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ny0072421
|
[
"us"
] |
2015/03/24
|
Police Find No Evidence of Rape at University of Virginia Fraternity
|
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — The police here said Monday that they had found “no substantive basis” to support a Rolling Stone magazine article depicting a horrific gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity house and that a four-month review had identified serious discrepancies in the account by a woman identified as Jackie, who refused to cooperate with their investigation. After a review of records and roughly 70 interviews, Police Chief Timothy J. Longo Sr. said at a crowded news conference here, his investigators found “no evidence” that a party even took place at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity on Sept. 28, 2012, when the rape was said to have occurred. Instead, he said, there was a formal that night at the house’s sister sorority, making it highly unlikely that the fraternity would have had a party on the same night. Despite “numerous attempts,” he said, his officers were unable to track down the man Jackie had identified as her date that night. And several interviews contradicted her version of events. The chief said he was suspending, but not closing, the investigation, and he left open the possibility that some kind of assault might have occurred, saying additional information could still come to light. “We’re not able to conclude to any substantive degree that an incident occurred at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house, or any other fraternity house, for that matter,” Chief Longo said. “That doesn’t mean something terrible didn’t happen to Jackie on the evening of Sept. 28, 2012. We’re just not able to gather sufficient facts to determine what that is.” The announcement was yet another turn in a case that has shaken the university, as well as the worlds of journalism and advocates working to prevent sexual assault, since the publication in November of the 9,000-word Rolling Stone article, “ A Rape on Campus .” The article, which was quickly discredited, set off a national debate about sexual assault on campus — and the fraternity culture more broadly — and painted one of the nation’s oldest and most elite public institutions as a place where parties took precedence over learning. And it came after an academic year of almost nonstop turmoil. Reaction on Monday was swift. The fraternity said it was “now exploring its legal options to address the extensive damage caused by Rolling Stone,” which it said had “recklessly and prejudicially thrust the brothers of Phi Kappa Psi into the center of a national debate.” The magazine has commissioned its own external review, being led by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Rolling Stone’s managing editor, Will Dana, said Sunday that the results would be published in the next few weeks. Some students took to the social media app Yik Yak to denounce Jackie and demand that she be prosecuted, or expelled from the university, which has a strict honor code. Spencer Gorsch, a second-year student from Charlottesville, said in an interview that Jackie should perhaps face prosecution. “It does sound like she was very distraught and something may have happened, but I think that what she did was unacceptable on both a personal and a social level,” he said, “and that she greatly harmed our society by doing what she did because now it is much harder for a true rape victim — whether or not Jackie is a true rape victim — to now come out.” Some saw a more complex picture, saying that the uproar over the story and the steps that the university had taken since in an effort to change its culture had, in the end, raised awareness and probably done the school, and the nation, some good. “Something happened to her, I think,” said Janie Nelson, a first-year student from Richmond. “I don’t know what, but she’s obviously had some issues. I don’t think there’s a reason to charge her for anything. Even if the article wasn’t completely true, it still brought a good point in the community and has still been important to making it a better place.” Image The Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Va. Credit Steve Helber/Associated Press The Rolling Stone article, which shattered the university’s genteel image of itself , exploded here at a time when campuses around the country were already under scrutiny from the Obama administration over their handling of sexual violence. In Virginia, Gov. Terry McAuliffe convened a task force to combat sexual violence at the state’s colleges and universities last August, several months before the Rolling Stone article appeared. Virginia’s attorney general, Mark R. Herring, chairman of the task force, said Monday that it would issue a report in the next few weeks. “We know that sexual violence is a real problem on college campuses,” Mr. Herring said, adding, “This issue will not, and should not, be pushed back into the shadows.” After the article appeared, the university’s president, Teresa A. Sullivan , briefly suspended fraternity activities, then imposed tough new restrictions on campus Greek life. Beer kegs are no longer permitted during parties, security workers must be present, and at least three fraternity members in attendance must be sober. During his news conference on Monday, and in a separate written statement issued by his department, Chief Longo said the Charlottesville police first learned of Jackie in April 2014, after an officer met with her in the company of an associate dean of students, Nicole P. Eramo, who handles sexual assault matters. One day earlier, Jackie told Dean Eramo of the rape allegation and at that time reported a separate, unrelated physical assault. But she did not want to pursue a police complaint, the chief said. After the Rolling Stone article appeared, a detective reached out to Jackie, suspecting that she was the woman he had previously interviewed. “Since that time, despite numerous attempts to gain her cooperation, ‘Jackie’ has provided no information whatsoever to investigators,” the department’s statement said. During the course of the ensuing police investigation, the chief said, investigators interviewed nine of the 14 members who were living at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house in September 2012; none said they knew Jackie. The authorities also sent questionnaires to other fraternity members; 19 were returned, and none of the respondents said they knew Jackie or had any knowledge of an assault having occurred at the fraternity house. A review of bank records for the fraternity revealed no expenditures for a party. The police also found a photograph time-stamped Sept. 28, 2012. It showed two men in an otherwise empty entrance hall, the chief said. Investigators also interviewed two of Jackie’s friends, both men, whom Jackie had said met with her after the assault occurred. But both contradicted her version of events, the chief said, adding, “They don’t recall any physical injuries.” And while both said they were told by Jackie that she had gone out on the night of Sept. 28, 2012, with a person named Haven Monahan — identified in the Rolling Stone article as “Drew” — the police were unable to track Mr. Monahan down. Many of the story’s details had already been contradicted, particularly by The Washington Post . Despite the findings, the chief dismissed suggestions that Jackie had completely fabricated her account. “There’s a difference between a false allegation and something that happened that may be different than something that is reported in the article,” the chief said. “All I can tell you is there is no substantive basis to conclude what is described in the article happened that night.” The last few months have been especially trying ones here. In September, Hannah Graham, a second-year student, disappeared and was later found dead. Three students committed suicide last fall, one in October, one in November and one in December. On Monday, dozens of black flags advocating suicide awareness were flying on the Lawn, the main quadrangle designed by Thomas Jefferson, the university’s founder. And just last week, the campus, known to students as the Grounds, erupted in protest over police treatment of a third-year student, Martese Johnson , an African-American who was bloodied during an arrest by Virginia’s Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control agents. The university’s Black Student Alliance met Sunday night to discuss ways to change the university’s culture. Amid the turmoil, it was hard for many students to see anything positive emerging. Many said Monday that they simply wanted life to return to normal. “It’s really frustrating,” said Marcus Leibowitz, a fourth-year student. “We know we live in a good community, but these bad incidents keep on happening.”
|
College;Rolling Stone;Rape;Fraternities,Sororites;News media,journalism;Charlottesville VA;University of Virginia
|
ny0262610
|
[
"nyregion"
] |
2011/12/04
|
‘Elihu Vedder: Voyage on the Nile’ — Review
|
Around the time Albert Bierstadt painted “ Looking Down Yosemite Valley ” and Edouard Manet exhibited “ Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe ” (“Luncheon on the Grass”), the American artist Elihu Vedder , who had never visited Egypt, created a brooding, emphatically plain canvas, “ The Questioner of the Sphinx .” This image of a man kneeling in the desert sand with his ear pressed to the unmoving lips of a monumental sculpture — good luck with that! — touched a deep chord in Civil War America. It was snapped up by a collector as soon as it was exhibited (it is now in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston), and it helped make Vedder’s reputation. But the controlled color, tight line, mythological subjects and allegorical bent of his once-popular art do not resonate much with today’s tastes, which are more in tune with the sensuous, less affected approach of contemporaries like Bierstadt and Manet. Vedder’s drawings and sketches, however, are another story, and the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers has put together a winning little exhibition that forcefully makes this point. The painter we meet in “ Elihu Vedder: Voyage on the Nile ” is looser, more relaxed and more spontaneous than the one we think we know from his more formal work. And why not? He was on a four-month cruise, part of an all-expenses-paid trip to Egypt. In 1889, 26 years after Vedder had first depicted his imaginary sphinx, he was invited to come face to face with the real one by a wealthy American fan, George Corliss. Traveling initially on a traditional Egyptian houseboat and then on a steamer, Vedder got as far as Wadi Halfa , in present-day Sudan, sketching as he went. He returned home to Italy in 1890 with nearly 200 views of sand, water and sky punctuated by boats, date palms and distant figures — even an occasional landmark from the time of the pharaohs. The show includes several dozen of these lively drawings, in pastel, pencil, chalk and charcoal. Working on different kinds of paper, sometimes stacking several images on a single sheet as he started to run out, Vedder rendered windblown trees on Feb. 12, an intense blue sky on Feb. 16, ancient rock quarries at Gebel el-Silsila (known to him as Silsilis) on Feb. 26, a glowing field of green wheat on March 6, the limestone cliffs of Gebel Sheikh el-Haridi (he calls it Shegk El Haradu) on March 26. Laura Vookles, the curator, has also assembled a nice selection of Vedder’s Egyptian oils. Most, like “Mosque-Cairo” in the city and “Egyptian Landscape” in the country, depict scenes of contemporary Egyptian life. But there are also two sphinx paintings and an 1870s reworking of the “Questioner” (Vedder returned to this motif several times in his career). She has also collected photographs, books and other materials intended to put Vedder’s trip in context, although the show offers little biographical information on the artist himself, who was born in New York in 1836 and died in Rome in 1923. Vedder studied in Paris and in Florence before returning home, where he supported his painting with a career as a commercial artist. After the Civil War he returned to Europe and spent, for the most part, the rest of his life there, although he made periodic business trips to the United States. His murals are in the Library of Congress in Washington and at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Me., and his 1884 illustrations for the American edition of Edward FitzGerald’s translation of “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam ” were a sensational success. The excellent catalog for the Hudson River exhibit suggests that Vedder intended to use his Egyptian drawings as the basis for yet another illustrated book. But the pictures on the walls make you wonder. Images of monuments are few and far between, and his first encounter with the Great Sphinx at Giza — “I was simply struck dumb,” he wrote to his wife — is timidly rendered from behind. The locals and their customs are observed from a distance, even when the artist goes ashore for a camel excursion (which he loved but which left him “sorer and sorer” than he’d ever been). Such choices hardly seem appropriate for a travel book meant for his public; they seem more relevant as private souvenirs. Experienced together — and this is the first time this has been possible since the drawings were dispersed after the death of Vedder’s daughter — these pictures feel like a long, lovely tracking shot, the kind of memento tourists bring back in their video cameras today. In his discursive 1910 autobiography, “ The Digressions of V.: Written for His Own Fun and That of His Friends ,” he described the Egyptian countryside as “beautiful, simple and grand.” Those words fit his pictures, too.
|
Art;Hudson River Museum;Vedder Elihu;Westchester County (NY)
|
ny0044434
|
[
"nyregion"
] |
2014/02/05
|
2-Year-Old Girl Dies in Home With a History of Violence
|
Detectives were investigating the death of a 2-year-old girl who was found at her family’s home in Queens late Monday with broken ribs and bruising around her mouth. Police officers arrived at the family’s apartment in the Arverne section of the Rockaway Peninsula around 11:30 p.m., officials said. There they found the girl, Kevasia Edwards, unconscious. She was taken to St. John’s Episcopal Hospital in Far Rockaway, where she was pronounced dead. A woman who was staying with her sister in the building called 911 after she was notified of the emergency by the child’s mother, who was identified by the police as Ashley Diaz, 28. Christine Murphy, 27, the woman who called 911, said she ran to Ms. Diaz’s sixth-floor apartment after she had called to say Kevasia was not breathing. Ms. Murphy found the girl lying on the floor. “I started crying hysterically,” Ms. Murphy said. “I said, ‘Ashley, what happened? Did you call the ambulance?’ She goes, ‘No. I was about to.’ ” As of Tuesday evening, there had been no arrests. Although police officials could not immediately say whether a crime had occurred, they said Kevasia had been surrounded by violence and abuse for much of her short life. From 2010 to 2013, police officers came to her home nine times in response to domestic disputes, including arguments, harassment and assault, police officials said. Social workers from the Administration for Children’s Services had visited the home at least four times since 2011, officials said. Kevasia had four siblings, ages 3, 4, 6 and 10, officials said. A neighbor and friend of the family who requested anonymity said the children had only recently returned to live with their mother in their newly renovated building, in a complex called the Arverne View, overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. She said she had not seen the children’s father in a year. She said that when she saw Kevasia for the last time a week ago, she looked “frail, very little.” “Her nose was running like she always had a cold,” the neighbor said. The night Kevasia died, she said, she watched as “the ambulance guys tried to beat life into this baby.” Kevasia was wearing an oxygen mask, and Ms. Diaz was standing by, watching. After Kevasia was put in the ambulance, the neighbor said, Ms. Diaz was taken away in a police car. Christopher McKniff, a spokesman for the Administration for Children’s Services, said the agency was working with the Police Department to investigate Kevasia’s death, but said he could not provide any additional information. Kevasia’s death comes just two weeks after Mayor Bill de Blasio proposed changes to child protection policies in response to the death of another child, Myls Dobson, 4, who died on Jan. 8 after he was abused for weeks, allegedly by a caregiver, officials said. The caregiver, Kryzie King, had been given temporary custody of the boy by his father after the father was jailed on racketeering, fraud and money laundering charges. A review by the city found that officials from the Administration for Children’s Services had not been aware of the extent of the father’s criminal history and had stopped monitoring his parenting last August. Mr. de Blasio has proposed changing state law to give social workers access to arrest records and has called on the Family Court system to notify the relevant agencies when a parent on parole or probation is awarded custody.
|
Fatalities,casualties;NYPD;Child Abuse;Domestic violence;Murders;Queens;Kevasia Edwards
|
ny0028941
|
[
"world",
"europe"
] |
2013/01/14
|
Seeking Revenue, Greece Approves New Mines, But Environmentalists Balk
|
IERISSOS, Greece — In the forest near here, bulldozers have already begun flattening hundreds of acres for an open pit gold mine and a processing plant, which Canada’s Eldorado Gold Corporation hopes to open within two years. Eldorado has reopened other mining operations around here, too, digging for gold, copper, zinc and lead from nearby hills. For some residents, all this activity, which promises perhaps 1,500 jobs by 2015, is a blessing that could pump some life into the dismal economy of the surrounding villages in this rural northeast region of Greece. But for hundreds of others, who have mounted repeated protests, the new mining operation is nothing more than a symbol of Greece’s willingness these days to accept any development, no matter the environmental cost. Only 10 years ago, they like to point out, Greece’s highest court ruled that the amount of environmental damage that mining would do here was not worth the economic gain. “This will be a business for 10, maybe 15 years, and then this company will just disappear, leaving all the pollution behind like all the others did,” said Christos Adamidis, a hotel owner here who fears that the new mining operations will end up destroying other local businesses, including tourism. “If the price of gold drops, it might not even last that long. And in the meantime, the dust this will create will be killing off the leaves. There will be no goats or olives or bees here.” Tensions over new development schemes are being felt elsewhere in Greece, too, as the country stumbles into its sixth year of recession, eager to bring in moneymaking operations and forced by its creditors to streamline approval processes. Environmentalists are objecting to plans that would sell off thousands of acres for solar fields and allow oil exploration near delicate ecosystems. Image New mines near Ierissos, Greece, have sparked protests. “We see laws changing, policies changing,” said Theodota Nantsou, the policy coordinator in Athens for the World Wide Fund for Nature. “We see things getting rolled back under the guise of eliminating impediments to investment. But over the long run, all these things will have a heavy cost.” The fund says standards are widely being ignored or lowered, affecting air, water and land use, from the reduction of mandatory environmental impact reviews to plans for increasing coal use and the likelihood that 95 percent of Greece’s environmental fund — more than $1 billion collected for projects like improving energy efficiency and sustaining nature conservancies — will be absorbed into the general government budget. In June, the fund issued a report saying it was witnessing an “avalanche of serious environmental losses.” It said some rollbacks were an attempt to fulfill the demands of the trio of creditors, the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank and the European Commission, that have been sustaining Greece in recent years. But it said that, to an equal extent, the losses were because of initiatives put forward by various ministries. No project, however, appears to have elicited more of a public outcry than the resumption of mining operations in the mineral-rich hills here, where legend has it that Alexander the Great also mined for gold. Past mining operations here have been boom-and-bust enterprises, their fortunes swinging with the price of metals, leaving behind ugly piles of sandy gray tailings. Virtually everybody in the area has stories about the runoff from old mining operations, which turned the sea yellow at times. But perhaps as much as anything, the anger over the mines is a reflection of the fundamental distrust many Greeks feel toward their government: a firm belief that most officials are busy enriching themselves, their friends and their families at the country’s expense. Nick Malkoutzis, a columnist for the conservative daily newspaper Kathimerini, wrote that it was hard to blame villagers for their distrust, when so often companies had been allowed to ignore regulations. “Perhaps in another country, locals would feel more comfortable with the project because the process for awarding public contracts or environmental certificates is transparent and trustworthy,” he wrote, adding that in Greece, that was not the case. Opponents complain, for instance, that while making the deal with Eldorado, the government failed to make sure that Greece received a percentage of the earnings, a common practice in mining contracts. Image A mine in Skouries, Greece, owned by the Eldorado Gold Corporation of Canada. Credit Angelos Tzortzinis for The New York Times And they believe the 50 million euro letter of credit the government got as a guarantee against any problems is not nearly enough. A spokesman for Eldorado, Kostas Georgantzis, said the Canadian mining company had actually offered more, but that was all the government wanted. Until recently, environmentalists were beginning to feel optimistic about Greece. Environmental issues dominated the political agenda after George Papandreou was elected prime minister in 2009. He established an Environment, Energy and Climate Change Ministry and appointed a noted environmentalist to head it. He talked with enthusiasm of eco-tourism and renewable energy. But as Greece’s financial problems snowballed, the head of the ministry was replaced by the former finance minister, George Papaconstantinou, who is now embroiled in a scandal over whether he removed family members from a list of Greeks with Swiss bank accounts. Shortly after his appointment, the permit for Eldorado’s mining plans was issued, though it is still under review in the courts. Officials of Greece’s environment ministry, responding in writing to questions, acknowledged that they were overhauling regulations with a view to making “modern environmental policies” go hand in hand with much needed investments. But they said the WWF report was “excessively negative” in its conclusions. They also defended the decision to reintroduce mining in the Chalkidiki area, saying that northern Greece constituted a “wealth reservoir” of metals worth more than 20 billion euros based on current prices. The officials said the permit was issued after an eight-year period of preparations, evaluations and public consultations that ensured that the mining activity would not damage the environment. Image Rania Ververidis, 62, said a police officer injured her during a protest against the mining projects. Credit Angelos Tzortzinis for The New York Times In fact, the officials said, the new activity would ensure that the acidic runoff from abandoned mine operations would be averted and modern practices of waste management implemented. The ministry officials said they were unable to explain the 50 million euro letter of credit because the official in charge of that was on vacation. Eldorado has big plans for the region. It intends to invest one billion euros in various mining operations there, and its executives expect mining activities to last 15 years or more. But some opponents question that too, noting that right now the price of gold hovers around $1,700 an ounce, making even the tailings left behind by past mining efforts valuable. Eldorado is already at work reprocessing those tailings, which still contain about 3.4 grams of gold per ton. But the new open pit mine is expected to produce only 0.81 grams per ton. What will happen if the price of gold drops? Eldorado officials say the villagers need not worry because the open pit mine will also yield copper. But the villagers are not so sure. The new mining operations have divided the region, in some cases setting brothers against each other. Most often it is those that live close to the sea, where tourists arrive in the summer, who oppose the project. Those that live in the hills where there is little work generally support it. Image Inside a new gold mine on the Chalkidiki Peninsula in northern Greece. Credit Angelos Tzortzinis for The New York Times “These jobs mean that the barber and the doctor will have work too,” said Kostas Karagiannis, who has been working clearing the forest. “It is not just the miners who benefit.” But opponents worry about dust and ground water pollution. In the last year, opponents of the projects, many of them retirees, have staged more than a half-dozen demonstrations, some of which have been broken up by police shooting tear gas and rubber bullets. Both sides point fingers. Mining officials say the villagers surrounded city hall and kept the mayor imprisoned for eight hours at one point. But the villagers say that at one particularly large demonstration at the end of October, when 21 villagers were arrested, the police used brutal tactics. Rania Ververidis, 62, said that she had been ordered out of her car and told to kneel. At that point, she said, a police officer had stomped on her ankle. She was still limping three weeks later, she said. But she said she intended to protest more. She fears that Greece is in the process “of selling everything.” “We can’t let that happen without doing anything,” she said.
|
Mining;Gold;Euro Crisis;Greece;Eldorado Gold;World Wide Fund for Nature;Environment
|
ny0176163
|
[
"science"
] |
2007/07/17
|
Blowing in the Wind
|
Q . Are certain trees more susceptible or more resistant to being toppled by high winds? A. The vulnerability of trees to severe weather depends on many variables, including the tree’s stage of growth, its position relative to other trees and landscape features, soil conditions and previous precipitation, and previous damage. But studies done after severe storms have identified trees with better or worse chances of survival, often because of characteristics like the ratio of height to the diameter at the base or the depth of the root system. At or near the top of many lists of the fittest is the live oak. A 1982 study by the Forest Service listed runners-up like bald cyprus, black gum, sweet gum and the Southern red oak. At the bottom of that list are the box elder, hickory, red maple and yellow poplar. Another study, done in hurricane-prone northern Florida by the University of Florida extension service, and based on homeowners’ reports of storm damage, found some regional variations. “Dogwood, sand live oak, live oak, sabal palm and Southern magnolia are native trees that appear to tolerate hurricane-force winds extremely well,” the study found. “Less wind-resistant are laurel oak, turkey oak, Chinese tallow and red maple. Southern red cedar, sweet gum and silver maple all appear to have crowns which are easily damaged by the winds.” The Carolina laurel cherry and the sand pine were the most vulnerable of all.
|
Trees and Shrubs;Wind;Weather
|
ny0231422
|
[
"us"
] |
2010/09/23
|
New Jersey: Copper Penny From ’43 Fetches a Mint
|
A penny minted from the wrong metal in World War II has been sold for $1.7 million, said Laura Sperber of Legend Numismatics in Lincroft, who arranged the sale. Virtually all United States cents minted in 1943 were struck in steel rather than copper alloy, and are worth only a few cents each today, but a few coins were mistakenly made from bronze blanks left over in mint machinery. The coin was unknown to the collectors until 1979. Proceeds will go to charity.
|
Collectors and Collections;Currency;World War II (1939-45)
|
ny0255877
|
[
"us"
] |
2011/08/03
|
Stalemate in Senate Leaves 4,000 Out of Work at F.A.A.
|
WASHINGTON — After dealing with the debt crisis, Senate negotiators tried and failed on Tuesday to end a stalemate over temporary financing for the Federal Aviation Administration , leaving 4,000 agency employees out of work and relying on airport safety inspectors to continue working without pay. The partial agency shutdown, which began on July 23 and is likely to continue at least through Labor Day , has also idled tens of thousands of construction workers on airport projects around the country. Dozens of airport inspectors have been asked by the F.A.A. to work without pay and to charge their government travel expenses to their personal credit cards to keep airports operating safely. Air traffic controllers and airplane inspectors, who are paid with separate accounts, have continued to work, but workers who oversee research on aviation systems, grants for airports and facilities and operations equipment have been furloughed. If the stalemate continues through Labor Day, the government could lose roughly $1 billion in tax revenues on airline ticket sales. Ray LaHood , the transporta-tion secretary, said he firmly believed that passenger safety was not at risk. “No safety issues will be compromised,” Mr. LaHood told reporters on a conference call. “Flying is safe. Air traffic controllers are guiding airplanes. Safety inspectors are on duty and are doing their job. No one needs to worry about safety.” The House began its August recess on Monday night, and the Senate followed Tuesday, leaving little hope for a resolution until Congress returns in September. President Obama , in remarks after the Senate’s passage of the debt ceiling bill, urged Congress to break the impasse, which he described as “another Washington-inflicted wound on America.” The impasse centers on disagreements between Republicans and Democrats over a program that subsidizes commercial air service to rural airports. But behind the scenes, a larger fight has been taking place over federal rules on labor elections in the airline industry. Randy Babbitt, the F.A.A. administrator, said in a conference call with reporters on Tuesday that the agency was depending on the “professionalism” of airport safety inspectors to continue their work without being paid, because their jobs are paid for with money that is awaiting Congressional authorization. Those inspectors are the primary individuals responsible for ensuring that commercial airports comply with federal regulations. They also support runway safety action teams, oversee construction safety plans, investigate runway incursions and ensure that corrective action is taken on safety discrepancies. “The reason they are out on the job is because of the risk to operational safety or life and property,” Mr. Babbitt said. “We can neither pay them nor can we compensate them for expenses. We are depending and living on their professionalism at this point.” It is unclear how long the inspectors can continue to pay the bills for their own travel and hotel expenses. Typically, each of the roughly 40 regional inspectors travels to up to five airports in each two-week period, F.A.A. officials said. When F.A.A. financing expired last month, the agency also lost the ability to collect taxes on airline tickets. Those taxes amount to about $30 million a day and are paid into a trust fund that pays for much of its operations. The House passed a bill last month that would extend F.A.A. financing through Sept. 16 and allow it to continue collecting the ticket tax. Congress has passed 20 such temporary spending bills over the last four years, in part because it has been unable to agree on a larger, long-term authorization of the agency’s budget and capital plans. But the House temporary bill also would end $14 million in subsidies that provided commercial airline service to 16 rural airports. The law was written in a way that appeared to single out for closing airports in the states of prominent Senate Democrats, including the majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada . Democrats say Republicans are trying to save a few million dollars at the expense of the ticket tax, which would generate roughly $200 million a week. Some of the airport closings were included in a long-term spending bill passed by the Senate in February. But Senate Democrats, including Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia who is chairman of the committee with jurisdiction over the F.A.A., objected to their inclusion in what they said should have been a “clean” temporary spending measure. Mr. Rockefeller tried to draft a compromise with Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison , Republican of Texas , that offered to cut $70 million from the rural airport program — several times more than the amount that the Republican bill sought to cut. That effort was blocked by Senator Orrin G. Hatch , Republican of Utah . “We are going to lose $1 billion in the aviation trust fund if we leave this Congress for the month of August and we don’t extend the F.A.A.,” Ms. Hutchison said. Senator Barbara Boxer , Democrat of California , accused Republicans of “hostage taking” by refusing to approve an F.A.A. spending bill without including the rural air service cuts. Representative John L. Mica, a Florida Republican who is chairman of the House transportation committee, said the rural air cuts were intended to reduce wasteful spending, like the subsidies of more than $3,700 per passenger that paid for air service in Ely, Nev., that benefits fewer than 500 passengers a year. “Those 4,000 F.A.A. employees have been furloughed so some in the Senate can protect their own political pork,” Mr. Mica said. Mr. Reid said Republicans were using the rural airport issue as cover for an effort to change a recently instituted federal labor regulation that made it easier for unions to organize at airline companies. The new regulation, instituted by the National Mediation Board, requires an employee vote on labor representation to be approved by a majority of those voting. Previously, the rule required a majority of all affected employees, meaning that employees who failed to vote were counted as “no” votes. Mr. Reid said Republicans were trying to reverse the rule to benefit Delta Air Lines and other companies that have fought against union representation for their workers. A bill passed this year by the House that would grant permanent reauthorization for F.A.A. operations included the labor provision that would change the ruling by the mediation board. Mr. Hatch said the administration and Democrats in Congress were trying to “put their thumb on the scale in favor of big labor.” Senate Democrats had hoped that they could quickly pass a temporary spending bill on Tuesday without the rural airport provision, and offer it to the House during the recess. While House members are gone, the House officially reconvenes every few days for a few minutes, a technical move meant to block recess appointments. Senate Democrats maintained that the House, in one of those sessions, could adopt a clean spending bill by unanimous consent. But ultimately they were not able to gather the forces to pass a new bill.
|
FAA;Senate;null;Tax;Air traffic control;House of Representatives
|
ny0254111
|
[
"business"
] |
2011/07/29
|
Carmakers Back Strict New Rules for Gas Mileage
|
DETROIT — Four years ago, the American auto industry was so opposed to higher fuel economy standards that executives of Detroit camped out in Washington in an unsuccessful bid to undercut them. On Friday, when President Obama announced even stricter standards — in fact, the largest increase in mileage requirements since the government began regulating consumption of gasoline by cars in the 1970s — the chief executives of Detroit’s Big Three were in Washington again. But this time they were standing in solidarity with the president, who was also surrounded by some of Detroit’s highest-tech — and most fuel-efficient — new vehicles. While the American carmakers, as well as their Asian rivals, once argued against even minimal increases in government fuel rules, they are acquiescing without protest to an increase to 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025, from the current 27 miles per gallon. The new standards are seen by the Obama administration as critical to reducing oil consumption and cutting consumer expenses at the pump, and the White House made it clear to Detroit executives that the changes were coming and they needed to cooperate. It is an extraordinary shift in the relationship between the companies and Washington. But a lot has happened in the last four years, notably the $80 billion federal bailout of General Motors , Chrysler and scores of their suppliers, which removed any itch for a politically charged battle from the carmakers. And the auto companies have gotten a lot better at building popular small cars that are fuel efficient — thanks to gas-electric hybrids and advances in battery technology — and consumers are responding. Six of the 10 best-selling vehicles in America are small or midsize cars, and one of the most popular pickup models on the market is a Ford F-Series with a high-mileage, six-cylinder engine. Still, the industry’s meek acceptance of what are considered extremely challenging fuel-economy goals is a marked retreat from years past, when the companies argued that consumers would not be willing to pay for the technology needed to meet higher mileage requirements. “The auto companies’ level of vitriol and rhetoric has changed,” said Dan Becker, director of the Safe Climate Campaign, a group that works to mitigate global warming . “We welcome all epiphanies.” The new mind-set in Detroit has been helped by some give and take on the government’s side. G.M., Ford and Chrysler pressed for less onerous mileage goals for their profitable pickup trucks and got them. And the administration agreed to revisit the new requirements halfway through their course, with the possibility of adjusting them. In the end, though, Detroit was faced with an undeniable political reality: there was no graceful way to say no to an administration that just two years ago came to its aid financially. “This was no time to fight these regulations,” said one Detroit executive, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the nature of the closed-door negotiations. “And you’re starting to see these fundamental shifts in the market that play a huge role in this,” the executive said in advance of Friday's announcement. Environmental groups find themselves in the unusual position of lauding the automakers for making fuel economy a priority in virtually all their newest products, from the tiniest subcompact to the heaviest pickup. “These proposed standards can be met using well-known technologies such as better engines, lower-cost hybrids and electric cars ,” said Roland Hwang, transportation program director at the Natural Resources Defense Council . The proposal introduced by the president calls for a 5 percent annual increase in fuel economy for cars from 2017 to 2025. The gains are more modest for the light-truck category, which includes sport utility vehicles — 3.5 percent a year through 2021, and then 5 percent annually in the next four years. The standards announced four years ago run through 2016, requiring a corporate average of 36 miles per gallon by then. Over all, the new standards will require a 54.5 miles per gallon corporate average for 2025. That standard will be made more easily achievable by credits that automakers can earn by producing battery-powered vehicles, hybrids and alternative-fuel models. Details of how the credits will work have not yet been made public, but the intention is to encourage the development of cars with far lower emissions. Initially, the White House floated a much more aggressive target of 62 miles per gallon by 2025. It reduced that twice before agreeing on the final number. A crucial negotiator for the administration was Ron Bloom , one of the senior members of the president’s automotive task force that shepherded G.M. and Chrysler through taxpayer-financed bankruptcy reorganizations in 2009. Detroit executives said Mr. Bloom’s relationships with the companies and his understanding of their current and future products were critical factors in bringing all the sides together. The parties included environmental and public health groups as well as the California Air Resources Board, which has historically set standards more aggressive than the federal ones. “The really big part of this is the midpoint review,” said David Cole, chairman emeritus of the Center for Automotive Research, an auto industry research group in Ann Arbor , Mich. “By then everybody will have a better understanding of the cost of the technology, particularly the batteries.” The automakers are confident that they can achieve incremental goals each year, but the real test will be if costs can be lowered enough so consumers will want to buy more electric and hybrid models. “The standards are going to be quite stringent and a challenge,” said Scott Becker, a senior vice president in the United States for the Japanese automaker Nissan. “But given the range of technologies that we either have currently or are developing, we will be in a position to meet them.” Support for the new standards by the Detroit and Asian carmakers will allow the administration to formally set forth the plan by the end of September, which will then be followed by a public comment period. The White House has said the regulations will save drivers money at the pump in addition to reducing emissions. In the past, Detroit might have challenged the thesis, or forecast a negative impact on job growth. This time, the automakers’ trade group proposed radio ads that would have raised concerns about job losses, but the proposal was squelched by some of the companies, notably G.M. and Chrysler. Instead, the automakers decided to sign on to the goal of 54.5 miles per gallon — and wait and see if it can be achieved down the road. “These targets are far out there, but the economics need to work,” said Mr. Cole. “This is also the most aggressive environmental administration the industry has seen for a long time, and the companies have to get through this with them.”
|
Cars;Fuel efficiency;US Politics;GM;Chrysler;Ford Motor;Barack Obama
|
ny0235266
|
[
"sports",
"football"
] |
2010/01/07
|
Brady and Patriots Get Ready for Life Without Welker
|
FOXBOROUGH, Mass. — Tom Brady won the N.F.L.’s Comeback Player of the Year award Wednesday a few hours before Wes Welker went on injured reserve . The intersection of their injuries may determine how far the Patriots go in the playoffs. The quarterback and the receiver are close friends, and their chemistry is an underpinning of the offense. When Welker missed two games earlier this season, the offense sputtered and Brady looked rusty. He was hurried. He was unsure. He was un-Brady. But when Welker played, he led the N.F.L. with 123 receptions, his short routes over the middle providing the defining snapshot of the offense and allowing Brady to slip into the familiar rhythm that bedevils opponents. But with Welker shelved by torn knee ligaments — the former Patriots safety Rodney Harrison, who sustained a similar injury, estimates that he might not return before November because of all the cutting he does — the Patriots (10-6) are in full moving right along mode as they prepare for their wild-card round game Sunday against Baltimore. “In time, I plan on coming back the player I was and much more,” Welker wrote on his Web site . On Tuesday, Coach Bill Belichick made clear he would answer no more questions about Welker. On Wednesday, Brady had spoken to Welker, telling him about his heightened appreciation for playing after sustaining a serious injury. But as they did last year when Brady was lost for the season only minutes into the first game, the Patriots have already put Welker behind them. “This is one things we’ll move on from,” defensive tackle Vince Wilfork said. “We’ve moved on already, to be honest.” Said Brady: “It’s really the nature of the sport That’s been conditioned in us for a long time. Things change week to week. They can change year to year. You have a great game one week, then you don’t. Any time you spend wasting on what happened in the past, you’re really losing time on what’s going to happen that following week.” To avoid a bad game, the Patriots will focus on integrating Julian Edelman, a rookie who caught 10 passes Sunday, largely because Brady remained in the game well after Welker was hurt on the opening series, presumably to get snaps with Edelman. Edelman was an option quarterback at Kent State, blessed not with a great arm — “He can’t throw at all,” Brady said with a laugh — but with speed and an ability to handle the ball. The Patriots worked Edelman out as a receiver and drafted him in the seventh round. He came to national notice in the second game of the season when Welker was sidelined. He caught eight passes for 98 yards, with a quick cutting style reminiscent of Welker. Edelman, of course, has nowhere near the simpatico relationship with Brady, but with the Ravens expected to double-team Randy Moss, the passing game could rest heavily on him. He finished the season with 37 receptions for 359 yards. “It’s amazing, really, how much he’s done from where he started,” Belichick said. “But the fact of the matter is he got off to a good start and even in the spring when we tried him at receiver and catching punts and things like that. There was a point in time where he showed pretty quickly that he was capable of doing those kinds of things at this level.” Still, Harrison said that the loss of Welker was devastating because so many of his receptions were for first downs. He averaged 11 yards per reception and had six games of more than 100 yards receiving (when the Patriots played the Ravens in Week 4 , Welker caught 6 passes for 48 yards). Brady’s comfort level with him cannot be replaced. But Belichick has always employed an attitude that each player is one play away from being the starter. So he gives backups ample practice time. One person who saw Belichick early Monday said he was down, calling Sunday a bad day. But by that night, he was better and on Wednesday, Brady said the first practice of the week was a good one. Last year, Belichick and the Patriots navigated the worst injury they could imagine and nearly made the playoffs with 11 victories. Now, Brady is back in the fold, knowing what Welker will miss, and trying not to miss him. “For two days you say, ‘We don’t have Wes, what are we going to do?’ ” Brady said. “Then you get out to practice and you say, ‘Well, that looks pretty good.’ You could do a lot of things with Wes. Julian can do a lot of those things, too. It’s a different list of things.”
