News Headlines - 19 November 2014

▽Citigroup Said to Favor Sumitomo Mitsui to Buy Japan Bank - Bloomberg

Citigroup Inc. (C) plans to give Sumitomo Mitsui (8316) Financial Group Inc. the right of first refusal this month to buy its Japanese consumer-banking business, said people with knowledge of the matter.

▽Book Review: ‘Why We Lost’ by Daniel P. Bolger - WSJ

Iraq and Afghanistan are the focus of Daniel P. Bolger ’s “Why We Lost,” a study of war and policy in which “who” is as much a concern as “why.” A recently retired U.S. Army lieutenant general, Mr. Bolger commanded twice in Iraq, and he led the entire NATO training mission in Afghanistan from 2011 to 2013. His own experiences make surprisingly few appearances in his chronicle, leaving most of the text to the experiences of others and to the author’s critical analysis.

▽Hitler painting set to sell for more than $60,000 - The Independent

Created in 1914 during Hitler’s young adulthood, the historical painting of an old registry office will be sold on Saturday in Nuremberg, Germany, where several Nazi rallies took place in the 1930s.
Hitler struggled to make a living as an artist in his late teens and early 20s, painting some 2,000 works, but many critics have branded the auctioning of his work “tasteless”.

▽Norway's new passport design is a work of art

It's usually function before form when it comes to passports.
But the new design for the Norwegian passport is both beautiful and a practical government document. The government recently asked designers to submit concepts for a redesigned passport; Neue Design Studio won with its concept titled "The Norwegian landscape."

▽The Web Is Dying; Apps Are Killing It - WSJ

The Web—that thin veneer of human-readable design on top of the machine babble that constitutes the Internet—is dying. And the way it’s dying has farther-reaching implications than almost anything else in technology today.