Homeless Pay the Price of Progress in Lagos, Nigeria


Samuel James for The New York Times


Children scavenge through the remains of a demolition site in Lagos in search of scrap wood to sell.







LAGOS, Nigeria — The young man with the crowbar stood on a heap of rubble — planks, pallets, remains of pots, bits of cardboard, wisps of clothing, chunks of concrete — indistinguishable from every other pile in a field of debris stretching far into the distance.




“This is the home I am staying in before Fashola demolished it,” said John Momoh, 28, looking down at the pile, referring to the governor of Lagos, Babatunde Fashola. Mr. Momoh, a driver, searched doggedly for anything salvageable — a nail, a board — in the mess.


Government backhoes came in and plowed through Mr. Momoh’s simple wooden dwelling and some 500 like it last Saturday, instantly making homeless perhaps 10,000 of Lagos’s poorest residents and destroying a decades-old slum, Badia East. For days, residents wandered the chaotic rubble-strewn field, near prime Lagos real estate.


They were dazed and angry. Small children slept on the muddy ground. Men climbed the mounds of rubble, searching. In intense heat, women, men and children said they were hungry and sleeping outside. The government had destroyed their present, they said, without making any provision for their future.


“I lost everything,” Mr. Momoh said. “We are trying to bring out some sticks, to look for our daily bread,” he said, poking the rubble. “We don’t have money to eat.”


A 30-year-old cook, Kingsley Saviouru, said: “They demolished everything. They didn’t give us anything. We are here, suffering.”


Under Lagos’s energetic governor, much lauded in the international financial media, this crowded megalopolis of high rises, filthy lagoons, fierce traffic jams and sprawling slums, home to perhaps 21 million people, has proclaimed its ambition to become the region’s, if not Africa’s, premier business center.


Infrastructure and housing projects abound, including a light-rail network whose trestles already vault crowded neighborhoods, and a vast upmarket Dubai-style shopping and housing development built out into the Atlantic Ocean, inaugurated last week by former President Bill Clinton. A new Porsche dealership has opened in the financial district.


In this gleaming vision, the old Lagos of slums has an uncertain future. Two-thirds of the city’s residents live in “informal” neighborhoods, as activists call them, while more than one million of the city’s poor have been forcibly ejected from their homes in largely unannounced, government slum clearances over the last 15 years, a leading activist group says.


Last summer, there was a brief outcry when government speedboats bearing machete-carrying men cleared out the floating neighborhood of Makoko, making some 30,000 people homeless. At the vast city dump at Ojota, where thousands eke out a living, shacks are cleared out frequently, residents complained.


The Nigerian government’s untender approach to its poor, who account for at least 70 percent of the population, was again on full display last Saturday at Badia East, where even more demolition — another 40,000 live there — is now threatened. The scene Saturday was classic: a black police vehicle pulled up early, armed, uniformed policemen sprang out to quell any restiveness, and the backhoes went to work under the eyes of dismayed residents, slashing through thin wood and concrete block.


Street toughs — called “Area Boys” in Lagos, and often employed by the state government’s demolition squad for around $10 dollars, activists said — got busy where the backhoes could not penetrate, smashing flimsy structures with sledgehammers and, Mr. Momoh and others said, stealing residents’ possessions.


Many said they were given 20 minutes, at most, to pack up their belongings.


“Everybody was running helter-skelter,” said a resident, Femi Aiyenuro, adding that those who went back in to retrieve possessions risked being beaten with rifle butts and batons. “They started beating people.”


What little that could be salvaged was piled along a railway line running along Badia’s edge.


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HP sells webOS operating system to LG Electronics






SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Hewlett-Packard Co said on Monday it will sell the webOS operating system to South Korea’s LG Electronics Inc, unloading the smartphone software it acquired through a $ 1.2 billion acquisition of Palm in 2010.


LG will use the operating software, used in now-defunct Palm smartphones years ago, for its “smart” or Internet-connected TVs. The Asian electronics company had worked with HP on WebOS before offering to buy it outright.






Under the terms of their agreement, LG acquires the operating software’s source code, associated documentation, engineering talent, various associated websites, and licenses under HP’s intellectual property including patents covering fundamental operating system and user interface technology.


HP will retain the patents and all the technology relating to the cloud service of webOS, HP Chief Operating Officer Bill Veghte said in an interview.