|
Football;New England Patriots;Brady Tom;Welker Wes
|
ny0082605
|
[
"business",
"media"
] |
2015/10/11
|
Gloria Allred Wants to Question Bill Cosby a 2nd Time
|
Gloria Allred, the lawyer representing a woman in a case against Bill Cosby, said on Saturday that she wanted to question the entertainer under oath a second time and revealed that his deposition on Friday took place in Boston. The highly anticipated deposition, whose location was previously undisclosed, was for a California civil case brought by Judy Huth, who says Mr. Cosby forced her to perform a sex act on him in 1974, when she was 15. “We will be filing motions with the court in connection with the deposition,” Ms. Allred said in a prepared statement, which she read on Saturday at a hotel in Boston. “We will also be seeking to take a further deposition of Mr. Cosby at a later date.” Ms. Allred said the deposition, which was to have been videotaped and recorded by a court reporter, lasted from about 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. with a few breaks, including one for lunch. Mr. Cosby lost a bid this week to stop the case from going forward, though the judge in the case agreed on Wednesday that the transcripts of the deposition should be sealed for at least 60 days. Both sides have been ordered not to talk about Mr. Cosby’s statements until a hearing scheduled for Dec. 22. Given the judge’s order, Ms. Allred said, she had “no further comment on anything that happened at the deposition of Mr. Cosby.” Ms. Huth is scheduled to be deposed on Oct. 15 at an undisclosed location. On Friday, a federal judge, also in Massachusetts, refused to dismiss a separate lawsuit by three women who have accused Mr. Cosby of sexually assaulting them in the 1970s and later defaming them when, they said, he allowed his representatives to brand them as liars. The lawyer for the women in that case, Joseph Cammarata, said on Friday that he would depose Mr. Cosby “at the earliest opportunity.” Mr. Cosby has never been charged with a crime and has denied any wrongdoing. Andrew Wyatt, a spokesman for Mr. Cosby, declined to comment on Saturday.
|
Gloria Allred;Bill Cosby;Rape
|
ny0136534
|
[
"business",
"yourmoney"
] |
2008/05/03
|
Listen to Your Statement
|
PEOPLE loathe keeping track of expenses, and I am no exception. Few chores manage to combine anxiety and tedium in such high doses. But given all the disturbing news about the economy, I have found myself needing reassurance that our cash is flowing in and out more or less as usual. So I decided to take some of my own advice and read our household checking account statement over my morning coffee. The standard personal finance guidance would be to monitor one’s spending over a longer period of time, preferably by keeping a detailed money diary or using financial software. I have found that spending 10 to 15 minutes reviewing the bill payments, checks, debit charges and other transactions in a single month — in this case, our March-April statement — can be just as valuable. It’s also a nifty way to ruin your morning, as I realized upon seeing that we were being charged twice for out-of-network A.T.M. withdrawals: once by the bank that operates the A.T.M. (usually about $2), and again by our own bank (a scandalizing $3). “We can only use our bank’s A.T.M.’s,” I exclaimed to my husband, waving the bank statement wildly. I was lucky he didn’t pour coffee on my head. We try not to use other banks’ machines, but because we live in a small town, far from our own bank’s branches, sometimes it’s necessary. Still, the charges were embarrassing. I had just read that in 2007 Americans spent about $4.2 billion in A.T.M. fees, according to a report by Bankrate.com — and I’d shaken my head at the folly. We only ended up paying $10 for two withdrawals, but $10 is nearly three gallons of gas. Last year it cost about $150 to fill up our tank each month. Given that gas prices are about 25 percent higher now than they were a year ago, lately I had estimated that we were paying close to $200 per month. Try $256. That’s what my foray through our bank statement showed. I was shocked. I don’t know if the truth sets you free, but staring your finances in the face, as opposed to devising convenient estimates in your head, is as vital to your financial health as checking your cholesterol is to your physical health. Bad eating habits and bad money habits have a nasty way of building up if you’re not paying attention. That’s especially true right now, with the economy in a mess. It’s tempting to believe that if you’ve managed to skirt major fallout from the credit crisis and the sagging real estate and job markets, you’re not any worse off than you were a year ago. I have been putting my hands over my eyes and hoping that’s true. My tattle-tale bank statement says otherwise. A year ago this time, we paid about $400 a month for groceries. The tally for this April was $587. During the same period last year we spent about $140 on miscellaneous household items and sundries; this year we spent $346. IT’S possible that if we averaged out our expenses over a longer period, perhaps the increase in our expenses wouldn’t seem so dramatic. Nonetheless, they are higher than last year, and our net income is not. Given that my husband and I are both freelancers — I’m full-time, he’s part-time — is the answer to take on more work? Spend less? A little of both? Numerous articles have indicated that the economic growth in recent years was a rising tide that lifted only a few boats. Still, it’s a bit scary to dissect your own financial situation and realize that your money, really, only goes so far. Some close friends of ours came over for dinner the other night. They are retired and living on a very modest fixed income. A year ago, we were feeling relatively flush and secure, and so avoided talking about any financial topics that might have emphasized any disparity between us. Now we found ourselves commiserating with our friends about rising food costs, ways to cut back on driving, speculating about how life might change as gas prices continue to rise. It’s a gritty pill to swallow, but if my bank account statement is right, the answer is to obey the numbers and try to live within them, an idea so old it’s new again.
|
Personal Finances;Banks and Banking;Prices (Fares Fees and Rates);Credit
|
ny0186382
|
[
"business"
] |
2009/03/13
|
Drug Trial Company Finds Itself Under Scrutiny
|
Like other federal undercover operations, this one had the usual trappings, like a company whose address turned out to be a P.O. box in a strip shopping mall and a businessman whose credentials proved fraudulent. But the investigation had an unusual focus: determining whether companies that are paid to oversee the safety of patients in clinical studies of drugs and medical devices do their job. The inquiry came to light this week when one of its targets, a Colorado company, exposed it — via news release. The company, Coast Independent Review Board, said it had been duped by federal officials last year when it agreed to oversee a study of Adhesiabloc, a product designed to reduce scar tissue after surgery. As it turns out, there is no such product. Its developer, Device Med-Systems, does not exist. And neither, apparently, does Dr. Jonathan Q. Kruger, the Virginia doctor with a four-page curriculum vitae who was supposedly leading the research. “The fraudulent trial was apparently commenced as part of a Congressional ‘sting’ operation,” Coast, which is based in Colorado Springs, said in its release. The company’s president, Daniel Dueber, said he believed the operation was an unwarranted effort by the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight to embarrass firms like his. The subcommittee, whose chairman is Bart Stupak, Democrat of Michigan, has been investigating companies and others that monitor the safety of patients in medical studies. Critics contend that too many of the companies in that business may be slipshod in monitoring trials because they do not want to alienate the companies that pay them, a contention that officials like Mr. Dueber rejects. “They want to come out of this grandstanding” he said, referring to the House subcommittee. Nick Choate, a spokesman for Mr. Stupak, declined to comment on the inquiry. But he said that Coast would be part of a hearing later this month, and “all the facts related to this investigation will be discussed at that time.” The undercover investigation of the trial industry was conducted by the Government Accountability Office , a research arm of Congress, at the subcommittee’s request, a G.A.O. spokesman said. Medical experts say that companies that oversee clinical trials need, at the very least, to be familiar with the sponsors of the trials and to ensure that the doctors are qualified to conduct them and are in good standing with state medical boards. As for Coast, its due diligence seems to have started late. In a telephone interview, Mr. Dueber said his firm began investigating the bona fides of the Adhesiabloc study last week — five months after it gave Device Med-Systems approval to begin its clinical trial. Prompting that credential check was a letter from Mr. Stupak’s panel inviting Mr. Dueber to Washington to testify about the study. In the days since, Mr. Dueber said the company discovered that the address given for Device Med-Systems, the site where the study was supposed to be conducted, was a store that rents mail boxes in a strip mall in Clifton, Va. He also learned that the Virginia medical licenses of the physicians involved in the study were fake, including the one for the principal investigator, Dr. Kruger. (There is an ophthalmologist named Dr. Jonathan P. Kruger who is licensed in Virginia; he could not be reached for comment on Thursday.) Asked why Coast had not undertaken those background checks when it agreed last October to monitor the study, Mr. Dueber said it never occurred to him that anyone would develop a study that was not real. He added that the only issue raised in October by Coast’s medical board, which includes several real doctors, was a request for revisions in the study’s patient consent form. A Coast official, he said, had spoken by phone with the supposed head of Device Med-Systems, who identified himself as Paul Jennings and agreed to make the requested changes. “It was very congenial,” Mr. Dueber said. He said that Coast had followed all federal rules in approving the Adhesiabloc study, but that the company had now revised its own policies. As for the undercover investigation, signs of it were still visible on Thursday. The Web site for Device Med-Systems was still operating, as was a telephone number for the company. Calls placed to Dr. Jonathan Q. Kruger and Paul Jennings at the number listed for Device Med-Systems were not returned.
|
Medicine and Health;Tests and Testing;Coast Independent Review Board;Government Accountability Office
|
ny0080369
|
[
"nyregion"
] |
2015/02/24
|
For Enterprising Few, a Humble Patch of Newark to Build a Dream On
|
NEWARK — As the wind gusted down Broad Street on Feb. 14, the signs snapped against the metal police barricades encircling City Hall. “Lines will be allowed to form for the St. Valentine’s Day Land Sale at 7 a.m. The City of Newark has declared a Code Blue. Standing outside in a stationary position for more than 2 hours could be physically dangerous in this extreme cold. Please come back at 7 a.m.” The signs proved all but useless. Before the sun had even set the day before, more than a dozen people had lined up to be the first to buy a vacant lot, in a city still woefully full of them, for just $1,000. By the time the doors opened at 9 a.m., more than 500 huddled on the limestone steps, up the sidewalk and around the corner. With only 100 lots available on a first-come, first-served basis, less than half of those gathered would leave with what they came for. Still they waited, in the hope that they might make it into City Hall and, someday, into new homes built on those lots. “New York is saturated,” said Gerson Robles, who drove in at dawn from Astoria, Queens, with his cousin Moses, winding up as No. 77 in line. “There’s no real opportunities left; investors are buying up everything.” He was not alone in his frustrations or his journey. The sale lured people from all five wards of Newark, all five boroughs of New York and at least five continents: the Portuguese and the Brazilians who live in the nearby Ironbound neighborhood; Koreans and Midwesterners from Jersey City; a Cameroonian family who rode the subway four hours from Jamaica, Queens; and Ali Shah, a graduate student from London with a Cambridge Ph.D., now studying for an M.B.A. at Rutgers. “I’m living the American dream,” said Mr. Shah, whose Hashemite parents had themselves immigrated to England from Pakistan. “I got my green card last March, my wife is seven months pregnant and we’re about to build a home in one of the most exciting places.” Image Thurman Jordan, 40, of East Orange, N.J., was among those who lined up outside City Hall in Newark for a sale of municipally owned vacant lots. 1 / 8 It had almost seemed a gimmick when Mayor Ras Baraka announced the homesteading sale a week earlier. By dressing it up as a Valentine’s Day event, the administration hoped to emphasize that Newark, where 29 percent of the 277,000 residents live below the poverty line, was a place for families — families who saw value in properties that their previous owners had long since given up on. That is why the buyers had to be couples, though any pairing would do: married or not, straight or gay, relatives or just friends. And the couples had to agree to spend many times more than $1,000 in the end. Those lucky enough to get a plot must close on it within three months, build a home within 18 and then spend five years living there, all under the watchful eye of City Hall. They will not be obliged to pay property taxes during that span, and some financial assistance is available, but if they fail to follow through, they will be fined and could face repossession. Inside City Hall’s cavernous but crowded rotunda, couples clutched their red tickets, stamped with hearts and their precious number in line, while mortgage officers, architects and contractors peddled their services. Rafael Cura had arrived at 4 p.m. the afternoon before to secure the first spot in line. He and his wife, Ana Rezende, moved here seven years ago from Brazil, the birthplace of half of the first 10 couples. Also like many in line, Mr. Cura works in construction and has often contemplated building his own home. “It’s our dream, at a dream price,” Ms. Rezende said. Shannon Guy and her husband, John Errico, in the No. 7 spot, had already renovated two fixer-uppers in Union City after law school. Before driving over to Broad Street around 6 p.m., they scouted sites from a city-issued list. “I couldn’t think of a more romantic way to spend Valentine’s Day than building a future together,” Mr. Errico said. Those who had arrived the night before formed a fast bond, agreeing to camp out in idling cars and a van while everyone held onto their place in line. “I maybe slept for 30 minutes, between the excitement and the cold,” said Tal Shevah, No. 6. His Brazilian mother, uncle and cousin were all within the first 20 couples, and the group secured four lots near one another in the Central Ward. Image A vacant lot on Third Street in Newark that was purchased at the land sale on Feb. 14. Credit Yana Paskova for The New York Times Christina Coaker and Bern Woods, No. 18, live in Jersey City but have already begun the transition to Newark, attending church and gay pride events here. They recently shuttered their cafe, Steam, to relocate it. Some Newarkers bristled at the influx of outsiders. Karima Jackson, No. 111, was waiting in the lobby with her partner, Horatio Joines. Both were born and raised here. “It’s a nice incentive to give away city-owned lots to generate revenue for the city,” she said. “However, this should benefit the people who have been toughing it out in Newark all their lives.” (Still, she got a site, as did Mr. Shah, No. 103, because some of those who lined up in front of them gave up.) Julio Colon, Newark’s director of real estate and housing, said the city needed a mix of new and old residents for its revival. Ultimately, about a third of those who got lots live in Newark, a quarter were from New York, and the rest came from other parts of New Jersey . “Newark has had a stigma for a long time, but now people are banging down our door to get in,” Mr. Colon said. By noon, when officials were still calling out numbers in the 80s, every couple after the first 200 was sent home. Kristen Haff-Nichols and her husband, A. J. Nichols, three-year residents of Newark holding No. 99, decided to leave when they saw the dozen properties that were left. “It’s all bad areas,” Ms. Haff-Nichols said. “Don’t say that,” Mr. Nichols said. “There are no bad areas in Newark anymore!” For those who had their hearts broken, there is still hope. The city has at least 2,000 vacant lots it wants to redevelop, including 500 suitable for homes like these. “We’re already talking about a Mother’s Day sale,” Mr. Colon said.
|
Real Estate; Housing;Land use;Ras Baraka;New Jersey;Newark NJ
|
ny0082309
|
[
"world",
"americas"
] |
2015/10/20
|
U.S. Withholds $5 Million in Antidrug Aid to Mexico as Human Rights Rebuke
|
MEXICO CITY — In a rebuke to Mexico , the United States has decided to withhold $5 million in drug war aid because of continued human rights violations, the State Department confirmed Monday. The amount is just a small fraction of the overall aid that the United States supplies Mexico each year under a broad plan to train and equip its security forces and strengthen its criminal justice system. But the decision to withhold it offers a sharp message. “This is unprecedented,” José Miguel Vivanco, executive director of the Americas division of Human Rights Watch , said of the decision, which was first reported by The Washington Post . The State Department, he added, “has been systematically reluctant to use the leverage provided by law. What they have tended to emphasize is keeping the bilateral relationship as the principal objective, and human rights normally takes a back seat.” Under the terms of the Merida Initiative , the program to help Mexico fight drug cartels and organized crime, 15 percent of the funds set aside for the Mexican police and military are conditional, based on improvements in Mexico’s respect for human rights. In theory, the law was intended to encourage the Mexican government to take action, but in practice, the State Department typically reported each year that Mexico was complying, and the funds were released. “The U.S. government has engaged in all sorts of contortions” to avoid offending its central allies — Mexico and Colombia — in the drug war, Mr. Vivanco said. But after a year in which several highly publicized cases in Mexico, including the disappearance of 43 students , pushed the issue of human rights violations to the forefront, the State Department elected not to send a report. In the past, the funds had been delayed, but never withheld. “This year, the department was unable to confirm and report to Congress that Mexico fully met all of the criteria,” said Mark Toner, a deputy spokesman for the State Department. “The 15 percent was redirected away from Mexico.” The money, amounting to about $5 million of the $195 million in approved Merida funding, went toward coca eradication in Peru. The Merida Initiative was devised in 2007 to provide assistance to the Mexican government as it fought powerful drug gangs with seemingly infinite power to corrupt officials at every level. Since then, Congress has appropriated about $2.5 billion in Merida aid. The money has gone to a wide variety of needs, including helicopters for the police and military, training for judges and prosecutors, forensic laboratories for investigators, and X-ray equipment for customs posts. Mexico’s Foreign Ministry did not directly confirm the aid cut, but indicated the government’s displeasure with the decision in Washington. “The U.S. government has recognized Mexico’s determination and progress to address particular human rights challenges,” the ministry said in a statement. “Bilateral dialogue and cooperation are the appropriate ways to address the current challenges in this regard,” the statement added. But Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who was responsible for the law placing the conditions on the 15 percent of aid, said, “The violence that infects large parts of Mexico, and the impunity for Mexican police and military officers who are corrupt or violate human rights, call into question the effectiveness of the current strategy.” Mr. Leahy added, “We have yet to see the political will necessary to effectively address these problems.” Maureen Meyer, a Mexico expert at the Washington Office on Latin America , a human rights group, said that Mexican officials regularly met with congressional staff members to convince them that Mexico was working to improve compliance on human rights. “That only gets you so far when the reality on the ground is so different,” she said. In addition, Ms. Meyer said, Congress had strengthened the conditions for the 15 percent of police and military aid since 2013, asking for evidence that the Mexican government was moving forward on eliminating torture and solving disappearances. Repeated cases over the past year have cast a harsh light on the Mexican government’s failure to rein in the abuses of its security forces and to solve cases. In particular, the disappearance of 43 students in the southern state of Guerrero in September 2014 has come to represent the yawning gap between Mexico’s public commitment to respecting human rights and the turmoil in the states subsumed in drug violence. The government of President Enrique Peña Nieto said that the students had been attacked and abducted by corrupt local police officers, who handed them over to a local drug gang called Guerreros Unidos. Hit men from the drug gang confessed that the young men, who were training to become rural teachers, were transported to a remote garbage dump, killed and burned to ashes on a diesel-fueled pyre of tires and wood. But an independent investigation by a group of experts appointed by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights concluded last month that the students could not have been incinerated at the dump as the government described. The group also found that the military and the federal police were aware of the initial police attack on the students and did nothing to halt it. In another high-profile case, soldiers killed 22 people , suspected of being members of a drug gang, in what the military and civilian authorities first described as a shootout last year. But Mexico’s national human rights commission later found that at least 12 of them had been executed. Prosecutors initially charged seven soldiers and one lieutenant in the killings. After judicial rulings, only three soldiers remain to face trial in the case. At the end of a recent visit to Mexico, Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, the United Nations commissioner for human rights, gave a stinging condemnation of the government’s failure to correct the violations and to prosecute crimes. “For a country that is not engaged in a conflict, the estimated figures are simply staggering: 151,233 people killed between December 2006 and August 2015, including thousands of transiting migrants,” he said this month. “Thousands of women and girls are sexually assaulted, or become victims of the crime of femicide,” he added. “And hardly anyone is convicted for the above crimes.” Mr. al-Hussein also pointed to the 26,000 people who remain missing in Mexico. While organized crime groups are behind many of these disappearances, he said, security forces are believed to be responsible for many of the disappearances, extrajudicial killings and acts of torture. Since taking office almost three years ago, Mr. Peña Nieto has promised to resolve those cases, but there has been almost no progress.
|
Mexico;Human Rights;Drug Abuse;Foreign Aid;US;Enrique Pena Nieto
|
ny0108019
|
[
"business"
] |
2012/05/04
|
Higher Prices Help Kraft Raise Profit
|
Kraft Foods reported on Thursday that its first-quarter net income rose 1.8 percent as it charged higher prices for its packaged foods and its sales rose in developing markets. Kraft, the parent company of Nabisco, Velveeta, Miracle Whip and other brands, said it earned $813 million, or 46 cents a share, in the first three months of the year. A year earlier, its net income was $799 million, or 45 cents a share. Excluding one-time items like revamping costs, the company earned 57 cents a share. That was a penny more than analysts expected, according to FactSet. Net revenue for the quarter rose 4 percent to $13.1 billion, from $12.57 billion a year ago. Higher costs for ingredients reduced Kraft’s gross profit margin to 35.6 percent from 36.9 percent. But other costs fell, including selling, general and administrative expenses, which declined 4 percent, to $2.82 billion, for the quarter. Kraft Foods is preparing to split into two publicly traded companies this year. One company will focus on its international snack brands, like Cadbury. The other will concentrate on its North American grocery business, which includes Oscar Mayer meats. In North America, the company said, net revenue rose 1.3 percent with help from the price increases and the timing of Easter. Net revenue from Europe rose 4.5 percent, while net revenue from developing markets rose 8.5 percent as a result of both higher pricing and increased volume. The company stood by its outlook for operating earnings per-share growth of at least 9 percent. Shares of Kraft lost 11 cents in regular trading to close at $39.59.
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Company Reports;Kraft Foods Inc
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ny0287988
|
[
"sports",
"olympics"
] |
2016/08/21
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Ryan Lochte’s Evolving Story Faced Little Resistance From NBC
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NBC, the exclusive television home of the Olympics, became the exclusive repository of the Olympic swimmer Ryan Lochte’s dubious tale of a gunpoint robbery in Rio de Janeiro last Sunday morning. At once sensational, then debunked, Lochte’s terrifying yarn resurrected memories of Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te’o’s strange story three years ago about a dead girlfriend, one that Deadspin exposed as a hoax. Lochte spoke on the beach to Billy Bush of the “Today” show several hours after the incident, and the video quickly became fodder for solid reports that led “NBC Nightly News” three times and others that were carried by MSNBC and “Today.” On Wednesday, in a telephone interview with the “Today” co-anchor Matt Lauer for a report that was shown during NBC’s prime-time coverage, Lochte doubled down on his story, while changing some important details, of how he and three young swimmers, after a night of partying, were robbed at a gas station by men with badges and guns. The Evidence That Ryan Lochte Lied About an Armed Robbery in Rio Brazilian investigators said video evidence and witnesses showed that American swimmers had fabricated their account of being held up at gunpoint in Rio. On Saturday night, in a taped interview, Lauer spoke again to Lochte, who said that he had been intoxicated and had “over-exaggerated that story,” while sticking to the position that the swimmers had been coerced into giving money. “All we know is that there was a gun pointed in our direction, and we were demanded to give money,” Lochte said, though in the version told by the Brazilian police, the swimmers agreed to pay for the damage they had done at the station after armed guards threatened to call the police if they did not do so. In the initial interview, Bush listened intently as Lochte spun out his story, without really challenging him on the details. Bush, the new co-host of the third hour of “Today,” had the scoop of the Olympics: A star American athlete had been victimized by Rio street crime. Even if Bush had no reason to doubt Lochte, he could have asked what the men looked like, how much money was taken, what Lochte had done afterward or how he was feeling. Bush accepted the account, which included Lochte’s insistence that he had not gotten down on the ground at the request of one of the supposed robbers, whom he said had put a gun to his forehead. In a follow-up report on “Today” that traced Lochte’s route and used the interview video, the correspondent Keir Simmons said Lochte had “stood up to these guys; that was a brave and dangerous thing to do.” Lochte’s version had, in essence, co-opted NBC. Image Days after Lochte finished fifth in the men’s 200-meter individual medley at the Rio Olympics, he began telling a story about being robbed at gunpoint. Credit Clive Rose/Getty Images It was a risky thing for NBC to televise without stronger vetting. The network takes NBC News reporters to the Games but hopes nothing terrible will interrupt the Olympics as a sports and entertainment vehicle. Now it had a crime story about Lochte, the publicity-loving swimmer and popular second fiddle to Michael Phelps, that was reported by Bush, who was best known until recently as the host of the fluffy “Access Hollywood” syndicated program. Sensational as it was, Lochte’s account needed more reporting before it entered NBC’s news ecosystem. Bush held onto his trust in Lochte’s account too long. By Thursday morning, the Brazilian authorities were tearing into the story. Yet on “Today,” Bush stood by it. He and Lauer were on “Today” discussing Lauer’s segment the night before. Lauer said that Lochte had altered his story to say a gun had been pointed in his general direction, and was cocked, not held to his head and ready to fire, as he had told Bush. Lochte also said his taxi had not been pulled over by the impostor officers but that they had approached him and the other swimmers after they had stopped at a gas station to use its bathroom. Still, Bush seems not to have felt those changes dramatically altered Lochte’s credibility. “The fact that he told this story so mellifluously,” Bush naïvely said, “makes me think he could not have invented the whole thing.” Ideally, Lauer, with his longer years of experience in breaking news, should have openly questioned Lochte’s credibility. The closest he came was in his prime-time appearance with Bob Costas. He said he had told Lochte that “there are people out there” who were skeptical and felt that he and the other swimmers might be covering up for “some other form of embarrassing behavior.” Lauer said that Lochte had denied fabricating the story and had insisted that he and his teammates were victims who were happy to be safe. By Friday morning, Lochte’s story was in tatters. Through security video and eyewitness accounts, including the sworn statements of two of the swimmers, the authorities said that Lochte was drunk and disorderly; that the group had vandalized the bathroom and urinated publicly; and that when the four men had tried to leave, they were stopped by two security guards with guns. Video Ryan Lochte and three other American swimmers claimed they were held up at gunpoint while taking a late-night taxi at the Rio Games, but the police said they lied. We retraced their steps that night. Credit Credit Police Handout, via Reuters Yet on “Today,” Bush got into an unusual spat with Al Roker while trying, it seemed, not to let his exclusive be fully ruined. “He lied,” Roker, usually the cheerful weatherman, said insistently. “He lied to you. He lied to Matt Lauer. He lied to his mom. He left his teammates hanging while he skedaddled.” Roker rejected Bush’s response that Lochte had “certainly lied about some details,” saying: “No, Billy, not some details. There was no robbery. There was no pullover. There was no gun to his head. There was nothing. He lied.” Bush, who at one point told Roker to calm down, finally conceded that there had been “embellishing moments” and “total untruths.”
|
Ryan Lochte;2016 Summer Olympics;NBC;Swimming;News media,journalism;TV
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ny0126695
|
[
"world",
"europe"
] |
2012/08/13
|
European Countries Compete to Attract, and Retain, Foreign Students
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THE HAGUE — British graduates looking to work at the supermarket chain Tesco might be surprised to learn that speaking Mandarin fluently and being open to a move to China can go a long way toward getting a good job with the company. “The fact that someone has a foreign cultural background can be advantageous,” said Nannette Ripmeester, who runs Expertise in Labor Mobility, an international job-matching company based in the Netherlands. Europe, like the rest of the global economy, increasingly needs highly educated workers. And like Tesco, a British company, many European businesses see value in workers who hold a domestic degree but bring an international background to the job. Despite the elimination of a visa program in Britain, a call to enforce visa rules strictly in France, and tuition fee increases in Britain and Sweden in recent years, experts say that most European countries are trying to attract foreign students in the hope that once trained they will stay and join the work force. As in the rest of the world, student migration is booming in Europe. In 2010, just under 850,000 non-Europeans were studying there, up from almost 660,000 in 2005, according to Unesco figures. European countries, however, have a harder time retaining foreign students after they graduate than “destination” countries like Australia, Canada and the United States, in part because the path to citizenship is seen as easier there and opportunities for social mobility are greater. “A lot of students are going abroad as a part of strategic career planning,” said Wei Shen, who is associate dean for China at Essca, a management school in France, and studies student migration. “They are not interested in permanent settlement in Europe.” Though some European nations naturally attract students from specific countries — France, for example, enjoys popularity among Africans from French-speaking nations — other countries are trying to increase their popularity among foreigners. A study released this year by the Migration Policy Group, a nonprofit organization, compared the strategies and success rates of five European countries — Germany, France, Britain, the Netherlands and Sweden — in attracting and retaining non-European students. The Netherlands, for example, was found to do well in retaining students in comparison with the other countries, not only because of its respected postsecondary institutions and relative good value of degrees, but also because bureaucratic forms were easily available and because English is widely spoken in the country, facilitating integration into society. “The language is not a barrier,” said Hans de Wit, a professor at Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences and an adviser on the study. “It is a positive factor in the Netherlands.” Of the five countries profiled, the Netherlands was least likely to be the first choice among foreign students who ended up studying there, with only 59.4 percent of respondents saying the country had been their preference. When doctoral students were asked whether they would be staying in their host country of choice, those who answered from the Netherlands were more likely to want to stay than those answering in France or Britain. The level of language proficiency among incoming students was much higher in Britain, France and Germany than in the Netherlands or Sweden, because the first three countries’ languages are more commonly spoken around the world. And, while all five countries offer programs entirely in English, living in Germany or France tends to be more difficult without a working knowledge of the national languages. Germany was found to have the highest percentage of students willing to say for the long term, with 12.5 percent predicting that they would stay five or more years after finishing their study. While the investment many make in learning the German language before or during study plays a role, a strong job market, especially in the engineering sector, also contributes to Germany’s success in retaining foreign graduates, said Ludger Pries, the chairman of the sociology department at the Ruhr-University in Bochum. “Germany got a lot from globalization,” he said, “and now there’s a big push to bring globalization to German firms.” Under a new law, Germany gives recently graduated foreigners more time to find employment — 18 months rather than 12 — and has made obtaining permanent residency easier for them, especially if they are fluent in German. Over all, however, a vast majority of students said that the quality or reputation of the university and study program was the most important factor in determining where to go. “All these countries want to market themselves as a leading student destination,” said Mr. Shen, who was an academic adviser on the study. While European officials and academics adjust postgraduate programs, language course subsidies and the availability of information in English, a change in national policy can quickly undo years of progress. For example, a memorandum released in May 2011, known as the circulaire Guéant after the interior minister who issued it, instructed French officials to adhere more strictly to regulations when processing work-visa requests. Stories of foreign students in France waiting vainly for their work visas affected France’s reputation as an attractive study destination. A year after the directive was issued, a new French government rescinded it. “It is very damaging for the country,” Mr. Shen said of the directive. “The perception of the students is very important.” Similarly, last April’s elimination of the Tier 1 visa in Britain, which allowed a two-year work permit for foreign graduates of British universities, had a negative effect on postgraduate integration. In June, the McKinsey Global Institute published a study predicting that the global economy would need an additional 38 million to 40 million college-educated workers by 2020. While many of these new jobs will be in Asia, Europe will need at least 16 million to 18 million more highly skilled workers, the study predicted. As the need for highly trained workers and the desire for multinational backgrounds increase, European governments and universities will continue to compete to attract foreign students and keep them in the country. Tesco, on the other hand, promises a permanent move to China after six months’ training in Hertfordshire, England.
|
Education;Europe;Tesco PLC;Colleges and Universities;Immigration and Emigration
|
ny0023746
|
[
"sports",
"baseball"
] |
2013/08/05
|
A Reminder of the Yankees’ Failed Plan Deals Them Another Defeat
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SAN DIEGO — The Yankees took a deep breath and exhaled Sunday before diving into the maw of whatever Alex Rodriguez drama awaited them on Monday and in the days beyond. And for a few hours, they set aside concerns about whether Derek Jeter was headed to the disabled list again. But if the Yankees were saved from looking toward an uncertain future, they were not spared from a painful look back during a 6-3 loss to the San Diego Padres in front of another capacity crowd at Petco Park. Five years ago, Phil Hughes and Ian Kennedy, along with Joba Chamberlain, represented a transition to what was supposed to be the next generation of Yankees dominance. The plan was that by the time Jeter, Rodriguez, Andy Pettitte, Jorge Posada and Mariano Rivera were approaching the end of their careers, the torch would be passed to the young pitchers, who would be the centerpieces of the franchise. That unfulfilled promise was on display Sunday when Hughes and Kennedy opposed each other, with the Padres lighting into Hughes early and Kennedy pitching well in his debut for San Diego. Chamberlain, now relegated to mop-up duty, pitched a scoreless ninth for the Yankees. It was the second consecutive day that Jeter did not play. The magnetic resonance imaging test that Jeter had Saturday showed a Grade 1 strain of his calf, the least severe strain. Manager Joe Girardi said before Sunday’s game that Jeter would be available to pinch-hit. But Jeter received treatment on his calf during the game, and he said he would not have been able to hit in the ninth inning, when the Yankees brought the tying run to the plate. Instead, the Yankees sent up Brent Lillibridge and Vernon Wells, both of whom struck out. Jeter said he thought a decision would be made Monday on whether he would return to the disabled list. Jeter returned last month after a lengthy recovery from the broken ankle he sustained during last season’s playoffs, only to land on the disabled list after one game with a quadriceps injury. He injured his calf, which he described as akin to being hit by a baseball, in his first game back. “It’s been terrible,” Jeter said. “It’s been a nightmare. The whole season has been a nightmare.” The season has also been a nightmare for Hughes, who has won once since June 6. He left the game with two outs in the third and the Yankees trailing, 5-0. Hughes repeatedly had trouble finishing off batters because he could not throw his slider for strikes and the Padres could wait on his fastball, even when behind in counts. Hughes allowed four hits, a walk and two sacrifice flies when he had two strikes on the batter. It was the eighth time in 21 starts that Hughes (4-10) had been unable to make it through five innings. Image Curtis Granderson driving in the Yankees’ first run with a sixth-inning single off Ian Kennedy, who was making his Padres debut. Credit Lenny Ignelzi/Associated Press “Having something to put guys away has been an issue,” said Hughes, who had high hopes for his matchup against Kennedy. His parents had driven from suburban Los Angeles to spend the weekend with him. Kennedy and Hughes were familiar with each other during their high school days in Orange County, Calif., and their relationship deepened when Hughes, a first-round pick in 2004, and Kennedy, a first-round pick in 2006 after he attended the University of Southern California, joined the Yankees alongside Chamberlain. The three players made their major league debuts in 2007, showing such potential that the Yankees placed Hughes and Kennedy in the rotation to start 2008, with the plan for Chamberlain to join them. By the end of that season, though, Kennedy and Hughes were back in the minors, and the Yankees, in Girardi’s first season, missed the playoffs for the first time since 1994. “It was a nightmarish season for both of us,” Hughes said Saturday, relaxing in the clubhouse. “It’s never easy to go through those kinds of growing pains, especially in a city like New York where you’re expected to win all the time no matter what.” Kennedy missed most of 2009 with an aneurysm, and he was dealt to Arizona after that season in the three-way trade that sent Curtis Granderson to the Yankees. Kennedy flourished in his second season there, compiling a 21-4 record and finishing fourth in the National League Cy Young Award voting. He regressed last season and had floundered this season before his trade at the deadline. On Sunday, Kennedy looked nothing like that pitcher. He moved the ball in and out and changed speeds skillfully, reminding fans why he once drew stylistic comparisons to his idol, Greg Maddux. He was the third opposing starter in the Yankees’ last four games to carry a shutout into the sixth, departing with two outs after allowing run-scoring singles by Granderson and Lyle Overbay. Kennedy had to calm himself during warm-ups. He was worried that he would be sidetracked by emotions in his first game against his good friend Hughes, the team that drafted him and Pettitte, his mentor. “I didn’t want to play for anybody else,” Kennedy said of the Yankees. “You want to play for the Yankees. They have that aura about them that they’re better than everybody else. That’s what you’re brought with in the minor leagues. You’re taught to win and be better than everybody.” Hughes’s problems on the mound have come at an inopportune time: he will be a free agent after the season. He won 18 games in 2010 and 16 last season, but he has not consistently fulfilled his promise. Hughes said he had seen Kennedy and another former teammate, A. J. Burnett, revive their careers in smaller markets. “You don’t want to say maybe I’m not cut out for this: that’s almost like a cop-out in my mind,” Hughes said. “But yeah, you see guys go over to the National League and have success, and you wonder.” It was that type of achievement, and wonder, that the Yankees, in a brief respite from the uncertain status of their stars, were reminded of by the presence of Hughes, Kennedy and Chamberlain — and what was once expected of them.
