Field Museum to cut staff, may reduce hours of operation

Battered by the recession and a high debt load, the Field Museum today announced plans to cut staff, overhaul its operations and limit the scope of its research.

A comprehensive plan being drawn up by museum officials could include things like reducing its hours of operation, increasing the admission price for special exhibits and trimming the ranks of curators and scientists, according to museum officials.

“This may turn out to involve shrinking certain areas of inquiry,” said John Rowe, chairman of the museum’s board of trustees.

The Field Museum is both an international research institution and a vital cultural attraction for residents and tourists, drawing about 1.3 million visitors in 2011.

The natural history museum is home to Sue, the best preserved Tyrannosaurus Rex in the world and a Chicago icon. But in the bowels of the museum and all around the world Field scientists are also discovering new plants and animals – more than 200 last year alone.

That complex, dual mission comes at a price, however--one that has grown increasing difficult to cover amid the recent economic downturn.

The cost-cutting plan announced Tuesday comes on the heels of a previous effort that included reducing its operating costs by $5 million, mostly through staff cuts. Those measures were not enough to shore up an institution that in the past decade has doubled its bond debt and run multiple operating deficits amid flat revenues and shrinking government subsidies.

In April, the museum tapped former University of Oregon President Richard Lariviere to become President and CEO. Lariviere, who started in October, said he wants to use the cost cutting measures as an opportunity to refocus the museum’s mission.

“If we wrestle these issues to the ground successfully, our future is rosy,” he said during a meeting with the Tribune’s editorial board.

The latest planning effort will take place between now and July 1, with input from the museum’s staff and board members, who signed off on the approach Monday. Lariviere said that the average patron should feel little or no change to the experience in the short term.

Over the long run, he said that the museum will rely more on its own collection, use technology to enhance its interaction with visitors and be more selective in choosing special exhibits it brings in from the outside.

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Google Music adds free iTunes-like song-matching feature

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Naomi Watts pulls off “The Impossible” to critical acclaim

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Days after the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, actress Naomi Watts took part in a fundraising telethon spearheaded by George Clooney to help the region’s hundreds of thousands of people in 14 nations whose lives were shattered.

Little did Watts know that eight years later she would be starring in “The Impossible,” out in the U.S. movie theaters on Friday, about a real family’s experience in Thailand. The tsunami and earthquake killed more than 5,000 people, and resulted in 2,800 missing in that country alone.

Yet when the actress was first approached to star in the film, directed by Spanish filmmaker Juan Antonio Bayona, she hesitated.

“I thought, how do you make a movie about a tsunami without it becoming some sort of spectacular disaster movie?” Watts, 44, told Reuters. “That would be so wrong.”

However once Watts read the script, she said was moved by the story based on the real-life Spanish family of Maria Belon, her husband Enrique Alvarez – played by Ewan McGregor in the movie – and their three sons.

Belon’s family were spending their Christmas holiday in Thailand when the tsunami hit. The film follows their struggle to survive, injured and separated, in the aftermath and their perseverance in finding each other amidst the chaos.

“I felt a huge amount of pressure because of the responsibility to Maria’s story,” said Watts. “And on her back, she carries the stories of everybody else because hers is connected to the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. I felt a sense of responsibility.”

PLAUDITS FOR WATTS’ PERFORMANCE

The British-born, Australian actress delivered, despite her fears. So far, her performance has earned Watts best actress nominations from the Golden Globes, the Screen Actors Guild and the Broadcast Film Critics Association.

The New York Observer wrote in its review that “Watts seems almost spiritually committed to her role” while The Hollywood Reporter said she “packs a huge charge of emotion as the battered, ever-weakening Maria whose tears of pain and fear never appear fake or idealized.”

Watts credits the real Maria Belon for being “an open book” when it came to recalling her personal experience during that harrowing time.

The two met before shooting began, and Belon was on the film set. Belon, a physician in Spain, also wrote detailed letters chronicling her experience, including taking refuge in a tree and the Thai villagers who discovered her weak and injured body.

