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| 2010/07/20 | Real Estate Doldrums on Gulf Coast Beaches | GULF SHORES, Ala. — Nick Wilmott bent down on the beach near the high-tide mark and touched one of the reddish-brown pads of oil . It had washed up overnight from the BP spill off Louisiana and had yet to be cleaned up by the machines that sweep the beaches here every night. “Here’s your problem,” said Mr. Wilmott, president of the Baldwin County Association of Realtors. “Imagine we’re on the balcony of a condo that I’m trying to sell you, and you look out and see this.” Sales of beachfront condominiums and homes have plummeted since late April, when oil started gushing into the Gulf of Mexico after the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig. Property values are dropping, and the number of apartment rentals is half what it usually is. In a beach town like this, where sales and rentals of vacation homes are the life’s blood of the economy, drawing a tide of tourists to fill the restaurants and boutiques, the economic impact has been deep. Everyone in the business — builders, real estate agents, bankers, lawyers, title companies — is facing disastrous declines in business. Owners of vacation homes are watching their investments and the number of rental prospects shrink. The value of coastal property has taken a beating along a 600-mile stretch from the Louisiana bayous to Clearwater, Fla., a stretch that before the spill was worth at least $4.3 billion, just counting the land and buildings within an acre of the shore, according to Norm Miller, an economist at the University of San Diego who is also the vice president of analytics at CoStar Group Inc. After studying recent sales of shoreline property, Mr. Miller estimated that the value of property would drop at least 10 percent, on average, over the next seven years because of the spill. “The number of transactions has really dropped off a cliff,” he said. “My personal opinion is until the beaches are cleaned up and we are sure they will stay clean, I don’t think there will be people buying down there.” Brokers in Gulf Shores say that not only are the telephones quiet in their offices, but that once-eager buyers are also backing out of deals. “What’s happening is buyers are just on hold and there are great deals, but they are saying, ‘We are going to wait and see what happens with the oil,’” Mr. Wilmott said. Rusty and Deana Swanson of Thomasville, Ala., are among them. In late May, they had done everything except close on a three-bedroom condominium on the fourth floor in the Seawind building overlooking the gulf. The vacation spot was something of a dream home for them and their grown daughter, who uses a wheelchair and takes great pleasure in watching dolphins. As the oil spill dragged on, Ms. Swanson said she saw similar condominiums selling for far less than the $290,000 she had agreed to pay. She became worried that she wouldn’t be able to rent the apartment to help pay the mortgage, and that it would be worth less than what she was investing. The Swansons pulled the plug on the deal. “I’m not going to follow through with something when I am watching the prices plummet,” said Ms. Swanson, a dietitian. Steve Warren, the Swansons’ broker, said he had lost other sales for similar reasons. Having sold real estate for about 20 years, Mr. Warren usually closes three or four transactions a month — from which he earns about $13,000 — in the summer. “The last three months, it’s been zero,” he said. The real estate market here was already depressed, after the burst of the housing bubble in 2008 and the current recession. The market peaked in 2005, when nearly 1,300 condominiums were sold for about $400 a square foot. By 2008, the prices and sales had both been cut in half. Yet the market had recovered well in the last two years, brokers said, with the sales of condos — many of them foreclosures or short sales — climbing 30 percent a year. Sales were brisk in the first four months of this year, with more than 348 condos changing hands. Then came the spill. In the first three weeks of June, the value of condo and home sales was $21 million lower than in the same period the previous year. “This has been a sucker punch to what momentum we had,” said Kevin Corcoran, a Re/Max broker. The ripple effect can be seen everywhere. The white beaches, which are groomed every night by crews with mechanical sand sifters, are usually thronged this time of year, but now look like postcards for a remote island. “We are dying, literally,” said Brian Ottosen, 42, the owner of the Happy Shak, a ’60s-themed boutique a mile from the beach, where two shoppers were dawdling over some knickknacks one recent afternoon. “Right now, on my sales floor, you shouldn’t be able to move.” Mr. Ottosen has laid off several workers and cut the hours of the remaining skeleton staff in half, but his sales since the spill have been barely 50 percent of last year’s. Uncertainty about the coast’s economic future has frozen some real estate construction deals and scotched others. Scott Shamburger, a contractor who also owns several rental properties, said he had clients cancel five construction projects worth $2 million in the weeks after the spill began, including two commercial properties. Shaul Zislin, who owns a beachside restaurant and two souvenir stores, sat in his mostly empty establishment recently and noted that the biggest problem was the perception that the beaches were covered with oil. The oil has washed up sporadically, city officials said, and BP had been quick in the tourist towns on Alabama’s coast to send in droves of workers to clean it up. So far, crews have removed about 1,500 tons of oil from Gulf Shore’s beaches alone, city officials said, and they have been forced to close the city’s beaches for a day about once every four days since the spill began. With money from BP, the state has done what it can to counter the impression that the beaches are covered with goo. For instance, the oil company underwrote a concert that brought in tens of thousands of people to see Jimmy Buffett, whose sister owns a restaurant in town. Still, the television images of oil on beaches have scared off the tourists and potential investors, Mr. Zislin said. Receipts at his souvenir businesses are down nearly 60 percent from last year, he said, and the restaurant’s sales have also dropped precipitously. “The perception out there is that you get out of your car and the black oil plague is crawling up your leg,” he said. | Gulf of Mexico;Housing and Real Estate;Oil (Petroleum) and Gasoline;Office Buildings and Commercial Properties;Offshore Drilling and Exploration;Accidents and Safety;BP Plc |
ny0201451 | [
"science"
]
| 2009/09/01 | After the Transistor, a Leap Into the Microcosm | YORKTOWN HEIGHTS, N.Y. — Gaze into the electron microscope display in Frances Ross’s laboratory here and it is possible to persuade yourself that Dr. Ross, a 21st-century materials scientist, is actually a farmer in some Lilliputian silicon world. Dr. Ross, an I.B.M. researcher, is growing a crop of mushroom-shaped silicon nanowires that may one day become a basic building block for a new kind of electronics. Nanowires are just one example, although one of the most promising, of a transformation now taking place in the material sciences as researchers push to create the next generation of switching devices smaller, faster and more powerful than today’s transistors. The reason that many computer scientists are pursuing this goal is that the shrinking of the transistor has approached fundamental physical limits. Increasingly, transistor manufacturers grapple with subatomic effects, like the tendency for electrons to “leak” across material boundaries. The leaking electrons make it more difficult to know when a transistor is in an on or off state, the information that makes electronic computing possible. They have also led to excess heat, the bane of the fastest computer chips. The transistor is not just another element of the electronic world. It is the invention that made the computer revolution possible. In essence it is an on-off switch controlled by the flow of electricity. For the purposes of computing, when the switch is on it represents a one. When it is off it represents a zero. These zeros and ones are the most basic language of computers. For more than half a century, transistors have gotten smaller and cheaper, following something called Moore’s Law, which states that circuit density doubles roughly every two years. This was predicted by the computer scientist Douglas Engelbart in 1959, and then described by Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Intel, in a now-legendary 1965 article in Electronics, the source of Moore’s Law. Today’s transistors are used by the billions to form microprocessors and memory chips. Often called planar transistors, they are built on the surface (or plane) of a silicon wafer by using a manufacturing process that precisely deposits and then etches away different insulating, conducting and semiconducting materials with such precision that the industry is now approaching the ability to place individual molecules. A typical high-end Intel microprocessor is today based on roughly one billion transistors or more, each capable of switching on and off about 300 billion times a second and packed densely enough that two million transistors would fit comfortably in the period at the end of this sentence. In fact, this year, the chip industry is preparing to begin the transition from a generation of microprocessor chips based on a minimum feature size of 45 nanometers (a human hair is roughly 80,000 nanometers in width) to one of 32 nanometers — the next step down into the microcosm. But the end of this particular staircase may be near. “Fundamentally the planar transistor is running out of steam,” said John E. Kelly III, I.B.M.’s senior vice president and director of research. “We’re at an inflection point, you better believe it, and most of the world is in denial about it,” said Mark Horowitz, a Stanford University electrical engineer who spoke last week at a chip design conference in Palo Alto, Calif. “The physics constraints are getting more and more serious.” Many computer scientists have been warning for years that this time would come, that Moore’s Law would cease to be valid because of increasing technical difficulties and the expense of overcoming them. Last week at Stanford University, during a panel on the future of scaling (of which the shrinking of transistors is one example), several panelists said the end was near. “We’re done scaling. We’ve been playing tricks since 90 nanometers,” said Brad McCredie, an I.B.M. fellow and one of the company’s leading chip designers, in a reference to the increasingly arcane techniques the industry has been using to make circuits smaller. For example, for the past three technology generations Intel has used a material known as “strained silicon” in which a layer of silicon atoms are stretched beyond their normal atomic distance by depositing them on top of another material like silicon germanium. This results in lower energy consumption and faster switching speeds. Other researchers and business executives believe the shrinking of the transistor can continue, at least for a while, that the current industry standard Mosfet (for Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect-Transistor) can be effectively harnessed for several more technology generations. Technology executives at the Intel Corporation, the world’s largest chipmaker, say they believe that by coupling more advanced photolithographic techniques with new kinds of materials and by changing the design of the transistor, it will be possible to continue to scale down to sizes as small as five nanometers — effectively taking the industry forward until the end of the next decade. “Silicon will probably continue longer than we expect,” said Michael C. Mayberry, an Intel vice president and the director of the company’s component research program. Both Intel and I.B.M. are publicly committed to a new class of transistors known as FinFETs that may be used as early as the 22-nanometer technology generation beginning in 2011 or 2012. Named for a portion of the switch that resembles a fish fin, these transistors have the dual advantage of offering greater density because they are tipped vertically out of the plane of the silicon wafer, as well as better insulating properties, making it easier to control the switching from a 1 to a 0 state. But sooner or later, new materials and new manufacturing processes will be necessary to keep making computer technology ever cheaper. In the long term, new switches might be based on magnetic, quantum or even nanomechanical switching principles. One possibility would be to use changes in the spin of an individual electron to represent a 1 or a 0. “If you look out into the future, there is a branching tree and there are many possible paths we might take,” Dr. Mayberry said. In Dr. Ross’s laboratory at I.B.M., researchers are concentrating on more near-term technology. They are exploring the idea of constructing FinFET switches in a radical new process that breaks away from photo etching. It is a kind of nanofarming. Dr. Ross sprinkles gold particles as small as 10 nanometers in diameter on a substrate and then suffuses them in a silicon gas at a temperature of about 1,100 degrees Fahrenheit. This causes the particles to become “supersaturated” with silicon from the gas, which will then precipitate into a solid, forming a wire that grows vertically. I.B.M. is pressing aggressively to develop this technology, which could be available commercially by 2012, she said. At the same time she acknowledged that significant challenges remain in perfecting nanowire technology. The mushroom-shaped wires in her laboratory now look a little bit like bonsai trees. To offer the kind of switching performances chipmakers require, the researchers must learn to make them so that their surfaces are perfectly regular. Moreover, techniques must be developed to make them behave like semiconductors. I.B.M. is also exploring higher-risk ideas like “DNA origami,” a process developed by Paul W. K. Rothemund, a computer scientist at the California Institute of Technology. The technique involves creating arbitrary two- and three-dimensional shapes by controlling the folding of a long single strand of viral DNA with multiple smaller “staple” strands. It is possible to form everything from nanometer-scale triangles and squares to more elaborate shapes like smiley faces and a rough map of North America. That could one day lead to an application in which such DNA shapes could be used to create a scaffolding just as wooden molds are now used to create concrete structures. The DNA shapes, for example, could be used to more precisely locate the gold nanoparticles that would then be used to grow nanowires. The DNA would be used only to align the circuits and would be destroyed by the high temperatures used by the chip-making processes. At Intel there is great interest in building FinFET switches but also in finding ways to integrate promising III-V materials on top of silicon as well as exploring materials like graphene and carbon nanotubes, from which the company has now made prototype switches as small as 1.5 nanometers in diameter, according to Dr. Mayberry. The new materials have properties like increased electron mobility that might make transistors that are smaller and faster than those that can be made with silicon. “At that very small dimension you have the problem of how do you make the connection into the tube in the first place,” he said. “It’s not just how well does this nanotube itself work, but how do you integrate it into a system.” Given all the challenges that each new chip-making technology faces, as well as the industry’s sharp decline in investment, it is tempting to suggest that the smaller, faster, cheaper trend may indeed be on the brink of slowing if not halting. Then again, as Dr. Mayberry suggests, the industry has a way of surprising its skeptics. | Computer Chips;Nanotechnology;Computers and the Internet;Silicon;Electronics;Science and Technology |
ny0117987 | [
"sports"
]
| 2012/10/06 | Skater Cho Faces Hearing After Tampering | The U.S. Speedskating coaching scandal has become messier. Simon Cho, the reigning national short-track champion, faces a hearing after confessing that he tampered with a Canadian rival’s skate at the 2011 World Team Championship. The short-track interim coach, Jun Hyung Yeo, was suspended for failing to report the tampering. Jae Su Chun, the coach at the center of the scandal, remains suspended and could be disciplined for not reporting the tampering. | Cho Simon;Chun Jae Su;Speedskating;Short Track Skating |
ny0079420 | [
"world",
"middleeast"
]
| 2015/02/28 | Israeli Utility to Stop Disrupting Electricity in West Bank | JERUSALEM — Israel’s state-owned electric company will stop disrupting power supplies to Palestinian districts in the West Bank after reaching an agreement with the Israeli government meant to help offset a ballooning debt, Israeli officials said on Friday. The deal involves the transfer of 300 million shekels, over $75 million, to the Israel Electric Corporation — money to be deducted from Palestinian tax revenues that Israel has been withholding for two months in response to the Palestinian leadership’s move to join the International Criminal Court . Israel collects more than $100 million in monthly tax revenue on behalf of the Palestinian Authority — money that makes up a significant part of the budget needed to pay the authority’s tens of thousands of employees and provide government services. The withholding of the funds has caused a financial crisis in the authority, which has been unable to pay full salaries . Palestinian officials have denounced the move as “piracy.” But the effort to restore full electricity supplies seemed to indicate an Israeli desire to reduce tensions with the Palestinians, or at least not have them escalate further. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is running for re-election on March 17, is already under pressure because of acute tensions with the Obama administration over his plans to address a joint meeting of Congress next week about the nuclear talks with Iran. Relations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority took a turn for the worse after President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah party signed a reconciliation agreement last April with Hamas, the Islamic militant group that controls Gaza, contributing to the breakdown of troubled American-brokered Middle East peace talks. Israeli officials refused to say whether the arrangement with the Israel Electric Corporation was reached in coordination or agreement with the Palestinian Authority; the authority’s government spokesman did not respond to requests for comment. There was no word on whether Israel was considering an end to the withholding of tax revenue. “Our goal was to ensure that electricity would be supplied without interruption to the Palestinian Authority,” an Israeli official said on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the issue publicly. The Israeli government has in the past stopped the electric company from cutting Palestinian power supplies, wary of the humanitarian impact and diplomatic fallout. Soon after the electricity company reduced the supply to the Nablus and Jenin districts for about 45 minutes on Monday, the Israeli prime minister’s office clarified that the step had been taken at the company’s own initiative. Power was again reduced for an hour on Wednesday. “We were obviously not happy about the interruption,” the Israeli official said. The Israeli power company, which supplies most of the electricity to the West Bank, said the Palestinian Authority’s debt had been building over a number of years, and had reached 1.9 billion shekels, or around $480 million. Israel said the tax money being transferred to the utility company was not meant to dent the huge backlog of debt but only to prevent the debt from growing larger. The use of the tax money to offset utility bills is not new. For some time, a portion of the monthly tax money has automatically gone to pay the electric company, but it is not enough. And no funds have been transferred to the corporation over the last three months, said Dalia Bodinger, a spokeswoman for the company. Ms. Bodinger added that the electricity company had sent a letter on Thursday to the Palestinian prime minister and the head of the Palestinian energy authority warning that the electricity cuts would be broadened on Sunday. A few hours after the letter was sent, the Israeli prime minister’s office announced the new arrangement. Dhafer Melhem, the acting head of the Palestinian Energy and Natural Resources Authority , told the independent Palestinian news agency Ma’an that the authority had no knowledge of the Israeli decision to prevent further power reductions to the West Bank. He blamed some of the local Palestinian councils for the rising debt to the Israeli electricity company, saying they collected money from citizens for electricity but did not pay all their debts to the Israelis. In another step apparently intended to reduce tensions, the Israeli prime minister’s office said approval had been granted to connect the new Palestinian city of Rawabi to a nearby water main, a decision that had been held up for months and had threatened the viability of the flagship Palestinian enterprise. Bashar Masri, a Palestinian businessman and the driving force behind Rawabi, which is a short commute from Ramallah in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, said he had received confirmation on Friday from a senior Israeli official that the water issue had been resolved. Speaking by telephone from London, Mr. Masri said he expected to be able to deliver completed apartments to their new owners within about three months. “I am happy now,” Mr. Masri said. “I was losing a lot of credibility telling people, ‘Next week, next week, next week.’” | Israel;Palestinians;Electric power;West Bank;Israel Electric Corporation;Palestinian Authority |
ny0283236 | [
"nyregion"
]
| 2016/07/31 | A Neighbor Who Needs Help | Dear Diary: She raised her hands in the air and with a sort of sigh looked through the double glass doors, appealing to be let inside, sometime after noon. “She” is apparently a neighbor in our building. When my husband came in, I told him about the lady who appeared to be locked out of the building and that I had let her in. He then told me that earlier, she did the same to him when he was leaving the building. I saw that this woman was a bit off in her demeanor. While she proceeded to thank me in a sweet, British accent, I knew she demonstrated confusion about herself. These episodes continue, but she seems to be even more fragile. Her clothing is barely hanging onto her limbs. I saw her the other day, same place, similar story, although this time she told me she lost her purse. Later that day, while I was cooking dinner, she knocked on our door asking where the boys were. (There are no boys in our apartment.) As soon as I heard the fragile British voice, I told her that she had the wrong apartment and since it was 10 p.m. she should really be home. The next morning I encountered her standing in the lobby half-dressed and asking for help on what to wear. Another neighbor told her to go back up to her apartment and dress herself. I came home recently and found her waiting for someone to let her into the building once again. She stood there in the heat of early summer, with a coat on and no shoes, just socks, and a bottle of dish detergent in her hand. What to do? Where is a loved one or anyone who knows this woman? She should not be alone at this time in her life. | NYC;Mental Health |
ny0214625 | [
"sports",
"olympics"
]
| 2010/03/01 | Crosby’s Goal Ends Thriller as Canada Beats U.S. | VANCOUVER, British Columbia — The roar first erupted inside Canada Hockey Place and stretched across the prairies of Manitoba, to the shores of Parry Sound, Ontario, to Cole Harbour, Nova Scotia. Ridiculed by a nation only seven days earlier for its ignominious loss to the United States in a preliminary-round game, Team Canada saved its reputation by ruining a desperate United States comeback with a scintillating 3-2 overtime victory on Sunday to win the Olympic gold medal. Sidney Crosby , Canada’s greatest current star, who had not scored a point in the two previous games, wristed a six-foot shot past goaltender Ryan Miller , the tournament most valuable player, at 7 minutes 40 seconds of the extra session that set off an outpouring of joy by nearly 18,000 maple leaf flag-waving fans. The victory was the first time a host nation won a men’s hockey gold medal since 1980, when a group of collegians from the United States defeated Finland after stunning the Soviet Union in a medal-round game — the Miracle on Ice — in Lake Placid, N.Y. “It doesn’t even feel real,” Crosby said. “It feels like a dream.” The United States, which had never trailed in the tournament, fell behind, 2-0, before mounting a furious rally that was capped by Zach Parise’s goal with 24.4 seconds remaining in regulation. “Throughout that whole game we thought we were going to win,” Parise said. The victory was as thrilling as the Canadians’ path through the tournament and gave them their second Olympic title since 2002, when they beat the United States in Salt Lake City for their first hockey gold in 50 years. Crosby now joins Paul Henderson in Canada hockey lore. Every Canadian alive in 1972 surely knows where he or she was when Henderson beat goaltender Vladislav Tretiak of the Soviet Union with 34 seconds remaining to clinch the Summit Series that year. Now, a new generation, feeling the same exultation, will go to sleep with visions of Crosby jumping for joy in their heads. Miller, who finished with a superb .946 save percentage, said: “I’m just very frustrated. We got ourselves in a position to win from two goals down. Sudden death kind of stings.” Before the tournament, almost no one thought the Americans would reach the final. At an introductory news conference two weeks ago, Brian Burke, the American team’s general manager, asked a roomful of reporters how many thought Canada, Russia or Sweden would win the gold. Hands shot up for each country. He asked how many thought the United States would win. No hands were raised. “I couldn’t have asked for any more from our players,” Ron Wilson, the American coach, said. “It’s just a shame that both teams couldn’t receive a gold medal here today.” The game was fast-paced and physical from the moment the puck was dropped by Bill McCreary, the 54-year-old N.H.L. referee presiding over his third Olympic final. Jonathan Toews and Mike Richards, the forwards who shut down Russia’s Alex Ovechkin so effectively in a quarterfinal match, ganged up to strip the puck from defenseman Brian Rafalski. Toews fired the puck from short range to give Canada a 1-0 lead at 12:50 of the first period, ending Miller’s shutout streak at 124:28. Canada took a 2-0 lead at 7:23 of the second period when Ryan Getzlaf’s centering pass caromed to Corey Perry, who buried the puck past Miller. The Americans refused to wilt as Canada Hockey Place shook with thunderous cheers. Five minutes later, they got on the board when a streaking Ryan Kesler redirected Patrick Kane’s pass past a shaky Roberto Luongo, Kesler’s Vancouver Canucks teammate. Kesler told reporters on Saturday he knew Luongo’s weaknesses and would score on him. Miller kept the Americans in the game with 36 saves, many of them while he was screened or under assault in the crease. Miller, who plays for the Buffalo Sabres, thwarted Eric Staal and Crosby on a breakaway and Dany Heatley twice at the post with an outstretched right skate. He was lucky, too, as two Canadian shots hit the post in the first 1:45 of the third period. In overtime, he calmly stopped Jarome Iginla, Scott Niedermayer and Patrick Marleau on his doorstep, seconds apart. The Americans pressed the attack in the third period, but Canada repelled each assault. Wilson pulled Miller with just over a minute left and put Parise, Jamie Langenbrunner, Joe Pavelski, Kane, Ryan Suter and Rafalski on the ice. As the precious last few seconds ticked off the clock, Kane, in the high slot, twirled and fired a shot at Luongo. The puck pinged off Langenbrunner and then Luongo. Parise (four goals, four assists in the Games) swatted the rebound into the net with 24.4 seconds left. He then leapt against the corner glass and was mobbed by his teammates as a substantial American contingent in the crowd erupted with a cheer of its own. Then came overtime. Pressure anyone? Just all of North America was watching. “After he missed the third-period breakaway, going into the dressing room before overtime was pretty tough on him,” Iginla said of Crosby. Crosby worked the puck into the corner, slid it to Iginla and raced toward the net a step ahead of Rafalski. He took Iginla’s return pass and shot the puck between Miller’s legs. Bedlam. Redemption. O Canada. The triumphant Canadian players, gold medals around their necks, linked arms and sang with their overjoyed fans. Crosby, 22, stood on the far end of the line, having added Olympic gold to his achievement with the Penguins last spring, when he became the youngest captain to hoist the Stanley Cup. “It’s the opportunity of a lifetime to play in the Olympics here and try and get a gold medal,” he said. “It could’ve been any other guy in that room.” But it wasn’t. It was Crosby. | Olympic Games (2010);Hockey Ice;Crosby Sidney;Miller Ryan;Canada;United States |
ny0292479 | [
"nyregion"
]
| 2016/06/02 | After Years of Struggles, Bronx Woman Earns Her Prize: A Criminal Justice Degree | As hundreds of newly anointed graduates of John Jay College of Criminal Justice made their way across the commencement stage at Madison Square Garden on Wednesday, the college’s president, Jeremy Travis, beamed with pride at one particular student. The graduate, a 34-year-old Bronx woman named JoAnne Carpenter, had taken a remarkable, circuitous route to the ceremony. In the years leading up to the festivities, Ms. Carpenter nearly fell through the holes in the threadbare safety net of social services. Her mother struggled with drug addiction, and her father deserted the family for years. By 16, she was a mother to a baby boy whose father also abandoned her. Ms. Carpenter followed a familiar descent into a trying circle of group and foster homes, but she clung to the hope that she could reverse her course through education. “I knew school was the only way out,” she said. “I just kept telling myself the obstacles would make me stronger.” Despite long hours spent working and raising her son, Ms. Carpenter received her high school diploma, and, at the urging of a foster parent, she applied to John Jay, part of the City University of New York system. “The acceptance was a huge surprise because no one in my environment even thought past high school,” Ms. Carpenter said. “They talked about college like it was a foreign word.” Getting into college, it turned out, was easier than staying there. Ms. Carpenter remained determined in her studies, but she faced a multitude of hurdles: a troubled child, bouts of depression, the diagnosis of her bipolar disorder and an array of part-time jobs to pay the bills. In 2003, The New York Times profiled Ms. Carpenter as part of its annual Neediest Cases series. The article highlighted her fortitude and said the Jewish Child Care Association of New York, a social service agency supported by the Neediest Cases Fund, had provided Ms. Carpenter money to pay the deposit and rent for an apartment for her and her son, Stephon. The Times publishes dozens of such stories every year from November to January and has been encouraging readers to contribute to the Neediest Cases Fund for more than a century. Donors typically write checks directly to the fund, but Ms. Carpenter’s story struck a chord with Dick Tarlow, an advertising executive turned philanthropist from Shelter Island, N.Y. He read the report and wrote in to offer to cover her tuition. Image “I just kept telling myself the obstacles would make me stronger,” Ms. Carpenter said. Credit Hilary Swift for The New York Times “I was amazed by what she’d done despite it all,” Mr. Tarlow said. “How many of us born with a silver spoon haven’t even done that well?” Ms. Carpenter was overjoyed, but that largess did not propel her to academic success immediately. Overwhelmed by the responsibilities of classes, work and motherhood, she dropped out of John Jay to gain control of her life. She said she faced up to a drinking problem that she had ignored for years, arranged for her son to receive therapy for emotional and behavioral problems, and moved to a new apartment to cut ties with an environment she found toxic. Newly sober and ready to resume her studies, Ms. Carpenter enrolled at Hostos Community College in the Bronx. For nine years, from 2005 through 2014, she alternated between classes and jobs, calibrating the load so that she could afford care for Stephon. She also gave birth to another child, a daughter named London, now 3. Ms. Carpenter received an associate’s degree in criminal justice from Hostos in 2014, but she still had her sights set elsewhere. “The goal from the beginning was to get back to John Jay,” she said. Ms. Carpenter re-enrolled through John Jay’s Second Chance Policy, which allowed her to start with a new grade point average. From January 2015 through December, she completed two years’ worth of courses, finishing with a 3.4 G.P.A. and honors in her major. Stephon, now 18, attends college in Virginia, she proudly reported. “When I met her, I told her, ‘You’re my hero,’” Mr. Travis said. “I know she’ll have a great future and inspire the next cohort of students.” Although Ms. Carpenter fell out of touch with Mr. Tarlow, his confidence in her remained an inspiration. As she prepared to graduate, she sent him a letter, thanking him for his support. Ms. Carpenter hopes to pursue a career as a civil rights lawyer, helping people fight housing and employment discrimination. “I read through Neediest Cases every year, and I see stories just like mine,” she said. “Not everyone gets an article in The New York Times, though.” These days, Ms. Carpenter spends most of her time with London in their two-bedroom apartment on Fillmore Street in the Bronx. The two of them sit side by side at the kitchen table, Ms. Carpenter reviewing her used study guide for the law-school entry exam and her daughter leafing through “Green Eggs and Ham.” Though London can barely make out Dr. Seuss’ words, she often peers over at the study guide and insists on trying to read the legalese. “She wants to be a lawyer already,” Ms. Carpenter said. “But I just tell her to take her time.” | New York Times Neediest Cases Fund;Jewish Child Care Assn |
ny0205844 | [
"us"
]
| 2009/01/24 | Recipients of Aid After Hurricane Face Fraud Charge | NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Six people accused of fraudulently obtaining money from Louisiana ’s Hurricane Katrina homeowner grant program were charged Friday in federal court. United States Attorney Jim Letten said the six, all from the New Orleans area, had fraudulently obtained a total of more than $700,000 in federal money from the state’s Road Home program. Each faces up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine if convicted. About 15 people in Louisiana and 355 in Mississippi have been charged in federal courts with obtaining homeowner grants to which they were not entitled, said Tom Luke, a special agent for the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Office of Inspector General. Mr. Luke said the disparity between the two states resulted in part from Mississippi beginning its grant program several months before Louisiana, and differences in how the two states screened applicants. Charged Friday were Jacqueline Foreman-Pottinger, 44, of Metairie; Raymond Cuccia, 78, of Kenner; Eva Baptiste, 41, of New Orleans; Pearl Dileo, 84, of New Orleans; Ryant Price, 46, of St. Rose; and Shawntell Manuel, 30, of New Orleans. About 185,000 people have applied for money from the Road Home program, which has paid out $7.6 billion in grants. Mr. Luke said investigators had fielded more than 300 complaints of suspected fraud in connection with the program and had prevented more than $2.6 million in Road Home grant money from going to people who were not entitled to it. | Hurricane Katrina;Frauds and Swindling;Federal Aid (US);Housing;Louisiana |
ny0159085 | [
"sports",
"football"
]
| 2008/12/30 | From the Owner to the Players, the Jets Want Favre to Return | FLORHAM PARK, N.J. — While most of the Jets spent Monday afternoon packing their belongings into garbage bags, the space reserved for their most famous teammate, quarterback Brett Favre , was already empty. The question that lingers as the Jets begin their off-season is: Is he gone for good? “I’m pleading with him,” receiver Chansi Stuckey said. “I’m probably going to be calling and texting him every single day to make sure he comes back.” The chances that Favre will return next season appear unlikely, as evidenced by his age (39), his ailing shoulder and his news conference after the Jets’ loss to the Dolphins in the season finale. Still, the team owner, Woody Johnson, and General Manager Mike Tannenbaum said Monday that they wanted Favre back. After the Miami game, Favre said he would have a magnetic resonance imaging test on his right shoulder on Monday. The Jets would not confirm that any tests took place. A report on Foxsports.com said sources close to Favre said he did not like playing for Eric Mangini, whom the Jets fired Monday. It said Mangini had called Favre into the “principal’s office” to discuss his high number of interceptions. Favre led the league with 22 interceptions, matching his number of touchdown passes. He passed for 3,472 yards, his lowest since 2003. In Favre’s last five games, four of them losses, his highest passer rating was 61.4. Johnson defended Favre, whom the Jets traded for in August. “Brett Favre was a huge positive for this franchise,” he said. Asked if it is realistic for a 39-year-old quarterback with a bad shoulder to return, Johnson said: “It is realistic. It depends on what Brett wants to do, but he hasn’t been through a camp yet.” That was the message that emerged from teammates who wanted Favre back — give him a year in the system and a full off-season to become comfortable. Receiver Laveranues Coles even said he might go hunting with Favre in the coming months. Whatever decision Favre makes, several players, including safety Kerry Rhodes, said they hoped he would make it soon. Receiver Jerricho Cotchery said, “He still has some great football left in him.” | Favre Brett;New York Jets;Football |
ny0254825 | [
"sports"
]
| 2011/07/22 | U.S. Wins in China | The United States won the new 5-kilometer open water team event at the world aquatic championships in Jinshan City, China. Ashley Twichell, Andrew Gemmell and Sean Ryan finished in 57 minutes 0.6 seconds. | Swimming;United States;China |
ny0096620 | [
"business",
"media"
]
| 2015/01/14 | Ann Curry Leaves NBC News to Develop Media Start-Up | Two and a half years after stepping down as a co-anchor on NBC’s “Today” show, Ann Curry is leaving her full-time position at NBC News for a new role that will allow her to report for NBC and other outlets. Ms. Curry is working on a media start-up to produce scripted and nonscripted “content of national and global importance,” initially funded by NBCUniversal, according to a news release. “This is about reaching for the edge of the future in journalism, which we know is undergoing an irrevocable transition,” Ms. Curry said in a statement. “I am excited about working to become a valuable link between traditional media and what is to come.” Ms. Curry has worked as an anchor and correspondent at NBC News for about 25 years and was a “Today” show regular for about 15 years. In the middle of ratings turmoil and internal drama, she left her post as a co-anchor of “Today” in June 2012. Since then, she has worked as a national and international correspondent, an anchor for NBC News and an anchor-at-large for “Today.” “We’re proud to support Ann in her new venture, and we look forward to more of her exceptional storytelling,” Patricia Fili-Krushel, chairwoman of NBCUniversal News Group, said in a statement. “She is committed to uncovering critical issues, humanizing them, and ultimately helping viewers understand and connect.” | Ann Curry;NBC News;NBCUniversal;Today;News media,journalism |
ny0111972 | [
"sports",
"basketball"
]
| 2012/02/26 | Plenty of Room for Stars of All Kinds | Television viewers Sunday night will face a choice of events: the Oscars or the N.B.A. All-Star Game. “The Artist” versus LeBron James . “Hugo” versus Melo. Clooney versus Kobe. ABC’s Academy Awards coverage begins with a 90-minute red carpet show at 7 p.m. Eastern, followed by the awarding of the statuettes starting at 8:30. TNT’s All-Star Game broadcast starts at 7:30, but it, too, will be preceded by a 90-minute pregame show. The Oscars do not have much to fear from the N.B.A. All-Star Game. Last year, they were a week apart. And the envelope says: 37.9 million watched the Academy Awards and 9.1 million watched the game, according to Nielsen. The time that the two broadcasts overlap may not hurt either one very much. “There might be some channel surfing from the Oscars because there’s always dead air between the awards,” said Brad Adgate, the director of research for Horizon Media. “But both can coexist. There’s very little shaded area between the two.” Their audiences are quite different. Those who watch the Oscars tend to be female and older. All-Star Game viewers are more likely to be younger and male. “Certainly we realize that we have two strong events, but we think our audiences are distinct and different,” said David Levy, the president of Turner Sports, the parent company of TNT. “But we also know that the Academy Awards build to a crescendo for Best Picture, and we’ll be off the air by then.” Last year, 61 percent of the Oscars audience was female, according to Nielsen. Some of the highest viewership of the show was among women 35 or older. But for the All-Star Game, two-thirds of the audience was male; more than a third was 18 to 34, and most of that age group was male. Although Jeremy Lin will not play in the All-Star Game to boost New York market viewing, the N.B.A. has rebounded strongly from its lockout, which may help its viewership. That could push its audience past last year’s 9.1 million, which itself was a big leap over 6.8 million in 2010. And there is no huge box office smash among the Best Picture nominees, which could affect the audience for the Oscars, Adgate said. How much the return of Billy Crystal as the host helps the show is not known. But he has potential crossover appeal: he played an N.B.A. referee in the 1995 film “Forget Paris.” Adgate recalled that in late March 1987, the Oscars faced another sports event, and one that is truly meaningful: the N.C.A.A. men’s basketball final. Indiana’s 1-point victory over Syracuse generated an audience of 32 million viewers. The Oscars, with “Platoon” winning best picture, drew 39.7 million. Late that night, Chevy Chase, one of the Oscars’ hosts, said, “Is the game over yet?” | Academy Awards (Oscars);Basketball;National Basketball Assn;James LeBron;Crystal Billy;Lin Jeremy;Television;All Star Games |
ny0281915 | [
"business",
"dealbook"
]
| 2016/07/02 | Apple Flounders, but Tidal Will Not Steady the Boat | Apple is flailing around to the beat. The company may buy Tidal, the music-streaming service started by the superstar rapper Jay Z, according to The Wall Street Journal . The presumed logic is that it will help Apple strengthen its own service. Spotify, a rival, says that Apple is harming it by rejecting an app upgrade. Apple has the clout to fend off rivals, but adding Tidal will not help get its rhythm back. It was just two years ago that Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, spent $3 billion for Beats, the streaming music and headphones business owned by Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre. The co-founders have deep ties to the music industry with roots at Interscope and Death Row Records. And yet Apple’s streaming ambitions have been middling at best. It is redesigning the service after frustrating its approximately 15 million paying subscribers. That is just half as big as Spotify’s 30 million subscriber base. Tidal is struggling, too. It had a star-studded debut last March — with Beyoncé, Madonna and Chris Martin of Coldplay — and promised that an online service owned by artists would be better for artists. But it is on its third chief executive and has not drawn the masses, picking up fewer than five million paying customers, many of them reaped by dropping occasional exclusives from the likes of Kanye West, Prince and others. As sales of iPhones, computers and iPads slow, it is understandable why Apple is setting its sights on other businesses. Revenue from apps, Apple Music subscriptions, along with a few other services, rose 20 percent year-over-year and accounted for 12 percent of its $50 billion in last quarter’s top line. That partly explains why Apple is giving Spotify headaches. Recode reported that Apple will not approve the digital music service’s latest app. Spotify, based in Sweden, is encouraging customers to sign up through its own website, thus bypassing in-app subscriptions. Apple takes a 30 percent cut, though the fee falls to 15 percent after one year. It’s a retributive move – like a lyric from one of Dre’s old NWA raps. | Audio Recordings; Downloads and Streaming;Apple;Mergers and Acquisitions;Tidal;Spotify |
ny0168888 | [
"technology"
]
| 2006/12/05 | Troubling ’07 Forecast for the Old-Line Media but Not for the Online | THE first Monday in October is known in legal circles as the start of the Supreme Court term. Similarly, on Madison Avenue, the first Monday in December has become familiar as the kickoff of the advertising forecast season. And yesterday a flood of forecasts indeed flowed from analysts and agencies, all generally pointing to a challenging year ahead for the traditional media along with substantial growth for all things online. (For those wondering why early December brings the predictions, it is because two brokerage firms, Credit Suisse and UBS, have long held their annual media conferences in the first week of the month. Other firms schedule the release of their forecasts at the same time, to ride the coattails of the competing conferences.) Most forecasters are predicting growth in ad spending in the United States next year of 2 to 5 percent over 2006. That would represent a decline from the rate of growth in ad spending this year compared with 2005, which is expected to finish in the range of 3 to 6 percent. But it is not bad considering that 2007 will be missing two major events that help administer a hypodermic to ad budgets in even-numbered years: Olympics and national elections. “You normally see a real drop-off in a non-Olympics, non-election year,” said Robert J. Coen, senior vice president and forecasting director at Universal McCann in New York, who opened the UBS conference. Rather, Mr. Coen said, he believed that more marketers next year would increase ad budgets as they decide to “start turning their attention back to long-term communications” from a focus on cost-cutting. Still, reactions to the predictions for 2007 depend upon the perch from which they are considered. Those in the traditional media like television and newspapers will no doubt frown after hearing that most forecasters expect at best flat growth in ad spending for them. Those who sell ads on Web sites, on the other hand, are likely to be beaming at the high double-digit percentage gains being predicted for them. “The trend that will continue to affect the media universe in 2007 is the ongoing shift in advertising dollars from traditional media into nontraditional media, most notably the Internet,” Fitch Ratings concluded in an outlook report. Television, radio and newspapers will “experience slow growth and ongoing audience declines,” according to the report, “and ad spending continues to follow consumer patterns.” For instance, the Newspaper Association of America is predicting that spending for ads on the Web sites of newspapers will increase a robust 22 percent next year from 2006. But ad spending in the print editions of those newspapers in 2007 will be flat, the association is forecasting, pulled down by a decline in classified advertising and no growth in demand from national advertisers. An analyst for Credit Suisse, Debra Schwartz, questioned in a report whether even the prediction for an anemic gain of 1.2 percent was “too optimistic.” A forecast from the Morton-Groves Newspaper Newsletter, issued last week, may be pessimistic enough for her. The publication predicted that ad spending in newspapers next year will fall 2 percent from 2006, a bigger decline than the 1.8 percent it is forecasting for this year compared with 2005. (For ad spending on newspaper Web sites, the newsletter predicted an increase in 2007 of 23.3 percent from this year, coming after a gain of 34 percent it is forecasting for 2006.) James Conaghan, vice president for business analysis and research at the newspaper association, offered a reason for the upbeat outlook for newspaper Web sites. In a test recently started by Google to sell advertisements that appear in the print versions of 50 major newspapers, “the ad volume placed in the newspapers in the first three weeks has exceeded Google’s expectation for the entire three months of the test,” Mr. Conaghan said at the UBS conference. “The advertisers and the publishers are also satisfied with the results,” he added. Gordon Borrell, chief executive at Borrell Associates, who spoke with Mr. Conaghan, suggested that “10 years out, many newspaper Web sites could be as large as the newspapers that spawned them” in terms of ad revenue. In another striking example of the divergence in forecasts for the traditional and new media, Mr. Coen, whose agency is part of the McCann Worldgroup unit of the Interpublic Group of Companies, predicted that ad spending on the four largest national broadcast television networks would increase just 3 percent next year from 2006. In contrast, ad spending by national advertisers on the Internet will grow five times as fast, at 15 percent, Mr. Coen said. Mr. Coen does not include search engine marketing in his estimates for Internet ad spending, classifying it as more promotional in nature. Another forecaster who does include it within his online totals — Steve King, worldwide chief executive at ZenithOptimedia, part of the Publicis Groupe — offered a prediction that Internet ad spending next year would grow 29 percent from 2006. By comparison, Mr. King offered forecasts for many traditional media for percentage gains in low single digits like 1.5 percent for local radio and 2 percent for newspapers. In fact, Mr. King said, he expected online ad revenue to grow at “seven times the rate for traditional ad growth.” Internet ad spending as a percentage of the total for all American media will reach 7.1 percent this year, Mr. King said. He predicts that it will hit 10.4 percent in 2009. Mr. Coen, who offers forecasts twice a year, predicted that American ad spending in 2007 would total $298.8 billion, up 4.8 percent from $285.1 billion in 2006. That is a full percentage point lower than the 5.8 percent increase he predicted last June when he gave his initial forecast for 2007. Mr. Coen’s total for 2006 represents an increase of 5.2 percent from 2005. By contrast, last June he forecast a gain of 5.6 percent. Twice before, in June and December 2005, he predicted an increase of 5.8 percent. Mr. Coen attributed the decline largely to “the beleaguered local sector” of ad spending, “which hasn’t done very well in traditional media,” he said, because local advertisers “continue to cut to the bone.” Also, “consolidations are killing things” locally, Mr. Coen said, referring to combinations of local department stores, pharmacies and hardware chains, which are reducing the ranks of potential advertisers. That was demonstrated — painfully, if you own a local newspaper — in Mr. Conaghan’s presentation. In the third quarter, when Federated Department Stores replaced a host of local retail names with the Macy’s brand, he said, the company’s ad spending in newspapers fell about 14 percent from the same period a year ago. The declines were even more pronounced in certain Macy’s regional markets, Mr. Conaghan said, citing decreases of 34 percent in the South, 39 percent in the Midwest and 42 percent in the West. | Advertising and Marketing;Computers and the Internet;Newspapers;Television;Magazines;Newspaper Assn of America;Fitch Ratings;Interpublic Group of Companies Incorporated;United States |
ny0079690 | [
"world",
"middleeast"
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| 2015/02/19 | Persecution Defines Life for Yemen’s Remaining Jews | RAIDA, Yemen — About all that remain of Yemen ’s ancient and once vibrant Jewish community are untended cemeteries, dramatic hillside ghetto villages of thousand-year-old stone houses and a few people like Abraham Jacob and his extended family. Most of them live near this northern Yemeni town in Amran Province, deep in territory controlled by Houthi militants, whose leaders have made anti-Semitism a central plank in their political platform. It shows. When Mr. Jacob, 36, came to the souk here Thursday to meet journalists and take them on a rare visit to his community, he rode a battered motorcycle, his long, curly earlocks flapping and making him readily identifiable as Jewish. When traffic stalled for a minute, a khat dealer accosted the visitors’ Yemeni interpreter, Shuaib Almosawa, a journalist. “What are you doing with that dirty Jew?” the dealer said. “Why are you friendly with him?” “He’s a human being, after all,” Mr. Almosawa replied. “No, he’s not,” the dealer said. “God has damned him.” The last of Yemen’s once numerous Jews, who predated Muslims by many centuries, have seldom been so threatened and had so few protectors. The Houthis, who now dominate the country, are particularly strong in the two places with confirmed remaining Yemeni Jews: here in Raida, where there are 55 Jews, and in Sana, the capital, where a small number live under what amounts to house arrest by the Houthi leadership. The two countries that have long facilitated Jewish emigration from Yemen — the United States and Britain — both closed their embassies last week, as did most other Western countries. And the Yemeni strongman who for three decades was the Jews’ protector, former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, is not only out of power, but also, more recently, out of favor with the Houthis. “We have no friends,” Mr. Jacob said, “so we just try to stay away from everyone as much as we can.” Image The gate to the compound of the Jacob family, which is near the northern town of Raida. Credit Tyler Hicks/The New York Times They have more to fear than bad words. The encounter in the souk took place a short distance from where a Yemeni Air Force pilot in 2008 accosted Moshe Yaish Nahari, the brother of a prominent rabbi and the father of eight children, as he stepped out of his home. The assailant coldly said, “Jew, here’s a message from Islam,” and then fatally shot Mr. Nahari, who was unarmed, five times with an assault rifle, according to Yemeni news accounts. The pilot was convicted and sentenced to death for murder, but Mr. Nahari’s family, pressured into accepting blood money from the killer’s tribe to spare his life, left Yemen as soon as possible. In the next few years, nearly all of Raida’s Jews followed. Among the exceptions were Abraham Jacob and eight other interrelated households, 55 people in all, most of them children, according to Suleiman Jacob, 45, Abraham’s eldest brother and the community’s unofficial rabbi and kosher butcher. Like the men, most of the boys in the Jacob family wear earlocks, a proud sign of who they are in an otherwise Muslim society. Now Suleiman keeps his earlocks thin and long enough so that when he goes out he can tuck them out of sight under an Arabic-style head scarf, which also covers the skullcaps (or kipas) that the men and boys all wear. “It’s a shame that we have to do that sometimes, but we do,” he said. Abraham says he refuses to hide his earlocks: “I fear none but God.” Yemeni Jews, like those in other Arab countries, have suffered wave after wave of persecution. Originally many of them lived in Saada Province in the north, which was predominantly Zaydi, members of an offshoot of Shiite Islam that historically were anti-Semitic. The Houthis, whose base is in Saada, embedded that attitude in their slogan, “Death to America, death to Israel, damnation to the Jews.” The Houthis fought a succession of wars with the central government beginning in 2004, and in 2007, a Houthi representative in Saada gave Jews there an ultimatum: Leave in 10 days or face attack. Yemen’s president then, Mr. Saleh, though a Zaydi himself, became a champion of the Jews from Saada. At government expense, Mr. Saleh relocated them to a gated community in Sana next to the American Embassy. That place is known as Tourist City, and as recently as 2009, there were 400 Jews reportedly living there under the former president’s protection. Now there are said to be only 20 to 40. Many of them have reportedly cut off their earlocks after one of their number was killed in 2002 just outside Tourist City’s gates by a Muslim who accused the victim of ruining his life through witchcraft. Image The children in the extended Jacob family make up most of the remaining community of 55 Jews near the town of Raida. Credit Tyler Hicks/The New York Times One of the Jews still there, Yahya Yousef, who described himself as the Sana rabbi, expressed eagerness to be interviewed when contacted by telephone but said he could not do so unless the Houthi-dominated security office in the Interior Ministry gave formal permission. Repeated requests over a week for such permission were unsuccessful. Army guards at the community’s gate refused entry to journalists. In Raida, Abraham Jacob shrugged off his neighbors’ anti-Semitism, saying, “There are good people, and there are bad people.” But it is harder to overlook the Houthis’ slogan, which is chanted at all Houthi rallies, broadcast on television and painted on what seems like every blank wall space in areas they control. “We know there are Houthi people who are understanding and tolerant, and we have not been harmed by any of them,” Mr. Jacob said. “But this cursing us to damnation is distressing and hurtful to us.” “Honestly,” his brother Suleiman said, “we are a little afraid of the Houthi takeover and don’t know what to do about it.” Their family’s choice would be to emigrate to the United States, rather than Israel, Suleiman said, “because America is quieter, and we’ve had enough problems already.” Despite the embassy closings, he said he remained hopeful that his son Jacob, who will turn 13 late this year, can celebrate his bar mitzvah outside Yemen. The boy has already been memorizing the Hebrew verses that he will have to chant for the occasion. “He is my best Hebrew student,” Suleiman said. The neighborhood still has young children and their parents, as well as elderly people, but there are few single adults of marriageable age. Most have emigrated. The last wedding took place two years ago, Abraham said. The newlyweds left Yemen and never came back. “There isn’t a single one of us here who doesn’t want to leave,” Suleiman said. “Soon there will be no Jews in Yemen, inshallah,” he said, using the Arabic expression for “God willing.” | Yemen;Houthis;Judaism;Raida;Antisemitism |
