The James Logan Courier

By Alex Pham
Los Angeles Times (MCT)

LOS ANGELES — Sweden's Spotify digital music service arrived in the U.S. with its catalog of 15 million songs and an operation that is primed to shake up the world's largest and most lucrative music market.

With 10 million registered users in Europe, Spotify offers limited hours of music for free or streams unlimited songs for a small fee to computers and mobile phones. That model has analysts wondering if its U.S. debut Thursday spells the beginning of the end for the 99-cent download market dominated by Apple Inc.'s iTunes store.

"The download business is basically over," said Aram Sinnreich, an assistant media professor at Rutgers University.

Faiza Elmasry, VOA News

Business advice is available from many sources - books, workshops, the Internet but - the Beatles?

Authors George Cassidy and Richard Courtney believe the Fab Four followed a classic business model on their way to success. For example, Cassidy says, in any enterprise, you have to be careful about picking your business partners. That’s what young John Lennon and Paul McCartney did when they started a band in Liverpool.

“They were fortunate in that they had an enormous personal charm; their personalities seemed to work together well. They were also extremely gifted in several areas. You have great singers and you have great song writers and great performers.”

Once they found each other, they set a goal.

By Larry Gordon
Los Angeles Times (MCT)

LOS ANGELES — The University of California at San Diego faced a losing battle recently when it tried to hang on to three star scientists being wooed by Rice University for cutting-edge cancer research. The recruiting package from the private Houston university included 40 percent pay raises, new labs and a healthy flow of research money from a Texas state bond fund.

Another factor, unrelated to Rice, helped close the deal: The professors' sense that declining state funding for the University of California makes it a good time to pack their bags.

"What's happening now is that the UC and most of the public schools are getting in a much weaker position to play this game," said physicist Jose Onuchic, who has taught at UC San Diego for 22 years but will head to Texas this month, along with fellow physicist Herbert Levine and biochemist Peter Wolynes.

By Maeve Reston and Seema Mehta
Los Angeles Times (MCT)

AMHERST, N.H. — In California and most other states, a Fourth of July parade may be just a parade. But here in New Hampshire and Iowa, the states that hold the first presidential contests, politicians with higher aspirations know parades are serious business.

More than an hour before Amherst's parade, volunteers for GOP presidential rivals Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman gathered at the route, ready to rumble.

Huntsman, a presidential campaign newcomer, had followed the parade organizer's rules and capped his group at 30 volunteers — leaving them stretched thinly across the parade route. He was trailed by a Jeep.

But with one presidential run under its belt, Romney's campaign left nothing to chance, ignoring the rules to marshal more than 130 blue-shirted volunteers. A massive float bearing the state seal trailed the candidate.

When it came to impressing voters Monday, no detail was too small — which parade the candidates would attend, their choice of clothing, their skill at skirting Amherst's candy-tossing ban (Romney's camp put small boys on scooters to ride the route offering sweets from blue buckets).

By Steven Zeitchik
Los Angeles Times (MCT)

LOS ANGELES — "The Undefeated," Stephen Bannon's documentary about the emergence of Sarah Palin on the national political scene, aims to show what the filmmaker calls a "pop-culture beat-down" of the former Alaska governor.

Although the film has been tagged with only a PG-13 rating for "brief strong language" by the Motion Picture Assn. of America, Bannon said he has created an explicit cut of the film that demonstrates that beat-down in more graphic terms. "I took out all sorts of violence and masked the vulgarity for the theatrical release because I wanted families to be able to see the film," Bannon said Wednesday.

In the cut that will be shown in AMC movie theaters beginning July 15, Madonna, Louis C.K. and Pamela Anderson are among those shown in public appearances to be using epithets about the former vice presidential candidate.