Back Bay brownstone makes break from past

When you think of a 19th century brownstone located in Boston's Back Bay neighborhood, the last thing that comes to mind is a contemporary-style home.

But Boston firm Ruhl Walker Architects did just that for a triplex penthouse, where combined upper-floor units were designed and rebuilt into 3,100 square feet of living space. The condo has three bedrooms and three and a half bathrooms as well as one deeded parking space.

What makes the property special is a palette of whites and grays, complemented by the white oak plank floors with a gray stain and custom Tabu Caleidolegno wood cabinetry.

The condo is now on the market for just over $3 million.

The first level is completely open and airy, with the living area on one side of the 9-foot entry and dining area and kitchen on the other side. The ceiling height is close to 12 feet that is further enhanced by the internal atrium that soars to the top floor where a large skylight brightens the entire space even on a cloudy day.

The dining area features a three-story panel of silver quartzite cladding by Island Stone behind a long, custom-designed white lacquered banquette with uplighting.

The kitchen has the same color scheme. A long center island is wrapped in white Carrara marble. Appliances include a Miele dishwasher and a U-Line wine cooler, as well as a professional Wolf six-burner gas range.

The living room faces north, and its two large windows look out to the Esplanade and the Charles River. Dominating one wall is a nearly 12-foot-wide mantelpiece of Blue Savoy marble with an Absolute black granite surround for a raised fireplace. Above it is a 6-inch recess that holds a 60-inch flat screen TV. On the other side of the range counters are glossy white cabinets with a large Sub-Zero refrigerator, paneled to match the cabinetry. Hidden behind a paneled wall of Tabu Caleidolegno is a sleek powder room with a contemporary one-piece, custom-designed Corian sink with a waterfall faucet and a dual-flush toilet.

Within the internal atrium, you will find a cable and steel staircase that rises to the top floor against ledge stone that includes tiny step lights. On this level you will find two more rooms and another bath. There's a home office featuring a desk fabricated from Tabu Caleidolegno and black oxide steel with French doors behind the desk leading onto a copper-clad balcony.

Finally, stairs lead to the roof deck, which has a copper head house that holds the six-panel skylight. The tiered deck is equipped with an outdoor stainless- steel Viking gas grill and water and electric service. Two long built-in slat benches are fixed on the deck, and in the middle of this outdoor space is a small fire pit.

Charlie Abrahams is a licensed real estate agent in Boston who works with buyers and sellers and can be reached at: Bostonrealestate@charlieabrahams.com

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Puma tears up pact with Aaron Hernandez

Puma became the latest company to announce it was ending its endorsement deal with former New England Patriots tight end and accused killer Aaron Hernandez, offering only a terse statement yesterday.

"Puma has ended the relationship with athlete Aaron Hernandez in light of the current situation," spokeswoman Katie Sheptyck said via email. The athletic gear brand wouldn't comment on the timing of its decision.

Hernandez was charged Wednesday with the murder of Odin Lloyd, a semi-pro football player from Dorchester.

Germany's Puma, whose North American headquarters is in Westford, announced a two-year deal with Hernandez in April and said he would be a face of its men's training category. At the time, it said the relationship would focus on the "unexpected and highlight his life off of the field."

Investigators had been probing ties between Hernandez and Lloyd's murder since June 17. Sports nutrition company CytoSport ended its deal with Hernandez three days later. But Puma was mum until yesterday, when it issued an email just after 3:30 p.m. Sheptyck said the decision only had been made within a half-hour of her email.

"There are some crisis management specialists who will say come right out, be extremely proactive," Suffolk University sports marketing professor Catherine McCabe said. "Others will say, wait and make sure you have a really good strategy ... You can't wait too long … regardless of your approach."

Hernandez was to be featured in Puma's "Nature of Performance" campaign.

It's difficult to gauge the deal's worth, said Jim Andrews of Chicago sponsorship consulting firm IEG.