ny0061487 | [
"sports",
"ncaafootball"
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| 2014/01/02 | Major Florida State Wins Live On in Sod Cemetery | TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — North of Florida State’s football stadium, next to the practice fields and near a parking lot, there is a cemetery lined by a fence. The grass is Bermuda; the graves, bronze; the remains buried a few feet beneath the ground. The names include most every major college football team, from Miami to Nebraska to Penn State. A family of lizards likes to frolic amid the fallen. Most of what is buried here has decomposed, but what remains are the memories of Florida State football victories where losses were expected, and of bowl game and national championship triumphs. This is the Seminoles’ Sod Cemetery, where the story of a program that started as an underdog and became a powerhouse and then slipped and returned to dominance is told through patches of grass taken from other stadiums. Douglas Mannheimer, a lawyer by trade, is the keeper of the cemetery. On a recent visit, he wiped away wayward grass blades and picked up a discarded candy wrapper. The sun cast shadows across the plots. So many important games. “The Sod Cemetery is about celebrating a really great day when other people didn’t think you’d do so well,” Mannheimer said. A jogger ran by. She had not seen Mannheimer’s visitors at first, as he talked about tradition and next week’s Bowl Championship Series title matchup in Pasadena, Calif., where Florida State is favored against Auburn — and favored to bring back a piece of the Rose Bowl field for the first time. The jogger laughed. “I thought you were talking to yourself,” she said. Mannheimer is serious about his cemetery. He keeps a folder in his office with typed instructions from the man who started the tradition, Dean Coyle Moore, a longtime Florida State professor and member of the athletic board. Moore came up with the idea of a sod game in 1962. The Seminoles were set to play favored Georgia on Oct. 20, and Moore challenged the captains to win and “bring back some sod from between the hedges at Georgia.” From 1905 until 1947, Florida State had been a women’s college, and Moore wanted to instill a scrappy mentality in a relatively new program. The Seminoles upset Georgia, 18-0. Two captains, Gene McDowell and Red Dawson (Dawson was among those on Marshall’s coaching staff who did not board a plane that crashed in 1970), did as instructed. “We got a piece of sod and took it back to Tallahassee,” McDowell said. “Red had it in his pocket or something.” The sod briefly settled on a mantel in Moore’s parlor. His wife told him to remove it. He buried it and thus gave birth to a tradition that has continued for half a century. That could continue Monday night. The rise of Florida State football can be traced through seasons that lacked sod games because the team was often favored; through a downturn when the Seminoles were underdogs in games against teams from Maryland and Wake Forest; to this season, which has given the Seminoles a chance to put in four new plots. Moore asked Mannheimer to succeed him as caretaker in 1988, and for Mannheimer’s son, Andrew, to take over for his father. Doug Mannheimer says things like, “I had an undertaker friend in the rotary club,” and “The coffin looks like it’s built to handle a parakeet.” Mannheimer grew up in Tallahassee, where his father attended every home football and men’s basketball game for 40 years. Mannheimer last missed a home football game 51 years ago and was inducted into the university’s athletics Hall of Fame in 2013. Sod games include all away contests in which Florida State is not favored, all games at Florida and all conference championships, bowl games and national championships. (Rare exceptions are made for important road games in which the Seminoles are slightly favored, or which are considered even.) This year, Florida State brought home sod from wins at Clemson and at Florida and from its Atlantic Coast Conference championship, against Duke. It could add a fourth plot with a triumph over Auburn. Home games are never sod games, but for each home contest, flowers are placed on the grave markers of opposing teams, in their colors, to remember the departed. Mannheimer used to speak to the freshmen each August, to explain the sod tradition, but since Jimbo Fisher took over as coach in 2010, he has asked Mannheimer to address the entire team. Mannheimer also instructs the captains on how to remove the sod: look for divots, use hands or scissors from the trainer, remove a small square. Many markers are from the early years, like the seasons after Bobby Bowden arrived in 1963 as an assistant. (He served as coach from 1976 to 2009.) Every game seemed like a homecoming game then. Everybody wanted to play lowly Florida State. “Nearly all of those became sod games if we won them,” Bowden said. “It got to be a problem when we played on AstroTurf. I mean, you’ve got to have a big pair of scissors, boy! And I’m not sure they liked it.” Bowden was referring to a Sugar Bowl victory against Auburn after the 1988 season, when Odell Haggins, then a defensive lineman, now a longtime Florida State assistant, cut out a piece of the Superdome turf. That cost Florida State $500. The next time the Seminoles played in the Sugar Bowl, officials presented them with a precut sample of the carpet. Last summer, Florida State built new practice fields, and the cemetery was moved to its current location. A full 90 grave sites needed to make way, and Mannheimer joked that he had to appeal to a circuit court to exhume the graves. The current cemetery is closer to the stadium and more in public view. It can draw thousands of spectators on game days. A group from the Extra Points Club handles much of the maintenance along with the university’s staff, clipping the grass and shining the markers. Picking a favorite sod game is like picking a favorite child. Mannheimer likes the 37-37 tie against Bear Bryant’s Alabama in 1967. Or the 51-31 demolition of Michigan in 1991, a game in which Bowden said Florida State was “hot as a firecracker.” Or the game this year when Florida State hung 51 points on Clemson in Death Valley. There are too many to choose from. Once, a marker was stolen from the cemetery, and its absence went unnoticed until after graduation, when the perpetrators left it outside the athletic department offices. “I just remember what it meant to play in sod games,” said Charlie Ward, the former Florida State quarterback and Knicks guard. “You took pride in knowing you were on the road, and you were supposed to lose.” As Florida State became one of the most consistent teams in college football, the sod game “probably lost some of its meaning,” Bowden said. But not all feel that way. Take Matt Frier. He played receiver for the Seminoles. After they won the national championship in the 1993 season, he walked to the 50-yard line at the Orange Bowl and scooped up a piece of the field with his hands — “Down on the ground,” he said, “like a kid making a sand castle.” His teammates lifted him on their shoulders, and that is how he ended up on the cover of Sports Illustrated , sod in hand. He keeps a copy of the magazine in his office. The moment represented Bowden’s first national title. “It was,” Frier said all these years later, “the definition of a sod game.” He returned home with the patch. Mannheimer buried it, amid all the other plots. | College football;Cemetery;Florida State University |
ny0088631 | [
"sports",
"ncaafootball"
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| 2015/09/20 | Score Is Lopsided in 22nd Straight Loss, but Columbia Finds Room for Optimism | As Columbia Coach Al Bagnoli led his team back to the visitors’ locker room after a 44-24 loss to Fordham on Saturday at Jack Coffey Field, excited fans who gathered along the pathway cheered even though the Lions had absorbed their 22nd consecutive defeat. But this loss was a hopeful one. It did not feel like so many others. To start the Bagnoli Era, Columbia unveiled a team long on spirit and determination, one that may rise or at least free itself of a burdensome losing streak that punctuates decades of failure. “If this team stays together and keeps competing and avoids mistakes, we have a chance to be a decent football team,” Bagnoli said. For perspective on Bagnoli’s debut, Fordham went on the road to thump Columbia, 49-7, last year. The Lions were outscored, 389-103, in finishing 0-10. As if such ineptitude were not enough, Coach Peter Mangurian faced accusations that he mishandled concussions and verbally abused players. Mangurian resigned with two years left on a five-year contract. As for cheers after a 20-point defeat that reflected well on his team’s resilience but still pointed to a considerable talent gap, Bagnoli appreciated the fans’ sentiment but shrugged that off. “I don’t believe in moral victories,” he said. In one sense, the losing fans who smiled broadly reminded him of all that has gone wrong at Columbia, where routs and awful seasons have been the norm and weighed on players. “They’ve been scarred, so at times they don’t think they’re good football players,” Bagnoli said. “It is my job to get them to think they are.” Bagnoli offers a résumé that is superior to a parade of unsuccessful predecessors. He has the most coaching victories in Football Championship Subdivision history, with a record of 232-92. He proved beyond a doubt that he can succeed in the Ivy League. He compiled a 148-80 record in 23 years at Penn, including 112-49 in the league, and won nine Ivy titles. Columbia finally has intriguing long-term prospects. In the short term, the Lions could not match the skill players of the Rams (2-1). Kevin Anderson, a 6-foot-2, 195-pound transfer from Marshall in his first season as Fordham’s starter, gave the Rams an edge at quarterback. He finished 22 of 30 passing for 330 yards with five touchdowns and an interception. He rushed 20 times for 95 yards. Phazahn Odom, a 6-8 senior tight end, led the receivers with five catches for 94 yards and two touchdowns. Columbia did not have a running back to compare to Fordham’s Chase Edmonds in swiftness and elusiveness. Edmonds, a 5-9, 196-pound sophomore who was the Patriot League rookie of the year, rushed 13 times for 127 yards, including one for 73 yards. The season represents something of an unwelcome fresh start for Fordham, the reigning Patriot League champion. Under Coach Joe Moorhead, in his fourth season, the Rams have 18 new starters and 30 freshmen on the roster. But some things do not change. “One of the things we pride ourselves on here is running the ball successfully and creating one-on-one opportunities on the perimeter,” Moorhead said. Bagnoli will most likely continue to play two quarterbacks, Skyler Mornhinweg and Anders Hill, in an effort to capitalize on their disparate skills while covering their shortcomings as much as possible. Mornhinweg, the son of the former Jets offensive coordinator and current Baltimore Ravens quarterbacks coach Marty Mornhinweg, is one of three transfers and 22 freshmen added to a program whose ultimate success will depend largely on better recruiting. Mornhinweg excelled in a quick-hit passing game, completing 21 of 25 throws for 187 yards with one interception. Hill, a junior who battled for the starting job during the preseason, went 8 of 15 for 56 yards. He was also the Lions’ top rusher, with six carries for 46 yards. While Fordham made the most of its explosive offensive talent, Columbia lamented missed opportunities typical of a downtrodden team that must learn how to win. One of them came on Fordham’s opening series when Matt Cahal, a senior free safety, intercepted a pass from Anderson on third-and-9. The Lions took over at Fordham’s 26-yard line. Mornhinweg ran for 3 yards. But two passes to Alan Watson, a junior running back, were stuffed. Cameron Nizialek then missed wide right on a 41-yard field goal attempt. Anderson threw for three of his scores as Fordham built a 21-10 halftime lead. The Lions never recovered, but they continued to play with a relentlessness that was refreshing to the team’s long-suffering followers. Cahal acknowledged that the Lions tended to become disheartened when they trailed in the second half of games last year. That did not happen this time. “We fought from beginning to end,” he said. “Our execution was better. We played with a lot more confidence.” Watson said: “This is a loss we can build off of. There were a lot of good things, and the mistakes can get corrected.” | College football;Al Bagnoli;Columbia;Fordham |
ny0065192 | [
"business"
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| 2014/06/10 | Walmart Reorganizes E-commerce Personnel | Walmart announced two high-level changes to its e-commerce team on Monday, as it pushes to ramp up its online business and compete with its archrival Amazon. Walmart said Monday that Joel Anderson, who has been president of Walmart.com in the United States for the last three years, was resigning from the company to take a job elsewhere. A Walmart spokesman declined to name Mr. Anderson’s new employer, or to say whether it was another retailer, adding that an announcement would be made by that company in the next few days. The other change was the promotion of Fernando Madeira, who has been the president of Walmart’s Latin American e-commerce division. His new responsibilities will include leading Walmart.com’s domestic and Latin America teams, as well as other “growth areas,” the company said. Though these are some of the more visible changes to be made at Walmart’s e-commerce division, they are far from the only shifts in personnel. Dan Toporek, a company spokesman, said Walmart.com had hired about 1,000 employees in the last 18 months in Silicon Valley alone. Another 600 people were hired in Brazil in that time, he said. The company has also been beefing up its infrastructure, announcing three new e-commerce centers in just the past few months — one in Texas, one in Pennsylvania and one in Indiana. At its annual shareholder meeting last week, Walmart’s new chief executive, Doug McMillon, spoke extensively about offering more convenient, and often more technologically advanced ways of getting goods to their customers, pinpointing that as one of the keys to the company’s future health. “It is important that we all understand the shift that has happened in technology and retail, what it means for us, and what we’re doing to win,” Mr. McMillon said. | Walmart Stores;Appointments and Executive Changes;E Commerce;Joel Anderson;Fernando Madeira |
ny0111534 | [
"business",
"media"
]
| 2012/02/16 | Made-in-America Resonates With Marketers | BLUE-COLLAR workers in fields like manufacturing — particularly when they make products on American soil — are again becoming a favorite subject for white-collar workers on Madison Avenue. The trend was born of the economic worries that followed the financial crisis in 2008. Recently, it is gaining steam — appropriate, since the ads often use blasts of steam to signal something is being built — with proposals in Washington to offer incentives to encourage the location or relocation of factories in the United States. “We continue to see very heavy emotional response to anything that would leverage against the bad economy,” said Robert Passikoff, president at Brand Keys, a brand and customer-loyalty consulting company in New York. The trend is even extending beyond advertising. For instance, “ABC World News” is running a series of reports under the rubric “ Made in America ,” in which anchors and reporters celebrate a preference for buying merchandise made in this country. The most notable moment to date in the trend came on Feb. 5, when Super Bowl XLVI was played, as marketers paid NBC tens of millions of dollars to run commercials with work themes before the game, during the game and during halftime. Those commercials included spots for General Electric, part of a campaign carrying the theme “G.E. works,” that celebrated products like refrigerators and turbines being built in the United States; a spot that showed a bottle of new Bud Light Platinum beer being produced in a plant that looked more like a factory than a brewery; and a spot for Hyundai, featuring workers employed at its first American factory, in Montgomery, Ala. The Hyundai commercial, titled “All for One,” “was intended to celebrate Hyundai’s spirit of trying new things,” said Steve Shannon, vice president for marketing at Hyundai Motor America. “An example is certainly our growth and capabilities in the U.S.” “Although we didn’t develop ‘All for One’ specifically to communicate a ‘made in the U.S.A.’ message,” he added, “it became part of the story we wanted to tell.” No work-themed commercial that Super Bowl Sunday drew more notice than a spot from the Chrysler Group, known as “ Halftime in America ,” which featured Clint Eastwood declaring that “the world’s going to hear the roar of our engines.” The spot generated a national debate that was even spoofed on “Saturday Night Live.” The purpose of the Chrysler commercial, and the others in the genre, was summarized in a speech by Sergio Marchionne , chief executive at the Chrysler Group, to a group of dealers. The intention is “a call to take action to reconsider and contribute to this great land’s economic progress,” he said. “It’s simply a way of saying that everyone, in this land, has the right to dream and the power to turn that dream into reality.” Another example of the trend also arrived last week when the Tropicana Products division of PepsiCo augmented a campaign for Tropicana Pure Premium orange juice, which carries the theme “Tap into nature,” with ads that play up the provenance of the oranges. “Grown, picked and squeezed in Florida,” print ads proclaim. “Tropicana Pure Premium is 100% pure Florida orange juice.” In a television commercial that made its debut during the CBS coverage of the Grammy Awards , orange crates labeled “Tropicana Pure Premium 100% Florida” are displayed four times in 30 seconds. Tropicana Pure Premium had been made solely with Florida oranges until 2007, when PepsiCo began mixing in oranges from Brazil. That decision, and a similar step by the Coca-Cola Company, which sells orange juices bearing brands like Minute Maid and Simply Orange, led a competitor, Florida’s Natural, part of Citrus World, to add a logo to its packages composed of an American flag and the words “Product of U.S.A.” (Now that Tropicana Pure Premium has returned to its all-American orange sourcing, Florida’s Natural is proclaiming in ads and on its Web site : “All Florida. Never imported. Who can say that?”) The timing of the Tropicana Pure Premium campaign “is based on 100 percent Florida Tropicana Pure Premium being nationally available,” said a spokesman for Tropicana Products, Michael Torres. In several instances, there is more to the American-centric efforts by marketers than commercials. For instance, Tropicana Products also changed the labels on packages of Tropicana Pure Premium, adding a sentence that reads “100% pure Florida orange juice.” And the “G.E. works” campaign is being accompanied by initiatives at General Electric like a four-day conference in Washington this week, meant to shine a spotlight on “what works in America,” as the company described it. At the conference, Jeffrey R. Immelt, chairman and chief executive at G.E., discussed plans that include the opening of three G.E. Aviation plants in 2013, in Alabama, Mississippi and Ohio, and the company’s hiring of 5,000 American veterans in the next five years. For all the drumbeating for American workers, said Mr. Passikoff of Brand Keys, his research indicates that many consumers do not shop specifically “for something made in one place or another” because they have heard “in the past 20 years so much talk of a ‘global economy.’ ” For example, in the automotive category, where a car is built “is not one of the drivers, pardon the pun” in deciding whether or not to buy it, he added. | Labor and Jobs;Factories and Manufacturing;Advertising and Marketing;Eastwood Clint;Marchionne Sergio;United States Economy;Economic Conditions and Trends;Television |
ny0159963 | [
"sports",
"baseball"
]
| 2006/03/02 | Hall Still Has Time to Honor Buck O'Neil | IT would have been a wonderful day for baseball if Buck O'Neil had been elected to the Hall of Fame on Monday. The grand old man of his sport, O'Neil could have been inducted into the Hall on July 30, the living symbol of deprivation turned into victory. O'Neil plans to be there this summer, despite the firestorm over his exclusion in a special election. Keith Olbermann is blasting the vote on MSNBC and bloggers are whacking away on the Web, demanding a recount that is not going to happen. Meanwhile, O'Neil is reacting with the grace that has marked his entire 94 years. "That committee, I know they were voting just like they felt it should be," O'Neil said in the first disappointing hours Monday. O'Neil and Minnie Minoso were turned down by a special committee that voted 17 -- count 'em, 17 -- new members to represent black and Latino figures of the past. Anybody considering the good of the game would have recognized the fiesta that would have been touched off by the election of two living icons -- O'Neil, the star of the epic Ken Burns baseball documentary, and Minoso, the hero of the South Side of Chicago. What a no-brainer. When at least 4 of the 12 voters chose to exclude O'Neil and Minoso, I called the decision lamentable. Lately my mood swings have gone from thinking the voters were mean-spirited and shortsighted to thinking they were intellectually faithful to their instructions. You know the saying about no good deed going unpunished. The Hall, which is separate from Major League Baseball, was holding the one-time vote in response to the slow trickle of Negro league people into the Hall. Here was a chance to get it right. The Hall certainly chose the perfect person to lead the group. Fay Vincent, as commissioner, apologized in 1991 for the many decades of segregation in the major leagues that finally ended in 1947. Vincent has a keen mind and a thriving conscience, and he has been involved with many corporate boards. Yesterday, before heading out for a day at Dodgertown in Florida, Vincent spoke on the phone, explaining the role of this highly controversial panel. "It wasn't our job to address American history," said Vincent, who is not a voting member. "It was our job to address performance. People were hard-edged about it." Vincent said he never told the 12 voters to consider the feel-good energy that living inductees would surely generate. He said he challenged the panel to include only Negro leaguers that might have been better than some superb players still not in the Hall -- Cecil Travis, Marty Marion, Tommy Henrich, who was known as Old Reliable, Joe Gordon, Allie Reynolds, Dominic DiMaggio. Given the vagueness of records and the lack of public exposure for Negro and Latino players in those days, all comparisons are difficult. Ultimately, the voters chose 12 players and 5 officials, but not O'Neil, a good player and a successful manager in the Negro leagues and a scout and the first black coach in the major leagues, and not Minoso, the first dark-skinned Latino player in the majors as well as a career .298 hitter. Vincent defended the decision that the 12 voters would not discuss their ballots, but he praised O'Neil and Minoso. "You'd have to put a lot of weight on Citizen Buck," Vincent said, adding, "I was surprised Buck didn't make it." So were a lot of people. Charles Margulis, an ecology activist in Oakland, Calif., was moved to set up a blog (www.inductbuck.blogspot.com.) comparing O'Neil favorably to members of the Hall. Olbermann, who has a long sports background, complained that two men of color were excluded while two white officials, J. L. Wilkinson of Kansas City and Effa Manley of Newark, were voted in. This argument is inappropriate because Wilkinson held Negro baseball together for a long time, and Manley was a lifelong member of black society as well as a prominent team operator. Last night, in an interview with Olbermann on MSNBC, O'Neil said: "Don't weep for Buck. No, man, be happy, be thankful." O'Neil said he was grateful for the chance to be voted into the Hall. "As a human being, I love Buck O'Neil," Dale A. Petroskey, the president of the Hall, said yesterday. "I knew he would be disappointed. But as president of the Hall of Fame, I had faith in the process." O'Neil will have a role at the Hall on July 30, Petroskey promised. "We're looking at the best way to sort it out," he said. At the very least, the Hall could create a Buck O'Neil lifetime achievement award -- and give him the first one, to honor all the others who had to wait, and wait. For that matter, the board could find a way to include O'Neil, straight in the front door. Much more rigid rules have been broken down in Buck O'Neil's long and honorable life. Sports of The Times E-mail: [email protected] | BASEBALL HALL OF FAME;O'NEIL BUCK;BASEBALL;SPORTS OF THE TIMES (TIMES COLUMN);HALLS OF FAME;AWARDS DECORATIONS AND HONORS |
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"nyregion"
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| 2009/05/09 | Manhattan Baby Sitter Is Charged With Sexual Abuse of 3 Boys | A college sophomore who worked as a nanny and baby sitter for more than 20 families in and around New York City has been charged with sexually abusing three boys from Manhattan, officials said on Friday. The man, Jonathan Then, 21, a student at Hunter College, was ordered held without bail after his arraignment in Manhattan Criminal Court on Friday on sexual abuse, predatory sexual assault and other charges, the authorities said. But the case is “far from over,” a prosecutor, Rachel Ferrari, said in court. The police asked anyone with information about the case to come forward. “We have learned that the defendant has been a live-in nanny and baby sitter for more than 20 families throughout Manhattan, Brooklyn and New Jersey, and that number is growing,” according to a statement Ms. Ferrari read in court. “Each family we have spoken to has given us names of other families who hired the defendant and whose homes the defendant has been in.” Mr. Then also volunteered in second- and third-grade classrooms at two private schools in Manhattan, coached children in several sports leagues and worked at summer camps in New York and New Hampshire and at a day care center in Mansfield, Conn., the prosecutor said. Barry Weinstein, a lawyer for Mr. Then, did not return calls for comment. Detectives investigated complaints by the parents of the three boys from Manhattan, two 8-year-olds and an 11-year-old, said Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, who spoke about the case on Friday at 1 Police Plaza. The New York Post reported on Friday that Mr. Then was being questioned. The commissioner said Mr. Then, who lives on Seaman Avenue in Inwood, advertised on a Web site, Sittercity.com. Detectives arrested Mr. Then on Thursday at Hunter College, officials said. According to a criminal complaint, Mr. Then touched one boy on five occasions between January and March. The abuse of a second boy occurred between January and April 15, the complaint said, and the third boy was abused in January and February. But it was not the first time such allegations against Mr. Then had surfaced. Investigators in Brooklyn said a Brooklyn Heights mother hired Mr. Then on April 7 as a baby sitter for her 8-year-old son. Mr. Then was indicted on April 24 on charges of sexual abuse and endangering the welfare of a child, said a spokesman for the Brooklyn district attorney’s office. | Child Abuse and Neglect;New York City;Sex Crimes |
ny0077142 | [
"sports"
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| 2015/05/09 | A Syracuse Lacrosse Team Transformed a Sport, Clung to a Disputed Title and Lost a Trophy | The banner still hangs defiantly inside the Carrier Dome, recognizing what many in lacrosse contend was the greatest college team ever. But since the N.C.A.A. vacated Syracuse’s 1990 national title — its third consecutive championship, with the Gait brothers, Gary and Paul, dominating at the height of their careers — an asterisk has marred one of the storied program’s proudest achievements. Twenty-five years later, the still-bitter dispute surrounding the N.C.A.A.’s decision to penalize the program over an improper car loan signed by the coach’s wife has been overshadowed by a mystery: Nobody seems to know what happened to the trophy. It is missing; has been since 1995. Today in Central New York, the subject of its whereabouts is steeped in as much intrigue as the mythical sea monster of Lake Champlain. Tall tales and conspiracy theories abound. Some say it is somewhere in a remote bar in the Catskills. Some say it was stolen. The prevailing claim is that it was buried with Roy Simmons, the father of Roy Simmons Jr., the coach of the 1990 team. Others have even more absurd ideas. “It’s kind of like the Jimmy Hoffa story,” the former Syracuse attackman John Zulberti told the makers of the documentary “The Lost Trophy,” which will make its debut on ESPNU on Saturday. “It’s buried under the Dome.” The hourlong documentary, directed and produced by Fred Cambria with the executive producer Brett Jefferson, both former Syracuse lacrosse players, tells the story of the 1990 team, which outscored opponents by an average of more than 10 goals per game and was the culmination of a dynastic run for the Orange, who went 42-1 over three years. But at this year’s lacrosse Final Four — taking place in Philadelphia from May 23 to 25 — the N.C.A.A. will not recognize the 25th anniversary of the sport’s most controversial team. Instead, a fan vote was held to determine the “champion of champions” (with the 1990 Syracuse squad not included among the 16 eligible teams). The 1997 Princeton team won and will be invited to Lincoln Financial Field for an on-field ceremony. In 1995, a two-year N.C.A.A. investigation concluded that Nancy Simmons, the wife of Roy Simmons Jr., had signed her name on a car loan for Paul Gait and his wife during the 1990 season. The university argued that Roy and Nancy Simmons had an independent relationship and that she should not be viewed as a representative of the university’s athletic interests. But the N.C.A.A. ruled that Gait had participated while ineligible . That stigmatized a revolutionary team that had set new standards for offensive productivity and creativity. Including the Gaits, Syracuse had six players named as first-team all-Americans a total of 12 times from 1988 to 1990, and the free-spirited Simmons was an unconventional orchestrator of the game, preferring to stand in the middle of the field like a ringmaster during practices as the action buzzed around him. “It was showtime,” said Matt Palumb, the goalie from 1987 to 1990. “It was just a very magical, special time.” The filmmakers, Cambria and Jefferson, examined how Syracuse’s style and sizzle paved the way for other transcendent players like the brothers Casey, Ryan and Michael Powell, and later the Thompsons: Miles, Ty and Lyle. Cambria and Jefferson were assisted by John Jiloty, who was the editor in chief of Inside Lacrosse magazine for 13 years. He said fans today saw only the asterisk and did not recognize just how transformative the 1990 team had really been. “They blew everybody out of the water,” Jiloty said. “I don’t think we’ll see a team that dominant.” The film also delves into the revered and eccentric Simmons — an accomplished sculptor and painter off the field — and explores the shadowy circumstances behind the disappearance of the national championship trophy. “It’s a dream story,” Cambria said. “It has so many tentacles.” After 1990, the trophy sat on display in the Ernie Davis Room inside the Carrier Dome. When the N.C.A.A. announced that it was vacating Syracuse’s title, Jake Crouthamel, the athletic director at the time, went to the Dome to retrieve it and discovered it was gone. The N.C.A.A. questioned Simmons, who maintained that the trophy had been abducted by “friends of Syracuse lacrosse.” The N.C.A.A. left town empty-handed, and the trophy never resurfaced. Simmons, who retired in 1998, has always been suspected as the trophy’s kidnapper because of his public disgust with the N.C.A.A.’s ruling at the time. “He’s a very proud man,” Jefferson said. “He always stood up for what he thought was right. I don’t think he ever was able to grasp that something was done that was that wrong.” Members of the 1990 team have adopted a more playful perspective about the trophy’s whereabouts. Nobody claims to know where it is. Everybody has heard a tale of where it might be. “This is not torture; it’s not bitter,” Palumb said. “It’s a fun little tale of mystery and intrigue, a little bit of scandal. I would call it a harmless scandal.” In Syracuse’s Manley Field House today, an unsanctioned trophy sits on the pedestal designated for the 1990 team, among the program’s 10 official titles. It says simply “1990 Lacrosse Champion” under a large block S. The program’s media guide notes 11 national titles, not 10. “While the championship was vacated, we continue to recognize the team and their many accomplishments,” a Syracuse spokesman said in a statement. Tom Marechek, a first-team all-American for Syracuse from 1990 to 1992, said: “Nothing can take the championship away from that team, because we were such a family. And we were very good. We knew walking on the field every time that we were going to win.” This year’s Syracuse team (12-2) enters the N.C.A.A. tournament Sunday as the No. 2 seed and hosts Marist in the Dome. Its focus is on bringing home a 12th N.C.A.A. title, or an 11th, depending on whom you ask. | Lacrosse;College;Movies;NCAA Lacrosse;Brett Jefferson;Fred Cambria;NCAA;College Sports;Documentaries;Syracuse University |
ny0068340 | [
"nyregion"
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| 2014/12/19 | De Blasio Reluctantly Supports ‘Taxi of Tomorrow’ | A revamped plan for a nearly uniform fleet of New York City yellow taxis will go forward, city officials said on Thursday — casting Mayor Bill de Blasio as a reluctant cheerleader for a vehicle he has long criticized. Most taxi operators will be required to buy the so-called Taxi of Tomorrow , a Nissan NV200, established under Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg as the city’s official cab, beginning on April 20. Though Mr. de Blasio has opposed the vehicle for years, speaking out against it before and after taking office, his administration was thrust into an uncomfortable position: Nissan appeared primed to recoup expenses, and perhaps more, if the city did not honor the agreement. The company, which had secured a 10-year contract with the city, worth an estimated $1 billion, noted last year that it had invested more than $50 million in the program. The plan has been tied up in court since its inception, as officials in the yellow taxi industry, which includes some of the mayor’s most generous campaign donors, argued that the Bloomberg administration had exceeded its authority in mandating the purchase of a certain vehicle. In June, a state appeals court ruled that the program was legal , reversing a lower-court ruling that had initially been challenged under Mr. Bloomberg. After that ruling, Mr. de Blasio still expressed reservations about the Taxi of Tomorrow. He called its adoption “a broken process on many levels”; lamented that his predecessor “lost an opportunity to create jobs here in New York” by selecting the NV200, which is manufactured in Mexico; and said he remained troubled by “Nissan’s involvement in Iran.” (When he was the city’s public advocate, Mr. de Blasio posted an image of the NV200 on Twitter, with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the former Iranian president, superimposed in the front seat.) On Thursday, city officials said a revised agreement with Nissan included several notable changes, suggesting the contract was no longer the “exclusive” agreement its critics had long denounced. For one, Nissan will not have the exclusive right to sell hybrid vehicles. Owners with medallions for wheelchair-accessible vehicles remain exempt from the requirement to buy an NV200 as well. In all, officials said, the NV200 is expected to make up about 80 percent of the fleet. “Given the legal landscape we inherited, it represents real progress that addresses some of the biggest concerns we’ve had with this program,” said Wiley Norvell, a spokesman for the mayor. Image Nissan’s NV200, the so-called Taxi of Tomorrow, is expected to make up about 80 percent of the fleet of taxis in New York City. Credit Eric Michael Johnson for The New York Times A formal announcement from the city is expected on Friday. In a statement, Nissan said it had gotten a “great reception from drivers and passengers” and was “eager to see more” of its vehicles in the city. Though the cab includes sumptuous features like transparent roof panels, opponents seized on the choice of the NV200 because it was neither a hybrid nor wheelchair-accessible without modifications. Officials argued on Thursday that the revised agreement would be a boon to New Yorkers with disabilities, saying the administration had received a commitment from Nissan to reach the production targets necessary to achieve 50 percent accessibility in the fleet by 2020. But the vehicle itself has remained a target of criticism. In a letter, Edith Prentiss, chairwoman of the Taxis for All Campaign , said the NV200 remained dangerous for wheelchair users because it required entry from the rear. Late last year, the Bloomberg administration reached an agreement with advocates for the disabled, pledging to make half the fleet wheelchair-accessible by 2020 but leaving unanswered the question of how the plan would be paid for. In April, the de Blasio administration approved a 30-cent surcharge on all yellow and street-hail livery taxi rides to pay for the changes. It takes effect Jan. 1. The city’s revised agreement with Nissan might not be the final word on the Taxi of Tomorrow. An appeal against the vehicle from a group of yellow cab operators, the Greater New York Taxi Association , is pending. Though some opponents have also raised questions about the vehicle’s safety, Meera Joshi, the city’s taxi commissioner, said the roughly 540 NV200s already on the road (without a mandate) had performed well. The negotiations over the vehicle in recent months have placed Ms. Joshi in an unusual position. Before Mr. de Blasio named her as commissioner, she served as general counsel for the Taxi and Limousine Commission as it fought for the Taxi of Tomorrow program in court under the Bloomberg administration, over the objections of Mr. de Blasio. The revised agreement, she suggested, was a significant improvement. “New administration, new priorities,” she said. | Taxis;Bill de Blasio;Nissan Motor;NYC;Taxi and Limousine Commission |
ny0296230 | [
"nyregion"
]
| 2016/12/01 | How Jessica Lappin, an Advocate for Lower Manhattan, Spends Her Sundays | Jessica Lappin, president of the Alliance for Downtown New York , among the city’s largest business improvement districts, has a long history with Lower Manhattan. While she now calls a two-bedroom co-op in Midtown East home, in 1993 she was in the first graduating class of Stuyvesant High School’s Lower Manhattan campus. “Lower Manhattan was a ghost town on nights and weekends,” she said of the early 1990s. Since then, it has become one of the fastest-growing neighborhoods in the city. Ms. Lappin, 41, lives with her husband, Andrew Wuertele, 42, the chief administrative officer at East River Medical Imaging, and their sons, Lucas, 9, and Miles, 5. Image Ms. Lappin on the Hudson River Greenway. “Running is definitely my private time, to clear my head and think things through,” she said. Credit Stephen Speranza for The New York Times PODS, PAPER I usually wake up around 6:45. My oldest son, Lucas, and I are up early together. He’s a big reader of fantasy adventure — right now it is “ Ranger’s Apprentice ” — so he will sit in a chair by the window and read while I make myself coffee. We have a Nespresso machine with all the different colored pods, which I’m addicted to, and a milk frother. I’ll check email and Twitter and read the Sunday Times. MORNING MILES Then I’ll go for a run. I like to run in Central Park. Running is definitely my private time to clear my head and think things through. I like being outside and in nature. I ran the marathon in 2014, which was the first time I had done anything like that. Unfortunately, last year I broke my ankle in three places playing soccer with the kids, and I wasn’t sure I would be able to run again. But I just did the Staten Island Half Marathon . While I run I listen to pop music. I have my own Spotify playlist that I update periodically. So I’ll do around eight to 10 miles, a good 60 to 90 minutes. Image Breakfast with the family. Credit Stephen Speranza for The New York Times A LOT OF LOX When I get back from my run, Andy will go to Tal Bagels and pick up breakfast. I have a whole wheat everything bagel, as does he, and the boys get cinnamon raisin with lox. Not just a little bit of lox, either. My kids consume a large amount of lox. And cream cheese, of course. I’ll also throw something easy in the slow cooker for later in the afternoon. Andy’s parents are from Colorado, and there are these Hatch green chilies that they can get only once a year, so I will use them to make green chili or chicken enchiladas or pork tacos. ROOSEVELT RIDE Since the spring, Lucas and I go on long bike rides. His birthday was in March and he got a new bike; it’s a neon-green Specialized. It is really fun to map out routes. We often do Roosevelt Island. We live close to the tram, so we will take that over. They have a loop you can bike around, which is great for kids because you are separate from the cars and it isn’t too crowded with people. Image Ms. Lappin riding bikes on Roosevelt Island with her husband, Andrew Wuertele, and their sons, Lucas and Miles. Credit Stephen Speranza for The New York Times TEAM LOYALTY When we get back, it’s football time. Andy grew up playing high school football in Nebraska and he’s an avid University of Pittsburgh football fan, while I was raised on the Jets. We’ve adopted each other’s teams. I have one of those old-fashioned air popper popcorn makers and we’ll eat whatever I made in the slow cooker. At halftime Miles will get antsy, so we will bake something. I’ll measure all the ingredients, and he will put everything into the bowls; he especially likes to work the stand mixer. We have a few standards, like a quick banana or zucchini bread. Or he might successfully lobby for cookies. He has a particular Thomas Keller chocolate cookie with chocolate chunks that he likes. SUSHI SUNDAYS On Saturday nights I tend to cook and make something more elaborate, so on Sundays I like to take a break. We order a lot of sushi. Our go-to is Fusha . Having dinner as a family has always been a priority for us. It is a nice way to end the week. LAUGHTER BEFORE SLEEP We tend to eat around 8:30, so then it is bedtime: pajamas, brushing teeth, story and then lights out. Then Andy and I have some quiet time together. We will map out the week ahead, who is going to drop-off each morning and who will be home each evening. Then we will zone out in bed, usually to comedy shows that we have on our DVR from earlier in the week. It is usually “Modern Family,” and until recently, it was “S.N.L.” Andy would also watch “Game of Thrones,” but I need comedy before bed. | Alliance for Downtown New York;Manhattan;Financial District Manhattan |
ny0295489 | [
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| 2016/12/16 | Larry Colburn, Who Helped Stop My Lai Massacre, Dies at 67 | Larry Colburn, who became an 18-year-old American hero when he intervened with two comrades to halt the massacre of unarmed Vietnamese civilians by United States soldiers in 1968, elevating an innocuous hamlet named My Lai into a watchword for the horrors of war, died on Tuesday at his home in Canton, Ga. He was 67. The cause was liver cancer, his wife, Lisa, said. Mr. Colburn was the last surviving member of a three-man helicopter crew that was assigned to hover over My Lai on Saturday morning, March 16, 1968, to identify enemy positions by drawing Vietcong fire. Instead, the men encountered an eerie quiet and a macabre landscape of dead, wounded and weaponless women and children as a platoon of American soldiers, ostensibly hunting elusive Vietcong guerrillas, marauded among defenseless noncombatants. The crew dropped smoke flares to mark the wounded, “thinking the men on the ground would come assist them,” Mr. Colburn told Vietnam Magazine in 2011. “When we would come back to those we marked,” he said, “we’d find they were now dead.” Audaciously and on his own initiative, the pilot, Chief Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson Jr., swooped down and landed the copter. “Mr. Thompson was just beside himself,” Mr. Colburn recalled in an interview in 2010 for the PBS program “The American Experience.” “He got on the radio and just said, ‘This isn’t right, these are civilians, there’s people killing civilians down here.’ And that’s when he decided to intervene. He said, ‘We’ve got to do something about this, are you with me?’ And we said, ‘Yes.’ ” Mr. Thompson confronted the officer in command of the rampaging platoon, Lt. William L. Calley, but was rebuffed. He then positioned the helicopter between the troops and the surviving villagers and faced off against another lieutenant. Mr. Thompson ordered Mr. Colburn to fire his M-60 machine gun at any soldiers who tried to inflict further harm. “Y’all cover me!” Mr. Thompson was quoted as saying. “If these bastards open up on me or these people, you open up on them. Promise me!” “You got it boss,” Mr. Colburn replied. “Consider it done.” Mr. Thompson, Mr. Colburn and Glenn Andreotta, the copter’s crew chief, found about 10 villagers cowering in a makeshift bomb shelter and coaxed them out, then had them flown to safety by two Huey gunships. They found an 8-year-old boy clinging to his mother’s corpse in an irrigation ditch and plucked him by the back of his shirt and delivered him to a nun in a nearby hospital. Image Mr. Colburn in 2008 with Do Ba, whom Mr. Colburn had rescued at My Lai. Credit Chitose Suzuki/Associated Press Crucially, they reported what they had witnessed to headquarters, which ordered a cease-fire. By then, as many as 500 villagers had been killed. Would Mr. Colburn have fired at his fellow Americans? “How could I ever be prepared for something like that?” he replied years later. “Would I have? I guess that’s the $64,000 question, isn’t it?” Seymour M. Hersh, the independent journalist who later uncovered the My Lai massacre, said of Mr. Colburn in a phone interview on Friday that “for a door gunner in Vietnam to point his machine gun at an American officer” under those circumstances “was in the greatest tradition of American integrity.” Lawrence Manley Colburn was born on July 6, 1949, in Coulee Dam, Wash. His father, Harry, a World War II veteran, was a civil engineer who had helped build the Grand Coulee Dam. His mother, the former Catherine Manley, was a homemaker. His father died when Larry was 15. An altar boy, he attended Roman Catholic elementary and junior high schools and a public high school, where, after an altercation with an assistant principal, he was suspended for two weeks. Rather than return to school, he joined the Army. Because he was 17, he needed his mother’s permission. He earned his high school equivalency diploma in the Army before being shipped to Vietnam in December 1967. The full extent of the gang rapes, massacre and mutilations by Charlie Company in My Lai and another hamlet, on the South Central Coast, was not exposed until two months after Mr. Colburn was discharged. A Pulitzer Prize-winning report by Mr. Hersh for The Dispatch News Service in November 1969 provoked international outrage and eventually resulted in charges against more than a dozen officers. Only one, however, was convicted: Lieutenant Calley, for the murder of 22 civilians. He was sentenced to life imprisonment but ended up serving only three and a half years under house arrest at Fort Benning, Ga. Mr. Colburn entered Green River College in Auburn, Wash., on the G.I. Bill but struggled academically and financially and quit before graduating to become a commercial fisherman in Alaska. He later moved to Oregon, where he met Lisa Cale, a student at Eastern Oregon State College. They married in 1985 and moved to Atlanta, where he sold orthopedic rehabilitation equipment. She survives him, along with their son, Connor, and his sisters, Sheila Beal, Mary Jones and Colleen Capestany. Image Larry Colburn appeared as a witness at the 1970 murder trial of Lt. William L. Calley. Credit United Press International My Lai became a paradigm for unbridled brutality and an object lesson in battlefield ethics, but the crewmen whose audacious intervention prevented even more bloodshed were largely forgotten. Their heroism was acknowledged with Bronze Stars, which they considered inappropriate recognition: The Bronze Star is awarded for bravery under enemy assault, they reasoned, and they had demonstrated courage in the face of friendly fire. After the investigations and trial, Mr. Thompson and Mr. Colburn received something else, too: hate mail. “One of the most infuriating things is being called a whistle-blower, as if we went and ratted someone out,” Mr. Colburn told Vietnam Magazine. “That is completely false; there was no back-stabbing going on. We were right in their face at My Lai. We were ready to confront those people then and there. And we did, the best we could.” In the late 1980s, after seeing Mr. Thompson interviewed on a television documentary, David Egan, a professor at Clemson University in South Carolina, began a crusade to recognize, belatedly, the crew’s actions. Trent Angers, the author of “The Forgotten Hero of My Lai: The Hugh Thompson Story” (1999), told The Associated Press that Mr. Colburn had “stood up, shoulder to shoulder with Hugh and Glenn, to oppose and stand down against those who were committing crimes against humanity.” “Without his assistance,” he added, “Hugh might not have done what he did.” In 1998, 30 years after the massacre, Mr. Thompson and Mr. Colburn were awarded the Soldier’s Medal, which is granted for lifesaving bravery not involving direct contact with an enemy. “It is my solemn wish that we all never forget the tragedy and brutality of war,” Mr. Colburn said at the ceremony, held at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. “I would like to quote Gen. Douglas MacArthur: ‘The soldier, be he friend or foe, is charged with the protection of the weak and the unarmed.’ ” Mr. Thompson and Mr. Colburn walked the short distance to the memorial, where they made a rubbing of the inscribed name of Mr. Andreotta, who was killed in Vietnam three weeks after the massacre. He was awarded the Soldier’s Medal posthumously. The two men returned to My Lai that year, meeting some of the villagers they had rescued and dedicating an elementary school. On the flight home, Mr. Colburn recalled, he turned to Mr. Thompson and said, “It was so good to see all those little kids smiling again, not having to worry about being blown up, not having to be looking over their shoulders all the time, just being able to be kids.” Mr. Thompson died of cancer in 2006 at 62. Two years later, on the 40th anniversary of the massacre, Mr. Colburn returned to Vietnam and was reunited with Do Ba, who as a boy had been rescued by Mr. Colburn from an irrigation ditch. | Lawrence Colburn;Obituary;Vietnam War;My Lai Vietnam;War Crimes,Genocide,Crimes Against Humanity |
ny0137222 | [
"sports",
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| 2008/05/29 | Rare Signs of Life Uncovered at Shea | Among the criticisms of the Mets in this inconsistent season is that they lack a reliable bullpen and that their hitters do not compete with tenacity when trailing in late innings. Neither rap was valid Wednesday night after Fernando Tatis drove home two runs in the 12th inning with a double to the left-field corner against Justin Miller (1-2) to give the Mets a 7-6 victory over the Florida Marlins . It was the Mets’ second consecutive victory and only the second time this season they have won after trailing following the sixth inning. And they had to come from behind twice, the first time in the ninth to tie it, the second in the 12th to win it. In the ninth, Endy Chávez tied the score, 5-5, with a pinch-hit home run. Like Tatis, Chávez is a bench player pushed into service by injuries to front-line players. “The ambience over here is changing,” Chávez said. “It’s more positive.” Tatis, a veteran who was out of baseball in 2004 and 2005, was swarmed by his teammates after his game-winning hit and cheered by the remnants of a crowd announced as 47,769. He was playing right field in place of the injured Ryan Church. “They crushed me,” he said of his teammates. “We’ve got to show the people that this team can compete.” There were many other happy faces and key performers in this one, but none more grateful than Willie Randolph, the beleaguered manager. Randolph may have saved his job Monday in a long meeting with team ownership. After Wednesday’s inspirational victory, he spoke with words more charged than usual. “Make this kind of magic happen,” Randolph said. “It’s kind of contagious. I’ve got a good feeling about this team.” Perhaps in reference to criticism that he does not use emotion to inspire his players, Randolph added: “I was screaming and yelling to keep going and keep battling and kept fighting — the way I always do.” He had a lot to scream and yell about. The victory went to Duaner Sánchez (1-0), even though he surrendered a 12th-inning home run to Alfredo Amezega that gave Florida a 6-5 lead. He pitched the last two innings. “I feel great,” he said. “This is what we probably need to get everything rolling.” Until Sánchez gave up the home run, Mets pitchers had retired 19 consecutive Marlins. That string started after starter Oliver Pérez gave up a three-run home run in the sixth inning to Cody Ross, the third of the game allowed by Pérez and the second hit by Ross. Pérez retired the next two batters before leaving. He was followed by Scott Schoeneweis (one inning), Aaron Heilman (two innings) and Billy Wagner (one inning) before Sánchez came on and got the first two hitters ahead of Amezega’s home run. In the bottom of the 12th, the Mets put two runners on base with no outs against Miller. After Damion Easley struck out, Tatis drilled a fast ball down the left-field line, bringing home David Wright and Carlos Beltrán. The Mets also got a two-run homer from Luis Castillo, a solo shot from José Reyes, his third in three games and his seventh of the season, and a fourth-inning sacrifice fly by Tatis. “Unbelievable win for us,” Reyes said. “Hopefully, we can continue the momentum.” The Mets also received a superb running catch in center field by Beltrán that gave Pérez a reprieve in the fifth with two runners on base. Perhaps the Mets did not do everything perfectly, but they executed many details well. They are 25-26 and, for the first time in a while, feeling good about themselves. INSIDE PITCH Moises Alou said Wednesday he hoped to return from his strained left calf injury on June 5 for a game at San Diego. Alou will be 42 on July 3. He has not played more than 100 games since 2005, when he was in San Francisco. “I play hard, I’m old, I’m beat up,” Alou said, referring to how he is described in news reports. “It’s true. It bothers me. It hurts.” He said he was about 50 percent healed and was working out daily. “I think I can do it, but, with a calf, you never know,” he said. Nick Evans played left field Wednesday night. Alou spoke from in front of his corner locker, his voice deep, his hair flecked with gray, his left leg raised and showing scars from old operations. Carlos Delgado, batting .215, was not in the starting lineup for the second consecutive night against a left-handed starting pitcher, this time the Marlins’ Scott Olsen. In Delgado’s place at first base was the veteran Damion Easley. As a pinch hitter in the ninth inning, Delgado walked. Willie Randolph said Delgado would probably be in the lineup against right-handed pitching Thursday when the Mets open up a four-game series against Los Angeles Dodgers at Shea Stadium. | New York Mets;Baseball;Florida Marlins |
ny0070853 | [
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| 2015/03/11 | James Leads Cavaliers Past Mavericks | LeBron James had 27 points and took over sole possession of the Cavaliers’ career assists record as visiting Cleveland beat the Dallas Mavericks, 127-94, on Tuesday night. James was one of four players with more than 20 points for the Central Division-leading Cavaliers, who have won 12 of their last 13 games against Western Conference opponents. ■ Kawhi Leonard had 24 points and 11 rebounds and matched a career high with five steals, and the host San Antonio Spurs withstood a second-half letdown to beat the Toronto Raptors, 117-107, for their sixth straight victory. Tony Parker added 23 points and 9 assists. Toronto lost its fourth straight despite 32 points from Kyle Lowry. | Basketball;Cavaliers;Mavericks;LeBron James |
