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Tickets for one day of last year's Virgin Mobile Festival ran upwards of $100. This year, all 30,000 tickets were free. Call it a recession bonus from British billionaire and Virgin founder Richard Branson. The festival, held Aug. 30 at the Merriweather Post Pavilion outside of Baltimore, featured Blink-182, Weezer and Franz Ferdinand as headliners. Branson himself was on hand and talked to TIME about the project, the recession and Virgin's next improbable plan. (See TIME's 10 Questions video with Richard Branson...
...What was your reaction when Virgin Mobile came to you and told you they wanted to make this festival free? I thought the idea was brilliant. This is the worst economic year for young people since they've been born. A lot of them are out of work, are struggling to get jobs, and quite a large number are quite literally on the street. I'm sure I gulped and then almost definitely said, "Screw it - let's do it." And it's such a feel-good thing for everybody, and I think we'll raise a lot of money...
...there any plans to continue the free admission in coming years? Whether we do it again next year depends on whether the feel-good factor is strong enough to warrant the obviously enormous extra cost. At least in this particular year, it's been great...
Retail clinics - free-standing, walk-in medical providers located in drug stores, shopping malls and stores like Wal-Mart, Target and Walgreens - are rapidly becoming to the health-care industry what Fotomat was to the camera world. There are roughly 1,000 clinics now operating in the U.S., offering acute care for such routine problems as throat infections and earaches as well as providing diabetes and cholesterol screenings, routine checkups and vaccinations. The fees are low - and conspicuously posted; nearly all of the clinics treat both the insured and uninsured, and there is little or no waiting time. With...
...says it can recover $97.8 billion in "wasteful spending," partly through reductions in civil-servant-personnel costs and the upkeep of government offices, in order to realize its campaign promises over the next four years. Those promises include cash handouts to families with children, free high school education, free highways, a four-year freeze on consumption tax (now at 5%) and a curbing of bond issuances. The DPJ must deliver on its promises without increasing the level of deficit financing "to demonstrate that they're fiscally responsible," says Gerald Curtis, a Japanese-politics expert and professor at Columbia University...