By Associated Press

CHICAGO—A Chicago jury on Friday convicted Oscar-winner Jennifer Hudson’s former brother-in-law of murdering her mother, brother and 7-year-old nephew in what prosecutors’ described as an act of vengeance by a jilted husband.

Ms. Hudson, who expressed her undisguised disdain for William Balfour when she took the witness stand and who endured weeks of excruciating testimony about the October 2008 killings, was visibly overcome with emotion as the verdict was read. Ms. Hudson’s eyes filled with tears and she shook her head and bit her lip.

Mr. Balfour, 31, faces a mandatory life prison sentence.

Jurors deliberated for three days before reaching their verdict against Mr. Balfour, a former gang member who was the estranged husband of Ms. Hudson’s sister, Julia Hudson, at the time of the triple murders.

With no surviving witnesses to the Oct. 24, 2008, slayings or fingerprints, prosecutors built a circumstantial case against Mr. Balfour by calling 83 witnesses over 11 days of testimony. Witnesses said he threatened to kill the entire family if Julia Hudson spurned him.

Mr. Balfour’s attorneys proposed an alternate theory: that someone else in the crime-ridden neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side targeted the family because of alleged crack-cocaine dealing by Jennifer Hudson’s brother, Jason Hudson. During the 30 minutes in which they called just two witnesses, however, they presented no evidence to support that theory.

Jennifer Hudson, who was in Florida at the time of the killings, attended every day of the two-weeks of testimony, sobbing when photos of her relatives’ bloodied bodies were displayed to jurors during closing arguments.

Ms. Hudson, 30, rose to prominence as a 2004 “American Idol” finalist. But she became a bona fide star for her performance in the film adaptation of the musical, “Dreamgirls,” for which she won the 2007 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.

Ms. Hudson was the first witness prosecutors called to testify, and during her more than 30 minutes on the stand she talked about her murdered family members and spoke endearingly about her nephew, Julian King, whom she called Tugga Bear. She said she knew Mr. Balfour since the eighth grade but always deeply disliked him.

Mr. Balfour had lived in the Hudsons’ three-story Englewood home after marrying Julia Hudson in 2006. He moved out in early 2008 after falling out with his wife, but witnesses told jurors he often stalked the home.

The killings occurred the morning after Julia Hudson’s birthday, and prosecutors said he became enraged when he stopped by the home and saw a gift of balloons in the house from her new boyfriend.

After his estranged wife left for her job as a bus driver on the morning of Oct. 24, 2008, prosecutors said Mr. Balfour went back inside the home with a .45-caliber handgun and shot Ms. Hudson’s mother, Darnell Donerson, 57, in the back; he allegedly then shot Jason Hudson, 29, twice in the head as he lay in bed.  

Prosecutors said Mr. Balfour then drove off in Jason Hudson’s SUV with Julian—Julia’s son, whom she called Juice Box—and shot the boy several times in the head as he lay behind a front seat. His body was found in the abandoned vehicle miles away after a three-day search.

The defense tried to counter the portrayal of Mr. Balfour as an embittered husband by noting Julia Hudson continued to have sex with him until just days before the killings.

By BHARAT JOSHI

Which view would you prefer from your five star hotel room: Pool, beach, or perhaps a nuclear power plant?

Pardon the exaggeration, but I recently had pause to think about this on a trip to Goa.

Bharat Joshi

The state is far better known for its beaches, carnivals, fenny and hotels than its hard–nosed industry, which, surprisingly, is a larger contributor to the state coffers and jobs. Chiefly, Goa boasts of iron ore and coal deposits, a thriving fisheries sector, and shipping, though it may be argued that tourism is growing at the fastest rate.

Not surprising, then, that this former Portuguese colony is witnessing increased tensions between glitzy tourism and gritty industry.

One of the better hotel properties in Goa is nestled along the hillside of the ruins of Fort Aguada. If this backdrop wasn’t enough, the property also overlooks palm trees, beaches and the sea. A conspicuous killjoy in this setting is a large, rusting, sea vessel that is stationed not too far from the coast and commands a large part of the view – an eyesore that serves as a constant reminder of the industrial side of the state.

“All this raises the question of whether industry and tourism are mutually incompatible? There are precedents that bring hope.”

It represents more than just aesthetics, too. The beach front has been receding rapidly over the last decade, when the tanker ran aground at the very spot where it now stands. “We hardly have any beach left,” says an anguished hotel employee, who directly blames the wreck for the erosion.

Government agencies have done little to stem the state’s ecological, commercial and aesthetic decay. Remember: less beach space means fewer shacks, water sports and sand, therefore fewer tourists and less economic activity. It was interesting to note that Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee thought this was sufficiently problematic to dedicate funds in the latest Union Budget for preserving the state’s beaches.

All this raises the question of whether industry and tourism are mutually incompatible? There are precedents that bring hope.