"My best guess ... would probably be something in the low six figures," he said.

Andrews wasn't surprised Puma didn't announce sooner it was cutting ties with Hernandez. "What usually happens with big companies is they want to make sure legally they're doing everything the right way," he said. "They probably knew they wanted to terminate the agreement as early as last week when this whole thing blew up in the media."

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NASA launches sun-watching satellite from Calif.

VANDENBERG AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. — NASA launched a satellite late Thursday on a mission to explore a little-studied region of the sun and to better forecast space weather that can disrupt communications systems on Earth.

Unlike a traditional liftoff, the Iris satellite rode into Earth orbit on a Pegasus rocket dropped from an airplane that took off around sunset from the Vandenberg Air Force Base on California's central coast. About 100 miles off the coast and at an altitude of 39,000 feet, the airplane released the rocket, which ignited its engine for the 13-minute climb to space.

Mission controllers clapped after receiving word that Iris separated from the rocket as planned, ready to begin its two-year mission.

"We're thrilled," NASA launch director Tim Dunn said in a NASA TV interview.

The launch went smoothly, but there were some tense moments when communications signals were temporarily lost. Ground controllers were able to track Iris by relying on other satellites orbiting Earth. It also took longer-than-expected for Iris to unfurl its solar panels.

In a statement, NASA said it received confirmation that the satellite deployed its solar panels and was generating power.

Previous sun-observing spacecraft have yielded a wealth of information about our nearest star and beamed back brilliant pictures of solar flares.

The 7-foot-long Iris, weighing 400 pounds, carries an ultraviolet telescope that can take high-resolution images every few seconds.

Unlike NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, which observes the entire sun, Iris will focus on a little-explored region that lies between the surface and the corona, the glowing white ring that's visible during eclipses.

The goal is to learn more about how this mysterious region drives solar wind — a stream of charged particles spewing from the sun — and to better predict space weather that can disrupt communications signals on Earth.

"This is a very difficult region to understand and observe. We haven't had the technical capabilities before now to really zoom in" and peer at it up close, NASA program scientist Jeffrey Newmark said before the launch.

The mission is cheap by NASA standards, costing $182 million, and is managed by the space agency's Goddard Space Flight Center.

Engineers will spend a month making sure Iris is in perfect health before powering on the telescope to begin observations.

The launch was delayed by a day so that technicians at the Air Force base could restore power to launch range equipment after a weekend outage cut electricity to a swath of the central coast.

The Pegasus, from Orbital Sciences Corp. of Dulles, Va., is a winged rocket designed for launching small satellites. First flown in 1990, Pegasus rockets have also been used to accelerate vehicles in hypersonic flight programs.

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President Obama climate plan could generate jobs

President Obama's plan to tackle pollution and global warming could mean tougher standards for power plants in Massachusetts but it also could be a boon to local clean-energy businesses, officials said.

Noting power plants produce nearly 40 percent of the nation's carbon dioxide emissions, the heat-trapping gas blamed for global warming, Obama directed the head of the Environmental Protection Agency yesterday to propose rules limiting emissions for existing power plants by June 1, 2014, and finalize them by June 1, 2015.

Obama's plan also would boost renewable energy production on federal land, increase efficiency standards and prepare communities to deal with higher temperatures — a series of steps that don't require congressional approval.

"As a president, as a father and as an American, I'm here to say we need to act," Obama said. "I refuse to condemn your generation and future generations to a planet that's beyond fixing."

While Republican critics in Congress lambasted the president's plan as a job-killer that would threaten the economic recovery, Gov. Deval Patrick applauded Obama's "bold leadership" on climate change, saying the president "recognizes our generational responsibility to act now and proposes a proven way to do so."

"In Massachusetts, through similar means, we have achieved significant emissions reductions, alongside significant job growth in a new sector," Patrick said in a statement.

