Partnerships to bring organic market to Beecher

BEECHER, Mich. -- An urban farmer wants to bring a farm-fresh market to Beecher to make up for the loss of two grocery stores.

Jacky King tells The Flint Journal (http://bit.ly/1pS4PKW ) that something needs to be done to fill residents' need for food with the community losing Kroger and IGA stores. So the owner of Harvesting Earth Educational Farm partnered with Kettering University and Democratic State Rep. Phil Phelps of Flushing to bring an organic market to the area.

Phelps has launched an online crowd funding campaign to raise $25,000 to buy a building for the market.

King will run the daily operations of what will be called the Harvesting Earth Organic Market. He hopes to open in by next spring in Beecher.

This is an AP Member Exchange shared by The Flint Journal.

Total power blackout hits Lebanon

BEIRUT: Lebanon has been in a total blackout since 9 a.m. Monday, due to a malfunction in one of the power plants that hit the electricity network, a top executive at Electricite du Liban told The Daily Star.

The executive said the blackout was due to a failure at the Zahrani power plant, which is not uncommon for the country with one of the world's worst electricity systems.

“It happens every year,” the executive said, “but this time it’s different, because the control room that handles electricity flow was moved from the headquarters to the Jumhour facility.”

Moving the central control room to another location has, he said, made the task of restoring power more difficult.

“All the equipment is at the headquarters, which is blocked by the contract workers,” he said, explaining that only the technology that was movable, and not even all of that, was transported three weeks ago to the other facility.

While Lebanon has been experiencing intensive rationing for weeks, with EDL warning against a possible blackout if contract workers continue their occupation, Monday’s incident was sudden and unexpected.

Usually, Lebanon’s electricity output is less than 1,600 megawatts, while its electricity needs are over 2,400 megawatts. As a result, all areas in Lebanon are subject to a degree of electricity rationing.

However, two weeks ago, a malfunction emerged in the electricity network near UNESCO that increased the rationing in Beirut from 3 hours a day to nearly 14.

McNeese plans career fair Sept. 29

LAKE CHARLES, La. -- McNeese State University is planning a career fair Sept. 29 for students in all majors and alumni of the university.

The event will be held from 10 a.m.-2 p.m. in the Recreational Complex on the Lake Charles campus.

The university says more than 85 employers will participate. A list of companies is posted online at http://bit.ly/1sW4XZG.

More information on the career fair is available by calling McNeese Career and Student Development Services at 337-475-5612.

Dream Team, Barcelona Games continue to impact NBA

Officially, it was the U.S. Olympic team, together for just a few weeks.

To the basketball world, it was the Dream Team, and its gold-medal run changed hoops forever.

An American sport was transformed into a global phenomenon when Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird and the rest of the NBA's best arrived in Barcelona for the 1992 Olympics. They sparked an interest in basketball that continues to impact the NBA —on and off the court.

The league is now a $5.5 billion industry and arguably the most popular international sport behind soccer.

"I think basketball was about to explode and the dynamite stick to explode it was the Dream Team," said U.S. coach Mike Krzyzewski, an assistant on that team.

Springfield, Massachusetts, is basketball's birthplace. But the modern NBA game was born in Barcelona.

Major league baseball and the NFL would like to emulate the NBA's international success. Since 1992, the league has played about 150 international basketball games and its contests been televised in more than 200 countries and territories.

With Spain hosting the Basketball World Cup the last three weeks— capped off with the U.S. beating Serbia 129-92 in Sunday's gold-medal game — here's a look back at the Barcelona Games and how the sport is changing:

THE PLAYERS

When Jerry Colangelo went to sign the first players from behind the Iron Curtain, he didn't do a Pat Riley and drop a couple of championship rings on the table to woo Georgi Glushkov.

It was the mid-1980s, and the former Phoenix owner had been told about the Bulgarian big man who had done a good job against Hall of Fame center Arvydas Sabonis in a European tournament. So Colangelo and a Suns assistant traveled to Sofia to negotiate a contract.

Colangelo walked into a room at the Office of Sports Ministry to find six Bulgarians, some shot glasses and a Coke as a chaser.