“As we looked at it, we saw a very compelling IP that was very unique in the marketplace,” he said, adding that HP has already had a partnership with LG on webOS before the deal was announced.


“As a result of this collaboration, LG offered to acquire the webOS operating system technology,” Veghte said.


Skott Ahn, President and CTO, LG Electronics, said the company will incorporate the operating system in the Smart TV line-up first “and then hopefully all the other devices in the future.”


Both companies declined to reveal the terms of the deal.


LG will keep the WebOS team in Silicon Valley and, for now, will continue to be based out of HP offices, Ahn said.


HP opened its webOS mobile operating system to developers and companies in 2012 after trying to figure out how to recoup its investment in Palm, one of the pioneers of the smartphone industry.


The company had tried to build products based on webOS with the now-defunct TouchPad tablet its flagship product.


HP launched and discontinued the TouchPad in 2010, a little over a month after it hit store shelves with costly fanfare after it saw poor demand for a tablet priced on par with Apple’s dominant iPad.


WebOS is widely viewed as a strong mobile platform, but has been assailed for its paucity of applications, an important consideration while choosing a mobile device.


(Additional reporting By Paul Sandle and Alistair Barr; Editing by Gerald E. McCormick, Tim Dobbyn and M.D. Golan)


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WHO: Slight cancer risk after Japan nuke accident


LONDON (AP) — Two years after Japan's nuclear plant disaster, an international team of experts said Thursday that residents of areas hit by the highest doses of radiation face an increased cancer risk so small it probably won't be detectable.


In fact, experts calculated that increase at about 1 extra percentage point added to a Japanese infant's lifetime cancer risk.


"The additional risk is quite small and will probably be hidden by the noise of other (cancer) risks like people's lifestyle choices and statistical fluctuations," said Richard Wakeford of the University of Manchester, one of the authors of the report. "It's more important not to start smoking than having been in Fukushima."


The report was issued by the World Health Organization, which asked scientists to study the health effects of the disaster in Fukushima, a rural farming region.


On March 11, 2011, an earthquake and tsunami knocked out the Fukushima plant's power and cooling systems, causing meltdowns in three reactors and spewing radiation into the surrounding air, soil and water. The most exposed populations were directly under the plumes of radiation in the most affected communities in Fukushima, which is about 150 miles (240 kilometers) north of Tokyo.


In the report, the highest increases in risk are for people exposed as babies to radiation in the most heavily affected areas. Normally in Japan, the lifetime risk of developing cancer of an organ is about 41 percent for men and 29 percent for women. The new report said that for infants in the most heavily exposed areas, the radiation from Fukushima would add about 1 percentage point to those numbers.


Experts had been particularly worried about a spike in thyroid cancer, since radioactive iodine released in nuclear accidents is absorbed by the thyroid, especially in children. After the Chernobyl disaster, about 6,000 children exposed to radiation later developed thyroid cancer because many drank contaminated milk after the accident.


In Japan, dairy radiation levels were closely monitored, but children are not big milk drinkers there.


The WHO report estimated that women exposed as infants to the most radiation after the Fukushima accident would have a 70 percent higher chance of getting thyroid cancer in their lifetimes. But thyroid cancer is extremely rare and one of the most treatable cancers when caught early. A woman's normal lifetime risk of developing it is about 0.75 percent. That number would rise by 0.5 under the calculated increase for women who got the highest radiation doses as infants.


Wakeford said the increase may be so small it will probably not be observable.


For people beyond the most directly affected areas of Fukushima, Wakeford said the projected cancer risk from the radiation dropped dramatically. "The risks to everyone else were just infinitesimal."


David Brenner of Columbia University in New York, an expert on radiation-induced cancers, said that although the risk to individuals is tiny outside the most contaminated areas, some cancers might still result, at least in theory. But they'd be too rare to be detectable in overall cancer rates, he said.


Brenner said the numerical risk estimates in the WHO report were not surprising. He also said they should be considered imprecise because of the difficulty in determining risk from low doses of radiation. He was not connected with the WHO report.


Some experts said it was surprising that any increase in cancer was even predicted.


"On the basis of the radiation doses people have received, there is no reason to think there would be an increase in cancer in the next 50 years," said Wade Allison, an emeritus professor of physics at Oxford University, who also had no role in developing the new report. "The very small increase in cancers means that it's even less than the risk of crossing the road," he said.