Massachusetts' greenhouse gas emissions are down 11 percent from 1990 levels, said Mary-Leah Assad, a spokeswoman for the Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs. And from 2011 to 2012, the state saw an 11.2 percent growth in "clean" jobs, with more expected this year, said Catherine Williams, a spokeswoman for the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center.

"Supporting clean energy businesses through proactive policies that cut carbon emissions and support clean energy projects creates local jobs," Williams said. "That's a staggering number, especially in the context of a down economy, proving government support of clean energy projects pays off."

But the Bay State shouldn't stop there, environmentalists said. The Sierra Club of Massachusetts called on natural gas utilities to repair their aging infrastructure, which it said leaks as much as 10 billion cubic feet of methane into the atmosphere every year.

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Microsoft to unveil latest Windows adjustments

SAN FRANCISCO — Microsoft is giving people a peek into Windows 8.1, a free update that promises to address some of the gripes people have with the latest version of the company's flagship operating system.

Although the preview version of Windows 8.1 is meant for Microsoft's partners and other technology developers, anyone will be able to download it for free starting Wednesday, exactly eight months since desktops, laptops and tablets with Windows 8 went on sale. The version of the Windows 8.1 update meant for the general public will come out later in the year, though a specific date hasn't been announced.

Many of the new features have been shown off already. A three-day Build conference, which starts Wednesday in San Francisco, will give Microsoft developers a chance to learn more about the new system and try it out. It also will give the company a chance to explain some of the reasoning behind the update and sell developers on Microsoft's ambitions to regain relevance lost to Apple's iPad and various devices running Google's Android software.

There's also speculation that Microsoft could show off a new, smaller version of its Surface tablet computers. One of the new features in Windows 8.1 is the ability to work well on smaller-screen devices.

Windows 8, which was released Oct. 26, was meant to be Microsoft's answer to changing customer behaviors and the rise of tablet computers. The operating system emphasizes touch controls over the mouse and the keyboard, which had been the main way people have interacted with their personal computers since the 1980s.

But some people have been put off by the radical makeover.

Although Microsoft has said it has sold more than 100 million Windows 8 licenses so far, some analysts have blamed the lackluster response to the operating system for a steep drop in PC sales in the first three months of the year, the worst drop since tracking by outside research firms began in 1994.

Among the complaints: the lack of a Start button on the lower left corner of the screen. In previous versions of Windows, that button gave people quick access to programs, settings and other tasks. Microsoft replaced that with a tablet-style, full-screen start page, but that covered up whatever programs people were working on, and it had only favorite programs. Extra steps were needed to access less-used programs. Settings, a search box and other functions were hidden away in a menu that had to be pulled out from the right. How to do that changed depending on whether a mouse or touch was used.

And while Microsoft has encouraged people to use the new tablet-style layout, many programs — including Microsoft's latest Office software package — are designed for the older, desktop mode. People were forced into the tablet layout when they start up the machine and had to manually switch the desktop mode each time.

Windows 8.1 will allow people to start in the desktop mode automatically. In that mode, it is restoring a button that resembles the old Start button. Although the Start button will now take people back to the new tablet-style start screen, rather than the old Start menu, the re-introduction of the familiar button may make it easier for longtime Windows users to get accustomed to the changes.

Other new features of Windows 8.1 include more options to use multiple apps. People will get more options to determine how much of the screen each app takes while showing up to four different programs, rather than just two. The update will also offer more integrated search results, showing users previews of websites, apps and documents that are on the device, all at once.

Although Microsoft is addressing much of the criticisms with Windows, it is positioning the update as more than just a fix-up job. From its perspective, the tuneup underscores Microsoft's evolution into a more nimble company capable of moving quickly to respond to customer feedback while also rolling out more innovations for a myriad of Windows devices — smartphones, tablets or PCs.