"We talked a few hours, made a deal where the government was getting most of the money and the player getting a small piece of it," Colangelo said.

While the 6-foot-8 Glushkov's career was short-lived — he's now the president of Bulgaria's basketball federation — it's much easier finding international prospects with NBA scouts packing under-19 and under-18 tournaments around the globe.

The 1992 Olympics "just all kind of changed everything," said Colangelo, chairman of USA Basketball. "It opened the door for a lot of people and then people started to jump into it."

People including eventual NBA MVPs, league champions, No. 1 draft picks — players like Dirk Nowitzki, Pau Gasol and Tony Parker.

But Jordi Villacampa, president of the Spanish basketball club Joventut Badalona, cautions that just like American college kids, some international players bolt to the NBA too early.

"For me it is important that players, before going to the NBA, master the game and play very well and for several years growing in the European leagues, in our case, in the ACB," said Villacampa, who played for Spain at the Barcelona Games and is the Spanish league's No. 2 scorer. "Perhaps the timing (of some players) hasn't been the best to get the most out of their talent."

Still, more than 90 international players began last season on NBA rosters

INTERNATONAL INFLUENCE

As beautiful as the Dream Team made the game look, basketball in the NBA was getting pretty ugly.

The Detroit Pistons of Chuck Daly, who coached the Dream Team, were known as the "Bad Boys," a rough unit that played hard and fouled harder in winning consecutive NBA titles. Pat Riley's Knicks of the early and mid-1990s would play the same way, and offensive creativity had given way to post-ups and isolation play.

Enter the international influence.

Rather than pound the ball inside, they spread the floor and put good-shooting big men on the perimeter.

"Now we've gone more that way, because there aren't that many good big post players to start out with," said Rod Thorn, NBA president of operations. "We didn't have what is called a stretch 4 until we started getting all these kids from Europe. The Nowitzkis of the world in particular, guys who could shoot the ball out on the court and were big, and now everybody looks for a stretch 4."

Nowhere is the change more evident than with the Spurs.

Their first title in 1999 was won the old way, throwing it into David Robinson and Tim Duncan, and it wasn't much fun to watch. But the basketball they played to win the title in June didn't look like that.

This year's collection of Spurs looked like, well, the Dream Team — but with a roster comprised of nine players born outside the U.S.

GLOBAL MARKETING

The NBA was the first U.S. pro league to play regular-season games outside North America when Phoenix and Utah met in Japan in 1990. But it wasn't until after the Dream Team that interest there really took off.

"The finals in '93 between Phoenix and the Bulls, I think we probably had like 20 (Japanese) media, but '92 there were only me and the cameraman between the Bulls and Blazers," journalist Yoko Miyaji said.

The NBA took notice.

Building in Asia became a priority, particularly in China, where an NBA China division was launched and where the league estimated there were 300 million people playing basketball at the time of the 2008 Olympics. Shanghai and Beijing, with state of the art arenas that would make many U.S. cities envious, have become regular stops on the preseason schedule, and the Philippines joined them last year with its own sparkling facility.

Eric Doust, vice president of global marketing at SQ1 Agency, believes the NBA has done as well as any league growing internationally, in part because of its diverse rosters.

"They've got so many international players now, and you can see that from Spain in the FIBA World Cup," Doust said. "So that's where I think they gain a lot of leverage as well versus other leagues. ... That's where their growth is going to come from as well."

Doust said there were 16 billion page views and more than 9 billion video views on NBA.com China over a three-year period.

Now it's on to India and Africa, where the league will stage an exhibition game next summer.

LeBron James' first game against Miami will come in none other than Brazil, hosting another preseason game as the league ramps up its marketing efforts before the 2016 Olympics.

Barcelona showed just how big NBA players were — Thorn and Krzyzewski say players on the Dream Team "were like the Beatles" — and now the sport is bigger than ever.

"I would say today maybe there are a couple of soccer players that might be as popular as LeBron James around the world, maybe," Thorn said, "but he's right in there with anybody."

Along with the NBA.