WHO acknowledged in its report that it relied on some assumptions that may have resulted in an overestimate of the radiation dose in the general population.


Gerry Thomas, a professor of molecular pathology at Imperial College London, accused the United Nations health agency of hyping the cancer risk.


"It's understandable that WHO wants to err on the side of caution, but telling the Japanese about a barely significant personal risk may not be helpful," she said.


Thomas said the WHO report used inflated estimates of radiation doses and didn't properly take into account Japan's quick evacuation of people from Fukushima.


"This will fuel fears in Japan that could be more dangerous than the physical effects of radiation," she said, noting that people living under stress have higher rates of heart problems, suicide and mental illness.


In Japan, Norio Kanno, the chief of Iitate village, in one of the regions hardest hit by the disaster, harshly criticized the WHO report on Japanese public television channel NHK, describing it as "totally hypothetical."


Many people who remain in Fukushima still fear long-term health risks from the radiation, and some refuse to let their children play outside or eat locally grown food.


Some restrictions have been lifted on a 12-mile (20-kilometer) zone around the nuclear plant. But large sections of land in the area remain off-limits. Many residents aren't expected to be able to return to their homes for years.


Kanno accused the report's authors of exaggerating the cancer risk and stoking fear among residents.


"I'm enraged," he said.


___


Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo and AP Science Writer Malcolm Ritter in New York contributed to this report.


__


Online:


WHO report: http://bit.ly/YDCXcb


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W.H.O. Sees Low Health Risks From Fukushima Accident





TOKYO — A study published on Thursday by the World Health Organization on the health risks associated with the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant suggested that the risk for certain types of cancers had increased slightly among children exposed to the highest doses of radioactivity, but that there would most likely be no observable increase in cancer rates in the wider Japanese population.




The study, which capped off a comprehensive, two-year analysis of the estimated doses of radioactivity from the 2011 Fukushima accident and their potential risks, also warned that the disaster’s psychological impact could have a consequence on health, and called for continued monitoring and health screenings for populations most exposed to the radiological fallout.


The study’s authors warned, however, that their assessment was based on limited scientific knowledge; much of the scientific data on health effects from radiation is based on acute exposures like those that followed the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and not chronic, low-level exposure. In Japan, some densely populated areas are expected to remain contaminated with relatively low levels of radioactive materials for decades.


“Because scientific understanding of the radiation effects, particularly at low doses, may increase in the future, it is possible that further investigation may change our understanding of the risks of this radiation accident,” the report said.


The Japanese government called the report overly cautious. “It overestimates the risks, and could lead to misunderstandings of the likelihoods of developing cancer,” Japan’s Environment Ministry said in a statement made to the public broadcaster, N.H.K. In particular, the ministry said the study failed to fully take into account government evacuations of residents closest to the plant, assuming many people were exposed for longer than they were.


According to the W.H.O. study, girls exposed as infants to radioactivity in the most contaminated regions of Fukushima Prefecture, where estimated doses ranged from 12 to 25 millisieverts for the first year, faced a 70 percent higher risk of developing thyroid cancer than what would normally be expected. The report pointed out, however, that the normal expected risk of thyroid cancer was just 0.75 percent, and that the additional lifetime risk would raise that to 1.25 percent.


Girls exposed to radioactivity as infants in the most heavily contaminated areas also had a 6 percent higher risk of developing breast cancer, and a 4 percent higher risk of developing cancers that cause tumors. Meanwhile, boys exposed as infants had a 7 percent higher chance of developing leukemia.


The study also said that about a third of the emergency workers who remained to try to stabilize the Fukushima Daiichi plant were estimated to have a slightly increased risk of developing leukemia, thyroid cancer and other types of cancer.


There would most likely be no observable increase in cancer rates for the general population in Fukushima Prefecture outside the most contaminated zones, in the rest of Japan and the world, the report said. It also said that the radiological fallout from the disaster was not expected to cause increases in miscarriages, stillbirths and other physical or mental disabilities.


Still, the study said that the psychological toll of the disaster, including the stresses of evacuation, were harmful to health and should color the Japanese government’s response.


The W.H.O. report “underlines the need for long-term health monitoring of those who are at high risk, along with the provision of necessary medical follow-up and support services,” Dr. Maria P. Neira, the Geneva-based organization’s director for public health and environment, said in a news release. “This will remain an important element in the public health response to the disaster for decades,” she said.


