablets, $8 for 14. These little pills can reduce the chance of thyroid damage.

You will be amazed how dark it can be at night without a dozen light bulbs glowing in your living room, so stock up on flashlights. You can get a couple that require batteries, but also have backups that don’t need them, even though these might not be quite as bright. Forever Flashlights ($30) can be shaken up and down to create power. They actually do work: shaking for seconds will generate up to five minutes of light.

If you think the world might take a while to wind down, you might want to invest in a generator. They start at around $300 and go up into the thousands. Don’t forget to pick up fuel to run it, though. And you might want to make sure your fire extinguisher is working, in case fireballs start falling from the sky or the toaster goes berserk.

Take a look at the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Ready.gov Web site, which tells you how much water and food you will need for an emergency and offers a list of things you should always have at the ready. The agency recommends water canisters or sealed jugs so you do not have to drink from your bathtub.

Finally, don’t forget to have a camera fully charged and some extra batteries so you can document your particular angle on the apocalypse. This way, when society finally rebuilds itself, you’ll be able to post those awesome photos on Twitter and Facebook.

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Robert Bork, failed Supreme Court nominee, dies at age 85

Robert H. Bork, whose failed Supreme Court nomination in 1987 infuriated conservatives and politicized the confirmation process for the ensuing decades, died Wednesday at the age of 85. 

The former Yale law professor and judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit had a history of heart problems and had been in poor health for some time.

But Bork was a towering figure for an early generation of conservatives. In the 1960s and '70s, he argued that a liberal-dominated Supreme Court was abusing its power and remaking American life by ending prayers in public schools, by extending new rights to criminals, by ordering cross-town busing and by voiding the laws against abortion.

PHOTOS: Robert Bork | March 1, 1927 - Dec. 19, 2012

He was an influential legal advisor in the Nixon administration and served as a footnote to history in the Watergate scandal. When the embattled president ordered the firing of special counsel Archibald Cox, the attorney general and his deputy resigned in protest. Bork, who was in the No. 3 post as U.S. solicitor general, then carried out Nixon’s order.

But Bork’s biggest moment came during the Reagan administration in the 1980s. He left Yale and came to Washington when Reagan appointed him to the U.S. court of appeals in the District of Columbia. The job was seen as a steppingstone to the high court.

In 1986, Bork was passed over for a younger colleague when Reagan named Judge Antonin Scalia to the Supreme Court. A year later, Bork’s turn came when Justice Lewis Powell, the swing vote on the closely divided court, announced his retirement.

PHOTOS: Notable deaths of 2012

Democrats, led by Sen. Edward Kennedy, launched an all-out attack on Bork’s nomination, saying he would set back the cause of civil rights, women’s rights and civil liberties.

The summer of 1987 saw campaign-style attacks on Bork’s reputation.  In televised hearings, the bearded, heavy-set professor tried to explain his views, but he won few converts. The Senate defeated his nomination by a 58-42 vote.

In his place, Reagan eventually chose Judge Anthony Kennedy, who was confirmed unanimously. The switch proved to have lasting consequences. Kennedy cast decisive votes to uphold Roe vs. Wade and to preserve the ban on school-sponsored prayers.

Bork stepped down from the bench a year after his defeat, but wrote several books renewing his criticism of liberalism. In the past year, he served as a chairman of Mitt Romney’s advisory committee on the judiciary and the courts.

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Benghazi Commission Practically Demands Pain Rays at Embassies

Want to stop the next riot at a U.S. embassy? The commission into the September assault on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi has an unexpected suggestion: load them up with exotic, supposedly non-lethal weaponry. Not that the commission has much confidence in the security personnel who’d operate the controversial gear.

In its newly released report into the Benghazi disaster, an independent commission assembled by the State Department found that, among other security failures, “the lack of non-lethal crowd control options” at the consulate “precluded a more vigorous defense.” (.pdf) The September attack, in which Libyans assaulted the sparsely defended consulate with rockets, mortars, machine-gun fire and more, killed four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens.