ny0071522 | [
"nyregion"
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| 2015/03/26 | Museum in Little Italy Seeks to Evict a Living Link to the Past | Adele Sarno’s father, a longshoreman, emigrated from Naples, and she grew up in Manhattan’s Little Italy. As a child, she served as princess for the annual Feast of San Gennaro, she said, and one year was even crowned the queen. Ms. Sarno eventually owned a candy shop and, later, an Italian products store below her family’s apartment on Grand Street until Sept. 11, when business dried up. The number of people of Italian ancestry who live in Little Italy is shrinking by the year, and may soon drop by one more: Ms. Sarno, 85, is being evicted from her apartment after losing a fight to keep her $820-a-month rent from skyrocketing. But what has gotten tenant advocates’ attention is not just her age, but also the identity of the landlord: the Italian American Museum , which is in the building next door. “You’re fighting a museum that purports to exhibit Italian-American culture and then proceeds to evict a living artifact,” said Victor J. Papa, director of the Two Bridges Neighborhood Council , an affordable housing group that has helped Ms. Sarno in her effort to stay. “That’s absolute hypocrisy.” A spokesman for the museum said ethnicity had nothing to do with it. The museum owns a total of six apartments, including Ms. Sarno’s, in three contiguous tenement buildings at Mulberry and Grand Streets, and relies on the rental income to help pay expenses. “So the museum should be running a charity or providing residences at discount rates?” Joe Carella, the spokesman, asked. “That doesn’t match the mission.” Image Founded in 2001, the museum bought the tenement at the corner of Grand and Mulberry Streets and the two adjacent properties seven years later. Credit Karsten Moran for The New York Times Founded in 2001, the Italian American Museum is “dedicated to the struggles of Italian-Americans and their achievements and contributions to American culture and society,” according to the mission statement posted on its website. Ms. Sarno said she was indeed struggling, with a notice from the city marshal giving her only days to leave. She filed a request in housing court this week to halt the eviction. “How could you throw old people out?” she said on Wednesday, sitting in her apartment, a mini-museum itself furnished with lamps, marble tables and ceramics from the old country. “I’m not going to be here that many more years. Let me die in my home.” The players in the dispute have added a cultural element to one of the thousands of eviction cases in New York each year. In this case, Ms. Sarno’s two-bedroom unit could fetch five times the current rent in an area that, like many in the city, has become lucrative territory. Ms. Sarno, whose only child, a daughter, lives in Wisconsin, wants to stay in the neighborhood where she was born by midwife. Her family, including two brothers, a sister and her parents, who eventually separated, all lived in Little Italy. She said she had moved to her current second-floor apartment, where her father was living, after her divorce in the 1960s. Not much is left of Ms. Sarno’s Little Italy, now mostly a tourist magnet of a few blocks that has been overwhelmed by Chinatown’s sprawl. The 2010 census recorded not one neighborhood resident who had been born in Italy. “My good friends all passed away,” she said. “I’ve got my television.” She still counts on a few friends: the owner of the gun shop next door who takes out her garbage; the young couple upstairs who have a baby and pay $4,500 a month; an old boyfriend who drives her to a ShopRite on Staten Island to save on groceries. Her doctors and the parish where she was baptized, Church of Most Precious Blood, founded in the late 1800s, remain within walking distance. Image Ms. Sarno was queen of the Feast of San Gennaro in 1945. Credit Karsten Moran for The New York Times The museum moved to Little Italy from Midtown Manhattan in 2008, buying the three buildings for $9 million in order to expand. The recession halted those plans, Mr. Carella said, and the goal now is to find a developer to buy the buildings while allowing the museum to remain rent-free. Ms. Sarno said she got a letter from the museum about five years ago saying that the rent was being raised to $3,500. With Social Security payments and help from relatives as her only sources of income, she said, she could not possibly pay that much. With the help of Two Bridges Neighborhood Council, she sought a determination from state housing officials about whether her apartment was subject to rent-regulation laws that would protect her. She learned it was not, and after several years of appeals and legal back-and-forth, the museum was allowed to the pursue eviction in November. The notice to vacate followed this month. Described by neighbors as an independent woman who goes to bed early, wakes up in the middle of the night and cooks pasta in the wee hours, Ms. Sarno said that if she was forced out, her most viable option would be to join her daughter in Wisconsin, taking along her 19-year-old cat, Tosha. “I don’t want to go there,” she said. “I don’t drive. I’d be stuck in the house 24/7.” In an interview, Joseph V. Scelsa, founder and director of the museum, rejected the idea that the eviction was at odds with the institution’s mission. Little Italy, he said, “is not a community of Italian-Americans any longer.” He said at some point the population that gave the area its name would disappear entirely, but that “the legacy would still remain because we have an institution that does that.” Other promoters of Italian-American culture saw the irony in the situation. “I would hope they can find some sort of solution for her,” said Anthony Tamburri, dean of the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute at Queens College, where Dr. Scelsa once served as director. “The thought of an 85-year-old having to move to Wisconsin is unsettling to be sure.” | Real Estate; Housing;Adele Sarno;Eviction;Italian American;Italian American Museum Manhattan NY;Little Italy Manhattan;Museum |
ny0159239 | [
"business"
]
| 2008/12/06 | Legg Mason to Cut Up to 200 Jobs as Assets Decline | Legg Mason , the big asset management company, said Friday that it would cut nearly 200 jobs, or about 8 percent of its work force, as part of its effort to cut $120 million in costs. Legg Mason joins a growing list of asset managers that have cut nearly 4,000 jobs over the last few months as the worst financial crisis since the 1930s severely depressed asset values and led to huge investor withdrawals from investment funds. Legg Mason plans to cut back in areas like fund administration, legal and finance, a spokeswoman, Mary Athridge, said. The cuts are part of $120 million in annualized corporate expense savings that Legg Mason aims to achieve by March 31. The latest work force reduction comes on top of up to 50 job cuts announced in October by Legg’s affiliate, Legg Mason Capital Management, Ms. Athridge said. Fidelity Investments, Janus Capital Group, MFS Investments, Putnam Investments and BlackRock are among the asset management companies that have announced job cuts. Fidelity is cutting nearly 3,000 jobs through early 2009. Legg Mason, based in Baltimore, managed $842 billion in assets as of Sept. 30. That amount was down 9 percent in the third quarter. | Legg Mason Incorporated;Layoffs and Job Reductions |
ny0143355 | [
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| 2008/11/25 | The $64,000 Question: Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? | THE economic downturn is renewing interest on Madison Avenue in a marketing mainstay that is particularly popular during tough times: cash giveaways. Contests and sweepstakes with money prizes rather than merchandise like cars, furniture or trips are appearing more frequently as the financial crisis continues. In some instances, the dollar amounts are as high as seven figures, as in a contest with a $1 million bonus being sponsored by the Doritos brand of snack chips sold by Frito-Lay. Who wants to be a millionaire? These days, just about everyone — even people who a few months ago were billionaires. “Everyone is trying to get you to buy something at a time when no one is buying,” said Michael Watras, president at Straightline International, a brand consultancy in New York. “They’ve got to do what they can.” The trend includes these other examples: ¶“Secret Millionaire,” which Fox Broadcasting will introduce on Dec. 3. The reality series features wealthy men and women who live incognito in everyday neighborhoods, deciding whether to give up to $100,000 of their own money to deserving residents. Although Fox, part of the News Corporation, announced the show in May — when the Dow Jones industrial average was about a million points higher than today — “it comes on at a time when people are more attuned to the fact many of our fellow citizens are having a hard time,” said Chris Coelen, chief executive of RDF USA in Santa Monica, Calif., which is producing the series. ¶Dubai Duty Free is dangling a $5 million prize in a raffle that is being called “the world’s biggest duty-free promotion.” The winner will be chosen from among the purchasers of 5,000 tickets, each costing about $1,360. ¶“Wheel of Fortune,” the game show syndicated by a unit of the Sony Corporation of America, is celebrating 5,000 episodes by giving away $5,000 a day through May 24, 2009, to members of the Wheel Watchers Club. There is also a “Spin ID sweepstakes,” with a $50,000 prize, for viewers who have Sony Card Visa credit cards. The trend echoes what took place during the Depression, when marketers eagerly gave away cash prizes on radio quiz shows and in contests advertised in magazines and newspapers. Some, like a puzzle contest sponsored by Old Gold cigarettes, which offered what Time magazine described as an “unprecedented $100,000 first prize,” became national crazes. Two decades later, when television supplanted radio, the dollar amounts ballooned; the radio quiz “The $64 Question” became “The $64,000 Question” on TV. More recently, the money multiplied again, with shows like “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” and “Deal or No Deal.” “Money has been an incentive for a long time,” said Andrew Keller, vice president and co-executive creative director of Crispin Porter & Bogusky, part of MDC Partners. “Certainly the notion of offering money at a time like this is more appealing.” For a client, Volkswagen of America, Crispin Porter worked with @Radical.Media on a series for the Speed cable channel that chronicled a race among 30 drivers, ages 16 to 26, featuring Volkswagen Jetta TDI clean-diesel cars. In a 90-minute documentary, “Racing Under Green,” that Speed showed on Saturday, the winner of the race, Josh Hurley, 23, of Cooper City, Fla., won $100,000 from Volkswagen to begin his racing career; he will win another $150,000 if he lands a berth with a professional team. “For young people getting into racing, they’ve experienced for some time what might be termed a financial crisis,” Mr. Keller said, “because it’s an expensive sport.” However, at a time when many companies have less to spend on marketing, Mr. Keller wondered whether giving cash to consumers amounts to “ ‘renting’ them to participate in your advertising.” That thought was echoed by David Melançon, chief executive at the Ito Partnership, a brand consulting company in New York, who warned about the long-term implications of what he described as “selling out your brand for a couple quarters of growth.” “While you can say, ‘If I don’t make it through the next two quarters, there is no long term,’ certain marketing tactics are like taking a mortgage against your brand,” Mr. Melançon said, “and mortgages are what got us into this.” A cash giveaway can make sense “when it connects in the consumer’s mind to the brand’s purpose,” he added, citing a contest sponsored by CNBC called the CNBC.com Million Dollar Portfolio Challenge. The first prize is $500,000 in cash, the second prize is $200,000, and the third prize is $100,000. “The prize money is certainly attractive,” said Tom Clendenin, vice president for marketing at CNBC, part of the NBC Universal division of the General Electric Company. “But people like the opportunity to learn more about the market and about the cnbc.com site.” This is the third time for the contest, which was first played in spring 2007 and returned in spring 2008. The fall run began its make-believe trading on Nov. 17 and ends on Feb. 6, 2009. “We’re trying to capitalize on the traffic to the site,” Mr. Clendenin said, referring to the increasing number of visitors to cnbc.com, “as well as drive people to the site.” The contest has “thousands of players,” he added, declining to be more specific. For the Doritos contest, Frito-Lay, a unit of PepsiCo, is somewhat more forthcoming with statistics. The $1 million bonus has resulted in “a pretty significant increase” in entries, said a spokesman for Frito-Lay in Plano, Tex., Chris Kuechenmeister to more than 1,700 from about 1,100 for a previous contest. The Crash the Super Bowl contest asks consumers to create commercials for Doritos for a 30-second time slot during Super Bowl XLIII on Feb. 1, 2009. Five finalists will be announced in January; each wins $25,000. Computer users will be able to vote online from among the five spots for the commercial they want to see during the game. If that commercial is ranked first in the annual Ad Meter poll conducted by USA Today, the creator gets the $1 million bonus. Although the idea for the bonus came well before the financial crisis began, “certainly the $1 million prize is something we thought people would find attractive,” Mr. Kuechenmeister said. Asked whether a million dollars seemed more valuable today than when the idea was developed, he replied, laughing, that even “a dollar seems more valuable today.” | Advertising and Marketing;Contests and Prizes;Credit and Money Cards;Personal Finances |
ny0006508 | [
"world",
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| 2013/05/18 | Bombs Kill at Least 9 at Gated Community Near Kandahar | Two bombs hidden in a motorcycle and a car exploded inside a gated community linked to the family of President Hamid Karzai on Friday evening, killing at least 9 people and wounding more than 70 near the southern city of Kandahar, an official said. The blasts happened inside Aino Mina, a housing complex on the northern outskirts of the city that was developed in part by Mahmood Karzai, the president’s younger brother. No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack. A Kandahar government spokesman said that an investigation was under way into how the explosives-laden vehicles slipped past the heavy security. | Bombs;Mahmoud Karzai;Hamid Karzai;Kandahar;Afghanistan;Afghanistan War |
ny0062191 | [
"business",
"media"
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| 2014/01/17 | After Tina Brown’s Exit, Daily Beast Brings In Editing Help | The Daily Beast has hired Noah Shachtman, a former editor at Foreign Policy and Wired, as its new executive editor and has formally elevated John Avlon to editor in chief, according to a memo Mr. Avlon wrote to the website’s staff on Thursday. Mr. Shachtman “is perhaps best known as co-founder and editor of Wired’s Danger Room blog, which won the 2012 National Magazine Award for reporting in digital media,” Mr. Avlon wrote. Mr. Shachtman will start at The Daily Beast on Feb. 1. The site, part of Barry Diller’s IAC/InterActiveCorp, was once linked to Newsweek and edited by Tina Brown, a former editor of The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. The site has been adapting since Newsweek was sold in August and Ms. Brown left to run her own conference business. The site, started by Ms. Brown as a stand-alone project, has endured tumult and financial challenges as it was merged with Newsweek, then separated, and then it lost its founder; it has been seeking its own editorial identity since then. Mr. Avlon, an author and columnist who was once a speechwriter and deputy director of policy for the presidential campaign of Rudolph W. Giuliani, has run the site since Ms. Brown stepped down. | Appointments and Executive Changes;The Daily Beast;Noah Shachtman |
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"us"
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| 2016/01/06 | Judge Rules for Cosby’s Wife | Camille Cosby will not have to sit for a deposition Wednesday in a lawsuit filed against her husband, the entertainer Bill Cosby, a federal judge in Massachusetts ruled Tuesday, as he granted Mrs. Cosby’s request to postpone any deposition until her lawyers have a chance to appeal. Magistrate Judge David H. Hennessy had ruled last week that Mrs. Cosby must sit for the deposition despite her opposition. She was scheduled to meet on Wednesday with lawyers for seven women who say Mr. Cosby defamed them when his team characterized their accounts of sexual assault as fabrications. But Judge Hennessy granted Mrs. Cosby’s motion for a stay to allow her lawyers to appeal his decision. Both sides will have to wait for the United States District Court judge, Mark G. Mastroianni, the senior judge overseeing the case, to rule on the appeal. A lawyer for Mr. Cosby, Monique Pressley, praised the decision. A lawyer for the seven women, Joseph Cammarata, said: “The day of reckoning will come. We expect that we ultimately will be able to take Mrs. Cosby’s deposition.” Lawyers for Mrs. Cosby had tried to prevent the deposition, putting forward a variety of arguments, including that she was not a party to the litigation against Mr. Cosby and has no information the opposing lawyers could not obtain from her husband. And, her lawyers had argued, that even though the defamation case is in federal court, her testimony could still be banned under the state’s spousal disqualification laws. But the judge dismissed those arguments. Mr. Cosby, who was criminally charged last week in Pennsylvania in a case involving a different woman, will also be deposed in the Massachusetts civil suit, possibly as early as next month. Mr. Cosby has long denied all of the allegations against him. | Camille Cosby;Bill Cosby;Rape;Decisions and Verdicts;Lawsuits;David H. Hennessy |
ny0000416 | [
"business",
"energy-environment"
]
| 2013/03/20 | Transocean Chief Admits Crew Shortcomings in Gulf Oil Spill | NEW ORLEANS — The chief executive of the company that owned the Deepwater Horizon oil rig acknowledged in court on Tuesday that his crew should have done more to avert the 2010 oil well blowout that left 11 dead and soiled hundreds of miles of beaches along the Gulf of Mexico. “Do I wish the crew had done more? Absolutely,” said Steven L. Newman, chief executive of Transocean. “We acknowledged we should have done more.” Mr. Newman’s measured and partial acknowledgment of accountability goes to the heart of the United States District Court trial, now in its fourth week, to assign responsibility for the disaster. Mr. Newman said that while his company was responsible for a “narrow slice” of the drilling operations, including providing pressure tests that produced faulty readings shortly before the explosion, it was the oil company BP that “has everything under its umbrella.” The trial bundles suits brought by the Justice Department, several state governments, private businesses and individual claimants against BP and its contractors. Lawyers for tens of thousands of people and businesses seeking redress for damages claim that BP, Transocean and Halliburton were grossly negligent for mismanaging safety procedures. The Justice Department is arguing that BP was grossly negligent and ultimately responsible for a series of mistakes because it designed the well, selected the contractors and managed the drilling operation. While BP has acknowledged mistakes, it says its contractors also made serious errors that caused the well blowout, and over the last two weeks, several trial witnesses appear to have helped make its case. Geoffrey Webster, an expert witness in marine engineering for the plaintiffs, testified earlier that Transocean had neglected to properly maintain and operate the rig and its critical blowout preventer, and did not adequately train its crew. The crew deliberately disabled the automatic functions of a gas alarm system that should have alerted the crew to hazardous gases rising from the well, Mr. Webster said. He also testified that the Transocean rig crew failed to use lines designed to divert the escaping oil over the side of the rig, using small, low-pressure tanks on the rig instead that were inadequate for the task. Those errors, he said, contributed to allowing escaping oil to reach the rig deck and set it on fire, conclusions that had been documented in previous government reports. Image Steven L. Newman, chief of Transocean, testified on Tuesday in federal court in New Orleans. Credit Gerald Herbert/Associated Press Mr. Newman also acknowledged that he knew Transocean had problems assuring safety even before the Deepwater Horizon accident when four workers were killed in rig accidents in 2009. The company temporarily suspended operations and underwent a review of its safety practices. “I knew that as a result of the incidents we were experiencing we needed to do something,” he said. Mr. Newman testified for more than five hours with a steady voice. But at the end of his testimony, when asked how often he thought of the men who lost their lives in the accident, he choked up and fought back tears. “Every day,” he answered. “Because I ask myself if there isn’t something more I could have done.” Another contractor-defendant, Halliburton, which mixed the cement for the well, has also faced some embarrassing questions at the trial in recent days. Thomas Roth, a senior Halliburton executive who was in charge of cementing operations at the time of the spill, acknowledged that because of the well design and other factors, “the cement placement was going to be a job that would have a low probability of success.” Timothy Quirk, a Halliburton laboratory manager, testified on Tuesday that he conducted stability tests on cement samples from a similar blend that had been used in the Macondo well after the accident. Under instructions from a colleague, he said he did not prepare a laboratory work sheet. “It was a little unusual,” he conceded. He then acknowledged that he had thrown out his notes. Subsequent investigations have shown that the cement was not stable. The plaintiffs have accused Halliburton of conducting undocumented cement tests and then hiding the results. BP has accused Halliburton of destroying evidence of its cement testing. “To shift responsibility to Transocean and Halliburton is good for BP,” said Edward F. Sherman, a law professor at Tulane University. “They would like to argue that the primary actors were Halliburton and Transocean employees and BP was not responsible for their failures and, therefore, BP could not be grossly negligent.” The trial, which started in late February, is unfolding in two phases. The first will determine whether BP and its contractors were guilty of gross negligence — wanton and reckless behavior or disregard for reasonable care that is likely to cause harm or injury — in causing the accident. The second phase will determine how much oil actually spilled. Together, the determinations by District Court Judge Carl J. Barbier will decide how much BP and the others will have to pay in fines. Under the Clean Water Act, fines could range from $1,100 for every barrel spilled through simple negligence to as much as $4,300 a barrel if gross negligence is found. The federal government has estimated that about four million barrels of oil were spilled, meaning liabilities of as much as $4.4 billion to $17.2 billion. Talks to settle out of court appeared to have reached a stalemate. “The window may have closed once the parties became entrenched in the litigation,” said Blaine G. LeCesne, a law professor at Loyola University New Orleans. “At this point, BP is likely to take its chances and hope the allocation of fault is spread more equally among all the defendants.” BP has already pleaded guilty to 14 criminal charges, agreed to pay $4.5 billion in fines and other penalties and shaken up its management. It has also paid out roughly $9 billion in a partial settlement with businesses, individuals and local governments. Because of their contracts with BP, Halliburton and Transocean are protected from most spill costs, aside from punitive damages, even if they are all found to have been grossly negligent. Transocean has already pleaded guilty to a single misdemeanor criminal charge of violating the Clean Water Act and agreed to pay $400 million in criminal penalties. It has also agreed to $1 billion in civil settlements. Halliburton has not settled with the Justice Department and claims that it was simply following BP’s instructions. | Steven L Newman;Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill;Transocean;Offshore drilling;Lawsuit;BP |
ny0066928 | [
"business"
]
| 2014/06/25 | New Rail Car Standards Anticipated for Autumn | Regulators this autumn may impose new standards for rail tank cars that carry crude oil that are tougher than the latest design adopted by railroads in 2011, a top industry safety executive said on Tuesday. The Transportation Department has been under pressure to overhaul safety rules after a series of train crashes, including a disastrous one in Lac-Megantic, Quebec, that killed 47 people. James Rader, senior vice president at Watco Companies and the head of the Association of American Railroads’ tank car committee, said: “It’s going to be a jacketed, thermally protected car” with other strength reinforcements. The head of Canada’s National Transportation Safety Board said on Tuesday that the United States should follow the example of Canada and opt for a relatively quick phaseout of older tank cars. Watco estimates that there are some 23,450 cars in service that comply with the post-October 2011 standards, and 55,546 should be ready by the end of next year as carriers retire older cars. | Train wreck;NTSB;Oil and Gasoline;Transportation Department;Canada |
ny0117117 | [
"business"
]
| 2012/10/19 | Boston Scientific Posts Loss as Heart Device Sales Lag | The medical device maker Boston Scientific reported a quarterly loss on Thursday because of charges and lower sales in its two largest businesses. It warned of continued weakness in the fourth quarter, when sales usually have a seasonal increase. The company lost market share in its crucial heart stent and heart defibrillator markets, which together make up 55 percent of its total sales. It also makes products used in cardiology, urology, gynecology and gastroenterology. The company’s top executives said they were moving to broaden the business mix and improve results, but analysts were not convinced that the company was on the right track to reinvigorate its business. The net loss was $725 million, or 52 cents a share, compared with a net profit of $142 million, or 9 cents a share, in the period a year earlier. Excluding one-time items, profit was 16 cents a share, compared with Wall Street estimates of 11 cents. Per-share figures were based on fewer outstanding shares after the company bought back about 46 million shares under a 2011 authorization. Quarterly sales were $1.735 billion, down from $1.874 billion. Boston Scientific lowered its 2012 sales outlook to a range of $7.168 billion to $7.243 billion, from $7.2 billion to $7.4 billion. The company now expects earnings of 63 to 66 cents a share, excluding items, compared with 62 to 68 cents previously. Michael F. Mahoney, the president, who will become chief executive on Nov. 1, said in a telephone interview that he hoped to expand the company’s smaller businesses so it was less reliant on its cardiovascular and cardiac rhythm management businesses, which are affected by weak markets worldwide. Those smaller businesses, like peripheral interventions, endoscopy and urology, “are doing well,” he said. “They have less headwind.” Sales of interventional cardiology products, like heart stents , fell 20 percent in the quarter, while sales of cardiac rhythm management products, like pacemakers and implantable defibrillators , dropped 8 percent. Those are the company’s two largest businesses, making up more than half of total sales. Shares of Boston Scientific fell 3.9 percent to close at $5.40. | Boston Scientific Corporation;Company Reports;Medical Devices |
ny0200959 | [
"us",
"politics"
]
| 2009/09/19 | Ruling Broadens Financial Influence of Independent Groups During Elections | WASHINGTON — The federal appeals court for the District of Columbia ruled Friday that the government cannot restrict independent political spending by nonprofit groups or political committees, accelerating the judicial rollback of regulations aimed at curtailing the power of money in politics. The ruling, in Emily’s List v. Federal Election Commission , broadens the field of activity open to groups known as 527s (after that section of the tax code) and other independent outfits like MoveOn.org on the left or Swift Boat Veterans for Truth on the right. Such organizations have stirred controversy in recent elections by funneling unlimited donations from a small number of wealthy donors into voter turnout efforts and campaign commercials. Following the direction of recent Supreme Court decisions, the appeals court held that independent groups have a First Amendment right to raise and spend freely to influence elections so long as they do not coordinate their activities with a candidate or a party. The Supreme Court has ruled that the federal government’s only legitimate interest in restricting political donations is combating the appearance or reality of corruption that could arise from allowing unlimited contributions directly to a candidate or political party. The court has held that, on the other hand, a desire to level the playing field or limit the power of moneyed interests is not a permissible reason for the government to limit the amount a rich person might spend on independent efforts to elect or defeat a candidate. In this case, the appeals court held that nonprofit groups are essentially like rich individuals, so the government cannot restrict their independent spending either. “ Donations to nonprofit groups cannot corrupt candidates and officeholders,” Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh wrote for a three-judge panel. “And to the extent a nonprofit then spends its donations on activities such as advertisements, get-out-the-vote efforts and voter registration drives, those expenditures are not considered corrupting, even though they may generate gratitude from and influence with officeholders and candidates.” To regulate the political activities of nonprofit groups in order to ward off such potential gratitude and influence was overkill, Judge Kavanaugh wrote. He quoted Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. in the opinion overturning certain restrictions on corporate political spending two years ago in Federal Election Commission v. Wisconsin Right to Life: “Enough is enough.” The Emily’s List case came about in the aftermath of the 2004 presidential election, when both major-party candidates complained about the free spending by 527 groups. In response, the Federal Election Commission established new rules, including a $5,000 limit on the amount of money from each contributor that a group could spend trying to influence federal elections. Emily’s List , which raises money for the election of Democratic women who support abortion rights, argued that the rules violated the First Amendment. The appeals court agreed. Though the groups are prohibited from coordinating with candidates, political operatives say it is still usually easy enough to execute a strategy that a campaign manager has described in the news media. Or outside groups simply mimic the content and targeting of a campaign’s own commercials. Advocates for stricter campaign finance rules said the appeals court decision would only encourage similar efforts around the 2010 midterm elections or the 2012 presidential race. “This opinion, if it stands up, is going to make it harder to constrain the role of influence-seeking money in federal campaigns,” said Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21. Election law experts said the decision of the appeals court dovetailed with the Supreme Court’s evident direction in the pending case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. In a recent rehearing of the case, a majority of the justices appeared inclined to overturn restrictions on political spending by corporations and labor unions as well as nonprofit groups or political committees. In his opinion, Judge Kavanaugh appeared to point the way toward the further elimination of all the limits on direct campaign contributions first imposed after Watergate. He noted that it might seem “incongruous” to let nonprofit groups receive and spend unlimited donations — often known as “soft money” — on political campaigns while parties and candidates cannot. But under Supreme Court precedents, the government cannot remove that incongruity by imposing new limits on outside groups, Judge Kavanaugh continued. It could only eliminate the limits on the other side, on parties and candidates. “We are moving toward a deregulated federal campaign finance system, where money flows freely and perhaps only disclosure laws remain,” Richard L. Hasen, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, wrote Friday on ElectionLawBlog.org , his Web site. He added: “It is a world in which those with more money use their considerable funds to elect candidates of their choice and to have disproportionate influence over public policy. The unlevel playing field awaits.” | Campaign Finance;Nonprofit Organizations;Emily's List;Kavanaugh Brett M;MoveOn.org;Swift Boat Veterans for Truth;Federal Election Commission |
ny0266184 | [
"us"
]
| 2016/03/28 | Rahm Emanuel Picks Eddie Johnson as Chicago’s Interim Police Chief | CHICAGO — Mayor Rahm Emanuel has informed some city leaders that he has chosen an interim superintendent of police, rejecting three candidates that had been recommended by the police board, as he seeks to repair Chicago’s fractured relationship with its police force. Eddie Johnson, the Police Department’s chief of patrol, was asked to take the job as interim police superintendent, said Anthony Beale, the alderman for Chicago’s Ninth Ward. The selection was reported by The Chicago Sun-Times late Saturday. The choice of Chief Johnson, who is African-American and a 27-year veteran of the force, suggested that the mayor believed an insider was needed to help restore the community’s trust in the department. The job at the helm of Chicago’s roughly 12,000 officers, which pays $260,000, is among the toughest in American law enforcement. Chief Johnson would face challenges of rising violence; bruised officer morale; and community relations, particularly with African-Americans, that have been strained by outrage over police misconduct. The move by Mr. Emanuel signaled his disapproval of three candidates who had been presented this month by the Chicago Police Board. Under city ordinance, Mr. Emanuel is required to choose the police superintendent from the slate of recommendations offered by the police board. If he intends to install Chief Johnson in the job permanently, he will have to ask him to apply and request that the board conduct a new search. The board had whittled down a field of 39 applicants to three: Cedric L. Alexander, the chief of police of DeKalb County, Ga.; Anne Kirkpatrick, a former police chief of Spokane, Wash.; and Eugene Williams, a deputy police superintendent in Chicago and the chief of the Bureau of Support Services. It was unclear why the mayor went off script. Kelley Quinn, a spokeswoman, said Sunday that Mr. Emanuel had spent more than three months researching the hiring decision, and that he would be making an announcement about his choice “in the coming days.” “The mayor’s choice for the next superintendent will be one of the most important decisions he makes,” Ms. Quinn wrote in an email. Image Eddie Johnson, the Chicago Police Department’s chief of patrol. Credit Chicago Police Department In a separate statement, Ms. Quinn explained Mr. Emanuel’s decision to reject the three finalists. “While each of the finalists had strong qualifications, the mayor did not feel that any of them were the complete package that Chicago needs at this time and thus none were offered the position,” Ms. Quinn wrote. “The mayor called each of them individually late Saturday to let them know of his decision.” The police board said in a statement on Sunday that it had not been notified of any decision. “The board will be taking no action until it receives such notification,” Lori Lightfoot, the panel’s president, said in the statement. Chief Johnson would replace the interim superintendent, John J. Escalante, who was not among the finalists, though he did apply. Mr. Beale, the alderman, who is a member of the City Council’s black caucus, said he supported the mayor’s decision. “Eddie Johnson knows Chicago,” he wrote in an email. “He knows the Police Department and the challenges facing our neighborhoods. He is a true leader and will bring the fundamental changes C.P.D. needs right now.” Public anger over the use of force by the department has put intense pressure on city leaders since November, when Jason Van Dyke, a white officer, was charged with first-degree murder in the shooting death of Laquan McDonald, a black teenager. The public release of video footage of the shooting fanned outrage and led to weeks of protests. In the fallout, the Justice Department announced an investigation into the Police Department, and in December Mr. Emanuel abruptly fired Garry F. McCarthy , then the superintendent. Mr. Emanuel’s choice for superintendent also posed high political stakes for him. He has faced fierce criticism over the police, and some have even called for his resignation. In statements announcing earlier promotions in Chief Johnson’s career, the Police Department portrayed him as an officer with “vast experience” in sometimes difficult settings. He was promoted in December to chief of patrol. Mr. Emanuel is not the first Chicago mayor to circumvent the police board in selecting a superintendent. In 2007, Mayor Richard M. Daley rejected the board’s three recommendations and instead named Jody P. Weis, an outsider, to lead the department. | Eddie Johnson;Rahm Emanuel;Chicago;Police;Police Brutality,Police Misconduct,Police Shootings;Appointments and Executive Changes;Chicago Police Department |
ny0245023 | [
"us"
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| 2011/04/16 | California Bill Would Require Teaching of Gay History | LOS ANGELES — In California public schools, students are required to learn about black history and women’s history. And if a bill approved by the State Senate this week becomes law, the state will become the first in the country to mandate that schools also teach gay history. While the bill does not set specific requirements about what should be taught to students, it does say that contributions of gays and lesbians in the state and country must be included in social science instruction. So Harvey Milk, one of the first openly gay elected officials in the state, and Bayard Rustin, a civil rights activist, may take a prominent place in the state’s history books. Advocates say that teaching about gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people in schools would prevent bullying and shatter stereotypes that some students may harbor. They point to several students who have committed suicide after being taunted by peers for being gay. But the bill has drawn vociferous criticism from opponents who argue that when and how to talk about same-sex relationships should be left to parents. A similar bill was approved by the Democratic-controlled Legislature in 2006, but vetoed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who said that school curriculum should be left up to local schools. But there is a new governor now. And both supporters and opponents of the bill expect it will sail through the heavily Democratic Assembly and be signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat who has been supportive of gay rights. “It is very basic to me that people dislike and fear that with which we are less familiar,” said Mark Leno, who sponsored the bill and is one of the first openly gay men elected to the State Senate. Students who come to view their fellow classmates as regular members of society, rather than misfits, will find that “their behavior changes for the better,” Mr. Leno said. Some school districts, including San Francisco and Los Angeles, have already put in place such a curriculum. But even in those more liberal areas, Mr. Leno said, students may not realize how recently gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender individuals have been given more rights. For example, he said, many teenagers would be shocked to learn that it was just more than a decade ago when the state legally prohibited discrimination based on sexual orientation. The increasing acceptance of gays and lesbians is precisely what bothers some of the opponents of the legislation. Craig De Luz, a conservative activist and school board member from Sacramento, said that in many communities “the issue of homosexuality is far from settled.” “There is still a big cultural discussion of: Is it something that one chooses, or is it something that someone is born with,” Mr. De Luz said. “It is all part of the same agenda, which is largely about social acceptance. Now this is a way of endorsing a lifestyle that many people are morally opposed to.” Bob Huff, a Republican from San Bernardino, said he worried that the bill would water down the state curriculum and distract students from learning the basics. “To have something this nebulous just opens it up to problems,” Mr. Huff said. “At what age do you start doing this instruction? What is age appropriate and what is appropriate at all is really a question we haven’t answered.” Carolyn Laub, the director of the Gay-Straight Alliance Network , who lobbied for the legislation, cited the experience of an Orange County student as an example of how the law might work. When the student learned that the civil rights protests of the 1960s would be discussed in history class, he asked the teacher to talk about the Stonewall riots . “Suddenly students see he is part of a broader community, and they have a much better understanding of that community in the context of the rest of the world,” Ms. Laub said. “It has absolutely nothing to do with sex; it’s about entire communities that are left out.” | Homosexuality;Education (K-12);History (Academic Subject);California;State Legislatures;Discrimination;Bullies |
ny0009388 | [
"business",
"economy"
]
| 2013/02/02 | Manufacturing Activity Rises for Second Consecutive Month | Manufacturing activity in the United States grew at a faster pace in January, driven by an increase in new orders and more hiring at factories. The Institute for Supply Management, a trade group of supply management professionals, said Friday that its index of manufacturing activity jumped to 53.1 in January from 50.2 in December. It was the highest reading since April, when the index hit 54.1. Any reading above 50 indicates expansion. In another positive economic report, the Commerce Department said spending on construction projects rose in December, ending a year in which construction activity increased for the first time in six years. The second straight monthly increase in the manufacturing index showed that activity was starting to grow again after struggling through most of 2012. Uncertainty about tax increases and deep government spending cuts led many companies to reduce orders for machinery and equipment earlier this year. And a weaker global economy dampened demand for American exports. The report was also encouraging because it showed that demand for factory goods increased while consumers started to pay higher Social Security taxes. That left them with less take-home pay, which could hurt consumer spending. The survey came hours after the Labor Department reported that employers added 157,000 jobs in January. Manufacturers added 4,000 jobs last month, the fourth straight monthly increase. Image Credit The New York Times “There’s a fair bit of optimism here to start the year,” said Dan Greenhaus, chief global strategist at BTIG LLC, a trading firm based in New York. Mr. Greenhaus said the solid manufacturing gains, especially in new orders and employment, suggested that “the larger story remains intact, of a moderate, ongoing recovery.” The I.S.M. report showed that 13 of the 18 industries surveyed had an increase in activity last month. They included manufacturers of plastics and rubber, textiles, furniture, printing, and apparel. Four industries reported contraction: minerals, computers and electronics, wood and chemicals. The survey’s new orders index returned to growth, rising to 53.3 in January from 49.7 in December. Companies reported adding to their inventories in January after two months of declines, a sign that factories are preparing to increase production. Slower growth in stockpiles was a major reason the economy shrank at an annual rate of 0.1 percent in the quarter from October to December, the first contraction in three and a half years. Construction spending rose to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of $885 billion in December, up 0.9 percent from November when spending increased a revised 0.1 percent. For all of 2012, construction spending totaled $850.2 billion, a gain of 9.2 percent from 2011, when construction spending had fallen 3.3 percent. Even with the increase, construction activity is 27.2 percent below its high of $1.17 trillion in 2006 at the peak of the housing boom. Construction has been posting a slow recovery, led by housing gains. In December, housing and nonresidential construction posted gains but spending on government projects fell. | Construction;US Economy;Commerce Department;Manufacturing |
ny0242457 | [
"world",
"middleeast"
]
| 2011/03/10 | New Bridge Linking Asia and Europe a Step Closer | ISTANBUL — A proposed third bridge linking Asia to Europe over the Bosporus took a crucial step closer to becoming reality this week when the Turkish government announced a deadline for bidders to tender for the $6.5 billion Northern Marmara Highway Project. Engineering companies from around the globe are expected to compete for the construction project, which has aroused the ire of environmentalists and urban architects. Companies from Japan, China, Korea, Italy, Spain and India are said to be interested in the job, probably in consortium with Turkish partners. Sovereign wealth funds from Arab countries are also being mentioned as potential equity investors. As part of a 414-kilometer, or 257-mile, thoroughfare with links to the existing Black Sea Coastal Highway, the as yet unnamed toll bridge will stretch from the fishing villages of Garipce on the European side of Istanbul to Poyrazkoy on the Asian side of the greater metropolitan area, the semiofficial Anatolia news agency said Tuesday. Completion is forecast for 2015. Bids will be accepted through mid-August and the winner announced on Aug. 23, the agency said, quoting the government’s Official Gazette. Initial planning calls for eight lanes of auto and truck traffic, and possibly the first railway line to cross the Bosporus — a boon for the ever-increasing amount of freight moving between Europe and Central Asia through Turkey. Like many large-scale infrastructure projects, the deal is being structured under a build-operate-transfer model in which a government does not have to contribute huge amounts of financing in advance, but promises to purchase at least a preset percentage of the project so that the builder is guaranteed to recoup costs within a specific time period. The bridge is central to the budding development of the northern fringes of Istanbul, Turkey’s financial and cultural center and its largest city, with an unofficial population of 16 million. Supporters say the route will ease congestion by diverting heavy commercial traffic to the far north artery and its connecting roads, skirting densely populated areas now served by the First Bosporus Bridge and the Fatih Sultan Mehmet Bridge. Officials have estimated that 20,000 of those heavy vehicles would use the new link each day. Mehmet Cahit Turhan, the general manager for the General Directorate of Highways, and others have said that the new span will help ease the choking traffic jams in the sprawling city, but environmentalists and some city planning experts assert that the construction will only make a dire situation worse, setting off a new wave of rapid and poorly planned urban development. “We know from the aftermath of the first two bridges, and from the connecting beltways, that the land-use pattern changed rapidly and new settlements came on,” Haluk Gercek, a professor of civil engineering and transportation said during an interview at Istanbul Technical University. Similar development in the third bridge area, he said, “will destroy all the wetlands and forests and so on, which we describe as being the lungs of the city.” Opponents also say that the bridge and resulting urban development will wipe out vast stretches of pine forest in a city where green spaces are at a minimum, damage aquifers on both continents and encourage more polluting automobile use. Binali Yildirim, the Turkish transportation minister, however, said last April that from among a half-dozen routes being considered for the third bridge, the Garipce to Poyrazkoy option would cause the least environmental damage. In October, the Turkish Green Party led demonstrations against the construction. Thousand of protesters gathered for candlelight vigils at parks, ferry stations and cafes on the eastern and western shores of the strait. The Istanbul Chamber of Architects has filed lawsuits against the project, saying that it violates a previous master plan for land use in the region and that a decision made by Ankara should not supersede a blueprint approved in Istanbul. Hundreds of professional groups and individuals filed objections with the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality during a period of public comment. Until 1973, there were no permanent bridges across the 31-kilometer strait, a crucial shipping conduit between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. That was the year the First Bosporus Bridge, now clogged with commuters, opened to traffic between the neighborhoods of Ortakoy and Beylerbeyi. The bridge, 64 meters above the chilly Bosporus waters, is also used for the Istanbul marathon each October and has been host to publicity stunts, including a truncated tennis match featuring Venus Williams. A second span, the Fatih Sultan Mehmet Bridge, named for the Sultan Mehmet the Conquerer, was completed about five kilometers farther north in 1988. | Turkey;Istanbul (Turkey);Bridges and Tunnels |
ny0086773 | [
"us",
"politics"
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| 2015/07/09 | A Political Lifer, Scott Walker Has Long Been His Own Strategist | WASHINGTON — When Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin met privately here at the Capitol Hill Club recently with a group of congressional Republicans, he did not just seek their support for his presidential candidacy. He also laid out a state-by-state assessment of how the 2016 race would unfold. He pointed to his family roots in Iowa and said he would be able to appeal to moderates and conservatives there. He noted that he was already doing well in New Hampshire polls. And he predicted that when the campaign moved to Florida next March, either Senator Marco Rubio or former Gov. Jeb Bush would be forced from the race. “It was a pretty good analysis,” said Jim Talent, an adviser to Mr. Walker and a former senator from Missouri, who attended the meeting. “He’s up on the strategy.” To say the least. As Mr. Walker, 47, prepares for his formal entry into the presidential contest , he has brought on a campaign manager, a pollster and a group of press aides. But he has not hired a strategist — because it might be needlessly duplicative: Those who know him well say that Mr. Walker has always been his own. For all the attention he has drawn because of his confrontations with organized labor, Mr. Walker is at least as animated by political strategy and tactics as he is by policy and ideological crusades. Except for a brief postcollege stint fund-raising for the Red Cross, he has spent his entire adult life in politics, first running for state representative at 22. He has held elected office continuously since 1993; the presidential contest will be his 14th campaign. And he comes to the race steeped in the knowledge required of a good political operative: what it costs to compete in swing states; the science of purchasing television advertising time; the art of getting good press. Video Highlights of the political career of Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016. Credit Credit Jabin Botsford/The New York Times “If I know Scott Walker, he probably knows the media markets just as well in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina as he does Wisconsin, plus where they spill over into and who has the best ratings,” said Robin Vos, the speaker of the Wisconsin Assembly and an ally of Mr. Walker’s. “While I’m up reading Sports Illustrated and The Economist, he’s doing that kind of research.” Another Republican recalled a fund-raiser for the Republican Governors Association last summer in which Mr. Walker, locked in an expensive re-election fight, described the Democratic attacks against him and boasted of already having come up with his response to one on abortion. Indeed, he went on to write and design the commercial himself, in which he faced the camera and, in solemn tones, said he had signed legislation leaving “the final decision to a woman and her doctor.” Mr. Walker’s tendency to play consultant revealed itself long before his own presidential bid. In October 2000, Mr. Walker, then a 32-year-old state representative from Wauwatosa, published what he called “an open memo” to George W. Bush, sketching out four campaign commercials that he said would help Mr. Bush defeat Al Gore. “On Social Security , run an ad with a 50-year-old man and his parents talking about how the Bush plan preserves Social Security for his parents and then include the man’s college age son and have him talk about how the Bush plan ensures that there will be something left for him, too,” Mr. Walker wrote. “They should all talk about being upset with the politics of the past eight years and that they want a president with the courage to lead.” Twelve years later, Mr. Walker was at it again, firing off unsolicited strategic advice in an email to Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee. “Grab the mike and get out from behind a podium and talk directly to voters,” he urged Mr. Romney, according to “Unintimidated,” Mr. Walker’s 2013 memoir. “Use real examples of people who would benefit from your plan. Have them join you on the trail. Connect to them like you did to the Olympic athletes. You have real passion. Let the voters see it.” (As he recounted in the book, he never heard back.) Who Is Running for President? Donald J. Trump officially accepted the Republican party's nomination on July 22. Hillary Clinton was officially nominated on July 26 at the Democratic Convention. Mr. Walker’s hands-on approach to his political operation in Wisconsin bordered on the obsessive, judging from a trove of emails from his time as Milwaukee county executive, and as a candidate for governor, that was released as part of a lawsuit. He recommended a news leak for a fall weekend in which the Green Bay Packers were idle, to maximize news media coverage. He sent a Saturday morning order to three aides to “divide reactive and proactive communications” operations in his press office. And he advised a talk-radio host to file a public records request to his office for the sole purpose of unearthing the excessive number of public records requests being filed at the time by his opponents. Mr. Walker’s strategic talents can be an asset. His ability to formulate and convey an effective message helped him win three hard-fought elections for governor in four years, including a 2012 recall election, in an extraordinarily competitive state. And he is doing much the same now: It was Mr. Walker who came up with the best-of-both-worlds formulation he has recently woven into his stump speech — that his hard-charging Senate opponents are “fighters,” and his rival governors who have won difficult elections are “winners,” but he is the rare breed who has done both. Asked about Mr. Walker’s hands-on approach, a Republican close to him who requested anonymity to discuss the candidate’s political style said: “It’s clear that he’s engaged. He knows what he wants, knows what he believes in and is not being told what to say.” Just as it is considered unwise for a lawyer to represent himself in court, though, Mr. Walker’s self-reliance on political strategy could prove problematic. His penchant for veering off into the arcana and mechanics of politics can divert him from his message, unintentionally raise expectations and, more significantly, reinforce an impression his opponents are hoping will take hold: that he is a political lifer with a shallow grasp of policy who lacks the gravitas the presidency demands. To think like an operative, after all, is to find a way to appeal to the political marketplace at a given moment, to devise a way to win. But a fixation on salesmanship can also lead to shifting on issues, something Mr. Walker did this year when he moved to a harder line on immigration to align himself with conservative primary voters. And by embracing the language of the abortion rights movement in his re-election commercial last year, he opened himself up to complaints from abortion opponents that he had changed his tone, if not his tune. Such moves, while tempting in the short term, can also lead to accusations of being unprincipled. “You can say it’s brilliant if you’re a political strategist, but on the other side, what does it say about character?” said Thomas A. Loftus, a Democrat and former speaker of Wisconsin’s Assembly. What was understandable for an ambitious politician on the rise now has even Mr. Walker’s allies saying he had better let the consultants do the consulting. “If you don’t have good people around you, or delegate, one of two things happens: You make dumb decisions, or you burn yourself out,” said Mr. Vos, referring to his own experiences. “I have actually hoped people have given him that advice. In fact, I know people have given it to him. And he is listening. To what degree, I have no idea.” Not so much, perhaps, that Mr. Walker has fully given up the shoptalk: Some primary voters who were eager to meet with him said they were disappointed to see how much he dwelt on the politics side of politics. A Republican activist in Iowa, who insisted on anonymity to divulge a private conversation, recalled trying to engage Mr. Walker on his tenure in Wisconsin. Instead, the activist said, Mr. Walker steered the conversation to how the presidential field was shaping up, the history of the Iowa caucuses and how to manage expectations for his campaign in the state. “There is no Walker whisperer,” the activist said, “because it’s him.” | Scott Walker;2016 Presidential Election;Wisconsin;Republicans |