|
Baseball;Padres;Yankees;Ian Kennedy;Derek Jeter;Phil Hughes
|
ny0110384
|
[
"nyregion"
] |
2012/05/12
|
Bloomberg’s Charter School Battle Detailed in E-Mails
|
The city released hundreds of e-mail messages Friday, providing a behind-the-scenes look at one of the major battles of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg ’s administration, the 2010 campaign to expand charter schools , or, as one dramatic e-mail put it, the “fight of our life.” The e-mails, released in response to a Freedom of Information request by the city’s teachers’ union, detail the central role that Joel I. Klein , who was then the schools chancellor, took in the effort, including constant contact with charter school advocates and lobbyists for the city. They were then fighting to raise the statewide cap on charter schools to at least 400 from 200 and communicated regularly about their struggles to herd state lawmakers to their side and their exasperation with the union. The mayor and Mr. Klein supported charter schools, which are privately run with public money, as a way to offer parents in poor neighborhoods alternatives to underperforming schools. But teachers’ unions say charter schools, which are typically nonunionized, do not outperform regular schools and simply take space and resources from them. “We need to mobilize,” Mr. Klein wrote on the night of Jan. 18 to James Merriman, head of the New York City Charter School Center. “Every time we keep our powder dry, we shoot ourselves.” At one point, a member of the mayor’s legislative affairs staff e-mailed to say he was searching for someone to write an op-ed article supporting the mayor’s charter school stance and was hoping to recruit the Rev. A. R. Bernard, an influential pastor in Brooklyn. On Friday, Mr. Bernard said that he wrote the article, which appeared in The New York Post , with city officials’ input. The e-mails show that in February 2010, Mr. Klein and several charter school advocates participated in a phone call with the board members of the Robin Hood Foundation, a nonprofit group that fights poverty. The first attempt by charter advocates to get the State Legislature raise the charter cap had failed miserably, and the main advocacy group pushing for the higher cap, Education Reform Now, needed money for a second attempt, which was ultimately successful. Jessica Scaperotti, a spokeswoman for the Department of Education , said Mr. Klein did not ask the board members for money. “He was strictly talking about the charter school landscape and the political environment,” she said. But one of the callers on the line with Mr. Klein in 2010 said Friday that the chancellor did ask the Robin Hood board to commit more funding to Education Reform Now, rather than start its own lobbying organization. Mr. Klein told them “their philanthropy was going to amount to minuscule results unless they stepped it up,” said the caller, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Attempts to reach Mr. Klein through News Corporation, where he is now a top executive, were unsuccessful on Friday. Though Ms. Scaperotti said Mr. Klein did not fund-raise on the call, it is not clear whether any rule prohibited him from doing so. After everyone on the call had hung up, the rapid e-mailing resumed. “You were terrific,” Mr. Klein wrote to Bradley Tusk, a consultant for Education Reform Now. “Perfect pitch, perfect message.” “Who’s the heavy breather on the call?” wrote a participant, whose name was redacted. “Normally, I’d ask them to mute their phone but I don’t want to alienate any donors.” “Some overweight billionaire,” Mr. Klein replied.
|
Charter Schools;Bloomberg Michael R;Education Department (NYC);Klein Joel I;Robin Hood Foundation;New York City;Education (K-12)
|
ny0284336
|
[
"sports",
"tennis"
] |
2016/07/25
|
Italian Match Fixing Suspensions Imposed Amid Criticism of Tennis Watchdog
|
In a year of increased scrutiny of match fixing and the perceived inadequacy of the Tennis Integrity Unit, the sport’s designated watchdog, the highest profile conviction was brought by another governing body. The Federation of Italian Tennis last week barred Marco Cecchinato for 18 months and fined him 40,000 euros ($43,900) after he was accused of fixing two of his matches and using confidential information for gambling. Cecchinato, 23, of Palermo, Italy, is ranked 143rd in the world and is the youngest Italian man in the ATP top 250, making him easily the highest-profile player charged with such a violation in recent memory. He played in the main draws of the most recent United States Open, the Australian Open and the French Open, and he was part of the Italian Davis Cup team that lost to Argentina, 3-1, this month, although he did not play. Cecchinato has been seen as one of his country’s few bright spots in a disappointing generation of men’s players. He has denied any wrongdoing, and his lawyer, Antonino Reina, indicated to the Italian site Tennis Best that Cecchinato would appeal the decision in a federal court. If he loses the appeal, he cannot play again until January 2018. Two other Italians, unranked Riccardo Accardi and 842nd-ranked Antonio Campo, were also barred and fined in connection with the case. Accardi was barred for one year and fined 20,000 euros ($21,950), and Campo was given a ban of four months and a fine of 10,000 euros ($10,975). Many countries do not devote significant resources to policing match fixing in tennis, but Italian authorities have been among the most effective in the world at exposing improprieties. Last year, two other Italian players, Daniele Bracciali and Potito Starace, were barred for life by the federation for match fixing, but the federation’s appeals court cleared Starace and reduced Bracciali’s punishment to one year. The Tennis Integrity Unit rarely reveals any details of its work, but the Italian federation released a 47-page report on the Cecchinato case. The focus of the investigation was a quarterfinal match in October at an ATP Challenger Tour event in Mohammedia, Morocco. Cecchinato, who was at a career-best ATP ranking of 82nd that week, had won his previous two matches against higher-ranked opponents easily, but he lost to a qualifier, 338th-ranked Kamil Majchrzak of Poland, 6-1, 6-4, in 66 minutes. The upset loss did not raise suspicions, but the Autonomous Administration of State Monopolies, which regulates gambling in Italy, spotted unexpectedly large bets for Majchrzak to win the match in straight sets. Majchrzak, a clear underdog to win at 4 to 1, was an even longer shot, 7 to 1, to win in straight sets. Accardi and his father, Fabrizio, were the only people in Italy to place the straight-set bets, according to the administration. The Accardis used dozens of accounts across various sites to place bets of 800 euros, far more than the previous average of 50 to 100 euros. The investigation revealed that the younger Accardi and Cecchinato had become friends while playing as adolescents at the same tennis club in Palermo. They remained in close contact despite, as the federation’s report noted, that “the paths of the two had divided since Cecchinato had become a good world-class player while Accardi was sailing between the slums of the third category.” Cecchinato deleted his messages with Accardi, but investigators were able to recover their WhatsApp conversations from Accardi’s cellphone — which Cecchinato’s lawyer planned to cite in his appeal, saying it was a violation of privacy. In a conversation weeks before the match against Majchrzak, Cecchinato lamented to Accardi that he could have won 1,770 euros if an Italian league soccer match between Carpi and Napoli had gone his way, and he vaguely suggested that he could recoup the money in Morocco, noting that a poor Moroccan opponent might yield an opportunity. Accardi responded: “What Moroccans?” And Cecchinato replied: “Nothing … you did not understand? no … leave it alone.” As further corroboration of Cecchinato’s intention to fix the Majchrzak match, the federation pointed to the fact that he had purchased his plane ticket home before the match. The federation said Cecchinato had additionally altered the results of a doubles contest in a Challenger event in Prostejov, Czech Republic, months earlier. “I have the urge to go home,” Cecchinato wrote to the younger Accardi before that match. Cecchinato’s doubles partner, Luca Vanni, was fined 300 euros ($329) for his role in the match. The federation also said that, in addition to fixing the two matches, Cecchinato had given confidential information about a first-round match at last year’s French Open between Andreas Seppi, with whom Cecchinato shares a coach, and John Isner. Following Cecchinato’s recommendation, Accardi bet on Isner to win in straight sets because Seppi was injured. Cecchinato has said that the information was not confidential, because reports about Seppi’s health issues had been reported in the Italian news media. Cecchinato also received confidential information from Campo on a match involving Lorenzo Frigerio, the federation said. The Italian federation’s ban may not extend to countries outside Italy, but Reina said that Cecchinato did not plan to play during his ban. This would give the Tennis Integrity Unit, which has requested evidence from the Italian federation, time to catch up. A decision will be made about whether to charge the three players with “a corruption offense under the Tennis Anti-Corruption Programme,” the I.T.F. told the Associated Press last week. The integrity unit did release its quarterly briefing of alerts it had received of potentially suspicious betting activity earlier this month, citing 73 alerts. Separately, the European Sports Security Agency said tennis accounted for 83 percent of the dubious betting activity it had monitored in the second quarter of the year.
|
Tennis;Gambling;Fraud;International Tennis Federation;Marco Cecchinato;Italy;Cheating;Riccardo Accardi;Antonio Campo
|
ny0069592
|
[
"sports"
] |
2014/12/12
|
Army-Navy Game Is Setting for Larry Dixon to Complete Comeback
|
WEST POINT, N.Y. — A fumble at a critical time in the most important game that Army plays helped propel Larry Dixon to great heights. Dixon, a senior, will enter Saturday’s game against Navy in Baltimore with 3,098 rushing yards, more than any other Black Knights fullback. But he will also take into the game, his final collegiate contest, a bitter memory from two years ago, one he cannot shake as easily as he can defenders. Army seemed to be on the verge of completing a dramatic drive in the final minutes to win that game. But with open field ahead, Dixon was unable to secure a handoff from quarterback Trent Steelman. Navy recovered the ball at its 14-yard line with 1 minute 3 seconds left and closed out a 17-13 victory. The failure to convert that drive, which began at Army’s 17-yard line, was perhaps the nadir of the 12-game losing streak to Navy that the Black Knights (4-7) will take into Saturday’s showdown, the 115th edition of their storied rivalry with the Midshipmen (6-5). Image Dixon (third from left) celebrated with his Army teammates after they defeated Connecticut earlier this season at Yankee Stadium. Credit Bill Kostroun/Associated Press “I’ll never forget it,” Dixon said after a recent practice. “It’s always going to be in the back of my mind. But I try not to take it with me on the field.” Dixon, who is 5 feet 11 inches and 239 pounds, was almost inconsolable after the fumble brought an ignominious end to his sophomore season. His mother, Laura Ashley, was among those who tried to comfort him. “You could see he was very upset about it,” said Ashley, who was a senior chief petty officer in the Navy for 24 years. “I told him: ‘You can’t look back. You’ve got to move on.’ ” Terry Baggett, now a senior running back, recalled sitting beside Dixon in the film room, watching over and over as the screen showed Dixon, the first alternative in Army’s triple-option attack, failing to control the ball that Steelman extended to him. Somehow, the replays proved cathartic. “It’s one of those things that hurts, but if you don’t address it, that just makes the problem worse,” Baggett said. “You’ve got to go in and look at it. Even though it hurts, it’s going to make you better.” Image Dixon, at left in 2011, ranks fourth in Army’s history in rushing yards and has 11 games with at least 100. “I’ve been fortunate enough to play with really unselfish, hard-working linemen,” he said. Credit Angel Franco/The New York Times Dixon said after the game that he was battling fatigue; he estimated that he was 15 to 20 pounds overweight that season. From that point, he drew on memories of the fumble in the weight room and during conditioning drills and practices. “I was younger,” he said. “I felt I let the season get to me. It really helped push me to be the best conditioned I can possibly be toward the end of the season.” Dixon has carried 287 times for 1,743 yards and 15 touchdowns in the two years since then — and lost only one fumble. That came at Stanford, in Army’s second game this season. He has rushed for a career-high 1,028 yards and nine scores this year and recently passed Glenn Davis — a Heisman Trophy winner who played from 1943 to 1946, during Army’s glory days — as he moved to fourth in career rushing yards for the team. Mike Mayweather, who played from 1987 to 1990, tops the list with 4,299 yards, 1,201 more than Dixon. Dixon is tied for third in the program’s history with 11 games of at least 100 rushing yards. He is tied with Felix Blanchard, another Heisman winner who was known as Doc and played from 1944 to 1946, with 26 rushing touchdowns, sixth in the Army record book. He has averaged 6.1 yards per carry in his career. Much of the ground he has gained can be attributed to his grasp of the triple option, which is seldom used beyond the service academies, and his determination. N.C.A.A. Fan Map: How the Country Roots for College Football We’ve published maps showing where fan support for one team begins and another ends for baseball and basketball. Now we’re pleased to offer another one: the United States according to college football fans. “He knocks tacklers in the other direction to gain that extra yard,” said Jeff Monken, Army’s first-year coach. “He’s not gifted with great speed, but he’s powerful enough to get through there, and when he gets into the secondary, he’s been able to give us some pretty good runs.” Dixon’s selflessness may be more impressive than his statistics. “It’s a we thing,” he said. “I’ve been fortunate to play with a great set of running backs who block for me, a great set of wide receivers who get to the next level, and most important, I’ve been fortunate enough to play with really unselfish, hard-working linemen.” His attitude helped Dixon establish himself as the leader of the Black Knights. “The things he does on and off the field are truly inspirational,” Joe Drummond, a senior defensive lineman, said. “His work ethic, day in and day out, is something we all aspire to.” Dixon, an economics major who said Army provided him with needed structure, is not a loud leader. “He’s a hard worker who plays with great intensity, and his teammates really respect him,” Monken said. “When he opens his mouth to talk, which he doesn’t do a lot, he’s heard.” Although Army has not defeated Navy since a 26-17 decision at Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia on Dec. 1, 2001, Dixon said he felt certain that he and the rest of the senior class were poised for a triumph that would mean more than any other. “When we win,” Dixon said, “it’s not going to be just for us. It’s going to be for those who helped our class get here and the next guys. It would be a tremendous legacy.”
|
College football;Larry Dixon;Trent Steelman;West Point
|
ny0274464
|
[
"us"
] |
2016/02/20
|
Melissa Click, Missouri Professor, Defends Her Actions Against Student Journalist
|
In Melissa Click’s view, one of her worst moments happened to be caught on video and seen by millions of people. Ms. Click, a University of Missouri communications professor, was taking part in a student protest over racial issues in November when she grabbed at a student journalist’s camera and enlisted other activists to help her with a call that ricocheted across social media: “ I need some muscle over here! ” She has since apologized , and she has since been suspended by the university. Ms. Click has heeded advice to remain silent on social media and decline interview requests even as she was excoriated for what was viewed as an outrageous display by a member of academia. Some conservatives saw her as a thuggish symbol of speech-intolerant higher education, while journalists protested her attempt to restrict the ability to document events in a public area. A petition to fire her attracted more than 3,500 signatures, while more than 100 Republican lawmakers in Missouri called for her ouster . Now, nearly three months later, she has emerged to tell her side, backed by a public relations and reputation management firm, Status Labs, based in Texas. Her message: She didn’t like the person she saw in the video, either. “When I watch it, I am embarrassed and sorry,” she said in a telephone interview. “I see someone dealing with a high-stress situation who gets flustered. I see a moment where I feel like I’m not representing my best self, and I see somebody who’s trying to do her best to help marginalized students. “I try to remember that’s only one moment of a full day, and only one moment in a 12-year career,” she said. Attempts by ordinary people to recover their reputations after spectacular downward spirals as public villains du jour is an emerging art form and business opportunity. Status Labs has worked pro bono to arrange Ms. Click’s interviews and distribute professional head shots to replace the more commonly known image of her: a blurry, mid-yell frame from the YouTube video. Mark Schierbecker, the student behind the camera, who described himself as an independent journalist, said he had intended to upload any video he took that day to Wikipedia, which he often edits, and was not on assignment for any student or professional organization the day of the protests. (Before his encounter with Ms. Click, Mr. Schierbecker captured footage of Tim Tai, a student photographer on freelance assignment for ESPN, also being blocked from covering the protest.) Mr. Schierbecker said he interpreted Ms. Click’s call for “muscle” as a threat that he would be physically removed, and that her grabbing at his camera led him to wonder how far she would go. He said when other protesters put their hands on him to escort him away, he left. “I decided the story just wasn’t worth getting hurt over.” The backlash put Ms. Click in legal and professional hot water. In January, she agreed to 20 hours of community service for the misdemeanor third-degree assault charge against her. The university suspended her in January pending its own investigation. Few have publicly come to her defense, and her lack of public statements left only one narrative to swirl in the news and on social media. “When she stays silent, everyone assumes that she was guilty of something, and the vacuum gets filled by, often times, trolls, detractors and people who dislike her,” said Darius Fisher, the president of Status Labs. In the recent interview, Ms. Click acknowledged making mistakes, painting herself as passionate for the cause but saying she was unprepared for crowd-control duties. She said she was first drawn to Concerned Student 1950, the group that gathered to protest racial issues on campus, at the university’s homecoming parade in October. There, she witnessed an angry crowd respond to the students. “I didn’t want them to feel alone,” she said. The November day she was filmed in the YouTube video, the atmosphere on campus was tense. Racial incidents had unfolded throughout the semester, she said, and the black student group was protesting from a tent encampment in the center of campus. The night before, a truck with a Confederate flag had driven around near the campsite, which the students interpreted as an intimidation tactic. The morning the video was shot, the university’s president, Timothy Wolfe, had stepped down . The protesting students had spent hours talking to the news media, Ms. Click said, but asked for a break so they could prepare for a news conference. At that point, a human wall formed around the campsite to keep reporters out. When Ms. Click spotted Mr. Schierbecker, she said, she was suspicious of him and didn’t believe he was with the media. The students’ protocol for perceived threats was to involve some of the bigger protesters to defuse the situation, she said, hence her call for “muscle.” “I wasn’t prepared for that interaction,” she said, adding that she wished she had taken the time to “respectfully converse” with the student. “I certainly didn’t mean what I said to be a call for violence,” she said. Mr. Schierbecker, in a telephone interview, said he had watched and read most of Ms. Click’s recent interviews, but was not sold on her explanation. “I think she still has a lot to own up to,” he said. “I don’t believe her when she says I caught her in an odd moment.” Ms. Click’s efforts to recast her narrative have been further complicated by the release last week of a video from the October homecoming parade that shows her cursing at a police officer trying to move protesters off a road. She defended that reaction as most likely being “fairly common for people pushed by police unexpectedly in the middle of an angry crowd.” In a statement , however, the interim university chancellor, Hank Foley, said, “Like many in our community, I watched newly released footage of Dr. Melissa Click directing a verbal assault against members of the Columbia Police Department during the homecoming parade in October 2015. Her conduct and behavior are appalling.” He described her actions as “just another example of a pattern of misconduct by Dr. Click,” adding, “We must have high expectations of members of our community.” Ms. Click, a mother of three, said she was nevertheless surprised and disappointed that she became the national focus, instead of the protests or the racial issues. Her goal, she said, is to continue working for the university. “I love my job,” she said. “I’m good at it, and yeah, I think I have a lot of good left to do with the University of Missouri.”
|
Video Recordings; Downloads and Streaming;Civil Unrest;Melissa Click;University of Missouri;Missouri
|
ny0023316
|
[
"sports",
"autoracing"
] |
2013/09/14
|
Baltimore Grand Prix Canceled
|
The Baltimore Grand Prix has been canceled for 2014 and 2015 after organizers could not find a date for the race. The IndyCar event was staged on Labor Day weekend in each of the past three years. But next year the city will host a football game between Ohio State and Navy. In 2015, the American Legion will be assembling at the Baltimore Convention Center.
|
Car Racing;Indy Racing League,IndyCar;Baltimore
|
ny0256116
|
[
"technology"
] |
2011/08/27
|
Apple Ends Its TV Episode Rental Service
|
Nearly a year after Apple persuaded the television networks to try out a television episode rental service through its iTunes store, it has quietly taken the service down. Customers, it seems, did not want to rent TV episodes through an online store. “iTunes customers have shown they overwhelmingly prefer buying TV shows,” an Apple spokesman said Friday, confirming the take-down. The slight retreat by Apple comes two days after Tim Cook was named the chief executive of Apple, replacing Steve Jobs, who was named chairman. And it comes at a time when the company is widely believed to have its industry-disrupting sights set on the television industry. The company has sold episodes of TV shows through iTunes for years for $1.99 to $2.99. The sales have been beneficial for Apple and for television networks, but have not had major effects on consumer behavior. The rental service, announced last fall, was an experiment of sorts to see if a lower price point and a short viewing window would entice consumers and encourage sales of the Apple TV product. But as Apple’s statement indicated, rentals did not take off. The News Corporation , which owns the Fox network, said in a statement that after studying the results of the experiment, “it became clear that content ownership is a more attractive long-term value proposition both for iTunes customers and for our business.” News Corp. said it was working with Apple to make TV shows available within iTunes in the Cloud, a new online service that makes content more portable by securely storing it online. In its statement Friday, Apple promoted the new service, saying that it lets users “enjoy their programming whenever and however they choose.” The Walt Disney Company, which owns ABC, also offered some shows for rent; the company did not respond to a request for comment Friday evening.
|
Television;Computers and the Internet;Apple Incorporated;iTunes;News Corp
|
ny0243074
|
[
"nyregion"
] |
2011/03/30
|
Planned Downtown Mosque Could Become an Interfaith Center
|
Two co-founders of the plan to build a Muslim community center and mosque in downtown Manhattan have begun exploring a new, and possibly competing, project: an interfaith cultural center that they said might be located at the currently proposed site, two blocks from ground zero, or elsewhere in the neighborhood. Daisy Khan , the executive director of the American Society for Muslim Advancement, said on Tuesday that she and her husband, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf , two co-founders whose involvement in the controversial community center plan was curtailed this year after a falling out with their real estate partner, might develop a new project that was “larger in concept” than what is now proposed at 51 Park Place. The new project would be interfaith in character, rather than predominantly Islamic, she said, and it would include a center for inter-religious conflict resolution. Ms. Khan’s comments, made at a luncheon held by the women’s magazine More and attended by reporters, were the first in which the couple indicated a willingness to put their names behind a different religious mission in the city. “Once we are ready to announce our new vision, we will talk to the property owner and see if it is the right location for us,” she said, referring to Sharif el-Gamal , the real estate developer and onetime protégé of Mr. Abul Rauf’s. Mr. Gamal announced in January that Ms. Khan and the imam, who first conceived the idea of a downtown Muslim community center, would no longer speak or raise money for the planned project, known as Park51 , though the imam would remain on its board of directors. “We had the vision. We still have the dream,” Ms. Khan said. “The location is not the dream, my friend.” A spokesman for Mr. Gamal said the developer had no comment. Whether either alternative comes to fruition will depend on the ability of each camp to raise the estimated $100 million in public and private funds needed. Since plans for Park51 were announced last summer, and drew angry protests from some politicians and families of 9/11 victims who considered it insensitive to build a Muslim center so close to ground zero, no management staff has been hired, no members have been named to the project’s board and no money has been raised. Park51 was registered as a charitable organization with the state attorney general’s office. But its application to the Internal Revenue Service for designation as a tax-exempt organization — crucial to its ability to solicit tax-deductible donations — has been under review for six months without a decision. The rift between the two factions is partly personal, and partly based on differences of vision, spokesmen for the two sides have said. Mr. Abdul-Rauf and Ms. Khan initially conceived the project, which they referred to as Cordoba House, as a community center for the neighborhood grafted to a kind of world headquarters for interfaith dialogue — a place where tourists from around the globe might come to learn about other people’s religions. Mr. Gamal, a businessman, had always favored a more down-to-earth approach, focused on providing much-needed downtown facilities like an indoor swimming pool, and prayer space for the large population of Muslims who work in the financial district. On Tuesday, Ms. Khan said that since last summer, she and her husband had been meeting privately with family members of 9/11 victims and first responders in an effort to understand the source of some of the opposition to the original idea. She said that as a result of those meetings, the story of the 9/11 families “will be housed in our center.”
|
World Trade Center (NYC);September 11 (2001);Khan Daisy;Park51;Rauf Feisal Abdul al-;Mosques;El-Gamal Sharif
|
ny0115358
|
[
"sports",
"basketball"
] |
2012/11/15
|
In Top Form, Knicks’ J. R. Smith Hits a Career Low in Ego
|
SAN ANTONIO — A lot of words can be used to describe J. R. Smith. He can be volatile, headstrong and eccentric. And when things are going well, he can also be a significant contributor. Smith is an important reason the Knicks are 5-0 heading into Thursday’s road game against the San Antonio Spurs . For five games, Smith has not disrupted the Knicks’ rhythm on offense. He has not forced many shots with most of the time remaining on the shot clock. He has not been a problem for Coach Mike Woodson. Instead, Smith has helped give the Knicks balance on offense and tenacity on defense. In his eighth N.B.A. season, Smith is playing 33 minutes per game, a career high. He is also doing more with his time on the court. According to John Hollinger’s player-efficiency ratings, an advanced statistic he developed at ESPN, Smith’s rating of 23.22 ranked 10th in the N.B.A. entering Wednesday among players who had played at least five games this season. Smith is averaging 18.2 points, 4.8 rebounds and 3.2 assists — all higher than his career averages. He is also shooting 49.3 percent from the floor. “I’m loving it right now,” Smith said of his role as the Knicks’ sixth man. “I’m just playing my game and playing with confidence. I’m getting a chance to make plays for my teammates. Coach is giving me a lot of opportunities, so I love it.” Smith was instrumental in the Knicks’ last two victories, over the Dallas Mavericks and the Orlando Magic. He became one of the Knicks’ primary scorers in the second half of each game. Against the Magic on Tuesday, he scored 12 of his 21 points in the third quarter. “I thought he was the one that got us going offensively,” Jason Kidd said after the game. “I thought him just taking his time and finding his shot put a lot of pressure on the defense.” Smith is doing more than excelling on offense. He has made 11 steals this season. “I feel I have to make plays more than just scoring,” Smith said. “I have to make the little plays. I have to get rebounds. I have to try to get Steve Novak going. I have to make sure Tyson Chandler and Rasheed Wallace are still getting their shots as well.” Woodson knows Smith’s statistics explain only part of his improvement. During the off-season, Smith worked out twice a day for two months. He also made it a goal to become the team’s starting shooting guard with Iman Shumpert and Ronnie Brewer rehabilitating from knee injuries. Woodson, however, said during training camp that he wanted Smith to come off the bench. Woodson’s decision upset Smith, and he said as much before the Knicks played their first preseason game. Woodson, though, reminded Smith of what he said to the players during their first dinner together before training camp. “I told everybody they had to leave their egos at the door,” Woodson said. “If we’re talking about trying to win our division and win a title, you have to leave your ego. I’m not going to deal with guys who have bad egos.” Smith’s teammates reiterated Woodson’s message. Within a few days, Smith began to focus on doing his best to give the Knicks a lift whenever he entered the game. “What they really needed was for me to come off the bench,” Smith said of his teammates. “It wasn’t really a disappointment, because I could still help my team.” Smith has helped the Knicks — mostly because he has not been the player he was last season. He has stayed out of legal trouble and has not posted an inappropriate photo on Twitter, as he did in March. Also, at Woodson’s request, he has arrived at games in suits rather than jeans. “He’s really more professional about his approach,” Woodson said. “I think that has a lot to do with his play, and he feels good about himself. I think he’s taken full advantage of his playing time.” REBOUNDS Ronnie Brewer sat out practice Wednesday because of swelling in his left knee. Mike Woodson said Brewer, who was listed as probable for Thursday’s game, did not participate for precautionary reasons. His leg was in a compression device to help reduce the swelling. Brewer, who had arthroscopic knee surgery in September, felt soreness early in the third quarter of Tuesday’s win over the Magic. He did not return after Woodson took him out of the game. “His knee is a little sore, but he’ll play,” Woodson said. “I just have to be a little bit careful in terms of how many minutes I play him.”
|
Smith J R;New York Knicks;Basketball;Woodson Mike;San Antonio Spurs
|
ny0185936
|
[
"sports",
"baseball"
] |
2009/03/01
|
A Maine College Baseball Team That Is Always on the Road
|
Two days after leaving the Canadian border town of Presque Isle, Me., the bus with 14 players, 2 coaches and a manager pulled into a lot at the baseball field of Ferrum College in western Virginia. The drive had been 22 hours, but for this baseball team, the journey was finally over. Or was it just beginning? This February day’s doubleheader against Ferrum would be the first of 37 successive away games scheduled for the University of Maine at Presque Isle team this year. Because winter can last until May in northern Maine, Presque Isle routinely plays its entire season on the road. With their campus 400 miles north of Boston, the Owls have not played a home baseball game since 2005, when there were two. “You can either complain that the baseball field is buried under six feet of snow, or you drive to where you can play baseball,” said Tyler Delaney, a junior infielder. “We don’t complain.” Waiting for batting practice to start at Ferrum, the players in the bus, none of whom have ever played a home game, were buttoning their jerseys and pulling on game socks when a woman approached and knocked on the door. Two lines of written script are on the side of the blue-and-white bus: The University of Maine at Presque Isle North of Ordinary When the bus door opened, the woman peered inside and asked in a drawl, “Where’s Ordinary?” The nation’s prominent college sports of basketball and football are flashed across television screens around the clock, a big-money, high-stakes enterprise awash in excess. Unseen but nonetheless part of the same intercollegiate athletic community are teams like Presque Isle, bumping along the quiet country back roads of Virginia looking for a game. “Believe me, we know the difference between them and us,” first baseman D. J. Charette said the next day as the bus rolled down Interstate 81. “Their sport got them an athletic scholarship, and they might see it as a career. We aren’t in that world. We just want to play.” Presque Isle has had a baseball team since at least the 1940s, about the time the Army built an airstrip there, from which scores of World War II fighter planes departed for Europe. The Presque Isle baseball teams have always been road warriors. But in an era of all-weather playing surfaces and expansive indoor college athletic complexes, this team may be the only college baseball squad in the nation to regularly play all its games on the road. The university, known as U.M.P.I., which the locals pronounce “Um-Pea,” has teams in N.C.A.A. Division III and in the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics. Representatives from each organization said they had no record of any other baseball teams routinely playing entire seasons without a home game. The boys of winter from Presque Isle play on, laughing when opposing players tease them about frostbite or ask if they brought any snow with them in the bus. Their closest opponent, Daniel Webster College in Nashua, N.H., is about seven hours away. Presque Isle’s only winter practice facility is in a basketball gymnasium, making the first fly balls and pop-ups of the season an adventure. Because every extra dollar is poured into the extensive travel budget, there is not money for technologically advanced bats. Their helmets are clearly a few years old. The roster was small, at 14 players, for the weeklong eight-game trip against six Virginia programs, so almost everyone had to pitch occasionally, whether they liked pitching or not. The players get $15 a day for food. They stayed in budget hotels, four to a room for $60 at a Howard Johnson’s last month. There are no athletic scholarships, and their bus lacked a restroom. They are literally and figuratively miles away from the pumped-up, high-price world of professional baseball. “We do it for the love of the game,” the senior Brandon Elie said. “We do it because we’ve been playing since we were in T-ball, and we don’t want to stop.” Charette added: “No one should feel sorry for us. This is fun. I feel sorry for all the people who don’t get to play college baseball.” The late afternoon sky was a mix of snow and hail when the Presque Isle bus left Maine to start the Virginia trip. The team could have left earlier, before the storm, but Coach Leo Saucier did not want any player to miss a class. Despite all the travel, Saucier’s players work in tandem with the college’s faculty to minimize absences and to make up homework or take tests early, even if that means extra, advance studying. The trip’s first stop was Boston. The second day brought 15 hours on the road, counting several stops for food and bathroom breaks. When they arrived at their Virginia hotel at 11 p.m., the players unpacked the team’s bags and equipment, which could fill a small U-Haul. When a player entered the hotel lobby, he would remove his cap or hat, acknowledging a team rule adopted and enforced by the players. “We want to show respect for the hotels and restaurants we visit,” first baseman Andrew Parker said later. “We don’t want anyone to say anything bad about that Maine team they saw one day.” The Maine visitors lost both games of the opening-day doubleheader at Ferrum College, and a day later, against the Division III powerhouse Lynchburg College, the Presque Isle visitors were behind, 15-1, in the fifth inning. With two outs and a runner at third base, every player and coach in the Presque Isle dugout was on his feet cheering as Delaney doggedly worked the count to 3-2. He then fouled off seven consecutive pitches. Delaney, a Nova Scotia native and the only player on the Presque Isle roster not from Maine, eventually grounded out to shortstop. But his teammates met him as he came off the field, touching fists and handing out high-fives. “We rely on each other because we are all we have,” said Clint Carter, a sophomore pitcher. “We never have any fans cheering us. It’s easy to give up. We pick each other up instead.” The next day, playing their fourth game in three days — after a layoff of nearly nine months — the Presque Isle pitching staff looked weary in an 18-0 loss at Roanoke College. “No one likes to lose, but I admired those kids and what they’ll go through to play,” Roanoke Coach Larry Wood said. “We lined up after the game to shake hands, and they all looked you in the eye and wished you luck. I can’t say that about a lot of teams.” After the game, the team found a parking lot in walking distance of a Sonic, a Burger King and a Pizza Hut. Players scattered, meal money in hand. “When you practice in a gym, you don’t come down here expecting to go 8-0,” Saucier said, waiting in the parking lot. “This is meant to help us get ready for the rest of our schedule and do what athletics is supposed to do — teach the value of teammates, teach responsibility and maybe some other life lessons, too.” The Presque Isle baseball team was 5-20 last season, a major improvement from a couple of winless seasons earlier in the decade. Scanning the team’s spring schedule of games across New England and New York, Saucier said he thought this season’s team could reach double digits in victories. By 9 p.m., the bus had rumbled back to the team hotel. Some players immediately alighted for the laundry room with bundles of dirty socks. Some did homework. Some did both. The majority fell asleep with televisions turned to ESPN. The next day’s game was at Shenandoah University. In a twist the Presque Isle players found unbelievable, it was nearly snowed out. Instead, it was moved back a few hours. The players used the delay to crowd into their already crowded rooms and when prodded, wondered what it would be like to play major college athletics: traveling in jets, playing before packed grandstands, staying in swanky hotels. “I’d settle for a home game that my parents could come to,” Elie, the lone senior on the team, said. Delaney said: “I don’t know, I kind of like it that it takes more passion to play at our level.” Caleb Hale, a freshman pitcher, snickered. “Well, I’d love to play on TV, have someone pay for college and do my homework for me,” he said. The room filled with laughter. “There is that,” Delaney conceded. The Presque Isle team was still winless as it entered the final game of the February trip, but led Southern Virginia University, 4-3, in the fifth inning. A two-out, bases-loaded bloop single proved to be the pivotal moment in a game-winning rally for the home team. The Presque Isle players headed back to Maine to face another three weeks of practice in the university gym before their next game. The day they returned to campus, a foot of snow fell as a greeting. “The guys were disappointed about that last loss in Virginia, but even before we got home, some were already talking about the next trip,” Saucier said in a telephone interview Thursday. “They believe we can do some good things. You know kids, they love to play the game.” On March 20, the blue-and-white Presque Isle bus will roll out of northern Maine bound for the next day’s game in Boston. It will head south and west, but as the script on the side of the bus will attest, it will always have originated from somewhere north of ordinary.
