Category: People

{{Former Ford Motor Co executive William Clay Ford Sr., the last surviving grandchild of the automaker’s founder, Henry Ford, and the longtime owner of the Detroit Lions football team, died on Sunday at age 88, the company said.}}

Ford, who spent many of his 57 years at Ford focusing on automobile design, died of pneumonia at his home in the Detroit suburb Grosse Pointe Shores.

Ford was the father of William Clay Ford Jr., the automaker’s current executive chairman. He was director emeritus of the company at the time of his death.

He joined the automaker’s sales and advertising staff after graduating from Yale in 1949 and was named a company vice president in 1953.

Ford’s notable executive positions included vice president of product design, head of the former Continental Division and member of the Office of the Chief Executive.

His board positions included vice chairman, chairman of the Executive Committee and chairman of the Finance Committee.

He was a Ford director from 1948 until his retirement in 2005 – more than half the automaker’s 110-year history. Forbes magazine estimated his fortune at $1.35 billion.

“My father was a great business leader and humanitarian who dedicated his life to the company and the community,” William Jr. said in a statement released by Ford.

Nick Scheele, a former Ford Motor president and former chief executive of Jaguar Cars, said William Sr. was one of the key supporters of Ford’s 1990 purchase of Jaguar, the British sports carmaker, and appreciated fine European design.

“You could see it in his Continental Mark II,” Scheele said. “He had a great eye for styling.”

{{HEIRS TO EDSEL}}

Ford and his brother Henry II were sons of Edsel Ford, whose father founded the storied automaker.

Henry II outshone his younger brother in his career at the company. Known as “HF2,” and “Hank the Deuce,” he was Ford’s chairman and chief executive officer before his death in 1987.

William Clay inherited Edsel’s love of design and it showed in his stewardship of the Continental Mark II, a beautiful but short-lived Ford luxury car in the mid-1950s.

Bill Chapin, president of the Detroit-based Automotive Hall of Fame and longtime friend of the Ford family, said Ford would be remembered for the Mark II, which was inspired in part by his father Edsel’s personal 1939 Lincoln Continental.

Considered a postwar classic of automotive design, the Continental Mark II “was not a financial success, but it helped build Ford’s image and reputation,” Chapin said.

Ford bought the Lions in 1963 for a reported $4.5 million and was the team’s chairman until his death.

In recent years, the club has been managed by his son Bill Jr. The Lions never won a National Football League championship under his ownership; its last NFL crown came in 1957.

Forbes last year valued the Lions franchise at $900 million.

On the team’s website on Sunday, Lions President Tom Lewand said: “No owner loved his team more than Mr. Ford loved the Lions.”

Ford shunned the spotlight, but in recent years talked about his grandfather giving him his first driving lesson at age 10 – they were going 70 miles per hour with young William in Henry’s lap when a policeman stopped them.

Ford took his first airplane ride with celebrated aviator Charles Lindbergh at the controls of a Ford Tri-Motor and enlisted in the Naval Air Corps during World War Two. He was taking flight training at the time of his discharge in 1945.

He would have marked his 89th birthday on Friday.

His survivors include his wife of 66 years, Martha Firestone Ford, granddaughter of Harvey Firestone. Harvey Firestone was the founder of the Firestone tire company and a good friend of the first Henry Ford.

In addition to his wife and William Jr., Ford is survived by his daughters Martha Ford Morse, Sheila Ford Hamp and Elizabeth Ford Kontulis; 14 grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

At the 2003 shareholder meeting, marking the automaker’s centennial, Ford said: “We have tremendous pride in the Ford name … We have a passion for cars. And we also have a great desire to see the Ford name in the forefront of world transportation.”

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{{At 07:15 on a dusty street corner in Rawalpindi, among the dozen rickety minibuses jostling for passengers, a brand-new, bright pink vehicle stands out.}}

Emblazoned with the words “Ladies Transport”, this is Pakistan’s first commuter bus solely for women, aimed at those sick of wandering hands and unwanted attention on regular services.

Some see it as a welcome respite, but detractors warn it is reinforcing gender segregation in a highly patriarchal and often misogynistic country.

Sat on one of the minibus’s four banquette seats, Azra Kamal, who works at an electronics shop, welcomes the new project, named “Tabeer” – “fulfilment of a dream” in Urdu.

Her face half-hidden behind a black veil, she tells of obscene comments and other inappropriate gestures she suffered on mixed transport.

“I have a long journey to work and when I get there it’s often only me left on board. Sometimes the driver will take advantage to give me his phone number and ask for mine,” she said during the 20-odd kilometre ride to her destination in the capital Islamabad.

Others on board described being touched by drivers, conductors and male passengers.

To add to this harassment, the tiny minibuses that ply the roads of the Pakistani capital and its twin city Rawalpindi often have only a few seats, sometimes with only one out of a dozen reserved for women.

“I used to work in a hospital. Often there would be no space on the bus and I would get told off for being late,” said Sana.

Today the 21-year-old proudly wears a pink tunic, the uniform of her job as conductor on the women’s bus, as she collects the 30-rupee fare.

{{ Mobile segregation?}}

But the new service has not impressed everyone in a country where the forces of conservatism are seen to be growing in strength.