There’s Singapore – small, beautiful and frightfully efficient. Simultaneously, it has one of the world’s busiest airports and seaports but also attracts masses of tourists. Then there is China, where scale is mega and moderation unknown. The Chinese have pulled off an impressive marketing feat: positioning an industrial development as a tourist attraction: I was amazed to see bus loads of American tourists at the formidable Yangshan Port, off Shanghai (that I had to visit in the line of duty).

These examples remain the exceptions to the norm and some argue that states shouldn’t try to do both.

“Would you like to see a cement factory outside your hotel?” challenges Mr. Amitabh Kant, author of Branding India. Every state has its unique core competency and “if tourism is your core competency, why industrialize?” he says.

A view of the ship that ran aground.

Tourism, in general, has a low tolerance for visible industrial activity. So it seems like we should put our industry and tourism in two separate planets (a la Avatar). But critics warn against putting all your eggs in the tourism basket. Avian flu, SARS and the economic downturn have all reminded us of the fickleness of the traveler. And when the tourists don’t visit, the mood in tourist meccas rapidly turns gloomy. Having an element of the economy independent of tourism creates a safety net.

Industry can also be a benign contributor to tourism, especially if it builds roads. Goa’s airport was recently ranked among the world’s worst, and roads, energy supply, waste management, and the taxi service could do with a hand.

And even if industry isn’t directly tied into tourism, it could co-exist in harmony, if development is sustainable, environmentally sensitive, and recycles all its waste. The industrial city of Kitakyushu, in Japan, is a fine example.

Returning to our case of the stranded ship, a partnership between industry and tourism could have solved the issue innovatively. Coastal Regulation Zone laws don’t even allow the construction of a wall along the beach for preservation. But did anybody consider building an artificial reef further into the sea? This would, in time, become a living ecosystem that protects the coastline.

The ship that ran aground is, in many ways, an apt metaphor for the interrelationship between industry and tourism — where the failure of one is also a very visible failure of the other.

—Bharat Joshi is director of Associated Container Terminals Ltd., based in New Delhi.

By DYLAN EVANS

Most of us have to estimate probabilities every day. Whether as a trader betting on the price of a stock, a lawyer gauging a witness’s reliability or a doctor pondering the accuracy of a diagnosis, we spend much of our time—consciously or not—guessing about the future based on incomplete information. Unfortunately, decades of research indicate that humans are not very good at this. Most of us, for example, tend to vastly overestimate our chances of winning the lottery, while similarly underestimating the chances that we will get divorced.

Alex Nabaum

Weather forecasters tend to focus on a few clear questions, and their accuracy gets tested the very next day

Psychologists have tended to assume that such biases are universal and virtually impossible to avoid. But certain groups of people—such as meteorologists and professional gamblers—have managed to overcome these biases and are thus able to estimate probabilities much more accurately than the rest of us. Are they doing something the rest of us can learn? Can we improve our risk intelligence?

Sarah Lichtenstein, an expert in the field of decision science, points to several characteristics of groups that exhibit high intelligence with respect to risk. First, they tend to be comfortable assigning numerical probabilities to possible outcomes. Starting in 1965, for instance, U.S. National Weather Service forecasters have been required to say not just whether or not it will rain the next day, but how likely they think it is in percentage terms. Sure enough, when researchers measured the risk intelligence of American forecasters a decade later, they found that it ranked among the highest ever recorded, according to a study in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society.

It helps, too, if the group makes predictions only on a narrow range of topics. The question for weather forecasters, for example, is always roughly the same: Will it rain or not? Doctors, on the other hand, must consider all sorts of different questions: Is this rib broken? Is this growth malignant? Will this drug cocktail work? Studies have found that doctors score rather poorly on tests of risk intelligence.

Finally, groups with high risk intelligence tend to get prompt and well-defined feedback, which increases the chance that they will incorporate new information into their understanding. For weather forecasters, it either rains or it doesn’t. For battlefield commanders, targets are either disabled or not. For doctors, on the other hand, patients may not come back, or they may be referred elsewhere. Diagnoses may remain uncertain.

If Dr. Lichtenstein’s analysis is correct, we should be able to develop training programs for instilling greater risk intelligence by boosting and speeding up feedback. Royal Dutch Shell introduced just such a program in the 1970s. Senior executives had noticed that when newly hired geologists predicted oil strikes at four out of 10 new wells, only one or two actually produced. This overconfidence cost Royal Dutch Shell millions of dollars. In the training program, the company gave geologists details of previous explorations and asked them for numerical estimates of the chances of finding oil. The inexperienced geologists were then given feedback on the number of oil strikes that had actually been made. By the end of the program, their estimates roughly matched the actual number of oil strikes.