Pilots at Germany's Lufthansa to strike on Tuesday

BERLIN -- A union representing Lufthansa's pilots says they will walk off the job at Frankfurt airport for eight hours on Tuesday, preventing departures by Germany's biggest airline from its busiest airport.

The Vereinigung Cockpit union said Monday that pilots on international long-distance flights from Frankfurt will walk out from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. (0700 to 1500 GMT). The work stoppage follows several strikes in the past three weeks by Lufthansa pilots in Munich and pilots at Lufthansa's Germanwings subsidiary.

The two sides are locked in a dispute over the pilots' demand that Lufthansa keep paying a transition payment for those wanting to retire early. The airline, which faces tough competition from European budget airlines and major Gulf airlines, wants to cut those payments.

New study on 'income inequality' looks at Mass.

BOSTON -- Advocates for changing Massachusetts' personal income tax may have new fuel for their campaign, as a new national study suggests a more progressive income tax that requires wealthier individuals to pay higher tax rates could help states deal with revenue problems.

Standard & Poor's, in a study released Monday, found that the improving fortunes of the nation's top earners corresponds with a decades-long slowdown in tax revenue growth among states. The rating agency says states adopting more progressive, or graduated, income tax rates could be more insulated from the problem, though it stops short of endorsing outright such policy changes.

"In the setting of rising income inequality, the move toward more progressive tax rates may help states generate faster tax revenue growth than would flatter tax regimes," the report concludes.

State Rep. Jay Kaufman, a Lexington Democrat that chairs the legislature's Revenue Committee, says he's not surprised by the findings. He hopes the report helps bolster efforts to address Bay State taxes.

"It's a conversation whose time has come," he said. "The problems that we've got — both with wealth inequality and our regressive tax system — are worth addressing. Our failure to address them would continue the unfairness of the system and the challenges that we have with revenue."

The Tax Fairness Commission, a legislative panel Kaufman co-chaired earlier this year, found that Massachusetts' overall tax system, including state income and sales taxes and local property taxes, places a greater burden on middle and low-income taxpayers than those with higher income. Among that bipartisan commission's recommendations: discarding Massachusetts' flat income tax rate in favor of a graduated tax rate.

Of the 43 states that have a personal income tax, Massachusetts is one of just seven that still imposes a flat rate, which is currently 5.2 percent. Changing the tax's structure, which would require voter approval of a constitutional amendment, has faced stiff opposition over the years.

Michael Widmer, a member of the Tax Fairness Commission who opposed the recommendation, says such an overhaul would only compound income inequality by discouraging business investment.

The president of the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation, a business-backed research group, he suggested more "modest" changes to the tax code, such as raising the value of certain tax exemptions for individuals and married couples. "That goes directly to the spending power of that person on the lower end that's living in a high cost state and trying to make ends meet," Widmer said.

But Noah Berger, president of the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center, a left-leaning budget research group, argues that the state has enacted a series of tax changes over the last 15 years or so that have primarily benefited the wealthy, including reductions in the overall income tax rate and the tax rate on investment income.

The result, he says, is that the lowest income households — those on living less than $21,000 a year — are paying 9.5 percent of their income toward state and local taxes while those in the top 1 percent — those earning about $700,000 or more — are paying just 6 percent.

"Our state tax system has become more conducive to supporting inequality," Berger said. "It taxes higher income people at lower rates than lower income people. That exacerbates the problem."

S&P's report cautioned that a greater dependence on top earners for income tax revenue makes it harder for state policymakers to predict what they'll find in their coffers, since much of their income comes from investments in the sometimes volatile stock market. The agency report closes with this caveat: "tax revenue growth slows as income inequality rises, regardless of a states' tax structure ... changes to state fiscal policy alone won't likely fix what's wrong."

Venezuela's newest shortage: breast implants

CARACAS, Venezuela -- Venezuela's chronic shortages have begun to encroach on a cultural cornerstone: the boob job.

Beauty-obsessed Venezuelans face a scarcity of brand-name breast implants, and women are so desperate that they and their doctors are turning to devices that are the wrong size or made in China, with less rigorous quality standards.