The commission doesn’t explicitly endorse any particular form of non-lethal defense of diplomatic installations. But the obvious options would be a laser flash that “dazzles” oncoming attackers, an ear-splitting sonic blaster … and a microwave-like pain ray that make targets feel like they’re being hit with the exhaust of a giant oven. The first two weapons have been used by U.S. military forces overseas in recent years. The third one was pulled from Afghanistan because it was considered too controversial.

The commission does not consider such weaponry a panacea. It does find that the State Department is behind the curve on exploring how those technologies, however. “There have been technological advancements in non-lethal deterrents,” it writes, “and the State Department should ensure it rapidly and routinely identifies and procures additional options for non-lethal deterrents in high risk, high threat posts and trains personnel on their use.”

The U.S. military has been experimenting with non-lethal crowd control systems for years. One of the marquee projects of its Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate is a millimeter-wave gun called the Active Denial System. Intended for the perimeter defense of a base, the truck-mounted weapon blasts angry mobs with 12 joules of focused energy per square centimeter. The blast doesn’t penetrate the skin, but — as I learned first-hand in March — it very rapidly creates an unbearable burning sensation, prompting anyone in its path to involuntarily move out of the way.

Another non-lethal option: sonic blasters like the Long-Range Acoustic Device or the Inferno, which cause, in the words of Danger Room co-founder Sharon Weinberger, “the most unbearable, gut-wrenching noise I’ve ever heard in my life.” The Long-Range Acoustic Device, for instance, fires sound waves at a 300-meter distance, and has been used against pirates; a related Israeli weapon, called the Scream, was put to work in 2009 to literally nauseate protesters.

But the commission’s brief plaudit for less-lethal weaponry doesn’t consider some of the very real drawbacks of these systems, both technical and, er, diplomatic. The commission notes that the Benghazi attack happened too quickly for the U.S. military to respond to. That would also be too fast for the Active Denial System, which needs a 16-hour boot-up time if the energy-intensive device isn’t constantly running. It also doesn’t work as well in dusty, rainy, snowy or other poor-weather conditions.

Then there are the diplomatic problems with the weapons. The Active Denial System was recalled from Afghanistan after a brief deployment in 2010 out of fear that the Taliban would effectively portray it as a sterilization device. Mounting one of these on the walls of an embassy would not exactly send the message that the U.S. is eager to work with the locals on matters of mutual interest.

But the Benghazi commission also provides little confidence in the security officers who’d have to operate and oversee the non-lethal weapons. The State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security comes across in the commission’s report as barely able to manage the resources that it already has. Not only did the Benghazi consulate depend on a “poorly skilled” Libyan militia and unarmed guards from the Blue Mountain security firm, the commission found the Diplomatic Security bureau needs to “upgrade surveillance cameras at high risk, high threat posts for greater resolution, nighttime visibility, and monitoring capability beyond post”; create an “action plan” about what to do about “the use of fire as a weapon against diplomatic facilities”; and “revisit [its] high-threat training with respect to active internal defense and fire survival.”

That makes it sound like the Bureau of Diplomatic Security is under-prepared at the basics of protecting diplomatic outposts. And it’s not the first time the directorate has come in for criticism. A 2007 State Department inquiry found that the bureau exercised inadequate oversight of its private security force in Iraq, owing to under-staffing and meager budgets. (That’s something Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is asking Congress to correct.) In Afghanistan, Diplomatic Security contracted out for embassy guards that couldn’t speak English, despite repeated warnings from embassy personnel that such a move jeopardized an effective response to a crisis.

Veterans of the bureau describe a hidebound bureaucracy insulated from accountability, especially as it had always succeeded at its core job of keeping diplomats alive. Until Benghazi.

“The [Diplomatic Security] Bureau showed a lack of proactive senior leadership with respect to Benghazi,” the commission writes, “failing to ensure that the priority security needs of a high risk, high threat post were met.” The commission, however, stops short at recommending anyone inside the bureau be fired over Benghazi, punting on that suggestion to “future” studies. But the report appears to have prompted the resignations of top Diplomatic Security officials, including Amb. Eric Boswell. Not exactly the people you’d want manning your acoustic cannons and heat rays.

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