ny0031359 | [
"sports",
"basketball"
]
| 2013/06/06 | In Finals’ Clash of Styles, Only Certainty Is a Worthy Champion | MIAMI — On one side of the 2013 N.B.A finals is Tim Duncan, a quiet superstar who has stayed put for 16 years in south Texas. On the other is the world-renowned LeBron James, who left home in blue-collar northern Ohio for the glitterati of South Beach. Starting with the no-drama Duncan in 1997, the San Antonio Spurs have been a model of player development and long-term stability. Upon signing the free agents James and Chris Bosh in 2010, the Miami Heat became the essence of microwaved title contention. The Spurs were largely built through the draft and trades, and most of their players are not from the continental United States. The Heat’s only drafted player of consequence is Dwyane Wade, and only a spare center, the Canadian-born Joel Anthony, qualifies as an international. Both franchises have succeeded doing it their way, and perhaps the stylistic differences are more attributable to conversational details than core values. “You have very similar structures and a commitment to a culture where there’s a structure, a discipline, a style of play, a type of player,” Heat Coach Erik Spoelstra said. Starting Thursday night with Game 1 at American Airlines Arena, each team will look to enhance its legacy. On the line for the Spurs is a fifth championship in the Duncan era and what would be their first since 2007. At stake for the defending champion Heat is establishing a pattern of dominance that could avert a breakup after next season when James, especially, can opt out of his contract. Systematic ties notwithstanding, the antithetical operational approaches of these franchises should help make for a most compelling matchup in a series that has something for everyone, including critics of the outgoing commissioner, David Stern. Stern has said he will leave his post next February, or almost three months before the 2014 playoffs begin. The last finals of his 30-year tenure will cover both sides of an endless debate about his beloved league’s ulterior motives and best business practices. Many have believed that the contemporary N.B.A. has preferred to showcase sexy teams with at least one transcendent star. But Stern has long insisted that franchises in smaller markets could hold on to their best players and thrive under smart management. By a wide margin, the Spurs have been the most shining example of that with Duncan, Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili. According to Nielsen, San Antonio is the 36th-largest television market in the United States, or fourth smallest of the 30 N.B.A. cities. Miami is 16th, only the league’s 14th largest. But James is a big enough celebrity to be his own market. “I don’t want to say what’s a big market or a small market,” the veteran Heat forward Juwan Howard said. “But the Spurs have an unbelievable legacy. They’re a franchise and a team that everyone recognizes, everyone knows and respects.” Image Neither Tony Parker nor Manu Ginobili was a lottery pick. Credit Eric Gay/Associated Press Respect has not necessarily translated to widespread acclaim, or prevented the Spurs from being saddled with baseless charges of being boring. Coach Gregg Popovich has at times carried a Texas-size chip on his shoulder for the lack of a national aura. But Duncan, for one, has preferred it. “It doesn’t matter,” he said Wednesday. “We play the same way. We do the same things. We’ve been blessed to have won four championships. And we’re blessed to be back and have a chance to win the fifth one.” He added that he would never want to walk in James’s sneakers, or “have that kind of pressure on me, absolutely.” After sweeping James in the 2007 finals when James was with the Cleveland Cavaliers, Duncan told James that the league, in effect, would soon belong to him. But James had to first exit Cleveland, and team up with Wade and Bosh. After Miami’s president, Pat Riley, landed James and Bosh and re-signed Wade, he took a congratulatory call from Popovich, of all people. “He put together a team fairly, within the rules, that is a monster,” Popovich said. “So why wouldn’t he get credit for that? Why wouldn’t you congratulate him for that?” Within the basketball establishment, Popovich and the Spurs have been admired for their knack of finding stalwart players where others weren’t looking. The Spurs lucked into Duncan with the first pick of the 1997 draft but stole Parker with the 28th pick of the draft in 2001 and Ginobili with a second-round pick in 1999. Asked to explain the team’s continuous success, Popovich said: “It’s a total function of who those three guys are. What if they were jerks? What if they were selfish? What if one of them was, you know, unintelligent? But the way it works out, all three of them are highly intelligent. They all have great character.” This is where the Heat and the Spurs are more alike than not, said Ray Allen, who joined Miami this season after five seasons with Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett in Boston. That so-called Big Three won a title in its first season together. “You can’t put a time frame on what works and what doesn’t,” Allen said. “It’s more a question of maturity, of the people who are coming together.” In three seasons, James, Wade and Bosh have not failed to reach the finals, and that has made them the instant sensation they were supposed to be. But in returning after a six-year absence, and finally against an opponent they can be measured against for greatness, Duncan, 37, and the Spurs may finally have won what might be considered a team lifetime achievement award, or their warmest welcome yet to the N.B.A. finals. Whoever wins can croon that they did it their way. | Basketball;Spurs;Miami Heat;Playoffs;Tim Duncan;LeBron James;Gregg Popovich;Pat Riley |
ny0044085 | [
"us",
"politics"
]
| 2014/05/14 | In a Shift From Deficit Concerns, the Senate Will Take Up Tax Breaks | WASHINGTON — The Senate on Tuesday shrugged off the deficit concerns that were once an animating force on Capitol Hill, voting 96-3 to take up a package of business tax breaks without offering any way to pay for them. The procedural vote presaged final passage as early as this week and followed the House’s overwhelming approval last week of legislation that would make permanent the research-and-development tax credit for businesses and raise the deficit by $156 billion over the next 10 years. On that vote, 62 House Democrats joined virtually every Republican in ignoring President Obama’s veto threat because of the deficit implications. “It’s pretty remarkable,” said Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a deficit watchdog group. “It’s a shift from, ‘This is a huge problem’ — and if anyone looks at the long-term problems, it clearly still is — to ‘We’ve made so much progress on the budget deficit’ to doing things that actually hurt the debt. It’s as though members of Congress tried out fiscal discipline, didn’t like how it felt and are falling back to bad habits.” As the deficit continues to fall, it loosens the policy reins in Washington for the first time since Mr. Obama rammed through his stimulus law in the opening weeks of his presidency. Last week, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office reported that tax receipts were up 8 percent over the first seven months of the fiscal year, which began in October. Spending was down around 3 percent, and at $301 billion, the federal budget deficit is $187 billion lower than at this time last year. “We will not pull the plug before our nation’s recovery is complete,” said Senator Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, the majority leader. “Let’s work together to give America’s families a fair shot.” Image Senator Ron Wyden, right, the Oregon Democrat who heads the Senate Finance Committee, with reporters after the vote. Credit Gabriella Demczuk/The New York Times The Senate’s Expiring Provisions Improvement Reform and Efficiency Act, or Expire, renews more than 50 tax credits through 2015, including the research and development tax credit, tax credits for investments in depressed areas, tax breaks for energy-efficient home improvements and tax breaks for higher education expenses. Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, the new chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, had pledged to pare back the routinely extended tax breaks as a dry run for a broader overhaul of the tax code. In the end, nothing was pared back, not the “temporary” tax break for rum producers in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, not the ability for moviemakers to write off the first $15 million of film production costs for films made in the United States, not the much maligned but longstanding tax breaks for racehorses and Nascar racetracks. Heritage Action, the political arm of the conservative Heritage Foundation, called it “one of the most egregious examples of Washington using its power to prop up well-connected interests.” Yet only the staunchest deficit hawks, Republican Senators Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, Jeff Flake of Arizona and Mike Lee of Utah, voted against beginning debate on the bill. And Congress’s actions over the last few days are only the beginning. In the coming weeks, the House is likely to make permanent five more corporate tax cuts, costing $301 billion through 2024. That would virtually wipe out all the deficit reduction last year, when Bush-era tax cuts were allowed to expire on upper-income households. The White House noted that the House’s expanded and permanent tax credit for research and development would cost more than 15 times as much as renewing and extending unemployment benefits, which Republicans insist must be paid for. “The administration wants to work with Congress to make progress on measures that strengthen the economy and help middle-class families, including pro-growth business tax reform. However, making traditional tax extenders permanent without offsets represents the wrong approach,” the White House said in extending a veto threat. A large majority in Congress appears to disagree, potentially setting up the first veto of consequence of the Obama presidency. | Federal Budget;US Politics;Tax Credits Tax Deductions Tax Exemptions;US Economy;Senate;Congress |
ny0039668 | [
"sports",
"olympics"
]
| 2014/04/26 | Michael Phelps’s Return Brings More Eyes to Young Swimmers | MESA, Ariz. — Lane 8 was where the future and the past of American men’s swimming converged Friday at a USA Swimming Grand Prix meet at Skyline Aquatic Center. In the three seeded preliminary heats of the men’s 50-meter freestyle, 17-year-old Justin Lynch gave way to the 22-time Olympic medalist Michael Phelps, who gave way to 15-year-old Michael Andrew. Lynch and Andrew were the type of swimmers Phelps had in mind when, on the eve of his final swim of the 2012 Olympics, he said: “The sport is going to be fun to watch. I’m excited to see it from the outside more than anything, what these young people are going to do to continue to change the sport.” For Lynch and Andrew, who have bettered national age-group records set by Phelps, being able to race against him was an unexpected treat. Their arrivals on the senior-national scene came after Phelps had left it. “I look at it as an opportunity to race the best in history,” said Lynch, who finished fourth Thursday in the 100-meter butterfly final, 1.35 seconds behind Phelps, the runner-up . The people who were quick to criticize Phelps, 28, for breaking his retirement vows were nowhere to be seen or heard this week. Or perhaps they were simply drowned out by the helicopter whirring overhead Thursday morning before the first official race of Phelps’s comeback, or by the clicking of the cameras that recorded his every stretch and smile and the crowd’s roar when he stepped to the blocks for the 100 butterfly qualifying. “Yeah, I saw the helicopter circling over workouts,” Natalie Coughlin, a three-time Olympian, said with a laugh. “We’re all happy he’s here, but the meet was a little more low-key last year.” It was surreal seeing swimming highlights sandwiched between N.B.A. and N.H.L. playoff results. If Phelps’s return is bad for the sport, what constitutes good publicity? “It was nice seeing all those cameras here,” said Ryan Lochte, who edged Phelps in the 100 butterfly. “Thanks, Michael.” Lochte, 29, has been competing against Phelps in international competitions for a decade. In welcoming his rival back with open arms, Lochte set the tone for the rest of the competition. “Any race he swims, he’s going to make the other swimmers hurt,” Lochte said, adding, “Racing against Michael is probably the hardest thing to do.” Image Michael Phelps at the start of the 50-meter freestyle, an event well off his competitive radar. He chose to swim the butterfly in the race. Credit Rob Schumacher/USA Today Sports, via Reuters Then Lochte reiterated how much he enjoyed it. It is up to Lynch, Andrew and other members of the next generation to rise to the challenge of sending Phelps back into retirement — respectfully, of course — by swimming so fast they displace Phelps from the Olympic conversation. Whether or not Phelps competes in the 2016 Games in Rio de Janeiro, if he can be the tide that lifts American swimming, the sport wins. “I’m doing this because I want to, because I’m having fun,” Phelps said. “I’m not putting any pressure on myself. I’m just enjoying this process.” However long it lasts, Phelps’s return has forced his longtime coach, Bob Bowman, to think differently about how to train him. Figuring out how best to prepare Phelps for the 100-meter freestyle, the 100 butterfly and relays — instead of a long list of events, including the 400-meter individual medley — took Bowman out of his comfort zone. That is not a bad thing. “I’m sort of experimenting with stuff that I didn’t have the guts to do before,” Bowman said. Like what? “His training is half what it was,” Bowman said, adding, “And what we’re doing is working for these races.” On Friday, Phelps bypassed the 400 I.M., one of three individual long-course events in which he still holds the world record, for the 50 freestyle, an event well off his competitive radar. “The 50 is kind of weird,” Phelps said. “Bob said, ‘This could be the first and last one of your career,’ and I said ‘O.K.’ ” Also at Bowman’s suggestion, Phelps chose to swim the butterfly in the 50 freestyle preliminary, which the rules permit. Phelps had been slow to find his rhythm on the first lap of the 100-meter butterfly final against Lochte, a factor in his defeat. This was a chance to work on his speed and his stroke — and to race, which Phelps does well no matter the stroke or distance. Phelps finished in 24.06 seconds, more than half a second faster than his first 50 of the previous night’s butterfly final. It is right about where he would need to be if he wanted to challenge his 100 world record. It did not seem to matter that Phelps finished seventh in the eight-man heat and did not advance to the final. “If I want to do a good 100, I have to be out in that with a comfortable stroke,” Phelps said. So Phelps got a gauge of how far he was from where he needs to be if he wants to be competitive with his younger self. And his opponents, a few of whom had never seen Phelps in the flesh, got a gauge of where they need to be to challenge him. Lynch, who won a bronze medal in the 100 butterfly at the 2013 world junior championships, said he was a little intimidated racing the man whose name was in the record books. “It’s a whole other level racing the best in the world,” Lynch said. Whenever he races Phelps next — at the next Grand Prix event, in Charlotte, N.C., or at the national championships in August — “I’ll be a lot more comfortable,” Lynch said. | Swimming;Michael Phelps;2016 Summer Olympics;USA Swimming;Justin Lynch;Michael Andrew |
ny0291320 | [
"us",
"politics"
]
| 2016/01/06 | Group Backing Marco Rubio Unleashes Ads Attacking Chris Christie | The “super PAC” supporting Senator Marco Rubio of Florida is focusing its attacks on Gov. Chris Christie, an emerging rival in the New Hampshire Republican primary, through two new harsh, negative ads, one of them titled “Favorite.” On Screen The “Favorite” ad opens with an image tying Mr. Christie to a moment that has haunted the New Jersey governor: his embrace of President Obama, days before the 2012 election, after the devastation of Hurricane Sandy (the actual opening image is from 2011, after Hurricane Irene). The ad then levels criticisms against Mr. Christie’s record as New Jersey governor, such as embracing an online sales tax, Common Core and the expansion of Medicaid, while images of Mr. Christie — who, the narrator says, “could well be Obama’s favorite Republican governor” — and Mr. Obama remain in the background. The ad saves its final 10 seconds for a syncopated list of critiques — “One high tax, Common Core, liberal energy loving, Obamacare Medicaid expanding president is enough.” It closes with the widely seen photograph of Mr. Christie and Mr. Obama shaking hands after Hurricane Sandy. The Message Blunt and direct, the ad accuses Mr. Christie of embracing the policies of Mr. Obama. It is a relentless attempt to portray the New Jersey governor as a left-leaning Republican, just as Mr. Rubio hopes to align the right-leaning establishment behind his own candidacy. Fact Check While Mr. Christie did once support the Common Core education reforms, he reversed his position early last year, claiming that he “gave it four years to work,” and “it didn’t work.” He stands by his support of an online sales tax, calling it a “fairness issue” that should be left to individual states . And while he also claims that expanding Medicaid was “the right move for New Jersey,” he has also made entitlement reform a cornerstone of his campaign . Where Tuesday in New Hampshire broadcast markets, as part of a multimillion-dollar ad buy in the state. Takeaway Mr. Rubio is faced with a difficult path: trying to halt the momentum of Senator Ted Cruz in Iowa while also aligning the establishment and right-leaning vote in New Hampshire. Mr. Christie’s recent surge in the Granite State threatens Mr. Rubio’s coalition, so his super PAC is coming in to provide air support. | 2016 Presidential Election;Campaign advertising;Chris Christie;Marco Rubio |
ny0058146 | [
"sports",
"football"
]
| 2014/09/14 | Broncos’ Thomas Is No Longer a Secret | Broncos tight end Julius Thomas has lost the element of surprise. He had a big opener a year ago, catching five passes for 110 yards and two touchdowns in a walloping of Baltimore. That sent fantasy football players scrambling to their laptops to pick him up. He caught three touchdown passes in Denver’s 31-24 victory against the Colts last week, and by now every football fan knows him. Thomas caught quarterback Peyton Manning’s eye as soon as Manning arrived in Denver in 2012. Players could not work out at the team’s headquarters, so Manning and a few teammates, including Thomas, went to Valor Christian High School in Highlands Ranch, Colo., “which was a great facility,” Manning said. “And the track team is practicing track, running around the track and the FedEx guy filming the whole workout,” Manning said. “I don’t know if the package got there on time that day or not. So it’s just the little things you got to deal with.” Manning said he was throwing to Thomas, Eric Decker and a few others. “I remember going, Golly, 6-4 tight end, those guys don’t come around very often and they can really run,” he said. Thomas, however, aggravated a leg injury during the workouts and would not be himself until a year ago, when he had a breakout season with 65 receptions for 788 yards and 12 touchdowns. His seven-catch, 104-yard, three-touchdown performance against the Colts earned Thomas his first A.F.C. Offensive Player of the Week honor. “I think he’ll be a better player this year than he was last year, I really do,” Manning said. COUGHLIN’S FOUNDATION Giants Coach Tom Coughlin’s Jay Fund Foundation is helping Childhood Cancer Awareness Month on Sunday. Twelve families of pediatric oncology patients will attend the game against Arizona as guests of the fund. They will wear special edition Jay Fund #GoGold T-shirts. Coughlin and his coaching staff will also wear #GoGold pins to show their support. Coughlin will wear the pin during all Giants games this month. Before kickoff, two ambassador patients, Ahtziri Garcia, 12, who received a diagnosis of Ewing’s sarcoma in 2012, and Shameem Crooks, a 2014 graduate of Teaneck (N.J.) High School who received a diagnosis of acute lymphoblastic leukemia in 2011, will join the captains of the Giants and Cardinals for the opening coin toss. The Tom Coughlin Jay Fund Foundation was created in 1996 in honor of Jay McGillis, a player for Coughlin at Boston College who died from leukemia. DEMAND FOR JERSEY DIPS It did not take long for Johnny Manziel’s jersey to slide from the top of the popularity charts. Manziel did not play in Cleveland’s loss at Pittsburgh on opening weekend while Brian Hoyer played quarterback for the Browns. After leading in sales in Dick’s Sporting Goods’ Jersey Report, Johnny Football, as Manziel is known, was fifth in the week ending last Thursday — although he was still first over all since the draft. He was, by far, the top-rated nonstarter in the league, as well as the highest-ranked Brown. Cornerback Joe Haden came in 33rd for the period. Fans were most interested last week in buying the jerseys of Peyton Manning, Joe Flacco, Andrew Luck and LeSean McCoy. ‘HOME’ GAME FOR WITTEN Cowboys tight end Jason Witten will play at Tennessee for the second time in his 12-year career. He grew up in the state and was a standout for the Tennessee Volunteers before Dallas drafted him in the third round in 2003. Witten, a nine-time Pro Bowler, goes home on the verge of becoming the third tight end in league history with 10,000 yards receiving. It is unlikely he will get there against the Titans — he still needs 187 yards after being held to two catches for 14 yards against San Francisco. But it will be a special weekend for him either way. “It’s really kind of where the dream started for me,” said Witten, who had two catches for 19 yards at the Titans early in the 2006 season. “A lot of people invested in me when they didn’t have to, a lot of family, coaches, high school and college.” Witten is not getting carried away in the sentiment, though. He is not big on socializing on such trips. And while he is taking care of family and friends, he said it only amounts to about 15 tickets. “I’m pretty strict on those things, but I’m sure there will be a pretty big crowd this week,” Witten said. BENGALS’ NEW WRINKLES Hue Jackson, Cincinnati’s new offensive coordinator, showed a few surprises in the Bengals’ 23-16 opening win at Baltimore, including Andy Dalton running option plays. He would fake a handoff as part of a zone-read play, roll out and pitch it out. Expect to see more of Dalton running around. “Your goal offensively would be to always keep the other team off-balance as much as you can and get them to have to keep turning the page and turning the page,” Coach Marvin Lewis said. The Bengals have rarely used Dalton as part of the running game until now. “I may not be as athletic as some of the guys in this league, but I feel comfortable doing it,” said Dalton, who ran more at Texas Christian. “The thing we are always looking for is the right matchup. Most of the time I just handed the ball off and got out of the way. We didn’t do that here very much, but in college I ran it a lot.” | Football;Broncos;Julius Thomas |
ny0134588 | [
"world",
"americas"
]
| 2008/04/20 | Trading Pulpit for Politics, Paraguay Cleric Is Favored | ASUNCIÓN, Paraguay — A former Roman Catholic bishop who regularly wears sandals and admires Che Guevara has a historic chance to break the ruling party’s 62-year grip on power in Paraguay. The former bishop, Fernando Lugo, is a self-described defender of the poor who left the church two years ago. He was leading in opinion polls here just days before Sunday’s election, which has been marked by accusations of dirty campaigning and claims that outside agitators are planning to destabilize the country if Mr. Lugo is defeated. Sunday will be only the fourth time that Paraguayans have gone to the polls to elect a president since the fall of the dictator Alfredo Stroessner in 1989. He ruled Paraguay, a country of 6.7 million people, for 35 years, leaving a legacy of corruption and one of the worst human rights records in the hemisphere. The Colorado Party, which supported Stroessner, has been in power longer than any other political party in the world. “It won’t be easy to beat them after 60 years, but it isn’t impossible,” said Atilio Alegre, 40, who attended Mr. Lugo’s final rally on Thursday night. “The Roman Empire fell, and the Colorado Party can fall as well.” As of Saturday, Mr. Lugo was clinging in most polls to a lead of 4 to 7 percentage points over the Colorado Party’s candidate, Blanca Ovelar de Duarte. But one poll released Saturday by the polling group I.C.A. showed a virtual dead heat, with Mrs. Ovelar ahead, 36 percent to 33.5 percent for Mr. Lugo, said Enrique Chase, I.C.A.’s general director. The poll had a margin of error of 2.9 points. Even if Mr. Lugo, 56, does not win, the election’s outcome is likely to be historic. Mrs. Ovelar would be the first woman elected president in Paraguay — and the third woman in three years to be elected to lead a South American country. But many Paraguayans view Mrs. Ovelar, 50, a former education minister, as more of the same. While she has a reputation as an honest and competent administrator, she is a political novice. Analysts say she was backed by the president, Nicanor Duarte Frutos, over Vice President Luis Castiglioni to ensure that Mr. Duarte Frutos remains the power behind the presidency. Mr. Duarte Frutos tried to change the Constitution two years ago so he could run again, even naming himself head of the party, which drew widespread protests led by Mr. Lugo. If Mrs. Ovelar wins, the Colorado Party apparatus is likely to give him considerable sway as president of the Senate. At the Colorado Party’s final rally on Wednesday night, where party officials gave away soccer balls and packs of cigarettes, Mr. Duarte Frutos attacked Mr. Lugo as a “failed priest” and implored supporters to defend their votes “as if our lives depended on it.” Mr. Lugo, in turn, has denounced the Colorado Party’s “dirty campaign.” He refused to attend a final debate among the candidates on Thursday, because, a spokesman said, “political conditions did not exist” to participate. The tense race has heightened concerns about voter fraud, especially after the national electoral council decided to return to paper ballots because of a lack of confidence in electronic voting systems. The switch has meant 50 percent more voting booths. The increase has put a strain on opposition parties to find and train enough volunteers to guarantee a fair vote, said Joel Fyke, program officer at the Washington Office on Latin America, a nonprofit research and human rights group. Paraguay, nestled between Argentina and Brazil, has struggled to shed its reputation as one of the most corrupt countries in Latin America. It is also one of the poorest. Some 33 percent of Paraguayans live below the poverty line, and about a million live abroad, an exodus that became a campaign theme this year. Other central issues have been growing impatience with corruption and the public perception, especially amid rising unemployment in Paraguay’s cities, that the Colorados have helped themselves to the country’s wealth at the exclusion of ordinary Paraguayans. Mrs. Ovelar said during the debate last week that Paraguayans had “low self-esteem” stemming from years of authoritarian rule. Both she and Mr. Lugo have vowed to woo back expatriate Paraguayans. Mr. Lugo’s campaign slogan is “Lugo has heart,” and his personal warmth and religious background have stirred hope in many Paraguayans seeking change. Three of his brothers were tortured during the Stroessner dictatorship for being political dissidents, he said. As a priest, he lived for 11 years in San Pedro, one of the poorest regions in the country. Thousands of Paraguayans living across the border in Argentina boarded trains last week for the 20-hour journey to Paraguay to vote in the election. Most were Lugo supporters, according to local newspaper accounts. Mr. Duarte Frutos and Mrs. Ovelar have also asserted that hundreds of “invaders” from Venezuela, Ecuador and other countries who sympathize with Mr. Lugo are entering the country to try to destabilize it if he is defeated. Mr. Duarte Frutos, who has been a supporter of President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, nevertheless appealed to Mr. Chávez to not interfere in the election by aiding Mr. Lugo. Many analysts believe that if elected, Mr. Lugo would be another in a line of dressed-down South American populists with Socialist tendencies. But while he shares some of their Socialist ideas, Mr. Lugo shrugs off easy comparisons to populists like Mr. Chávez or Evo Morales of Bolivia and Ecuador’s Rafael Correa. “Chávez is a soldier, I am holy man,” he said in an interview Thursday at his home. “Evo is an Indian, I am not an Indian. Correa is an intellectual, I am not an intellectual. I am simply an individual that feels for the people, that feels their pain, their hopes.” During the interview, Mr. Lugo wore his trademark Roman sandals and sipped maté. Sitting on a bookshelf was a small plaque commemorating the revolutionary Che Guevara. The former bishop dismissed concerns about the legalities of his candidacy. The Paraguayan Constitution prohibits church officials of any denomination from being elected president, so Mr. Lugo resigned from the church in December 2006. The Vatican refused to accept his resignation and considers him only suspended from his clerical duties. Mr. Lugo said he was abiding by Paraguayan laws. He has become controversial in Brazil for his plan to renegotiate contracts for the Itaipú hydroelectric dam on the Brazil-Paraguay border, the world’s largest. Paraguay and Brazil split the electricity generated 50-50, but Paraguay uses only 7 percent of its share. The rest it can sell to Brazil at a price fixed years ago — a price that today is some 20 times less than the market rate. Renegotiating the contract could “substantially change” Paraguay’s economy, he said. Mr. Lugo also said he might consider increasing export tariffs on agricultural producers, which are currently close to zero. The country’s agriculture exports — especially soy and meat sales — have been growing considerably, but most of the profits are not filtering down to the population. Tens of thousands of supporters filled a downtown plaza on Thursday night to hear Mr. Lugo’s final speech. With a Paraguayan flag draped across his chest — and a bulletproof vest underneath — Mr. Lugo fluidly switched between Spanish and Guarani, the dominant indigenous language here. “They have kidnapped hope,” he said of the Colorados. He denounced the corruption of previous governments, vowing that neither he nor his running mate would steal “even one cent” from Paraguay. His speech concluded, and he threw a white dove into the air. | Paraguay;Elections;Lugo Mendez Fernando;Christians and Christianity;Colorado Party |
ny0091853 | [
"business"
]
| 2015/08/11 | Man Charged in Bitcoin Scheme Appears in New York Court | Anthony Murgio, a Florida man who was charged last month by federal prosecutors in Manhattan with running an illegal bitcoin money exchange firm and is thought to have information about last summer’s hacking attack against JPMorgan Chase, seemed to be taking the unfolding criminal case against him in stride during a court appearance on Monday morning. Mr. Murgio, 31, made small talk with the two federal agents in the hallway of the federal court in Lower Manhattan, while waiting to appear on those charges before the United States magistrate judge, James C. Francis IV. At one point, he even rushed to see if a woman who had fallen in the hallway was hurt and needed help getting up. But when he appeared in court, Mr. Murgio said nothing, letting his lawyer, Gregory W. Kehoe of the big law firm Greenberg Traurig, do the talking. The hearing was brief and the judge allowed Mr. Murgio, who has run a number of less-than-successful businesses since graduating from Florida State University, to remain free on $100,000 bail. Mr. Murgio posted the bail a week ago after his arrest on July 21 in Tampa after spending a few nights in the Pinellas County jail while he and his family secured the money. Both Mr. Murgio and his lawyer declined to comment after the proceeding in federal court. Federal authorities contend that Mr. Murgio’s company, Coin.mx , allowed online criminals to illegally exchange the digital currency bitcoin for cash as part of a money-laundering scheme. Mr. Murgio could be sentenced to up to 20 years in prison if convicted on the money-laundering charges. The judge, at the request of Eun Young Choi, a federal prosecutor assigned to the case, ordered Mr. Murgio not to talk to anyone associated with his company and not to work for any other money-transfer firm. Mr. Murgio’s partner in running the small bitcoin firm, Yuri Lebedev, who also lives in Florida and was similarly charged by prosecutors, is out on $25,000 bail. Neither man has been charged with any wrongdoing in connection with the hacking at JPMorgan that compromised the personal contact information of 83 million customer accounts at the bank. But federal authorities are particularly interested in what Mr. Murgio may know about the attack, as his name surfaced early in the inquiry by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, people briefed on the investigation have said. Joshua Aaron, a friend of Mr. Murgio and one of his college classmates from Florida State, also came to the attention of the F.B.I. early on. Mr. Aaron was one of three men charged by prosecutors in Manhattan with operating a series of schemes to pump up the prices of otherwise worthless stocks who also is said to have some link to the JPMorgan attack. Two of those men were arrested in Israel on the day that Mr. Murgio and Mr. Lebedev were arrested in Florida. Mr. Aaron, who moved to Israel several years ago, could not be arrested at his home in Tel Aviv because he was out of the country. Mr. Aaron, 31, is thought to be staying in Russia with his wife, Alona Chaim Aaron, an Israeli citizen, based on social media posts from several weeks ago. The authorities have not formally declared him a fugitive, but people briefed on the matter said it was being considered. On Monday, the two men arrested in Israel, Gery Shalon and Ziv Orenstein, appeared in a Jerusalem court and were ordered by a judge to remain in custody until at least Sept. 1. Both men have been detained by Israeli authorities at the request of federal prosecutors since their arrest on July 21. Lawyers for Mr. Shalon and Mr. Orenstein had asked for the men to be released from prison and confined to home arrest. Israeli prosecutors had wanted both men held for an additional 40 days. Federal prosecutors are beginning to seek to extradite Mr. Shalon and Mr. Orenstein to New York. But the process could take months. As with Mr. Murgio and Mr. Lebedev, neither Mr. Aaron nor his associates in Israel are facing any charges arising out of apparent theft of information from JPMorgan. The authorities have declined to discuss what led them to conclude Mr. Murgio and Mr. Aaron might have some information about the JPMorgan attack. People briefed on the matter said that Mr. Aaron might have used information gathered in the breach, like purloined email addresses and customer home addresses, to put together a list of potential victims to pitch the stocks for their various schemes. People familiar with stock manipulation schemes said a high-quality list of email addresses — like the customer contact information taken from JPMorgan — could sell for several million dollars on the black market. Mr. Murgio and Mr. Aaron were known to have visited Russia in the last few years. The authorities suspect the actual hackers may be in Russia or another European country. Federal authorities are under some pressure to develop information that could lead to the filing of charges related to the breach, especially against Mr. Aaron, Mr. Shalon and Mr. Orenstein, now that charges have been filed against them with regards to the stock manipulation. Legal experts said once a defendant was extradited from a foreign country it was difficult to file new charges against that person, especially if the charges arose from a different offense. The time constraint facing authorities then would seem to give leverage to anyone charged in either case but willing to take a plea and provide evidence linking the crimes to the attack. | Anthony Murgio;Bitcoin;Fraud;JPMorgan Chase;Hacker (computer security) |
ny0000791 | [
"world",
"europe"
]
| 2013/03/29 | Russia: Opposition Activist’s Trial to Begin in April | The trial of the opposition activist Aleksei A. Navalny, who is accused of embezzling $500,000 from a timber company, will begin between April 15 and 19, and may be lengthy, court officials in Kirov now say. An aide to Mr. Navalny, Anna Veduta, said he had not been officially notified of the date. Mr. Navalny, the most recognizable face of the antigovernment protests that began in 2011, faces several criminal cases opened over the past year. In the embezzlement case, he is accused of organizing a conspiracy to steal timber from KirovLes, a state-owned company, while he served as an adviser to Kirov’s governor four years ago. Mr. Navalny has said he expects to be sent to prison. | Russia;Aleksei Navalny;Embezzlement;Logging |
ny0241265 | [
"business",
"media"
]
| 2011/03/03 | Got a Fan Club? Mobilize It | A few social media early birds found a new kind of recorded message on their smartphones on Monday: “Good morning,” said a woman in a soft, deep voice. “It’s February 28th, 2011 A.D. We’re on planet Earth; some of us, anyway.” The woman on the recording was the singer Erykah Badu, and she spoke through FanTrail, a new application for the iPhone that will make its official debut this month at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Tex. Its developers hope to usher in the next phase of social networking, allowing musicians to tap social networks for useful and possibly valuable information about their fans. Like MySpace or Facebook, FanTrail , which also has an Android version in the works, gives artists a simple template for creating an online home, in this case a free mobile app to keep in touch with fans. But FanTrail also includes several innovations that reflect the entertainment industry’s growing need to control the white noise of social networks. One function, called LoveMail, allows musicians to record short audio messages to fans, a touch that the company, also called FanTrail, sees as more personal than artists’ sometimes ghostwritten Twitter feeds. Another feature, LoveMeter, ranks fans’ loyalty by measuring their activity in buying music and checking in at concerts. All that love has real dollars-and-cents value, and for Joel Rasmussen, one of the developers, FanTrail solves one of social networking’s most persistent problems: distinguishing true, money-spending fans from all the rest. On older social media platforms, the artist “doesn’t know if you friended once on Facebook and then walked away, or if you’ve been to every show and know the producer on every album,” said Mr. Rasmussen, 40, who produced and co-wrote a 2006 documentary about the industry’s problems, “Before the Music Dies.” “This gives artists and fans a new tool to build that relationship to a level that hasn’t been possible before,” he added. Using FanTrail, artists can tailor messages or commercial offers to specific groups of fans, identified by location or LoveMeter ranking. For instance, a band touring in Chicago might invite only its biggest fans there to a secret show, or offer them premium merchandise. A virtual tip-jar allows artists to collect extra money from fans or raise donations for their favorite cause. Calling it a “psychographic GPS,” Richard Nichols, the manager of the Roots, imagined that FanTrail could be used for advanced forms of crowdsourcing like testing out new tracks on only the biggest and most loyal followers. Joshua McClure, 37, Mr. Rasmussen’s partner in FanTrail, considered perhaps more fundamental questions about the types of communication that will happen on the service: “Imagine what Eminem is going to say,” he said. “Imagine what a drunk drummer is going to say.” For its first stress test, FanTrail is being offered to each of the 2,200 bands at South by Southwest , with a sweepstakes that will give a free recording session and $40,000 in equipment to the group that builds the largest following. That following is defined, market-capitalization style, as a group’s number of FanTrail users multiplied by their average LoveMeter score, so an act with a smaller but more active following could beat another that has a lot of dormant fans. FanTrail’s offerings overlap with those of several other companies. Mobile Roadie also builds apps for musicians, for example, and TopSpin Media has a broad portfolio of new media services for bands like organizing fan information and managing content rights. SkyGrid Groups , introduced last month, gives acts a way to bring together their fans’ scattered conversations from around the Web. FanTrail has already raised more than $250,000 in seed money from the founders and others, Mr. Rasmussen said, and is in the process of raising more investment. The company’s main source of income will be advertising, along with a cut of any sales made through the app, and it has developed a payment system that will reward artists when their fans use it to buy music and other merchandise. Apart from the standard royalties an artist would receive from a sale on iTunes or Amazon, FanTrail will pay an additional cut that increases with his or her LoveMeter score. Ms. Badu signed up as the service’s first user, and she send her first message on Monday, after returning from a tour in Australia. “The old music business is a troglodyte-ish system,” she said in an interview. “It’s still run at some companies like it’s 1950, using the same tools. This is another tool, probably the best I’ve seen as far as social networking to centralize fans and build support.” | Social Networking (Internet);Music;Mobile Applications;iPhone |
ny0137532 | [
"nyregion"
]
| 2008/05/26 | Caregivers on Strike Look to Labor Board for Relief | After three wearying months of walking the picket line, 220 nursing home workers at the Kingsbridge Heights Rehabilitation and Care Center in the west Bronx have had plenty of time to sharpen their message. “Health care workers like us should have health care coverage,” said Jacqueline Simono, who has worked for 10 years at the six-story, 400-bed nursing home. In August, the nursing home stopped paying the workers’ health insurance premiums, and as a result, their coverage was cut off. That, the workers say, was the main reason they went on strike on Feb. 20. The workers, members of 1199 S.E.I.U. United Healthcare Workers East, say they are expecting the National Labor Relations Board to give them some good news soon to help end the strike. A labor board official said on Friday that the board’s Manhattan office would issue a formal complaint on Tuesday or Wednesday accusing Kingsbridge Heights of illegally spying on the workers, refusing to execute a contract with the union and failing to pay $2 million into the health and benefits fund. Dan Ratner, a lawyer for the union, said the labor board’s insistence that the nursing home and 1199 have a contract will pressure the home’s owner to end the dispute so that the strikers can resume work. Union officials say that 1199 accepted the nursing home’s last contract offer and that a contract should therefore be in force — despite what they said was an effort by the nursing home’s owner, Helen Sieger, to walk away from a deal. In a statement, Mrs. Sieger said that the strike was illegal and that 1199, a Manhattan-based local of the Service Employees International Union, had manipulated the 220 workers into walking out. “The facility is appalled by all the lies that the 1199 union is broadcasting,” she said. She said it was not the nursing home’s fault that health coverage was cut off, adding that the home, at 3400 Cannon Place, had sought to reach an agreement on an interim contract. Mr. Ratner disagreed. “She refused to pay the appropriate premiums, and when that happens, insurance is cut off,” he said. “Money was no problem for her. The home had $5.2 million in profits in 2006.” The union has sought to bring maximum pressure against the nursing home’s owner. It got legislators to ask the State Health Department to investigate whether Kingsbridge Heights mishandled Medicaid funds. It had Senator Barack Obama give a pep talk, via a conference call, to the strikers. “You’re not just representing yourselves, you’re representing a lot of people out there who are struggling,” he told them. The union has issued a report asserting that the death rate at the home has more than tripled since the strike began. It has also publicized instances when families moved or wanted to move patients after the walkout. Meiling Viera sought to transfer her grandmother from the home because, she said, after replacement workers were hired, “the care isn’t what it used to be.” She said that after the strike started, her grandmother suffered a bed sore, lost weight and was often wet when she visited. But Ms. Viera ended up not moving her. Mrs. Sieger said Kingsbridge Heights “continues to provide the highest level of care to its residents.” She added that the Health Department had not found any deficiencies in care since the strike began. Ms. Simono, a therapeutic recreation worker at Kingsbridge Heights, has spent day after day picketing. “It’s frustrating, the long days, weeks, months,” she said. “But we’re hanging tough.” She remains angry that the nursing home stopped paying for the workers’ health insurance. “It’s really devastating to be working for a health institution and waking up one morning and your health benefits are cut off,” she said. She says she has asthma, as does her 4-year-old daughter, Amber. Because she has been without health insurance since November, she has not taken Amber to the pediatrician since then, she said. Moreover, she added, she has tried far more than usual to avoid an asthma attack. Another longtime worker at Kingsbridge Heights, Audrey Smith-Campbell, was not so lucky. After health coverage was cut off, Ms. Smith-Campbell, who had worked at Kingsbridge Heights for 29 years as a certified nursing assistant, stopped paying $600 a month for asthma medication, according to her relatives. On May 12, she had a severe asthma attack, and the next day Ms. Smith-Campbell went into cardiac arrest. Ms. Smith-Campbell’s daughter, Yvonne Young, blamed Mrs. Sieger for her mother’s death. “The strike brought on the stress, which brought on the attack,” Ms. Young said Mrs. Sieger accused 1199 of “using this woman’s death to gain support.” “This shameless act screams of desperation and guilt,” she said. The union has been so upset with Mrs. Sieger that it has petitioned the Health Department to appoint a temporary receiver to run Kingsbridge Heights In another unusual move, 1199 has asked the labor board to declare that the union and Mrs. Sieger do indeed have a contract. The union said the two sides had settled on all the terms of a contract except for Mrs. Sieger’s request to use a different arbitrator. The union said that it officially accepted the offer in March and that its acceptance created an enforceable contract. Mrs. Sieger said the strike resulted not from a dispute over health coverage, but from one over who the arbitrator would be. | Nursing Homes;Strikes;Health Insurance and Managed Care;Bronx (NYC);National Labor Relations Board;Organized Labor;Insurance |
ny0051474 | [
"sports",
"basketball"
]
| 2014/10/30 | Nets Are Dismantled by the Celtics, Another Work in Progress | BOSTON — It is hard to concede 67 points in the first half of a basketball game and win it. Some of that common sense was most likely flowing through the head of Nets Coach Lionel Hollins on Wednesday night late in the second quarter of his team’s 121-105 loss to the Boston Celtics. It was a night full of mishaps and misadventures, and the Nets, in their first game of the season, produced nearly all of them. They entered the game with modest expectations from outside observers, but what materialized on the TD Garden court from the opening whistle probably surprised even the most pessimistic of their fans. “It just kind of made no sense tonight,” guard Joe Johnson said. “We looked at the tape at halftime, and it was brutal to even watch. And to come out in the second and basically duplicate the same thing, it’s mind-boggling.” The Nets’ offense — a work in progress under Hollins, who was hired this summer — was aimless and disjointed. There were more turnovers (21) than assists (20). On defense, the Nets seemed to have no concept of how to protect their rim, leaving the Celtics to dribble to the basket in what at times appeared to be straight lines. Boston shot 55.7 percent from the field. “It was like an open gate, and all the sheep got out of the gate,” Hollins said. “It was layup after layup. They had 62 points in the paint, and most of them were uncontested.” The flogging started early and never let up. Kelly Olynyk, a second-year center, hit a twirling baseline floater at the third-quarter buzzer to run the Celtics’ point total to 101, which jolted the crowd into a delighted frenzy and essentially ensured that the Nets’ season can only get better when they play their next game, Saturday night at Detroit. Amid the visible problems, the Nets clearly missed center Brook Lopez, who has not recovered from a right foot sprain he sustained in a preseason game two weeks ago. On Wednesday morning, Hollins said Lopez, who has broken that foot twice in his career, was “still having some pain when he goes hard.” Image Avery Bradley, left, and the Celtics scored 62 points in the paint against Kevin Garnett and the Nets. Credit Elise Amendola/Associated Press Hollins said the loss had nothing to do with Lopez’s absence. But he may have been able to fix some of the problems the Nets were having, like an inability to get baskets and a lacking presence in the paint. Deron Williams was the Nets’ best performer, scoring 19 points and handing out eight assists. More important than numbers, though, was that Williams, who had surgery on both ankles this summer, continued to move well around the court. Mirza Teletovic added 20 points, and Johnson chipped in 19, but their late flurry of baskets never threatened to alter the outcome of the game. “That should open our eyes up a little bit,” Williams said. That such a cringe-inducing performance could emerge against the Celtics, of all teams, made the night all the more vexing. Boston won 25 games last season and is openly rebuilding. “Communication, effort, second effort, third effort,” Hollis said, listing the Nets’ problem areas. “The game of basketball is about efforts — not effort — but efforts. We do it in practice, but we’ve got to do it in the game.” The Celtics were potent and entertaining, following the lead of point guard Rajon Rondo, who was cleared to play shortly before tip-off. In September, Rondo broke his left hand after slipping in the shower at his home, an incident that felt particularly ill-fated given that he played just 68 games over the previous two seasons after tearing the anterior cruciate ligament in his right knee in January 2013. He looked at ease carving up the Nets’ defense. In the first half, he wove a number of slick, one-handed bounce passes through crowds of players to create easy baskets. In the second half, he started looking for his own shots, and he even banked in a 3-pointer halfway through the third quarter. He finished the night with 13 points, 12 assists and 7 rebounds. “Rondo was classic,” said the Nets’ Kevin Garnett, who contributed 10 points and 6 rebounds in about 23 minutes. The Nets, on the other hand, were abysmal. They spent the last several days shrugging aside their numerous naysayers. But in the first game of their season, they produced a performance that probably surprised even the harshest among them. | Basketball;Lionel Hollins;Brooklyn Nets;Celtics |
ny0099199 | [
"us"
]
| 2015/06/23 | Justices Rule Police Must Obtain Warrant to Search Hotel or Motel Registries | WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday struck down a Los Angeles ordinance that allowed the police to inspect hotel and motel guest registries without permission from a judge. In a second decision, the court clarified the standards for excessive force claims against corrections officers from people awaiting trial. Both cases were decided by 5-to-4 votes, with the court’s more liberal members in the majority. The case concerning hotel registries is likely to have a broad impact, as dozens of cities allow warrantless searches, which law enforcement officials say help them catch fugitives and fight prostitution and drug dealing. A group of motel owners challenged the Los Angeles law. They said they were not troubled by its requirement that they keep records about their guests. But they objected to a second part of the ordinance, which allowed the police to look at the registries at any time without the owners’ consent or a search warrant. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, writing for the majority, said most owners were not likely to object. But those who do, she said, must be given the opportunity to make their case to a “neutral decision maker” before they are forced to turn over the records or risk arrest. “Absent an opportunity for precompliance review,” Justice Sotomayor wrote, “the ordinance creates an intolerable risk that searches authorized by it will exceed statutory limits, or be used as a pretext to harass hotel operators and their guests. Even if a hotel has been searched 10 times a day, every day, for three months, without any violation being found, the operator can only refuse to comply with an officer’s demand to turn over the registry at his or her own peril.” Justices Anthony M. Kennedy, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer and Elena Kagan joined the majority opinion. If a police officer fears the owner will tamper with the records while a judge considers the matter, Justice Sotomayor wrote, “he or she can guard the registry until the required hearing can occur, which ought not take long.” In dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia called that approach “equal parts 1984 and Alice in Wonderland.” He added that the majority had struck a needless blow against a valuable and barely intrusive practice. “Motels not only provide housing to vulnerable transient populations, they are also a particularly attractive site for criminal activity ranging from drug dealing and prostitution to human trafficking,” he wrote in an opinion joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Clarence Thomas. “Offering privacy and anonymity on the cheap, they have been employed as prisons for migrants smuggled across the border and held for ransom and rendezvous sites where child sex workers meet.” Given that, Justice Scalia wrote, “the limited warrantless searches authorized by Los Angeles’s ordinance are reasonable under the circumstances.” Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. filed a separate dissent in the case, Los Angeles v. Patel, No. 13-1175. The excessive-force case, Kingsley v. Hendrickson, No. 14-6368, concerned a lawsuit against Wisconsin jail officials who used a stun gun on a detainee after he was handcuffed and taken from his cell for refusing to remove a piece of paper covering a light fixture in his cell. The detainee, Michael B. Kingsley, was awaiting trial on a drug charge. The question for the justices was whether Mr. Kingsley had to prove that the officials subjectively believed that they had crossed a line in using too much force or that, as Justice Breyer put it for the majority, “a pretrial detainee must show only that the force purposely or knowingly used against him was objectively unreasonable.” The second showing was enough, Justice Breyer wrote in an opinion joined by Justices Kennedy, Ginsburg, Sotomayor and Kagan. The standard should not be applied mechanically, Justice Breyer cautioned. “A court must make this determination from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene, including what the officer knew at the time,” he wrote, “not with the 20/20 vision of hindsight.” The Supreme Court sent the case back to the lower courts. Justice Scalia said the majority’s approach was flawed. “It is illogical,” he wrote, “automatically to infer punitive intent from the fact that a prison guard used more force against a pretrial detainee than was necessary. That could easily have been the result of a misjudgment about the degree of force required to maintain order or protect other inmates.” “An officer’s decision regarding how much force to use,” Justice Scalia wrote, quoting an earlier decision , “is made ‘in haste, under pressure and frequently without the luxury of a second chance.’” Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Thomas joined Justice Scalia’s dissent. In a separate dissent, Justice Alito said he would have dismissed the case and awaited another that presented the central questions more directly. | Search and seizure;Hotels;Prison;Prison Guards,Corrections Officers;Police;Supreme Court,SCOTUS |
