Offshore Bank Account Opening

Who did you have in mind when you founded the Bridgeman Art Library – art venues or consumers?I dreamt up the Bridgeman Art Library while editing an art publication and becoming increasingly aware of the problems of sourcing good quality images at short notice, or indeed at even a modicum of notice.Museums and art collections did not have the rights and reproduction departments which are now regarded as the norm, nor were they conscious of the income they could potentially generate by not having efficient operations in this area. As I knew from personal experience, it was very hard for publishers to source images quickly and before the days of the internet, to even know what to source and from where!Since we returned 50% of any money we made to museums and because our clients were very grateful for any help they could be given in researching pictures, it was a win-win situation for both provider and consumer.
How important is your background in art history and hiring staff with that same expertise?The library has always been staffed by history of art graduates and I regard it as very important that staff members should be both thoroughly well informed on the subject as well as having a passion for art. Unfortunately there are far more history of art graduates than there are jobs so we are extremely fortunate in having a number of graduates who are very highly qualified and have first class degrees.In the early days of the library, there was no internet. General Information, Forward-Looking Statements and Risk Factors.Now, even the best qualified have Google and Wikipedia to fall back on, which is a great boon, particularly for our cataloguing department.
How do you balance the aim of widening access to art with the challenges of copyright and ownership?We provide meticulous information on copyright and ownership to our clients and we ensure they know from the outset if copyright clearance is required and if there is an extra fee to pay. It’s worth remembering that copyright exists for only seventy years after the death of the creator, so by far the largest tranche of art images lie in the public domain.Getty wanted to buy your business – why did you keep it in the family and what have you gained from doing so?My enjoyment in owning and running the library, and watching its successful development, far outweighed the attraction of any financial windfall that would have come from a sale to Getty. If I had sold and stayed on, I would have lost my autonomy and the chance to hand over something to the next generation that had the possibility of enhancing their lives as much as it has mine.

General Information, Forward-Looking Statements and Risk Factors and Non-GAAP Financial Measures: Universal Health Services, Inc. (“UHS”) is one of the nation’s largest hospital companies, operating acute care and behavioral health hospitals and ambulatory centers nationwide and in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. It acts as the advisor to Universal Health Realty Income Trust, a real estate investment trust.This press release contains forward-looking statements based on current management expectations. Numerous factors, including those disclosed herein, those related to healthcare industry trends and those detailed in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (as set forth in Item 1A-Risk Factors and in Item 7-Forward-Looking Statements and Risk Factors in our Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2011), may cause the results to differ materially from those anticipated in the forward-looking statements.
Many of the factors that will determine our future results are beyond our capability to control or predict. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties and therefore actual results may differ materially. Readers should not place undue reliance on such forward-looking statements which reflect management’s view only as of the date hereof. We undertake no obligation to revise or update any forward-looking statements, or to make any other forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.
During the first quarter of 2012, we adopted the Financial Accounting Standards Board’s Accounting Standards Update No. 2011-07, “Health Care Entities (Topic 954): Presentation and Disclosure of Patient Service Revenue, Provision for Bad Debts, and the Allowance for Doubtful Accounts for Certain Health Care Entities,” which required health care entities to change the presentation in their statement of operations by reclassifying the provision for bad debts associated with patient service revenue from an operating expense to a deduction from patient service revenue (net of contractual allowances and discounts). As a result, the provision for doubtful accounts for our acute care and behavioral health care facilities is reflected as a deduction for net revenues in the accompanying consolidated statements of income for the three-month periods ended March 31, 2012 and 2011. The adoption of this standard had no impact on our financial position or results of operations.

It sounds like the start of a science fiction or disaster movie, or both. An enormously rich corporation plans to start “lassoing” asteroids near the Earth, taking them to the moon to be mined and broken up, and returning the most valuable metals – including gold, platinum and rhodium – back to our planet for use in batteries and other products.But this is real: on Tuesday, Planetary Resources, a company based in Seattle with billionaires including former US presidential candidate Ross Perot and Google’s Eric Schmidt and Larry Page among its investors, said it plans to mine “near Earth asteroids” within 10 years.
The scheme will cost billions of dollars and could take decades to come to fruition, say independent experts – but they also say that it offers an amazing chance for humans to move permanently beyond the boundaries of Earth.”When you think about it, there’s all the raw energy you need from the sun, and 99.9999% of all the material in the solar system isn’t on Earth,” said Dr Ian Crawford, a planetary scientist at Birkbeck College, London.The company, formed by space entrepreneurs Peter Diamandis and Eric Anderson along with Nasa scientists and astronauts Chris Lewicki and Tom Jones, unveiled the plans at Seattle’s Museum of Flight.
Their scheme would, they said, “overlay two critical sectors – space exploration and natural resources – to add trillions of dollars to the global GDP”.Planetary Resources is to begin by sending out robot spacecraft costing about $10m (￡6.2m) each, carrying telescopes which would identify promising asteroids made of metals.Those would then be lassoed by another unmanned craft and very slowly brought into a moon orbit for automated mining.
“This is the stuff of science fiction, but like in so many other areas of science fiction, it’s possible to begin the process of making them reality,” said Jones.The idea is off-planet, but not out of this world, said John Zarnecki, professor of space sciences at the Open University. “There’s nothing in the ideas they’re laying out that requires a quantum leap in technology. They’re just talking about lumps of rock. The first thing you would ask, though, is: where’s the business case?”The announcement followed the publication earlier this month of a Nasa study saying that an asteroid 7 metres in diameter and weighing 500 tonnes could contain as much gold, platinum and rare earth metals – such as rhodium – as is mined on Earth in a single year.

A large national company active in North Dakota’s booming petroleum industry has stepped into Kern County’s crowded oil services business with the purchase of a family-run operation with offices in Bakersfield and Colorado.The Phoenix-based buyer, privately held Frontier Energy Group LLC, provides a variety of oil field services from 16 locations in North Dakota, Colorado, Wyoming, Nebraska, Montana and Utah. Its purchase of Spicer Wireline Service Inc. gives Frontier a toehold in California.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Neither company could be reached for comment Tuesday.Frontier said in a news release Tuesday that it plans to hire additional employees in Kern County and expand its menu of services and its geographical reach within a year. It noted that Spicer’s South Union Avenue headquarters “will be Frontier’s first location in the San Joaquin Valley.”The transaction is noteworthy not because a national company is buying a locally based oil field services business; the entire industry has consolidated in recent years, and several independently owned Bakersfield companies have been acquired as discoveries of petroleum reservoirs here have raised Kern’s energy profile.
As Frontier’s news release suggests, the purchase is significant largely because the company has experience in the Bakken formation, a shale oil area that has put North Dakota at the heart of a domestic oil boom.Representatives of local oil field service companies theorized that Frontier may be trying to parlay its technical experience in North Dakota to garner new business in California’s largely untapped shale formations, which are similar in some ways to the Bakken.”It might be just the thought of trying to get in front of the line,” said Steve Layton, president of Bakersfield-based oil producer E&B Natural Resources Management Corp.
Frontier’s entry to the local market could help ease the waiting list for getting a well rig out onto oil fields.”There seems to be more demand for services than supply right now,” he said.But Frontier’s local competitors noted that addressing the backlog presents its own challenge: finding experienced oil workers.”They’re going to have a difficult time” finding qualified employees, said Jay Mercer, human resources and health, safety and environment coordinator in Bakersfield for Kenai Drilling. He added that Kenai chose to reduce its growth amid the recent increase in local oil activity in order to keep its safety record strong.