It's crucial that Microsoft sets things right with Windows 8.1 because the outlook for the PC market keeps getting gloomier. IDC now expects PC shipments to fall by nearly 8 percent this year, worse than its previous forecast of a 1 percent dip. IDC also anticipates tablets will outsell laptop computers for the first time this year.

The growing popularity of tablets is now being driven largely by less expensive devices with display screens measuring 7 inches to 8 inches diagonally. Microsoft built Windows 8 primarily to run on tablets with 10-inch to 12-inch screens, an oversight that Microsoft is also trying to fix with Windows 8.1.

Microsoft has said the company was working with other manufacturers to make smaller tablets, but it has yet to confirm reports that it is making its own. A smaller Surface with an 8-inch screen would be significantly smaller than its current, 10.6-inch models and would put the Surface in closer competition with Apple's iPad Mini, Google's Nexus 7 and Amazon's Kindle Fire HD.

Such a device would coincide with Intel Corp.'s recent release of a new chip line called Haswell. The company says Haswell chips offer a 50 percent improvement in battery life over the previous generation when playing back high-definition video.

In an indication that Microsoft Corp. is clearing out inventory of a Surface tablet running the lightweight Windows RT operating system, the company is effectively cutting the price of that by including a keyboard cover for free. The cover sells for $120 or $130 on its own.

Microsoft also said this month that it would give buyers of the RT version of Surface the Outlook email and calendar program at no extra charge — joining other Office freebies Excel, Word and Power Point — and sweetening the offer for the device that is priced starting at $499. That will come as part of the Windows 8.1 update.

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Suit between SF dailies claims predatory ad rates

SAN FRANCISCO — The San Francisco Examiner filed a lawsuit Tuesday alleging that the city's dominant daily newspaper the San Francisco Chronicle has slashed advertising prices to stifle competition.

The suit claims Chronicle owner the Hearst Corp. and officials at the paper took advantage of its greater corporate resources to "selectively and secretly" target Examiner advertisers with "below-cost and discriminatory offers designed to injure the Examiner."

The two newspapers shared business operations and revenues from 1965 until 2000, when then-Examiner-owner Hearst acquired the Chronicle and sold the Examiner to a local family.

The suit alleges the Chronicle charged significantly higher rates for ad space as expected after selling the Examiner, but reversed course when the new Examiner owners, San Francisco Newspaper Company LLC, took over in 2011.

Attorneys said the Chronicle began using the tactic when the new group, which unlike its immediate predecessors had significant experience operating major newspapers, took over the Examiner and brought the threat of heightened competition.

"It started happening just as new ownership came in," Examiner attorney Ralph C. Allredge said in a telephone interview.

The suit claims that the Chronicle charged less than $1,000 for space that its public rate lists said cost between $59,000 and $92,000 per page.

The Examiner alleges the intention behind the lowered rates was clearly to harm the competition.

"In many cases," the lawsuit says, "these discounts were specifically conditioned on the advertiser agreeing to purchase advertising services exclusively from Hearst and requiring it to stop doing business with the Examiner."

The suit seeks damages it says will be determined at trial, and an injunction keeping the Chronicle from charging below cost for advertising and from keeping prices secret.

At issue is the same state law behind a suit involving San Francisco's alternative weeklies, where a jury in 2008 found the SF Weekly engaged in predatory price-cutting on advertisements in order to thwart competition from the rival Bay Guardian. The Guardian was awarded $21 million in damages but later settled for a smaller undisclosed amount.

Allredge was also the lead attorney for the Guardian in that lawsuit, and both weeklies now belong to the same owners as the Examiner.

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Top area innovators on tap at Tedx-Boston event

The fifth annual TedxBoston gets underway today at the Seaport World Trade Center, where innovators in technology and other fields will showcase their game-changing ideas.

"The mission of Ted is to deliver talks that are full of ideas worth spreading," said Jimmy Guterman, one of the event's curators. "We are lucky enough to be in a community that is full of innovators."