Intelligence agencies are also working to improve their approach to risk. In 2011, researchers began recruiting volunteers for a multiyear, Web-based study of people’s ability to predict world events. The Forecasting World Events Project, an experiment sponsored by the Director of National Intelligence, aims to discover whether some kinds of personalities are better than others at such exercises. Volunteers offer their best guesses about events and trends in realms such as international relations, economics, public health and technology.

Just by becoming aware of our tendency to be overconfident or underconfident in our estimates, we can go a long way toward correcting for our most common errors. Doctors, for instance, could provide numerical estimates of probability when making diagnoses and then get data about which ones turned out to be right. As for the rest of us, we could estimate the likelihood of various events in a given week, record our estimates in numerical terms, review them the next week and thus measure our risk intelligence in everyday life. A similar technique is used by many successful gamblers: They keep accurate and detailed records of their earnings and their losses and regularly review their strategies in order to learn from their mistakes.

No one can be great at estimating all types of probabilities in all situations. But given the right conditions and the right kind of self-reflection and practice, we can all make substantial improvements in our risk intelligence.

—Dr. Evans is the author of “Risk Intelligence: How to Live With Uncertainty.”

A version of this article appeared May 12, 2012, on page C3 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: How to Beat the Odds at Judging Risk.

By PAUL LEVY

© Tate, London

‘Monna Vanna’ (1866) by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Oxford: For the Ashmolean Museum’s first major exhibition in its new building, the title “The Pre-Raphaelites and Italy” sounds a bit self-evident. In what other country would you expect to find the antecedents of an Italian painter who was emblematic of the High Renaissance?

In fact, despite rearranging his given names from “Gabriel Charles Dante” to “Dante Gabriel,” Rossetti (1828-82), the most influential member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, or PRB, never set foot in Italy. Of the other two founders, says curator Colin Harrison in his gripping catalog essay, John Everett Millais (1829-96) only finally visited as a tourist with his wife in 1885. And though William Holman Hunt (1827-1910) was in Florence and Naples a great deal between 1866 and 1868, he only went because his plans to go to the Middle East had fallen through.

On the other hand, their mentor and champion, John Ruskin (1819-1900), spent much time in Italy studying its art and architecture. Of course, there were many other artists involved with the movement, most notably Sir Edward Burne-Jones (1833-98) and Frederic Leighton (1830-96), but plenty of other nonhousehold names.

One reason this show is so pleasingly unpredictable is that there was no PRB manifesto, or even organization, and ultimately their tastes and views diverged. Ruskin veered away from the austerity of the early Florentines toward the sensuous qualities of the Venetian painters of the High Renaissance—contradicting the movement’s original aims.

Initially, the “Brotherhood” was opposed to what they thought of as Renaissance practice in favor of an earlier, more spiritual Gothic style, and Rossetti in particular drew on Italian literary sources for his subjects.

Holman Hunt, on the other hand, remained so true to the ideal of painting only what you could see in front of you, that though he had completed painting his subject in the foreground, he couldn’t finish the 1863 painting of a kneeling woman (“Past and Present”) until he made a second trip to Naples in 1868, when he got yet another woman to pose for the background. It’s next to an 1864 portrait of the same woman by Robert Braithwaite Martineau(1826-69)—a recent discovery, and one of the quirky joys of this exhibition.

The recent British TV series “Desperate Romantics” encouraged speculation about the PRB’s sexuality. Here, an array of PRB lily-pad ladies, made androgynous by their prominent chins, surrounds Holman Hunt’s “Il Dolce far Niente”—his wife’s features, but surely a drag queen.

Write to Paul Levy at wsje.weekend@wsj.com

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page W10

Por EMESE BARTHA

FRÁNCFORT (EFE Dow Jones)–Los costos de financiación del Tesoro español casi se duplicaron en la subasta de bonos soberanos del martes frente a la colocación del mes pasado, reflejando la debilitada posición fiscal y económica de España, aunque el Tesoro vendió más deuda de la que había planeado, en una señal de saludable demanda.

La rentabilidad del bono a 10 años de España superó el 6% el lunes, un nivel no visto desde antes de que el Banco Central Europeo lanzara la primera de las dos operaciones a tres años para suministrar liquidez. Sin embargo, tras la subasta la rentabilidad del bono a 10 años cayó 11 puntos básico hasta 5,92%, mientras que la rentabilidad del bono a dos años retrocedió nueve puntos básicos hasta 3,46%.

Los futuros de los bunds, que cotizaron en territorio negativo durante el día, cayeron más al conocerse los resultados. Los futuros de los bunds cotizaban en 140,06, cayendo 0,33, comparado con los niveles en torno a 140,13 antes de que se publicaran los resultados. Este hecho refleja un menor apetito por los valores considerados refugio.