One of the more challenging aspects of the shoot was recreating the tsunami, a 10-minute sequence in the film that Watts said took six weeks to shoot on location in Spain. Rather than creating the tidal wave digitally, actors were anchored in water tanks with the current pushing at them and “debris being chucked at you.”

Watts said that while the challenge of shooting the sequence was incomparable to the suffering of those who went through the ordeal in 2004, it was “physically the most demanding thing I’ve ever done.”

There was much more dialogue scripted during that sequence but “you were struggling to breathe and we quickly learned that once you open your mouth, water is going in and nothing is coming out.

“Though it was difficult, I’m grateful we got that kind of level of fear and intensity,” she added.

What offset the intensity during the shoot was having her sons Sasha, 5, and Sammy, 4, visiting Watts on the set. “We had them paint stuff on themselves like scars and wounds, then rub them off so they could see it wasn’t real,” recalled Watts.

It’s a far cry from the way she used to approach her work before having kids, such as her Oscar-nominated performance as a grief-stricken mother the 2003 film “21 Grams.”

“I was taking everything home with me, staying up all hours, writing, thinking, researching … just living with torment,” Watts recalled of that time. “I can’t live like that at this point in my life with little ones. I am a mom of two small kids and once I put the key in the door, it’s my duty to be totally present.”

(Editing By Jill Serjeant; Editing by Alden Bentley)

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McDonald's urging franchisees to open on Christmas

McDonald's Corp. is urging U.S. restaurant owners to take the unusual step of opening on Christmas Day to deliver the world's biggest hamburger chain with the gift of higher December sales, AdvertisingAge reported Monday.

The request -- which comes as McDonald's tangles with resurgent rivals such as Wendy's, Burger King and Yum Brands' Taco Bell chain -- would be a break from company tradition of closing on major holidays.

"Starting with Thanksgiving, ensure your restaurants are open throughout the holidays," Jim Johannesen, chief operations officer for McDonald's USA, wrote in a Nov. 8 memo to franchisees -- one of two obtained by AdvertisingAge.

"Our largest holiday opportunity as a system is Christmas Day. Last year, (company-operated) restaurants that opened on Christmas averaged $5,500 in sales," Johannesen said.

"The decision to open our restaurants on Christmas is in the hands of our owner/operators," McDonald's spokeswoman Heather Oldani told Reuters.

Don Thompson took over as chief executive at McDonald's in July and has the difficult task of growing sales from last year's strong results in a significantly more competitive environment.

McDonald's monthly global sales at established restaurants fell for the first time in nine years in October, but unexpectedly rebounded in November.

The November surprise was partly due to a 2.5 percent rise in sales at U.S. restaurants open at least 13 months.

"Our November results were driven, in part, by our Thanksgiving Day performance," Johannesen wrote in a Dec. 12 memo to franchisees.

Oldani said 1,200 more McDonald's restaurants were open on Thanksgiving this year versus last year -- not 6,000 more as AdvertisingAge reported.

Still, the company has a high hurdle when it comes to posting an increase in restaurant sales this month because its U.S. same-restaurant sales jumped 9.8 percent in December 2011.

"It's an act of desperation. The franchisees are not happy," said Richard Adams, a former McDonald's franchisee who now advises the chain's owner/operators.

The push to open on the holidays goes against McDonald's cultural history, said Adams. In his first published operations manual, McDonald's Corp. founder Ray Kroc said the company would close on Thanksgiving and Christmas to give employees time with their families, Adams said.

"We opened for breakfast on Thanksgiving the last couple years I was a franchisee. It was easy to get kids to work on Thanksgiving because they want to get away from their family, but not on Christmas," Adams said.

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Judge: Assign Daley nephew case to judge outside Cook

Cook County Chief Judge Timothy Evans said today he has asked the Illinois Supreme Court to name a judge from outside of Cook County to preside over the trial of a nephew of former Mayor Richard Daley in a 2004 death of David Koschman.