Dr. Angelika Tritscher, acting director for the food safety and zoonoses department at the health agency, said, “In addition to strengthening medical support and services, continued environmental monitoring, in particular of food and water supplies, backed by the enforcement of existing regulations, is required to reduce potential radiation exposure in the future.” .


Matthew L. Wald contributed reporting from Washington.



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HP sells webOS operating system to LG Electronics






SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Hewlett-Packard Co said on Monday it will sell the webOS operating system to South Korea’s LG Electronics Inc, unloading the smartphone software it acquired through a $ 1.2 billion acquisition of Palm in 2010.


LG will use the operating software, used in now-defunct Palm smartphones years ago, for its “smart” or Internet-connected TVs. The Asian electronics company had worked with HP on WebOS before offering to buy it outright.






Under the terms of their agreement, LG acquires the operating software’s source code, associated documentation, engineering talent, various associated websites, and licenses under HP’s intellectual property including patents covering fundamental operating system and user interface technology.


HP will retain the patents and all the technology relating to the cloud service of webOS, HP Chief Operating Officer Bill Veghte said in an interview.


“As we looked at it, we saw a very compelling IP that was very unique in the marketplace,” he said, adding that HP has already had a partnership with LG on webOS before the deal was announced.


“As a result of this collaboration, LG offered to acquire the webOS operating system technology,” Veghte said.


Skott Ahn, President and CTO, LG Electronics, said the company will incorporate the operating system in the Smart TV line-up first “and then hopefully all the other devices in the future.”


Both companies declined to reveal the terms of the deal.


LG will keep the WebOS team in Silicon Valley and, for now, will continue to be based out of HP offices, Ahn said.


HP opened its webOS mobile operating system to developers and companies in 2012 after trying to figure out how to recoup its investment in Palm, one of the pioneers of the smartphone industry.


The company had tried to build products based on webOS with the now-defunct TouchPad tablet its flagship product.


HP launched and discontinued the TouchPad in 2010, a little over a month after it hit store shelves with costly fanfare after it saw poor demand for a tablet priced on par with Apple’s dominant iPad.


WebOS is widely viewed as a strong mobile platform, but has been assailed for its paucity of applications, an important consideration while choosing a mobile device.


(Additional reporting By Paul Sandle and Alistair Barr; Editing by Gerald E. McCormick, Tim Dobbyn and M.D. Golan)


Tech News Headlines – Yahoo! News





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The Jennifer Lawrence Guide to Being Awesome





Wish you were J.Law? Join the club. Here, the rules for living a fabulous life like hers (Disclosure: killer body and Oscar statue not included)








Credit: Sebastian Mlynarski



Updated: Wednesday Feb 27, 2013 | 03:00 PM EST
By: Zoë Ruderman




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Huge study: 5 mental disorders share genetic links


WASHINGTON (AP) — The largest genetic study of mental illnesses to date finds five major disorders may not look much alike but they share some gene-based risks. The surprising discovery comes in the quest to unravel what causes psychiatric disorders and how to better diagnose and treat them.


The disorders — autism, attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder or ADHD, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder and schizophrenia — are considered distinct problems. But findings published online Wednesday suggest they're related in some way.


"These disorders that we thought of as quite different may not have such sharp boundaries," said Dr. Jordan Smoller of Massachusetts General Hospital, one of the lead researchers for the international study appearing in The Lancet.


That has implications for learning how to diagnose mental illnesses with the same precision that physical illnesses are diagnosed, said Dr. Bruce Cuthbert of the National Institute on Mental Health, which funded the research.


Consider: Just because someone has chest pain doesn't mean it's a heart attack; doctors have a variety of tests to find out. But there's no blood test for schizophrenia or other mental illnesses. Instead, doctors rely on symptoms agreed upon by experts. Learning the genetic underpinnings of mental illnesses is part of one day knowing if someone's symptoms really are schizophrenia and not something a bit different.


"If we really want to diagnose and treat people effectively, we have to get to these more fine-grained understandings of what's actually going wrong biologically," Cuthbert explained.


Added Mass General's Smoller: "We are still in the early stages of understanding what are the causes of mental illnesses, so these are clues."