|
College Athletics;Baseball;University of Maine;Maine
|
ny0156091
|
[
"nyregion"
] |
2008/06/16
|
A Young Man From Omaha, Who May Perfectly Represent Brooklyn
|
Moments before Yosef Abrahamson, 16, accepted an award for the essay he’d written in a competition sponsored by the Police Athletic League, an officer approached him to complain about his fedora. The hat, an essential wardrobe item for Hasidic men, was gaudy, the policeman told him, and what’s with all these kids today and their nose rings and their attitudes. A second police officer, overhearing the conversation, came over to steer away the first one, who reappeared a few minutes later to apologize. He’d never seen a Hasidic Jew, he told Yosef. A policeman working in New York who’d never seen a Hasidic Jew? What he probably meant, Yosef theorized, was “that he’d never seen a Hasidic Jew of color. I think he was probably making some assumptions there.” Thanks to his Egyptian father, who left the family when Yosef was young, and his maternal grandfather, who was of African descent by way of Panama, Yosef looks African-American (though his family prefers to describe themselves as Jews of color, believing their culture to be exclusively Jewish). Yosef moved to Crown Heights only a year ago, until then having lived in Omaha, where his mother’s maternal family, German Jewish merchants, had settled several generations earlier. If Yosef, who attends the yeshiva Darchai Menachem in Crown Heights, ever finds himself writing a college application essay, his advisers would have a hard time choosing which of his compelling story lines would most dazzle those college admissions officers: The story of growing up in a Hasidic family in Omaha? Or the story of being the only student of color in his yeshiva? Or maybe the story of being the only Hasidic person of color in Omaha’s competitive ice skating circuit? Despite the friendships he made while ice skating, a hobby his mother encouraged to round him out, life in Omaha was “a bit lonely,” Yosef admitted last week while eating a Kosher hamburger on Albany Avenue with his mother and his older sister, Sarah, 22. His mother, Dinah, who joined the Chabad-Lubavitch movement after seeing videos of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson several years ago, home-schooled both of her children. Yosef was obviously sheltered from too much scrutiny from the outside world, but the surprising combination of his race and his particular form of religious observance fazed no one in Omaha — for all the average person knew in Omaha, all Hasidic Jews were of African descent, his mother said. When friends from Nebraska first visited New York, they were fascinated to meet some white Hasids for the first time. It was easier for Ms. Abrahamson to raise her children in Omaha than it would have been in Crown Heights, she said. “People are laid-back in Omaha,” she said. “It’s different there.” Omaha is not, for example, a place where race relations between Jews and blacks have exploded into days of riots, as they did in Crown Heights in 1991; nor have the police in Omaha ever deemed it necessary to set up mobile command centers to monitor simmering tensions between Jews and blacks, as the New York police did last month in the Brooklyn neighborhood in response to two unrelated physical altercations. A young man like Yosef could easily start to feel like a powerful symbol, rather than just a kid, the human embodiment of that famously controversial Art Spiegelman New Yorker cover depicting a Hasidic man embracing an African-American woman. But life in Crown Heights is somehow less complicated than that for Yosef, a tall, athletic young man who seems to have internalized Omaha’s easygoing ways (and its broad Midwestern accent). Beyond the misunderstanding at the awards ceremony — of which Yosef said, “It was a bit strange, but really, I understand” — he says he has felt comfortable in Crown Heights from the moment he came there to advance his education. Through summer camps and occasional trips to New York, the Abrahamsons were already familiar to the Jewish community in Crown Heights when he arrived last fall (the community has only a handful of other black families). The response from the African-American community has been, if anything, amazement. “Now I’ve seen everything,” an African-American man said three or four times as he passed Yosef and his mother and his sister walking home from synagogue. Some black neighbors recently asked Ms. Abrahamson questions about the meaning of some Lubavitch fliers they had received in the mail. The family sensed that the neighbors had long been harboring those questions but had felt a certain comfort level with the Abrahamsons because of their shared skin color. If there have been resentful or disapproving responses from either side, they have apparently gone as far over Yosef’s head as the references his ice skating friends used to make to movies or television shows he’d never seen. The ease with which both communities have received Yosef seems a little unlikely, but appropriate in the year of what some call the country’s first post-racial presidential campaign. Except that the Abrahamsons consider themselves “post-racial, for real,” said Ms. Abrahamson, a Republican delegate in Nebraska who is not a fan of Mr. Obama. To the contrary, the whole family strongly supports John McCain, and Yosef will be a page at the Republican National Convention in the Twin Cities in September. One more item to add to that list of possible essay topics.
|
Jews;Blacks;Race;Brooklyn (NYC);Crown Heights (NYC)
|
ny0142098
|
[
"sports",
"ncaafootball"
] |
2008/11/19
|
Texas Puts Defensive Coordinator in Line for Promotion
|
The University of Texas announced Tuesday that the Longhorns’ defensive coordinator, Will Muschamp, would succeed Coach Mack Brown when he retires. Muschamp, 37, is in his first season at Texas, after two seasons as Auburn’s defensive coordinator. A native of Rome, Ga., who played safety at Georgia, Muschamp was the defensive coordinator at Louisiana State for three seasons, including 2003, when the Tigers won a share of the national title. Muschamp’s contract was still being completed, but the university said his salary would increase to $900,000 a year as of Jan. 1. He had been mentioned as a candidate for jobs at Clemson, Tennessee and Washington. Brown, 57, is in his 11th season at Texas and has eight years remaining on his contract. His salary is approximately $3 million this year. He has the longest tenure of any coach in the Big 12 and is 113-26 at Texas, winning a national title in 2005. “I am not thinking at all about moving on; it’s simply that I think Will is a great young coach, a perfect fit for this place and he wants to stay,” Brown said in a statement. “Nothing will change in our structure. He will continue in his role as defensive coordinator and when the time comes, will be ready to step in and take over the program.” THAYER EVANS
|
University of Texas;College Athletics;Football;Coaches and Managers
|
ny0287219
|
[
"world",
"europe"
] |
2016/08/18
|
German Who Plotted to Bomb U.S. Targets in Europe Gets Out of Prison Early
|
A German man who trained in Pakistan with an offshoot of Al Qaeda and confessed in 2009 to plotting to bomb American targets in Germany was released from prison this week. The decision to grant early release to the leader of the plot, Fritz Gelowicz, comes as the country grapples with the aftershocks of two recent attacks in Bavaria by people claiming loyalty to the Islamic State. Mr. Gelowicz, 36, was sentenced in 2010 to 12 years in prison . Counting time served before his sentencing, he had been in prison for nearly nine years and was eligible for early release based on good behavior and because he was no longer deemed to be a danger, according to Andreas Vitek , a spokesman for the Düsseldorf Higher Regional Court. Mr. Gelowicz will have to report regularly to a probation officer. The court in Düsseldorf released Mr. Gelowicz on Monday, but the decision did not receive widespread attention until Wednesday, after his defense lawyer, Dirk Uden , wrote about it on his website. “I’m sure he will not use any violence against anybody,” Mr. Uden said in a phone interview on Wednesday, adding that his client had cooperated with the authorities and expressed remorse. “That’s based on my conversations with him, his conversations with psychologists in prison and his contacts with the police.” It was not clear whether the American authorities objected to Mr. Gelowicz’s release. A spokesman for the United States Embassy in Berlin said the embassy was aware of the decision to release Mr. Gelowicz. In 2008, after his arrest, the United States Treasury Department designated Mr. Gelowicz a terrorist . He also remains on a United Nations sanctions list , so it is likely that American intelligence services and the German authorities will keep an eye on him. Guido Steinberg , a terrorism expert at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, who was an expert witness at the trial of Mr. Gelowicz and his accomplices, said the early release was likely to reinforce suspicions in the United States that Germany is soft on terrorism. “Fritz Gelowicz is a well-known personality,” Dr. Steinberg said in a phone interview. “We are a lot softer on terrorism than the Americans, the British, the French. It is obvious. Even Austria is tougher than the Germans.” Dr. Steinberg said he did not object to the decision to release Mr. Gelowicz, but said he was concerned about what he described as persistent weaknesses in the collection and sharing of intelligence by and among the German authorities. Dr. Steinberg said it was the National Security Agency, the United States counterintelligence service, that tipped off the German Federal Intelligence Service in late 2006 that Mr. Gelowicz had traveled to the North Waziristan region of Pakistan, to train with the Islamic Jihad Union, an affiliate of Al Qaeda. Last week, partly in response to recent attacks in Würzburg and Ansbach , in Bavaria, by men proclaiming loyalty to the Islamic State, Germany’s interior minister proposed new security measures. They included closer monitoring of refugees, enhanced surveillance, the hiring of more federal police officers and greater sharing of intelligence data with other European nations. But Dr. Steinberg said he feared the measures did not go far enough. “Our intelligence services don’t have a clue about communications among the Islamic State recruits in Iraq and Syria,” he said. “Our intelligence services are extremely weak. They have to become stronger if we are going to fight ISIS,” he added, referring to the Islamic State, which is also known as ISIL. Born to a middle-class family in Munich in 1979, Mr. Gelowicz converted to Islam as a teenager. He made contacts with the Pakistan training camp through an Islamic center in Bavaria. When the police arrested him, in September 2007, they found 26 military detonators and 12 drums of hydrogen peroxide, the main explosive used in the London bombings that killed 52 people on July 7, 2005. Mr. Gelowicz and three accomplices were charged, and the men became known as “the Sauerland cell,” after the region in North Rhine-Westphalia where Mr. Gelowicz and two others were arrested in a police raid . Their proposed targets included the Ramstein Air Base, a major United Nations and NATO military installation in southwestern Germany. “You planned a monstrous blood bath with an untold number of fatalities,” Judge Ottmar Breidling told Mr. Gelowicz and his accomplices at their sentencing. One of the accomplices, Daniel Martin Schneider, who also received a 12-year term, was released from prison last year. Another accomplice, Atilla Selek, a German son of Turkish parents, was sentenced to five years and was released from prison in 2011 . The fourth accomplice, Adem Yilmaz, a Turkish citizen, was given an 11-year term and remains in prison.
|
Fritz Gelowicz;Germany;Pakistan;Terrorism;Islamic Jihad Union;Al Qaeda;ISIS,ISIL,Islamic State;Decisions and Verdicts;Spying and Intelligence Agencies
|
ny0295960
|
[
"us"
] |
2016/12/09
|
For John Glenn, a Rare Repeat Tour of the Canyon of Heroes
|
It is March 1, 1962. There is bright sunshine across Lower Manhattan, and a crowd is building. New Yorkers still love a parade. The ritual of throwing blizzards of ticker tape from the windows of stock brokerages has become a cherished tradition. People are lining the sidewalks of Broadway, two deep, then four deep, then six deep. And they keep arriving. They are waiting to see the most famous man in America that day. They are waiting to see Buck Rogers. As many as four million people turned out that morning to celebrate Lt. Col. John H. Glenn Jr., who had become the first American to orbit the Earth only nine days earlier. For a nation rattled by the Soviet Union’s advances in space, including putting a man in orbit the year before, the Ohioan radiated the can-do attitude, frontier spirit and gusty valor that characterized the best of his countrymen. Image Annie and John Glenn in a ticker-tape parade on Broadway in New York in 1998. Credit Keith Meyers/The New York Times It is Nov. 16, 1998. There are overcast skies above New York City, and a crowd is building to see Glenn again. At 77, he had just returned to space once more, this time as a beloved former astronaut — and a United States senator — on a mission aboard the space shuttle Discovery. But ticker-tape parades are not what they once were. Their numbers have dwindled, from several a year in the 1950s and ’60s to only the occasional procession. In the previous seven years, only baseball and hockey players have been so honored. Glenn’s is the third in a month , a relative onslaught under a suddenly parade-happy Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani. (It followed ones for the Chicago Cubs slugger Sammy Sosa and the world champion New York Yankees.) Some are complaining about overtime for the police and the street cleaners. But others want to see Buck Rogers again. For Glenn, who died on Thursday at the age of 95, the two tours along the Canyon of Heroes were a dual distinction reserved for a select few. Amelia Earhart got two. So did Dwight D. Eisenhower. The explorer Rear Adm. Richard E. Byrd got three, the most of anyone. As the parades have ebbed, so have the crowds: Glenn and his fellow astronauts drew only tens of thousands of people in 1998, far lower than the 500,000 expected. “New York has historically prided itself on the Canyon of Heroes, but perhaps we have more cynicism today about heroes, just as we do about most every institution in society,” said John Mollenkopf, a professor of political science and sociology at the Graduate Center at City College of New York. Image Credit The New York Times But that 1962 parade — boy, it was a sight to behold. The outpouring of affection for Glenn was so great that the festivities were largely undeterred by an unfolding tragedy in the city. American Airlines Flight 1 had taken off that morning from Idlewild Airport (now John F. Kennedy International Airport) and crashed in Jamaica Bay , killing all 87 passengers and eight crew members. It was the deadliest commercial airline crash in United States history at that point, and it was later memorialized in an episode of “Mad Men” — the father of the character Pete Campbell was said to have died onboard. While city officials took action, Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. was still on hand to introduce Glenn, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson and others. Glenn, handsome and humble, kept the focus on the spirit of the day. “We truly feel we are representing all of you,” he told a luncheon of 2,000 at the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel that day. “And we hope that in the future, we can represent you in ever more ambitious endeavors.” The space program would reach the moon seven years later. There were more sunny days for America, and more overcast ones, but Glenn remained a beacon of hope throughout. Even if less ticker tape fell in 1998, he was much the same man in both motorcades — with his glowing wife, Annie, by his side each time, with his hand flashing a thumbs-up and with a smile as wide as a canyon.
|
Parade;John Herschel Glenn Jr;Space;Manhattan;NYC;Awards
|
ny0197046
|
[
"sports",
"baseball"
] |
2009/10/01
|
Yankees’ Chamberlain Stumbles in Playoff Audition
|
When A. J. Burnett took the mound Tuesday night, his goal was to reassure the Yankees that he would be all right when the playoffs begin. When Joba Chamberlain did the same Wednesday night, it was more of an audition. After the way he pitched, he is not likely to get a callback soon. Chamberlain had a strong outing against Boston in his previous start, but he struggled with his command Wednesday and could not make it out of the fourth inning in a 4-3 loss to the Kansas City Royals, one of the worst offensive teams in the American League. So if the Yankees had any thought of choosing the shorter of the two A.L. division series and going with four starters, that choice seems far too risky now. It is now even more likely than ever that the Yankees will go with the series that has an extra day off and use only three starters, meaning Chamberlain will either need to reclaim his old role as a dominating reliever, or sit out the first round. Chamberlain said that if it would help the team advance, he would settle for doing domestic chores. “If they want me to fold towels, I’ll fold towels,” he said. “I don’t really care. I’ll do anything to win on this team.” This was his final chance to make a good impression before the Yankees make their roster choices heading into the playoffs, but Chamberlain allowed three runs, seven hits and walked four. He threw 91 pitches in only three and two-thirds innings. “You would liked to see him throw six strong innings and throw 90 pitches,” Manager Joe Girardi said. “We didn’t get that from him.” Girardi said the Yankees had not made a decision on whether Chamberlain would be used as a reliever in the division series, or even if he would be on the roster. But he made clear that a relief role had not been ruled out, based on Chamberlain’s past success in the bullpen. “I can’t guarantee that when you put a guy in a situation that he’s going to revert back to his old form, if we do put him back in the bullpen,” Girardi said. “But he does have a lot of confidence coming out of those gates.” Barring an unexpected appearance this weekend, Chamberlain will end up with a 9-6 record and a 4.78 earned run average. “I did some things good and I did some things terrible,” he said. “But at the end of the day it’s about the team, and I could care less about myself.” INSIDE PITCH Derek Jeter hit a leadoff home run, his fourth of the season and the 23rd of his career. Only Rickey Henderson, with 24, had more for the Yankees. Nick Swisher also homered, giving the Yankees 241, one shy of the team record set in 2004. ... Hal Steinbrenner, the Yankees’ managing general partner, gave his approval to the job Joe Girardi has done this season. “Joe has had a tremendous year this year, we all know that,” Steinbrenner said, according to The Associated Press. He added, “As far as I am concerned, as far as the family is concerned, as far as the organization is concerned, he’s the man for the job.”
|
Chamberlain Joba;New York Yankees;Baseball
|
ny0237081
|
[
"world",
"asia"
] |
2010/06/16
|
Ex-Taliban Leaders See Hopeful Signs for Talks
|
KABUL, Afghanistan — Despite their hard-line public stance and continued attacks, the Taliban are quietly putting out tentative feelers in response to the government’s recent peace jirga, according to Afghan government officials and two former Taliban political leaders. While it was under way, the Taliban attacked the consultative peace jirga, or council, which ended June 6, both with rockets and through denunciations. Many political opponents doubted that the jirga would be successful, because insurgents had not been included. Publicly, the insurgents insist that they reject the effort to start talks. But the two former Taliban leaders, who both are known to maintain contacts with the insurgents, said in interviews on Monday and Tuesday that the Taliban have been encouraged by signs of progress on removing some of their names from a United Nations blacklist , as well as by indications that the government may speed up the release of Taliban detainees. Meanwhile, insurgents in troubled areas of Wardak Province said they would no longer attack government officials there as long as they were not working with the NATO coalition, according to a prominent Afghan official, who, like others interviewed, spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the matter. The official said Afghan officials had taken the gesture as a hopeful sign, even though Wardak has had a recent increase in insurgent activity, as well as possible infiltration by fighters from Al Qaeda and Arab fighters, and violence and threats continued elsewhere in the country. Calling for an end to the blacklist and the release of detainees were two of the decisions made by the consultative peace jirga. A visit this week by a United Nations delegation to review the list was received favorably by Taliban leaders as evidence of good faith, said Mullah Arsala Rahmani, who is one of 137 Taliban figures on the list. “The blacklist will be a start,” said Mullah Rahmani, now an Afghan senator and formerly the minister of higher education under the Taliban government. “It is symbolically very important. Even if they only remove 60 or 70 names, that would be enough. The next step could be talks between government and Taliban representatives in some neutral country.” He suggested either Turkey or Saudi Arabia would be likely locations. Hajji Musa Hotak, the former Taliban planning minister and now a member of the Afghan Parliament from Wardak Province, who was one of the first five Taliban figures to be removed from the United Nations blacklist last January, concurred. “I have heard the same thing,” he said. “If the government fulfills their promises on the blacklist and the prisoner releases, we are ready to take part in negotiations.” Mr. Hotak added that he had heard that seven names were under consideration for being taken off the list, and said, “Even that would be a start.” On Tuesday, the organizers of the peace jirga announced at a press conference that the members of a High Council for Peace, which would be charged with arranging negotiations, would include neutral, nongovernment figures. While both Mr. Hotak and Mullah Rahmani are known to maintain close connections with the Taliban, and Mullah Rahmani in particular says he was recently in indirect communication with the Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar, there is no way to verify their claims. In addition, it is unclear how much control older Taliban political leaders have over a new generation of younger military commanders, most of whom are not even on the United Nations blacklist. The Taliban’s official spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, reached by telephone on Tuesday, repeated his denunciation of the jirga and dismissed the diplomatic activity concerning the blacklist. “This is not the way to make the Taliban leadership agree to negotiate,” he said. “U.N. mediation can only work if the foreigners end their occupation of the country first.” A third former Taliban leader, Mullah Abdul Salam Rocketi, who had been a corps commander under the Taliban and now lives in Kabul, also predicted that taking names off the blacklist could help start negotiations, although he said he was no longer in touch with the insurgents. “This is their policy, to play a double game, telling people you’re going one way when in fact you’re going another,” he said of the insurgents. “All they’re waiting for is a green light from the Americans and if they get it, they would change 180 degrees tomorrow.” By “green light,” he said, he meant action on the blacklist. The United States and other permanent members of the Security Council could veto any proposed changes to the list. Despite the hints of a thaw, there was no overall letup in the violence on Tuesday. A massive car bomb exploded, killing Hajji Abdul Jabar Murghani, the governor of the Arghandab district, a key location in the United States military buildup just outside the city of Kandahar. His son and a bodyguard were also killed. Elsewhere, insurgents killed four NATO soldiers in four separate attacks, two in southern Afghanistan and two in eastern Afghanistan, according to statements from the International Security Assistance Force. Two of the dead were British soldiers, killed in separate firefights in the Nad Ali district of Helmand Province, the British Defense Ministry announced. In Wardak Province last week, Agriculture Ministry extension workers in three districts — Chak, Jalrez and Sayedabad — reported that they had been contacted in person by Taliban insurgents, officials said. They expected to be attacked, but instead were told by the insurgents that they could carry on their work. “This is very significant,” said Farouk Wardak, the minister of education and a confidant of President Hamid Karzai, who had organized the peace jirga. He said the episode was discussed in a cabinet meeting and taken as a positive signal from the insurgents. “The Taliban told the workers to go back and tell government officials that we won’t bother you, if you’re honest and don’t bring foreigners,” Mr. Hotak said. “I consider this as a very good sign, especially to come such a short time after the jirga.” Threats persisted elsewhere, however. In eastern Ghazni Province, the governor, Mohammad Musa Akbarzada, confirmed that the Taliban on Monday night distributed leaflets, known as night letters, warning government workers to leave their jobs within five days or be punished or killed. Mullah Rahmani, the senator, said that the Taliban leadership “still does not believe or trust in the current government,” but that movement on the blacklist would give Mr. Karzai more credibility with the insurgents. Mullah Rahmani himself had been visited by the United Nations delegation shortly before giving the interview, and he said it was the first time he had ever met with them concerning his own case. He added that Mr. Karzai’s frequent criticisms of the NATO peacekeeping force, as well as of his own government’s failures, had found a sympathetic if skeptical ear with many Taliban leaders. On Sunday, however, Mr. Karzai visited Kandahar and warned local leaders of impending military action to regain control there from the Taliban.
|
Afghanistan;Taliban;Politics and Government;Blacklisting;Afghanistan War (2001- )
|
ny0173544
|
[
"business"
] |
2007/10/05
|
G.E. to Close Some Lighting Plants
|
HARTFORD, Oct. 4 (AP) — General Electric said Thursday that it would close a number of lighting plants in Brazil and the United States as part of a plan to overhaul one unit, potentially cutting more than 1,400 jobs. The division, GE Consumer and Industrial, said it would close all of its lighting operations in Rio de Janeiro, affecting about 900 jobs. The company also plans to close some lighting factories in the United States, which will affect about 425 jobs, although “a portion” of them will shift to other G.E. sites. G.E., based in Fairfield, Conn., said it was closing the plants in part because of a changing lighting market, in which demand for the incandescent bulb has declined over the last five years because of new technology and efficiency standards. “We are increasing our focus on the development and production of new, innovative lighting products,” said Jim Campbell, president of GE Consumer and Industrial.
|
General Electric Co;Layoffs and Job Reductions;Shutdowns (Institutional);Lighting;Brazil
|
ny0025414
|
[
"business",
"media"
] |
2013/08/01
|
Whistle-Blowers in Limbo, Neither Hero Nor Traitor
|
Even as Americans expressed increasing concerns about government intrusions into their life in a recently released Pew Research Center study, they have hardly embraced those who decide to take matters into their own hands. Leakers, often lionized by members of the press, face an indifferent and sometimes antagonistic public. On Tuesday, when Pfc. Bradley Manning was acquitted of aiding the enemy and convicted of six counts of violating the Espionage Act, a few dozen protesters showed up on his behalf. There has been an outcry from civil libertarians and privacy advocates, but in general, his decision to unilaterally release hundreds of thousands of sensitive documents did not make him a folk hero or a cause célèbre in the broader culture. Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency employee, also released a trove of documents, including ones revealed on Wednesday in The Guardian that suggested that security analysts are able to search through e-mails, chats and browsing history without judicial authorization. Even though many people are glad to learn that, Mr. Snowden remains very much on his own in the Moscow airport — stateless, isolated and frozen in place for the time being. In some respects, Mr. Snowden and Private Manning were performing a quintessentially American act: lone individuals taking on larger forces. But whistle-blowing has always been fraught with peril; one person’s heroic crusade is another’s betrayal of loyalty. In the case of both Mr. Snowden and Private Manning, each became an army of one, reasoning that there was a moral imperative to rendering secrets visible, acting on behalf of a public that he believed deserved to know more. But some Americans don’t seem ready to embrace this version of informational cowboy. “Who is he to decide?” suggested a cabdriver in New York on Tuesday, speaking of Private Manning. He could have been speaking of Mr. Snowden as well. In the view of advocates of civil liberties, both men performed acts of supreme self-sacrifice, but there is an unavoidable appearance of self-aggrandizement as well. We have been treated to hundreds of images of Mr. Snowden and Private Manning. “Whistle-blowers they are not. These are essentially little people with bloated egos and sense of self-importance,” suggested one reader in comments that appeared with The New York Times’s article about Private Manning’s conviction. Part of the reason that both men have gotten so much attention is that the Web has made the gathering and dissemination of large amounts of information much easier than it was in the past. Rather than slipping an envelope under a door, many of today’s leakers operate using hard drives jammed with millions of documents. It is far easier to do much more damage, something both the government and the public are struggling to come to terms with. “The more they reveal, the greater the threat against them,” said Gregg Leslie of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, referring to large-scale whistle-blowers. The mixed feelings evoked by those who perform jailbreaks on information was very much in evidence in a report released by M.I.T . on the same day that Private Manning was convicted. The report concluded that in the case of Aaron Swartz, the hacker who committed suicide after being charged with hacking into the M.I.T. computer network, the university “missed an opportunity to demonstrate the leadership that we pride ourselves on.” The report noted that the university had based on its reputation as an institution known “for promoting open access to online information, and for dealing wisely with the risks of computer abuse.” Time can change things. Daniel Ellsberg, who came in for sustained criticism for his leak of the Pentagon Papers, is now viewed as an important historical figure who brought much-needed accountability to America’s prosecution of the Vietnam War. But for the time being, Private Manning and Mr. Snowden are legally imperiled and living in the place between hero and traitor. As Bill Keller, the former executive editor of The New York Times, said on Wednesday morning on WNYC’s “The Takeaway,” they are “neither Benedict Arnold nor Nathan Hale.”
|
Edward Snowden;Civil Rights;Whistleblower;Government Surveillance;Privacy;Freedom of the press;NSA
|
ny0098117
|
[
"nyregion"
] |
2015/06/10
|
Con Edison and New York City Are Faulted in East Harlem Explosion
|
WASHINGTON — An explosion in East Harlem that killed eight people last year would not have happened if two of Consolidated Edison’s gas pipes had been welded together properly, federal regulators said on Tuesday. But the regulators at the National Transportation Safety Board also said that the faulty connection between those pipes might not have ended so disastrously had New York City repaired a gaping hole in a nearby sewer main that it had known about for at least eight years. Those two failings combined to cause the blast and ensuing fire, which destroyed two five-story apartment buildings on Park Avenue, displacing more than 100 families and several small businesses, the safety board concluded at a meeting here. “These factors aligned to create the accident, but there were others,” said Christopher A. Hart, the chairman of the safety board. Among them, he said, were the failure of neighborhood residents to report the gas odor they noticed and the failure of Con Edison to notify the Fire Department as soon as somebody alerted the company. The complicated conclusion left officials of the utility company and Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration unsatisfied amid a welter of lawsuits filed by victims of the explosion and their families. Con Ed executives applauded the safety board’s focus on the broken sewer main, which they said caused erosion of the soil that supported the company’s gas pipe beneath the street. If the city’s Department of Environmental Protection had repaired that breach, the gas main would not have sagged and cracked open, company officials said. But Con Edison disputed the investigators’ finding that the primary source of the natural gas that fueled the explosion was the ruptured connection between its main pipe and a smaller one that branched off to an apartment building. Company officials acknowledged that the weld was flawed but insisted that the gas had seeped through a different crack that the investigators found. On Friday, Con Edison filed a suit against the city, blaming the city’s failure to maintain sewer and water mains near its gas pipes. In the suit, filed in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, Con Edison contended that the city’s Department of Transportation had repeatedly been notified of depressions in the pavement of Park Avenue that indicated the earth beneath the surface was eroding. Image Members of the National Transportation Safety Board on Tuesday presented their findings from an investigation into the East Harlem gas explosion. Credit T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York Times City officials countered that there was not enough evidence to apportion any of the blame to the long-broken sewer main, which sat more than a dozen feet below the gas main and had been there even longer. “The finding that damage to a sewer may have also played a role appears unsupported by the facts,” Amy Spitalnick, a spokeswoman for Mr. de Blasio, said in a statement. What nobody disputed was that the gas likely started leaking from Con Edison’s system of underground pipes a day or so before the explosion. It escaped into the porous ground in front of 1642 Park Avenue, a building between 116th and 117th Streets that receives its gas for heating and cooking through a three-year-old plastic pipe, known as a service line. From there, investigators said, the gas migrated into the basement of the neighboring apartment building, 1644 Park, which housed a church on its ground level. Over the course of more than 12 hours, the level of gas within the building climbed until it reached a combustible level, they said. Several residents of the block later said that they had detected the rotten-egg odor added to natural gas to set off bells in people’s heads. But not until after 9 a.m. on the day of the explosion, March 12, 2014, did any of them call Con Edison. Even then, the caller’s tone was so uncertain that a Con Edison representative started to alert the Fire Department, but became distracted by other matters. A safety board staff member said that call was placed about 9:19 a.m. and ended with him telling the Fire Department: “Hold up. No, sorry. Hold on. Hold on. I’ll call you right back.” The callback never came, and 11 minutes later, the explosion rocked the entire block, damaging buildings on both sides of Park Avenue, opening a crater in the street and disrupting train service on the elevated Metro-North tracks until late in the day. Among the 15 findings the safety board issued on Tuesday was that rescue crews could have arrived on the scene as much as 15 minutes before the explosion if Con Edison had notified the Fire Department immediately. But the board members agreed that there was no way of knowing if the block could have been evacuated in time. The task of the emergency medical workers was complicated further by Con Edison’s failure to install valves that would have made it easier to shut off the gas that fed the fire, the safety board concluded. The board recommended that the city repair breaches in its sewer lines “in a timely fashion” and coordinate with other agencies to identify places where ground is eroding under the streets. Ms. Spitalnick said that the de Blasio administration had already begun addressing that weakness. For starters, she said, the city repaired the big hole in the sewer pipe near the site of the explosion.
|
Con Edison;NTSB;Explosions;East Harlem;NYC;Accidents and Safety;Sewers Sewage;Natural gas;Fires
|
ny0036422
|
[
"world",
"europe"
] |
2014/03/19
|
Russia’s Most-Wanted Rebel Is Dead, Website Says
|
MOSCOW — The death of Doku Umarov, Russia’s most wanted terrorist leader, was announced Tuesday on a website representing Islamist militant groups in southern Russia. The website, Kavkaz Center, offered no evidence or explanation for Mr. Umarov’s death, instead giving a description of his 20 years in the anti-Russian insurgency and saying that he “joined the group of sincere monotheists who fulfilled their contract with Allah till the very end.” Mr. Umarov, 49, a former Chechen separatist guerrilla, embraced radical Islam in 2007 and founded a network of fighters called the Caucasus Emirate. According to Kavkaz Center, he will be replaced by a younger man from Dagestan, Magomed Kebekov, who delivered a brief address in a videotape posted on the site. The appointment of a new leader is a significant shift for the insurgency, which seemed diffuse and weakened in the period leading up to the Winter Olympics in Sochi. Mr. Umarov issued a chilling threat last year to attack the Games, but they came and went without incident, in a victory for Moscow. Now it appears that Mr. Umarov may have died some time before the Games. In late January, an audiotape made by Chechen security services and posted on the Internet captured supposed militants debating the thorny question of who would succeed Mr. Umarov, said Ekaterina Sokirianskaia, the North Caucasus director for the International Crisis Group. The introduction of a leader from Dagestan, which in recent years has supplanted Chechnya as the center of terrorist activity, could change the nature of the network, she said. “Dagestanis are much more Islamist, they are much better integrated into global jihad, and they are more supernational,” she said. The Russian government’s pre-Olympics security will be lifted, she said, since “it’s impossible to keep such pressure for a long time,” and the militants “will reorganize and restore the chain of command.” Video Chechen warlord Doku Umarov, who claimed responsibility for suicide bombings in the Moscow metro which killed 39 people Monday, is trying to unite rebels in the all region in the name of Islam. Credit Credit Agence France-Presse — Getty Images She added, “Doku was ill for a long time, probably not very actively involved in recent months,” whereas Mr. Kebekov is “more fit.” The Russian authorities have not confirmed the report of Mr. Umarov’s death. Ramzan A. Kadyrov, leader of the republic of Chechnya, was the only Russian official to comment on the report on Tuesday, writing via Instagram that “the site of the Caucasian devils informs us that Umarov has been sent to the place from which there is no return!” “Now it has been confirmed by the rats themselves,” he wrote. Mr. Umarov was associated with some of the bloodiest attacks of the last decade. In 2010, Mr. Umarov took responsibility for two separate suicide bombings that killed 40 people on the Moscow subway, saying they were meant as revenge for the deaths of Chechen civilians. In the hours after the bombings, he made a videotape taunting Russians, saying “I promise you the war will come to your streets, and you will feel it in your own lives and on your own skin.” In 2011, he claimed responsibility for an attack on Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport that killed 36 people. His organization also took responsibility for the bombing of a luxury train, the Nevsky Express, which killed 28 in November 2009. Mr. Umarov’s biography tracked with an insurgency that changed course several times after the fall of the Soviet Union. Employed as a construction engineer in the early 1990s, he joined the Chechen separatists. After Russian troops were forced to withdraw from the Chechen capital, Grozny, Mr. Umarov became an official in the territory’s Security Council. But Russia eventually crushed the separatists. Searching for a more grandiose idea, Mr. Umarov declared himself the leader of the Caucasus Emirate with the intent to establish a Shariah-based state independent of Russia.