Venezuelans once had easy access to implants approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. But doctors say they are now all-but impossible to find because restrictive currency controls have deprived local businesses of the cash to import foreign goods. It may not be the gravest shortfall facing the socialist South American country, but surgeons say the issue cuts to the psyche of the image-conscious Venezuelan woman.

"The women are complaining," said Ramon Zapata, president of the Society of Plastic Surgeons. "Venezuelan women are very concerned with their self-esteem."

Venezuela is thought to have one of the world's highest plastic surgery rates, and the breast implant is the seminal procedure. Doctors performed 85,000 implants here last year, according to the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery. Only the U.S., Brazil, Mexico and Germany — all with significantly larger populations — saw more procedures.

There are no official statistics on how many Venezuelans are walking around with enhanced busts. But a stroll down any Caracas street reveals that the augmentations are at least more conspicuous here than in other surgery-loving places. Even the mannequins look they've gone under the knife.

Until recently, women could enter raffles for implants held by pharmacies, workplaces and even politicians on the campaign trail. During this spring's anti-government street demonstrations, the occasional sign protesting the rising price of breast implants mixed in with posters railing against food shortages and currency devaluation.

"It's a culture of 'I want to be more beautiful than you.' That's why even people who live in the slums get implants," surgeon Daniel Slobodianik said, fiddling with an FDA-approved pouch of saline solution no longer on sale here.

Slobodianik used to perform several breast implants each week, but now performs closer to two a month. He says women call his office every day asking if he the implant size they're looking for. When they can't find it, they choose a second-best option, almost always a size up.

No one is giving the frustrated women much sympathy, especially not the government. The consumerism of plastic surgery has always jibed awkwardly with the rhetoric of socialist revolution. The late President Hugo Chavez called the country's plastic surgery fixation "monstrous," and railed against the practice of giving implants to girls on their 15th birthdays.

On social media, some Venezuelans take a judgmental tone, saying the panic over implants shows the real shortage here is values. Others joke that the scarcity will force Venezuelan women to start developing their personalities, using a Twitter hashtag that riffs on the Colombian telenovela "Sin Tetas, No Hay Paraiso" ("Without Boobs, There's No Paradise").

In the absence of U.S. brands, plastic surgery has become an area dominated by Venezuela's chief trading partner, China, whose goods are often given priority for import over those from other countries. They're also a lot cheaper. While a pair of implants approved by European regulators can cost as much as $600 — about the same as the annual minimum wage here — the Chinese equivalent goes for a third of that. Some Venezuelan doctors refuse to use the Chinese devices, which are not subjected to random government inspections or clinical studies.

"I'm not saying they're not safe, but I've removed more than a few ruptured Chinese implants. I just don't feel comfortable with them," Slobodianik said.

April Lee, an analyst at the Massachusetts-based health care research company Decision Resources Group, said the medical community frowns on the use of non-FDA-approved implants.

Unable to find the devices in doctors' offices, some women are turning to the Venezuelan equivalent of the bartering website Craigslist, where sellers post pictures of black market implants of unknown origin sitting in sealed packages on kitchen tables, complete with stories of spouses who changed their minds and reassurances that the pouches remain sterile.

It's not just women looking for a more attention-getting silhouette who are struggling; some patients are in urgent medical need. Lisette Arroyo, 46, waited two months this summer to get her ruptured implants replaced, dealing with intense itching while waiting for new devices to arrive from France. She had to buy them directly from the manufacturer before they could be shipped, spending the entire $300 in foreign currency the government permits Venezuelans annually. The surgery can cost another $800.

"This country is not what it used to be," she said earlier this month as awaited surgery in a blue paper gown.

For the doctors trying to manage their patients' expectations, the shortages are no less grave than Venezuela's other hardships. Dr. Miguel Angel Useche's, who performed Arroyo's delayed surgery, says women sometimes save for years for their operations, and to be told they must wait longer can be unbearable.

"Women call me up saying: 'I've made so many sacrifices for this. How can you not help me?'" he said.