Among this year's speakers are:

• Daniel Clarke and Joshua Trautwein, co-founders of Fresh Truck, who took a retrofitted school bus and are turning it into a mobile market for Boston residents who don't live near a grocery store. Beginning next month, Fresh Truck will bring healthy foods such as fruits, vegetables, whole grains and granola to people at prices 20 percent lower than those of an average grocery store.

"Food access is a big issue," Clarke said, "and it's causing a lot of health disparity, particularly in urban areas."

• Nikita Bier, founder and CEO of Outline.com, which builds public policy simulators to see what the financial impact of those policies are at the ZIP code level. Using his app, Bier will do a demonstration showing the impact of cutting the income tax and education spending in Massachusetts.

"The big problem is, when assessing public policy, people tend to base their decisions more on emotion or rhetoric than empirical evidence," Bier said.

• Helen Greiner, CEO of CyPhy Works, whose flying robots are in the development stage to work with the military. Her robots also could be used for everything from farming to bridge inspections but are restricted by the Federal Aviation Administration for commercial applications.

"These are applications where you could save time and lives," Greiner said.

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Downtown may bag grocer

Roche Bros. is in lease negotiations to open its first Boston grocery store in Downtown Crossing, sources told the Herald.

The Wellesley-based, family-owned chain of suburban supermarkets is hammering out plans for its first urban market at Millennium Partners' $630 million Millennium Tower project, which includes redevelopment of the adjacent Filene's building, according to sources familiar with the talks.

Roche Bros. spokeswoman Lisa Lazarczyk, meanwhile, said the company was considering a number of locations within its market area. "However, at this time, we can't discuss any other locations than the Medfield one," she said.

Millennium principal Anthony Pangaro yesterday said he'd neither confirm nor deny the negotiations.

"It's fantastic news," Rosemarie Sansone, president of the Downtown Boston Business Improvement District, a property owner-funded group that's been working to revitalize Downtown Crossing, said of the reported talks.

"It's absolutely the right brand," Sansone said. "Roche Bros. has a fabulous reputation, and people in this neighborhood and people in this district will be pleased. It is the first question in every conversation with residents, with people interested in what's going on in the district and other businesses that are moving into the district: What about a grocery store?"

Roche Bros., which has 18 Massachusetts stores, announced last week that it would open a new smaller, neighborhood store format in Medfield next February, with approximately 9,000 square feet.

Millennium's Downtown Crossing project includes 240,000 square feet of retail space. Both the developer and the city have wanted to bring in a grocery store to cater to the growing number of condo residents in the area — including those who will move into Millennium Tower's 450 luxury units — in addition to workers.

The 61-year-old Roche Bros. chain is small, but very well-respected, according to Mike Berger, senior editor of the Griffin Report of Food Marketing in Duxbury. "(They're) very big on fresh and perishables, quality stuff," he said. "They really do a lot of customer services. They've (also) really grown in catering and prepared foods."

A Downtown Crossing location would be a unique opportunity for the company, according to Norwell retail consultant Michael Tesler. "It gives them the opportunity to be very innovative, very creative," he said. "It upgrades their brand and the opportunities for their brand."

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Asian stocks extend fall on China worries

SEOUL, South Korea — Asian stock markets were mostly lower Tuesday as investors continued their flight from risky assets on the prospect of slower Chinese growth and the winding down of the U.S. Federal Reserve's monetary stimulus.

Markets in China extended declines from the previous day as investors worried that measures to curb underground lending would hurt growth in the world's second-largest economy.

The Shanghai Composite Index was down 0.2 percent to 1,958.62 after earlier plunging nearly 4 percent. Hong Kong's Hang Seng fell 0.2 percent to 19,780.12, trimming earlier losses.

Japan's Nikkei 225 shed 0.7 percent to 12,969.34. South Korea's Kospi dropped 1 percent to 1,780.63 and Australia's S&P/ASX 200 was down 0.3 percent to 4,656. Stocks in the Philippines and Indonesia also declined while India and Singapore gained.