|
Chechnya;Doku K Umarov;Terrorism;Russia;Magomed Kebekov;Kavkaz Center;Dagestan
|
ny0034266
|
[
"world",
"africa"
] |
2013/12/06
|
Obama’s Path Was Shaped by Mandela’s Story
|
WASHINGTON — Without Nelson Mandela, there might never have been a President Obama. That is the strong impression conveyed from Mr. Obama, whose political and personal bonds to Mr. Mandela, the former South African president, transcended their single face-to-face meeting, which took place at a hotel here in 2005. It was the fight for racial justice in South Africa by Mr. Mandela that first inspired a young Barack Obama to public service, the American president recalled on Thursday evening after hearing that Mr. Mandela, the 95-year-old world icon, had died. Mr. Obama delivered his first public speech, in 1979, at an anti-apartheid rally. Mr. Obama’s first moment on the public stage was the start of a life and political career imbued with the kind of hope that Mr. Mandela personified. “The day that he was released from prison gave me a sense of what human beings can do when they’re guided by their hopes and not by their fears,” Mr. Obama said on Thursday. “Hope” would eventually become the mantra for his ascension to the White House. On two continents separated by thousands of miles and vastly different political cultures, the lives of the two men rarely intersected. Weeks before their only meeting, Mr. Obama wrote Mr. Mandela a letter that Oprah Winfrey carried to South Africa. As Mr. Obama later emerged as a national political leader, he and Mr. Mandela occasionally traded phone calls or letters. But the trajectories of the two leaders, who broke political and social barriers in their own countries, were destined to be connected, even if mostly from afar. Mr. Obama wrote about Mr. Mandela as a distant but inspirational figure in the forward to Mr. Mandela’s 2010 book, “Conversations With Myself.” “His sacrifice was so great that it called upon people everywhere to do what they could on behalf of human progress,” Mr. Obama wrote. “In the most modest of ways, I was one of those people who tried to answer his call.” Mr. Mandela and Mr. Obama served as the first black leaders of their nations and both were looked to by some as the vehicles for reconciliation between polarized electorates. Both won the Nobel Peace Prize, in part for their charisma and their ability to inspire and communicate. Mr. Obama often referred to Mr. Mandela by the former president’s clan name, Madiba — a term of affection for the aging, beloved leader in South Africa. On Thursday, Mr. Obama spoke of the goals that Mr. Mandela worked decades for, and eventually achieved. “A free South Africa at peace with itself — that’s an example to the world, and that’s Madiba’s legacy to the nation he loved,” Mr. Obama said from the White House as news of Mr. Mandela’s death spread. But the American president regularly shied from direct comparisons with Mr. Mandela. Mr. Obama often noted privately and publicly that his sacrifices would never compare to Mr. Mandela’s. Aides to Mr. Obama said he was uncomfortable when people drew parallels between them, as they often did. Robert Gibbs, the former White House press secretary, accompanied Mr. Obama on his first visit to the tiny prison cell on Robben Island where Mr. Mandela had been jailed for years. “Having stood in that space that day, you realize that whatever analogies you might draw, that Mandela is and always will be a singular figure in the history of the world,” Mr. Gibbs recalled this summer. “I don’t think the president would look at even the hardest days as equal even to the very best day that he might have spent inside of Robben Island.” And yet, the struggle by Mr. Mandela has been a beacon to Mr. Obama, drawing him to South Africa twice to pay homage. The last trip came in June of this year, as Mr. Obama traveled to Senegal, Tanzania and South Africa on a visit overshadowed by the possibility that the ailing Mr. Mandela might die at any moment. On the trip, Mr. Obama did not visit with Mr. Mandela, who was fighting a lung infection. Officials said a visit would have been disruptive and unhelpful to Mr. Mandela’s recovery. Instead, Mr. Obama and the first lady, Michelle Obama, visited with Mr. Mandela’s family. “I don’t need a photo-op, and the last thing I want to do is to be in any way obtrusive at a time when the family is concerned about Nelson Mandela’s condition,” Mr. Obama said at the time. During the trip, Mr. Obama reflected repeatedly on the impact Mr. Mandela had on him, and people around the world. Moments before he again stood in the cell on Robben Island, Mr. Obama told his daughters of Mr. Mandela’s legacy. “One thing you guys might not be aware of is that the idea of political nonviolence first took root here in South Africa because Mahatma Gandhi was a lawyer here in South Africa,” the president told them. “When he went back to India the principles ultimately led to Indian independence, and what Gandhi did inspired Martin Luther King.” In a speech to students at Cape Town University, Mr. Obama lauded Mr. Mandela as a leader whose “spirit could never be imprisoned” and a man who serves as an inspiration for all. “Nelson Mandela showed us that one man’s courage can move the world,” Mr. Obama told the students. “And he calls on us to make choices that reflect not our fears, but our hopes — in our own lives, and in the lives of our communities and our countries.” The 2005 meeting between Mr. Obama and Mr. Mandela was brief, just a few minutes, as a young American senator shook the hands of an elderly man. The moment was captured in a photograph taken by Mr. Obama’s driver. It shows Mr. Obama, silhouetted against a bright window, holding hands with Mr. Mandela, who is reclining on a couch. One copy of the photograph has sat for years on a desk in Mr. Mandela’s office in South Africa. Another copy is on Mr. Obama’s desk in the Oval Office.
|
Barack Obama;Nelson Mandela;Black People,African-Americans;Apartheid in South Africa;South Africa
|
ny0277445
|
[
"us"
] |
2016/11/11
|
Campuses Confront Hostile Acts Against Minorities After Donald Trump’s Election
|
The fliers depicting men in camouflage, wielding guns and an American flag, appeared in men’s restrooms throughout Texas State University: “Now that our man Trump is elected,” they said. “Time to organize tar and feather vigilante squads and go arrest and torture those deviant university leaders spouting off that diversity garbage.” A year after students at campuses nationwide pushed for greater sensitivity toward cultural differences, the distribution of the Texas State fliers was just one of several episodes this week suggesting that the surprise election of Donald J. Trump is provoking a round of backlash on campuses. At the same time, universities are trying to address more generalized fears about the country’s future, organizing campus meetings and counseling sessions and sending messages to students urging calm. “A lot of Muslim students are scared,” said Abdalla Husain, 21, a linguistics major at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who is of Palestinian ancestry. He said some Muslim students on campus were afraid to go outside. “They’re scared that Trump has empowered people who have hate and would be hostile to them.” At San Jose State University in California, a Muslim woman complained that she had been grabbed by her hijab and choked. The police are investigating. At Wellesley College in Massachusetts, alma mater of Hillary Clinton, two male students from nearby Babson College drove through campus in a pickup truck adorned with a large Trump flag, parked outside a meeting house for black students, and spat at a black female student, according to campus black student organizations. After being ejected by the campus police, the two students bragged in a video that was widely viewed over social media. Reports of hostility toward minorities were not limited to university campuses. In Durham, N.C., walls facing a busy intersection were painted with graffiti Tuesday night with the message, “Black lives don’t matter and neither does your votes,” according to local news reports. Also according to local news reports, a baseball dugout in Wellsville, N.Y., was spray painted with a swastika and the message “Make America white again.” Another swastika , replacing the “T” in Trump, appeared on a storefront in Philadelphia, along with “Sieg heil 2016.” Incidents were also reported at several high schools. At York County School of Technology in York, Pa., a video circulated of students carrying a Trump sign and yelling “white power” as they walked through the hall on Wednesday. “The whole situation is absolutely horrible,” someone posted on the PTA’s Facebook page. Students at Royal Oak Middle School in Royal Oak, Mich., chanted “build the wall” in the cafeteria on Wednesday, according to a statement by Shawn Lewis-Lakin, the superintendent, who said a video was shared on social media. Throughout the week, threatening messages on social media against racial and religious minorities and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people have spiked. Racist episodes occur regularly at places throughout the United States, including college campuses. Mr. Trump’s election, though, seems to have worked as an accelerant. But the police said that at least some reported incidents on campuses were fake. A Muslim student at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette who said she was attacked Wednesday by two men — one wearing a Trump hat — recanted her story on Thursday, admitting she had made it up, the police said. At Canisius College in Buffalo, in what officials said began as a prank, a black doll was photographed hanging from a curtain rod in a dorm room on Tuesday night. “One student created a meme with language about ‘Trump fans’ and sent it to friends,” a university statement said. “It’s evident that what may have started as a thoughtless, insensitive prank earlier in the evening in the elevator degraded into a very offensive, inappropriate act later that night,” said the statement by John J. Hurley, the college president. Just last year, a wave of anti-racism protests broke out on campuses across the country. In response, many universities cracked down on students’ insensitivity, and some fired school administrators. But this week, students began to worry that all their work was fruitless with Mr. Trump’s election success. To many, Mr. Trump is the champion of anti-political correctness and embodies the opposition to “safe spaces.” Gay, lesbian and transgender students were also concerned, said Patrick R. Grzanka, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Tennessee. “Our lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students are deeply concerned about Trump,” he said. “After enduring months of homophobic and transphobic rhetoric during the campaign, many of us — sexual minorities and gender nonconforming individuals — are asking ourselves, What happens next?” Liberal-leaning college students around the country, in a state of shock over the election’s outcome, gathered in spontaneous protest marches at some campuses and, at others, asked university leaders to schedule meetings across the campus to reflect on the results. Tennessee was among a large array of universities — public, private, liberal and conservative — that held meetings for concerned students. “Join us for a moment of reflection and gathering of solidarity,” the Office of Multicultural Students wrote in an invitation on Wednesday. “Counseling center staff will be available.” The University of Southern California invited students who had concerns about the election to attend a meeting on Wednesday. About 100 showed up, said Michael Quick, the provost. “We’re hearing a lot from our students, particularly our Muslim students, given the rhetoric of the campaign,” he said. “Given the feeling of many students from last year who expressed concerns about diversity and inclusion, now they’re feeling tremendously marginalized,” he added. Stanford University, in a note signed by its president, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, said it would offer “supportive resources and opportunities to gather together” in the wake of the divisive election season. Columbia University scheduled what it called a “post-election conversation and reflection” for its students Wednesday afternoon. Earlier in the day, graduate journalism students at Columbia requested a meeting with faculty members. At Wellesley, which was founded as a safe space for its entirely female student body, the supporters of Mr. Trump driving around campus have rattled students, and administrators have sent a flurry of emails to students this week in response to the episode, which is being investigated by the university police. Wellesley could be considered ground zero for the culture of political correctness that Mr. Trump has criticized; in recent decades, it has introduced guidelines for appropriate language and other protections for addressing racial and religious minorities and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students. After the election, even colleges that are unaccustomed to clashes over race or religion struggled to address student safety concerns while fostering free speech. When administrators at Texas State University in San Marcos, which has a mostly minority student body of more than 38,000, learned Wednesday that protests in the campus quad were growing tense, the university president, Denise M. Trauth, tried to head off conflict by releasing a statement to students. “Our aim should be to better understand that which causes divisions among us and to work toward strengthening our bond as a university community. Constructive dialogue is the best way to achieve this goal,” she said. But by late afternoon, the pamphlets depicting men wearing military clothing and bearing arms were already circulating on campus and social media. Denise Cervantes, 20, who writes for the student newspaper and is Latina, said she was spat on by a male student wearing a Trump 2016 shirt, who told her she did not belong there anymore. “I didn’t realize that it would get this bad all of a sudden,” Ms. Cervantes said. Thursday evening, Ms. Trauth issued a stronger statement labeling the pamphlets vandalism and saying, “Threats absolutely have no place on our campus or in a free society.” But protests continued throughout the day, and students expressed concern about whether the atmosphere on campus would improve. “This is only two days after,” said Emily Sharp, 21, a senior majoring in communications. “I’m worried that we’re going to see other people doing these things and thinking it’s O.K.”
|
Donald Trump;Muslim Americans;Hate crime;College;Minorities;2016 Presidential Election
|
ny0041792
|
[
"sports",
"hockey"
] |
2014/05/18
|
McDonagh Returns to Top Form Against the Team That Sent Him Away
|
MONTREAL — They could have loved him here, and they would have, too, had Ryan McDonagh remained a member of the Montreal Canadiens organization. It was not his choice to leave five years ago. A trade was made, he was included, and off he went to New York, the Rangers elated that he had done so. From afar, the Canadiens and their fans have watched McDonagh develop into a star, one of the N.H.L.’s best defensemen. From up close on Saturday, they watched him shine in a performance as dominant as it was comprehensive. The Rangers scored seven goals in sending Montreal to its worst home playoff loss in more than 12 years, and McDonagh factored in four of the scores, becoming the first Rangers defenseman to record 4 points in a playoff game since Brian Leetch in Game 4 of the 1994 Stanley Cup finals. Told as much after the 7-2 victory in the opener of the Eastern Conference finals, McDonagh offered the verbal equivalent of a shrug. “It could have been anyone, the way we were moving the puck and seeing plays happen,” he said. Maybe McDonagh was correct. Maybe it could have been anyone among his fellow defensemen, who pushed the puck up the ice, helping the Rangers gain the offensive zone and stay there. But it was not. It was McDonagh who scored a goal and had three assists, and it was McDonagh who neutralized the Canadiens’ scorers, and it was McDonagh who restored some functionality to a struggling power play. The Rangers’ best defenseman played his best game of the playoffs. “The plays on the power play along the blue line — it’s a big thing,” Marc Staal said. “In the offensive zone from the blue line, he’s very dangerous in recognizing when there’s an opportunity to jump, and he did that tonight. That’s something, obviously, in the last few games that’s been big for him.” That it was McDonagh — and not, say, Staal or Dan Girardi or Anton Stralman — who tied Leetch’s mark made all the difference. Voted the team’s most valuable player, McDonagh led Rangers defensemen in goals (14) and points (43) during the regular season, but his strong play did not carry into the playoffs. McDonagh was publicly challenged by his coach, Alain Vigneault, to improve after a stretch of poor play that started in the first playoff series, against Philadelphia, and bled into the team’s victory over Pittsburgh in the second round. His first 10 playoff games went by without a point as speculation persisted that the shoulder injury that had sidelined him for the final five games of the regular season was still hindering his mobility. After the Rangers’ Game 5 victory in Pittsburgh, which ignited their comeback from a 3-1 series deficit, Vigneault insisted that McDonagh was not hurt, adding that he expected him — needed him — to duplicate that effort in every game. Which he has. “You’re seeing things a lot happen faster,” McDonagh said. “Obviously, the way everybody was contributing, moving the puck and winning one-on-one battles, it only helps you as a defenseman because you’re above everything; you can see everything happening.” At times, McDonagh could watch the play unfold, such as when he roamed toward the slot and drilled a puck that came free off the boards for a one-timed power-play goal, a shot that traveled so fast the net should have had an exit wound. Or when he faked a shot and slapped a pass to Martin St. Louis, who whipped the puck across the crease to Derek Stepan for the Rangers’ second power-play goal in 2 minutes 43 seconds in the third period. At other times, McDonagh relied on his instincts, skating from the corner toward the crease, where he shoveled a no-look pass by Dominic Moore at the net. The puck took a favorable bounce, and Mats Zuccarello swooped in to chip it past Carey Price. By now, McDonagh’s departure from Montreal in 2009 is a subject that interests him as much as tying Leetch. Asked whether he had derived any additional satisfaction from the circumstances, McDonagh said, “No, just the satisfaction of winning the first game of the series.”
|
Ice hockey;Ryan McDonagh;Rangers;Montreal Canadiens;Playoffs
|
ny0126843
|
[
"business",
"media"
] |
2012/08/22
|
How ‘Call Me Maybe’ and Social Media Are Upending Music
|
For decades, the song of the summer would emerge each year following a pattern as predictable as the beach tides. Pop radio would get it rolling before school let out, and soon the song — inevitably one with a big, playful beat and an irresistible hook — would blare from car stereos everywhere. Then came prom singalongs as the song finally became ubiquitous around the Fourth of July. In 1987, it was Whitney Houston ’s “I Wanna Dance With Somebody.” In 2003, Beyoncé’ s “Crazy in Love.” But the success of this summer’s hit, Carly Rae Jepsen’s cheerfully flirty “Call Me Maybe,” shows how much the hitmaking machine, as well as the music industry itself, has been upended by social media. Only a year ago, the charts were dominated by stars who had come out of the old machine of radio and major-label promotion: Katy Perry, Rihanna , Adele , Maroon 5 . This year’s biggest hits — “Call Me Maybe,” Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know” and Fun.’s “We Are Young” — started in left field and were helped along by YouTube and Twitter before coming to the mainstream media. For “Call Me Maybe,” which was No. 1 for nine weeks, the longest run of the year, the critical piece was YouTube. After Justin Bieber and friends posted a video of themselves lip-syncing to it in February, hundreds of fan tributes followed. Alongside Ms. Jepsen’s own video, which has been watched 212 million times, versions by Katy Perry, the Cookie Monster ( “Share It Maybe” ) and the United States Olympic swim team turned it into a yearlong audiovisual meme . A tribute version even brought the song to the attention of President Obama . In an interview with KOB-FM, a New Mexico radio station, he said: “I have to admit, I’ve never actually heard the original version of the song. I saw this version where they spliced up me from a whole bunch of different speeches that I made. They kind of mashed together an Obama version of it.” Nearly two-thirds of teenagers listen to music on YouTube, more than any other medium, Nielsen said last week. Ms. Jepsen said in a recent interview that “the viral videos are what’s been the driving force for this. It was insane to see that the music could spread that far because of the Internet. It’s a cool thing. It changes the game completely.” YouTube, Twitter and Facebook are now record labels’ textbook tools for starting a marketing campaign, and if the numbers there are big enough, they can be used in pitches to radio and television programmers. To introduce Cher Lloyd, a 19-year-old singer who was on “The X Factor” in Britain , Epic Records set up a “queen” fan to beat the drum on Twitter , and coached Ms. Lloyd on what to mention online — a TV appearance, for example, or the Twitter handles for radio D.J.’s. “In this day and age, artist development is about how do you turn 10 Facebook likes into 100, into 1,000,” said Scott Seviour, Epic’s senior vice president for marketing. The song catapulted Ms. Jepsen, apple-cheeked and giggly at 26, from obscurity to worldwide fame. Five years ago she placed third on “Canadian Idol,” and last fall she released “Call Me Maybe” in Canada to preview her second album. By the Christmas holiday it was a minor hit in Canada, when Mr. Bieber heard it. “It’s supposed to be a fun song,” Ms. Jepsen said. “Not to take yourself too seriously, to put you in a good mood.” Mr. Bieber’s role in popularizing the song reflects the importance of both social media and old-fashioned celebrity promotion. On Dec. 30, 2011, he told his 15 million Twitter followers that “Call Me Maybe” was “possibly the catchiest song I’ve ever heard lol.” Shortly thereafter, he and Mr. Braun signed Ms. Jepsen to their label in the United States, Schoolboy, which is affiliated with Interscope Records and the Universal Music Group. To exploit the success of the single, which has sold eight million downloads around the world, Ms. Jepsen delayed the release of her album. Called “Kiss,” it will now be released next month, when she will also hit the road as an opening act for Mr. Bieber. The song’s trajectory also demonstrates the continuing power of radio, which record executives say is still essential to turn any song — no matter how much online buzz it has — into a genuine smash. In March and April, when “Call Me Maybe” was getting tens of millions of views on YouTube, it still had relatively low radio play — fewer than 5,000 spins a week on Top 40 stations in the United States, according to Nielsen. It hit No. 1 on iTunes on May 27, but took almost a month to reach No. 1 on Billboard’s singles chart, which counts sales as well as airplay and streaming services. By then it had about 20,000 spins a week on multiple radio formats. “There’s not a million-seller out there that doesn’t have radio play,” said Jay Frank, chief executive of the label DigSin. “But its first million generally doesn’t come from radio.” “Call Me Maybe” is a watershed case for the use of social media as a marketing tool, but the song’s success will be difficult to replicate — even for Ms. Jepsen as she prepares to release her album. No matter how hard a record company might push, popularity online depends on the enthusiasm of individual fans. The marketers behind Ms. Jepsen have worked to organize it to some degree, through tools like a Tumblr blog collecting fan tribute videos. But Jonathan Simkin, her manager, said that trying to control the energy wasn’t the point. “That’s part of the beauty of how this has grown,” Mr. Simkin said. “This is just people who the song struck. I don’t want to harness it or limit it. I just want to pinch myself and say, ‘Thank God the song affects people this way.’ ” Ms. Jepsen said she was not worrying about trying to line up another megahit, because that kind of success is never predictable. “I never know what is a hit and what isn’t a hit,” she said. “I just write what feels natural and good. At end of the day you just release it and hope for the best.”
|
Music;null;Video;Audio Recordings
|
ny0055593
|
[
"sports",
"tennis"
] |
2014/09/04
|
U.S. Open 2014: Kei Nishikori Outlasts Stan Wawrinka in Five Sets
|
For the second time in three days, Kei Nishikori found himself battling through a fifth set, fighting fatigue as much as his opponent, and somehow ending up the last player standing. After the 10th-seeded Nishikori outlasted No. 3 Stan Wawrinka, 3-6, 7-5, 7-6 (7), 6-7 (5), 6-4, on Wednesday, he could manage little more than a smile to celebrate the 4-hour-15-minute victory. It did not help that he was less than two days removed from a 4:19, fourth-round win over Milos Raonic that ended at 2:26 a.m. on Tuesday, tying the United States Open record for the latest finish of a match. “I don’t know how I finished that game,” Nishikori said Wednesday. “But I’m very happy.” Mats Wilander and Philipp Kohlschreiber, the two men who previously won matches at 2:26 a.m., in 1993 and 2012, both failed to win a single set in their next round. But Nishikori, who was done few favors by schedulers by being put in the afternoon session on Wednesday, showed few signs of fatigue. Image Wawrinka said: “We were both quite tired in the fifth set. I try not to show.” Credit Julio Cortez/Associated Press “That was a little bit tough because I never had that experience,” Nishikori said of the late finish. “But always, you know, good to win after 2:30 a.m. “I had a little bit jet lag today,” he added, smiling. “No, it’s good; it’s good. My body is good.” Wawrinka, who won his first Grand Slam title at the Australian Open in January, was impressed by Nishikori’s endurance. “Even at the beginning he looks like he’s going to die on the court, but he’s there,” Wawrinka said. “Physically, he’s there. Even at the end of the match, even. We were both quite tired in the fifth set. I try not to show. “I still think that I was the fresher on the court, but he handle well. He was really going for his shot in the fifth set. I had some chance to break him. Maybe I should go a little bit more, maybe I should try a few different things, but didn’t happen that way. That’s life.” Nishikori, 24, has two days off before the semifinals on Saturday, when he will play the winner of the match between No. 1 Novak Djokovic and No. 8 Andy Murray. Nishikori became the first Japanese man to make a semifinal of the United States championships since Ichiya Kumagae in 1918. He did it the hard way, not only reaching his first Grand Slam semifinal, but doing it by beating Wawrinka, who is no slouch in tough matches. The meeting did not start well for Nishikori, who fell behind by 3-0 in the first set. The second set was also a bit topsy-turvy, but Wawrinka handed Nishikori a gift by double-faulting on break point at 5-6. The third set featured long rallies that often ended in spectacular shots. Nishikori grabbed an advantage, only to squander it. He was serving for the set, leading by 5-3, but when he was down by 30-15, he unwisely tried a between-the-legs shot that plunked into the net to give Wawrinka a break point that he converted. Although Nishikori would win the tiebreaker in spectacular fashion, the match was destined to go the distance. The fourth-set tiebreaker proved equally dramatic, with Wawrinka soaring to a 4-0 lead only to have Nishikori surge back to tie it. Then Nishikori picked the wrong time to send a few shots long and wide, and a fifth set became necessary. It did not turn until Nishikori easily won his service late in the final set, unfurling an audacious drop shot for a winner on game point. Wawrinka then blinked again, double-faulting to give Nishikori two match points. He converted the second into the victory when Wawrinka sent a final forehand into the net. Nishikori did not raise his arms in victory, managing little more than curling the sides of his mouth toward the sky. In his box, however, his coach led a much more raucous celebration. In a fitting bit of U.S. Open symmetry, Nishikori’s coach is the former American player Michael Chang, who played the longest match in Open history — a 5:26 semifinal loss to Stefan Edberg in 1992.
|
Tennis;US Open Tennis;Kei Nishikori;Stan Wawrinka
|
ny0129915
|
[
"us"
] |
2012/06/24
|
Spending for Weight-Loss Surgery Increases in Texas
|
As the numbers of obese in Texas have swelled, so has the comfort of state and federal lawmakers with spending taxpayer dollars on weight-loss surgery for the elderly and the poor. A Texas Tribune analysis of federal and state health care expenditures shows Medicare spending for weight-loss surgeries for Texas seniors — including gastric bypass and gastric banding — grew by nearly 400 percent between 2006 and 2010, to $1.7 million from $340,000. Since 2009, the number of bariatric procedures covered by Medicaid , the state health provider for the disabled and the very poor, has more than doubled. And annual Medicaid spending has jumped to $2.7 million from $290,000 in the last three years, the bulk of which was supplemental payments made to managed care plans. This state subsidized weight-loss surgery has seen a boom in Hidalgo County along the Texas-Mexico border, where, according to Medicaid records, doctors have been reimbursed for 443 weight-loss surgeries in the last five years, at a cost of more than $340,000. That is dozens more — and more than twice the cost — than have been performed in Dallas County, which has nearly 150,000 more people on Medicaid than Hidalgo County. Border surgeons say that they are simply responding to demand: Their region has the highest rate of Medicaid patients in the state, and patients roll into the medical hubs of McAllen and Edinburg from across southern Texas. “There is no single diet right now that helps patients lose weight and keep it off,” said Dr. Luis Reyes , a McAllen bariatric surgeon who has filed nearly 300 Medicare and Medicaid claims for weight-loss surgeries over the last six years and earned about $220,000 for them, according to state and federal data. “Bariatric surgery has been able to help these patients to lose weight, to keep it off and to get rid of their comorbidities, which are very expensive,” he said, referring to medical conditions caused by obesity. And Medicare and Medicaid officials say Texas’ overall numbers track with a state in which nearly two-thirds of adults and one-third of teenagers are either obese or overweight. Stephanie Goodman, spokeswoman for Texas’ Health and Human Services Commission , said there is a higher incidence of diabetes along the border, “so that may be why we’re seeing more of these surgeries in that region.” But state lawmakers, who have set their sights on Medicaid as a way to curb out-of-control health care costs, are troubled by the spending on bariatric surgery. State Senator Jane Nelson , Republican of Flower Mound, who chaired a committee in the 2011 legislative session aimed at cutting Medicaid costs to help close the state’s budget gap, said lawmakers “need to understand why we are seeing such a prevalence of these surgeries, especially in light of the rampant abuse of the system across the state.” State Senator Dan Patrick , Republican of Houston, said that in light of The Tribune’s analysis, he asked H.H.S.C.’s inspector general to review the state’s bariatric surgery policy to “ensure that any opportunities for fraud, waste or abuse are eliminated.” Covering weight-loss surgery under state and federal health plans is a relatively new concept. Medicare started doing it in 2006; Medicaid covered it only on a case-by-case basis until opening it up in 2009. While Medicare spending on bariatric surgeries in Texas has marched up steadily, Medicaid has seen a pronounced increase — the result of the state making supplemental payments to managed care plans, which get paid set premiums and faced unanticipated costs due to the state’s decision to more widely cover weight-loss surgery. Those payments, which at a cost of $23,000 per surgery reached $2.3 million in 2011, ended last year, creating significant cost savings for the state. Both Medicare and Medicaid require potential bariatric patients to meet what is designed to be a high bar. Patients must have a body mass index of at least 35, which is 210 pounds for someone who is 5-foot-5, and 245 pounds for someone who is 5-foot-10. They must have other comorbidities related to obesity, like sleep apnea and high blood pressure, and must have tried and failed other weight-loss regimens. Medicaid even covers teenagers, though they must have a B.M.I. of at least 40 and go through a special review. (Just four were covered in 2009, compared with 18 in 2011.) Dr. Ernesto Garza Jr ., a McAllen bariatric surgeon, said that as the medical field and patients themselves have become more comfortable with weight-loss surgery, Medicare and Medicaid have followed suit. While it used to take three to four months for Medicare to approve a surgery, he said, now it takes three to four weeks. Though Medicaid requires evidence that patients have secondary conditions, he said, problems like joint pain, reflux and incontinence can qualify. “It’s not really hard to find these issues,” Dr. Garza said, adding that 30 to 40 percent of the bariatric surgeries he performs are covered by Medicaid or Medicare, and that his patients live healthier lives post-surgery. “You just have to ask the right questions.” State and federal health officials say the financing for weight-loss surgeries has been a good investment. Ms. Goodman, of the Health and Human Services Commission, said that when they are used appropriately, surgeries reduce Medicaid costs. “That’s because we reduce the number of expensive medications and treatments that are needed for the health conditions associated with obesity,” she said. Dr. Erik B. Wilson , the medical director for bariatric surgery at Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center in Houston, said that once someone reaches a B.M.I. over 30, the likelihood of that person being able to lose weight and keep it off plummets. Between 18 months and three years after a bariatric surgery, he said, the procedure has paid for itself. “It’s a concept the public has a hard time getting its arms around,” he said, “but it really is the best option for a lot of these patients.” But there are critics who think the surgeries are not the best long-term approach for the state’s obesity problems, or its budget woes. State Senator Bob Deuell , Republican of Greenville and a family physician, said that when Texas decided to start covering bariatric surgery under Medicaid, health officials assured lawmakers that it would only be used in extreme cases. Dr. Deuell said that it appears that threshold is not hard to meet. Daniel O’Connor , an associate professor in the University of Houston’s department of health and human performance , said that although weight-loss surgery has clear benefits for individual patients, it is not a sustainable public-health intervention. Mr. O’Connor said the state could reach many more people with less expensive lifestyle interventions, and improve their health enough to save far more dollars than bariatric surgeries do. “We need to determine what model we should use on a gross level, not a patient-by-patient level,” he said. “We might be able to make them better enough with nonsurgical interventions that there’s still a significant health care saving to the state.”
|
Obesity;Bariatric Surgery;Texas;Health Insurance and Managed Care
|
ny0122613
|
[
"sports",
"golf"
] |
2012/09/10
|
Rory McIlroy Wins BMW Championship Over Mickelson and Westwood
|
CARMEL, Ind. — As Phil Mickelson and Vijay Singh stalked their putts on the 18th green, Rory McIlroy stood outside the scoring trailer scrolling through his congratulatory messages. McIlroy, ranked No. 1 in the world, had secured his second title in two weeks and his third in his last four starts with a two-stroke victory in the BMW Championship. Among the first texts he retrieved on his smartphone was one from the tennis superstar Rafael Nadal, who wrote, “Well done.” McIlroy, 23, is in the kind of zone known to only the rarest of athletes. Nadal, an 11-time Grand Slam champion, has been there, and so has Tiger Woods, the last golfer to win in back-to-back weeks on the PGA Tour, in August 2009. Since securing his second major title, at the P.G.A. Championship last month, McIlroy has broken 70 in 10 of 12 rounds and is 41 under par in that stretch, including 40 under in the last two weeks. He closed with a five-under-par 67 in the third leg of the FedEx Cup playoffs to win by two strokes at 20 under, equaling his winning score at the Deutsche Bank Championship six days earlier. “Just playing with a lot of confidence right now,” McIlroy said. “I’m confident in my ability and confident with the shots that I’m hitting and confident on the greens.” He added, “It’s a nice run to be on, and I want to try to keep it going for as long as possible.” Those who followed McIlroy’s final round will say he won the tournament with three birdies on the closing nine and two nervy par putts, at Nos. 14 and 17. The truth is, McIlroy laid claim to the winner’s trophy the night before, when he spent 40 minutes after his round working out a few kinks in his swing on the driving range. McIlroy, who is in a relationship with the tennis player Caroline Wozniacki, was criticized earlier in the year, while in the throes of a four-month winless stretch, accused of getting lost in a social vortex. But as he showed here, nothing is wrong with his work ethic or his will to win. “I went out and did some great work on the range last night after I played,” McIlroy said, “and I figured a couple things out.” That’s putting it mildly. He missed one fairway Sunday after missing six during the third round. McIlroy, of Northern Ireland, was paired with the Englishman Lee Westwood in a final round that felt like a five-hour preview of the coming Ryder Cup between teams from the United States and Europe. Four of Sunday’s first five finishers and six of the top nine are set to represent the United States or Europe in the biennial event at Medinah Country Club outside Chicago starting Sept. 28. Aside from McIlroy, there was Westwood, who closed with a 69 to finish in a tie for second with the United States team stalwart Mickelson (70). Another United States team member, Woods (68), tied for fourth with Robert Garrigus. They were one stroke ahead of Adam Scott (70) and the American Dustin Johnson (70), who will make his second Ryder Cup appearance. His countryman Jim Furyk validated his choice as a captain’s pick by closing with a 68 to finish ninth, one stroke behind Singh, who shot a 73. Five players held at least a share of the final-round lead: McIlroy, Singh, Mickelson, Westwood and Johnson. “A lot of people stayed in neutral, and Rory geared ahead,” said Mickelson, whose streak of consecutive sub-70 rounds ended at seven. Two forces were moving toward each other like tectonic plates to cause the oscillations in the leader board. There were the players jockeying for the victory, and those scrambling to secure their place in the top 30 in the point standings to qualify for the Tour Championship next week in Atlanta. Squeezed by both stressors were Singh, who began the week at No. 49, and Garrigus, who was No. 31. Garrigus closed with his fourth sub-70 round, a 69, to move up 11 places in the standings. Singh’s 73, the highest score among the top 25 finishers, left him three places shy of qualifying. Kyle Stanley, who spent five weeks atop the FedEx Cup rankings earlier in the year and was No. 30 at the week’s start, also failed to make it. So did Bill Haas, the reigning FedEx Cup champion, who shot a 78 (two days after carding a 64) to extend a bewildering trend. No champion has successfully defended his title. Then there was McIlroy, who could have taken this tournament off after securing a top-five seeding at the Tour Championship with his win the previous week. In other years and in other permutations of the FedEx Cup playoffs, stars like Woods and Mickelson have bypassed a playoff event. “I felt like I was playing really well and didn’t want to stop that run,” McIlroy said. McIlroy will spend the next few days in New York running with the Knicks during their preseason conditioning sessions. He was extended the invitation through his fitness trainer, Steve McGregor, who has worked with the teams. “It’ll be good,” McIlroy said. “We’re doing a bit of track work next week. I think their stride is probably a little longer than mine, but it should be good fun.”
|
Golf;McIlroy Rory;Westwood Lee;Mickelson Phil
|
ny0000987
|
[
"world",
"asia"
] |
2013/03/28
|
Daw Aung San Suu Kyi Attends Military Parade in Myanmar
|
BANGKOK — Myanmar’s military asserted its role in the country’s politics at a ceremony on Wednesday that featured a prominent guest, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi , the Nobel laureate, whose presence among the generals would have been unthinkable a few years ago. In the capital, Naypyidaw, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi sat in the front row, flanked by her former military captors and watching a display of the country’s armed might. It was a scene that symbolized what members of her party say is a fledging partnership, jarring to some , that recognizes the military’s continuing power in a country moving toward greater democracy. The ceremony, in observance of the country’s Armed Forces Day, was broadcast on national television and featured a parade of tanks and rocket launchers as helicopters and fighter aircraft flew overhead, a more militaristic display than in previous years. Nearly two years after a military junta ceded power to a nominally civilian administration, the army appears ascendant again, buttressed in part by Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, who despite widespread hatred and resentment in Burmese society for the military after decades of oppression, has flattered the army with praise in recent months. The army’s profile rose last week when soldiers flooded the streets of the central city of Meiktila, where the police had been unable to stop three days of killings of Muslims by Buddhist mobs. The troops, ordered into the city by President Thein Sein, a former general himself, have kept the city calm. Over the weekend, religious violence flared in other parts of the country, raising the prospect of further military interventions. At the ceremony Wednesday, Myanmar’s commander in chief, U Min Aung Hlaing, said the military would maintain its “leading political role.” Image Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi sat with her former military captors on Wednesday, for a display of the country’s armed might in the capital, Naypyidaw. Credit Nyein Chan Naing/Reuters This month, he took the title of senior general, the same rank as his predecessor in the job, U Than Shwe, the dictator who led the junta. Although Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi has sent public signals for greater cooperation with the military for several months, the ceremony Wednesday was among the first public signs that the military was reciprocating. “Today is historic for our country,” said U Zaw Htay, a former military officer who is a director in Mr. Thein Sein’s office. “Daw Aung San Suu Kyi was a V.I.P. guest.” “No one could have expected this in the past,” Mr. Zaw Htay said. “This is a good sign for the new generation in Myanmar. And the warm welcome for Daw Aung San Suu Kyi shows the Tatmadaw recognizes her role,” he said, using the Burmese term for the armed forces. U Nyan Win, a leading member of Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi’s party, said her presence symbolized a reconciliation between the army and civilians. “Judging from today’s event, we can say the Tatmadaw is no longer separate from the people,” he said. Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi was kept under house arrest for a total of 15 years by the military before her release in 2010. She is now the leader of the opposition in Parliament. Members of her party, especially former political prisoners, have expressed apprehension at the party’s new strategy toward the military. Image The ceremony was in observance of the country’s Armed Forces Day. Credit Gemunu Amarasinghe/Associated Press They and outside analysts say it could alienate some of Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi’s supporters and mutes the party’s role as a critical voice toward the military as the army continues to battle rebel ethnic groups. “She’s obviously trying very hard to show the leaders of the armed forces that she is not their enemy, but it’s a dangerous game she’s playing,” Bertil Lintner , an author of many books on Myanmar, said by e-mail. “It may antagonize many of her supporters who are ordinary people with no love for the repressive military.” International human rights groups have documented abuses by the Burmese military in its campaigns against ethnic militias, including the use of child soldiers and civilians as human minesweepers. On Wednesday, Mr. Min Aung Hlaing, who rose to prominence by leading the rout of an ethnic minority group along the border with China, took a defensive tone about the military’s legacy. “All our members are being trained in the provisions of the Geneva Convention so our Tatmadaw does not commit any war crimes,” he said, according to Reuters. “There is no such thing as genocide in the history of our Tatmadaw.” The role of the military, despite the green shoots of democracy in the country, is often described as indispensable under the current Constitution , which the military wrote. Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi needs the military perhaps more than anyone else if she is to advance politically. She is barred from the presidency under the 2008 Constitution because her husband, who died in 1999, was English. The military controls one-quarter of the seats in Parliament, enough to block the amending of the Constitution. This month, Parliament agreed unanimously to form a commission to review the Constitution. But the scope and structure of the commission have not been decided, leaving it unclear whether the rule barring Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi from the presidency might be changed.