Evans agreed to a request earlier today from Judge Michael Toomin that a judge from outside Cook County preside over the trial of Richard Vanecko because of the appearance of impropriety.

“To permit the appearance of impropriety acknowledged by Judge Toomin to persist would undermine public confidence in the administration of justice,” Evans said in a letter to the state’s highest court.

Toomin took the action after a judge with ties to Daley who had been randomly assigned last week to preside over the involuntary manslaughter charge voluntarily stepped aside today. The special prosecutor then asked that the case against Daley’s nephew, Richard Vanecko, be assigned to a judge outside of Cook County.

Toomin agreed and said he would refer the matter to Cook County Chief Judge Timothy Evans, who could ask the Illinois Supreme Court to decide the issue.

Toomin said he had the utmost respect for judges in Cook County and he believed there were plenty that could be fair and impartial, but he said he felt a judge needed to be brought in from outside the county because of “perceptions that have nonetheless pervaded this case.”

Whatever Cook County judge was selected would be scrutinized not by the soundness of their rulings “but rather by the road taken by that particular judge to get to where he or she is today,” including any political friendships or professional connections, Toomin said.

Vanecko's attorneys strongly objected, telling Toomin that to go outside Cook County for a judge would give the case preferential treatment than it doesn’t need.

Speaking to reporters in the lobby of the Leighton Criminal Court Building, Vanecko’s attorney, Marc Martin, called it "disappointing" that the perception exists that Vanecko can't receive a fair trial from a Cook County judge.

"We are really outraged by the fact that because some newspaper reporters think that Cook County judges can't be fair that this case has to be reassigned," Martin said.

But Martin went on to call the prosecution witnesses in the case “liars” and said, “You can bring a judge from Kalamazoo for all I care.”

The case had been assigned last week to Judge Arthur Hill, but he declined to voluntarily withdraw despite ties to Daley, saying he could be “fair and impartial.” However, Hill reconsidered and withdrew today.

“I am ready and able to handle this case, but in an abundance of caution, I am recusing myself from further proceedings,” Hill said.

After Vanecko entered a not guilty plea last week, Hill told attorneys he was a prosecutor when Daley was Cook County state's attorney, and that Daley later appointed him to the board of the Chicago Transit Authority as mayor.

Hill also rose to the No. 2 post under State's Attorney Dick Devine, a top Daley ally whose office declined to prosecute Vanecko eight years ago.

Though Hill said he believed he could be impartial, he indicated to Vanecko's attorneys and special prosecutor Dan Webb that he would consider stepping aside.

Vanecko, who resides in Costa Mesa, Calif., turned himself in to authorities in Chicago earlier this month and is free on a $100,000 bond.

A special grand jury found that Vanecko, the son of former Mayor Richard M. Daley’s sister Mary, “recklessly performed acts which were likely to cause great bodily harm to another.”

Koschman, 21, of Mount Prospect, had been drinking in the Rush Street nightlife district early on April 24, 2004 when he and his friends quarreled with a group that included Vanecko. During the altercation, Koschman was knocked to the street, hitting the back of his head on the pavement. He died 11 days later.

Police at the time said Koschman was the aggressor and closed the case without charges. In announcing the indictment, Webb, a former U.S. attorney, noted that at 6-foot-3 and 230 pounds, Vanecko towered over Koschman, who was 5-foot-5 and 125 pounds.

Webb said the grand jury is still probing how the original investigation was conducted.

Vanecko's attorneys released a statement denying wrongdoing.
 
If convicted of involuntary manslaughter, Vanecko faces from probation up to 5 years in prison.