A rise in the yield on the 10-year U.S. Treasury note compounded worries for investors, an analyst said, which could spur more selling of stocks in emerging markets as the cost of borrowing increases.

"A rise in interest rates is a very bad variable for the market," said YS Ryoo, an analyst at Hyundai Securities in Seoul. "Because the cost of borrowing the dollar rises, dollar funds will try to return home quickly."

In Seoul, market heavyweight Samsung Electronics Co. sank 1.2 percent to close at the lowest level since November. In Tokyo, Nissan Motor Co. fell 1.1 percent even after its chief executive promised strong sales growth to shareholders.

Shanghai's stock index endured its biggest loss in four years Monday after the country's central bank allowed commercial lending rates to spike higher. Analysts say the move was part of an effort to curb off-balance-sheet lending in China that could threaten the country's financial stability.

But the higher lending rates could also hurt economic growth. The impact for stock markets would be all the greater if the U.S. Federal Reserve tightens its own ultra-loose monetary policy over the coming months, as it has signaled it would do so long as the U.S. economy improves according to its forecasts.

On Monday, Wall Street closed lower. The Dow Jones industrial finished down 139.84 points, or 0.9 percent, at 14,659.56. The S&P 500 index fell 19.34 points, or 1.2 percent, to 1,573.09.

Analysts at Moody's Investors Service said they saw the Chinese central bank's action to allow lending rates to rise as "a conscious decision" to curb credit growth.

Moody's said a prolonged credit crunch could threaten Chinese companies, "especially those in the private sector with weak credit quality, because it heightens the risk that banks will scale back lending to those companies." The credit ratings agency said that China's central government finances remain strong, but that rapid credit growth and liabilities at the local level pose a threat to growth.

The concerns over China's credit market were magnified by existing worries that access to money will tighten in the world's largest economy, the U.S.

Investors are concerned what will happen as the U.S. Federal Reserve slows down its monetary stimulus program, which has been pumping $85 billion into the financial system every month and helped many stock indexes reach multiyear or record highs. Markets tumbled last week when Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke said the program would likely slow down this year and end in 2014.

Benchmark oil for August delivery was up 12 cents to $95.30 per barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The contract rose $1.49 to close at $95.18 in New York on Monday.

In currencies, the euro rose to $1.314 from $1.3125 late Monday. The dollar fell slightly to 97.52 yen from 97.54 yen.

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Springfield mom sells personal-protection devices

Fear can be a powerful motivator — powerful enough, Deborah Halpin found, to make you brave the treacherous waters of entrepreneurship.

About four years ago, the Springfield mother had what she calls a "triple flat" — her home was broken into, her daughter was going away to college in New York City, and her father died, leaving her elderly mother living alone in Milwaukee.

"The combination of events made me feel uncomfortable and insecure," she said. "I started to look for personal security products for us."

Halpin went to a gun store looking for pepper spray, but felt uncomfortable because she was the only woman there. So she looked online, but most of what she found was for the military or for hunters.

"There wasn't any place where women could go to comfortably buy safety and security products without feeling intimidated," she said.

After stints in marketing and product development at two Fortune 500 companies, Halpin decided to start ArmHer to sell a carefully curated selection of what she considered the most effective and affordable personal protection devices on the market for women.

They range from $2.50 security decals for your home or car window to $20 cameras with motion detectors that can be mounted on your home. They also come in different "survival kits" for students, mothers, seniors and active women. Those kits sell for between $29 and $75 and, depending on whom they're for, can include safes disguised as soda cans, alarms as loud as 120 decibels or cards that detect date-rape drugs in drinks.

You won't find guns, knives or even pepper spray on ArmHer.net, though, because those weapons can be taken away by an assailant and used against a woman, said Halpin, who's now a finalist in the $1 million MassChallenge startup accelerator and competition.

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