|
Aung San Suu Kyi;Myanmar,Burma;Politics
|
ny0047411
|
[
"sports"
] |
2014/11/16
|
Clif Bar Drops Sponsorship of 5 Climbers, Citing Risks
|
Moments before the San Francisco premiere of “Valley Uprising,” a documentary about the evolution of rock climbing in Yosemite National Park, Gary Erickson, the Clif Bar founder, was asked to stand and be acknowledged. He waved to the crowd inside a packed theater and received a warm ovation. Clif Bar , a maker of nutrition bars with long ties to the climbing community, and with a climber on its logo, was a major sponsor of the film. Other executives attended a showing of the movie the next night in Berkeley, Calif., not far from Clif Bar headquarters. Two months later, Clif Bar has withdrawn its sponsorship of five top professional climbers featured in the film, some with a year or more left on their contracts, saying the climbers take risks that make the company too uncomfortable to continue financial support. It has stirred debate in the outdoors community, creating rare introspection about how much risk should be rewarded. “They’re on a really slippery slope,” said Cedar Wright , one of the five whose sponsorship deal was cut. “Where do you draw the line?” Among those whose contracts were withdrawn were Alex Honnold and Dean Potter , each widely credited with pushing the boundaries of the sport in recent years. They had large roles in the film, mainly showing them climbing precarious routes barehanded and without ropes, a technique called free soloing. Potter also was shown highlining, walking across a rope suspended between towering rock formations. Image The climber Dean Potter walking across a rope suspended between rock formations in Moab, Utah. Credit Jim Hurst Other climbers who lost their Clif Bar contracts were Timmy O’Neill and Steph Davis , who spends much of her time BASE jumping (parachuting from a fixed object, like a building, an antenna, a span or earth) and wing-suit flying. Last year, her husband, Mario Richard, was killed when he crashed in a wing suit. “We concluded that these forms of the sport are pushing boundaries and taking the element of risk to a place where we as a company are no longer willing to go,” Clif Bar wrote in an open letter to the climbing community . “We understand that some climbers feel these forms of climbing are pushing the sport to new frontiers. But we no longer feel good about benefiting from the amount of risk certain athletes are taking in areas of the sport where there is no margin for error; where there is no safety net.” In the sports world, companies often end contracts with athletes over issues of behavior, usually when athletes run afoul of the law. But these athletes are sponsored precisely because of their willingness to take risks that most could not imagine. Companies like Clif Bar reward them for their adventures. But, as Clif Bar’s sudden stance publicly declares, there is responsibility in balancing the conflicting notions of comfort and risk. “We have and always will support athletes in many adventure-based sports, including climbing,” the company said. “And inherent in the idea of adventure is risk. We appreciate that assessing risk is a very personal decision. This isn’t about drawing a line for the sport or limiting athletes from pursuing their passions. We’re drawing a line for ourselves. We understand that this is a gray area, but we felt a need to start somewhere and start now.” Image “I think it’s completely fair for them to draw a line,” Honnold said. “It’s a very personal decision.” Credit Peter Mortimer Clif Bar declined to comment further on Friday. The athletes, who get most of their income from a web of sponsorship deals, greeted the news with surprise and a range of emotion. “It’s a general reflection on risk,” Honnold said. “The risk decision that Clif is making is the same kind of decision that we all make as athletes. I think it’s completely fair for them to draw a line. It’s a very personal decision. If Clif thought about it and said that that’s the line that they want to take, I can’t begrudge that. That’s the same kind of line I draw with risk.” Clif Bar still lists 99 sponsored athletes on its website , representing a long list of outdoor pursuits. Honnold was among those wondering why it chose to suddenly shed five specific climbers when he considers sports like big-wave surfing, big-mountain skiing and snowboarding more dangerous than free-solo climbing. “Maybe they just didn’t like us,” Honnold said. “That’s fair. It’s their prerogative.” Davis laughed it off, saying that sponsors come and go. Her affinity for BASE jumping may have cost her Clif Bar, but she said she had recently gained two other sponsors. Potter, sponsored by Clif Bar for more than a decade, called it “a huge emotional blow.” What frustrated him most was that the decision seemed connected to “Valley Uprising,” which recently won the grand prize at the Banff Mountain Film Festival. Clif Bar remains a major sponsor, and said that it continues to support the film and its current tour. Image In the film “Valley Uprising,” Potter was shown highlining. Credit Jim Hurst The movie’s primary sponsor is North Face , the outdoor-equipment and apparel company. Its roster of sponsored athletes includes Honnold and Wright, and company officials said that no changes were expected. Speaking of Clif Bar, Potter said: “It’s understandable if they say, ‘We shouldn’t have supported the film and we’re not aligned with you guys.’ I would have understood, and said, ‘Yeah, I know we’re pretty out there.’ But what they did was a filthy business move. They still support the film, but not the athletes? It seemed sleazy that Clif Bar would use some of my best climbs, and Alex’s best climbs, as a marketing tool on one hand, but then fire us on the other.” Most of the athletes involved have been doing those activities for many years. They have been featured in numerous magazines and films. Potter and highlining were featured in The New York Times in 2008. Clif Bar said that it had held internal discussions about its sponsored support of BASE jumping, free soloing and highlining for more than a year. The release of “Valley Uprising,” by Sender Films, might have just been the tipping point for action. “It just looks so crazy when you see a guy dangling by his fingertips without a safety net,” said Peter Mortimer , the founder of Sender Films and a climber. “I think a lot of people from Clif saw ‘Valley Uprising,’ and that brought the conversation to a head.” Video An excerpt from the film “Valley Uprising,” a documentary about the evolution of rock climbing in Yosemite National Park. Mortimer said he still had a strong relationship with Clif Bar. Sender Films, too, has had internal discussions about being involved in the most dangerous of athletic pursuits. “In the climbing community, it has been really clear from the response to this that it’s a really sensitive subject matter,” Mortimer said. Wright, a climber and filmmaker, has made movies with sponsorship help from Clif Bar featuring free-solo climbs with Honnold. He said Clif Bar had always been supportive — until now. “It shows a lack of understanding for the sport,” Wright said, “and a lack of respect for the athletes who have helped build their brand.” Wright said Clif Bar contacted him last week and asked if he would return. “I was like, definitely no,” he said. “It’s like your girlfriend who breaks up with you and wants to get back together. But she’s not really that loyal.” Wright and others have received inquiries from other nutrition companies. They want to know if the climbers would be interested in discussing new sponsorship deals now that they have a hole in their portfolios. Apparently, risk still has its rewards.
|
Mountaineering;Clif Bar;Movies;advertising,marketing;Rock climbing;Alex Honnold
|
ny0225411
|
[
"us"
] |
2010/10/29
|
California: Los Angeles Subway Link Approved
|
Los Angeles County transit officials have approved a proposed $5 billion subway link to West Los Angeles. On Thursday, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority board selected a 9.5-mile general route for the so-called Purple Line between downtown Los Angeles and the veterans hospital in Westwood. Specifics of the route must still be worked out. Construction is scheduled to begin in 2013 after a final environmental impact review. Completion could take more than two decades, but the time could be shortened if the project gets federal financing.
|
Transit Systems;California
|
ny0080423
|
[
"science"
] |
2015/02/24
|
Rarely Seen Images From Space Including the ‘Best Selfie Ever’
|
Hundreds of photographs from the early years of the space age are for sale. That includes the first image taken from space — from an altitude of 65 miles by a camera on a V-2 rocket launched from the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico on Oct. 24, 1946. (The boundary to outer space is generally placed at 100 kilometers, or 62.1 miles.) The prints are vintage — dating from that era, not modern reproductions — and come from the collection of a single European collector, said Sarah Wheeler, head of photographs at Bloomsbury Auctions in London. The more than 1,100 photographs, to be auctioned Thursday, are expected to fetch $750,000 to $1 million. Some are iconic NASA photographs, like Apollo 8’s “Earthrise,” which shows our planet floating above the lunar horizon, and Buzz Aldrin’s boot print in the moon’s soil, taken during the Apollo 11 mission. But others were never widely distributed by NASA, and although some have been available on the web , the images are still unfamiliar to most. That includes a selfie taken by Mr. Aldrin in 1966 as he was floating in orbit during a Gemini 12 spacewalk.
|
Space;Photography;Auction;Apollo program;Moon;NASA;Buzz Aldrin;Dreweatts & Bloomsbury Auctions
|
ny0038136
|
[
"business"
] |
2014/03/25
|
China Fines Nu Skin Over Sales Tactics and Product Claims
|
SHANGHAI — The American company Nu Skin Enterprises was fined $540,000 by China for illegal product sales and for misleading consumers, a regulator said Monday, adding that China would strengthen regulation of the country’s direct sales market. The fine was smaller than expected, and shares of Nu Skin — which says its products like cosmetics and nutritional supplements reduce the effects of aging — rose nearly 20 percent in morning trading in New York. Nu Skin, a multilevel marketing company, sold items outside the permitted range and overstated the potential results from using some of its products, the regulator, the State Administration for Industry and Commerce, said in a statement on its website, adding that some employees had also engaged in unsanctioned sales and misled consumers. “The company is already taking steps to correct the issues raised in the S.A.I.C. reviews, and is not aware of any other material enforcement investigations currently pending in China,” Nu Skin said. In addition to the company fine, six members of the sales staff will face fines totaling $241,000, the company said. The company previously said it had taken steps to resolve the matter, and it said last week that it expected a fine. Direct sales companies have come under fire in China, with the official People’s Daily newspaper saying in January that Nu Skin had organized “brainwashing” gatherings, prompting the regulator’s investigation. The inquiry dragged down Nu Skin’s shares, as well as those of its rivals Herbalife and Usana Health Science. Before Monday’s announcement, Nu Skin shares had lost more than a third of their value since Jan. 16, when China started its investigation. After the annoucement, however, the stock rallied. “The scope of the penalties is a little narrower than we had expected,” John Faucher, an analyst at J.P. Morgan Securities, wrote in a note. The company added that it would seek direction from the government about restarting normal business activities in China. It previously suspended promotional meetings and stopped accepting applications from prospective sales representatives. The regulator said it would examine increasing regulation of the direct sales sector, an area that analysts said was a regulatory gray area in China. Chinese law allows direct sales under limited conditions, but there are laws barring so-called pyramid selling, when members make more money recruiting new members than selling the actual product.
|
Nu Skin Enterprises;China;Regulation and Deregulation;Herbalife;Fines;advertising,marketing
|
ny0036004
|
[
"world",
"americas"
] |
2014/03/16
|
Transgender Models Prosper in Brazil, Where Carnival and Faith Reign
|
SÃO PAULO, Brazil — As a young boy in Brazil’s heartland, Carol Marra watched her parents politely correct strangers who said what a pretty daughter they had. In her teenage years, she coveted the boyfriends of her female classmates and tried out androgynous outfits, dutifully changing back into a young man’s clothes in her car before returning home. Now a favorite among Brazil’s growing class of transgender models, Ms. Marra, 26, has become a star. She filmed two mini-series for major Brazilian television channels, is starting a lingerie line, and was the first transgender model to walk Fashion Rio — considered a top national runway event — and also the first to pose for Revista Trip, a Brazilian culture magazine that features female nudes. Her popularity points to striking, if precarious, gains in Brazil’s popular culture for Ms. Marra and her small number of peers. In a country that publicly celebrates its mixed-race and multicultural heritage, Brazil’s cosmopolitan capitals like São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro have become places where crossing gender lines is increasingly accepted. Still, transgender models themselves say Brazil is also in many ways a deeply conservative country with strong religious forces that can create a hostile environment for its gay and transgender population. “They say Brazil is a liberal, progressive country, but it’s not really like that,” said Ms. Marra, as a stylist curled her long dyed-blond hair in the upscale Jardins neighborhood of São Paulo before a television shoot. Image Felipa Tavares, 26, a transgender model, during a photo shoot in Rio de Janeiro. Credit Lianne Milton for The New York Times Ms. Marra herself has become a success story for a rising number of transgender models who, like her, migrated from more remote regions to São Paulo, considered the most important fashion hub of South America. “When I arrived, I immediately felt the difference,” said Melissa Paixão , 22, who moved here at age 19. She was born Robson Paixão in Belo Horizonte, a more traditional city in Brazil’s interior. As a teenager, she made extra cash posing as Marilyn Monroe and Audrey Hepburn in a store there and, she said, she drew stares on the street, which she attributes less to prejudice than to being a six-foot-tall woman. Relative newcomers like Ms. Paixão, Camila Ribeiro and Felipa Tavares have gotten runway and catalog work in the national fashion market. Ms. Ribeiro walked in the Fashion Business show in Rio for Santa Ephigênia, a classy women’s wear brand. And Ms. Paixão will be in the coming catalog of Walério Araújo, a Brazilian designer who is known for flamboyant styles and has dressed Brazilian celebrities including singers like Preta Gil and Maria Rita. The transgender models say that their experiences bear out the idea that progress in gaining social acceptance has been uneven despite the anything-goes image the nation projects. The country’s gay and transgender movements were stunted during the military dictatorship that steered the country from 1964 to 1985, years when similar movements were taking root in other countries, scholars of gay rights here say. Video Carol Marra is leading a new group of transgender models who are stepping into Brazil’s mainstream fashion industry. Gender-bending has a long history in Brazil; public cross-dressing peaks each year with the pre-Lenten Carnival celebrations. The participation of boisterous men in women’s clothing and crude makeup is as much a tradition as samba competitions. Drag shows by transgender and gay performers became a fad in Rio nightclubs in the 1950s and ’60s, and in subsequent decades some transgender women began using hormonal treatments and silicone to feminize their bodies, according to James N. Green, a historian and the author of “Beyond Carnival: Male Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century Brazil.” Brazil has also increasingly become supportive of gay rights. São Paulo hosts one of the world’s largest gay pride parades, and since 2010 , the Brazilian judiciary has upheld gay couples’ rights to civil unions, adoption and marriage. But a proposal to distribute antidiscrimination kits in public schools was defeated by the government after evangelical members of Congress complained of its sexual content. And violence and prejudice against the gay and transgender populations remain high. Grupo Gay da Bahia , a prominent gay rights group, reported 338 killings nationwide of gay, lesbian and transgender people in 2012. It is not possible to verify the motives for every crime, but many victims show marks of torture and multiple wounds, leading the group to believe such killings are often hate crimes, Luiz Mott, the anthropologist and historian who founded the group, said. Image Camila Ribeiro, 24, also transgender, with her manager, Fernando Herbert, at her agency in São Paulo, Brazil. Credit Lianne Milton for The New York Times Even as transgender models gain prominence, Mr. Green, the historian, argues that their success — while it is positive for those individuals — has little political value. “I think it means that men who look like women, as long as they are submissive to men and focus on beauty and clothes, don’t threaten anything,” he said. “It fits into men’s fantasies.” Some models see themselves as highly political while others say they are eager to be accepted as a woman like any other. Roberta Close , who posed for Playboy in 1984, is considered Brazil’s first transgender model and cultivated a devoted male following with her girlish aesthetic. The actress Rogéria , born Astolfo Barroso Pinto, is a household name in Brazil after years of appearing on Globo TV. Image Ms. Ribeiro walked in the Fashion Business show in Rio for a women’s wear brand, Santa Ephigênia. Credit Lianne Milton for The New York Times Still, the proportion of transgender models is tiny considering the vast fashion industry here. Brazil’s most internationally recognized transgender model — Lea T, born Leandro Cerezo and the son of a former soccer star, Toninho Cerezo — posed for a 2010 international Givenchy campaign . She also walked São Paulo Fashion Week with supermodels like Gisele Bündchen and Alessandra Ambrosio, who are known for their work for Victoria’s Secret. Débora Souza, a modeling agent who represents Ms. Marra, said, “A trans model is interesting because she can get two crowds: both the feminine crowd and the gay crowd, which is the main group of the fashion world.” But once they venture beyond the confines of fashion, the models have enjoyed less success. Ms. Ribeiro, 24, who comes from the Amazonian industrial city of Manaus, has posed for Candy, which calls itself the “first transversal style magazine.” But she said that despite being welcomed by fashion and artistic, experimental or avant-garde publications, transgender models had found it difficult to branch out into mainstream consumer magazines, catalogs, trade shows and ads for products with broad appeal. Ms. Marra also said her own renown in the fashion world has not carried over to other realms. She said she has been inundated with vulgar messages from men on her Facebook page, often asking her how much she costs for a night. “I never wanted to be an activist of the cause,” Ms. Marra said. “I thought I was a woman like any other.” But she became more outspoken after receiving messages from transgender individuals in more remote corners of the country, like a prostitute in Manaus who saw her on TV and asked for guidance. Ms. Marra also complained that she did not receive fair treatment in casting, saying that she was assigned only to roles of transgender women. “The majority of actors are gay and they can play a heartthrob,” Ms. Marra told her director at her mini-series shoot. “Why can’t I play a maid, a secretary, a tree?”
|
Gay and Lesbian LGBT;Models;Fashion;Transgender and Transsexual;Carnival;Brazil
|
ny0289851
|
[
"business"
] |
2016/01/29
|
Justices Take On a Muddled Issue: Insider Trading
|
In the 30 years since I chronicled the 1980s insider trading scandals in the book “Den of Thieves,” I’ve never seen the insider trading law in a greater state of confusion. A little over a year ago, a controversial ruling by United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit cleared two hedge fund managers who had traded on advance tips about company earnings. The ruling has thrown many insider trading prosecutions into disarray, and dealt a serious blow to the crackdown on insider trading by Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan. Judges have dismissed insider trading charges against six people and vacated a dozen convictions from his office alone. Other investigations have languished or been closed. The few remaining cases are on appeal or under a cloud. “There’s been a huge amount of fallout from the Second Circuit’s decision, and none of it good,” said Thomas Lee Hazen, a professor at the University of North Carolina’s law school who has written widely about securities law. Consider the case of the former investment banker Sean Stewart and his father, Robert (no relation to my branch of the Stewart clan). Last year, federal prosecutors charged that Sean Stewart leaked information to his father on impending mergers gleaned from his work at JPMorgan Chase and Perella Weinberg Partners. He and a golfing buddy traded on the information, earning over $1 million in profits. And when the elder Mr. Stewart didn’t trade on one of his tips, his son chastised him: “I can’t believe I handed you this on a silver platter and you didn’t invest in it,” he said in one conversation recorded by a cooperating witness. A textbook example of insider trading, the Stewart case would once have seemed open-and-shut. And the father did plead guilty to insider trading last summer. But Sean Stewart’s lawyers have moved to dismiss the case, citing an “endemic problem” with insider trading law in the wake of recent appellate court rulings. Federal prosecutors and securities regulators worry that hedge funds and other traders have seized on the confusion by trading on tips and confidential information that would once have been forbidden. I spoke to several government lawyers and hedge fund officials, and while none said they knew of any illegal activity (or would agree to be quoted by name on such a thorny subject), they feared that the law now gave the dark underbelly of Wall Street legal cover. Now, the Supreme Court may come to the rescue. Last week, it agreed to hear another insider trading case, from California, involving tips to family members. The authorities are hopeful that this could be an opportunity to restore at least some degree of clarity to the law. The court “might well view it as an opportunity to make a decision that will be a road map for the future,” Professor Hazen said. Image Just over a year ago, a ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit dealt a serious blow to the insider-trading crackdown led by Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan. Credit Spencer Platt/Getty Images Just about everyone I discussed the topic with this week agreed that some kind of road map is urgently needed. Prominent insider trading convictions, outsize Wall Street profits and the recent market volatility have shaken many Americans’ faith in the integrity of the financial markets. As I have written before, the root of the problem is that insider trading is a crime defined not by statute but by an accumulation of cases and judicial precedents that date from the 1960s. It has been open to interpretation by an ever-changing cast of prosecutors, regulators and judges on various federal courts, not all of which agree on what the law should be. Congress could — and should — pass a law defining and outlawing insider trading. But numerous efforts have failed, and no one expects anything soon given the current partisan divide on Capitol Hill. The Second Circuit upended insider trading prosecutions a little over a year ago when it swept aside the convictions of the two hedge fund managers. The court ruled that the traders weren’t guilty because they didn’t know the original sources of the inside tips and their immediate sources didn’t receive any benefit from passing on the information, unlike, say, the suitcases of cash that the former investment banker Martin Siegel received from Ivan Boesky back in the 1980s. Critics of the Second Circuit’s decision said it reflected a naïve view of how information is now traded on Wall Street, where virtually every favor carries a quid pro quo and hardly anyone is foolish enough to trade confidential information in return for cash. “Wall Street is a big favor bank,” said John C. Coffee Jr., a professor and expert in securities law at Columbia Law School. “There’s a culture of reciprocity.” The Supreme Court declined to review the Second Circuit case, so it remains the law in the trading-heavy jurisdictions of New York and Connecticut. But the court can hardly have failed to recognize the confusion that has ensued, even in what would seem straightforward cases like the one from California that it just agreed to review. In that case, United States vs. Salman, a former investment banker for Citigroup, Maher Kara, leaked confidential information about takeover deals to his brother, Mounir Kara, who in turn passed them to their sister’s fiancé, Bassam Salman. Testimony indicated that the families were close and that Mounir Kara and Mr. Salman, in particular, had become fast friends. When Mr. Salman asked the source of the information, Mounir Kara told him it was his brother Maher. Mr. Salman earned over $1.3 million on the trades, and was subsequently found guilty of insider trading. His conviction was upheld by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in California in an opinion written by Jed S. Rakoff, a federal trial court judge in Manhattan who was doing a guest stint on the Ninth Circuit. Judge Rakoff has taken a firm stand against insider trading in several rulings. Preet Bharara’s Key Insider Trading Cases The United States attorney in Manhattan oversaw a sweeping crackdown on insider trading in the hedge fund industry, but a federal appeals court upended the campaign. Like the Stewart case, Salman seems a particularly brazen example of insider trading — using confidential information to tip off relatives. (Another notorious example involving family members was Samuel Waksal, the former chief executive of ImClone Systems, who told his father and daughter to sell all their ImClone stock after he learned the Food and Drug Administration was about to reject his company’s cancer drug application.) The Second Circuit’s ruling has clouded all such cases. The court said that someone providing a tip must receive a benefit “that is objective, consequential, and represents at least a potential gain of a pecuniary or similarly valuable nature” to be guilty of insider trading. It suggested that familial love or friendship alone isn’t enough. But family members typically offer stock tips not for any immediate financial benefit to themselves, but simply out of the goodness of their hearts, or because they want to inspire feelings of gratitude and affection. Maher Kara testified he “loved his brother very much” and wanted to “fulfill whatever needs he had.” Sean Stewart’s lawyers argued that he gave the tips simply because Robert was his father. “The indictment does not even allege that Stewart provided information in expectation of any benefit,” they said in their motion to dismiss the case. But should the Supreme Court adopt that line of reasoning, and reverse Mr. Salman’s conviction, it might as well toss insider trading law out the window, not to mention several prominent Supreme Court precedents and decades of securities law enforcement. As Judge Rakoff pointed out, all someone privy to confidential market-moving information — corporate executives, investment bankers, lawyers — would have to do is tell a family member and ask for nothing immediate in return, which already seems to be one of the first instincts of many inside traders. For that reason, few think the Supreme Court will reverse Mr. Salman’s conviction, even though two justices — Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas — have in previous opinions demonstrated a hostility to the law. But assuming the Supreme Court upholds Mr. Salman’s conviction, it could provide guidelines and more clarity on the personal-benefit requirement, whether it be in cases involving family members or mere business relationships. Professor Hazen said he would like to see a far-reaching opinion that goes beyond cases involving family members or close friends. “I’d hope the court would go even further and say, if someone is giving you a tip or valuable information, then the presumption is they’re getting something in return,” he said. “It may just be a psychic benefit, but that should be enough. You shouldn’t have to prove an immediate tangible benefit.” He added, “The public already thinks the market is rigged. I don’t think the Supreme Court would want to add to that perception.”
|
Insider trading;Supreme Court,SCOTUS;Legislation;Securities fraud;Decisions and Verdicts
|
ny0111216
|
[
"nyregion"
] |
2012/02/18
|
City Ban on Worship in Schools Is Upheld
|
In the latest twist of a winding legal case over worship in public school facilities, a federal appeals court ruled on Friday that New York City was allowed to prevent dozens of religious groups from holding services in the schools. The ruling, by a panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit — which the city had asked to review a lower court’s decision — came one day after a federal judge directed the city to halt its plan to eject religious groups that that had been worshiping in public schools on weekends. The appeals court said a temporary restraining order that the judge, Loretta A. Preska of United States District Court in Manhattan, issued on Thursday applied only to the plaintiff in the case before her, the Bronx Household of Faith, and not to other groups. “The Department of Education is legitimately concerned about public schools being affiliated with a particular religious belief or practice,” Jane Gordon, a lawyer for the city, said. Jordan W. Lorence, the lawyer for the Bronx Household of Faith, said other religious groups were unlikely to try to use the facilities this weekend. “I don’t think there’s going to be any civil disobedience or anything like that,” he said. “The school officials would have to unlock the doors.” He said other church congregations were still assessing their options. One had discussed holding services on the sidewalk, he said, while others considered renting space in synagogues or other houses of worship whose congregations meet Saturdays. Kate O’Brien Ahlers, a spokeswoman for the city’s Law Department, said the city did not anticipate any confrontations. On Thursday, Judge Preska ruled that the Bronx Household of Faith had “a likelihood of success” on its claim that the Constitution required the schools to remain open to them. She said her injunction would last 10 days, after which she could make the order more permanent.
|
Decisions and Verdicts;Education Department (NYC);Bronx Household of Faith;Preska Loretta A;Religion-State Relations;Education (K-12);New York City
|
ny0229254
|
[
"sports",
"baseball"
] |
2010/07/15
|
The Old Yankee Stadium, the Boss and a Little Bit of Me
|
News of George Steinbrenner ’s death on Tuesday left me with the sobering feeling that part of my life had come full circle. In some ways the announcement was anticlimactic, as if I had witnessed the Boss’s life fading away, bit by bit, through my bedroom window. Since 1989, I have had a bird’s-eye view of the old Yankee Stadium from my Sugar Hill apartment, where, rumor has it, Babe Ruth once lived. Yankee Stadium was the first thing I saw in the morning and one of the last things I saw at night. It was a steady presence, with its large blue letters proudly proclaiming: Y-A-N-K-E-E S-T-A-D-I-U-M. The old place provided a sense of comfort, security and pride in Harlem, Washington Heights and the South Bronx. The old Stadium was a 15-minute walk from my building. I used to push my daughter’s stroller down the Macombs Dam Bridge to the Joseph Yancey track to run laps. There were frequent debates, especially during baseball season, about the pros and cons of George Steinbrenner and the Yankees empire. There were few debates during the Yankees’ recent banquet years, beginning in 1996, that Steinbrenner was in his final glory. Then came the rumors and the reality of a new stadium, the rumors and the reality that our beloved park would be devoured to make way for progress. The community would get another park, we were promised, one that would be bigger and better. And so the demolition began. It’s hard to describe the feeling of watching a piece of yourself disappear piece by piece, day by day. I’ve had such a long relationship with the old Yankee Stadium. Two weeks after my 18th birthday, I played my first college football game at the Stadium. Undefeated Morgan State played Grambling, and every detail of that afternoon has remained vibrant: the sunny afternoon, the sold-out stadium, Morgan’s goal-line stand and victory. A year later, as a defensive back for Morgan, I gave up my first collegiate touchdown in Yankee Stadium, and in my senior year I played in the first nationally televised game between two historically black colleges in Yankee Stadium. Twenty-seven years later, I moved into a building where my apartment looked into the soul of the place. I’ve spent the last two years avoiding the sight of the old Stadium being dismantled, and wondering, Would you rather be demolished and go quickly, or be dismantled like this, little by little? The symmetry of watching the vibrant old Stadium and the once-robust Boss deteriorate became a daily reminder of my own mortality, a reminder that nothing lasts forever. Each of us, no matter how ruthless or how kind, is destined to be replaced by a newer model. The new Yankee Stadium is better than the old; the new Joseph Yancey park is bigger and better, too. On Tuesday I took the walk down Macombs Dam Bridge — the final walk of the Steinbrenner era. The walk seemed like a life cycle in miniature: first overcast skies, then a pleasant drizzle, finally a hard rain. The electronic board atop the new Yankee Stadium announced the news of the Boss’s death. Across the street, in the place of the old Yankee Stadium, was a massive crater, a sacred burial ground for so many cherished memories. Mine included.
|
Steinbrenner George M 3d;Baseball;New York Yankees;Yankee Stadium (NYC)
|
ny0051694
|
[
"nyregion"
] |
2014/10/06
|
Cornell Plans to Expand Off-Campus Engagement
|
Not just conducting laboratory experiments about water filtration, but building water filtration systems and installing them in towns that cannot afford to buy them. Not just studying South American musical traditions, but going to a village in Peru to hear them first hand, armed with a slew of instruments on which to train local children. Not just reading about workplace diversity, but going to India to assist with an employment program for people with disabilities. Through an initiative to be announced on Monday, Cornell University plans to transform its curriculum to make real-world experiences like these a defining aspect of the undergraduate experience. Backed by $50 million from the Einhorn Family Charitable Trust, which university officials intend to augment with $100 million from other philanthropies, the program will be called Engaged Cornell. By the time the program is fully functioning in 2025, the goal is for all graduating students to have taken at least one course with a community component, “in which they play a direct role supporting, enhancing, contributing to solving problems and contributing to the greater good,” said Laura Brown, the senior vice provost for undergraduate education. Many students will take a number of these courses. “Probably no two students would have the same experience,” Ms. Brown said. At first, the university will offer grants to professors interested in developing new courses. But with 30 to 40 percent of faculty members expected to retire over the next decade, the hope is that the younger group that replaces them will arrive at Cornell with new plans and ideas for this educational model. Interest in educational styles tends to run in cycles, and community engagement is a trendy topic these days. Many other institutions have built programs around it; Cornell consulted with the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, Tulane and Stanford, among others, all of which have undertaken experiments of this nature. According to Richard Kiely, the director of Cornell’s Engaged Learning and Research center, the interest reflects several cultural dynamics: growing student awareness of the people who live outside university gates; the tradition of experiential learning — learning by doing — supported in the writings of John Dewey, among others; and the attention that accrediting agencies are now paying to the professional development opportunities that colleges and universities provide. Mr. Kiely spoke from New Orleans, where he was attending a conference on service learning and community engagement. The idea that Ivy League teenagers have much to offer underprivileged communities struggling with complicated problems will strike some as naïve, even condescending. But David Einhorn , a trustee for the Einhorn trust, pointed to Cornell students, not the members of the communities they will work in, as the most immediate beneficiaries of local engagement. “If people are engaged and they learn how to react on an interpersonal level, get out of the traditional setting, they’re going to interact with different kinds of people and have different kinds of experiences and build prosocial skills,” said Mr. Einhorn, a hedge fund manager and Cornell alumnus whose family foundation has donated more than $100 million toward two dozen partner organizations with the aim of “helping people get along better,” according to the trust’s tagline. By working on a team, Mr. Kiely said, students will “learn about the political and cultural dimensions of a problem, the technical challenges, or the multiple perspectives for stakeholders. So one substantial kind of learning is on a professional level.” Beyond that, he said, there is the satisfaction that comes from making something happen rather than simply writing papers about it. “It’s an incredible way to see learning in action.” Mr. Kiely cited a number of examples already in progress at Cornell: Human ecology students who get a firsthand look at the issues they’ve been studying by working with health care professionals in Tanzania and Zimbabwe. Landscape architecture students who work with residents of Utica, N.Y.,to revitalize public spaces there. Theater students who help stage dramatic productions at Auburn Correctional Facility. City planning students who conduct research or provide data to help communities in the region determine their land use and transportation needs. All are rooted in Cornell’s position both as a private university and a state-supported land-grant school with a public mission. The plan, for now, is somewhat vague. A beautifully produced Engaged Cornell brochure is long on buzzwords like “empowerment” and “high-impact practices,” but short on specifics. School officials say it will be up to professors, in fields ranging from engineering to the classics, to figure out how to implement the program’s goals. “In some contexts it’s really easy; in some, it’s almost impossible,” Ms. Brown said. “It will be highly varied.” For Cornell students, one measure of engaged learning may count above others: its ability to guide them to a paycheck upon graduation. The college’s leaders hope it will, ultimately, change Cornell’s identity. Gretchen Ritter, the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, said, “It will be part of what makes us different, and part of what helps us to attract students who really want to think about how to engage in a broader world.”