The Psychiatric Genomics Consortium, a collaboration of researchers in 19 countries, analyzed the genomes of more than 61,000 people, some with one of the five disorders and some without. They found four regions of the genetic code where variation was linked to all five disorders.


Of particular interest are disruptions in two specific genes that regulate the flow of calcium in brain cells, key to how neurons signal each other. That suggests that this change in a basic brain function could be one early pathway that leaves someone vulnerable to developing these disorders, depending on what else goes wrong.


For patients and their families, the research offers no immediate benefit. These disorders are thought to be caused by a complex mix of numerous genes and other risk factors that range from exposures in the womb to the experiences of daily life.


"There may be many paths to each of these illnesses," Smoller cautioned.


But the study offers a lead in the hunt for psychiatric treatments, said NIMH's Cuthbert. Drugs that affect calcium channels in other parts of the body are used for such conditions as high blood pressure, and scientists could explore whether they'd be useful for psychiatric disorders as well.


The findings make sense, as there is some overlap in the symptoms of the different disorders, he said. People with schizophrenia can have some of the same social withdrawal that's so characteristic of autism, for example. Nor is it uncommon for people to be affected by more than one psychiatric disorder.


___


Online:


http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(13)60223-8/abstract


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Wall Street gains on Bernanke comments, S&P above 1,500

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stocks rose on Wednesday, with major indexes posting their best daily gains since early January, as Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke remained steadfast in supporting the Fed's stimulus policy and data pointed to economic improvement.


In a second day before a congressional committee, Bernanke defended the Fed's buying of bonds to keep interest rates low to boost growth. The market's jump of more than 1 percent also came on better-than-expected data on business spending plans and the housing market.


Bernanke's remarks helped the market rebound from its worst decline since November and put the S&P 500 index back above 1,500, a closely watched level that has been technical support until recently. The Dow Jones industrial average <.dji> closed at a level not seen since 2007 as it again pulled within striking distance of an all-time high.


Speaking before the House Financial Services Committee, Bernanke downplayed signs of internal divisions at the Fed, saying the policy of quantitative easing, or QE, has the support of a "significant majority" of top central bank officials.


Bernanke removed a headwind from markets arising from concerns the Fed's quantitative easing might end earlier than anticipated. Doubts about the Fed's intentions had broken a seven-week streak of gains by stocks.


"The Fed continues to encourage risk-taking in markets, which is a powerful tool that makes the danger not being long stocks, not in being too long," said Tom Mangan, a money manager at James Investment Research Inc in Xenia, Ohio.


The Dow Jones industrial average <.dji> was up 176.32 points, or 1.27 percent, at 14,076.45. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index <.spx> was up 19.07 points, or 1.27 percent, at 1,516.01. The Nasdaq Composite Index <.ixic> was up 32.61 points, or 1.04 percent, at 3,162.26.


Pending home sales jumped 4.5 percent in January, three times the rate of growth that had been expected. While orders for durable goods fell more than expected in January, non-defense capital goods orders excluding aircraft - a closely watched proxy for business spending plans - showed the biggest gain since December 2011.


About 74 percent of stocks traded on the New York Stock Exchange closed higher while 64 percent of Nasdaq-listed shares closed up.


The S&P turned very slightly higher on the week, recovering from the index's biggest daily drop since November on Monday. That drop came on concerns over Italy's election, as well as over sequestration - U.S. government budget cuts that will take effect starting on Friday if lawmakers fail to reach an agreement on spending and taxes.


The index had climbed 6.3 percent for the year before pulling back on concerns about Fed policy and inconclusive elections in Italy, which rekindled fears of a new euro zone debt crisis.


"While the rally remains intact and there are reasons to be long-term bullish here, there are also reasons to not be surprised if we get a correction," said Mangan, who helps oversee $3.7 billion.


In earnings news, Priceline.com gained 2.6 percent to $695.91 after reporting adjusted earnings that beat expectations. TJX Cos Inc jumped 2.5 percent to $44.75 after the retail chain operator posted higher fourth-quarter results.


The S&P retail index <.spxrt> climbed 1.6 percent.


Target Corp offered a cautious outlook for consumer spending in 2013 following a weak holiday quarter. The stock dipped 1.1 percent to $63.32.


First Solar Inc plunged 14 percent to $27.04 after failing to give a full-year earnings and sales outlook, though it also swung to a quarterly profit.


Groupon Inc plunged 21 percent to $4.70 after the bell after reporting its fourth-quarter results.