In a blog post for one of Pakistan’s leading English-language newspapers, journalist Erum Shaikh called the project a “complete sham”.

“The mere fact that the authorities thought it appropriate to introduce something like this should actually offend women and yet we sit there smile, look pretty and let the big, tough, muscular men build walls around us to ‘protect’ us,” she wrote.

On board the bus, bank worker Misbah agrees.

“I really appreciate the service but we must tackle the root of the problem and make people take harassment seriously,” she said.

But the man behind the project, Ali Naqi Hamdani, says it is empowering women in a society where many are not permitted to leave the house without male accompaniment.

“The women here are willing to go out to work, they’re willing to go out for education purposes but they don’t have such a conducive situation where they can feel secure in public transport,” he said.

“So it was very important that you provide them an environment where they step out of their homes, they feel secure before they reach their universities or their offices so they are encouraged to come out.”

The Tabeer project has been running for three weeks, with 12 vehicles in the capital, and is hoping to expand to other cities if there is enough demand.

Sana is already dreaming of moving on to drive the bus – for a shortage of female drivers means that currently the women-only bus has a man behind the wheel.

– AFP

{{Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega appeared in public on Monday after a 10-day absence which had led to rumours about his health.}}

Mr Ortega, 68, greeted newly appointed Nicaraguan Cardinal Leopoldo Brenes at the airport in the capital, Managua.

Referring to the rumours, he told the cardinal he had “carried out the miracle of resurrecting me because a lot people thought I was dead”.

Mr Ortega, a former Sandinista rebel, is serving his third term in office.

{{Rumour mill}}

There had been feverish speculation about his state of health after he began missing official ceremonies after 21 February.

On 26 February, he had been expected to attend an event commemorating the 1978 indigenous uprising in Monimbo, in which his brother was killed.

The following day, Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa cancelled a planned trip to Nicaragua, citing scheduling problems on the side of the Nicaraguan government.

Some rumours circulated on social media saying Mr Ortega had health problems and was receiving treatment in Cuba, while others said he had died days previously on the Communist-run island.

Mr Ortega led a successful revolution against the dictatorship of the Somoza family, who ruled Nicaragua for four decades.

He headed the revolutionary committee that led the country until 1984, after which he was elected president for the 1985-1990 term.

His Sandinista party lost the 1990 elections but Mr Ortega was re-elected in January 2007.

In 2011 he won another term and is expected to run for re-election in 2016 after the National Assembly passed a bill scrapping limits to the number of terms presidents can serve.

The opposition say the changes are a threat to democracy in the impoverished Central American nation.

{wirestory}

{{The former head of a private preparatory school in Miami, Florida is out an $80,000 discrimination settlement after his daughter boasted about it on Facebook.}}

Patrick Snay, 69 — the former head of Guillver Preparatory School — filed an age discrimination complaint when his 2010-11 contract wasn’t renewed.

In November 2011, the school and Snay came to an agreement in which Snay would be paid $10,000 in back pay, and an $80,000 settlement. Gulliver Schools also agreed to cut Snay’s attorneys a check for $60,000.

But before the ink could dry on the deal, Snay’s daughter took to Facebook, boasting, “Mama and Papa Snay won the case against Gulliver. Gulliver is now officially paying for my vacation to Europe this summer. SUCK IT.”

Snay’s daughter blasted the message to her 1,200 Facebook followers, which included many current and former Gulliver students. Word of the post spread like wildfire back to school officials.

Within a few days, Gulliver Schools sent a letter to Snay’s attorneys stating that Snay had broken a confidentiality agreement and that he would not be receiving the $80,000 settlement.

The agreement stated that neither Snay nor his wife could speak about the settlement to anyone except for his attorneys and other professional advisers.
Snay filed a motion to enforce the settlement and won in a Circuit Court ruling. The school appealed.

A hearing was held to determine if his daughter’s knowledge of the settlement and her Facebook post had violated the confidentiality agreement.

“What happened is that after settlement, my wife and I went in the parking lot, and we had to make some decisions on what we were going to tell my daughter. Because it’s very important to understand that she was an intricate part of what was happening.

“She was retaliated against at Gulliver. So she knew we were going to some sort of mediation. She was very concerned about it. Because of what happened at Gulliver, she had quite a few psychological scars which forced me to put her into therapy.

“So there was a period of time that there was an unresolved enclosure for my wife and me. It was very important with her. We understood the confidentiality. So we knew what the restrictions were, yet we needed to tell her something,” Snay explained in court documents.

Last week, the Third District Court of Appeal for the State of Florida agreed that Snay had, in fact, violated confidentiality and reversed the Circuit Court ruling.

It wrote: “Snay violated the agreement by doing exactly what he had promised not to do.

His daughter then did precisely what the confidentiality agreement was designed to prevent, advertising to the Gulliver community that Snay had been successful in his age discrimination and retaliation case against the school.

“Based on the clear and unambiguous language of the parties’ agreement and Snay’s testimony confirming his breach of its terms, we reverse the order entered below granting the Snays’ motion to enforce the agreement.”

Snay is now the headmaster at Riviera Preparatory School in Coral Gables, Florida.

CNN