|
College;Cornell;Einhorn Family Charitable Trust;Philanthropy
|
ny0233538
|
[
"us",
"politics"
] |
2010/08/23
|
In Alaska, Two Names Not on the Ballot Play Roles
|
ANCHORAGE — Ted Stevens and Sarah Palin will not be on the ballot in Tuesday’s Alaska primary, but they may loom large in voters’ minds nonetheless. In the Republican primary, Senator Lisa Murkowski faces Joe Miller, a Fairbanks lawyer. Mr. Stevens was long Ms. Murkowski’s proud mentor. Ms. Palin has endorsed Mr. Miller, who styles himself a Republican reformer and is a friend of her husband, Todd. Mr. Stevens’s death in a plane crash this month prompted a wave of warm memories and tributes here. It also shined a spotlight on sharp differences between him and Ms. Palin, and their relationships with Alaska. Not everyone here loved Mr. Stevens, but most people thought they needed him. For all of Ms. Palin’s vocal embrace of Alaska, it is hard to argue that she has been essential to its fortunes. Many people can tell stories about getting help from Mr. Stevens; countless Alaskan résumés detail time spent working in his office. Ms. Palin is known more for people she has fired. Mr. Stevens built things. These days, Ms. Palin mostly posts things. She is a Twitter and Facebook phenomenon. Yet in a way, Ted Stevens made Sarah Palin possible. He argued that Alaska needed extra helpings of federal largess because life here was uniquely extreme and remote. In his 40 years in the Senate he made it much less so. He brought home billions of dollars for roads and runways, telephone lines and Internet access. By the time Ms. Palin shot out of Alaska during the 2008 presidential campaign, she played the role of a multitasking modern mom, thumbs on her BlackBerry, eyes on five children and running state government. She also happened to eat moose meat and have a floatplane out back. Ms. Murkowski has been a far less colorful political figure. Mr. Stevens’s endorsement of her in 2004 helped her win her first full term after she was appointed to the seat, quite controversially, by her father, Gov. Frank H. Murkowski, in 2002. Nine days before his death on Aug. 9, Mr. Stevens, 86, co-hosted an event for Ms. Murkowski with College Republicans. Ms. Murkowski has never hesitated to embrace Mr. Stevens’s complicated legacy, even after he lost his seat in 2008 amid a corruption scandal. The morning his death was confirmed, she stood in front of television cameras and solemnly told Alaskans, “We have lost one of the greatest leaders that this state will ever see.” Jay Ramras, a Republican state representative from Fairbanks running for lieutenant governor, said he became teary watching a replay that night. “It was not until that moment that she actually became Alaska’s senior senator, even though she’s already enjoyed the title for two years,” Mr. Ramras said. “I thought it was a transformational moment for her.” Ms. Palin also issued a statement praising Mr. Stevens, but the two had a complicated relationship. While she often boasted of taking on the “old boys network” in Alaska, she usually was careful not to attack Mr. Stevens directly because he was so revered here. But in 2008, when she was running for vice president and Mr. Stevens was found guilty of corruption, she called for him to resign. He did not, but lost his seat. The guilty verdict was later thrown out. In June, Ms. Palin announced online that she was supporting Mr. Miller. Some people thought she would run against Ms. Murkowski herself. “Though the media has tried to portray some sort of feud or bad blood between Lisa and myself, such is not the case,” Ms. Palin wrote on Facebook. “I’ve always wished her well, but it is my firm belief that we need a bold reformer who is not afraid to stand up to special interests and take on the tough challenges of our time. Joe Miller has stepped forward.” Not long after, the Tea Party Express endorsed Mr. Miller and said it would make the race one of its top priorities, coming to Alaska and spending aggressively on radio and television commercials to unseat “Liberal Lisa Murkowski.” But the campaign has not appeared as energetic as promised, and in any event critics say outside intervention does not go over well with conservative Alaskans. While Mr. Miller’s profile has risen, experts expect Ms. Murkowski to be re-elected. Two days after Mr. Stevens’s death was confirmed, Mr. Miller appeared before about three dozen polite but not particularly enthusiastic members of the Valley Republicans, in Ms. Palin’s hometown, Wasilla. He praised Mr. Stevens for “the incredible contributions he made to this state” but then he got to the gist of his message, which is that Alaska, with its vast federal land holdings, is too restricted by and dependent upon Washington. In an interview later, Mr. Miller said, “We’re at a crisis point because people are continuing to look to the federal government for all the answers when this state, this state of Alaska, if it controlled its lands, if it were in charge of title, if it actually had possession of its lands, would be the richest, wealthiest state in the nation.” That theme has popular appeal here, but so does its counterpoint — that Alaska needs federal help, the kind Mr. Stevens provided. He was a principal reason that the state has traditionally received more federal money per capita than any other, that life here is no longer as extreme or remote as it once was, even the reason that someone like Ms. Palin could become a national political celebrity, if not necessarily one able to steer the outcome of a Senate race in her home state. Ms. Palin has yet to appear with Mr. Miller to show her support, though she has traveled the country in support of other candidates. Mr. Stevens was to have been the “special guest” at a fund-raiser for Ms. Murkowski a few days after his death. Some say his presence in the race will be felt more than ever. “There’s an element of nostalgia in the water,” Mr. Ramras said.
|
Alaska;Elections;Murkowski Lisa;Miller Joe;Stevens Ted;Palin Sarah;United States Politics and Government;Primaries and Caucuses
|
ny0175036
|
[
"technology"
] |
2007/10/31
|
Online Marketers Joining Internet Privacy Efforts
|
Most consumers are familiar with do-not-call lists, which are meant to keep telemarketers from phoning them. Soon people will be able to sign up for do-not-track lists, which will help shield their Web surfing habits from the prying eyes of marketers. Such lists will not reduce the number of ads that people see online, but they will prevent advertisers from using their online meanderings to deliver specific ad pitches to them. Today the AOL division of Time Warner will announce a service of this type, which will be up and running by the end of the year. Other programs are likely to be articulated soon, as online advertisers prepare for a two-day forum on privacy to be held by the Federal Trade Commission. AOL says it is setting up a new Web site that will link consumers directly to opt-out lists run by the largest advertising networks. The site’s technology will ensure that people’s preferences are not erased later. There is a silver lining for marketers, however: the AOL site will try to persuade people that they should choose to share some personal data in order to get pitches for products they might like. Most Web sites, including AOL, already collect data about users to send them specific ads — but AOL is choosing to become more open about the practice and will run advertisements about it in coming months. Consumers who have already seen some benefits from online tracking systems — in the form of movie recommendations from Netflix, perhaps, or product recommendations from Amazon — might warm to AOL’s argument. “Instead of having interruptive ads, instead of jarring things that will grab your attention, things are hopefully tailored to be suitable to your experience,” said Jules Polonetsky, the chief privacy officer for AOL. “We think tailoring advertising content in a way that is useful is a good proposition.” Whether consumer privacy groups and other advertising companies agree with AOL’s philosophy will become clearer tomorrow and Friday at the event put together by the F.T.C., the agency that monitors advertising for deceptive and unfair practices. The gathering will feature privacy officials from Google, Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft, as well as experts in the field of behavioral targeting, which is the delivery of ads to people based on their online habits. Advertising companies fashion their behavioral targeting models differently, but generally the practice involves linking demographic information and Web site visits. Under the practice, people who read articles about babies would receives ads for baby gear even when they move on to read articles about stocks, for example. Much of the information is gathered anonymously, without links to people’s names. Consumer advocacy groups have in the past asked the F.T.C. to set up some kind of do-not-track list for the Internet, but the commission has been hesitant to issue regulations that might slow innovation on the Web, said Eileen Harrington, deputy director of the agency’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. “We all love the Internet, and the last thing we want to do is suggest that the government would step in here in a way that would take that away from consumers,” Ms. Harrington said. “We haven’t reached conclusions on any of these questions. The big news here for us is — and maybe it seems obvious when you say it fast — is that advertising has changed dramatically.” Since 2004, companies have more than doubled the amount they spend on ads on the Internet, shifting that money away from more traditional outlets like television, radio and print publications. Companies will spend $20 billion this year on Internet ads, the Interactive Advertising Bureau, a trade group of Web publishers, estimates. The growth has been fueled in part by technologies that enable advertisers to use data about consumers on the Internet in ways that were not possible in older media. Traditionally, viewers and readers have been shown the same ads in the same places at the same times, no matter their age, gender or interests. Advertising was designed for a mass audience, leading to decades of water-cooler humor about that funny commercial last night, shown to everyone who tuned in. But to many consumer brand companies, making different ads for different people is a better way to reach prospective buyers — and the Internet captures enough data for them to do so. AOL executives say they are happy to give people a way to keep their Internet habits private, even though that would undercut AOL’s own behavioral targeting efforts. In July AOL acquired a behavioral ad network company, Tacoda, that has been promoting opt-out options to users for a year. “We all have to build toward a future where we are delivering ads people want and not just ads we want people to see,” said Dave Morgan, the founder of Tacoda who now works at AOL. “The only way to do that is to listen to consumers.”
|
Computers and the Internet;Privacy;Advertising and Marketing;AOL;Time Warner Inc
|
ny0144144
|
[
"world",
"europe"
] |
2008/10/16
|
Mob Muscles Its Way Into Politics in Bulgaria
|
SOFIA, Bulgaria — Politics is played to the death in Bulgaria, where the lives of politicians can be as cheap as spent bullets and murky business groups wage a murderous struggle for their cut of everything from real estate deals to millions in European aid. During a furious political season last year, the home of the chairwoman of a municipal electoral committee was set on fire, and the garages of mayors were firebombed. The mayor of a resort town in central Bulgaria was shot and killed with seven bullets, as was the wealthy City Council chairman in the outwardly idyllic Black Sea port of Nesebur. “Other countries have the mafia,” said Atanas Atanasov, a member of Parliament and a former counterintelligence chief who is a magnet for leaked documents exposing corruption. “In Bulgaria, the mafia has the country.” By almost any measure, Bulgaria is the most corrupt country in the 27-member European Union . Since it joined last year, it has emerged as a cautionary tale for Western nations confronting the stark reality and heavy costs of drawing fragile post-Communist nations into their orbit, away from Russia’s influence. European Union membership has done little to tame the criminal networks in Bulgaria. It has arguably only made those networks richer, raising worries that if the union cannot tamp down criminal activity in a member like Bulgaria it may have little sway over other fragile nations that want to join. The United States helped Bulgaria into NATO , has rotated troops through for joint exercises since 2004 and has tried to encourage commerce, education and democracy. It has just announced that it will invest more than $90 million in facilities and equipment for joint use in military exercises. The European Union, eager to improve the lives of the 7.5 million Bulgarians, has promised 11 billion euros, or nearly $15 billion, in aid. Far from halting crime and violence, the money effectively spread the corruption. Once Bulgaria’s shady businessmen realized how much European Union money was at stake, said many of Sofia’s advocates for reform, they moved from buying off politicians to being directly involved in politics themselves. And so European officials froze almost $670 million in financing this summer and may halt the flow of billions more, alarmed at freewheeling white-collar criminals with links to the very highest reaches of power. The nation’s homegrown mobs of men in black — the “mutri,” or mugs — control construction projects in city halls. And questionable business networks have moved from declining black markets for smuggled cigarettes and alcohol to legal investments in booming real estate. They have made their mark on the capital’s atmosphere: men nicknamed “thick necks” for their muscular appearance linger in neon-lighted nightclubs like Sin City and Lipstick, or keep watch over Mercedes jeeps and Audis outside. Sofia guidebooks offer tips: Avoid restaurants that draw businessmen with four or more bodyguards. Now, men like this are muscling into public office. Ties to Top Officials Investigators with the European Union’s antifraud office are focusing on the Nikolov-Stoykov group, a sprawling conglomerate of dozens of companies with interests from meat processing and cold storage to scrap metal and a Black Sea resort. The group’s leading partners — both briefly detained last year on suspicion of fraud — boast top connections. Ludmil Stoykov helped finance the campaign of President Georgi Parvanov, organized a business group supporting him and maintained ties to a former deputy minister of foreign affairs. Mr. Stoykov, who has not been charged with any crime since his arrest last year, denies knowing about criminal activities involving European Union funds. “I categorically object to these attempts to stain my name and to be treated as a criminal,” he said in answer to written questions. He acknowledges giving 25,000 leva, about $17,000, as a campaign contribution to Bulgaria’s president. “I participated with a donation according to all requirements by the law,” he said. “And no one is saying the opposite.” His partner, Mario Nikolov, who is scheduled to stand trial next week on fraud charges, forged discreet alliances to Prime Minister Sergei Stanishev, according to contracts and bank deposit slips turned over to prosecutors last week by Boyko Borisov, the mayor of Sofia, who is a fierce rival of the prime minister. Those documents show he steered more than $137,000 to Mr. Stanishev’s Socialist Party as contributions from his companies. In an unusually blunt report leaked this summer, European Union fraud investigators accused the Nikolov-Stoykov group of being a front for a “criminal company network composed of more than 50 Bulgarian enterprises and various other European and offshore companies.” Among the European Union investigators’ accusations were tax and subsidy fraud: taking development aid to buy new equipment for companies and then passing off ancient equipment from the former East Germany and pocketing the difference. The companies were also accused of illegally importing huge quantities of Chinese rabbit meat for export to France and Germany with fake health certificates from Argentina. Reached at his office at Eurofrigo, a cold storage company in Sofia, Mr. Nikolov repeatedly declined to comment on the documents indicating contributions to the prime minister, which Bulgarian prosecutors said Wednesday were under formal investigation. After the European fraud report was leaked, Mr. Nikolov said: “I became public enemy No. 1. I am afraid for my life.” Mr. Stanishev, the prime minister, did not respond to 10 attempts to seek comment over a six-day period. A former journalist educated at the London School of Economics, Mr. Stanishev was called “Mr. Clean” by President Bush last year for his efforts to fight organized crime. After other European nations started complaining about aid fraud, Mr. Stanishev said publicly that there was no “umbrella” of protection for rich businessmen or organized crime figures. But when he made those comments, it was not known that he met in 2005 with Mr. Nikolov. A five-minute video obtained from Sofia’s mayor shows Mr. Stanishev greeting Mr. Nikolov at his meat factory, inspecting equipment and a table laden with goose liver sausages before sitting down to lunch with white wine. A few weeks later, according to deposit slips handed to prosecutors by Mr. Borisov, Sofia’s mayor, contributions to Mr. Stanishev’s party started to flow. One Western European diplomat, who spoke anonymously because of being involved in sensitive negotiations in Bulgaria, said that copies of the contractual agreements on donations appeared authentic: “It means they know they won’t be prosecuted, so why not have secret contracts?” A summary agreement was addressed to Rumen Petkov, who headed the Socialists’ campaign at the time and resigned as interior minister a few months ago amid revelations that he had met organized crime figures. Origins of Crime Bulgaria’s gray economy is looped around disparate politically connected companies that shift in and out of business as opportunities and legal obstacles arise, according to a report from the Center for the Study of Democracy, an anticorruption group in Sofia. According to the center and other anticorruption activists, bosses typically enlist longtime employees to register companies in their names; if there are legal problems, the companies cease functioning without being linked to the actual leaders. Meanwhile, profits from sources like cigarette or alcohol smuggling are plowed into legal front companies, like soccer clubs, where money can be laundered through huge fees paid for transfers of players. The competition is brutal: all three past chairmen of the soccer club Lokomotiv Plovdiv have been killed, one by a sniper by the Black Sea. Seventy-five percent of Bulgarian businesses have security protection, far more than in other countries in Eastern Europe, according to Enterprise Surveys, analysts for the World Bank. As in Russia and some other Balkan nations, corruption has seeped into the fabric of life. Sofia has a thriving black market for blood outside hospitals, where patients’ families haggle over purchases with dealers, according to Bulgarian news reports that track the prices. The roots of this organized crime date to the collapse of Communism in the early 1990s. Thousands of secret agents and athletes, including wrestlers once supported and coddled by the state, were cast onto the street. During the United Nations embargo of warring Serbia in the 1990s, they seized smuggling opportunities and solidified their networks. The wrestlers, in particular, developed private security forces and insurance companies that were little more than shakedown protection rackets. Other men became shadowy entrepreneurs with close ties to the government. In the past five years, Bulgaria has weathered machine gun assassinations and inventive daylight attacks. Hitmen disguised themselves as drunks and Orthodox priests. In 2004, a bomb planted atop an elevator in central Sofia was detonated by cellphone, killing a businessman and three bodyguards. The toll now tops more than 125 contract killings since 1993, according to a list compiled by the United States Embassy in Sofia, which does not include at least four people killed this year, including the head of an energy company. Most of the killings are unsolved. A Power Grab Begins Admission to the European Union did not halt the carnage, but emboldened a power grab. According to corruption fighters and election observers, votes can be traded, depending on the town, for marijuana cigarettes or sold for up to 100 leva, or $69. People document their votes by taking pictures of their ballots with their cellphone cameras, according to Iva Pushkarova, executive director of the Bulgarian Judges Association. “They trade votes freely on the streets, kill and threaten people with no shame,” Ms. Pushkarova said. While corruption affects many corners of society, the impact is particularly stark in the legal system, where some people without political connections have resorted to hiring decoy lawyers, for fear that their legal documents would vanish if presented to particular clerks by lawyers recognized as working for them. Kremikovtzi, an insolvent Communist-era steel plant and one of Bulgaria’s largest companies, has become a test case. Foreign creditors — many of them American hedge funds — are pursuing a $474 million claim against Kremikovtzi, whose former chief executive is under investigation by the Bulgarian authorities for fraud and embezzlement. “When your law enforcement system isn’t cleaning up the corruption in the legal system, who do we go to?” asked Justin Holland, an adviser to the Kremikovtzi investors committee, “Literally, we cannot go to anybody in Bulgaria.” Among Western nations, impatience is growing, particularly at the lack of trials of high-level government officials accused of corruption. As Frans Timmermans, the Dutch minister for European affairs, argued, “What we need to see is real people put before real judges, convicted and put in jail.” Meglena Pluchieva, Bulgaria’s newly appointed deputy prime minister for oversight of European government funding, said she believed that the nation was making headway similar to that of nations that joined the European Union a few years earlier, in 2004. The difference is that then there was enthusiasm for union expansion, but today “the situation is entirely different,” she said. She also accused wealthier nations of double standards, citing a scandal over rotten meat in Germany last year. Some European countries have simply given up on Bulgarian justice. Germany complained of getting little local help in its effort to prosecute Konstantin Hadjivanov, a wealthy businessman and a member of the City Council in Petrich, Bulgaria, who is known as “the Kitty.” So the Germans waited until he had stepped into Greece to serve their warrant. Now he sits in a jail cell on cigarette smuggling charges while facing another fraud inquiry. But it is only a matter of time before he returns home to resume his political career, say his supporters and wife, a former Mrs. Bulgaria. City elections, canceled once because of irregularities, took place on Saturday. From his Greek jail cell, Mr. Hadjivanov gamely ran for re-election, but the voters finally rebelled: He won less than 1 percent of Petrich’s vote.
|
Bulgaria;Politics and Government;Organized Crime;International Relations;European Union;North Atlantic Treaty Organization;Europe
|
ny0222311
|
[
"science"
] |
2010/11/02
|
‘Bad Science’ by Ben Goldacre Skewers Quack Health Claims - Book Review
|
Ben Goldacre is exasperated. He’s not exactly angry — that would be much less fun to read — except in certain circumstances. He is irked, vexed, bugged, ticked off at the sometimes inadvertent (because of stupidity) but more often deliberate deceptions perpetrated in the name of science. And he wants you, the reader, to share his feelings. His initial targets are benign. Health spas and beauty salons offer detox footbaths for $30 and up, or you can buy your own machine online for $149.99. You put your feet in salt water through which an electrical charge runs. The water turns brown, the result of electrolysis, and you’re supposedly detoxed. Dr. Goldacre describes how one could produce the same effect with a Barbie doll, two nails, salt, warm water and a car battery charger, thus apparently detoxing Barbie. The method is dangerous, however, because of the chance of getting a nasty shock, and he wisely warns readers not to try his experiment themselves. As for homeopathy, he says that it may indeed work but it’s not because of the ingredients in those pills. You can pay for Valmont Cellular DNA Complex (made from “specially treated salmon roe DNA”), but Vaseline works just as well as a moisturizer. There’s more here than just debunking nonsense. The appearance of “scienciness”: the diagrams and graphs, the experiments (where exactly was that study published?) that prove their efficacy are all superficially plausible, with enough of a “hassle barrier” to deter a closer look. Dr. Goldacre (a very boyish-looking 36-year-old British physician and author of the popular weekly “Bad Science” column in The Guardian) shows us why that closer look is necessary and how to do it. You’ll get a good grounding in the importance of evidence-based medicine (the dearth of which is a “gaping” hole in our culture). You’ll learn how to weigh the results of competing trials using a funnel plot, the value of meta-analysis and the Cochrane Collaboration. He points out common methodological flaws: failure to blind the researchers to what is being tested and who is in a control group, misunderstanding randomization, ignoring the natural process of regression to the mean, the bias toward positive results in publication. “Studies show” is not good enough, he writes: “The plural of ‘anecdote’ is not data.” Dr. Goldacre has his favorite nemeses, one of the most prominent being the popular British TV nutritionist Gillian McKeith, whose books and diet supplements are wildly successful. According to her Web site , “Gillian McKeith earned a Doctorate (PhD) in Holistic Nutrition from the American Holistic College of Nutrition, which is now known as the Clayton College of Natural Health .” (The college closed in July of this year.) Clayton was not accredited, and offered a correspondence course to get a Ph.D. that cost $6,400. She is also a “certified professional member” of the American Association of Nutritional Consultants, where, Dr. Goldacre writes, he managed to get certification for Hettie, his dead cat, for $60. Ms. McKeith has agreed not to call herself “Dr.” anymore. There’s nothing wrong, he says, with the substance of her diet (“anyone who tells you to eat more fresh fruits and vegetables is all right by me”) any more than with diets that advise drinking plenty of water and moderate alcohol intake and exercise. What he does object to is the “proprietorialization of common sense.” Adding sciency flourishes and a big price tag to the advice may enhance the placebo effect, “but you might also wonder whether the primary goal is something much more cynical and lucrative: to make common sense copyrightable, unique, patented and owned .” Sometimes bad science is downright harmful, and in the chapter titled “The Doctor Will Sue You Now,” the usually affable Dr. Goldacre is indeed angry, and rightly so. The chapter did not appear in the original British edition of the book because the doctor in question, Dr. Matthias Rath, a vitamin pill entrepreneur, was suing The Guardian and Dr. Goldacre personally on a libel complaint. He dropped the case (after the Guardian had amassed $770,000 in legal expenses) paying $365,000 in court costs. Dr. Rath, formerly head of cardiovascular research at the Linus Pauling Institute in Menlo Park, Calif., and founder of the nonprofit Dr. Rath Research Institute, is, according to his Web site , “the founder of Cellular Medicine, the groundbreaking new health concept that identifies nutritional deficiencies at the cellular level as the root cause of many chronic diseases.” Dr. Rath’s ads in Britain for his high-dose vitamins have claimed that “90 percent of patients receiving chemotherapy for cancer die with months of starting treatment” and suggested that three million lives could be saved if people stopped being treated with “poisonous compounds.” He took his campaign to South Africa, where AIDS was killing 300,000 people a year, and in newspaper ads proclaimed that “the answer to the AIDS epidemic is here.” The ads asked, “Why should South Africans continue to be poisoned with AZT? There is a natural answer to AIDS.” That answer was multivitamin supplements, which he said “cut the risk of developing AIDS in half.” “Tragically,” as Dr. Goldacre writes, Dr. Rath found a willing ear in Thabo Mbeki. Despite condemnation by the United Nations, the Harvard School of Public Health and numerous South African health organizations, Dr. Rath’s influence was pervasive. Various studies have estimated that had the South African government used antiretroviral drugs for prevention and treatment, more than 300,000 unnecessary deaths could have been prevented. You don’t have to buy the book to read the whole sorry story, which is readily available online. Dr. Goldacre believes in the widest possible dissemination of information. But if you do buy the book, you’ll find it illustrated with lucid charts and graphs, footnoted (I’d have liked more of these), indexed and far more serious than it looks. Depending on your point of view, you’ll find it downright snarky or wittily readable. BAD SCIENCE Quacks, Hacks, and Big Pharma Flacks.By Ben Goldacre. Faber and Faber. 288pages. $15.
|
Frauds and Swindling;Books and Literature;Diet and Nutrition;Dietary Supplements and Herbal Remedies;Medicine and Health;Science and Technology;Bad Science (Book)
|
ny0175970
|
[
"business"
] |
2007/07/05
|
At I.B.M., a Smarter Way to Outsource
|
Jeffrey Taft is a road warrior in the global high-technology services economy, and his work shows why there are limits to the number of skilled jobs that can be shipped abroad in the Internet age. Each Monday, Mr. Taft awakes before dawn at his home in Canonsburg, Pa., heads for the Pittsburgh airport and flies to Houston for the week. He is one of dozens of I.B.M. services employees from around the country who are working with a Texas utility, CenterPoint Energy, to install computerized electric meters, sensors and software in a “smart grid” project to improve service and conserve energy. Mr. Taft, 51, is an engineer fluent in programming languages and experienced in the utility business. Much of his work, he says, involves being a translator between the different vernaculars and cultures of computing and electric power, as he oversees the design and building of software tailored for utilities. “It takes a tremendous amount of face-to-face work,” he said. What he does, in short, cannot be done overseas. But some of the programming work can be, so I.B.M. employees in India are also on the utility project team. The trick for companies like I.B.M. is to figure out what work to do where, and, more important, to keep bringing in the kind of higher-end work that needs to be done in this country, competing on the basis of specialized expertise and not on price alone. The debate continues over how much skilled work in the vast service sector of the American economy can migrate offshore to lower-cost nations like India. Estimates of the number of services jobs potentially at risk, by economists and research organizations, range widely from a few million to more than 40 million, which is about a third of total employment in services. Jobs in technology services may be particularly vulnerable because computer programming can be described in math-based rules that are then sent over the Internet to anywhere there are skilled workers. Already, a significant amount of basic computer programming work has gone offshore to fast-growing Indian outsourcing companies like Infosys, Wipro and Tata Consultancy Services. To compete, companies like I.B.M. have to move up the economic ladder to do more complicated work, as do entire Western economies and individual workers. “Once you start moving up the occupational chains, the work is not as rules-based,” said Frank Levy, a labor economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “People are doing more custom work that varies case by case.” In the field of technology services, Mr. Levy said, the essential skill is “often a lot more about business knowledge than it is about software technology — and it’s a lot harder to ship that kind of work overseas.” The offshore specialists in India are learning that lesson. As they increasingly compete for higher-end work, the Indian companies are hiring thousands of workers this year in the United States, adding an odd twist to the offshoring trend. Tata alone plans to recruit 1,000 workers in America, said Surya Kant, president of the company’s American unit, for “the near-shore work that requires regular contact with clients in person.” For I.B.M., the world’s largest supplier of technology services, moving up to more sophisticated work is not the only step in its strategy to address the rising global competition. Labor represents 70 to 80 percent of the cost in traditional technology service contracts, and the traditional work of maintaining and updating software and data centers for corporate customers is still a large part of I.B.M.’s services business. So I.B.M. has moved aggressively to tap the global labor pool, and it is increasingly using software to automate as much traditional services work as possible. Today, I.B.M. employs 53,000 people in India, up from 3,000 in 2002; in India, the salaries for computer programmers are still about a third of those in the United States. Over the same span, the company’s work force in the United States declined slightly, to 127,000 at the end of last year. I.B.M. is also one of the world’s largest software companies. And its software development work, bolstered by dozens of acquisitions in the last few years, is more and more being done with an eye for use in its services business — to substitute software automation for labor. Smarter, more customized software can automatically handle some programming chores. I.B.M. employs 200,000 people worldwide in its services business, and if growth means constantly having to add more people, the business is in trouble. “We couldn’t keep building out labor,” Samuel J. Palmisano, the chief executive, said. “The long-term strategic answer was not to have a half a million people working for I.B.M.” Today, the company’s global work force is organized in clusters of business expertise and connected by high-speed communications links. Project managers can search worldwide for the right people with the right skills for a job. One tool is Professional Marketplace, a Web-based database of people and expertise. The idea is to build networks for producing and delivering technology services much like the global manufacturing networks that have evolved over the last couple of decades. Look inside a computer or automobile and the parts come from all over the world. High-end technology services projects increasingly will follow that formula, combining skills from across the globe and delivered on-site or remotely over the Internet. Over the years, I.B.M. has been challenged by disruptive waves of technology, from the minicomputer to the Internet. Mr. Palmisano sees the globalization of services as the next big shift in the business landscape, and I.B.M. is moving to adapt. “We’re reinventing I.B.M. once again,” he said. “We’re reinventing it by moving up to the higher-value portions of our industry and creating this globally integrated enterprise.” The utility project I.B.M. is doing in Texas offers a glimpse of the global formula. The far-flung work team includes research scientists in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., and Austin, Tex.; software developers in Pune and Bangalore, India; engineering equipment and quality-control specialists in Miami and New York; and utility experts and software designers like Mr. Taft that have come from Philadelphia, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Raleigh, N.C., and elsewhere. I.B.M. plans to use the skills learned and software written for the smart-grid project in work with utility clients around the world. In the services field, these are deemed “reusable assets,” reducing costs in the future. Ron Ambrosio, a senior I.B.M. researcher, has been down to Houston a few times, attaching sensors to power lines and collecting gigabytes of data on electricity flows. He and others at I.B.M. are studying how to predict and prevent power failures, optimize performance, reduce costs and conserve energy. “We’re looking at this as part of a worldwide opportunity,” he said. Dennis Hendon, an account executive, and Rob Calvo, a senior services consultant, lead the I.B.M. team in Houston. Mr. Hendon is an engineer by training, while Mr. Calvo has a business degree, but their real skills lie in years of on-the-job training — what labor experts call “passive knowledge” and “complex communications,” observing, listening, coordinating, negotiating and persuading. The two men say they think of themselves as orchestra conductors, getting all the human parts working smoothly together, inside and outside I.B.M. “We aren’t mounting the poles, but our subcontractors are,” Mr. Hendon said. CenterPoint considered trying to do the smart-grid project itself, but not for long, said Thomas Standish, a senior vice president. “We don’t begin to have the kind of Internet and technological sophistication we needed for this,” he said. CenterPoint talked to other large technology services companies, Mr. Standish said, but soon settled on I.B.M. as the one with the breadth of research, software and services capability needed for the ambitious project. In Pune, Dheeraj Gupta, a 34-year-old software engineer, said it was I.B.M.’s breadth — and thus the range of opportunity for him — that prompted him to join the company in 2000. After earning a master’s degree at an elite technical institute in India, Mr. Gupta worked at four software and services companies in India before being recruited to I.B.M. At I.B.M., Mr. Gupta began as a Java programmer, but later moved to higher-end work, personifying the strategy for success in the evolving global services economy. Today, Mr. Gupta leads a team of four developers writing software for utilities like CenterPoint. “I’m a technical guy,” he said. “And now I’m moving higher up the ladder. I know various software technologies but now I’m gaining business and industry expertise as well.”
|
Relocation of Business;United States Economy;International Business Machines Corp;Economic Conditions and Trends;Labor
|
ny0204948
|
[
"sports",
"hockey"
] |
2009/01/16
|
Bruins Goalie Tim Thomas Shows He Belongs in the N.H.L.
|
UNIONDALE, N.Y. — Tim Thomas was 31 years old and had played goaltender in all of four National Hockey League games when he rejoined the Providence Bruins three years ago after starring in Finland. He was competitive, combustible and athletic. His coach at Providence, the top farm team of the Boston Bruins, was a former goaltender named Scott Gordon, who thought Thomas was terrific at stopping first shots but not rebounds. Gordon emphasized two things: the butterfly technique, and patience. “It’s still a personal insult when he gets scored against, but he’s a lot more in control,” said Gordon, who became the Islanders’ head coach in August. “He’s more technically sound than he was.” Thomas played only 26 games for Providence before the two goaltenders for the Boston Bruins got hurt. Thomas was called up and kept the job, won the starter’s job back the next season and has been named an N.H.L. All-Star the last two seasons. The Bruins, who beat the Islanders, 2-1, at Nassau Coliseum on Thursday, acquired Manny Fernandez before the 2007-8 season, but Thomas is playing a little more this season than Fernandez, who is being paid four times Thomas’s $1.1 million salary. “It wasn’t like I went from a guy who couldn’t play street hockey to playing in the N.H.L.,” said Thomas, who made 40 saves against the Islanders (12-28-4). “That’s my point. I’ve just kind of been there all along, plugging along.” The Bruins (33-7-4) have the best record in the Eastern Conference primarily because they have adhered to the system installed by Coach Claude Julien, the Devils’ former coach, but the two goalies seem to push each other. “We’ve got two guys who want to play,” said Fernandez, who had a 14-3-1 record, 2.07 goals-against average and .928 save percentage, comparable to Thomas’s 18-4-3, 2.04 and .935. “It’s a situation where we can let it all out energy-wise. We’ve gotten into a rhythm where we can empty our tanks every night.” Neither goaltender has played in more than five consecutive games this season. Thomas started his third straight game Thursday because Fernandez had back spasms, but Julien is not interested in choosing one goaltender over another anytime soon. “So far, they haven’t given me a reason to,” Julien said. Thomas does not seem to have lost much of his edge. He picked up a roughing penalty for crosschecking Montreal’s Andrei Kostitsyn to the ice Tuesday after Kostitsyn hit Boston defenseman Aaron Ward from behind. “He never, ever backs away from anything,” Bruins forward P. J. Axelsson said of Thomas. “Sometimes he might look like a soccer goalie out there, but he plays hard.” Thomas was born in Flint, Mich., and was an all-American at the University of Vermont before wandering the globe to find a team. He played in the East Coast, International and American leagues, and he played for three teams in Finland and another in Sweden. He had played for Providence (and briefly for Boston) in the 2002-3 and 2003-4 seasons, but jumped again to Jokerit Helsinki during the N.H.L. lockout season. He had 15 shutouts there and was named the Finnish league’s most valuable player. The next season, 2005-6, Thomas headed back to Providence and was called up for one more shot with Boston. He has been there ever since. The Bruins played 8 of their first 11 games on the road and were 5-3-3 after an Oct. 30 loss to Calgary. But they won 14 of their next 16 games, and they later assembled a 10-game winning streak. Thomas was in goal for six of those games and Fernandez four. “I don’t know if it works well all the time, but it works well for us,” Boston defenseman Mark Stuart said of the two-goalie system. “Each guy is someone we have a lot of faith in. It seems like it works well for them. One guy gets his rest, and the other guy comes in and does the job.” The Islanders, without the injured goaltenders Rick DiPietro and Joey MacDonald, announced before Thursday’s game that they had agreed to terms with Wade Dubielewicz, who won the last four games of the 2006-7 regular season to help them make the Stanley Cup playoffs. Dubielewicz, 29, played in 21 games for Ak Bars Kazan in the Continental Hockey League in Russia earlier this season, posting an 11-8-3 record and an .892 save percentage. He must secure a formal release from Ak Bars and clear N.H.L. waivers before he can join the Islanders. So Dubielewicz was not available Thursday to face Thomas, who skated out wearing a mask with a message. “Beware of bear,” it read.