With 93 percent of the S&P 500 companies having reported results so far, 69.5 percent beat profit expectations, compared with a 62 percent average since 1994 and 65 percent over the past four quarters, according to Thomson Reuters data.


Fourth-quarter earnings for S&P 500 companies are estimated to have risen 6.2 percent, according to the data, above a 1.9 percent forecast at the start of the earnings season.


About 6.23 billion shares changed hands on the New York Stock Exchange, the Nasdaq and NYSE MKT, slightly below the daily average so far this year of about 6.48 billion shares.


(Editing by Nick Zieminski and Kenneth Barry)



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IHT Rendezvous: Eve Best Returns to the Globe, This Time as a Director

LONDON — The recent press conference announcing the 2013 season at Shakespeare’s Globe on one level seemed like variations on an ongoing theme.

A onetime Falstaff at this address, Roger Allam, is returning to open the season as Prospero in “The Tempest,” directed by Jeremy Herrin, while the perennial favorite, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” will be seen in May in a new staging, this time from the Globe’s artistic director, Dominic Dromgoole. The 2011 Olivier winner Michelle Terry (“Tribes”) will play Titania.

The international season that so galvanized the space for six weeks last spring will return in a greatly pared-down form, and there will be three new plays, including one, “Blue Stockings” by Jessica Swale, that tells of the first female students at Cambridge University.

But it’s the last in the trio of supernaturally charged Shakespeares that promises to break fresh theatrical ground. In what represents her first-ever stab (you’ll forgive the word in context) at directing, the much-laureled actress Eve Best will stage a new production in June of “Macbeth.” Joseph Millson and Samantha Spiro have signed on as the murderous couple at the play’s black, bleak heart.

What prompted one of the most accomplished stage performers of her generation (an actress with an Olivier Award and two Tony nominations) to make the shift? The answer was arrived at via a lengthy phone call to a remote island in Denmark, where Ms. Best, 41, is currently filming “Someone You Love” for the director Lars von Trier’s Zentropa production group. This film’s specific director is Pernille Fischer Christensen.

To hear Ms. Best describe it, she thought her time at the Globe was finished, at least for a while, following a triumphant 2011 production of “Much Ado About Nothing” in which she played Beatrice opposite Charles Edwards’s no less witty and scintillating Benedick. (That staging opened within days of a contrasting commercial production of the same play, with David Tennant and Catherine Tate, and trumped its starrier competitor hands down.)

“I love the Globe so much,” Ms. Best recalled, “and wanted any excuse to spend some time there, having played Beatrice which was just my most favorite part ever. But I did think I was sort of running out of parts to play for a little while until I get into the world of Cleopatra and those kinds of parts” — that’s to say, Shakespeare’s more senior women.

But all that was before Mr. Dromgoole surprised Ms. Best with an offer to take on the directing of the Shakespeare tragedy in which she had made her Globe debut in 2001, opposite Jasper Britton.

“I put myself forward to direct something thinking that they might say yes in a couple of years and that if they did say yes they might start me off with something light or something simpler or more obscure,” she said.

“I was not prepared for them to turn around and say, ‘Yes, all right, and what about “Macbeth?”’ Ms. Best continued, delight evident in her voice. “It took me back. My first response was: ‘Absolutely no way; you must be kidding!’”

The play is particularly challenging at the Globe. Open to the elements, the theater is a tricky fit for a text suffused with darkness, and it can be hard to focus the gathering intensity of the Macbeths’ toxic rise and fall.

“We are in the broad daylight and the open air,” Ms. Best acknowledged, “and that particular circular shape is certainly going to have a significant effect on the kind of production ours is. We can’t set it in the dark with candles, so we just have to embrace what it is that the Globe will give us: I’m very interested in just seeing the play as clearly as we possibly can and focusing on the human relationships within it.”

Mr. Dromgoole for his part said he thought Ms. Best would be able to meet the play head-on without lots of additional mumbo jumbo. “I wanted someone who I thought could just let [“Macbeth”] play itself rather than forcing it down a tunnel of darkness.”

As it happens, Ms. Best has firsthand knowledge of both central roles. In addition to acting Lady Macbeth at the Globe, she participated in workshops of the play in New York with the Scottish actor Alan Cumming in which she played the title role opposite Mr. Cumming’s Lady. Mr. Cumming is soon to open his own solo take on the play on Broadway.