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Charlie Brown’s Christmas Reunion Will Ruin Your Childhood

We realize there’s only so much time one can spend in a day watching new trailers, viral video clips, and shaky cell phone footage of people arguing on live television. This is why every day The Atlantic Wire highlights the videos that truly earn your five minutes (or less) of attention. Today:

RELATED: A ‘Straight’ Protest Against Chick-Fil-A; Mark Hamill’s ‘Star Wars’ Audition

Sometimes we don’t get art. Sometimes we really, really, don’t get it: 

RELATED: Proof Ceiling Cat Exists; 295 Movies Bring You ‘Baby Got Back’

RELATED: When Hot Wheels Become a Reality and the Other Pitt

We love A Charlie Brown Christmas. We love Louie. We’re not quite if we love the two mixed together, but we’ll let you know right after we tell kids that Santa doesn’t exist: 

RELATED: The Only ‘Kiss From a Rose’ Cover You’ll Ever Need

RELATED: Let’s Get Honest with ‘The Avengers’

Meet Basse Andersen of Arendal, Norway. He’s the biggest chicken/scaredy cat in the entire world. And on the bright side, he probably never has any bouts with the hiccups. 

Shifting gears from scaredy cats to actual cats, here’s the latest chapter in the eternal battle between printers and cats:

Wireless News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Participant Media starts cable network for millenials

NEW YORK (TheWrap.com) – Participant Media, the company behind films including “Lincoln” and “The Help,” is starting a new cable network targeting millenial viewers, with content from Davis Guggenheim and The Jim Henson Company, among others.

It will be led by Evan Shapiro, who joined Participant in May after serving as President of IFC and Sundance Channel.

Participant has bought The Documentary Channel and entered into an agreement to acquire the distribution assets of Halogen TV from The Inspiration Networks. No terms were disclosed.

The combined and rebranded properties are expected to reach more than 40 million subscribers once the yet-to-be-named network launches in the summer.

“The goal of Participant is to tell stories that serve as catalysts for social change. With our television channel, we can bring those stories into the homes of our viewers every day,” said Participant chairman and founder Jeff Skoll.

Those producing content for the new network also include producer Brian Graden, The Jim Henson Company’s Brian Henson, columnist and blogger Meghan McCain, Morgan Spurlock, Gotham Chopra, filmmaker Mary Harron, writer/director Timothy Scott Bogart, and Cineflix Media, a TV producer and distributor in which Participant Media controls an equity interest.

Guggenheim directed the Oscar winning documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” for Participant.

“Our content will be specifically designed for the viewers that the pay TV eco-system is most at risk of losing,” said Shapiro. “We all know that Millennials are changing how media is consumed. However, they also have the strong desire and inimitable capacity to help change the world. Our research shows that there is a whitespace in the television landscape and we believe that a destination for ‘the next greatest generation’ will be a win for our affiliate partners, advertisers and the creative community.”

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A Conversation With S. Matthew Liao: Studying Ethical Questions as We Unlock the Black Box of the Brain

Béatrice de Géa for The New York Times

CAUTION S. Matthew Liao urges advance thinking about new technologies.

In a world of proliferating professions, S. Matthew Liao has a singular title: neuroethicist. Dr. Liao, 40, the director of the bioethics program at New York University, deploys the tools of philosophy, history, psychology, religion and ethics to understand the impact of neuroscientific breakthroughs.

We spoke over four hours in two sessions. A condensed and edited version of the conversations follows.

You’re a philosopher by training. How did philosophy lead to neuroethics?

Mine’s the typical immigrant’s story. My family moved to Cincinnati from Taiwan in the early 1980s. Once here, my siblings gravitated towards the sciences. I was the black sheep. I was in love with the humanities. So I didn’t go to M.I.T. — I went to Princeton, where I got a degree in philosophy. This, of course, worried my parents. They’d never met a philosopher with a job.

Do you have any insight on why scientific careers are so attractive to new Americans?

You don’t need to speak perfect English to do science. And there are job opportunities.

Define neuroethics.

It’s a kind of subspecialty of bioethics. Until very recently, the human mind was a black box. But here we are in the 21st century, and now we have all these new technologies with opportunities to look inside that black box — a little.