El primer ministro español, Mariano Rajoy, dijo el lunes que es consciente de la pérdida de confianza de los inversionistas en la economía de España, pero defendió los recortes presupuestales de su Gobierno y los esfuerzos de las reformas. El Gobierno advirtió el lunes que podría tomar el control de las finanzas en los gobiernos regionales, que representan alrededor de un tercio del gasto público en España y constituyen la mayor parte del exceso presupuestario de 2011.

En la subasta del martes, el Tesoro vendió 3.178 millones de euros en bonos a 12 y 18 meses, por encima de la parte alta del rango objetivo, que estaba situado entre 2.000 millones de euros y 3.000 millones de euros. La rentabilidad en de los bonos a 12 meses fue del 2,623%, subiendo desde 1,418% de la anterior subasta celebrada el 20 de marzo. La rentabilidad media de las Letras a 18 meses fue del 3,110%, subiendo desde el 1,711%, de la anterior subasta, también celebrada el 20 de marzo.

La demanda, sin embargo, fue saludable, tal y como revelaron los ratios de cobertura, o el apetito por el riesgo de los inversionistas. Las proporciones de cobertura fueron del 2,90 para las Letras a 12 meses, frente al 2,14 registrado en marzo, y de 3,77 para las Letras a 18 meses, subiendo desde el 2,93 de hace un mes.

Sin embargo, los analistas dijeron que el aumento de las rentabilidades es un mal presagio para la subasta más significativa que celebrará España el jueves, con dos líneas de bonos con vencimientos a 2 años y a 10 años.

Por ROGERIO JELMAYER , de São Paulo

Um volume extraordinário de ofertas de ações de empresas brasileiras este mês pode forçar uma valorização do real e novas intervenções do governo no câmbio.

Quatro empresas brasileiras planejam captar pouco mais de R$ 6 bilhões (US$ 3,3 bilhões) com ofertas de ações em abril, sendo que investidores internacionais devem ter um papel importante. Historicamente, os estrangeiros compram 65% das ações emitidas no Brasil, e a entrada substancial de capital provavelmente será motivo de alarme para o governo.

“A intervenção do Banco Central sempre foi voltada a compensar o tamanho das entradas de capital privado. Em abril, com as novas ofertas iniciais de ações provavelmente acontecendo, acredito que os leilões de dólares do BC aumentarão em tamanho e frequência para compensar o esperado influxo de capital”, disse Nick Chamie, diretor mundial de estratégia cambial do RBC Capital Markets, sediado em Nova York.

O governo já afirmou claramente que vai tentar conter qualquer valorização do real, tanto para suavizar a volatilidade quanto para proteger a indústria nacional, que tem mais dificuldade para concorrer com produtos estrangeiros quando o real está forte. O governo já realizou uma série de medidas, desde compras pelo BC de dólares à vista ou em contratos futuros até um aumento do Imposto sobre Operações Financeiras para alguns tipos de fluxos de capital.

O BC já aumentou as compras de dólares em março, adquirindo US$ 3 bilhões no mercado à vista, contra apenas US$ 842 milhões em fevereiro. As reservas internacionais brasileiras aumentaram US$ 8,9 bilhões em março e atingiram o maior nível da história, batendo em US$ 365,2 bilhões.

“Estamos confortáveis com o aumento de nossas reservas e continuaremos comprando dólares por meio dos leilões cambiais”, disse recentemente o ministro da Fazenda, Guido Mantega.

Depois de começar 2012 valorizado, o real caiu em relação ao dólar em março, mas ainda acumula alta de 2% este ano, depois de ter se desvalorizado 11% em relação à moeda americana em 2011.

As intervenções do governo tiveram um papel crucial em impedir que o real se valorizasse.

“Analisando apenas os fundamentos, o real deveria estar sendo negociado atualmente a uma taxa de R$1,64 ou R$ 1,65 [em relação ao dólar]“, afirmou o economista-chefe do Banco Bradesco, Octavio de Barros. “Isso se baseia no fato de que o real é uma das chamadas moedas de commodities, como os dólares australianos ou canadenses. A única razão para o real não ter chegado a esse nível foi a intervenção do governo.”

Embora a expectativa seja de que o governo vai realizar novas intervenções com leilões de compra de dólares, os participantes do mercado preveem que medidas mais drásticas, como um imposto sobre aplicações acionárias, são improváveis e podem prejudicar o financiamento das empresas brasileiras.

“O governo já impôs o IOF para transações com ações e derivativos. Embora funcione com os derivativos, para as ações isso se mostrou um desastre”, disse recentemente ao The Wall Street Journal Edemir Pinto, diretor-presidente da BM&FBovespa, enfatizando que as empresas do país usam o mercado como uma ferramenta importante para obter financiamento.

“Uma iniciativa de aumentar impostos como o IOF sobre o investimento estrangeiro em ações brasileiras prejudicaria fortemente as cotações e a capacidade das empresas brasileiras de conseguir capital barato”, disse Chamie, do RBC.