(For those collecting “Macbeths,” the West End is now hosting the film actor James McAvoy in a modern-dress, gory, commendably visceral version. That one, at the Trafalgar Studios, will have finished roughly two months before Ms. Best’s begins.)

“What’s really lovely about this play — and all Shakespeare plays obviously — is that they are so magnificently and eminently flexible,” said Ms. Best, who was sounding in no way deterred by other productions arriving before hers. “They can encompass 6 or 8 or 10 productions all going on at the same time, all equally fascinating, all equally interesting, with all kinds of different approaches.”

Nor was she sounding spooked by a famously hexed play that has on occasion brought disaster in its wake. Whereas theater lore, for instance, often insists that those involved with this text refer to it as “the Scottish play,” Ms. Best was having none of that.

“I’ve been saying it like mad,” she said. “If we’re going to be working on it for two months, life’s too short to be worried.”

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Title Post: gN2WZW ߣ鐨qʭl q$ :}X,MjVư&0ryUŤޏh, %Et]Aխk#8>4b;KuF1dV@BgyWpZ֬>+ ̲כ#Jv@X8Gň(/EwȉPɕ]Uڌ+mkf˲-+oɫة7>v6ume\Uaʹё(NϢ؈co#е/]5eA{zG1�-/F% 2ɮ6,dיcq! F+3jZ|lZ Xo;y-RvOb_?;OTxi-!O2z롸/Mdf’,@@_OoT;o O$Ǩ64`%Y/h93m&(gJc>S:”N5kExD!Kzf1|M+’X{fu6E݌ 3>.`#Ĩ?Sӌ!c8ʴ)|}R8ѥ)Ncݥdx,iA]w0″L)f|. qN{91؜TWiEO:5`c4ȉ21ԵEH”DŽYt; mp=*a܆y’ԙ>AU?a=LypBL,sŖB”C]Ӧj悌fyn0t?)dD,>”䕙s$ s{tir’.L,3Ui՜FeZu 4Mho&1Ja퍾8u>TY%*:dMvm@R/O(xJ竔ךH 37MqXq,yJ2; G6e\p*)w9=3nӗ|d1+i3En?4jfDgh,7 3|!ew_Mv4N4+a8ņlxf{nO[e C Dw9CX&(.KdZtIhn3Ѷz8rC!`\9~EV/ءaIy EI兗ŽA 4Lc_G]-
Url Post: http://www.news.fluser.com/gn2wzw-%df%a3%e9%90%a8q%ca%adl-q-xmjvu0ryut%de%8fh-eta%d5%adk84bkuf1dvbgywpz%d6%ac-%cc%b2%d7%9bjvx8gnew%c8%89p%c9%95u%da%8cmkf%cb%b2-o%c9%ab%d8%a97v6umeua%cd%b4/
Link To Post : gN2WZW ߣ鐨qʭl q$ :}X,MjVư&0ryUŤޏh, %Et]Aխk#8>4b;KuF1dV@BgyWpZ֬>+ ̲כ#Jv@X8Gň(/EwȉPɕ]Uڌ+mkf˲-+oɫة7>v6ume\Uaʹё(NϢ؈co#е/]5eA{zG1�-/F% 2ɮ6,dיcq! F+3jZ|lZ Xo;y-RvOb_?;OTxi-!O2z롸/Mdf’,@@_OoT;o O$Ǩ64`%Y/h93m&(gJc>S:”N5kExD!Kzf1|M+’X{fu6E݌ 3>.`#Ĩ?Sӌ!c8ʴ)|}R8ѥ)Ncݥdx,iA]w0″L)f|. qN{91؜TWiEO:5`c4ȉ21ԵEH”DŽYt; mp=*a܆y’ԙ>AU?a=LypBL,sŖB”C]Ӧj悌fyn0t?)dD,>”䕙s$ s{tir’.L,3Ui՜FeZu 4Mho&1Ja퍾8u>TY%*:dMvm@R/O(xJ竔ךH 37MqXq,yJ2; G6e\p*)w9=3nӗ|d1+i3En?4jfDgh,7 3|!ew_Mv4N4+a8ņlxf{nO[e C Dw9CX&(.KdZtIhn3Ѷz8rC!`\9~EV/ءaIy EI兗ŽA 4Lc_G]-
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