ny0145271 | [
"us",
"politics"
]
| 2008/10/24 | Group’s Tally of New Voters Was Vastly Overstated | On Oct. 6, the community organizing group Acorn and an affiliated charity called Project Vote announced with jubilation that they had registered 1.3 million new voters. But it turns out the claim was a wild exaggeration, and the real number of newly registered voters nationwide is closer to 450,000, Project Vote’s executive director, Michael Slater, said in an interview. The remainder are registered voters who were changing their address and roughly 400,000 that were rejected by election officials for a variety of reasons, including duplicate registrations, incomplete forms and fraudulent submissions from low-paid field workers trying to please their supervisors, Mr. Slater acknowledged. In registration drives, it is common for a percentage of newly registered voters to be disqualified for various reasons, although experts say the percentage is higher when groups pay workers to gather registrations. But the disclosure on Thursday that 30 percent of Acorn’s registrations were faulty was described by Republicans as further proof of what they said was Acorn’s effort to tilt the election unfairly. “We were wondering how many were Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse,” said Danny Diaz, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee . “The group is really tainted, and any work they do is suspect.” Republicans had been prepared for months to make an issue of Acorn’s registration drive. A year ago, the party’s national committee anticipated the surge of new registrations by putting a map of the country on its Web site, labeled “You Can’t Make This Up! Vote Fraud.” Democrats and officials with Acorn accuse Republicans of trying to manufacture a controversy to deflect attention from alleged voter suppression activities in several states. Election officials and experts say there is little chance that significant numbers of supporters of either party would actually try to vote through a fraudulent registration. Over the last few weeks, the Acorn registration drive has become a flash point in the campaign when the flood of new voter registrations prompted complaints from election officials about the high number of improper submissions. State and local officials have begun investigations into possible fraudulent activity in at least 10 states. If interviews with two dozen voters in the swing states of Florida and Ohio are any indication, Republicans’ efforts appear to have resonated with some members of their own party as well as with some independents and Democrats. “I’d have to see how bad it is and what happens,” said Dorrie Cohen, an 82-year-old Democrat in Boynton Beach, Fla. “If it’s very organized fraud, I think that I would question the election. If it’s just a few people trying something, I don’t think I would. However, there’s so much on the newspapers and the TV about it, I imagine it will be organized.” Mr. Slater and Acorn officials have defended their voter registration work. They said that it remained technically difficult to weed out duplications without better access to election records, and that their internal auditing identified many of the fraudulent registrations, which they flagged for election officials to review. “Everybody knows that when 1.3 million applications are submitted, not every single one of them gets on the rolls,” said Brian Kettenring, a spokesman for Acorn. “That’s common sense.” The Republican drive to publicize Acorn’s problems has had another less visible impact on the race, shifting the focus of election lawyers in the homestretch to the Nov. 4 election. Much of the Democratic team of lawyers and operatives who had intended to work on monitoring voter rights at the polls has instead played defense the last two weeks, responding to accusations of fraud. The Obama campaign has also sought to deflect Republican efforts to tie Acorn’s registration campaign to the Democratic presidential nominee, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois. The Republicans highlighted a federal election filing by the Obama campaign that showed an $832,598 payment last February to an Acorn affiliate, Citizens Services Inc., for “staging, sound, lighting.” The Republicans suggested that the payment was actually for voter registration. But the Obama campaign said it had mislabeled the payment, and it filed an amended report that reflects the money was for get-out-the-vote efforts. In a letter on Thursday to Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey, the general counsel for the Obama campaign, Robert F. Bauer, said he worried that Republican Party officials or candidates would pressure the Justice Department to improperly involve itself in the election. Accusations of impropriety by a Republican voter registration campaign surfaced this week in California, where the authorities arrested the owner of a firm hired by the California Republican Party to register voters. Officials said that the owner, Mark Jacoby, fraudulently registered himself at a childhood address to qualify for gathering signatures on petitions and registering voters. Mr. Jacoby’s firm, Young Political Majors, is also facing accusations of tricking residents into registering as Republicans by having them sign petitions seeking tougher penalties for child molesters. Mr. Jacoby’s lawyer, Dan Goldfine, said that the charges against his client were “baseless,” and added that although the authorities have been looking into accusations that Mr. Jacoby’s firm improperly registered voters, they did not charge him with those violations. In June, federal election records show, the California Republican Party paid $175,000 for voter registration work to the firm of a Republican operative, Nathan Sproul, who has been investigated for voter registration fraud in several states. Mr. Sproul could not be reached for comment. In interviews this week, Acorn officials said they had an extensive program to detect fraudulent applications, which included calling the registrants to verify information provided on the forms. They also said they had combed through electronic records from the group’s field offices across the country, and that their internal audit did not show evidence of pervasive voter registration fraud. Most of the registrations that were rejected were duplicate forms, followed by incomplete forms. The Acorn officials said their investigation found about 9,000 voter registration cards that were determined to be fraudulent. A lawyer for the group estimated that perhaps 5,000 to 6,000 more cards employees turned in were fraudulent. Acorn officials said that 20 percent to 25 percent of the applications it submitted were likely duplicates, 5 percent were incomplete, and 1 percent to 1.5 percent were fraudulent. Mr. Slater said the estimates were based on past registration drives and a sampling of this one. Acorn officials said they were unable to provide a state-by-state breakdown identifying where the fraudulent voter registrations were submitted, but a spokesman said that at least some bogus cards cropped up in all 18 states where the group had major registration drives. Acorn conducted smaller drives in three other states. Mr. Kettenring, the Acorn spokesman, said the number of fraudulent cards did not vary widely from state to state, but he identified Acorn’s office in Gary, Ind., as a particular trouble spot. After Acorn officials identified the percentage of problematic cards to be “unsatisfactorily high,” they shut down the office for three weeks beginning in late August, and brought in new management and canvassers before reopening it. The group also said it was forced to fire 829 of the 10,000 canvassers it hired during the election for job-related problems, including falsifying registration forms. Acorn officials say they pay canvassers an hourly wage and not by the number of forms they obtain. Mr. Kettenring said Acorn intended to change the language on its Web site to reflect that 400,000 of the 1.3 million registration submissions would likely be rejected by election officials, but said the group did not intend to be misleading. In Las Vegas, where state officials raided Acorn offices this month to seize records, the county registrar of voters, Harvard L. Lomax, said his workers had found hundreds of potentially fraudulent registrations beyond those identified by Acorn. “What this has done is undermined confidence in the system, because voters don’t understand that we have checks and bounds,” Mr. Lomax said. “I’m confident in the integrity of elections here.” Echoing other election officials, Mr. Lomax said registration fraud could be sharply reduced if registration workers were all volunteers. “I have a solution: Make it illegal to pay people to register to vote,” Mr. Lomax said. “Money is the root of evil.” But Acorn officials say that paying workers helps their voter registration drives succeed in signing up large numbers of minority and low income voters. Joseph Hickson, an automobile designer from Naples, Fla., who is registered as a Democrat, said the voter registration issue would be made moot by a large margin of victory for Mr. Obama. “It really depends on how much of a landslide he has — if he has one,” Mr. Hickson said. “If it’s close there may be some questions.” | Voter Registration and Requirements;Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN);Project Vote;Presidential Election of 2008;Frauds and Swindling;Republican National Committee;Slater Michael |
ny0114331 | [
"sports",
"basketball"
]
| 2012/11/19 | With Tyson Chandler, Knicks Win Argument Over Style Against Pacers | Tyson Chandler can go an entire game without taking a single dribble, but he is second only to Carmelo Anthony when it comes to creating good shots for the Knicks . In their four-out offense, Chandler is the all-important, all-screening “dive man,” the explosive finisher who rumbles down the lane off a pick-and-roll and forces the defense to leave the Knicks’ shooters to prevent an easy dunk. In the Knicks’ 88-76 victory over the Pacers on Sunday, Chandler scored only 7 points, but his impact was evident throughout. Along with Anthony, Chandler forms a dynamic front line that is dominating traditional forward-center lineups like Indiana’s, which features David West and Roy Hibbert. Both West and Hibbert are skilled enough to convert an open 18-foot jump shot, but Indiana’s offense often feeds them for post-ups near the basket. The idea Sunday was that Indiana would use its superior size to overwhelm the Knicks’ smaller, faster players, as the Memphis Grizzlies did Friday in handing the Knicks their only loss this season. Before the game, West compared the Knicks to the Steve Nash-era Phoenix Suns, “with three guards and a forward.” “We just got to make adjustments,” West said. “But we can’t change too much in terms of what we do.” Steve Novak echoed West from the Knicks’ locker room, insisting that his team would stick with its philosophy. “Memphis plays the same way,” he said, comparing the Pacers and the Grizzlies. “We think that the way we play is good enough. We don’t want to adjust to other teams.” So each team planned to impose its style on the other. But as has been the case all season, except for the loss to Memphis, it was the Knicks who ended up making the other team pay. Each coach’s determination to exploit his team’s presumed advantage was evident from the tip-off. Indiana opened the game by trying to feed the burly West inside against Anthony, while the Knicks isolated Anthony against Paul George. This dynamic favored the Knicks all game. Anthony did enough defensively to mostly deny West in the post, but he bullied George on the other end, finishing with 26 points. After feeding Anthony, the Knicks went straight to work on Hibbert by engaging him in a number of pick-and-rolls in the middle of the court. This is where Chandler makes his impact on offense, often forcing opposing teams to choose between a dunk and an open 3-pointer. “When you got to guard the 3-point line and with the way he rolls with force to the rim, it puts a lot of pressure on you,” Indiana Coach Frank Vogel said of Chandler. Novak acknowledged how much he benefits from the threat Chandler poses. “We depend so much on having somebody drawing attention in the middle and hoping that our guy goes in to tag and opens us up for one second,” he said. Chandler’s presence also makes opponents reluctant to help on drives, as when Jason Kidd was able to drive unguarded to the rim because Tyler Hansbrough, who was staring at Kidd the whole way, did not want to abandon Chandler. Hibbert was ineffective on offense and made only 3 of 10 shots. Chandler routinely muscled Hibbert out of the lane and out of range for his hook shot. The Pacers could never figure out how to consistently exploit his advantage in strength against Anthony. Indeed, the whole Pacers offense was a mess, in part because they did not create the space for drives the way the Knicks did with their one-big-man, four-shooters alignment. On Sunday, the Knicks won the battle of styles. “Right now we think what we’re doing is the right way for our team and we can win that way,” Novak said. Who would argue otherwise? Despite a supposed disadvantage in strength inside, Anthony and Chandler combined for 18 shots within a few feet of the rim, compared with nine for West and Hibbert. The Knicks once again proved they know how to use two of their most important players effectively. And as Vogel said, that makes them “challenging to guard; very, very challenging to guard.” | Basketball;New York Knicks;Indiana Pacers;Chandler Tyson |
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"business"
]
| 2007/09/18 | Some Volatile Opinions About Volatile Liquids | AT least there probably isn’t a Web site called www.joesharkeyisanidiot.com ,” said Kip Hawley, the head of the Transportation Security Administration . I checked. Not yet — I probably should claim it fast. There is, however, a Web site called www.kiphawleyisanidiot.com . And the other day, Mr. Hawley sounded more than happy to have someone share some of the online abuse he gets while trying to manage the national transportation security operation from a position of being up to his neck in alligators. For last week’s column, I thought it would be a good idea to ask Mr. Hawley to describe, in detail, the agency’s rationale for the much-derided so-called 3-1-1 rules for carrying liquids and gels on board an airplane. Under the rules, passengers are allowed to carry liquids and gels in individual 3-ounce containers, all packed in a transparent quart-size zip-lock bag — one baggie per passenger. The formula, Mr. Hawley explained, allows passengers to carry on liquids and gels in reasonable quantities, while relieving screeners of the necessity of determining what is actually in each little container. Exhaustive lab and field tests, he said, showed that restricting liquids and gels this way negates the potential for an evildoer to take enough material on board in a big enough container to create a working bomb. Oh, did the e-mail messages pour in. Now, let me say that the vast majority of readers who respond to this column are smart and courteous, even when they are saying, as many did last week, that they are surprised to hear about my temporary loss of sanity. Other messages were somewhat more pointed. “Moron!” “TSA lackey!”But even the less harsh ones suggested I had been bamboozled. “So I’ve got a bunch of 3-ounce bottles, and my three friends have a bunch of 3-ounce bottles. And once we get past security, we buy a large, overpriced bottle of water, empty it, and voilà!” said one reader, the ingredients are mixed into the big bottle and a bomb is born. Again, I think it is useful to hear the agency’s rationale in at least enough detail to allow for cogent argument. Mr. Hawley was happy to elaborate. So again, the floor is his: “This is something we thought a lot about. There’s a whole classified section to the answer, but in the unclassified part we are limited to discussing, with 3-1-1, the major focus was first, to stop assembled bombs,” he said. “The nature of liquid explosives is that they are very volatile, unlike military-grade explosives that react predictably. With homemade explosives, while the benefit is that they are made of easy-to-get ingredients, the downside is that you get widely different results for the same quote-unquote recipe. “If you’re going to use these explosives in the aviation context, you have to be very precise in the mixing because, as we found in the testing, minor variations in formula have a very dramatic effect on whether or not the explosives are successful. “So 3-1-1- eliminates the ability to assemble the ingredients in a laboratory, using expert people to provide a finished bomb for somebody to use on a suicide mission on an airplane,” he said. On a plane, mixing up a bomb in a suitable container “isn’t like mixing a beverage,” he said, adding: “This stuff is very volatile; it is very obvious; you can smell it a long way away. It’s very corrosive.” So the agency disputes the notion that assembling a liquid bomb is easy to do on a plane, even assuming a group of terrorists have brought on a sufficient amount of ingredients and a big enough container. Incidentally, one of the best online sources for smart security analysis is Schneier on Security ( www.Schneier.com ). Last summer, Bruce Schneier, a security expert, created a “Movie-Plot Threat” contest on the site, inviting readers to concoct the most ingenious terror plot, assuming 20 to 30 attackers and about $500,000 in cash. Nearly 900 readers responded. Mr. Hawley, who admires Mr. Schneier, calls these “MacGyver plots,” after the old TV show in which the hero uses everyday objects to build ingenious devices for getting out of jams. “Americans are incredibly ingenious” in thinking up these possibilities, as unrealistic as they would be in actual life, Mr. Hawley said, “particularly if they’re standing in line.” | Bombs and Explosives;Security and Warning Systems;Transportation Security Administration |
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"nyregion"
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| 2009/07/19 | On Long Island, a Strategy to Prevent Foreclosures | The village of Freeport has a diverse population — one-third white, one-third Hispanic and one-third black — but it is consistently low income and its housing troubles are far flung and well established. All four of its neighborhood quadrants, in fact, have strings of abandoned and foreclosed homes. “Many people bought houses they could never afford,” said Marianne Garvin, president of the Community Development Corporation of Long Island. Prevention is a primary strategy of Ms. Garvin’s group, which offers monthly foreclosure-prevention counseling and prepurchase seminars in Freeport. Interest in the programs is strong; the most recent homeowner clinic there drew about 250 people. The development corporation, based in Centereach, is also taking a preventive approach on a broader community level in the battle against vacant homes. “If we can come in and purchase some of these homes in the open marketplace before they go to speculators,” Ms. Garvin said, “it will be better for everyone in the long run because we can ensure that they never end up vacant or boarded up.” The group has selected 15 Freeport homes for renovation and resale as affordable housing to prescreened, qualified buyers, a project that Ms. Garvin called “a good test” of the value of foreclosure intervention on a local level. The organization is also planning to connect at-risk homeowners with local agencies in such foreclosure-prone areas as North Amityville, Central Islip, Mastic, East Patchogue and Centereach. ROBIN FINN | Housing and Real Estate;Foreclosures;Long Island (NY) |
ny0083696 | [
"sports",
"football"
]
| 2015/10/09 | Fantasy Football Week 5: Colts at Texans | Starting this week, we are reorganizing and expanding our coverage to analyze every game and every player we deem fantasy-relevant for the week, starting with Thursday night’s game in Houston. Check back Friday for analysis on Sunday’s games and Monday’s matchup between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the San Diego Chargers. You can also find us on Twitter at @5thDownFantasy and see our complete Week 5 player rankings here. Fantasy Football Rankings 2015 These player rankings from the Sablich brothers are for standard and PPR scoring formats and will be updated throughout the season. Colts at Texans 8:25 p.m., Eastern time, CBS Quarterback Andrew Luck and Matt Hasselbeck (IND) — The Texans rank 11 th against the pass, having allowed an average of 238 passing yards per game, but have yielded the eighth most fantasy points (22.7 F.P.P.G.). Luck returned to practice this week and expects to play, but both he and Hasselbeck, who was 30 of 47 for 282 yards and one touchdown against Jacksonville last week, are listed as questionable. If Luck plays, start him with confidence. “If I’m playing, I do not expect to be hindered,” Luck told reporters Tuesday. UPDATE: Luck will not start Thursday night for the Colts. Hasselbeck will. This is obviously not good news for any Colts receiver, but Hasselbeck can still be a servicable QB2 for the desperate. Running Back Frank Gore (IND) — Houston ranks seventh against the run (3.8 Y.P.C.), but has permitted the fifth most fantasy points on the ground, largely due to Devonta Freeman’s second consecutive game of three touchdowns last weekend (154 total yards). Arian Foster (HOU) — The Colts have allowed the eighth most rushing yards in the league through four weeks. T.J. Yeldon managed 105 yards on 22 carries last week against them. Foster is set up for his first big fantasy performance of 2015. Wide Receiver T.Y Hilton/Donte Moncrief (IND) — Houston held Julio Jones in check (four catches on six targets, 38 yards) last week, but in doing so allowed Leonard Hankerson to drop 103 yards and a score (16 F.P.s). An opposing receiver has managed at least 10 fantasy points against Houston in three straight weeks. DeAndre Hopkins (HOU) — The Colts have allowed the sixth most fantasy points to the position. Hopkins is averaging 14.7 F.P.P.G. and currently ranks as the fifth best wide receiver. He has proved himself to be Texans QB-proof, so start him with no hesitation. Tight End Dwayne Allen/Coby Fleener (IND) — Allen is expected to return this week from his concussion, making Fleener a tough start despite his 83 yards and one touchdown last week. | Football;Fantasy sport;Houston Texans;Colts |
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"us"
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| 2012/06/27 | Texas: No Defense Is Given in Bomb-Making Trial | Defense lawyers presented no evidence and called no witnesses before resting Tuesday in the federal trial of a Saudi man accused of gathering materials to make a bomb. Closing arguments are set for Wednesday in Amarillo in the case of Khalid Aldawsari, a former Texas Tech chemical engineering student who is charged with attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction. He is accused of having a list of targets, including dams, nuclear plants and former President George W. Bush’s home in Dallas. The 22-year-old could be sentenced to life in prison if convicted. In testimony for the prosecution, the authorities shared some of what were said to be Mr. Aldawsari’s writings. They said he kept the recipe for picric acid, an explosive, in several e-mails and journal entries. In one entry, Mr. Aldawsari said he was close to obtaining phenol, a chemical needed to create explosives, and had gotten other necessary items, “so I may use them in missions to please God.” A defense lawyer, Dan Cogdell, in his opening statement, said Mr. Aldawsari never took the “substantial step” necessary to be convicted. | Bombs and Explosives;Texas Tech University;Aldawsari Khalid Ali-M;Texas |
ny0003469 | [
"business",
"media"
]
| 2013/04/20 | Al Neuharth, Executive Who Built Gannett and USA Today, Is Dead at 89 | Al Neuharth, the brash and blustery media mogul who built the Gannett Company into a communications Leviathan and created USA Today, for years America’s best-selling newspaper, died on Friday at his home in Cocoa Beach, Fla. He was 89. USA Today announced his death. Family members said the cause was complications of a recent fall. Mr. Neuharth’s influence on American journalism extended well beyond the 93 daily newspapers he amassed for Gannett. USA Today’s pioneering use of bright colors and bite-size articles in the early 1980s was mimicked by newspapers across the country seeking to compete with television. His business model, characterized by stripped-down costs and generous margins, reshaped the industry, tilting the balance between profits and public service and turning Gannett into a darling of Wall Street. Mr. Neuharth’s admirers applauded him for rethinking the American newspaper and streamlining the business in a way that would make print media more nimble and competitive in the Internet age. “Neuharth’s innovations had a revolutionary impact,” said Bill Kovach, former editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and founding chairman of the Committee of Concerned Journalists. “Virtually no newspaper in the country, nor many around the world, have not been deeply affected by USA Today in terms of look, color, graphics and brevity.” But his critics said the cost-cutting he championed was draconian and would only dumb down journalism and hasten the industry’s decline. They mocked USA Today as “McPaper” and said Mr. Neuharth’s editorial approach — emphasizing what readers wanted over what editors thought was important — resulted in a profusion of fluff. Yet Mr. Neuharth’s emphasis on lifestyle coverage was also credited with helping to broaden the definition of news, to include cultural trends and health and consumer issues. “We give the readers what they want because we are in the business of selling news,” he told The New York Times in 1979. “If we meet the wants of an audience in a community, as we try to, successfully, then we can also give readers a percentage of what they need. But that isn’t what sells.” In an industry long dominated by white men, Mr. Neuharth led the way in the hiring and promotion of women and minorities, tying compensation to hiring goals. By 1988 the proportion of minorities in Gannett newsrooms was 47 percent higher than the national average. Women accounted for nearly 40 percent of the company’s managers, professionals, technicians and sales agents and an unheard-of quarter of its newspaper publishers. As Gannett’s chairman from 1973 to 1989, Mr. Neuharth transformed a regional group of mostly small, northeastern newspapers based in Rochester into a multimedia empire comprising the nation’s largest newspaper chain, 10 television and 16 radio stations and the nation’s largest outdoor advertising company, now based in McLean, Va. Flamboyant, egotistic and proudly Machiavellian, Mr. Neuharth relished the role of larger-than-life tycoon. Even as he squeezed newspapers to plump share prices, he lived royally, maintaining luxurious executive suites in New York and Washington and five homes around the country. He crisscrossed the world in his corporate jet and was known to ride by limousine even for just a few blocks. With a personal style that was more Rat Pack than rumpled newspaperman, he wore designer finery only in shades of black and white; was frequently seen with a woman on his arm, three of whom he married; and favored martinis. He installed bronze busts of himself in the lobbies of the two newspapers he founded, USA Today in McLean and Florida Today in Melbourne, Fla. He was openly contemptuous of the journalistic establishment, reserving particular scorn for Ben Bradlee of The Washington Post, a rival across the Potomac with whom he feuded publicly. “If USA Today is a good newspaper, then I’m in the wrong business,” Mr. Bradlee once said. Mr. Neuharth shot back: “Bradlee and I finally agree on something. He is in the wrong business.” In the office his employees grew accustomed to his temper, many of them receiving scorching “love notes” on peach-colored paper. In his memoir, unabashedly titled “Confessions of an S.O.B.,” he bragged about scheming to remove a mentor, eavesdropping on a business rival and manipulating his colleagues. He quoted a former wife (“Al Neuharth is a snake”), The Times of London (“Neuharth’s ego makes the average British press baron look like a retiring lily”) and enough “love letters” to make it clear that he let subordinates know not only that what they did was wrong, but that they were idiots for having done it. No gesture was too outrageous. In 1984, in an effort to push USA Today executives to cut costs, he invited them to a dinner near his home in Cocoa Beach. They arrived to see a long table set with matzo and Manischewitz wine in a mock tableau of the Last Supper and a Passover Seder. At the center sat Mr. Neuharth, a crown of thorns on his head and a huge wooden cross behind him. “I am the crucified one,” he told the stunned executives, and warned them that they would be “passed over” if the newspaper foundered. At Gannett, he expanded on the company’s proven business strategy, buying newspapers mainly in small to medium-size towns that had no significant competition, building essentially a chain of small monopolies. Then he raised ad prices and cut costs. Image Al Neuharth in 1983. Many applauded him for rethinking the newspaper and streamlining the business to make it nimbler. Credit G. Paul Burnett/Associated Press During his tenure, the company’s revenue grew to $3.3 billion, from $390 million, frequently by leaps of 15 to 20 percent a year. He made his boldest move in 1982, when he gambled Gannett’s fiscal success on the dream of a national newspaper. His goal was nothing less than to reinvent the American newspaper, and to a great extent he succeeded. USA Today featured brief articles, bright colors, bold graphics and light news. Modeled on television, it sought a market of business travelers, transplants and anyone for whom six paragraphs about the Middle East was sufficient and anything less than every last sports score was not. His disregard for what the industry considered serious news was rooted not only in marketing but also in his conviction that his small-town, heartland sensibility made him more attuned than the East Coast elites to what Americans cared about. “Coffeyville, Kan., Muskogee, Okla., they don’t give a damn,” he told the American Society of Newspaper Editors in 1978. “The less they hear about Washington and New York, the better they feel about it.” The experiment nearly failed. USA Today was savaged by critics as junk-food journalism. David Hall, editor of The St. Paul Pioneer Press, said it was “like reading the radio.” Even USA Today’s editor, John Quinn, half joked that it “brought new depth to the meaning of the word shallow.” And its coverage sometimes seemed like self-parody. Plumbing American behavior for potential trends generated front-page headlines like “Men, Women: We’re Still Different” and “USA Is Eating Its Vegetables.” Readers bought it, but advertisers did not. Financially USA Today bordered on disastrous, losing $800 million to $1 billion before breaking even more than a decade later. It was a testament to Mr. Neuharth’s determination, and his power with his board, that the newspaper survived its infancy. Like Ted Turner, the founder of CNN, Mr. Neuharth seized the technology of the moment, satellite transmission, to turn a string of cheap, local businesses into something larger than the parts, zapping USA Today’s pages to printing plants across the country. But while CNN was immediately hailed as an idea whose time had come, few people beyond Mr. Neuharth thought that another national newspaper — to compete with The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and The Christian Science Monitor — was either necessary or viable. “He had a vision for USA Today, and simply by dint of will made it happen,” says Alex Jones, director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard. “USA Today was viewed as a fool’s mission, and it has proved to be an enduring institution, and an important one.” USA Today did not turn a profit until 1993, four years after Mr. Neuharth had retired and after the newspaper had begun shifting to more serious, and often lengthier, news coverage, partly to counter the paper’s reputation as a lightweight but also to draw more readers and advertisers, which it did. Readers, it turned out, also wanted what they need. USA Today, the only major daily newspaper founded since World War II, went on to become the most widely read daily newspaper in the country, though it has slipped to second behind The Wall Street Journal in total circulation when digital subscribers are included. While it has yet to win a Pulitzer, it has earned a reputation for serious reporting and found a niche as a digest of the day’s news that frequently offers more heft than the local newspaper. Allen Harold Neuharth was born on March 22, 1924, in Eureka, S.D. He traced his drive and ambition to early privation and failure. His father, who ran a small creamery, died before he was 2. At 10, he was forced to become a breadwinner, as a paperboy for The Minneapolis Tribune. After graduating from the University of South Dakota in 1950, he and a classmate founded a weekly sports newspaper, SoDak Sports, which went bankrupt in two years. Mr. Neuharth began his career as a reporter for The Miami Herald in 1954, moved to The Detroit Free Press as assistant executive editor in 1960, and was hired by Gannett as a general manager in 1963. He became president in 1970 and chief executive in 1973. His make-do-with-less business model remains his most debated legacy at a time when newspapers are being battered by the Internet. “Today newspapers are facing a real financial challenge, and if they hadn’t been prepared for it by Al Neuharth, they were going to be behind the curve,” said David Laventhol, former president of The Times Mirror newspaper company. But others believe that years of diverting fat profits to the service of stock prices, rather than reinvesting in newsrooms, made newspapers more vulnerable. At Gannett and its imitators, “content was always a secondary consideration,” Mr. Kovach said. “The result was generally weaker newspapers.” At 65, Mr. Neuharth retired from Gannett in 1989 but not the journalistic stage. He took control of the Gannett Foundation, the company’s charitable arm, whose board was filled with his appointees, forced Gannett to buy back the foundation’s endowment of company stock, severed ties with the company and created the Freedom Forum, which promotes First Amendment issues and newsroom diversity. It also built a museum of journalism, the Newseum, in Washington. Mr. Neuharth’s first two marriages, to Loretta Helgeland and Lori Wilson, ended in divorce. He is survived by his third wife, Dr. Rachel Fornes, a chiropractor; two children from his first marriage, Dan and Jan Neuharth; six children he adopted with Dr. Fornes, Alexis, Karina, Andre, Ariana, Rafaelina and Aliandro; and two grandchildren. He retired as chairman of Freedom Forum in 1997, but continued to write a weekly column for USA Today, often composing them in a treehouse lair at his oceanfront Cocoa Beach estate, with a view of the launchpads at Cape Canaveral and a sign outside warning “No girls or grown-ups allowed.” Assessing USA Today’s legacy in The American Journalism Review in 1997, Mr. Neuharth said the paper had “the right formula for reinventing newspapers at the time.” If it also had less salutary effects on the industry, he said, it was the fault of those who had copied him. “It has had a tremendous impact on newspapers for better or for worse, and in some cases it has been for the worse,” he said. “There are some things some papers have been foolish to adopt.” | Allen H Neuharth;USA Today;Obituary;Gannett;Newspaper;News media,journalism |
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"us"
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| 2010/12/03 | GTT: The Most Interesting Things to Do in Texas | Our quirky, discerning picks for the most interesting things to do around the state this week. DALLAS The Art of Football Trenton Doyle Hancock was skeptical when he was asked to create a work for the new $1.2 billion Cowboys Stadium. But the Houston artist soon realized that the team’s owner, Jerry Jones, and Mr. Jones’s wife, Gene, were serious about uniting beer-chuggers and chardonnay-sippers. The Joneses spearheaded the Dallas Cowboys Art Program, which is responsible for 19 large-scale, site-specific contemporary works valued at more than the cost of the stadium. Mr. Hancock’s mural, “From a Legend to a Choir,” features what he calls “mounds” — hybrid creatures that have some animal and some vegetable characteristics — that recur in his work. “Just like the game of football itself, hopefully my piece reveals the wonderment of a seemingly never-ending and impossibly large field populated by strange playful creatures,” Mr. Hancock said. Mr. Hancock is one of 17 international artists included in “Big New Field,” an exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Art featuring the creative output of participants in the Cowboys program. Alas, “Choir” and other works commissioned by the Joneses are not part of the show; to see them, you’ll have to pay the stadium’s hefty parking fee — which, given the team’s record this year, may be the only reason to do so. Dallas Museum of Art, Dec. 5, 11 a.m. dm-art.org AUSTIN Okie-Dokey Holiday “Okie Christmas” is that rare holiday song that stands on its own, no matter the season. With a comedic undertone, it splits the difference between Sooners and Longhorns, between proper Christians and people who take the Lord’s name in vain. Bruce Robison wrote it years ago, after spending the big day with Kelly Willis, his wife and frequent collaborator, at her grandmother’s house in Oklahoma. But about the only time you can hear it performed live is at their annual statewide holiday show. The couple, who live in Austin, are an anomaly: Each has a respectable music career independent of the other. Ms. Willis is a dreamboat with a songbird voice; Mr. Robison is an accomplished singer and songwriter, with the Dixie Chicks’ “Travelin’ Soldier” to his credit. Ms. Willis and Mr. Robison will incorporate a countrified vibe into this year’s show, exemplified with a mandolin and steel guitar-inflected version of the sultry classic “Santa Baby.” The Paramount Theatre, Dec. 9, 8 p.m. austintheatre.org GALVESTON Charity on the Strand Charles Dickens’s relatives give their stamp of approval to Dickens on the Strand, the Galveston Historical Foundation’s yearly recreation of London of yore, by regularly crossing the pond to attend. “It was astonishing to me that around 30,000 people turned up on a Texas island to celebrate my great-great-great-grandfather,” Lucinda Hawksley said, “and that the majority of the visitors also made the most superb effort to dress up in costume.” The 37-year-old, activity-filled event was conceived as a fund-raiser to prevent the demolition of historic buildings near Galveston Harbor, and its charitable purpose continues in the wake of Hurricane Ike . Costumes abound. Do you fancy yourself a Tiny Tim, Oliver Twist or Miss Havisham? Or will you represent this year’s new class of characters: fringe Victorians known as “steampunks”? The Strand Historic District, Dec. 4 and 5, 10 a.m. galvestonhistory.org SAN ANTONIO Quick Shooters Among the consequences of readily available, easily affordable digital technology is a surge in 48-hour film festivals, for which participants write, shoot and edit short films in two days. The screenings at the end of these festivals produce their share of laughs, but the San Antonio 48 Hour Film Experience — which began in 2005 and has grown to 20 filmmaking teams from 5 — brims with artistry. Bryan Ortiz’s winning short from the 2008 competition, “The Big Scary German,” went on to have a good festival run, and two other filmmakers, Buddy Calvo and Mark Cantu, have graduated to feature films. “Our event is open to everybody from students to retired folks who want to try their hand at filmmaking,” said Drew Mayer-Oakes, director of the San Antonio Film Commission. This year’s assigned locations for the eight-minute films include “deserted highway” and “public art,” among others, and the theme is “Over 40,” meaning one of the actors must be at least that age. Various locations, Dec. 3-5 and 7, various times. sa48hr.eventbrite.com CRANFILLS GAP A Fishy Tradition The tiny Central Texas town of Cranfills Gap, population 358, honors its Norwegian heritage at its annual dinner of traditional lutefisk (which Garrison Keillor once described as “a repulsive gelatinous fishlike dish that tasted of soap and gave off an odor that would gag a goat”). Cranfills Gap School, Dec. 4. cranfillsgapisd.net CORPUS CHRISTI Saturday Night Lights A new 75-foot Christmas tree with energy-efficient lighting will add to the Harbor Lights Festival — a grand illumination of the marina — but the carol-singing boat captains are still the biggest draw. Corpus Christi Marina, Dec. 4. harborlightsfestival.org | Music;Festivals;Christmas;Art;Willis Kelly;Robison Bruce;Texas |
ny0107667 | [
"us"
]
| 2012/04/14 | Mammoth Lakes, Calif., Looking at Bankruptcy | MAMMOTH LAKES, Calif. — It was a seemingly perfect day at this ski resort town high in the Sierra Nevada this week, one that could have redeemed the season’s poor snowfall under brighter circumstances. Families here on spring break were enjoying the slopes or shopping at the luxury outlet mall. Some stocked up at the Vons supermarket for dinner, while others braved the half-hour waits at the town’s popular restaurants. But despite the appearance of prosperity, the government of Mammoth Lakes is considering bankruptcy because of its inability to pay a $43 million legal judgment in a development dispute dating back to 1997. After entering a mediation process under a new California law, the town now faces a 90-day deadline to reach an agreement with its creditors, raising doubts about the future of this longtime getaway for residents of San Francisco and Los Angeles. Town officials say they hope that mediation will allow them to avoid filing for bankruptcy. But so far, the developer that won the lawsuit, Mammoth Lakes Land Acquisition, has refused to participate in the mediation process. Now, amid rising anxiety and recriminations, this resort town, like other more modest municipalities across the nation, is facing sharp budget cuts. They could affect not only services to full-time residents, but also ones like free bus shuttles that cater to tourists. “We’re afraid if the services drop too low, people will choose not to come, and then it becomes a downward spiral,” Jo Bacon, the mayor, said in an interview at the Java Joint, a cafe in a 1970s shopping mall that also houses the local government. Mammoth Lakes, a town of about 8,200 residents and a budget of $17 million, has become the second municipality after Stockton to use a new state law that requires local governments to hire a third-party mediator to negotiate with creditors before declaring Chapter 9. The union-backed law made it harder for local governments to file for bankruptcy and was intended to protect public employees in cities with large work forces, like Stockton, which entered the mediation process in February. In Mammoth Lakes’s case, its problems are rooted in the 1997 deal with Mammoth Lakes Land Acquisition. The town gave the developer the rights to build a hotel, residential and retail project near the local airport in exchange for making airport improvements. But the town backed out of the deal after the Federal Aviation Administration, which provided Mammoth Lakes with grants to improve the airport, objected to development nearby. The developer sued in 2006 for breach of contract and was eventually awarded a $30 million judgment. The town exhausted its legal appeals last year, and the amount has grown to $43 million. Meanwhile, in the past decade, other development projects here have met with mixed success. Many “condo-hotels,” in which a company manages a hotel with individually owned units, were left unsold or uncompleted. With growth plans unrealized, the town’s work force was cut to 70 from a peak of 130 about five years ago. Like all ski resort towns, Mammoth also remained dependent on the weather: two winters of good snowfall — the ski season lasted until the Fourth of July last year — were followed by scant snow this winter. Town officials declined to discuss details of the lawsuit. But residents blamed past officials and legal advisers, saying they failed to properly negotiate in 1997 in the first place. John Walter, a leader of Advocates for Mammoth, a private organization focusing on planning, said the town did not “read the fine print” in signing a deal with the developer and mistakenly believed it was insured against the kind of problems that arose with the airport. “A lot of people are bitter,” Mr. Walter said. John Lemay, a Los Angeles resident who has owned a home here for 10 years, said, “It sounds like they didn’t cross their t’s and dot their i’s. They made a stupid mistake that’s now become a tragic mistake.” “Someone is taking advantage of them who has the right to take advantage of them,” Mr. Lemay said of the developer. “It may be seen as greedy, but it’s turned into an incredible windfall for the developer.” Most residents believe that given the fate of other projects here in the past decade, Mammoth Lakes Land Acquisition could end up making more money through this lawsuit than if it had been able to go through with the original project. In a March 23 letter to the town from the developer’s lawyers, the company declined to negotiate as part of the new mediation procedure. Mark Rosenthal, a manager at Mammoth Lakes Land Acquisition, said the company believed that the town had no alternative to filing for bankruptcy. “We just think that mediation will delay the inevitable,” he said in an interview. The letter also reiterated the developer’s last offer to the town: an initial payment of $2 million, followed by annual payments of $2 million over 30 years. The developer, which released the letter to the local news media, said it was making it public to “open the process to all the constituents in the town.” Matthew Lehman, a councilman, said that all negotiations had been behind closed doors until the letter’s publication. “My guess is they’re trying to use the press as a tool to create animosity and frustration within the community,” he said. Mr. Rosenthal denied the accusation, saying that the letter did not violate any confidentiality agreement. With the apparent deadlock in the mediation, residents are bracing themselves for cutbacks in services. “I have a couple of young kids, and I’m worried about the schools,” said Dave Leonard, 44, the owner of a bookstore, the Booky Joint. Dave Wilbrecht, the town manager, said big projects would most likely be delayed, including improvements to a new ice rink. “The town would love to put a roof on that ice rink, and I think it will take some time before I think we can afford those kinds of things,” he said, adding that the town would try to avoid cuts to tourism-related services. Still, a possible bankruptcy worried longtime visitors, including Alex Sexton, 20, who has been coming here from San Diego since he was 5 years old. “It’s sad to hear it may go bankrupt,” he said in the middle of a break from skiing. “My dad’s had a time share here for 30 years, and one day I was hoping to inherit it.” | Bankruptcies;Mammoth Lakes (Calif);Mammoth Lakes Land Acquisition;Local Government |
ny0234058 | [
"nyregion"
]
| 2010/01/04 | Port Authority Invites Partnership Bids on 1 World Trade Center | The central tower at ground zero, designed to rise to 105 stories, has been characterized by some as a symbol of New York’s resilience, and reviled by others as a white elephant. Now it will pick up a new label: for sale. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey wants to sell the skyscraper, the former Freedom Tower , known now by its original name, 1 World Trade Center. In recent days, the Port Authority has asked a select group of commercial real estate developers and owners to bid for a partnership interest in the $3.2 billion tower, according to a developer who was contacted by the authority. The offering would allow the authority to raise what it hopes would be at least $100 million for the project. But the authority wants its new partner to take on the difficult task of marketing the skyscraper’s space and negotiating leases with corporate tenants. Stephen Sigmund, a spokesman for the authority, acknowledged that a potential sale was in the offing. “As 1 World Trade Center continues to rise into the city skyline,” he said Thursday, “the timing is right to determine whether there is a strategic partnership that can add long-term success to the building.” Although the steel latticework is only about five floors above street level today, the skyscraper has been laden with enormous symbolic weight since its inception. It will stand 1,776 feet tall, in a nod to the country’s founding. The tower, with 2.6 million square feet, will also be among the most expensive office buildings in North America when it is completed in 2013. The sales effort is likewise just getting off the ground. According to executives briefed on the Port Authority’s strategy, it has hired two real estate advisers, Cushman & Wakefield and Jones Lang LaSalle, to handle the negotiations with the prospective partners. The authority has identified a half-dozen companies with the financial wherewithal and the commercial expertise for the job, including Boston Properties, the Related Companies , the Durst real estate family, Hines , Vornado Realty Trust and Brookfield Properties, which owns the adjacent World Financial Center . The bidders are being asked to sign a confidentiality agreement and are being given access to a restricted Web site with detailed information about the skyscraper. It is not an especially auspicious time to be selling real estate. Values have plunged since the market peaked in 2007. Rents are down by as much as 45 percent, according to real estate brokers. And the office vacancy rate downtown is expected to climb above 10 percent as A.I.G., the insurance giant, reduces its presence and Goldman Sachs moves this year to its new heavily subsidized headquarters near ground zero. The Port Authority is also at loggerheads with the developer Larry A. Silverstein, who leased the World Trade Center only weeks before it was destroyed in 2001. Mr. Silverstein wants to build three office towers at ground zero with Port Authority financing, but given the lack of demand, the authority favors a slow, phased approach to construction. The two sides are in the last stage of arbitration. Still, a number of real estate investors have recently created funds to buy real estate, at the right price. The publicly traded real estate investment trusts, like Vornado and Boston Properties, raised tens of billions of dollars this year, in part to take advantage of falling prices. The Port Authority, executives say, believes it has a saleable asset. “There’s a substantial amount of real estate equity capital looking for the right investment,” said Michael Rotchford, the executive vice president at Cushman who is handling the partnership sale for the authority. “We think this is potentially one of the best real estate investments available in New York.” In March, the Beijing Vantone Industrial Company, a Chinese real estate firm, signed a 23-year lease for the 64th through 69th floors at 1 World Trade Center. The authority has also signed preliminary agreements with the state and federal governments for an additional one million square feet. | Freedom Tower (NYC);Port Authority of New York and New Jersey;New York City;Office Buildings and Commercial Properties |
ny0000031 | [
"us"
]
| 2013/03/03 | A 93-Year-Old Paperboy, Still Making the Rounds | In the troubled newspaper industry, where steady layoffs mean that gray-haired reporters have disappeared from newsrooms as quickly as the typewriters that preceded them, Newt Wallace, a broad-shouldered 93-year-old, has held on. Every Wednesday morning, Mr. Wallace heads to the dusty, newsprint-scented offices of The Winters Express in Winters, Calif., population about 6,600. He starts his day by placing labels on the freshly printed copies of the 2,300-circulation weekly, slips a carrier bag stuffed with several dozen papers over his shoulder, pulls on his baseball cap and starts his route. Mr. Wallace, one of eight carriers for the paper, has been walking the same blocks of downtown Winters since 1947. On foot, he briskly delivers to downtown Winters’s businesses the papers, which are filled with local stories like the creation of a new bridge over Putah Creek and the rising value of Yolo County crops. “I don’t hunt or play golf; I deliver papers,” Mr. Wallace said recently as he walked his route. “I like delivering papers. I get to see the people I know.” Mr. Wallace’s tenure has now made him a contender for the world’s oldest newspaper delivery person. The Guinness World Records title is currently held by Ted Ingram, who turned 93 on Feb. 14 and who delivers The Dorset Echo to his neighbors in the English hamlet of Winterborne Monkton. But according to Jamie Panas, a Guinness spokeswoman, Mr. Wallace is older than Mr. Ingram by eight months. The transfer of the record title depends on Mr. Wallace’s son Charley, the paper’s publisher, finishing the paperwork that Guinness officials sent him weeks ago. “We’re not in any hurry,” said the younger Mr. Wallace, adding that his father’s mother lived to 98. Newt Wallace, who speaks about delivering newspapers the way some people speak of a first love, offers a glimpse into how important news delivery used to be. Around the turn of the 20th century, newspaper delivery boys were a powerful work force, according to David Nasaw, the author of “Children of the City,” a book that helped inspire the Broadway musical “ Newsies .” “They not only sold the papers,” Mr. Nasaw said, “but they were the major form of advertising, because in order to sell the paper, they had to scream the headlines.” “Paperboy” is also a title that often crops up in the biographies of some of the nation’s most powerful men. Members of the Newspaper Association of America’s Newspaper Carrier Hall of Fame include Warren E. Buffett, John Wayne and Tom Brokaw. In an interview, Mr. Buffett said that even though he had turned down dozens of honorary titles over the years, he accepted recognition for his position as paperboy because “that one hit my heart.” Mr. Wallace still remembers the thrill of shouting “Extra, extra, read all about it!” on street corners in Muskogee, Okla., in 1930 and being the primary news source for locals who did not have radios. By 1931, at age 12, he had a route delivering The Muskogee Times-Democrat’s afternoon edition. In the winter of 1946, Mr. Wallace, who had recently finished a stint in the military at the shipyard in Long Beach, Calif., and was working at a paper in Upland, heard that The Winters Express was for sale. He took the overnight train from Los Angeles to Davis, Calif., and walked 10 miles through the area’s walnut orchards to downtown Winters. He bought the paper and the building that housed it for $13,500, running it until 1983, when his son became publisher. After retiring, he continued to type columns on his Underwood, wrote up the town’s history page and took the local temperature. Now he focuses on delivery. While Mr. Wallace’s shyness and impaired hearing mean he says little when he drops off papers, readers are fondly protective of him. When Mr. Wallace delivered the paper to the Ireland real estate and insurance agency, he placed his hand on the shoulder of the owner, Timothy W. Ireland, and noted that Mr. Ireland’s father had sold him his first house. When Mr. Wallace left a dozen papers at the Winters Chamber of Commerce, the executive director, Mike Sebastian, said he had known Mr. Wallace for 40 years and defended him when tourists asked about his age. “They always ask me, ‘Isn’t your paperboy kind of old?’ ” Mr. Sebastian said. “There is no way Winters would survive without the weekly paper.” But newspaper industry experts say the world Mr. Wallace inhabited is gone, just as newspapers themselves have declined. Charles R. Eisendrath, the director of the Knight-Wallace Fellows in journalism at the University of Michigan, pointed out that paperboys had been replaced with adult professional deliverers in cars. They no longer have the same connection to readers. “It’s part of the disengagement of newspapers from the daily lives with people,” Mr. Eisendrath said. “It was not just paperboys. It was the whole mentality of the operation.” Like any wise paperboy, Mr. Wallace fills his route with perks along the way. After he drops off papers at the Berryessa Sporting Goods and Mini Market, a convenience store with walls lined with heads and whole bodies of stuffed game animals, he spends $2 on lottery tickets. He delivers three copies of The Winters Express to the Buckhorn Saloon, exchanging them for a beer. John Pickerel, the owner of the Buckhorn Saloon, said he had been welcoming Mr. Wallace for the past 33 years. After appearing in the paper’s police report once in 1984 (he would not say for what), Mr. Pickerel said, he had a new appreciation for how much the paper was read. “I’ve traded the service of lifelong weekly beers for the stories of Winters, and it’s a good trade,” Mr. Pickerel said. “The paper is a report card for the entire town.” Still, the job can be tiring, and Mr. Wallace has thought about giving it up. “He’s tried to quit, but I tell him, ‘Show me three friends who are your age, retired and still alive,’ ” Charley Wallace said. “He thinks about it and goes back to his desk.” | Newspaper;Records and Achievements;Newt Wallace;Winters Express;Winters CA |
ny0086738 | [
"sports",
"basketball"
]