With functional magnetic imaging, f.M.R.I., you can get pictures of what the brain is doing during cognition. You see which parts light up during brain activity. Scientists are trying to match those lights with specific behaviors.

At the same time this is moving forward, there are all kinds of drugs being developed and tested to modify behavior and the mind. So the question is: Are these new technologies ethical?

A neuroethicist can look at the downstream implications of these new possibilities. We help map the conflicting arguments, which will, hopefully, lead to more informed decisions. What we want is for citizens and policy makers to be thinking in advance about how new technologies will affect them. As a society, we don’t do enough of that.

Give us an example of a technology that entered our lives without forethought.

The Internet. It has made us more connected to the world’s knowledge. But it’s also reduced our actual human contacts with one another.

So what would be an issue you might look at through a neuroethics lens?

New drugs to alter memory. Right now, the government is quite interested in propranolol. They are testing it on soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder. The good part is that the drug helps traumatized veterans by removing the bad memories causing them such distress. A neuroethicist must ask, “Is this good for society, to have warriors have their memories wiped out chemically? Will we start getting conscienceless soldiers?”

What do you think?

It is a serious business removing memories, because memories can affect your personal identity. They can impact who you think you are. I’d differentiate between offering such a drug to every distressed soldier and giving it only to certain individuals with a specific need.

Let’s say you have a situation like that in “Sophie’s Choice,” where the memories are so bad that the person is suicidal. Even if the drug causes them to live in falsehood, that would have been preferable to suicide.

But should we give it to every soldier who goes into battle? No! You need memory for a conscience. Doing this routinely might create super-immoral soldiers. As humans we have natural moral reactions to the beings around us — sympathy for other people and animals. When you start to tinker with those neurosystems, we’re not going to react to our fellow humans in the right way anymore. One wonders about the wrong people giving propranolol routinely to genocidal gangs in places like Rwanda or Syria.

Some researchers claim to be near to using f.M.R.I.’s to read thoughts. Is this really happening?

The technology, though still crude, appears to be getting closer. For instance, there’s one research group that asks subjects to watch movies. When they look at the subject’s visual cortex while the subject is watching, they can sort of recreate what they are seeing — or a semblance of it.

Similarly, there’s another experiment where they can tell in advance whether you’re going to push the right or the left button. On the basis of these experiments some people claim they’ll soon be able to read minds. Before we go further with this, I’d like to think more about what it could mean. The technology has the potential to destroy any concept of inner privacy.

What about using f.M.R.I. to replace lie detectors?

The fact is we don’t really know if f.M.R.I.’s will be any more reliable or predictive. Nonetheless, in India, a woman was convicted of poisoning her boyfriend on the basis of f.M.R.I. evidence. The authorities said that based on the pictures of blood flow in her brain, she was lying to them.

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Reyes goes craft with Windy City deal

Independent breweries are still a niche category in the marketplace, but interest in them continues to grow.

Reyes Beverage Group, a division of global food and beer distributor Reyes Holdings of Rosemont, said Sunday it has reached an agreement to purchase Windy City Distribution, a well-regarded distributor of craft beers.

Brothers Jim and Jason Ebel founded Windy City in 1999. The firm operates as a distributor across eight northern Illinois counties for more than 40 craft breweries, such as Tyranena, Lagunitas and Jolly Pumpkin Artisan Ales. The Ebels also are the brewers behind Warrenville-based Two Brothers beer.

The deal, which is expected to close by the end of the year, is yet another sign of the coming-of-age of the craft beer scene, which is now much more part of the mainstream beer industry. In 2012, 442 craft breweries opened, according to the Beer Institute. The Brewers Association, a trade association, said sales of craft brews increased 14 percent in the first half of 2012 and volume jumped 12 percent.

While the beer industry overall has shown limited growth, the explosive interest in craft beer is enticing giants such as Anheuser-Busch, the maker of Budweiser, and MillerCoors, both of which have struggled to enter the craft market on their own. Since acquiring Chicago's Goose Island in 2011, Anheuser-Busch has aggressively expanded that well-known label. Earlier this year, it revealed plans to increase Goose Island's distribution to all 50 states, making it one of the few craft brands with a true national footprint.

Reyes' Chicago Beverage Systems and Windy City will not integrate their operations. Windy City's president, Bob Collins, and his management team will join Reyes. Chicago Beverage Systems distributes Miller, Coors and Heineken brands, among others.

"Windy City Distributing will be a new entity in our network focused solely on the craft beer market," said Ray Guerin, chief operating officer of Reyes Beverage Group. "I look forward to working with Windy City to learn more about servicing the craft beer industry while providing Reyes Beverage Group's expertise to help Windy City expand."

Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Both companies are privately held.

mmharris@tribune.com

Twitter @chiconfidential

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Gunman's school rampage may have been stopped short

CBS 2's Lou Young reports.

NEWTOWN, Conn.—

The gunman in the Connecticut shooting rampage was carrying an arsenal of hundreds of rounds of especially deadly ammunition — enough to kill just about every student in the school if given enough time, authorities said Sunday, raising the chilling possibility that the bloodbath could have been far worse.

Adam Lanza shot himself in the head just as he heard police drawing near to the classroom where he was slaughtering helpless children, but he had more ammunition at the ready in the form of multiple, high-capacity clips each capable of holding 30 bullets.

The disclosure on Sunday sent shudders throughout this picturesque New England community as grieving families sought to comfort each other during church services devoted to impossible questions like that of a 6-year-old girl who asked her mother: "The little children, are they with the angels?"

With so much grieving left to do, many of Newtown's 27,000 people wondered whether life could ever return to normal. And as the workweek was set to begin, parents weighed whether to send their own children back to school.

Gov. Dannel Malloy said the shooter decided to kill himself when he heard police closing in about 10 minutes into the attack.

"We surmise that it was during the second classroom episode that he heard responders coming and apparently at that decided to take his own life," Malloy said on ABC's "This Week."

Authorities said they found hundreds of unused bullets at the school, which enrolled about 670 students.

"There was a lot of ammo, a lot of clips," said state police Lt. Paul Vance. "Certainly a lot of lives were potentially saved."

The chief medical examiner has said the ammunition was the type designed to break up inside a victim's body and inflict the maximum amount of damage, tearing apart bone and tissue.

By late afternoon, President Barack Obama arrived to console families and speak at a vigil in memory of the 26 teachers and schoolchildren who were killed in the second-deadliest school shooting in U.S. history.

Newtown officials couldn't say whether Sandy Hook Elementary School, would ever reopen.

"We're just now getting ready to talk to our son about who was killed," said Robert Licata, the father of a boy who was at the school during the shooting but escaped harm. "He's not even there yet."

Jim Agostine, superintendent of schools in nearby Monroe, said plans were being made for students from Sandy Hook to attend classes in his town this week.

The road ahead for Newtown was clouded with grief.

"I feel like we have to get back to normal, but I don't know if there is normal anymore," said Kim Camputo, mother of two children, ages 5 and 10, who attend a different school. "I'll definitely be dropping them off and picking them up myself for a while."

Also Sunday, a Connecticut official said the gunman's mother was found dead in her pajamas in bed, shot four times in the head with a .22-caliber rifle. The killer then went to the school with guns he took from his mother, got inside by breaking a window and began blasting his way through the building.

As churches opened their doors, federal agents checked out dozens of gun stores and shooting ranges across Connecticut, chasing leads they hoped would cast light on Lanza's life.

Investigators have offered no motive for the shooting, and police have found no letters or diaries that could shed light on it.

School officials were discussing how to send survivors back to class, but Newtown police Lt. George Sinko said he "would find it very difficult" for students to return to the school.

"We want to keep these kids together," he added. "They need to support each other."

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