| 2015/07/07 | Prospect Has Deal With Minnesota Timberwolves | The Timberwolves agreed to terms with Nemanja Bjelica, 27, of Serbia, the Euroleague’s most valuable player and Minnesota’s second-round draft pick from 2010. The terms were not announced. | Basketball;Timberwolves;Nemanja Bjelica |
ny0221873 | [
"business",
"media"
]
| 2010/02/25 | Profit Soars at Washington Post Company | The Washington Post Company said on Wednesday that its fourth-quarter profit more than quadrupled, largely because of a big reduction in accounting charges. Its education division also provided a lift, and the publishing segment made money after cutting staff members. Along with other companies that publish newspapers and magazines, the Washington Post Company has made cutbacks to deal with an advertising slump. It has offered buyouts to employees of The Washington Post newspaper and Newsweek magazine and consolidated printing facilities. The Post, however, also operates cable television and Kaplan education services businesses, which account for nearly three-quarters of the company’s revenue and continue to grow. Over all, in the fourth quarter the company earned $82.2 million, or $8.71 a share, compared with $18.8 million, or $2.01 a share, in the period a year earlier. However, in the year-earlier quarter, the company’s net income was lowered $80 million by several one-time costs, including restructuring charges and reductions in the value of the company’s newspapers. In the most recent quarter, the company took only $1 million in one-time charges. Revenue rose 6 percent, to $1.24 billion, from $1.16 billion. Revenue declined 4 percent at the newspaper division, which includes dozens of dailies and weeklies. Job reductions and other cost-cutting steps helped it report an operating income of $3.2 million, in contrast to an operating loss of $14.4 million a year earlier. The lingering impact of the recession and competition on the Web continued to erode ad sales in the fourth quarter. Magazine revenue fell 30 percent, spurred by a 36 percent drop in ad revenue at Newsweek. At the company’s namesake newspaper, print advertising revenue fell 9 percent although that was an improvement over the 28 percent decline in the third quarter. Shares of the company, which is based in Washington, rose $10.10, or 2.45 percent, to $422.23. | Washington Post Co;Company Reports;Newspapers;Advertising and Marketing;Cable Television |
ny0236574 | [
"business",
"global"
]
| 2010/06/02 | China's Manufacturing Sector Grew in May, but at a Slower Pace | HONG KONG — The booming pace of China’s manufacturing growth slowed somewhat in May, as an array of government steps to forestall overheating in the giant economy began to take effect, data showed Tuesday. Two surveys of purchasing managers in China, one by the government’s Federation of Logistics and Purchasing and another by HSBC, eased in May. Both readings remained strong and showed that the manufacturing sector was continuing to expand — but also indicated that the government’s attempts over the past months to slow the pace of economic growth were bearing fruit. Buoyed by government spending programs and a flood of easy credit from state-controlled banks, China’s economy recovered rapidly from the global financial crisis last year. With an expected growth rate of about 10 percent in 2010, China is poised to overtake Japan as having the world’s second-largest economy, after the United States, sometime this year. Much of the rest of Asia also has resumed solid growth, and though purchasing managers’ indexes in South Korea, Taiwan and Australia also dipped in May, the region at this stage remains largely unaffected by the European debt worries and the probable slowdown in Europe’s already feeble recovery. “I remain cautiously optimistic about the outlook for Asia,” said Stephen Schwartz, Asia economist for BBVA in Hong Kong, adding that he did not think a slowdown in Europe would be enough to derail the growth momentum across Asia. “Asia is taking a breather, and the trade cycle is slowing,” echoed Frederic Neumann, regional economist at HSBC in Hong Kong. “But it’s far too early to talk about a hard landing in China.” The purchasing managers’ index published by China’s logistics federation slipped to 53.9 in May from 55.7 in April, close to what analysts had expected. And the index compiled by HSBC fell from a revised 55.2 in April to 52.7 in May, the lowest reading in 11 months. A reading higher than 50 indicates expansion. Many analysts welcomed the slight decline as a positive development and said it should ease market concerns about more aggressive growth-tamping steps. The Shanghai composite index, the main stock market gauge for mainland China, has been one of the world’s worst performers this year as investors have fretted about China’s policy measures. The index fell an additional 0.9 percent Tuesday, taking its total decline since Jan. 1 to about 22 percent. “We believe the moderation in P.M.I. in May should provide some comfort to the market, reducing concerns about economic overheating,” Qing Wang, China economist at Morgan Stanley in Hong Kong, said in a note. Soaring property prices, which have been among the side effects of the government stimulus measures, remain a major thorn in the government’s side. Beijing has introduced a string of measures in recent months to deflate what many analysts describe as a building bubble. On Tuesday the state-controlled China Daily reported that the government had signaled that it would gradually introduce taxes on property holdings. It also cited an unidentified government source who said a tax would be levied on state-owned properties, starting with Wuhan, the capital of Hubei Province, on a trial basis. Other details, including on timing, remained sketchy, but the news was fresh evidence of Beijing’s determination to rein in property prices. The government has also instructed state-owned banks to cut back on the amount of loans they are making, and to set aside a larger portion of their reserves, a measure that restricts the amount of money the banks can lend. Both measures are part of a precarious balancing act that policy makers in Beijing — and in other countries across the region — are now engaged in: The authorities are seeking to slow down the breakneck speed of growth without choking it off entirely. But the uncertainties about Europe, combined with signs that China’s measures to rein in the booming property market are taking effect, have reduced that chance that the government will intensify its tightening measures, Mr. Wang and other economists say. Elsewhere in Asia, too, policy makers are expected to put on hold plans to scale back the stimulus measures they introduced after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008. The Australian central bank Tuesday kept its key interest rate unchanged at 4.5 percent, interrupting the series of increases it started in October. Rising inflation pressures in India mean there is an “urgent” need for a rate rise there, said Mr. Neumann of HSBC. But elsewhere, inflation pressures have eased, helped by lower commodity prices, meaning the need for rate increases has declined. “It’s very much a fine-tuning exercise now,” said Mr. Schwartz of BBVA. “It’s become even more challenging for policy makers in Asia to get the balance right.” | China;Factories and Manufacturing;Economic Conditions and Trends |
ny0162854 | [
"science"
]
| 2006/02/17 | Glaciers Flow to Sea at a Faster Pace, Study Says | The amount of ice flowing into the sea from large glaciers in southern Greenland has almost doubled in the last 10 years, possibly requiring scientists to increase estimates of how much the world's oceans could rise under the influence of global warming, according to a study being published today in the journal Science. The study said there was evidence that the rise in flows would soon spread to glaciers farther north in Greenland, which is covered with an ancient ice sheet nearly two miles thick in places, and which holds enough water to raise global sea levels 20 feet or more should it all flow into the ocean. The study compared various satellite measurements of the creeping ice in 1996, 2000 and 2005, and was done by researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and the University of Kansas. Glaciers are creeping rivers of ice that accelerate or slow and grow thicker or shrink depending on the interplay of a variety of conditions including rates of snowfall and temperature and whether water lubricates the interface between ice and the rock below. Sometimes the rate of movement in a particular glacier can change abruptly, but the speedup in Greenland has been detected simultaneously in many glaciers, said Eric J. Rignot, the study's author, who has extensively studied glacier flows at both ends of the earth. "When you have this widespread behavior of the glaciers, where they all speed up, it's clearly a climate signal," he said in an interview. "The fact that this has been going on now over 10 years in southern Greenland suggests this is not a short-lived phenomenon." Richard B. Alley, an expert on Greenland's ice at Pennsylvania State University who did not participate in the study, agreed that the speedup of glaciers in various places supported the idea that this was an important new trend and not some fluke. "There's no way that the Jakobshavn Glacier on the west side can call up the Helheim on the other side of the ice sheet and say, 'Let's get going,' " he said. A separate commentary published in Science by Julian A. Dowdeswell of the Scott Polar Research Institute in Britain noted that the rising flows could be a result of both the rapid deterioration of the miles of floating "tongues" of ice where the glaciers enter the sea and an increase in water melting on the ice surface and percolating down through crevasses, where it can reduce friction with the underlying rock. | GREENLAND;NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION;WEATHER;GLOBAL WARMING;OCEANS;GLACIERS;ICE |
ny0126368 | [
"world",
"asia"
]
| 2012/08/24 | Australia Increases Refugee Quota, and Deterrents | SYDNEY, Australia — Prime Minister Julia Gillard on Thursday ordered an immediate increase in the number of refugees that her country accepts yearly, part of an immigration reform package aimed at encouraging migrants to use official channels for asylum rather than long and dangerous boat journeys. The increase in the annual refugee intake — to 20,000 from 13,700, the biggest increase in 30 years — caps two weeks of bruising debate after the release of an expert report on immigration commissioned by the Australian government. The debate has led Ms. Gillard’s governing Labor Party to reverse its longstanding opposition to reopening remote offshore detention centers that were closed when the party came to power in 2007. “This increase is targeted to those in most need: those vulnerable people offshore, not those getting on boats,” Ms. Gillard told reporters. “Message No. 1: If you get on a boat, you are at risk of being transferred to Nauru or P.N.G.,” she said, referring to a small Pacific island nation and to Papua New Guinea. She continued, “Message No. 2: If you stay where you are, then there are more resettlement places available in Australia.” Immigration Minister Chris Bowen announced that the camps would cost 150 million Australian dollars, or $157 million, through the 2012-13 fiscal year. Nauru and Manus Island in Papua New Guinea could begin accepting detainees within days, he said, depending on negotiations. But Mr. Bowen told reporters that the Nauru center would house only 1,500 people when fully operational, while Manus would hold 600 refugees, raising questions about their efficacy as deterrents. A total of 8,439 asylum seekers have arrived by boat in Australia this year, according to local news reports. Graham Thom, an expert on immigration at Amnesty International, said that while the increase was a positive step, given the complex factors driving people to seek asylum, it was far from clear that camps of the type outlined Thursday would actually deter desperate refugees. “For people fleeing violence and persecution, how they move and where they move is a complex interplay of both ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors,” Mr. Thom said. “With the situation in countries like Afghanistan likely to continue to force significant numbers to flee, whether or not they choose to continue to try and reach Australia, even with the reintroduction of offshore processing, remains to be seen.” Thousands of people try to reach Australia each year on rickety, overcrowded vessels, leading to accidents at sea that have killed more than 600 people since late 2009. Around 90 asylum seekers are believed to have died in June when their boat capsized south of the Indonesian island of Java, reigniting a debate that has smoldered for more than a decade. Australia has tried for years to formulate a policy that would deter would-be immigrants from trying to reach Christmas Island, a territory in the Indian Ocean that is Australia’s closest point to Indonesia. Ms. Gillard had proposed sending asylum seekers to Malaysia for processing, but the plan was rejected by Australia’s highest court and negotiations over a replacement plan broke down. | Australia;Illegal Immigrants;Asylum Right of;Gillard Julia;Immigration and Emigration;Law and Legislation |
ny0260656 | [
"nyregion"
]
| 2011/06/28 | Mayor’s Poker Tactics Ignore Faces Behind Library and School Cuts | They might be seen as the tiniest of cogs in the vast machinery of municipal government: Selina Sharmin, a Queens librarian by way of Bangladesh, and Estena Powell, a Manhattan park worker by way of the South Bronx. Each woman takes pride in her labors. Ms. Sharmin speaks of the oasis a good library offers a new arrival, and Ms. Powell takes prickly pride in shooing away the “stragglers and whatnot” who loiter too near toddlers in a playground west of Times Square. Yet each has spent the past few weeks worrying that her job could fall victim to budget cuts. Their worries might draw a shrug from some of us; these are storm-tossed days. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg noted this past weekend that the city had sidestepped the worst of the pain visited on much of the nation. A few aides also pushed the notion that the City Council had fallen for the mayor’s bluff. But that raises a different question: The mayor plays a reasonable hand of political poker, but is the city the better for that this year? Was the threatened mayhem — the thousands of layoffs and firehouses closed — an attempt to reimagine the city in rough times, or just a sound-and-light show? The mayor has no discernible taste for second-guessing. Ask about his credibility, and he purses his lips. “My family trusts me,” he says. “I mean, what do you mean, ‘credibility’?” Then he rattles off his greatest hits: balanced budget, safe city, fewer fire deaths. “Stop me when you get bored,” he advises reporters. Consider me just confused. Mr. Bloomberg’s aides privately made a reasonably persuasive case that New York had too many fire stations, noting that fires were down and demographics had changed sharply. A former high-level city official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity as the mayor is a wealthy fellow with a long reach, said: “Firehouses are located on a 100-year-old map that we should have torn up a long time ago. It is worth a managerial scrub. But it’s just a negotiating point.” In fact, the mayor played those cuts as call-and-response. He drew his cutting knife, unions squawked and picket signs bobbed, and the City Council stepped in to “rescue” the station houses. The teachers proved a no-less-baffling exercise. To lay off 4,000 teachers made little public policy sense. Class sizes are on the rise, as the Independent Budget Office pointed out in a smart piece of analysis in May, and so is the number of schoolchildren. A SINGLE indicator tells this story: five years ago, 400 third-grade classes had more than 30 students. This year, there are 4,000 such overcrowded classes. Some restorations suggest sleight of hand. The City Council and the mayor congratulate themselves annually on saving six-day-a-week library service. But most libraries in Queens and Brooklyn, home to more than half of the city’s population, already have trouble staying open five days a week. In Brooklyn, overall library hours have fallen nine hours per week in the past year. You might argue that tough choices are daily chowder for political leaders. But what is striking is that Mr. Bloomberg, like Gov. Chris Christie in New Jersey and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo in Albany, has yanked a set of choices off the table: namely, raising revenue. In a city gilded at its Manhattan core, Mr. Bloomberg treats talk of tax increases as class warfare of the crudest sort. An income tax surcharge on the wealthiest, or a flea-on-the-elephant’s-back surcharge on hedge fund trades, would raise enough money to allow parks — which are bleeding workers — to retain staff members and libraries to restock books. I don’t want to overstate the pain; the apocalypse is not at hand. But class sizes will swell and libraries will cut around the edges. And those cogs, Ms. Sharmin and Ms. Powell, will try to save a bit against the still-present possibility of unemployment. Not long ago, the city budget director, Mark Page, suggested that libraries are ink-on-paper artifacts in the Web age. To test this unfortunate hypothesis, he might hop the E train to a Queens library, where he could sit in on a Bengali reading hour with hundreds of children. Ms. Sharmin worries for her future, of course. But ask if libraries might go the way of dirigibles, and this soft-spoken woman turns slightly stern. “Now I have to speak as a librarian,” she says. “To run a business, to run a city, you need people behind desks. Here, that person is a librarian.” | Libraries and Librarians;Bloomberg Michael R;Layoffs and Job Reductions;New York City |
ny0069394 | [
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| 2014/12/23 | Poland Suspends Inquiry Into a Former Vatican Envoy | WARSAW — Poland has suspended an investigation into the Polish-born former Vatican ambassador, Archbishop Jozef Wesolowski, who has been accused of sexually abusing boys while serving in the Dominican Republic. Przemyslaw Nowak, a spokesman for Warsaw’s regional prosecutor’s office, said Monday that the investigation had been suspended for purely formal reasons. The Dominican investigators have not responded to Poland’s requests for materials and evidence concerning the allegations against Mr. Wesolowski, who has been defrocked. The inquiry could begin again if the Dominican Republic shares — or officially declines to share — the requested documentation, Mr. Nowak said. Polish prosecutors have already been refused the materials by the Vatican, which will hold a criminal trial for its former envoy on charges of child sexual abuse. It will be the Vatican’s first trial of its kind. Last summer, the Vatican revoked Mr. Wesolowski’s diplomatic immunity. | Jozef Wesolowski;Catholic Church;Dominican Republic;Poland;Child Abuse;Rape |
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| 2007/08/30 | The Independent Woman Who Became a Victim at the End of a Rural Road | Until last year, Betty Jane Dehart, 81, a retired seamstress in Greencastle, Pa., drove a 23-year-old Mercury of questionable reliability. Then her daughter and her son-in-law bought her a new Hyundai. “It was our way of saying thanks for taking care of all of us over the years,” her son-in-law, Jim Chilcoat, said. On Sunday, a man sought in five murders in Texas left the highway near Mrs. Dehart’s mobile home, saw the 2006 Hyundai and decided to steal it to replace his getaway car, the authorities said Wednesday. When Mrs. Dehart screamed, they said, the man, Paul G. Devoe III, killed her. “It was just a random situation,” District Attorney John Nelson of Franklin County, Pa., said. “He was looking for a vehicle, because the vehicle he was in was having problems on the road. Other than that, there’s no rhyme or reason for this.” Mr. Devoe, 43, was charged with murder on Wednesday after admitting that he shot Mrs. Dehart in the head in her mobile home. Investigators theorize that after killing five people in Texas in two separate occurrences on Friday, Mr. Devoe drove from Texas in a Saturn station wagon that he took from one of the victims. Traveling to Long Island, he ended up on Interstate 81, which passes through Franklin County, on the border with Maryland. The authorities investigated reports that Mr. Devoe also shot at two people in Tennessee while trying to hijack a car there. He apparently decided to try again and took the first exit in Pennsylvania , eventually turning on to North Young Road, a rural dead-end street. According to court papers, Mr. Devoe said he drove down the road “and saw an older female sitting on a porch, and a nice vehicle parked in the driveway.” He drove to the end of the road, turned around, returned to Mrs. Dehart’s driveway. On a road isolated enough that residents know just about every car they see, Mrs. Dehart apparently realized that something was wrong when she saw Mr. Devoe. He told investigators that she jumped from her porch swing and ran inside, trying to close the door. But Mr. Devoe forced his way in, chasing the 4-foot-11, 92-pound Mrs. Dehart to the back bedroom. As she screamed, Mr. Devoe told investigators, he feared that neighbors would hear her, so he shot her in the head. He found the car keys, took $6 or $8 and fled in the Hyundai, driving to Shirley, N.Y., where he was arrested on Monday after a brief standoff. Mrs. Dehart was quiet and independent, Mr. Chilcoat said, adding that she would “be the first person to help someone, but the last person to ask for help.” She mowed the lawn, pruned the trees and tended to her flowers. She asked her three children to promise that she would never live in a nursing home, Mr. Chilcoat said. “A normal death is relatively easy to deal with,” Mr. Chilcoat said. “A senseless murder like this is not. We have a lot of healing to do.” | Devoe Paul G III;Murders and Attempted Murders;Pennsylvania;Texas;New York State |
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| 2014/10/27 | Ahead of 2016, Immigration Activists Want Answers From Clinton | CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Hillary Rodham Clinton had just finished telling the crowd that North Carolina families could count on Senator Kay Hagan when the chants of Oliver Merino — a 25-year-old whose mother, an undocumented Mexican immigrant, faces deportation — grew louder. He held a sign that read, “Hillary, do you stand with our immigrant families?” and shouted that his mother lives in constant fear of deportation. “I have to say that I understand immigration is an important issue, and we appreciate that,” Mrs. Clinton said. “We thank you for your advocacy.” President Obama has promised executive action on immigration change after the midterm elections. But immigration activists have already turned their focus — and their frustration — to his potential successor. The incident at a rally here on Saturday was only the latest time members of a group of young, undocumented immigrants who call themselves Dreamers have aggressively confronted Mrs. Clinton. Behind the public confrontations is a quieter but concerted effort by a critical bloc of young Latinos to urge others like them not to automatically support Mrs. Clinton in an increasingly likely 2016 presidential campaign. “If you’re going to pick politics over our families, you should know that you can’t take this constituency for granted,” said Cristina Jimenez, managing director of United We Dream , the largest national network of young undocumented immigrants. The targeting of Mrs. Clinton comes amid growing disillusionment about Mr. Obama’s failure to enact immigration change and his handling of the arrival of thousands of Central American children on the United States border. The four members of the Dream Organizing Network who attended the rally here on Saturday urged Mrs. Clinton to support executive action to stop deportations. By mobilizing against Mrs. Clinton two years before the next presidential election, the self-named Dreamers hope to pressure her to commit to immigration change or risk losing critical Latino votes. Image Oliver Merino, 25, expressed his concerns about immigration Saturday following Hillary Rodham Clinton’s speech at a rally in Charlotte, N.C. Credit Chris Keane/Reuters Mrs. Clinton had overwhelming support among Hispanics in the 2008 Democratic primaries; in the 16 Super Tuesday contests that year, 63 percent of Latinos voted for Mrs. Clinton, compared with 35 percent for Mr. Obama. But in the past six years, the immigration issue has become a flash point among the 25.2 million Latinos who are eligible to vote in the 2014 midterm elections. “Immigration is not the only issue, but it is the defining issue, and she will need to learn that the old lines and old dynamics no longer apply,” said Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice , a pro-immigration group. Mrs. Clinton has drawn criticism from some Latinos by campaigning for Democrats like Ms. Hagan, who was one of five Senate Democrats to vote against the Dream Act that would have given undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children a path to legal status. This month, Mrs. Clinton headlined a rally in Kentucky for Alison Lundergan Grimes, the Senate candidate, shortly after her campaign released a TV ad criticizing her Republican opponent, Senator Mitch McConnell, for voting to grant “amnesty and taxpayer-funded benefits to three million illegal aliens.” Yash Mori, 19, who videotaped the confrontation on Saturday for United We Dream, said, “If she stands with Hagan, then she obviously doesn’t stand with the Latino community.” Mrs. Clinton has said she supports the Dream Act and comprehensive immigration change. “I think it’s important to provide opportunities for young people, many of them brought here as babies or young children who have imbued the American dream in their genes,” Mrs. Clinton said at an event in April at the University of Connecticut. “She strikes a chord within the Latino community,” said Representative Joaquin Castro, a Democrat from Texas who has already endorsed the “super PAC” Ready for Hillary. “There is a sense that she cares deeply about the issues confronting the community, and she has spent time nurturing relationships within the Latino community,” Mr. Castro added. When asked whether they would vote for Mrs. Clinton or the Republican nominee for president in 2016, regardless of who that is, 63 percent of Latinos ages 18 to 34 said they would vote for Mrs. Clinton, according to a poll conducted in September by Bendixen and Amandi International for Fusion, the fledgling network owned by ABC and Univision. Image Mrs. Clinton and Senator Kay Hagan, Democrat of North Carolina, at a rally on Saturday in Charlotte, N.C. Credit Ian Mahathey for The New York Times But how she handles the immigration issue could impact her popularity, said Matt A. Barreto, co-founder of the polling and research firm Latino Decisions. In June, Mrs. Clinton told CNN that the Central American children “should be sent back as soon as it can be determined who responsible adults in their families are,” a statement that made some young Latinos question her commitment to their communities. Not long after that, Jorge Ramos of Fusion asked Mrs. Clinton if she had a “Latino problem.” Mrs. Clinton replied, “I hope not!” and then said only those children who do not have a legitimate claim for asylum or a family connection in the United States should be sent back. Her initial comments struck some immigration activists as even more hard-line than the statements out of Mr. Obama’s White House. “She was a lawyer who represented children,” said Mony Ruiz-Velasco, a Chicago-based immigration lawyer who referred to Mrs. Clinton’s work with the Children’s Defense Fund. “The last position we’d think she would take would be curtailing due process for children.” In September, after a campaign rally in Indianola, Iowa, Monica Reyes introduced herself as a Dreamer and asked Mrs. Clinton about Mr. Obama’s delay on immigration change. Mrs. Clinton eventually told the young activists, “You know, I think we have to elect more Democrats.” The exchange, posted on YouTube , made some Latinos believe Mrs. Clinton may take their support for granted. Frustration with Mr. Obama, a record number of deportations over the past six years and stalled immigration change have made Latinos less devoutly Democrat than they have been in the past, according to recent polls. “I don’t think she had any idea of how that response was perceived by a young Dreamer who is thinking, ‘Um, we’ve elected a lot of Democrats,’ ” Mr. Sharry said of Mrs. Clinton. Mr. Merino, the protester who continued his chants until security personnel escorted him out of the Charlotte Convention Center, said he wanted to see Mrs. Clinton encourage Mr. Obama to take executive action to end deportations. “For Hagan and for Hillary Clinton to say they support families, but at the same time they want to deport my mother, I think that is a contradiction that needs to be raised,” Mr. Merino said in an interview after the rally. The activists have also confronted Mr. Obama and potential 2016 presidential candidates on the Republican side, including Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, a Cuban-American. For some of them, Mrs. Clinton is only marginally more aligned with them on this issue than Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey and Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida whose wife is Mexican, who both enjoy support among Hispanics. In January, Mr. Christie signed into law a bill that allowed undocumented college students to pay in-state tuition. And conservatives have criticized Mr. Bush for saying that coming to the United States illegally is “not a felony. It’s an act of love.” Many immigration activists said it was Mrs. Clinton’s husband’s actions that led to the formation of the Dreamers movement. In 1996, President Bill Clinton signed into law the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, which created new barriers for undocumented immigrants to gain legal status or return after deportation. “There were no Dreamers before 1996 because there was a way for people with long-term status to obtain citizenship,” Ms. Ruiz-Velasco said. While Mrs. Clinton cannot be held responsible for legislation her husband enacted, given the importance of the Latino vote and the sensitivity about immigration, activists said she would probably have to address the 1996 bill. “She has to declare independence from both the Obama administration’s track record and her own husband’s track record,” said Jose Antonio Vargas, an undocumented Filipino immigrant and founder of Define American , an immigration activist group. Cesar Vargas, a co-director of the Dream Action Coalition who along with Ms. Reyes yelled out to Mrs. Clinton in Iowa, said the group would continue to try to get answers about her specific positions. “We are going to make sure we are ready to question Hillary Clinton and not be completely blinded by a candidate’s celebrity,” Mr. Vargas said. “Immigrant communities are not ‘Ready for Hillary.’ ” | 2016 Presidential Election;Hillary Clinton;Immigration;Hispanic Americans;Democrats |
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| 2014/11/21 | Some in G.O.P. Fear That Their Hard-Liners Will Alienate Latino Voters | WASHINGTON — All but drowned out by Republicans’ clamorous opposition to President Obama’s executive action on immigration are some leaders who worry that their party could alienate the fastest-growing group of voters, for 2016 and beyond, if its hottest heads become its face. They cite the Republican Party ’s official analysis of what went wrong in 2012, the presidential-election year in which nominee Mitt Romney urged Latinos here illegally to “self-deport.” “If Hispanics think that we do not want them here,” the report said, “they will close their ears to our policies.” “Both the president and the Republican Party confront risks here,” said Bill McInturff, a Republican pollster. While the danger for Mr. Obama is “being perceived as overstepping his boundaries,” Mr. McInturff said, “the Republicans’ risk is opposing his action without an appropriate tenor, and thereby alienating the Latino community.” How the two parties manage their respective risks as they battle for public opinion is likely to define the final two years of Mr. Obama’s presidency as well as the emerging race to pick his successor. But some Republicans say their party has the greater challenge — as the White House is betting — in framing their opposition in a way that does not antagonize Latinos and other minority groups like Asian-Americans, much as Republicans lost African-Americans’ support in the civil-rights era. Video President Obama argued that rounding up and deporting all undocumented immigrants in the United States would be not only unrealistic, but also immoral. Credit Credit Pool photo by Jim Bourg Most emboldened by Republican victories in this month’s midterm elections were its hard-line conservatives, who say the results vindicated their defiant actions, including last year’s government shutdown. Their numbers in Congress will grow in January with newly elected conservatives, significantly increasing the ranks of House Republicans who have publicly said they would consider impeaching Mr. Obama. As for immigration, many candidates took stands against “amnesty” for those here illegally with little fear of political penalty because few close contests were in places with significant Latino populations. Consequently, the party could hardly be further from the positions on immigration that former President George W. Bush and Senator John McCain sought in the past, and that Speaker John Boehner unsuccessfully pressed on House Republicans at the start of this year. “Clearly with Republicans not having gotten to a consensus in terms of immigration, it makes it a lot more difficult to talk about immigration as a unified voice,” said David Winston, a Republican pollster who advises House leaders. “There are some people — because there’s not a consensus — that somehow end up having a little bit louder voice than perhaps they would normally have.” Among them is Representative Steve King of Iowa, once a fringe figure against immigration and now a voice of rising prominence, to many leaders’ chagrin. Congressional leaders were privately relieved that many Republicans had left Washington for the Thanksgiving holiday before Mr. Obama announced plans for his address, reducing the availability of anti-immigration conservatives for cable-television bookers seeking reactions. But Mr. King purposely stayed: “I decided in an instant,” he told reporters. He also is convening an “Iowa Freedom Summit” in January to feature Republican presidential aspirants, taking advantage of his leverage as a representative of the state with the first nominating contest. Image Representative Michele Bachmann, a Minnesota Republican, is an ally of Mr. King’s. Credit Manuel Balce Ceneta/Associated Press A King ally, Representative Michele Bachmann, Republican of Minnesota, on Wednesday told The Washington Post that the president, by his action, was trying to increase the number of “illiterate” Democratic voters. Mrs. Bachmann, a 2012 presidential candidate, is leaving Congress, but she has indicated that she intends to remain active in politics. And Representative Mo Brooks, Republican of Alabama, outlined for reporters an escalating series of court and legislative actions that Republicans could take, including impeachment. Mr. Brooks has been outspoken against immigration legislation, including a House Republican’s failed proposal to extend citizenship to so-called Dreamers — Latinos brought into the United States illegally as children — if they joined the military. “I don’t want American citizens having to compete with illegal immigrants for jobs in our military,” he said, adding, “These individuals have to be absolutely 100 percent loyal and trustworthy.” A few Republicans went public with their concerns that party colleagues would go too far. “If you overreact, it becomes about us, not President Obama,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, who was a sponsor of the bipartisan immigration bill that was passed in the Senate in 2013 but died in the House. Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma, a House Republican leader, noted that Republicans had held behind-the-scenes discussions to temper reactions, and conceded, “I think our leadership and our members are really trying to find, O.K., well, what is the appropriate response?” The former Republican Party chairman Michael Steele, appearing on MSNBC on Wednesday, admonished House Republicans to “get a grip,” adding, “You have the solution already in front of you — the Senate in a bipartisan effort passed an immigration bill.” House Republican leaders have refused to consider that Senate bill, and the only immigration legislation they allowed to pass, sponsored by Mr. King, called for deporting Latino “Dreamers” who were temporarily spared the threat of deportation by Mr. Obama’s more limited executive order in 2012. That bill died in the Democratic-controlled Senate, but with Republicans taking charge of both chambers in January, party leaders could find it harder to contain such legislation. A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll released Wednesday found that a plurality of Americans, 48 percent, disapproved of Mr. Obama’s decision to act unilaterally; 38 percent approved. But 57 percent supported a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants, and support jumped to 74 percent for a path that required would-be citizens to pay fines and any back taxes and pass background checks — just as the Senate-passed bill would mandate. Exit polls this month also found that 57 percent of all voters supported a statutory path to citizenship, a position supported by 74 percent of Latino voters. In the midterm elections, 62 percent of Latinos voted for Democrats. While most television networks declined to cover the president’s remarks live, both Spanish-language networks — Telemundo and Univision — quickly agreed to do so. Matt A. Barreto, a founder of Latino Decisions, a public opinion research firm that focuses on Latinos, said the risk for Republicans was real. “Their own 2012 post-mortem report highlights that they cannot espouse anti-immigrant rhetoric and win the Latino vote, and they are absolutely right,” he said, citing his firm’s election-eve poll that found nearly two-thirds of Latino voters thought that the Republican Party either did not care about them or was openly hostile to them. “The issue here is that the president is promoting a policy that tries to keep children and parents together, and stop the detention and deportation of parents who have U.S. citizen children,” Mr. Barreto said. “Can the Republicans honestly face Latino voters and say, ‘We want the federal government to continue deporting parents who have young children?’ That is about the least family-values message I can think of and a sure way to write off the Latino vote in 2016 and beyond.” | US Politics;Illegal Immigration;Hispanic Americans;Immigration;House of Representatives;Congress;Steve King;Republicans;Michele M Bachmann;Morris Jackson Brooks |
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| 2012/07/31 | Employers Are Advised Against Warning on Layoffs | The Labor Department says federal contractors do not have to warn employees about potential layoffs from across-the-board budget cuts on Jan. 2. A guidance letter sent Monday says it would be inappropriate for employers to send such warnings because of uncertainties about if and where the $110 billion in automatic cuts might occur. | Layoffs and Job Reductions;Labor Department (US);United States Politics and Government;McKeon Howard P;Presidential Election of 2012 |
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| 2013/02/13 | ‘Constant Drumbeat’ Sped the Pope’s Exit | VATICAN CITY — Just days after Pope Benedict XVI returned from a 2010 trip to Britain where he met the queen and mended fences with the Anglicans, prosecutors in Rome impounded $30 million from the Vatican Bank in an investigation linked to money laundering. In May, soon after the pope made an address on the priesthood, chastising those who sought to stretch the church’s rules and calling for “radical obedience,” Vatican gendarmes arrested Benedict’s butler on charges of theft after a tell-all book appeared, based on stolen confidential documents detailing profound mismanagement and corruption inside the Vatican. Benedict had hoped that his papacy would rekindle the Catholic faith in Europe and compel Catholics to forge bonds between faith and reason, as he so loved to do. But after a seemingly endless series of scandals, the 85-year-old who so ably enforced doctrine for his predecessor, Pope John Paul II, seemingly came to understand that only a new pope, one with far greater energies than he, could lead a global church and clean house inside the hierarchy at its helm. In the end, Vatican experts said, he decided he could best serve the church by resigning, a momentous decision with far-reaching implications that are still not fully understood. “It wasn’t one thing, but a whole combination of them” that caused him to resign, said Paolo Rodari, a Vatican expert at the Italian daily newspaper Il Foglio. Clerical sex abuse scandals battered the papacy relentlessly, erupting in the United States, Ireland and across Europe, all the way to Australia. But the most recent, the scandal involving the butler, “was a constant drumbeat on the pope,” he said, hitting close to home — literally where the pope lived. In the end, Mr. Rodari said, the message was, “I can’t change things, so I will erase everything.” While the pope clearly has been losing strength in recent years, some Vatican experts saw Benedict’s decision less as a sign of frailty than one of strength that sent a clear message — and a challenge — to the Vatican prelates whose misdeeds he had struggled to rein in: No one is irreplaceable, not even the pope. Even the Vatican acknowledged this. “The pope is someone of great realism,” the Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said on Tuesday. “And he knows very well what the problems and the difficulties are.” Image A view of Mater Ecclesiae, in Vatican City, where Pope Benedict XVI will live in retirement when renovations are completed. Credit Alessandra Tarantino/Associated Press Father Lombardi added: “I think this decision sends many messages to all of us, of humility, courage, of wisdom in evaluating one’s situation before God.” The resignation could “open the door for a potential wave of resignations” — including from within the administrative body known as the Curia, Massimo Franco, a political columnist at the Corriere della Sera daily newspaper and an expert in relations between Italy and the Vatican, wrote on Tuesday. A weak manager further weakened by age — the Vatican said for the first time on Tuesday that the pope had a pacemaker — Benedict apparently no longer felt equal to the task of governing an institution that had lacked a strong leader for over a decade, ever since John Paul II began a slow descent into Parkinson’s disease. It was another scandal-marred trip, this one to Mexico and Cuba in March, that seems to have finally persuaded Benedict to consider the idea of stepping aside, Vatican officials said. The visit to Mexico was haunted by the specter of the Rev. Marcial Maciel Degollado, the Mexican founder of the Legionaries of Christ, a powerful and deeply conservative religious order with close ties to John Paul’s papacy. Before he died in 2008, Father Maciel was found to have raped seminarians, fathered several children and engaged in drug abuse. Throughout the visit, victims’ groups and other advocates organized news conferences and other events to call attention to what they saw as the church’s dismal record on sexual abuse, even though Benedict, as the Vatican’s chief doctrinal officer, had reopened an investigation into Father Maciel that ultimately disclosed his double life. But he failed to address the issue in Mexico, upsetting victims’ groups there and around the world. When he became pope, Benedict knew of what he spoke, but he struggled to make the mighty wheels of a 1,000-year-old bureaucracy turn smoothly. Benedict’s first missteps were seen as problems of communications. When in 2006 he quoted a Byzantine emperor saying Islam had brought things “evil and inhuman,” remarks that helped provoke riots in which several people died, the Vatican said his words had been misinterpreted. Clearly pained, he visited Turkey as a way to make amends. In 2009, when Benedict lifted the excommunication of four schismatic bishops, one of whom had denied the scope of the Holocaust, the Vatican — and the pope — said the gesture was aimed at healing a rift in the church, not at offending. Officials also admitted they had failed to use the Internet to research the bishop’s views. But later that same year, when the Vatican shocked many, including the archbishop of Canterbury, by announcing a new structure to welcome traditionalist Anglicans back into Catholicism, it became clear that the crisis of communications might in fact be a crisis of governance. The Vatican official then in charge of the church’s relations with Anglicans, Cardinal Walter Kasper, said he had not been informed of the new structure, which had been announced in an impromptu news conference by a different Vatican office when he was out of town. Video Pope Benedict XVI is likely to be remembered for his work as a scholar, including his writings on love, charity and capitalism. As a theologian intent on making overtures to the more traditionalist elements of the church, and lacking John Paul’s charisma, Benedict was bound to ruffle some feathers. But the fatal flaw of his papacy, Vatican experts say, and a leading cause of the scandals and missteps, is that he did not choose the right deputies to make the institution run well. “The daily running of the shop is in such disarray because he doesn’t consult with anybody,” said Robert Mickens, a Vatican expert for The Tablet, a London-based Catholic weekly. “The major problem of this pontificate is his choice of Bertone as secretary of state, and his insistence in keeping him there,” he added, referring to Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone. “This has angered and alienated people. He put a non-diplomat in the office that deals mostly with people who were trained to be diplomats, and he’s not very diplomatic.” Vatican experts speculate that the scandal over the butler leaking confidential information was part of a complex power battle within the Vatican by factions that wanted to undermine Cardinal Bertone, a canon lawyer and a former archbishop of Genoa. In January 2012, letters emerged in the Italian news media and later a book , “Your Holiness,” in which a high-ranking Vatican official said he had discovered corruption and mismanagement in the awarding of construction contracts and said that Cardinal Bertone had been influenced by Italian political circles. In a letter, the official, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, then the second-ranking official of the part of the Curia that administers Vatican City, implored both Benedict and Cardinal Bertone to allow him to stay in a job overseeing the Holy See’s financial affairs. Instead, Benedict transferred Archbishop Viganò to become the papal nuncio, a diplomatic post, in Washington. And he stood by Cardinal Bertone even after the pope’s butler, Paolo Gabriele, was arrested in May 2012 on charges he took confidential documents that wound up in the book. In October, Mr. Gabriele was sentenced to 18 months of house arrest in the Vatican, but over the Christmas holidays, Benedict pardoned him. Mr. Franco wrote in Corriere della Sera that Benedict was believed to be distraught by a secret report compiled by the three cardinals that the pope had appointed to investigate the leaks scandal. As the scandals piled up, it was clear that the pope was increasingly tired, his voice strained, his face drained. But although the resignation was related to a series of painful personal defeats, Benedict’s act was expected to resonate through history. “It’s revolutionary,” said Eamon Duffy, a professor of the history of Christianity at Cambridge. “He’s sweeping away the mystical in favor of the utilitarian: That being a pope is a job, and the pope must be in the condition to do the job.” | Pope Benedict;Catholic Church;Pope |
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| 2012/09/19 | Romney Defends Blunt Comments Captured on Video | Mitt Romney on Tuesday fully embraced the substance of his secretly recorded comments that 47 percent of Americans are too dependent on government, saying that his views helped define the philosophical choice for voters in his campaign against President Obama. “The president’s view is one of a larger government; I disagree,” Mr. Romney said in an interview on Fox News. “I think a society based on a government-centered nation where government plays a larger and larger role, redistributes money, that’s the wrong course for America.” The comments were Mr. Romney’s attempt to find some benefit in the political furor after the disclosure of statements he made at a closed fund-raiser in Florida in May, where he spoke of nearly half of Americans who pay no federal income taxes and, in his analysis, would never vote for him. Those are people, he said at the fund-raiser, who are “dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them.” Mr. Romney, who on Monday called the remarks inelegant, suggested on Tuesday that it was time for a full debate about dependency, entitlements and what his campaign characterized as a long history of Mr. Obama’s support for “redistributionist” policies. But despite the effort by Mr. Romney to take the offensive, his campaign spent the day working to keep the episode from becoming a turning point in a campaign that until now has remained neck and neck, and trying to minimize the damage from the disclosure of another set of remarks from the fund-raiser, in which he suggested that a two-state solution for peace between the Israelis and Palestinians — longstanding United States policy — was not feasible. Some Republicans applauded Mr. Romney’s determination not to back away from his statements about taxes and entitlements, which echo themes promoted in recent years by many conservatives, including Mr. Romney’s running mate, Representative Paul D. Ryan. Speaking to a Nevada TV station on Tuesday, Mr. Ryan echoed Mr. Romney’s line of attack on Mr. Obama and government dependency, though he said Mr. Romney’s comments were “inarticulate.” But the developments gave Democrats new ammunition to make their case that Mr. Romney is out of touch with the needs and values of the middle class and does not understand the economic forces at work in many families. It also left some Republicans distancing themselves from Mr. Romney’s remarks. And it forced the Romney campaign to adopt a new message just a day after starting an ad campaign built around different themes, as officials closely monitored whether donors were growing more nervous about the management of Mr. Romney’s candidacy and his prospects in November. In an appearance on “Late Show” with David Letterman, Mr. Obama accused Mr. Romney of “writing off a big chunk of the country” and said it would be wrong for a politician to “suggest that because someone doesn’t agree with me that they’re victims or they’re unpatriotic.” In the editing bays of the pro-Obama “ super PAC ” Priorities USA Action, producers were finding ways to splice bits of Mr. Romney’s commentary at the fund-raiser into videos and television advertisements, a sign that the recordings will provide the Democrats fodder until Election Day. Two Republican Senate candidates in hard-fought races in the Democratic territory of the Northeast, Senator Scott P. Brown of Massachusetts and Linda McMahon of Connecticut, disavowed the remarks. “Not the way I view the world,” Mr. Brown said; “I disagree,” Ms. McMahon said. Even some conservative intellectuals argued with Mr. Romney’s description of the 47 percent of people who do not pay income taxes as Obama voters. They noted that among that 47 percent were potentially Romney-supporting “seniors, who might well ‘believe they are entitled to health care,’ ” as the Weekly Standard editor William Kristol wrote, and “lower-income Americans (including men and women serving in the military) who think conservative policies are better for the country.” Mr. Romney effectively ceded that point in his interview with Neil Cavuto on Fox News, saying he was referring instead to “those that are dependent on government and those that think government’s job is redistribute — I’m not going to get them.” The tension of the moment spilled out in unguarded moments with Mr. Romney’s aides, one of whom likened the situation to a circus. Two advisers, speaking on condition of anonymity in separate interviews, expressed frustration that the comments at the fund-raiser — held at the Boca Raton, Fla., home of the financier Marc Leder — played into the image that Democrats have promoted all year of Mr. Romney as uncaring about average voters and concerned only about himself and his wealthy friends. Mr. Romney’s campaign organized back-to-back conference calls to reassure donors, featuring a coterie of top advisers — Matt Rhoades, the campaign manager; Spencer Zwick, the finance director; and Beth Myers and Ed Gillespie, both senior advisers. One of the calls, with Mr. Romney’s national finance committee, was moved up from its usually scheduled time near the end of the week, and on the second, larger donor call, the campaign urged the donors to “have at it.” Later on Tuesday, National Review reported that Mr. Romney had faced such a cash shortage while awaiting the ability to spend his general election money that he had to borrow $20 million in August to get him through the end of his convention. The money was easily covered by his general election account. Mr. Romney’s aides said that they were keeping perspective in a way that the news media “feeding frenzy” was not. A Gallup daily tracking poll that had shown Mr. Obama with a growing edge after the Democratic convention effectively had the race as a tie on Tuesday, though an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released Tuesday night showed the president with more of an edge and with his approval rating reaching the 50 percent mark. While Mr. Romney’s aides played down the significance of the recordings, they said they were most unwelcome because they yet again kept Mr. Romney from getting back to his message on the economy, delivering a clearer sense to voters of where he would lead the nation. “Every day that he is not talking about jobs he is losing an opportunity to draw a contrast with the president’s abysmal record on the economy,” said Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine. Referring to Medicare and Social Security , she said she feared that his comments at the fund-raiser would paint him as being against “earned programs that people pay into” and have “widespread support.” “He has just not brought sufficient clarity to what his vision for America is,” Ms. Collins said. Throughout the country Republicans reacted with a mix of trepidation and defiance. Joe Gruters, chairman of the Republican Party of Sarasota, Fla., said he believed it would “play into his strength,” while Steve Armstrong, chairman of the Linn County, Iowa, Republicans, called it “an unfortunate mistake.” Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, said he believed that Mr. Romney would ultimately win the argument on substance, but cautioned that Republicans need to show that “they are concerned about every American.” | Romney Mitt;Presidential Election of 2012;Video Recordings and Downloads |
ny0263539 | [
"world",
"middleeast"
]
| 2011/12/10 | Israeli Planes Attack Gaza Targets | GAZA — Israel carried out more airstrikes in Gaza early Friday, accidentally killing a Palestinian man and his 12-year-old son as militants continued to fire rockets into southern Israel. Tensions flared after an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City on Thursday killed two Palestinians whom the military described as terrorists involved in a plot to attack Israelis. Palestinians retaliated by firing rockets from Gaza into southern Israel. The Palestinian man who was killed on Friday died instantly when Israeli fighter jets attacked at least two targets that were described as training sites for the armed wing of Hamas, the Islamic militant group that controls Gaza. The boy died later of his wounds, and seven family members, including two women and several other children, were injured. The man was identified by Agence France-Presse as Bahjat al-Zalan. One of the strikes, on a site in northern Gaza, badly damaged a house, causing the casualties, said Adham Abu Selmia, a spokesman for the Gaza medical services. The Israeli military said in a statement that it regretted the civilians’ deaths, and that its airstrike was accurate but that it had caused secondary explosions of stored weapons. The military said that the responsibility for the deaths lay with Hamas because it operates in the heart of populated areas. On Thursday, a missile struck a car in which the two men were traveling along a busy street during the afternoon rush hour, near a public park and several banks. Six bystanders were reported wounded. The rockets fired into Israel on Thursday and Friday landed in open areas and caused no casualties, the Israeli police said. A longer-range rocket that was fired toward the city of Ashdod on Friday evening was intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome antimissile system. The Israeli military said in a statement that the main target of the strike on Thursday was Essam al-Batsh, 43, a senior operative of Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades , a group in Gaza that is nominally associated with Fatah, the party led by the Palestinian Authority’s president, Mahmoud Abbas. The military said that Mr. Batsh had been involved in numerous attacks on Israel from across the border with Egypt, including a suicide bombing in the Israeli resort of Eilat in 2007 in which three Israelis were killed. Israeli security forces have been on high alert in recent days in the area along the Egyptian border because of intelligence warnings of an imminent attack. In August, gunmen who crossed into Israel from the Sinai killed eight Israelis and wounded more than 30 in multiple attacks north of Eilat , the most serious assault on Israel from Egyptian territory in decades. Five Egyptian security personnel were subsequently killed by Israeli forces as they pursued the attackers, severely straining Israeli-Egyptian relations. The second Palestinian killed in Gaza on Thursday was a relative of Mr. Batsh’s and a member of Hamas. On Wednesday, an Islamic Jihad militant was killed in an Israeli bombing to the east of Gaza City. In another development, Hamas officials in Gaza denied reports this week that most Hamas personnel had left Damascus, Syria, where the group has its headquarters, under pressure from moderate Arab states like Egypt, Qatar and Jordan to increase the isolation of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad. A Hamas official in Gaza said that the leadership was remaining in Syria, but that some of the organization’s members may have left out of fear for their safety because of the unrest there. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of relations with Syria and other Arab governments. | Israel;Gaza Strip;Defense and Military Forces;Palestinians |
ny0292302 | [
"sports",
"golf"
]
| 2016/06/03 | Sponsors Driven Away by Golf’s Angel Investor | To the many things you can say about Donald J. Trump’s presidential bid, add this: Running for president can be bad for business. Last year, NBC and Univision declined to telecast the Miss Universe pageant. Trump, now the presumptive Republican nominee, was essentially forced to buy out NBC, which had been a partner in the venture, and then sell off the pageant a few months later. The federal lawsuit over Trump University has exposed some unsavory business tactics that he appears to have approved. Also last year, Nascar moved an awards banquet from the Trump National Doral Miami resort after one of its key sponsors, Camping World, said it would boycott the event if it were held on the Trump property. The reason, said Marcus Lemonis, Camping World’s chief executive, was “blatantly bigoted and racist comments from Donald Trump in regards to immigrants of the United States.” (Brian France, Nascar’s chief executive, endorsed Trump in March, then faced intense blowback.) On Wednesday, the PGA Tour announced that a World Golf Championships event was moving from Doral — which has a history of holding PGA events that goes back more than half a century — to Mexico. Yes, Mexico. Doral is one of America’s best-known golf resorts. It has four courses, including its crown jewel, the Blue Monster, where most of the professional tournaments it hosts are played. Built on swampland acquired in 1959 by a New York developer, the resort was sold to Morgan Stanley, the investment bank, in 2007 for $500 million. But then came the real estate bust, which had a devastating financial effect on Doral, causing the resort, by then somewhat run-down, to file for bankruptcy in 2011. Image Bubba Watson putted on the ninth green of the event at the Doral in March. Credit Wilfredo Lee/Associated Press The Trump Organization, meanwhile, had decided to go all-in on golf; today it owns 17 resorts, up from three in 2007, and its golf resort business is most likely the largest fief of the Trump empire. Many of those properties were bought in the wake of the financial crisis, when the golf business was struggling, and many of those involved believe that golf owes Trump a debt of gratitude for investing in the sport during such a tough time. “I’ve been very good for golf,” Trump has said. Few would disagree. Trump’s purchase of Doral was typical of his approach: Seeing a chance to buy a distressed property, he scooped it up for $150 million, a discounted price Forbes magazine later described as “almost unbelievable.” He then sank $250 million into renovating it, including an overhaul of the Blue Monster. Although he lists its revenue, perhaps implausibly, as nearly $132 million in the most recent financial disclosure he submitted as part of his presidential run — up from $49.4 million in last year’s financial disclosure form — it is probable that Doral is his highest grossing and most profitable golf resort. Among his properties, only his Turnberry golf resort in Scotland ranks with Doral in terms of prestige. Well before Trump bought Doral, the PGA Tour had used it to host one of its four annual World Golf Championships — tournaments that, unlike most tour events, are restricted to the top players in the world. Beginning in 2011, Cadillac was the chief sponsor. (From 1962 to 2006, Doral hosted a more traditional PGA tournament, the Doral Open.) But Cadillac let it be known that it would be dropping its sponsorship. The 2016 tournament, which was held in March, was its last as a sponsor. And though it sought a new sponsor for over a year, the PGA Tour was simply unable to find a company to replace Cadillac. On Wednesday, when the tour commissioner, Tim Finchem, confirmed that the tournament was moving to Mexico City , he went out of his way to say the decision to leave Doral had not been a political statement. “From a golf standpoint, we have no issues with Donald Trump,” he said, adding, “The PGA has never been involved nor cares to be involved in presidential politics.” In earlier statements, the tour noted that it had a 54-year relationship with Miami and Doral — something it was reluctant to walk away from. Finchem said at Wednesday’s news conference that the problem was that Trump was such a huge brand: He was likely to overshadow any company that was interested in sponsoring the tournament. And it’s true that after he had bought Doral, Trump would invariably make a showstopping appearance at the tournament, landing his helicopter for all to see and making the rounds like a conquering hero. But corporations hate controversy, and they especially hate political controversy. Companies sponsor golf tournaments precisely because they offer a way to market to upscale customers in a setting where the only controversy is about who is going to win. Although there are certainly chief executives and other corporate executives who support Trump, corporate entities on the whole don’t want to be associated with polarizing political positions, whether on the left or the right. And corporations now embrace diversity. Grupo Salinas, a major Mexican conglomerate, will now move the tournament to Mexico City. Ricardo Salinas, its billionaire chief executive, has been openly critical of Trump. He told CNBC last year that Trump’s comments about Mexicans had shown “the worst face of America.” He added, “It’s a disgrace that someone could speak in terms like that.” Landing the tournament was not only a coup for Grupo Salinas and Mexico, but a way to one-up Trump. On Tuesday evening, when Trump told Sean Hannity, the Fox News host, that the tournament was moving to Mexico City — “ I hope they have kidnapping insurance ,” Trump said — he claimed that it would allow him to make more money because he would be able to charge full price for his hotel rooms during the prime tourist season. Maybe. But losing the tournament hurts nonetheless. Being part of the PGA Tour adds luster to a golf resort, making it more appealing to amateur golfers. A tournament brings in money from fans and corporations. It raises money for charity. People who travel to the tournament spend money in the community. (Doral is not the only Trump property being deprived of a prestigious tournament. The Turnberry resort, which he bought in 2014, has traditionally been in the rotation to host the British Open. But the R&A, which organizes the British Open, indicated last year that Turnberry was out of the rotation after Trump’s comments about Muslims .) On Wednesday, Trump angrily suggested that the PGA Tour’s decision was akin to other corporations abandoning America — and American workers — for Mexico. “The PGA Tour has put profits ahead of thousands of American jobs, millions of dollars in revenue for local communities and charities and the enjoyment of thousands of fans,” he said. But he’s wrong to blame the PGA. In this case, the only person Trump has to blame is himself. | Golf;2016 Presidential Election;Donald Trump;PGA Tour;Trump National Doral Miami;Mexico;Turnberry,Trump Turnberry |
ny0053747 | [
"us"
]
| 2014/07/19 | Examining the Growth of the ‘Spiritual but Not Religious’ | “Spiritual but not religious.” So many Americans describe their belief system this way that pollsters now give the phrase its own category on questionnaires. In the 2012 survey by the Pew Religion and Public Life Project , nearly a fifth of those polled said that they were not religiously affiliated — and nearly 37 percent of that group said they were “spiritual” but not “religious.” It was 7 percent of all Americans, a bigger group than atheists, and way bigger than Jews, Muslims or Episcopalians. Unsurprisingly, the S.B.N.R.s, as this growing group is often called, are attracting a lot of attention. Four recent books offer perspectives on these Americans who seem to want some connection to the divine, but who don’t feel affiliated with traditional religion. There’s the minister who wants to woo them, two scholars who want to understand them and the psychotherapist who wants to help them. The Rev. Lillian Daniel’s book “When ‘Spiritual But Not Religious’ Is Not Enough” (Jericho, 2013) began as a short essay for The Huffington Post, in which she voiced her exasperation with the predictability that she found in spiritual but not religious people. “On airplanes,” Ms. Daniel wrote in the essay , in 2011, “I dread the conversation with the person who finds out I am a minister and wants to use the flight time to explain to me that he is ‘spiritual but not religious.’ Such a person will always share this as if it is some kind of daring insight, unique to him, bold in its rebellion against the religious status quo.” Before you know it, “he’s telling me that he finds God in the sunsets.” “These people always find God in the sunsets,” Ms. Daniel said. “And in walks on the beach.” The essay spread online, with thousands of Facebook “likes” and reposts. Ms. Daniel heard from so many people that she decided to expand her essay. In the book, Ms. Daniel, a Congregationalist preacher who is pastor at a church near Chicago, argues that spirituality fits too snugly with complacency, even hedonism — after all, who doesn’t like walks in nature? — whereas religion is better at challenging people to face death, fight poverty and oppose injustice. Religion, by bringing people together, in community, at regular intervals, facilitates an ongoing conversation about matters outside the self. “The book is kind of for the person who in some ways is half in and half out of religion,” Ms. Daniel said in a recent interview. “They know it might be meaningful, but they don’t know how to make a case for it, or tell a story about the religious life that does not sound obnoxious or judgmental.” Ms. Daniel, by contrast, makes the case forcefully, seemingly unworried about those she might offend. “Being privately spiritual but not religious just doesn’t interest me,” she writes. “There is nothing challenging about having deep thoughts all by oneself. What is interesting is doing this work in community, where other people might call you on stuff or, heaven forbid, disagree with you. Where life with God gets rich and provocative is when you dig into a tradition that you did not invent all for yourself.” But Linda A. Mercadante, who teaches at the Methodist Theological School in Ohio contests that description of the spiritual but not religious. In “Beliefs Without Borders: Inside the Minds of the Spiritual but Not Religious” (Oxford), published in March, she makes the case that spiritual people can be quite deep theologically. An ordained Presbyterian minister whose father was Catholic and whose mother was Jewish, Dr. Mercadante went through a spiritual but not religious period of her own — although she now attends a Mennonite church. For her project, she interviewed 85 S.B.N.R.s, then used computer programs to help analyze transcripts of those interviews. She found that these spiritual people also thought about death, the afterlife and other profound subjects. For example, “they reject heaven and hell, but they do believe in an afterlife,” Dr. Mercadante said recently. “In some ways, they would fit O.K. in a progressive Christian context.” Because they dislike institutions, the spiritual but not religious also recoil from the deities such institutions are built around. “They may like Jesus, he might be their guru, he might be one of their many bodhisattvas, but Jesus as God is not on their radar screen,” Dr. Mercadante said. When Courtney Bender, now teaching at Columbia, went looking for spiritual but not religious people in Cambridge, Mass., where she was then living, she found them not on solitary nature walks but in all sorts of groups — which complicates the stereotype of them as anti-institutional loners. She described her findings in “The New Metaphysicals: Spirituality and the American Religious Imagination” (Chicago, 2010). They “participated in everything from mystical discussion groups to drumming circles to yoga classes,” Dr. Bender said in an interview. And her finding that spirituality “is not sui generis,” but rather learned in communities that persist over time, actually runs contrary to spiritual people’s conceptions of themselves, she said. “There is something in the theology of spiritual groups that actually refocuses their practitioners from thinking about how they fit into a long continuous spirituality.” In other words, their self-image “makes them think, ‘I don’t need history, I don’t need the past,’ ” Dr. Bender said, adding that they think, “I am not religious, which is about the past — I am spiritual, about the present.” Yet people who call themselves spiritual are actually embedded in communal practices, albeit not churches or religious denominations. Dr. Bender found them in “alternative and complementary medicine,” for example. “So people would encounter this stuff in the shiatsu massage clinic, or going to an acupuncturist,” she said. “Another one that is very important is the arts,” she added. “People involved in everything from painting and dance” would also end up discussing their conception of the divine. So is spirituality solitary or communal? Is it theologically engaged or just focused on “nature” and “gratitude,” as Ms. Daniel worries? To judge from “A Religion of One’s Own: A Guide to Creating a Personal Spirituality in a Secular World” (Gotham, 2014), by Thomas Moore, whose “Care of the Soul” is one of the best-selling self-help books ever, spirituality can be whatever one makes it. In his guide to developing a custom spirituality, he encourages people to draw on religion, antireligion — whatever works for them. “Every day I add another piece to the religion that is my own,” Dr. Moore writes. “It’s built on years of meditation, chanting, theological study and the practice of therapy — to me a sacred activity.” At the very least, we might conclude that “spiritual but not religious” isn’t necessarily vague or wishy-washy. It’s not nothing, although it may risk being everything. | Religion and Belief;Books;Lillian Daniel;Courtney Bender;Thomas Moore;Polls |
ny0047622 | [
"nyregion"
]
| 2014/11/10 | Marijuana May Mean Ticket, Not Arrest, in New York City | The New York Police Department, which has been arresting tens of thousands of people a year for low-level marijuana possession, is poised to stop making such arrests and to issue tickets instead, according to law enforcement officials. People found with small amounts of marijuana would be issued court summonses and be allowed to continue on their way without being handcuffed and taken to station houses for fingerprinting. The change would remake the way the police in New York City handle the most common drug offenses and would represent Mayor Bill de Blasio’s most significant effort since taking office to address the enduring effects of the department’s excessive stop-and-frisk practices. Image The administration of Bill de Blasio is publicly embracing the notion that small-scale drug possession merits different treatment than arrests. Credit Chang W. Lee/The New York Times Curbing arrests for small-scale marijuana possession has become a cause for criminal justice reform advocates, and this year, the new Brooklyn district attorney, Kenneth P. Thompson, said he would stop prosecuting such cases. But his announcement did not go over well with Mr. de Blasio and his police commissioner, William J. Bratton, who vowed to continue making low-level marijuana arrests. Now, the de Blasio administration is publicly embracing the notion that such small-scale possession merits different treatment. And with the changes, City Hall is moving to retake control of a politically potent issue that has enormous resonance in the black and Latino communities, where a vast majority of small-scale marijuana arrests have taken place. In the first eight months of the year, blacks and Hispanics represented 86 percent of those arrested for marijuana possession in the city, according to a study written in part by Harry G. Levine, a sociology professor at Queens College who is a director of the Marijuana Arrest Research Project. Many details of the changes planned by the de Blasio administration are still being discussed at City Hall, and many questions remain unanswered. Under the new policy, for example, will the 25 grams or less that constitutes misdemeanor possession under state law be the threshold below which a summons is issued? Will a lit marijuana cigarette be treated differently from a packet of unsmoked cannabis? Other key questions, such as the cost of the fines or whether a criminal record would typically result from a summons, may not be up to City Hall. Order for Summons, in Lieu of Arrest, for Possession of Marijuana The procedure for the issuance of a criminal court summons for a person found with 25 grams or less of marijuana in a public place and open to public view. A clearer picture is expected to emerge this week, as Mr. de Blasio prepares for his first meeting with the city’s five district attorneys. A spokeswoman for the mayor, Marti Adams, declined to comment on the proposed policy change, although officials in two of the district attorney’s offices confirmed that the de Blasio administration was working on a new policy for how the police handle marijuana cases. In an interview on Sunday, Mr. Thompson expressed concern about the mayor’s plan, calling it an end-run around the district attorneys that could end up hurting some of the very people the changes are supposed to help. Since July, the Brooklyn district attorney’s office has dismissed 849 misdemeanor marijuana cases involving police arrests, or about 34 percent of the total 2,526 such cases in Brooklyn. Under the proposed changes, it appears that instead of being arrested, those given a ticket for marijuana will be told to appear in a courtroom. But the new policy could push prosecutors out of the process, because summonses issued without an accompanying arrest generally do not receive prosecutorial review. Image Police Commissioner William J. Bratton Credit Michael Appleton for The New York Times “In order to give the public confidence in the fairness of the criminal justice system, these cases should be subject to prosecutorial review,” Mr. Thompson said. “By allowing these cases to avoid early review, by issuing a summons, there is a serious concern that many summonses will be issued without the safeguards currently in place. These cases will move forward even when due process violations might have occurred.” Another possible effect of the new policy would be that many of the tickets later convert into arrest warrants if the person misses a court date, he said. There are currently about 1.2 million active warrants in New York relating to missed court dates and unpaid fines for misdemeanors and noncriminal violations. In 2013, people failed to pay or show up to court about a quarter of the time for the 329,198 summons cases on the dockets of the city’s lowest level criminal courts, according to court statistics. Under the current practice, more than half of those arrested for marijuana were released a couple of hours after being brought to a station house, according to 2012 data gathered by the Criminal Justice Agency, a nonprofit that assists with bail determinations. They were fingerprinted, checked for warrants and issued a ticket demanding their appearance in court six to eight weeks later. The remainder of those arrested for marijuana possession were “put through the system,” meaning they were held for up to 24 hours before being arraigned before a judge. In New York, the debate over marijuana arrests has been less about drug decriminalization than it has been about the aggressive stop-and-frisk tactics that came to define the Police Department’s crime-fighting strategies . During the Bloomberg administration, the police arrested as many as 50,000 people a year on minor marijuana charges, meaning that some years, approximately one in eight arrests made by the police was for marijuana. In some cases, arrests were made after officers stopped people under dubious circumstances and instructed them to remove any contraband from their pockets. Image Kenneth P. Thompson, the Brooklyn district attorney. Credit Bebeto Matthews/Associated Press In 1977, the Legislature in New York moved to decriminalize possession of small amounts of marijuana that were not in public view. That meant that carrying a small bag of marijuana hidden in a pocket was supposed to be a ticket-eligible violation that did not amount to a crime. But since the mid-1990s, the police have routinely arrested people they found with marijuana and charged them with a misdemeanor, even though it was only supposed to apply to marijuana that was burning or discovered in “public view.” In 2011, the police commissioner at the time, Raymond W. Kelly, issued an unusual order reminding officers that the misdemeanor was not the appropriate charge in many cases. In 2013, the police still arrested more than 28,000 people for marijuana possession, and in 2014, the arrests were occurring at a similar pace, Professor Levine said. While campaigning for mayor, Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat, emphatically criticized the department’s marijuana arrest practices. His populist outrage against heavy-handed policing in minority neighborhoods helped propel him into City Hall. But since becoming mayor in January, he has exerted little pressure on the department, instead often deferring to Commissioner Bratton, who has made a national reputation for aggressive street policing combined with an ability to soothe the often-inflamed relations between big-city police departments and the minority neighborhoods they serve. Yet Mr. de Blasio now finds himself under increasing pressure to deliver on his platform of police reform. That pressure began in July after a black Staten Island man died after a police officer put him in a chokehold while trying to arrest him for selling untaxed cigarettes. Since then, the departures of the department’s top Hispanic official and its highest-ranking black officer have led a number of minority lawmakers and City Hall allies to begin to question Mr. de Blasio’s oversight of the police. | Marijuana,Pot,Weed;NYPD;Bill de Blasio;Search and seizure;NYC;Minorities;Legislation |
ny0236024 | [
"business",
"global"
]
| 2010/01/13 | Cadbury Again Rejects Kraft’s Takeover Bid | PARIS — Cadbury reported increases in 2009 revenue and dividends Tuesday and highlighted a strong forecast for 2010 as it seeks to persuade shareholders to reject a hostile takeover bid from Kraft. “We generated good revenue growth despite the weakest economic conditions in 80 years,” Todd Stitzer, chief executive of Cadbury, said in a statement. In preliminary results, Cadbury said it had seen revenue growth of 5 percent for the year (11 percent when current exchange rates are taken into account), and 6 percent for the second half. The company also said it expected an increase in dividends of about 10 percent. More complete, but unaudited, results are to be released Thursday. For this year, the company is “targeting revenue growth within our 5-7 percent goal range,” as it steps up marketing and introduces new products, Mr. Stitzer said. The British chocolate maker reaffirmed its opposition to Kraft’s hostile cash-and-share takeover offer, noting that the bid did not match similar deals in the industry in recent years. Cadbury has argued the bid undervalues the company. Roger Carr, chairman of Cadbury, said the Kraft shares in the bid also exposed “shareholders to Kraft’s low growth conglomerate business model, its long history of underperformance and its track record of missed targets.” Just last week, Kraft raised the cash portion of its $16 billion bid after agreeing to sell its North American frozen pizza business to Nestlé for $3.7 billion, hoping to tempt Cadbury shareholders who might be uncertain about the future performance of Kraft shares. But it refused to increase the overall value of the offer. At the same time, Nestlé made it clear that it would not participate in any bid for Cadbury, narrowing the field to Kraft’s bid on the one hand, and a much less certain approach from Hershey and Ferraro on the other. Kraft will publish the final details of its offer on Jan. 19, and Cadbury shareholders have until Feb. 2 to decide whether or not they will accept it. At home, Kraft faces significant resistance from its largest shareholder, Berkshire Hathaway, over raising the bid, with Warren E. Buffett arguing that its shares are undervalued and that the Kraft offer is already worth more than it appears on paper. | Kraft Foods;Cadbury Plc;Mergers Acquisitions and Divestitures |
ny0044604 | [
"world",
"africa"
]
| 2014/02/20 | Disillusionment in Libya Over Vote on Charter Assembly | TRIPOLI, Libya — For the second time since the overthrow of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi two and a half years ago, Libyans are being asked to go to the polls to elect lawmakers responsible for preparing a new constitution. On Thursday, increasingly frustrated voters will directly elect a 60-member assembly to draft the charter after Parliament failed to appoint the body as originally planned. “People are saying: ‘What happened?’ ” said Claudia Gazzini, a senior analyst for the International Crisis Group who is based in Libya. Disillusioned with the lack of progress, Libyans are disinclined to come out and vote, she said. “They are saying: ‘I’m not going to dip my hand in the ink this time.’ ” Precious little has been achieved in Libya since the war that killed Colonel Qaddafi and ended his 42 years of autocratic rule. The country held its first free elections amid much euphoria in 2012, creating a General National Congress that then appointed a new government. But both bodies have come under criticism for failing to manage the country effectively. Security is deteriorating amid growing corruption and perceived incompetence, and the Congress has been frequently gridlocked by a strong divide between Islamist parties and the more liberal groups that are nervous about the growing power of the Islamists. Tensions have been rising in recent weeks as the militias that fought the war against Colonel Qaddafi have tried to influence the political process. Prime Minister Ali Zeidan was abducted from his hotel and held for hours in October by militia members who wanted to force his resignation. On Tuesday, two militia groups demanded that the Congress dissolve itself or face the arrest of its members. The government and lawmakers have resisted the threats so far, but in a major concession they have agreed to move the date for new general elections to June from December. Legislators are hoping that Thursday’s election for the new constitutional-drafting assembly, itself a concession to those seeking greater autonomy in eastern Libya, will help ease frustrations. Voter registration has been low — just over one million, out of three million eligible — and dismal turnout is expected. There has been little fanfare around the vote and, despite a few billboards posted around town, the 649 candidates are little known. Some minority groups have threatened to boycott the election despite seats reserved for them. Yet there is much to debate in writing a new constitution for Libya. Earlier constitutions, from 1951 when the country was a monarchy, and an amended version from 1963, are outdated. After Colonel Qaddafi seized power in 1969, he ignored the Constitution and ruled by a series of odd and draconian laws, some of which are still in force. “There’s no doubt a new constitution is a must have,” said Muhammad Toumi, a law professor and lawyer who is a candidate from Tripoli for the constitutional assembly. “There is no constitution that defines the rights and duties of citizens and the freedoms of citizens, what will be protected, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion.” Universal rights of women, children and those with disabilities all needed to be recognized, he said in a telephone interview. “There are so many values that need to be defined for Libyans — how their country will be governed, what form of legislature and government, and what will be their limits and responsibilities.” Libyans had no interest in returning to a monarchy, he said, but there would be debate over a presidential system or a mixed one with a president and a prime minister, which Mr. Toumi favors. He said he was undeterred despite surviving a bomb attack on his car in January for which he blamed Islamic extremists who did not want to see a constitutional democracy in Libya. With bombings and assassinations in the east, armed clashes between rival militias and general crime and kidnappings all over the country, there are calls from the public for a strong leader who can bring stability. Yet, after more than four decades under the domineering rule of Colonel Qaddafi, Libyans will need time to learn how democracy works, said Abdulaziz Hariba, a member of the Congress. “Under a dictatorship, you always wait for someone to tell you what to do,” he added. “It takes time to adapt.” The type of Islamic system and the role of Shariah law will most likely be a central issue, as they were in new constitutions drawn up in Tunisia and Egypt since the Arab Spring. The Congress voted in December that Shariah law be declared “the source of legislation,” apparently an attempt to pre-empt any move to declare a secular or civic state. Another critical issue is the dismantling of Colonel Qaddafi’s centralized state. Citizens complain about the vast distances they have to travel to the capital for the smallest bureaucratic task, like getting papers to open a business or a subsidy to travel for health care abroad. Analysts and legislators warned that drafting the constitution would take longer than the four months now allotted. “There are so many things individuals can blow up,” said Diederik Vandewalle , a professor from Dartmouth College who is part of an expert mission following the elections in Libya. Nevertheless, he predicted the constitutional assembly would gain traction. “This has not degenerated into a civil war,” he said. “Libyans are still talking to each other.” | Libya;Legislation;Constitution;Legislature;Muammar Kaddafi |
ny0272133 | [
"nyregion"
]
| 2016/05/28 | Boy, 8, Brings Loaded Pistol to Brooklyn Public School | An 8-year-old boy brought a loaded semiautomatic pistol to an elementary school in Brooklyn on Friday, the police said. The episode occurred at Public School 91 on Albany Avenue. A teacher there discovered the gun, which was loaded with four rounds, around 11:30 a.m. when the boy refused to put down his pack, the police said. The teacher lifted the backpack, noticed that it was unusually heavy, opened it and found the gun, the police said. The teacher told school officials, who called the police. The police said there were no arrests, but that they were looking into who owned the gun and how it came into the boy’s possession. In recent months, Families for Excellent Schools, a pro-charter school advocacy group that often opposes Mayor Bill de Blasio’s education policies, has said that New York City’s schools are growing more dangerous under Mr. de Blasio. The organization recently joined a group of public school families to sue the Education Department, contending that students were being deprived of their right to an education free of violence, bullying and harassment. The data, however, is mixed. The advocacy group, using state statistics collected by school administrators, maintains that the number of violent episodes rose 23 percent from the school year that ended in June 2014 to the one that ended in June 2015. But John B. King Jr., the federal education secretary who was previously New York State’s education commissioner, has said that the state data was inconsistent and that it “rarely reflects the realities of school health and safety.” The Education Department, citing Police Department data that tracks any episode in a school in which the police are involved, said that crime in the city’s schools declined 29 percent from the 2011-12 school year to the 2014-15 year. As of Friday, seven guns had been found in schools so far this school year, one fewer than had been found by this point last year, according to the police. | K-12 Education;Guns;Brooklyn |
ny0051290 | [
"technology"
]
| 2014/10/31 | The Coming Out of Apple’s Tim Cook: ‘This Will Resonate’ | Tim Cook’s declaration on Thursday that “ I’m proud to be gay ” made him the first publicly gay chief executive of a Fortune 500 company. But Mr. Cook isn’t just any chief executive. And Apple isn’t any company. It’s one of the most profitable companies in the Fortune 500 and ranks No. 1 on the magazine’s annual ranking of the most admired companies. As Lloyd Blankfein, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, put it, “He’s chief executive of the Fortune One. Something has consequences because of who does it, and this is Tim Cook and Apple. This will resonate powerfully.” Trevor Burgess, the openly gay chief executive of C1 Financial in Florida, and one of the first publicly gay chief executives of a public company, said Tim Cook used “the metaphor of laying a brick on the ‘path towards justice.' ” But, “This is more like 600 million bricks,” Mr. Burgess said. “He has the most influential voice in global business.” Given widespread rumors that he was gay, including being ranked No. 1 on Out magazine’s list of the most powerful gay people last year, the fact that Mr. Cook is gay is less surprising than his willingness to publicly acknowledge and embrace it. He certainly made the announcement from a position of strength: Apple just completed the most successful product introductions in its history, the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, and reported record cash flow earlier this month. Apple’s latest fiscal year “was one for the record books,” Mr. Cook told investors. Mr. Cook has survived the intense glare of attention since succeeding Apple’s legendary founder, Steve Jobs, in 2011. Still, Mr. Cook was plainly reluctant, and, as he put it in his essay in Bloomberg Businessweek, “I don’t seek to draw attention to myself.” But, he wrote, he came to the realization that “If hearing that the C.E.O. of Apple is gay can help someone struggling to come to terms with who he or she is, or bring comfort to anyone who feels alone, or inspire people to insist on their equality, then it’s worth the trade-off with my own privacy.” Although Mr. Cook and Mr. Blankfein are professionally close (they were together in China last week), and Mr. Blankfein has publicly championed gay rights, they had never discussed Mr. Cook’s sexual orientation. “I don’t talk about my sexual predilections, and if anybody asked it would be jarring,” Mr. Blankfein said. “No one owes the public such a deep view of his personal life. People underestimate how hard this is. But someone had to be first. For Tim, this was a commitment to make life easier and better for others. It was a generous and courageous thing to do.” It’s also something that was “unthinkable” when Allan Gilmour was chief financial officer and a board member at Ford, Mr. Gilmour said. “Companies didn’t want controversial executives,” he recalled. As a gay man, he kept his own sexual orientation a closely guarded secret, he said, but there were rumors. He was single and had never married. He retired in 1995 at age 60 after he was twice passed over for the top job. Mr. Cook’s announcement is “historic and it’s wonderful,” Mr. Gilmour said. Progress “has been erratic, but it’s major.” Mr. Gilmour came out to a local newspaper in 1996, returned for a stint as the openly gay vice chairman at Ford, and served as president of Wayne State University and on numerous corporate boards. He recently married his partner, Eric Jirgens, in Vermont. On Thursday, he sent Mr. Cook an email thanking him for his “courage and leadership.” He added: “I found, after I outed myself in a poorly planned interview, that my life had a new, and wonderful, dimension. I didn’t have to dissemble, lie, exaggerate, change the subject, etc. I was what I was.” Richard L. Zweigenhaft, co-author of “Diversity in the Power Elite: How It Happened, Why it Matters” and a psychology professor at Guilford College in North Carolina, who has closely tracked the progress of minorities in business, said Mr. Cook’s announcement gave him “the same feeling that I had back in 1998, when many were speculating about when the first African-American would be appointed a Fortune-level chief executive and who it would be.” There were two named in 1999 — Franklin D. Raines at Fannie Mae and Lloyd Ward at Maytag. By 2005, there were seven more African-American chief executives at Fortune 500 companies. “Those first appointments really opened the gates,” Professor Zweigenhaft said. “It was like the car went from zero to 60 in 10 seconds.” But since then, progress has stalled, and there are no more African-American chief executives today than there were in 2005. Professor Zweigenhaft noted that unlike African-Americans, women and Hispanics, for gay men and lesbians, “There’s the issue of self-disclosure — they may choose not to publicly disclose their sexual orientation.” That may be one reason it has taken so long for a chief executive of a Fortune 500 company to come out publicly as gay since doing so may distract from the company and its products. “Your mission at Ford was to serve the company,” Mr. Gilmour said. “It wasn’t to draw attention to yourself. It wasn’t about self-realization.” This was evidently a consideration for Mr. Cook. In his essay, he said, “I like keeping the focus on our products and the incredible things our customers achieve with them.” Mr. Cook told Josh Tyrangiel, senior executive editor at Bloomberg, that he had sought and obtained the approval of Apple’s board before making the announcement, Mr. Tyrangiel said on Bloomberg Television. Image Mr. Blankfein at the Clinton Global Initiative in September. Credit John Moore/Getty Images Mr. Blankfein sent an internal memo on Thursday to Goldman Sachs employees, praising Mr. Cook’s “eloquent” statement and stressing “the importance of a workplace that celebrates and embraces people’s differences.” But he acknowledged in an interview: “There are still pockets of resistance. There’s still gender discrimination, and we’re still dealing with racial issues. I’m not sure we can say the battle has been won. But I think people are pretty confident how the battle will end. It’s amazing how much progress has been made and how fast.” Todd Sears, the founder of Out on the Street, which promotes gay and lesbian leadership in the financial industry, and who has been encouraging gay chief executives to come out, said Mr. Cook’s statement might have even more impact outside the United States. “Sixty percent of Apple’s sales are outside the United States,” he said. “People love Apple products. It’s the biggest company on the globe. There are 78 countries where being gay is illegal, and in a third of those, it’s punishable by death. What are those countries going to do when Tim Cook comes to visit?” Mr. Cook’s essay also seemed carefully drafted to be inclusive, to embrace anyone who feels different or excluded, which could broaden its impact far beyond the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities. Mr. Cook was “wonderfully candid about why it was difficult for him to come out,” said Kenji Yoshino, a constitutional law professor at New York University and co-author of “Uncovering Talent: a New Model for Inclusion.” “When I give presentations on diversity and inclusion in organizations, I often start by noting that of the Fortune 500 C.E.O.s, 5 percent are women, 1 percent are black and zero percent are openly gay,” Professor Yoshino said. In his essay, Mr. Cook wrote that he was many things besides being gay: “an engineer, an uncle, a nature lover, a fitness nut, a son of the South, a sports fanatic.” Professor Yoshino noted: “When Drew Faust became the first female president of Harvard, she made a similar point. ‘I am not the woman president of Harvard,’ she said. ‘I’m the president of Harvard.' ” Professor Yoshino added: “We should honor these individuals as the pioneers they are. But one way we do so is to let them know that we will not reduce their stories to that one narrative. So in my next presentation, which I am about to give in an hour, I will happily adjust the gay C.E.O. statistic up to 0.2 percent, but underscore that the movement has occurred today thanks to ‘the nature lover and sports fanatic’ Tim Cook.” | Timothy D Cook;Gay and Lesbian LGBT;Apple |
ny0149995 | [
"business"
]
| 2008/09/23 | New Salvo in Splenda Skirmish | New ammunition has been added to the battle that is pitting a leading artificial sweetener against sugar, leading the two sides to claim fresh grievances. The latest salvo comes from Duke University researchers, who have published a study that says Splenda — the grainy white crystals in the little yellow packets — contributes to obesity , destroys “good” intestinal bacteria and prevents prescription drugs from being absorbed. But the Duke study was financed by the Sugar Association, the lobbying group for the natural-sugar industry and a chief competitor to and legal adversary of Splenda. The study, which disclosed the financing, was posted last week on the Web site of a peer-reviewed scholarly journal, The Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health, and will appear in the printed version. But it is likely to fuel questions about the relationship between the private sector and academia. Nevertheless, a consumer advocacy group, Citizens for Health of Minneapolis, is arguing that the Duke study shows that Splenda is a health threat, according to a statement made by the group on Monday. The group is scheduled to testify next month at a hearing held by the California Assembly on potentially unhealthy food additives . On Monday, Splenda’s maker, McNeil Nutritionals, dismissed the study’s findings as “unsupported by the data presented.” Among other things, the Web site for Splenda says the sweetener will not cause weight gain and “may be used as part of a healthy diet .” Splenda was introduced in late 1999 and over the years has gained nearly two-thirds of the estimated $1.5 billion artificial sweetener market, taking significant market share from rival Equal, also known as aspartame — the sweetener in the little blue packets. It has also helped to push down table sugar’s market share. The Sugar Association sued McNeil, a unit of Johnson & Johnson, in a California federal court in 2004, contending that McNeil had misled consumers with its former slogan “made like sugar, so it tastes like sugar.” Splenda’s main ingredient is sucralose, which is manufactured in laboratories. While a sugar molecule is used in the process, no sugar, technically called sucrose, remains at the end. Splenda’s slogan is now “it’s made from sugar. It tastes like sugar. But it’s not sugar.” Also in 2004, the maker of Equal, Merisant, sued McNeil in a Philadelphia federal court over false-advertising claims. The two companies reached an undisclosed settlement last May. Adam R. Fox, a lawyer for the Sugar Association, said the group’s complaint in part challenged Splenda’s claim to be healthy. McNeil has countersued, accusing the group of defamation. The judge in the case, Dale S. Fisher of Federal District Court in Los Angeles, ruled in July that the Sugar Association could not use as evidence the findings of the Duke study, which was completed by last year, or testimony by its two lead researchers. The case is scheduled to go to trial next January. The Duke study — decried on Monday by McNeil as “the Sugar Association-funded rat study” — was conducted on male rats over 12 weeks. The Food and Drug Administration also tested Splenda on rats — a standard process — before approving it for sale to the public. Mr. Fox defended what he said was the impartiality of the study. “We engaged the services” of the Duke scientists to look into this, he said, adding that his law firm, Squire Sanders & Dempsey, sought out, met and spoke with the Duke experts before commissioning them to perform the study. He declined to disclose the study’s cost. One of the lead researchers of the study, Dr. Mohamed B. Abou-Donia, said Monday that the Sugar Association had “no input” into the study’s findings and conclusions. | Sweetners Artificial;Sugar;Sucralose (Artificial Sweetener);Duke University;Food;Diet and Nutrition;Weight;Research |
ny0286147 | [
"world",
"asia"
]
| 2016/09/24 | Chinese City Urges Comrades to Do Their Part and Reproduce | BEIJING — For 36 years the Chinese state nearly turned out the lights on childbearing, ordering most families to have just one child and to focus instead on economic growth. An authoritative public letter to Communist Party members from the central government in September 1980 detailed the one-child policy. The program was effective. In the city of Yichang in the central province of Hubei, the fertility rate today is just 0.72 children per woman , according to a study by city officials and Chinese academics that was reported by Pengpai, an online news website. That is one of the lowest in the country. Data from the Chinese government’s national census in 2010 puts the overall fertility rate at 1.18, below the replacement rate of more than 2.1. So this week Yichang officials snapped on the lights again, issuing another public letter — this one to local party members and civil servants — urging them to fulfill their duty and procreate for China’s new two-child policy, which came into force nationwide on Jan. 1. Here are excerpts: “We require all party members and Communist Youth League members in city departments and companies, especially cadres at all levels, to stand at the forefront and take a high degree of responsibility for caring for the country’s happy future, the people’s welfare and their own descendants to come, by thoroughly implementing the meaning of the ‘two-child policy’ and using practical actions to lead the way in responding to the party’s call.” “Young comrades should start with themselves, and older comrades should educate and monitor their children.” Howls of amazement and resentment followed in Chinese news outlets and on social media. Here are some reactions attached to one of many articles circulating online, this one from Sina.com: “In those years you fined everywhere. You beat people, tore down homes, confiscated livestock, and forced people to abort. Today you want to force people to have a second child.” — Muranxuanxie lihua, Wuzhou, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region “If the state gives me a million, I’ll have a child.” — Sichiyuan, Jinchang, Gansu Province “If housing prices fall by half, talk to me then about having a second child.” — Xiaolong V8, Beijing “The government wants to manage a couple’s bed affairs, that’s really messed up.” — Zhijing louzhu, Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province Several days after it was published on the Yichang government website with the red stamps of a clutch of departments indicating wide local support, the letter disappeared , a sign it was politically sensitive. The appeal for more children could be seen as implicit criticism of Beijing’s population policies of the previous 36 years. The public letter was daring, said Fuxian Yi , a Chinese medical scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of a book on Chinese demographics, “ Big Country, Empty Nest .” Coupled with the scale of the reaction, Dr. Yi said he was nicknaming the letter the “ Yichang Rising ,” after a political uprising in the city in 1911, one of several that led to the overthrow of the Qing dynasty. “I’m not surprised that Yichang is trying to promote births,” Dr. Yi said in an interview. “But I’m surprised at how they did it. Because unlike the northeast and Shanghai, which have similarly low rates and have requested policy relaxations from the government quietly, in private, it looks like Yichang completely bypassed the National Health and Family Planning Commission and just issued a public letter.” The fact that it was removed appears to indicate it had not been approved, he said. A person answering the telephone at the Yichang Family Planning and Health Department on Friday declined to comment, referring a caller to the Hubei provincial government in Wuhan. Suggesting why the topic was sensitive, the letter said of the depressed fertility rate: “If this rate continues, it will create great hazards and harm to our city’s economy and the happiness of the masses.” It listed as hazards the effects of very low birthrates on labor, production, the fabric of the family and old-age care. Another, more mildly worded notice remains on the local government website. That one calls for everyone to fulfill the two-child policy, but also for an expansion of “family services” — cleaners and nannies, free hospital stays and services for women giving birth, more kindergartens and more accommodations at work for nursing mothers, among other things. Dr. Yi predicted that the old-style exhortation would not work. For decades, China’s economy has developed to cater mostly to one-child families. Housing, education and other costs are often high, based partly on the expectation a couple will have only one child. What is needed now, Dr. Yi said, is “more wealth distribution, old-age care, lower housing costs, lower population density in cities, more social services for children and lower child-raising costs” before a significant number of families will be prepared to take on the burden of a second child. | Birth Rates;Yichang;Population;Communist Party of China;Fuxian Yi;China |
ny0046607 | [
"nyregion"
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| 2014/11/05 | Andrew Cuomo Is Re-elected New York Governor, but Loses Clout | This was the election in which Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo had every reason to think he would outdo his father. He had kept his promise to steady New York’s teetering state government, restoring a sense of competent leadership in Albany after years of turmoil. He had cemented an image of himself as the Cuomo who got things done — not just gave memorable speeches — by recording high-profile victories legalizing same-sex marriage , capping property tax increases and tightening gun-control laws. He faced an unknown, underfinanced, socially conservative opponent. Instead, Mr. Cuomo, 56, who easily won re-election on Tuesday — but with what appeared to be a considerably smaller majority than the 65 percent that Gov. Mario M. Cuomo got during his bid for a second term, in 1986 — enters the next four years with less political clout than when the campaign began. Gone is the aura of invincibility that made Albany lawmakers clear out of his path. The governor’s future is uncertain, with a presidential bid presumably blocked by Hillary Rodham Clinton. Mr. Cuomo has hinted occasionally at the makings of a broad, if workmanlike, agenda for the next four years: creating jobs, particularly upstate; rebuilding infrastructure, including upgrading New York’s aging airports; demanding better performance from the state’s public schools. But his basic message to voters has been simpler: “Keep this state moving forward,” he urged. More of the same. “We are just getting started,” Mr. Cuomo said to a jubilant crowd celebrating his victory on Tuesday night in a Manhattan hotel ballroom. Yet more of the same is now a loaded phrase for Mr. Cuomo. A re-election year that was shaping up as a coronation — complete with the rollout of a memoir — proved unexpectedly trying. Liberal members of his own party rebelled against the unreliability of his liberalism, leading to a primary in which a little-known law professor claimed a third of the vote. His pledge to clean up Albany ricocheted against him, as federal prosecutors started an investigation into his shutdown of an ethics panel he had made a show of creating only nine months earlier. For all that, Mr. Cuomo’s victory over his Republican opponent, Rob Astorino, the Westchester County executive, came during an arduous year for Democratic candidates across the country. And unlike incumbent governors in many states, his re-election never seemed in doubt. With 98 percent of precincts reporting Wednesday, Mr. Cuomo held 54 percent of the vote, compared with about 41 percent for Mr. Astorino. Howie Hawkins, who as the Green Party candidate emerged as an alternative to Mr. Cuomo for exasperated liberals, had 5 percent. Mr. Astorino, speaking after Mr. Cuomo to a subdued gathering of supporters in White Plains, said he hoped the governor had “heard some of the cries of New Yorkers” during the campaign. “Better governing is what New York needs,” Mr. Astorino said. “The Empire State is failing, and that’s not acceptable.” In the race for state attorney general, which was slightly more suspenseful, the Democratic incumbent, Eric T. Schneiderman, fended off a challenge from John P. Cahill, a Republican who was a top aide to former Gov. George E. Pataki. The state comptroller, Thomas P. DiNapoli, a Democrat, also handily defeated his Republican challenger, Robert E. Antonacci, the Onondaga County comptroller. Mr. Cuomo’s victory came despite mixed feelings on the part of voters who, in interviews, frequently complained about the lack of an acceptable option. “He’s somewhat progressive as far as woman’s issues,” said Jeff Arberman, 58, an information technology programmer who voted in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. But he added that he mainly voted for Mr. Cuomo because he saw him as “the lesser of two evils.” In the end, Mr. Cuomo fell short of his own result in 2010, when he won over 62 percent of the vote against Carl P. Paladino, a Republican businessman from Buffalo. But Mr. Cuomo also is measured against an inherited set of benchmarks. His father, Mario Cuomo, after all, won a landslide victory in his first re-election , in 1986, against another Westchester County executive, Andrew P. O’Rourke — a campaign that Andrew Cuomo managed. Mr. Cuomo himself has ruminated lately on both the pride he takes in his father’s record as a three-term governor and the burden it imposed upon him. In his memoir, “All Things Possible,” he praises his father’s unshakable “sense of right and wrong.” And at his celebration Tuesday night, he saluted him as “the father of the modern Democratic Party, a man who is all about principle and inspiration.” But in an interview with Charlie Rose last month, Mr. Cuomo said that he had a “different mission” than his father, focused more on concrete results than on philosophical inspiration. “My father convinced people of the concept of progressive government, especially in opposition to the Reagan era,” Mr. Cuomo said. “I see my mission as proving to them that it can actually work efficiently, effectively.” He added, more pointedly: “I heard the speeches. I’ve heard them all. I want to see the results and the performance.” Yet with Mr. Cuomo’s reputation for political mastery dented slightly, some longtime Cuomo observers suggested that the governor could benefit from laying out a bolder animating vision for the next four years. Image Rob Astorino, Mr. Cuomo’s Republican challenger, with his family on election night at his headquarters in White Plains, where he spoke to a subdued audience of supporters. Credit Richard Perry/The New York Times Norman Adler, a semiretired political consultant, recalled that Mr. Cuomo had called him soon after his election in 2010 and asked, “What would you do?” Mr. Adler, who had worked for Mario Cuomo, said he urged the new governor to become an agent of serious political reform — and that, if asked, he would give him the same advice today. “Bobby Wagner went from being a Tammany Hall hack to a great reformer,” Mr. Adler said, referring to a three-term New York City mayor. “Andrew could redefine himself too.” For Mr. Cuomo, the campaign for re-election seemed like a bother to be dispatched with, rather than a victory lap to be savored. Relying on his prodigious fund-raising, he blanketed the state with television advertising, painting Mr. Astorino as a dangerous “ultraconservative” whose views on issues like abortion were unacceptable. In contrast to the turnaround project of the past four years, in which he proudly enacted on-time budgets each March, Mr. Cuomo heads into his second term with more of a blank slate. And though he rattled off a list of liberal priorities as his own on Tuesday night, in the same speech, Mr. Cuomo made clear that a centrist path was where he felt most comfortable: He boasted of having resisted being “pushed or pulled by the extreme forces on the left or the right.” Some liberal leaders were already sounding enraged by the election results, in which Republicans claimed a majority in the State Senate. Mr. Cuomo had promised to help Democrats take over the Senate, but he was almost invisible as their candidates struggled in tight races, while he devoted considerable energy promoting a new ballot line he created called the Women’s Equality Party. “Governor Cuomo spent his time and money creating a fake party instead of fighting for the State Senate and congressional candidates of the party he is supposedly a member of,” said Bill Lipton, the state director of the Working Families Party, a group of labor unions and liberal activists. With Republicans in control of the State Senate, Mr. Cuomo will have a smoother path to continuing his efforts to hold down spending and cut taxes. But it could also prevent the governor from achieving several of his leading campaign priorities, including legislation relating to immigration, abortion rights, the minimum wage and campaign finance reform. “He has asked to be judged by the prose of governing rather than the poetry of politics,” said Bruce N. Gyory, a Democratic political consultant. “So the question becomes, Can he continue to produce works of prose that deliver?” | Andrew Cuomo;Robert P Astorino;Gubernatorial races;New York;2014 Midterm Elections |
ny0152048 | [
"nyregion"
]
| 2008/08/30 | Ex-Detective Charged in Bank Robbery | He spent years working undercover as a New York City detective, and is said to have received a Silver Star, awarded for gallantry in action, and other medals in Vietnam. But on Friday, it appeared that the retired detective, Athelson Kelson, 59, of Jamaica, Queens, may have been leading a double life. The authorities say he pulled off a string of bank robberies in recent months, usually wearing sunglasses, a cap and one particularly identifiable ring. He carried a gun in at least two of the robberies, the police said. Mr. Kelson, formerly a delegate of the detectives’ union, turned himself in to union lawyers on Thursday afternoon and appeared in Queens Criminal Court on Friday on robbery charges. According to the criminal complaint, Mr. Kelson entered the Chase Bank branch at 205-02 Linden Boulevard in St. Albans on July 10 at 2 p.m. and handed the teller a note demanding large bills and saying that he had a gun but did not want to hurt anyone. “You have 10 seconds,” the note said. Mr. Kelson was handed $600, and he fled the bank, the complaint said. Mr. Kelson, who remained in custody on Friday, was a suspect in at least three other bank robberies in Nassau County, prosecutors said. The most recent was on Aug. 26 at a Chase Bank at 565 Hempstead Turnpike in West Hempstead. The robber, who fits Mr. Kelson’s description, was given cash and fled, the police said. Mr. Kelson’s next court date is Sept. 12. If convicted, he faces up to seven years in prison. His lawyer, Harold B. Ramsey Jr., asked that his client be given a psychiatric examination. Mr. Kelson joined the Police Department in 1973 and was a detective for 20 years. He retired in 2005 and learned in 2007 that he had liver cancer. He was divorced that year, according to court documents. “Unfortunately, sometimes life throws you a curve, and we can’t anticipate or predict how we will react,” Mr. Ramsey told reporters outside the courthouse. “It’s an unfortunate situation.” Mr. Ramsey said that Mr. Kelson was awarded a Purple Heart, a Bronze Star and a Silver Star in Vietnam. Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said on Friday that Mr. Kelson had been identified from surveillance footage. “He did little to cover up his face or identity,” Mr. Kelly said. “He had a ring that was identifiable, and that’s how he was picked out.” A law enforcement source said that the ring was the type given to detectives when they retire, and has a recognizable shield. Mr. Kelly said that Mr. Kelson was also identified in a lineup. “It is very sad and shocking,” Mr. Kelly said. “He was very well thought of in the department.” Asked whether Mr. Kelson might have been intent on committing “suicide by cop,” Mr. Kelly said, “We can’t exclude that.” Michael Palladino, the head of the Detectives’ Endowment Association, said that Mr. Kelson had worked in covert operations as a detective. He also worked in the Joint Terrorism Task Force, Mr. Kelly said. “I am shocked by the development,” Mr. Palladino said. “I can only think that something terrible has gone on in his life to make him step out of character.” | Robberies and Thefts;Banks and Banking;Queens (NYC) |
ny0175608 | [
"world",
"asia"
]
| 2007/10/13 | Indian Prime Minister Avoiding Early Elections | NEW DELHI, Oct. 12 — Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India , even though he has forcefully staked his legacy on a landmark nuclear agreement with the United States, made it plain on Friday that his government would not invite early elections by confronting its Communist allies in Parliament over their opposition to the deal. “What we have done with the United States — it is an honorable deal, it is good for India, it is good for the world,” he said at a conference here. “I do attach importance in seeing this deal come through, but if it doesn’t come through that is not the end of life.” In recent weeks the Communists have been vaguely threatening “serious consequences” if Mr. Singh’s cabinet advances its nuclear negotiations before parliamentary debate. The Communists contend that the nuclear deal, widely described as a centerpiece of a radical new relationship between Washington and New Delhi, would make India subservient to American interests in Asia. Without the Communists’ support, the coalition government, led by the Congress Party, cannot maintain its majority in Parliament. The saber-rattling prompted Mr. Singh and the chairwoman of the Congress Party, Sonia Gandhi, to suggest that they were prepared for early elections. But that seems to have been tempered in recent days, as several politicians in the governing coalition, perhaps staring into the abyss of early electioneering, dismissed the prospect of elections any time soon. On Friday, the prime minister echoed their sentiments. “This government still has one and a half years to complete its time,” he said. “It is my hope and expectation that we will stay the course.” Ms. Gandhi, who spoke after Mr. Singh at the conference, sponsored by The Hindustan Times, agreed that she preferred to complete the government’s five-year term, through spring 2009, rather than take on her allies and go to the polls sooner. “We are not in favor of early elections,” she said. The prime minister’s remarks are likely to disappoint officials in the United States who would prefer swift completion of the nuclear negotiations. Under the agreement, begun by the Bush administration and tentatively approved by Congress this year, India could buy nuclear fuel and technology to raise nuclear energy production, so long as it sequestered its military arsenal. India still has important steps to complete. It must negotiate a separate agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency and garner the blessing of the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group. The head of the atomic agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, was in India this week, and expressed strong support for the accord. | India;Atomic Energy;Politics and Government |
ny0186328 | [
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"media"
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| 2009/03/12 | Joining Peers, Scholastic Magazine Sells Cover Ad | AS tough times send some publishers running for cover, marketers are running advertisements on the covers of some publications. The April issue of Scholastic Parent & Child, scheduled to come out on Monday, will carry an ad on the front cover for the first time in the 16-year history of the magazine. The ad, for a company called Smilebox , will appear in the lower right corner of the cover and carry the label “advertisement” in small type. The ad, a change in the magazine’s policy, came after discussions between the business and editorial sides of the magazine, owned by Scholastic Inc., as well as conversations about the concept with readers. “There was a lot of thought put into it,” said Nick Friedman, the editor in chief of Scholastic Parent & Child. “We knew it was envelope-pushing.” The results were deemed positive enough to go ahead with the cover ad for April and to sell cover ads for subsequent issues. The next one, planned for May, is being bought by the Juicy Juice line of beverages sold by Nestlé, one of the world’s largest advertisers. “We’d like to do it as often as advertisers would like to do it,” said Risa Crandall, vice president for the Scholastic Parents Media unit of Scholastic in New York. An advertiser buying a front-cover ad has to buy at least one ad page inside the issue, Ms. Crandall said, for a total cost of $80,000 to $85,000. Smilebox, which enables computer users to create greetings, slide shows and scrapbooks, is buying an ad page in the issue along with ad pages in other issues this year, she added, for a total cost of around $154,000. A line of type at the end of the April cover ad will refer readers to the Smilebox ad page inside. The ads represent the first time that Smilebox has advertised in Scholastic Parent & Child, said Yannis Dosios, vice president for marketing at Smilebox in Redmond, Wash. The appropriateness of a cover ad “was something that crossed my mind initially,” he added. “It has to work within the context of the magazine, otherwise it will be very outlandish.” In this instance, the creative teams of the magazine and the company collaborated to produce an ad that will “meet the sensitivities of what the audience of the magazine is,” Mr. Dosios said. The arrival of paid pitches on magazines’ front covers — until now the province of editorial content — is emblematic of changing standards for advertising acceptability. One reason longtime policies are being rethought is, of course, the steep decline in ad revenue caused by competition from online media, coupled with the slowdown in demand for print ads as a result of the recession. So far this week, two magazines are being closed: Travel and Leisure Golf, by American Express Publishing, and Best Life, by Rodale. “As you watch what is going on in the media landscape, it is incumbent on us to provide innovation,” said Kevin C. O’Malley, vice president and publisher at Esquire in New York, part of the Hearst Magazines division of the Hearst Corporation. The February issue of Esquire broke ground with a window, or flap, in the middle of the cover under which were quotations from articles inside the issue and an ad for “One Way Out,” a series on the Discovery Channel cable network owned by Discovery Communications. The Esquire cover generated perhaps the most discussion about the blurring line between cover editorial content and advertising since 1990, when two top editors of Omni magazine resigned after complaining about the magazine’s publishing an ad on the cover of the November issue. (There was a hole in the Omni cover through which readers could see a hologram, which was part of a Motorola ad on the first inside page of the issue.) The American Society of Magazine Editors concluded that Esquire’s February cover did not violate the society’s guidelines on ad acceptability. But the ad on the cover of Scholastic Parent & Child “is a violation,” said Sid Holt, chief executive at the society in New York. “It’s unfortunate because it has the potential to tell readers and advertisers that editorial is for sale,” he added. “Clearly, there are changes in the marketplace,” Mr. Holt said, “and editors want to be supportive of their publishing colleagues and maintain the viability of magazines.” Although “we don’t want to be in the position of telling people how to run their businesses,” he added, “the guidelines are very clear that the cover is editorial space and advertising should not appear.” The editor in chief of Esquire, David Granger, is a member of the society. Mr. Friedman of Scholastic Parent & Child, however, is not, so the cover ad’s violation of the guidelines has no effect on his magazine. “We respect everything A.S.M.E. represents,” Mr. Friedman said, “but we do have taste, and we do have our readers in mind.” Another reason for magazine cover ads is that many new media have less stringent policies about where ads may appear. The home pages of Web sites, which could be compared to magazine covers, carry ads, from static banners to video clips to elaborate units known as home-page takeovers. The Online Publishers Association introduced on Tuesday several ad formats that are outside the banner box, among them a “pushdown,” which opens to display a bigger ad. “As we’ve started to explore new ad initiatives, especially on the Web, it’s made us start to think about different approaches for print,” Ms. Crandall said. “Readers are steeped in the Web and print and think of them together as one,” she added, so ads on magazine covers “are not for them such a grand departure from tradition.” Another reason ads are coming to magazine covers is because a print sibling, the newspaper, has reconsidered decades-old rules against display ads on section fronts or even front pages. Ms. Crandall said she was looking at cover ads for future issues that would differ from the triangle-shape ads in the right corners for the April and May covers. One possibility is “a bottom strip,” she said, “like what The New York Times is doing.” Relish, a supplement to Sunday newspapers that is devoted to food, is selling strip ads that fill about two-thirds of the bottom of its front covers. Among the marketers buying such ads from Relish, owned by the Publishing Group of America, is Hormel Foods. | Advertising and Marketing;Magazines |
ny0073682 | [
"nyregion"
]
| 2015/04/11 | Mentally Disabled Man, Convicted in ’87 Murder, Is Freed After Connecticut Court Ruling | HARTFORD — Richard Lapointe changed from an orange prison jumpsuit into a black T-shirt that read “I didn’t do it,” then walked out of the Hartford Superior Court building on Friday and threw his hands in the air in triumph. After almost 26 years in prison, and 10 days after the State Supreme Court threw out his convictions in the rape and murder of his wife’s grandmother, Mr. Lapointe, 69, was freed on a $250,000 bond. “Of course I didn’t do it,” Mr. Lapointe said later during a news conference. “That wasn’t me. I wouldn’t do nothing like that to nobody. I wouldn’t even kill my worst enemy.” At his trial in 1992, Mr. Lapointe was convicted in the 1987 killing of Bernice Martin, 88, who was stabbed, raped and strangled before she was found in her burning apartment in Manchester, Conn. A judge sentenced him to life in prison without the possibility of release. Mr. Lapointe, who is mentally disabled, confessed to the crime after a 9 ½-hour interrogation, and prosecutors pointed to that and other evidence as proof of his guilt. But the State Supreme Court ruled on March 31 that he was deprived of a fair trial because prosecutors failed to disclose notes by a police officer that suggested the crime occurred at a time for which Mr. Lapointe had an alibi. Murder charges have been refiled. But the prosecutor, Gail Hardy, said the state needed to review the evidence before deciding whether it could go forward with another trial. The state did not refile the capital felony count. Mr. Lapointe is due back in court May 15. His attorney, Paul Casteleiro, said he was hopeful that Mr. Lapointe would not be tried again, pointing out that he had already served the mandatory minimum sentence for the remaining counts. The notes from Sgt. Michael Ludlow of the Manchester police indicated that the fire in Ms. Martin’s home started between 7:50 and 8 p.m. on March 8, 1987, when Mr. Lapointe’s wife, Karen Martin, said he was home with her. (They have since divorced.) Mr. Lapointe’s lawyer and supporters said the evidence also showed Ms. Martin was tortured and killed over a long period of time by someone who had killed before. They argued that Mr. Lapointe, with limited mental and physical abilities and no criminal history, could not have committed the crimes. Mr. Lapointe suffers from Dandy-Walker Syndrome , a congenital brain malformation that results in hydrocephalus, or water on the brain. Mr. Casteleiro said his client’s mental impairment also made him vulnerable to giving a false confession. “He should not have been in a courtroom in the first place,” said Mr. Casteleiro. “He should have never been charged. We don’t welcome a retrial, but if they want to retry him, we’ll be more than prepared.” The case became a cause célèbre among advocates for the mentally disabled and others, including the writers Arthur Miller and William Styron . Mr. Lapointe, who is barred from seeing his family, will be living with a couple from East Hartford, Conn., who has agreed to take him in while more permanent arrangements can be made, Mr. Casteleiro said. Mr. Lapointe is under a 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. curfew and must report to the court whenever he leaves the house. | Richard A Lapointe;False arrest;Connecticut;Hartford Connecticut;Murders and Homicides |
ny0036399 | [
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| 2014/03/19 | Viacom and YouTube Settle Suit Over Copyright Violations | Seven years after their dispute began, Viacom and YouTube, a unit of Google, announced Tuesday morning that they had settled a copyright violations battle out of court. The agreement comes just before the two companies were to return to court next week and reflects the changed landscape concerning allegations of copyright violations on the web. Neither Viacom, the owner of cable channels like Comedy Central and the Paramount Pictures movie studio, nor YouTube, the leading global platform for online video, would reveal the terms of the settlement, but the digital news site ReCode reported that no money passed hands. The lawsuit began just two years after YouTube’s creation, with Viacom’s complaint that its shows, like “SpongeBob SquarePants” and “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart,” were appearing on YouTube without its permission. Viacom sought $1 billion in damages. But in the interim, Google has worked to address concerns of content owners like Viacom by creating a system that allows them to track their content when it is posted and then request it be taken down or run with ads. The situation has changed so much that in 2012 the two media giants signed a pact to allow YouTube to rent out hundreds of Paramount films. The joint statement by Viacom and Google alluded to the greatly reshaped landscape, with the comment, “This settlement reflects the growing collaborative dialogue between our two companies on important opportunities, and we look forward to working more closely together.” | Copyrights;Viacom;YouTube;Video |
ny0283012 | [
"world",
"europe"
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| 2016/07/21 | After Attack on German Train, Fears Over Refugees, and From Them, Too | WEIMAR, Germany — Residents of Weimar flocked to the German city’s central park to escape unusually scorching heat this week, setting up picnics and watching bees skitter across the wildflowers near a placid reflecting pool. But for two Syrians also soaking up the sun, who recently arrived in this eastern city of 65,000, the summer idyll belied deeper worries after news of an attack on a passenger train by a fellow migrant . “When you hear about something like this, like this attack, you are naturally just a little afraid,” said Hanan Alderzy, 28, who arrived in Weimar three months ago from the central Syrian town of Masyaf. “Will people treat you differently?” She said she understood the fears of her new German neighbors. But, she added, it would be wrong to blame the actions of one refugee on all refugees. “A man must be known by his name, not where he came from,” she said. It is unclear how fully Germans are prepared to embrace such advice after the episode on Monday evening, when a 17-year-old attacked passengers bound for Würzberg with an ax and knife, wounding five, two critically, before being killed himself by the police. After hundreds of sexual assaults on New Year’s Eve in Cologne apparently involving male migrants from North Africa, Germany was convulsed over whether such ugly cultural clashes would become standard fare in a country that accepted more than 800,000 asylum seekers last year from the Middle East and elsewhere. Now, the concern is that this apparent lone-wolf attack on strangers riding a regional train could inspire a fresh round of second-guessing about whether Germany had made a fatal error in accepting so many immigrants. “It was only one lonely person who did this,” said Heiko Clajus, who was also in the park and who works on a series of memorial projects at the site of the former Buchenwald concentration camp on the outskirts of Weimar. Image The Islamic State released a video that it said showed the teenager who attacked train passengers with an ax and a knife Monday night. Credit Reuters “You can’t really pin this on refugees in general and say, ‘Oh, all refugees are responsible and must be feared,’ ” he said. “But it is troubling that we had such an incident in Germany.” The young attacker on the train has not been identified by officials, but he was widely named in the German news media as Riaz Khan Ahmadzai. On Wednesday, Germany’s federal police said they had confirmed the authenticity of a video attributed to him by the Islamic State, which called him one of its soldiers. “The foster family were able to identify it, that he had filmed it in the room in their home where he had lived, in that they recognized the background,” Joachim Herrmann, interior minister for the state of Bavaria, said on Wednesday. “We are absolutely sure, the video is authentic.” The assessment supports the idea that the teenager had been radicalized quickly; he moved in with the family only several weeks ago. Thomas de Maizière, Germany’s interior minister, spoke of the attacker as having been “incited” by Islamic State propaganda. But he played down the significance of the video, describing it as being similar to a normal suicide video. “This is perhaps a case that falls into the gray zone between a rampage and an act of terror,” Mr. de Maizière said. Before this week, the young man had shown no signs of violence. He arrived in Germany last year as an unaccompanied minor, saying he was from Afghanistan, although officials now say he may have been from Pakistan. He had appeared to be integrating well, having been placed in foster care rather than in a group home. But apparently, after news of the death of a close friend back home last week, he became disturbed and rapidly radicalized, German officials said. “It’s not good,” said Rainer Wernicke, leader of the Green Party for the state of Thuringia, which includes Weimar, as he also wandered through the sun-baked park in the center of the city. “The atmosphere in this country is not comforting.” Mr. Wernicke said he expected the attack to have a “similar impact” to that of the Cologne assaults — making Germans more wary of accepting Muslim refugees and strengthening the hand of anti-immigrant parties. Peter Altmaier, the chief of staff for Chancellor Angela Merkel, said in an interview on German television that, despite Monday’s attack, all available evidence showed that refugees were no more likely to be involved in violent episodes than anyone else. “Most of the terrorists who have carried out attacks in Europe over the past few months were not refugees,” he said. “They were people who were born here and who grew up here.” But a statement by the Alternative for Germany, a right-wing party that has gained ground politically this year with its hard-line anti-immigrant stance, quickly tied the train attack to Ms. Merkel’s “welcoming policies,” which, the party said, “had brought too many young, uneducated and radical Muslim men to Germany.” Cem Ozdemir, a national chairman of Alliance ’90/The Greens, said that if people did descend into fear and took out their worries on refugees, it would be counterproductive, giving Islamic radicals exactly the outcome they desired. Germany, he said, is at a crossroads. It can react “irrationally,” by building up its “police state” to contain and control the migrants, or it can act “with rationality,” by exchanging intelligence more freely with other European nations to help identify violent and radicalized people before they strike. “Let’s face it, there is no easy answer,” Mr. Ozdemir said. “If this is not a proof of why we need Europe, I don’t know what is. No single country can tackle this alone. We need Europe to do that.” Like cities across Germany, Weimar, famous as the center of Germany’s literary golden age, home to Goethe and Schiller, has had to accept its allotted batch of refugees — about 900 of them in Weimar’s case. One of them, Lemar Poya, 25, from Afghanistan, lounged on a blanket in the shade at the park, munching on picnic food prepared by Syrian women. Mr. Poya said he worried that some of the Germans he had met in the months he had been in Weimar would now see him differently. “I was very sad, and concerned,” he said about his feelings upon hearing of the attack. “Will all Afghans be blamed? I hope not. All I want is to learn the German language and to get work and make a life here.” While acknowledging that a terrorism-related episode was possible — perhaps likely — many Germans had consoled themselves that, before Monday, there had been none of the type of violence that has hit France and Belgium. They saw it as a consequence of Germany’s being more welcoming and integrating than those countries. Now, though, they are not so sure. “I am really sad right now, because I thought Germany wouldn’t be the target of such attacks anytime soon, because Germany has tried so hard to help the refugees,” said Micha Ott, a graphic designer. “Now, I hope it won’t get harder for the refugees.” “But,” he added, “we have to face the fact that with this happening here in Germany, the Germans are frightened now.” | Refugees,Internally Displaced People;Terrorism;Islam;Germany;Syria;Weimar Republic;Middle East and Africa Migrant Crisis,European Migrant Crisis;ISIS,ISIL,Islamic State;Discrimination;Riaz Khan Ahmadzai |
ny0200505 | [
"business"
]
| 2009/09/11 | Du Jun, Ex-Morgan Stanley Banker, Guilty of Insider Trading | HONG KONG (AP) — A former Morgan Stanley banker was convicted of insider trading Thursday after a criminal trial in Hong Kong. Du Jun, a former managing director of the New York-based investment bank, was found guilty on nine counts of insider dealing. He was also convicted of a 10th related charge for helping his wife to deal in the shares of Citic Resources Holdings Limited before the company’s announcement of an acquisition in 2007. He reportedly reaped more than $4 million from the illegal scheme. Mr. Du, who was taken into custody after the verdict, faces a prison sentence of up to seven years, the maximum that can be handed down by Hong Kong’s District Court. The case was adjourned to Friday when the judge will hear mitigation pleadings from Mr. Du’s lawyer. The case is the 10th conviction for insider trading since it was made a criminal offense in 2003 as part of Hong Kong’s effort to tighten regulation in defense of its status as a leading financial center. It is also the longest and most heavily contested trial on insider dealing in the territory, said Mark Steward, executive director of the Securities and Futures Commission. Mr. Du was accused of spending 86 million Hong Kong dollars ($11.1 million) to buy 26.7 million shares in Citic Resources on nine occasions between February and April 2007. During that period, he had access to confidential information as part of a Morgan Stanley team advising the company on a $1 billion purchase of an oil field in Kazakhstan and the issuing of bonds to finance the deal. Handing down the verdict, Judge Andrew Chan said Mr. Du must have understood the risks he was taking because he has a master’s degree in international banking and finance from Columbia University and worked at various investment banks. Judge Chan also criticized Morgan Stanley’s compliance department for failing to pick up on Mr. Du’s unauthorized trading earlier. Mr. Du’s lawyer, Alexander King, declined to say Thursday whether his client would appeal. Morgan Stanley’s spokesman in Hong Kong could not immediately be reached for comment. | Hong Kong;Morgan Stanley;Insider Trading |
ny0113056 | [
"us",
"politics"
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| 2012/11/03 | First Federal Dollars Allotted in Hurricane Sandy’s Aftermath | WASHINGTON — The first trickle of federal funds has started to go out after Hurricane Sandy — $29 million to rebuild highways, $30 million to hire temporary workers to help with the cleanup. But lawmakers are just beginning to tally what is certain to be a multibillion-dollar bill for the federal government at a time of fiscal restraint. At least initially, New York, New Jersey and other states most affected by the storm will be spared the traditional fights in Washington over disaster assistance, thanks to a little-noticed provision in last year’s budget agreement that arose from the debt-ceiling fight and resulted in Congress setting aside roughly $12 billion for disaster relief. The Federal Emergency Management Office has $7.5 billion to spend this fiscal year, and an additional $5 billion could be made available with no spending offsets required in other government programs. While that will help in the short term, the East Coast states hit by the giant storm will almost certainly request billions in additional federal dollars, which would require appropriations by Congress and could set off partisan — or geographic — wrangling and stir longstanding concerns about fraud and waste. New York state officials have already started to apply pressure on the federal government to cover a greater share of the rebuilding cost than is provided under the law, seeking 100 percent reimbursement for major infrastructure projects compared with the 75 percent automatically provided in major disasters. State officials have also talked of an ambitious new sea wall system, with a possible price tag of at least $10 billion, that could protect New York from a future superstorm. “Our counties are responding to the continued impacts of multibuilding fires, tunnel closures, power losses to hospitals and other critical infrastructure, destroyed homes and sheltered populations — all in the midst of historic flooding that has complicated emergency response operations exponentially,” Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo wrote to President Obama on Wednesday. Lawmakers from New York and elsewhere, perhaps wary of any requests for new federal spending that could become political fodder, so far are playing down the need for additional money. But when pressed, they acknowledge that they could soon follow. “I think there is a very good chance we are going to need more than that,” Senator Charles E. Schumer , Democrat of New York, said in an interview Thursday of FEMA ’s disaster-relief reserves. “But the immediate needs are being taken care of without people looking over their shoulders.” President Obama has pledged to speed federal aid to the hard-hit states, winning praise from state and local officials of both parties. But so far, the flow of money has been relatively modest in a disaster that economists estimate could leave up to $30 billion to $50 billion in damage, costs borne by individuals, businesses, insurers and the federal government. The Federal Emergency Management Agency had approved the distribution of more than $40 million in temporary housing aid and other assistance to 98,000 victims of the storm as of 3 p.m. Friday. The government ultimately paid out more than $7 billion in so-called individual and household assistance in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005, an indication of how the bill from Hurricane Sandy could skyrocket. The Department of Labor, meanwhile, has already kicked in another $30 million to hire temporary workers to help with the cleanup, New York and New Jersey officials have announced. And the Department of Transportation has given what it calls “quick release emergency funds” totaling $29 million so far to five states, to help them start to rebuild roads, bridges, tunnels and other transportation infrastructure damaged in the storm. But it is clear this is just the start of the federal costs. After Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the federal government eventually allocated at least $120 billion, including $14 billion to rebuild 350 miles of levees and flood walls around greater New Orleans. Lawmakers and federal officials say they are determined to guard against fraud, which has marred past recovery efforts. Mispayments and fraud were estimated to cost at least $600 million in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. “Just as disasters bring out the best in most people, they bring out the worst in some,” said Representative Lou Barletta, Republican of Pennsylvania. “We need to make sure disaster recovery funds go to the people who truly need them. Those who are found to commit fraud and abuse should be punished severely because they are taking money from those who truly need it.” Representative Steve King, an Iowa Republican, said during a debate in his re-election campaign on Tuesday that while he favored assistance to the battered states, they needed to come up with a plan on how to spend it. After Hurricane Katrina , he said, “they spent it on Gucci bags and massage parlors and everything you can think of in addition to what was necessary.” Officials at FEMA said this week that they were committed to trying to block abuses, citing computer systems that will compare home addresses given by victims with public databases to make sure that applicants are not filing false claims, while also using computer programs to attempt to ensure victims do not register twice for aid. But it remains unclear if FEMA can meet the challenge. A report issued last year by the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general noted that the agency had far too few employees dedicated to investigating fraud — assigning just 6 people nationwide to the effort, compared with 21 in 2007. “FEMA begs people to call and apply even if they are not sure they are eligible,” the Inspector General’s report said, quoting agency employees, about the push to sign up people for disaster aid. FEMA’s 2012 disaster-relief allocation will certainly be enough to cover the initial response, FEMA director W. Craig Fugate said this week. But the widespread flooding in areas where many residents do not have flood insurance will probably mean requests to the federal government to provide more federal financing to the government-backed flood insurance program, which already is facing a deficit. FEMA is only authorized to provide each homeowner a maximum of about $30,000 in assistance, far short of the damage many of those without flood insurance have suffered. “This is going to require a very substantial recovery effort,” Mr. Fugate said on Friday. | Hurricane Sandy (2012);Federal Emergency Management Agency;Federal Budget (US);Infrastructure (Public Works);Federal Aid (US);New York State;New Jersey;States (US);New York Metropolitan Area;Northeastern States (US) |
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"us"
]
| 2012/09/21 | Family Pulled Into Fray Over Death With Links to Operation Fast and Furious | NACO, Ariz. — “There’s the sign,” Kent Terry Jr. exclaimed as the chartered bus pulled into the Border Patrol station, a compound on an expanse of sand and brush bearing the name of his younger brother, who was killed in a shootout linked to a botched gun-smuggling operation known as Fast and Furious. Some of the passengers squeezed their faces against the windows. Mr. Terry took pictures with his cellphone. Michelle, the oldest of the four Terry children, pressed a knuckle against the corner of her eye, as if to ward off tears. Before them, a square of brick and concrete planted on the ground announced: “Brian A. Terry Border Patrol Station.” On the night of Dec. 14, 2010, a bullet pierced Agent Terry’s back, severing his spine, during a firefight with Mexican bandits in a national forest west of Rio Rico, Ariz., 15 miles from the border. One of the bandits was hit and captured. Four others fled, though one was arrested in Mexico this month. All of them were indicted in July for Agent Terry’s killing. Agent Terry, 40, was the battle’s sole casualty. His death has been at the center of a nasty confrontation between Congressional Republicans and the Obama administration over the planning, execution and wisdom of an operation that went so wrong. Operation Fast and Furious was an investigation into an Arizona-based gun-trafficking network linked to a Mexican drug gang. Prosecutors and agents with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, hoping to dismantle the organization, failed to swiftly arrest low-level “straw buyer” suspects and seize weapons. Hundreds are presumed to have reached criminal hands, including two that were found near the site of the shootout in which Agent Terry was killed. There were allegations of a White House cover-up, a vote by the House citing Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. for contempt, and contentious Congressional hearings. On Wednesday, the Justice Department’s inspector general issued a scathing report singling out 17 department officials for blame but essentially exonerating Mr. Holder. One of the officials who was singled out, Jason Weinstein, the deputy assistant attorney general in charge of the department’s criminal division, resigned, and a second one, Kenneth E. Melson, who was the acting director of the A.T.F. at the time of the gun operation, retired. Throughout the fight, as politicians repeatedly invoked Agent Terry’s killing, the Terrys sought to grieve in seclusion, but eventually they, too, were sucked into the public debate over who was to blame for the death. His father, Kent Terry Sr., called Mr. Holder a liar on national television after the attorney general’s appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee in November. In June, after members of the Congressional Black Caucus walked out during the contempt vote, Kent Terry Jr. released an e-mail that said: “Very sad that our childish government walks out. What kind of respect?” In an interview, Brian Terry’s mother, Josephine, said his death became “a political football,” hurting “like a knife to my chest.” “I don’t look at it as Democrats or Republicans,” she said. “It’s about right or wrong. I just want justice for Brian.” With a picture of her son pinned to her chest, Mrs. Terry, 72, toured the Border Patrol station — only the second in the agency’s history named after a fallen agent — on Tuesday. She smiled as Octavio Arvizu, the supervisory Border Patrol agent, guided her into the gym and said, “Those of you who knew Brian know he’d have loved this place here.” Brian Terry cared meticulously for his chiseled physique, lifting barbells weighing as much as himself and seldom skipping his daily 10-mile runs across the Arizona desert, even when his mother came to visit. His colleagues at the Border Patrol called him “pretty boy.” Geoffrey Howard, 37, a friend he made at a police academy in Michigan, called him Johnny Bravo, after the cartoon character with the pompadour. He also had a more endearing nickname: Superman. He once carried a fellow agent on his back for two miles during a training exercise, trudging and panting over sandy ground to meet a challenge from an instructor. To his siblings — Michelle Balogh, 44; Kent Terry, 43; and Kelly Willis, 39 — he would often say, “Nothing is going to amount to anything if you don’t put in the work,” his mother recalled. His father, who worked for 30 years on a Chrysler assembly line, left them when they were teenagers. Mrs. Terry worked three jobs — as a cook at a hospital and at a retirement home during the week, and in the kitchen of fast-food restaurants on weekends — to make ends meet. She lives in Flat Rock, Mich., south of Detroit, where Brian grew up wanting to be a police officer like his uncle Bob Heyer, who retired as chief of police in nearby Lincoln Park. He joined the Marine Corps out of high school, telling his mother that he was going to amount to something, “no matter how long it takes,” she said. After a stint as a police officer in the suburbs of Detroit, he joined the Border Patrol in 2007, graduating first in a class of 699 recruits. He eventually gained entry into its elite special operations team known as Bortac, which is how he got to come face to face with the Mexican bandits who took his life. Mrs. Terry first heard about Operation Fast and Furious from reporters who started calling for her reaction. Members of Congress had begun asking questions about the operation after hearing from A.T.F. agents about its connection to Agent Terry’s killing. No one from the Justice Department explained to the family the link between the operation and the weapons found at the shooting scene, relatives said. On Monday, Mrs. Terry stood surrounded by politicians and other dignitaries who had gathered at a hotel ballroom in Tucson to raise money for a foundation honoring Agent Terry’s memory . There was Representative Darrell Issa, Republican of California, who, as chairman of the House oversight committee, helped lead the push for an investigation and who has called Mrs. Terry almost every week to check in on her. There was Representative Ron Barber, Democrat of Arizona, who said, “Standing up for the men and women of the Border Patrol should never be a partisan issue.” John Dodson, one of the whistle-blowing A.T.F. agents, was also there, and he rode in the back of the family’s chartered bus the next morning to join the ceremony at the Border Patrol station. As the bus rolled west on Interstate 10, he mused about whether Mrs. Terry and the rest of the family would ever get the answers they were looking for. “There’s a part of me that believes the system, with all its bureaucracy, politics and political pitfalls, is still just,” he said. | Terry Brian A;Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms;Border Patrol (US);United States Politics and Government;Firearms;Drug Abuse and Traffic |
ny0054780 | [
"world",
"middleeast"
]
| 2014/07/23 | Airlines Suspend Flights to Israel After Hamas Rocket Falls Near Main Airport | Airlines in the United States and Europe suspended flights to and from Israel on Tuesday after a rocket fell about a mile from Ben-Gurion International Airport outside Tel Aviv. Major airlines canceled service — and in several cases, diverted planes in midflight — after the Federal Aviation Administration instructed American carriers not to fly to Israel for 24 hours because of the “potentially hazardous situation created by the armed conflict in Israel and Gaza.” The disruption of air travel at the height of the summer tourism season highlighted the growing impact of the conflict in the Gaza Strip on the Israeli economy, even as the government sought to project an aura of business as usual. It also provides a victory of sorts for the Palestinian militant movement Hamas, which controls Gaza and has been firing rockets at Israel for the past three weeks. It is the first time the group has managed to cause restrictions on travel to Ben-Gurion airport; the last time foreign airlines suspended service to Israel was in 1991, when Iraq fired Scud missiles at the country. The three United States carriers with scheduled service to Israel — Delta Air Lines, United Airlines and US Airways — quickly canceled their flights, and were later joined by Air Canada and a number of Western European airlines, including Air France, Lufthansa and KLM. Turkish Airlines and the Russian carrier Aeroflot also suspended flights. Video As the death toll rises in the latest round of Israeli-Palestinian fighting, a look at the Obama administration’s strategy for reaching a cease-fire. Credit Credit Pool photo by Charles Dharapak British Airways said it “continues to operate as normal” for the moment, though a spokeswoman said the airline would monitor the situation closely. And El Al, the Israeli national carrier, kept flying as usual. The F.A.A. said it would provide updated instructions to the airlines “as soon as conditions permit.” The European Aviation and Safety Agency also warned airlines to avoid Israeli airspace. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel called Secretary of State John Kerry on Tuesday to seek his help in reversing the decision to suspend flights, Obama administration officials said. They did not comment on the substance of the call, which was first reported by the Israeli new media, nor did they say how Mr. Kerry responded to Mr. Netanyahu’s request. Ben-Gurion airport, the country’s main international gateway, handled 14 million visitors last year and is critical to Israel’s economy. It is about 40 miles from the Gaza border, closer than either of Israel’s other international airports, at Eilat and Haifa. Those airports are much smaller than Ben-Gurion and handle mostly domestic and European flights; no American carrier serves either one. The decision to suspend service reflects a turn to greater caution by the airline industry, which appears to be much more sensitive to the risks of flying over conflict areas after the downing of a Malaysia Airlines jetliner over eastern Ukraine last week. Delta suspended its service between Kennedy International Airport and Tel Aviv “until further notice,” and did not indicate when it might resume flights. US Airways said that it canceled Tuesday’s flight from Philadelphia and that it was in contact with federal authorities. United canceled its two daily flights from Newark Liberty International Airport. The Toll in Gaza and Israel, Day by Day The daily tally of rocket attacks, airstrikes and deaths in the conflict between Israel and Hamas. European airlines following suit included Air France, Brussels Airlines and KLM. Airlines of the Lufthansa Group, including the flagship, Austrian, Germanwings and Swiss, ordinarily operate seven to 10 flights daily from Frankfurt, Munich, Berlin, Zurich and Vienna, but the group canceled them all for Tuesday and Wednesday. Delta had a flight in the air on its way to Israel when the decision to restrict flights into Israeli airspace was made. Flight 468, a Boeing 747 with 273 passengers and 17 crew members aboard, was diverted to Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris after the rocket fell in Yehud, a Tel Aviv suburb just north of the airport. According to Flightradar24.com, the plane was flying over Greece, about two hours from its destination, when it turned around and headed for France. The State Department warned American travelers on Monday to put off going to Israel, the West Bank or Gaza because of the increasing danger from combat and from rocket fire. An Israeli official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly, said that Israel had had no advance notification by the airlines of their intention to cancel flights. The official insisted that it was safe to fly to Israel. “If they wanted to hand the terrorists a prize, they couldn’t have chosen a better way,” the official said, adding, “If it was safe so far, why would it not be safe now? Nothing has changed. The airport has been there since Day 1.” The police said that the rocket that struck Yehud on Tuesday badly damaged two houses. But the Israeli official noted that most of the rockets fired at the Tel Aviv area by militants had been intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome antimissile system. Ephraim Sneh, a retired general and deputy defense minister of Israel, was sharply critical of the decision to suspend flights. It was a dream of the militant Hamas leadership “to disconnect Israel from the outer world,” he told reporters on a conference call sponsored by the New York-based Israel Policy Forum. | Airlines,airplanes;Israel;FAA;Ben-Gurion International Airport;Palestinians;Hamas;Tel Aviv;US |
ny0162094 | [
"business"
]
| 2006/05/12 | The Higher Cost of Breathing | An environmental effort to protect the earth's ozone layer could mean disruptions for the nation's millions of asthma patients. A federally mandated shift to a more ozone-friendly version of the hand-held inhalers used to quell asthma attacks is creating spot shortages of the devices, because production of the older versions has declined even before producers of the new inhalers ramp up fully. The shift is also giving a few drug makers the rare chance to introduce brand-name medicine into a market long dominated by low-cost generics. The drug at issue is albuterol, the leading prescription treatment used to open constricted airways during an asthma attack. Because the new inhalers are covered by patents, they are commanding high prices — $30 to $60 each, including the drug inside, compared with as little as $5 to $25 for the older generic versions. By the end of 2008, which is the federal deadline for phasing out albuterol inhalers that use an ozone-depleting propellant gas, the nation's annual cost for these inhalers could be $1 billion higher than now. The main beneficiaries would be Schering-Plough, GlaxoSmithKline and other drug makers whose asthma inhalers are protected by patents that in some cases extend to 2017. For people with drug insurance, price increases may be less a concern than occasional spot shortages of the devices. In early March the Food and Drug Administration issued an alert about temporary shortages, although an agency official said more recently that supplies appeared to be "certainly adequate or nearly adequate." But some patients like Ross Berry have occasionally had to scrounge. "At Target here you couldn't get it for weeks," said Mr. Berry, 42, a disabled veteran in Reston, Va., who is covered by health insurance. "Safeway didn't have it. Finally I found a Giant that had it. It got a little bit scary." For people with no insurance, high prices might be the big concern. Although asthma can affect people from all economic strata, it is a disease disproportionately found among low-income people. Federal officials estimate that the new policy could mean an additional $95 a year for each of the 1.25 million asthma patients without health insurance. On the playground of an elementary school in a Hispanic neighborhood of Los Angeles recently, mothers brought their children for checkups at the Breathmobile, a free clinic on wheels. None of the women were yet aware of the inhaler transition, but when told that prices of the devices might double, some immediately recognized it as a potential burden. "I guess we have to do our best to buy it even if we have to pay cash," said Jenny Diaz, a nurse's assistant. She said she had been paying about $20 each for inhalers for her 9-year-old son and her husband because, while she is covered by the state's Medicaid program, she has a high deductible. She said her husband, a pizza deliveryman, needed a new inhaler every two to three months and her son less frequently. About 6.4 percent of children with family income below the poverty level had at least one asthma attack a year, compared with 5.4 percent of all children, according to a federal survey a few years ago. Asthma prevalence is particularly high among blacks. Experts say this could be because people with lower incomes might be exposed to dirtier air and to agents like dust mites and cockroaches that could set off asthma attacks. The devices at issue let patients dispense a mist of albuterol to open constricted airways during an attack. A single inhaler generally provides 200 puffs of medicine, and people may use anywhere from 1 to 12 a year, according to doctors. In most cases consumers buy a new inhaler each time, rather than buying a drug refill for an existing inhaler. The products being phased out use chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons, or CFC's, to propel a mist of medicine. CFC use is being ended in accordance with the Montreal Protocol, a 1987 global treaty intended to save the stratosphere's ozone layer, which protects the earth from some of the sun's cancer -causing ultraviolet rays. CFC has already been phased out of heavy-use applications like refrigeration and air-conditioning. Inhalers, which once accounted for less than 1 percent of CFC use, are now the major remaining application. But with alternatives available, the F.D.A. decided last year that the CFC inhalers were no longer essential and outlawed their sale after Dec. 31, 2008. Schering-Plough and GlaxoSmithKline, which had developed the new type of inhalers and were keen to sell more of them, urged the F.D.A. to set the deadline at the end of 2005. But the F.D.A. chose the later date to ensure that there would be an adequate supply of inhalers using the new propellant, called hydrofluoroalkane, or HFA, before the older devices were outlawed. The agency did express concern about the impact on the uninsured, saying that higher prices might have some adverse effects on public health by deterring use of albuterol. But the agency said it could not quantify that effect. There was little resistance to the change when the F.D.A. held a public advisory committee meeting on the issue in 2004. GlaxoSmithKline and Schering-Plough said then that their patient-assistance programs for low-income people would help provide the drug to those who could not afford it. Glaxo also promised to provide two million free samples a year, something it says it still intended to do after the CFC inhalers were gone. Asthma patient groups generally supported a more rapid changeover to help the environment. So did some medical societies, which saw the transition as an opportunity to reduce use of albuterol, which merely quells an asthma attack, in favor of drugs like inhaled steroids that can prevent attacks in the first place. "In many ways, treating asthma as a rescue situation is dangerous and is sort of putting a Band-Aid on the situation," said Dr. Julian L. Allen, chief of pulmonary medicine at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. Debra Mendelsohn of Claremont, Calif., who has two asthmatic children, said she favored protecting the ozone layer. Ms. Mendelsohn, who described herself as belonging to the upper-middle class, said the transition would perhaps mean a few extra dollars a month in insurance co-payments. "For me that's a small price to pay for a clean environment and for clear lungs," she said. But Mr. Berry, the asthma patient in Virginia, said that the small amount of CFC used by inhalers meant the changeover was "just straining at gnats and, in so doing, is causing a tremendous burden on people." The prime reason for the shortage during the transition is that Ivax, which supplied about 30 percent of the generic CFC inhalers, has cut back production. The company says it will no longer sell the product after July 1, because the European Union will not allow it to obtain more CFC for its factory in Ireland, where the inhalers are made. "We will simply run out of gas, quite literally," said George Barrett, the head of North American operations for Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, which recently acquired Ivax. Makers of the HFA inhalers, which so far represent only a few percentage points of the market, have been hesitant to increase production. The makers fear they will not be able to sell the new products because generics will remain available for three more years. Schering-Plough is the largest supplier of generic CFC inhalers, which it sells under the Warrick brand. It is also poised to be the major supplier of the new HFA inhalers, which it sells under the Proventil name; they are manufactured by 3M. Julie Lux, a spokeswoman, said Schering-Plough was producing CFC inhalers at maximum capacity while 3M was increasing output of HFA inhalers. Last November, to prevent hoarding, the company began allocating generic inhalers to wholesalers. GlaxoSmithKline, which stopped making a CFC product a few years ago, voluntarily suspended production of its Ventolin-HFA devices last May to refine its manufacturing process and to add a dose counter to the inhalers, a spokeswoman said. Shipments are expected to resume in mid-June. Armstrong Pharmaceuticals , which is the No. 3 supplier of generic inhalers after Warrick and Ivax, said it had excess capacity and would increase production. Armstrong is a unit of Amphastar Pharmaceuticals. Some health care providers are taking steps to cope with a shortage, or an anticipated one. Kaiser Permanente, the big health maintenance organization, said it was providing only one inhaler at a time to each patient. The supply pressures have resulted in some price increases even for the older inhalers, although they remain far cheaper than the newer ones. The Web retailer Drugstore.com recently raised its price for orders of three or more generic inhalers to $8.99 a device from $6.66. With more than $1 billion a year in potential extra revenue at stake, inhaler makers might seem to have an incentive in calling attention to a shortage to speed the transition. Sepracor, for example, said in an earnings conference call with analysts in late April that the shortage of CFC's provided a big opportunity for its asthma drug, Xopenex. The company says that Xopenex, available in an HFA inhaler since December, is an improved, safer version of albuterol — although The Medical Letter, published by a nonprofit organization that reviews clinical data, recently concluded "there is no convincing evidence" that Xopenex "offers any advantage" over albuterol. Xopenex is even more expensive than the new albuterol inhalers. A single Xopenex device sells for about $49 on Drugstore.com, compared with about $39 for an HFA albuterol inhaler. The Zeno Group, a public relations firm hired by Sepracor, has been trying to get reporters to write about the inhaler supply situation, offering to set up interviews with doctors and patient groups. It distributed a news release from the Allergy and Asthma Network Mothers of Asthmatics, a patient group, urging people with asthma to consider switching to HFA inhalers now, to avoid being caught short as the supply of CFC devices diminishes. The press release mentioned Xopenex as the newest HFA inhaler on the market, though it also mentioned other brands. Nancy Sander, an asthma patient who also has children with the condition, is founder and president of the nonprofit mothers group. She said that she wrote the press release herself and that Zeno helped distribute it only because her group did not have the money to do it alone. Ms. Sander has reported owning $25,000 to $50,000 of Sepracor stock in her retirement account. But she said that did not influence her belief that asthma patients should start trying to find the best new alternative that works for them. "For patients to make the transition now is incredibly important," she said. | Asthma;Food and Drug Administration;Ozone Layer |
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