|
Boston Bruins;Hockey Ice
|
ny0114753
|
[
"business",
"media"
] |
2012/11/30
|
Bazooka Gum Overhauls Brand and Loses Comic Strips
|
NO one is more accustomed to bubbles bursting than marketers of bubble gum, but even they have been surprised by recent sales declines. Total domestic sales of bubble gum are projected to total $206.9 million in 2012, from $332.4 million in 2007, a drop of 38 percent, according to Euromonitor International, a market research firm. Bazooka bubble gum , which was introduced in 1947, fell even more, from $17 million in 2007 to a projected $8.8 million in 2012, a drop of 48 percent. Now, in what the brand is calling a reimagined Bazooka, it has overhauled its logo and packaging. Gone is the red, white and blue color scheme and geometric design of the brand, replaced with more saturated hues like fuchsia and yellow, and with the splattered-paint look of graffiti. The new packaging is by Goodwin Design Group , of Wallingford, Pa., which also undertook a less pronounced Bazooka package redesign in 2006. It will begin appearing in stores in January. “What we’re trying to do with the relaunch is to make the brand relevant again to today’s kids,” said Anthony Trani, vice president of marketing at Bazooka Candy Brands, a division of the Topps Company. Ken Carbone, a founder of the Carbone Smolan Agency , a Manhattan branding and design firm, reviewed the new Bazooka design, and said it “takes visual cues from comic books and skateboard culture and graffiti” and that it “feels right for today.” But Mr. Carbone, the co-author with Leslie Smolan of “ ‘Dialog’: What Makes a Great Design Partnership,” questioned why the gum veered so far from its original design. “I wonder if they couldn’t have taken more from what they had and re-energized it to make it look cool, like the Juicy Fruit model and Hershey’s model,” said Mr. Carbone, referring to the gum brand and chocolate bar that have tweaked their looks over the years but not metamorphosed. “I think this is a little bit of an overreach,” he said, “because they had some equity and authenticity” in their original design. Bazooka, however, which has struggled to get shelf space in the last decade, said the bold approach was winning over retailers. Among those not carrying the brand now that will begin stocking it early in 2013 are Target, 7-Eleven and Kroger. The gum originally sold for a penny in individual pieces on countertop displays in penny candy stores. The new standard package will feature 10 pieces of gum, five each of the original flavor and of a new flavor, blue raspberry. A piece of the rectangular gum will increase in size to 6 grams from 4.5 grams, a mouthful compared with brands like Stride, with pieces at 1.9 grams, and Dentyne Ice, at 1.5 grams. (Along with being more elastic than typical gum, bubble gum generally comes in bigger pieces, giving chewers more to inflate.) In recent years, sugarless gums have increasingly been marketed for functional benefits, like freshening breath, whitening teeth and strengthening teeth, with some brands even winning approval to carry the American Dental Association seal and a statement that chewing sugarless gum after eating helps reduce cavities. But the draw for regular gum tends to be more indulgent, with 17.9 percent of those who chew regular gum doing so because they like the taste, in contrast to 15.1 percent of sugarless chewers, according to a 2010 report from the National Confectioners Association, an industry group. The favorite flavor among consumers age 6 to 12, bubble gum drops to third place among those age 13 to 17 and to fifth for those 18 and older, according to the study. Frequency of gum chewing is highest among those age 13 to 17, who on average chew 314 times a year, in contrast to 234 times for those 18 to 24 and 211 times for those 25 to 34. Bazooka is pitched to children from 10 to 13, according to the brand. The brand, which said it had not advertised in more than five years , also will embark on a television and online advertising campaign. The campaign is by Flint & Steel , a new agency in Manhattan, which also is redesigning the brand’s Web site. Commercials are expected to appear in March. What adults may remember best about Bazooka, however, is disappearing. The tiny comic strip featuring the eyepatch-wearing brand mascot Bazooka Joe that has been wrapped around each piece of gum since 1953 is being replaced. New inserts will feature brainteasers, like a challenge to list 10 comic book heroes named after animals, or activities, like instructions on folding the insert into an airplane. They also include codes that, when entered at BazookaJoe.com , will unlock content like videos and video games. Bazooka Joe and his sidekick, Mort, who wears his turtleneck up over his mouth, will appear only occasionally as illustrations in the new inserts, but without the antics and corny jokes of the three-panel strips. Only 7 percent of children age 6 to 12 are aware of the Bazooka Joe character, according to E-Poll Market Research, a brand and celebrity research firm that last collected data about the character in 2007. In contrast , an average 30 percent of children are aware of food product mascots, the firm said. Among children who are aware of Bazooka Joe, 41 percent liked the character, below the average likability for food characters, which is 54 percent. Mr. Trani stressed that the brand was not discarding Bazooka Joe, who in the past has appeared not just in comics, but also on packaging, on store displays and in advertising. “Instead of a cheesy joke,” Mr. Trani said, “we wanted to have a fun, engaging activity for kids, but the purpose wasn’t to not include Bazooka Joe.” “To me it is all about doing one thing really well,” he said, “and that is refreshing the Bazooka brand.”
|
Advertising and Marketing;Chewing Gum;Comic Books and Strips;Containers and Packaging;Topps Company Incorporated;Bazooka
|
ny0214867
|
[
"nyregion"
] |
2010/03/15
|
Bidders for Aqueduct Slots Look to the Next Deal, Too
|
With Albany’s dysfunction searing their fortunes and reputations, why is the same small group of companies insistent on trying to build and run a slot machine casino at a rundown racetrack in southern Queens? There is the obvious and immediate allure of revenue from the 4,500 video lottery terminals, or V.L.T.’s at Aqueduct racetrack, which could gross several hundred million dollars in their first year. Those are enticing numbers on their own. But the greater attraction may be the potential down the road: the gold-plated possibility that the state is on a path toward further legalization of gambling. “V.L.T.’s are usually the first step,” said Michael G. French, who oversees the gaming advisory practice at PricewaterhouseCoopers in Philadelphia. “Then as the market matures, you say, ‘What do we do now?’ ” Privately, several bidders have made clear that legalization is where they see things headed. And having a licensed casino, albeit a limited one, in the state’s greatest population center would provide a leg up should that day come. On Thursday, Gov. David A. Paterson announced that state officials were withdrawing their support for their favored bidder — the third one to be selected in an eight-year odyssey — because the state’s Lottery Division determined that it could not license some of the company’s investors. The company, Aqueduct Entertainment Group, challenged that finding and vowed to fight the reversal. At least two other bidders that were passed over in the most recent selection, Delaware North Companies and a team led by SL Green Realty Corporation, made clear that they would try again. Many state governments watched with envy the revenue flow that some states enjoyed from Indian casinos. Connecticut has collected $5 billion from the state’s two casinos since they opened in the 1990s. Several states — including Iowa, West Virginia, Indiana and Maryland — responded by approving the installation of video lottery terminals, typically at racetracks. “You then have established that you can have V.L.T.’s without the sky falling, without cannibalizing neighboring businesses or increasing crime,” said Joseph M. Kelly , a professor of business law at Buffalo State College and an associate of the Catania Consulting Group, which specializes in gambling issues. “You will also have increased tax revenue,” he added, “and believe it or not, that is attractive to many legislators.” A few states, including Delaware and Pennsylvania, have taken the next step of approving table games, an expected boon to state coffers and to the companies that run the casinos. Competition for gambling dollars could prove a powerful motivation at Aqueduct, with casinos in Connecticut, Atlantic City and Pennsylvania a short trip away. But putting terminals there would no doubt face strong opposition from gambling interests in Atlantic City and from the operators of nearby Indian casinos, lest new sites draw revenue away. State Senator Frank Padavan of Queens, who has long opposed gambling, said he believed that the state was indeed heading toward further legalization. “Sure, they’d like to have a full-fledged casino ultimately,” he said. “The people who are in this business are in the business to milk it for all it’s worth.” Mr. Padavan called it “a big mistake” to place a casino in a neighborhood “where the majority of the people who would be going in to lose money are frankly people who can least afford it.” Another motivation that bidders have only hinted at is the potential for future real estate development on the vast Aqueduct site. The Rev. Floyd H. Flake , who had been a partner in the Aqueduct Entertainment Group until he withdrew earlier last week, spoke about that motivation during a recent interview on the cable station NY1. As a partner, Mr. Flake said, he would be involved not in the gambling aspect of the project but rather in possible future real estate development, including affordable housing. “My role in the process,” he said, “is to do what I have done in the Southeast Queens community for the last 35 years, and that is to build homes, build senior housing, to build opportunities for people and to create jobs.”
|
Gambling;Aqueduct Entertainment Group;Queens (NYC);Paterson David A;Padavan Frank;Flake Floyd H;Casinos
|
ny0201379
|
[
"world",
"asia"
] |
2009/09/08
|
Aid Agency Says U.S. Soldiers Raided an Afghan Hospital
|
KABUL, Afghanistan — A Swedish aid agency said Monday that American soldiers stormed through one of its hospitals in Afghanistan last week, searching men’s and women’s wards for wounded Taliban fighters, breaking down doors and tying up hospital staff members and visitors. The soldiers reportedly demanded that administrators at the hospital inform military authorities of any incoming patients who might be insurgents. After that, they reportedly said, the military would decide if the patients would be admitted. “This is simply not acceptable,” said Anders Fange, the country director for the Swedish Committee for Afghanistan , which runs schools, medical clinics and development projects in eastern Afghanistan. In a statement , Mr. Fange called the episode “not only a clear violation of globally recognized humanitarian principles about the sanctity of health facilities and staff in areas of conflict, but also a clear breach of the civil-military agreement” between nongovernmental organizations and international forces. The hospital is in Shaniz, in Wardak Province, in east-central Afghanistan. Mr. Fange said the soldiers arrived about 10 p.m. on Wednesday and searched the hospital for two hours. He said the soldiers were from the United States Army’s 10th Mountain Division . The Associated Press reported Monday that a public affairs officer for the United States Navy, Lt. Cmdr. Christine Sidenstricker, confirmed that the hospital had been searched. “We are investigating, and we take allegations like this seriously,” she told The A.P. “Complaints like this are rare.” Mr. Fange said his group “cannot and will not tolerate this kind of treatment” by the military and would not allow troops to decide on hospital admissions. Meanwhile, the Interior Ministry said Monday that a rocket that struck a house in the capital, Kabul, on Sunday night killed an Afghan man, his wife and one of their daughters. Two other children, both girls, were wounded in the attack. Two other rockets landed elsewhere in Kabul on Sunday night but reportedly caused no damage or casualties, the ministry said.
|
Hospitals;Afghanistan;Swedish Committee for Afghanistan;Afghanistan War (2001- );United States Defense and Military Forces
|
ny0037621
|
[
"world",
"asia"
] |
2014/03/15
|
Radar Suggests Jet Shifted Path More Than Once
|
SEPANG, Malaysia — Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 experienced significant changes in altitude after it lost contact with ground control, and altered its course more than once as if still under the command of a pilot, American officials and others familiar with the investigation said Friday. Radar signals recorded by the Malaysian military appeared to show that the missing airliner climbed to 45,000 feet, above the approved altitude limit for a Boeing 777-200, soon after it disappeared from civilian radar and turned sharply to the west, according to a preliminary assessment by a person familiar with the data. The radar track, which the Malaysian government has not released but says it has provided to the United States and China, showed that the plane then descended unevenly to 23,000 feet, below normal cruising levels, as it approached the densely populated island of Penang. There, officials believe, the plane turned from a southwest-bound course, climbed to a higher altitude and flew northwest over the Strait of Malacca toward the Indian Ocean. Image This map released by Malaysian officials shows two red lines representing the possible locations from which Flight 370 sent its last hourly transmission to a satellite at 8:11 a.m. on March 8, more than seven hours after it took off from Kuala Lumpur's airport, and when the plane would most likely have been running low on fuel. Credit Office of the Prime Minister of Malaysia Investigators have also examined data transmitted from the plane’s Rolls-Royce engines that showed it descended 40,000 feet in the span of a minute, according to a senior American official briefed on the investigation. But investigators do not believe the readings are accurate because the aircraft would most likely have taken longer to fall such a distance. “A lot of stock cannot be put in the altitude data” sent from the engines, one official said. “A lot of this doesn’t make sense.” The data, while incomplete and difficult to interpret, could still provide critical new clues as investigators try to determine what happened on Flight 370, which disappeared early last Saturday carrying 239 people from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. Malaysian and international investigators have said in recent days that the plane may have departed from its northerly route toward Beijing and headed west across the Malaysian peninsula just after the aircraft disappeared from civilian radar, its pilots stopped communicating with ground controllers and its transponders stopped transmitting data about its speed and location. The plane is also now thought to have continued flying for more than four hours after diverting its course, based on automated pings sent by onboard systems to satellites. But the Malaysian military radar data, which local authorities have declined to provide to the public, added significant information about the flight immediately after ground controllers lost contact with it. The combination of altitude changes and at least two significant course corrections could have a variety of explanations, including that a pilot or a hijacker diverted the plane, or that it flew unevenly without a pilot after the crew became disabled. The erratic movements of the aircraft after it diverted course and flew over Malaysia also raise questions about why the military did not respond to the flight emergency. Malaysian officials have acknowledged that military radar may have detected the plane, but have said they took no action because it did not appear hostile. A week after the jet’s disappearance, the Malaysian authorities have shared few details with American investigators, frustrating senior officials in Washington. “They’re keeping us at a distance,” one of the officials said. But investigators in Malaysia and the United States recently began receiving additional data about the plane and anticipate more over the weekend, according to a senior American official. “It’s gotten better and better every day,” the official said, referring to information from the plane’s manufacturer, satellites and military radar. “It should provide more clarity to the flight path. It’s not a given, but it’s a hope.” Because the plane stopped transmitting its position about 40 minutes after takeoff, military radar recorded only an unidentified blip moving through Malaysian airspace. Certain weather conditions, and even flocks of birds, can occasionally cause radar blips that may be mistaken for aircraft. The Malaysian authorities said they were still studying the signals to determine whether they came from Flight 370. But the person who examined the data said it left little doubt that the airliner flew near or through the southern tip of Thailand, then back across Peninsular Malaysia, near the city of Penang, and out over the sea again. That is in part because the data is based on signals recorded by two radar stations, at the Royal Malaysian Air Force’s Butterworth base on the peninsula’s west coast, near Penang, and at Kota Bharu, on the northeast coast. Two radars tracking a contact can significantly increase the reliability of the readings. Image The search and rescue operation for the Malaysian jet continued over the Strait of Malacca on Friday. Credit Junaidi Hanafiah/Reuters Still, Ravi Madavaram, an aerospace engineer at the consulting firm Frost & Sullivan, based in Kuala Lumpur, said the accuracy of ground-based radars in determining a plane’s altitude diminishes the farther away the plane is. When Flight 370 lost contact with ground controllers, it was more than 100 miles from Kota Bharu and 200 miles from Butterworth, distances that he said could degrade accuracy. But the altitudes measured as the plane crossed the peninsula would be more reliable, he said. A senior aircraft industry executive in the United States said the account of Flight 370’s movements that was emerging from the Malaysian military radar information matched what their officials were told. “Everything we have heard is consistent with the plane flying under the control of someone with at least some flying experience,” said the industry executive, who asked not to be identified because of the tense nature of the conversation underway with the Malaysian authorities. Military radar last recorded the aircraft flying at an altitude of 29,500 feet, about 200 miles northwest of Penang and headed toward India’s Andaman Islands. The normal cruising altitude of a long-range commercial jetliner is between 30,000 and 40,000 feet. Cengiz Turkoglu, a senior lecturer in aeronautical engineering at City University London who specializes in aviation safety, said a deliberate act in the cockpit could cause a radical change in altitude. “It is extremely difficult for an aircraft to physically, however heavy it might be, to free fall,” he said. An Asia-based pilot of a Boeing 777-200, who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to speak to reporters, said an ascent above the plane’s service limit of 43,100 feet, along with a depressurized cabin, could have rendered the passengers and crew unconscious, and could be a deliberate maneuver by a pilot or a hijacker. Image Relatives in Beijing mourned loved ones who were among those aboard Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. Credit Ng Han Guan/Associated Press Other experts said that altitude changes would be expected if the pilots became disabled after the plane’s autopilot was disengaged. Changes in the weight distribution on the plane as fuel burned off would make the plane descend and climb repeatedly, though changes in course would be harder to explain. American officials were concerned in the first few days after the plane disappeared that terrorists had brought it down. But as investigators have examined the flight manifest and looked into the two Iranian men who were on the plane traveling with stolen passports, they have become convinced that there is no clear connection to terrorism. The Federal Bureau of Investigation interviewed family members of the Iranian men and used computer programs to determine whether they had ties to terrorists. Those efforts showed no such connections, leading the investigators to believe the men were smugglers. The investigators considered but dismissed the possibility that hijackers landed the plane somewhere for later use in a terrorist attack, according to a senior American official briefed on the investigation. The data, the official said, “leads them to believe that it either ran out of fuel or crashed right before it ran out of fuel.” It would take a long runway to land a plane of that size, the official said. Although the radius that the plane could have flown extends into South Asia, the official added, “the idea it could cross into Indian airspace and not get picked up made no sense.”
|
Malaysia Airlines Flight 370;Malaysia;Malaysia Airlines;Plane Crashes and Missing Planes;Radar
|
ny0206459
|
[
"business"
] |
2009/06/03
|
For Some Homeowners, Promised Help Proves Elusive
|
MESA, Ariz. — She had seen the advertisements for the new government program offering relief. She had heard President Obama promise that help was on the way for homeowners like her, people who had lost jobs and could no longer make their mortgage payments. But when Eileen Ulery called her mortgage company — Countrywide, now part of Bank of America — the bank did not offer to alter her mortgage. Rather, the bank tried to sell her a new loan with a slightly lower monthly payment while asking her to pay $13,000 toward the principal and a fresh $5,000 in fees. Her problem was that she did not yet present a big enough problem to merit aid. Yes, she was teetering toward delinquency. She was among millions of homeowners rapidly sliding toward danger for whom the Obama administration had devised an aid program — some already in foreclosure proceedings, others headed that way as they ran out of means to make their payments. But unlike those in imminent peril of losing their homes, Ms. Ulery had never missed a payment. “I don’t know who this bailout is helping,” she said. “We’ve given these banks all this money and they’re not doing what they say they’re doing. Something’s not working right. They keep saying they’re doing all this, but we don’t see it down here at this level.” More than three months after the Obama administration outlined a new program aimed at rescuing millions of distressed homeowners by compensating banks that modify mortgages, Ms. Ulery’s experience illustrates the mixture of confusion, frustration and limited assistance that now reigns. Through many months of wrangling over the fate of the financial system, with hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars dispensed on bailouts, distressed homeowners have waited for their own rescue amid talk that it was finally on the way. Modifications of so-called subprime and Alt-A mortgages — those made to people with tarnished credit — actually fell by 11 percent in May from April, according to research by Alan M. White at Valparaiso University School of Law. A Treasury spokeswoman, Jenni Engebretsen, confirmed that homeowners like Ms. Ulery — current on their mortgages yet grappling with a hardship like unemployment — were eligible for loan modifications under the program. She said mortgage servicers had offered to modify more than 100,000 loans since the department announced the program. But how many loans have been modified? Ms. Engebretsen declined to say, noting that the Treasury was working with mortgage companies to “fine-tune reporting systems.” A spokesman for Bank of America Home Loans, Rick Simon, confirmed that the bank offered Ms. Ulery refinancing and not loan modification. The bank is now focusing on modifications only for those borrowers “who are already in severe threat of foreclosure,” he said. “We’re still putting the systems in place to handle people who are current on their loans,” Mr. Simon said, declining to say how many loans Bank of America had modified. “It’s still very, very early in the program.” Ms. Ulery, 63, is the face of the latest wave of troubled American homeowners, a surge of people in financial danger not because of reckless gambling on real estate, but because of lost income. Far from being one of those who used easy-money loans to speculate on homes proliferating across the desert soil of greater Phoenix, she has lived in the same modest, stucco-sided condo in suburban Mesa for a dozen years. She bought the two-bedroom home in 1997 for $77,500. For two decades, she worked as an executive assistant at nearby Arizona State University, bringing home more than $1,000 every other week — enough to pay the bills. Round-faced, wry and given to staccato bursts of laughter, Ms. Ulery regularly visits yard sales, seeking out plates and patchwork quilts for her collections. She takes pleasure in her two grandchildren and her beagle. She enjoys an occasional glass of wine, favoring a $6 merlot that comes in a screw-top bottle. “I’m not an extravagant-type person,” she said. “I see these big houses all around, and they’re beautiful, but I’m comfortable in my little condo.” Like tens of millions of other American homeowners, she added to her mortgage balance as the value of her condo swelled, at one point exceeding $200,000. She refinanced to pay off some credit cards and settle into a 30-year, fixed-rate loan. Later, she took out a home equity line of credit to buy a new Hyundai. She refinanced again in 2007, borrowing $20,000, mostly for a new roof. Over the years, her monthly payment swelled from about $600 to more than $1,000. With planning and self-control — she tracks her monthly expenses on a color-coded spreadsheet — she always came up with the money. “I’ve never been late,” she said. But the equation broke down last year, when she lost her job in university budget cuts. Ms. Ulery received six months of severance. She arranged a monthly $1,500 Social Security check. But when the severance ran out in October, her mortgage finally exceeded her limited means. With so many people out of work, and with her doctor counseling rest for a stress-related illness, she did not pursue another paycheck, negotiating to have her university pension begin earlier. She has been leaning on credit cards. Across the country, millions of homeowners in similar straits have been sliding into delinquency. Some owe more than their houses are worth. Ms. Ulery is among that unhappy cohort — her house is worth about $122,000, and she owes $143,000 — but walking away is not for her. “In my family, we don’t do that,” she said. “You pay your bills. And I wanted my home.” In March, she heard about the Obama administration program. The Countrywide Web site directed her to a government site, makinghomeaffordable.gov , she said. There, she took a test to determine her eligibility for a loan modification. Was her home her primary residence? Check. Was she having trouble paying her mortgage? Check again, and so on until the screen told her that she might qualify. In April, she called the bank. The representative said the bank was not doing modifications for people like her, she recalled. He shifted the conversation: if she handed over $18,000, he could lower her payment to $967 from $1,046. Her interest rate would actually increase slightly, with the drop largely because she was putting down more money. “I just laughed,” Ms. Ulery said. “It was a really good deal for them.” To which she poses her own question: What sort of deal is it for the American taxpayer? As she sees it, the same banks that generated the mortgage crisis are now getting public money to fix it, while doing little more than seeking new fees. “I don’t think the government gets it,” she said. “These are the same people you couldn’t trust before.”
|
Mortgages;Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan;Subprime Mortgage Crisis;Obama Barack
|
ny0101728
|
[
"us"
] |
2015/12/30
|
Michigan: Regulator Quits in Drinking Water Crisis
|
Dan Wyant, Michigan’s top environmental regulator, resigned Tuesday in the wake of Flint’s drinking water crisis, which began when the city switched its supply but was not required to immediately keep corrosive river water from leaching lead from service pipes into homes. The resignation was accepted by Gov. Rick Snyder, who apologized for what occurred in Flint, where elevated blood-lead levels have been found in children. In a cost-cutting move while it was under state emergency financial management, Flint switched from Detroit’s system to the Flint River in 2014. Mr. Snyder’s administration initially played down concerns but later committed funding to reconnect Flint to Detroit.
|
Water pollution;Water;Dan Wyant;Flint Michigan;Michigan
|
ny0215671
|
[
"nyregion"
] |
2010/04/11
|
Exhibiting Images of Mao’s China and What It Became
|
With just over a dozen artists, “State of the Dao,” at the Lehman College Art Gallery , is smaller than many of the Chinese contemporary art shows that have come to the New York region over the past decade. But it is just as politically attuned. Dao, or Tao , is a concept from ancient Chinese philosophy concerned with the underpinnings of the universe. “State of the Dao” purports to survey the current order of things in China, a country undergoing social, cultural and economic transformation. But the work assembled here by Patricia Karetzky , an independent curator and an adjunct professor of art history at Lehman College, does not tell us much about Chinese art or society that we do not already know. Themes of pollution, consumerism and militarism predominate this show, as they have done in Chinese art for over a decade. Although several of the artists, like the Gao Brothers , Long-Bin Chen and Miao Xiaochun , are well known, happily there are also a handful of fresh faces. Among them is the sculptor Zhao Suikang , who makes sensual, elemental abstract assemblages using thin ribbons of powder-coated steel. Yang Jinsong is another extremely talented artist who is relatively little known in this country. His large, colorful painting “Watermelon” (2009), an expressionistic tour de force depicting a ripe watermelon, is the most visually alluring work in the show. But the real strength of the exhibition is the way in which it highlights the continuing influence of imagery from the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) in the work of contemporary Chinese artists. Shen Jingdong makes glossy, idealized but tongue-in-cheek takeoffs of cheery peasants, model workers, soldiers and other imagery once used by the Chinese authorities to serve political ends — art for the masses mobilized for the views and aims of the few. On display are a pair of 2009 shiny, colorful porcelain sculptures of Chinese soldiers wearing Mao jackets, part of Mr. Shen’s “Soldiers” series. Among the works of Mr. Chen, an artist who carves into stacks of discarded telephone books to create delicately beautiful figurative sculptures, is a monumental portrait of Mao Zedong. Not only is Mr. Chen’s work appealing, but it also makes references to the mindless cult of Mao that arose during the Cultural Revolution. Few political figures in the 20th century were the subject of more portraits than Mao, China’s leader from 1949 until his death in 1976. Estimates of the number of his portraits, including political posters, are as high as two billion. Today, Mao’s image continues to exert a tremendous fascination for Chinese artists. But because it has been so widely used in art, it no longer possesses the power of serious political critique, and I have to agree with the widespread view among Chinese critics (and possibly Mr. Chen) that its current use is opportunistic and facile. Other works in this show are oriented toward a more current revolution: China’s obsession with consumerism and materialism in the wake of seismic economic growth. “The Forever Unfinished Building No. 4” (2008), by the Gao Brothers, is a very densely detailed, computer-generated photograph that depicts China as a giant shopping mall perpetually under construction. A series of painted tomb sculptures by Liu Fenghua and Liuyong deals with one of the most important art world issues of our era: cultural property, specifically the looting of archaeological sites for objects that are then smuggled out of the country, often painted to look like souvenirs. There is a kitsch quality to these tomb sculptures, which remind you somewhat of tacky garden gnomes. They also bring to mind the work of 1990s appropriation artists, especially Jeff Koons, who fabricated everyday objects in stainless steel or porcelain. But, over all, they are successful works of art, appealing equally to the eye and the mind. Not everything in the show is about politics. Pang Yongjie paints charmingly quaint atmospheric abstractions, while Xu Yong takes black and white photographs of the old, traditional communal Hutong neighborhoods in Beijing , now largely destroyed for redevelopment. His pictures ooze nostalgia for a way of life that is all but gone. The only flaw in this otherwise enjoyable exhibition is that it lacks a standout piece, something that you absolutely have to go to the Lehman College Art Gallery to see. The upshot is nothing more, or less, than a somewhat random survey of contemporary Chinese artists.
|
Art;China;Westchester County (NY)
|
ny0221063
|
[
"nyregion"
] |
2010/02/07
|
Man With BB Gun Is Shot and Wounded in Brooklyn
|
A 61-year-old man was shot and wounded by a police officer early Saturday after, officials said, he refused to drop what looked like a pistol on a dark street in Brooklyn. But the weapon he was holding turned out to be a BB gun, the police said. The man, James Crockett, was listed in stable condition at Elmhurst Hospital Center, where he was being treated for wounds to the left side and thigh. The police said Mr. Crockett was charged with criminal possession of a disguised weapon and menacing. The shooting occurred at 1:20 a.m. after uniformed officers from the 83rd Precinct responded to a 911 call about a man in a blue jacket carrying a firearm, the police said. Three officers saw a man standing with a gun in his hand in front of 364 Linden Street, between Myrtle and Wyckoff Avenues, and took cover behind some parked vehicles, the police said. They ordered him to drop the weapon, the police said. “They were telling him, ‘Drop the gun, drop the gun,’ ” a law enforcement official said. But Mr. Crockett turned in the direction of the officers with the gun in his hand, according to the police. The officers again ordered him to drop the gun, then an officer fired twice, hitting Mr. Crockett both times, the police said. The weapon he was holding turned out to be a BB gun, the police said. An internal Police Department review board will conduct a routine inquiry into the shooting, the authorities said. On Saturday night, the police did not say if a preliminary review indicated whether the shooting was justified under police guidelines.
|
Brooklyn (NYC);Police
|
ny0082657
|
[
"sports",
"ncaafootball"
] |
2015/10/11
|
Trevone Boykin Rescues T.C.U. From Upset-Minded Kansas State
|
Trevone Boykin threw for 301 yards and two touchdowns, the second a 55-yard strike to Josh Doctson with 1 minute 10 seconds left in the game, and No. 2 Texas Christian rallied from a big halftime deficit to defeat host Kansas State, 52-45, on Saturday night. Boykin also ran for 124 yards and two scores for the Horned Frogs (6-0, 3-0 Big 12), who trailed, 35-17, at the break. Aaron Green added 124 yards and two touchdowns rushing, while Doctson caught eight passes for 155 yards and two touchdowns. None was bigger than his catch-and-run just 30 seconds after Jack Cantele had connected on a 37-yard field goal for Kansas State (3-2, 0-2) to tie the game at 45-45. The Wildcats had won 49 straight games when leading at halftime before last week’s loss at Oklahoma State. Now Coach Bill Snyder’s team has lost two in a row. MICHIGAN STATE 31, RUTGERS 24 The freshman L. J. Scott scored on a 3-yard run with 43 seconds to play, and No. 4 Michigan State (6-0, 2-0 Big Ten) won ugly for a second straight week at Rutgers (2-3, 0-2). Scott, who did not play in the first half, also scored on a 1-yard run to help the Spartans win their 10th straight game. They overcame an impressive return from suspension by the Rutgers senior receiver Leonte Carroo, who caught three touchdown passes. Image Ohio State quarterback J. T. Barrett (16) scoring one of his three touchdowns against Maryland. He split time with Cardale Jones, who had two touchdown passes. Credit Jay Laprete/Associated Press OHIO STATE 49, MARYLAND 28 Cardale Jones threw two touchdown passes, J. T. Barrett scored three times, and No. 1 Ohio State (6-0, 2-0 Big Ten) remained unbeaten — and mostly underwhelming — against Maryland (2-4, 0-2) in Columbus, Ohio. BAYLOR 66, KANSAS 7 Seth Russell threw three touchdown passes, Shock Linwood ran for 135 yards and a score, and No. 3 Baylor (5-0, 2-0 Big 12) rolled at Kansas (0-5, 0-2). CLEMSON 43, GEORGIA TECH 24 Deshaun Watson threw for two touchdowns, Wayne Gallman ran for two scores, and No. 6 Clemson (5-0, 2-0 Atlantic Coast) surged past visiting Georgia Tech (2-4, 0-3). L.S.U. 45, SOUTH CAROLINA 24 Leonard Fournette had an 87-yard run for a touchdown, Brandon Harris passed for a career-best 228 yards, and No. 7 Louisiana State (5-0, 3-0 SEC) defeated visiting South Carolina (2-4, 0-4). ALABAMA 27, ARKANSAS 14 Calvin Ridley caught an 81-yard touchdown pass from Jake Coker, and No. 8 Alabama (5-1, 2-1 Southeastern Conference) rode its swarming defense to a victory over Arkansas (2-4, 1-2) in Tuscaloosa, Ala. FLORIDA STATE 29, MIAMI 24 Dalvin Cook ran for 222 yards and three touchdowns, the final one a 23-yarder with 6:44 remaining, to help No. 12 Florida State (5-0, 3-0 A.C.C.) hold off Miami (3-2, 0-1) on the road. MICHIGAN 38, NORTHWESTERN 0 Jehu Chesson returned the opening kickoff 96 yards for a touchdown, and No. 18 Michigan (5-1, 2-0 Big Ten) scored on offense and defense to build a four-touchdown lead by halftime in a 38-0 victory over No. 13 Northwestern (5-1, 1-1) in Ann Arbor, Mich. 2015 Heisman Trophy Watch A look at the top players in contention for college football’s highest honor. Michigan became the first Football Bowl Subdivision team to shut out three straight opponents since Kansas State in 1995, according to Stats. MISSISSIPPI 52, NEW MEXICO STATE 3 Chad Kelly threw for 384 yards and three touchdowns to lead No. 14 Mississippi (5-1) in a rout of visiting New Mexico State (0-5). NOTRE DAME 41, NAVY 24 C. J. Prosise rushed for 129 yards and three touchdowns, two after Navy turnovers, and No. 15 Notre Dame (5-1) beat the Midshipmen (4-1) in South Bend, Ind. TENNESSEE 38, GEORGIA 31 Joshua Dobbs threw for 312 yards, ran for 118 and accounted for five touchdowns as Tennessee (3-3, 1-2 SEC) erased a 21-point deficit in a home victory over No. 19 Georgia (4-2, 1-2). The defeat was doubly painful for the Bulldogs, who lost the star running back Nick Chubb to an injured left knee on the first play from scrimmage. OKLAHOMA STATE 33, WEST VIRGINIA 26 The backup quarterback J. W. Walsh scored on a 2-yard run in overtime, and No. 21 Oklahoma State (6-0, 3-0 Big 12) held host West Virginia (3-2, 0-2) scoreless on its possession in the extra period to survive the Mountaineers. IOWA 29, ILLINOIS 20 C. J. Beathard had 200 passing yards and two touchdowns as No. 22 Iowa (6-0, 2-0 Big Ten) outlasted visiting Illinois (4-2, 1-1). TOLEDO 38, KENT STATE 7 Terry Swanson ran for 161 yards and a touchdown, Kareem Hunt had two scores, and No. 24 Toledo (5-0, 2-0 Mid-American) trounced Kent State (2-4, 1-1) at home. BOISE STATE 41, COLORADO STATE 10 Thomas Sperbeck caught two long touchdown passes, and the sophomore Jeremy McNichols scored his 13th and 14th touchdowns of the season, leading No. 25 Boise State (5-1, 2-0 Mountain West) past host Colorado State (2-4, 0-2).
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College football;Ohio State;University of Kansas;University of Maryland;Baylor University;Texas Christian University;Kansas State
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ny0028336
|
[
"business"
] |
2013/01/06
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Pilot Plant in the Works for Carbon Dioxide Cleansing
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WHETHER streaming from the tailpipes of cars or the smokestacks of so many power plants and factories, carbon dioxide emissions keep growing around the globe. Now a Canadian company has developed a cleansing technology that may one day capture and remove some of this heat-trapping gas directly from the sky. And it is even possible that the gas could then be sold for industrial use. Carbon Engineering, formed in 2009 with $3.5 million from Bill Gates and others, created prototypes for parts of its cleanup system in 2011 and 2012 at its plant in Calgary, Alberta. The company, which recently closed a $3 million second round of financing, plans to build a complete pilot plant by the end of 2014 for capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, said David Keith, its president and a Harvard professor who has long been interested in climate issues. The carbon-capturing tools that Carbon Engineering and other companies are designing have made great strides in the last two years, said Timothy A. Fox, head of energy and environment at the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in London. “The technology has moved from a position where people talked about the potential and possibilities to a point where people like David Keith are testing prototype components and producing quite detailed designs and engineering plans,” Dr. Fox said. “Carbon Engineering is the leading contender in this field at this moment for putting an industrial-scale machine together and getting it working.” Image David Keith, center of back row, is president of Carbon Engineering. By the end of next year, this Canadian company plans to build a pilot plant for capture of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Credit Geoffrey Holmes/Carbon Engineering Should the cost of capturing carbon dioxide fall low enough, the gas would have many customers, he predicted. Chief among them, he said, would be the oil industry, which buys the gas to inject into oil fields to force out extra oil. The injection has minimal risk, said Howard J. Herzog , a senior research engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “The enhanced oil recovery industry has put tens of millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the ground every year for decades with no problems,” he said. Much of the carbon dioxide for enhanced oil recovery comes from naturally occurring underground reserves that are piped to oil fields, said Sasha Mackler, vice president of Summit Carbon Capture, a unit of Summit Power Group in Seattle. Summit Carbon Capture harvests carbon dioxide gas from coal and natural gas-burning plants before it can be spewed into the air. The global demand for carbon dioxide will only grow as oil becomes scarcer and demands for transportation fuel rise, Mr. Mackler said. Direct capture from the atmosphere would offer another source for the gas. Yet the cost of capturing carbon dioxide directly from the air has yet to be demonstrated, said Alain Goeppert, a senior research scientist at the Loker Hydrocarbon Research Institute at the University of Southern California. Dr. Goeppert recently reviewed the literature of air capture technology. “There is a lot of speculation of how much it will actually cost,” he said, with estimates from $20 a ton to as much as $2,000. “We won’t know for sure until someone builds a pilot plant.” (An average passenger vehicle generates about five tons of carbon dioxide a year.) Dr. Keith says he thinks it may be possible to lower the cost of capture toward $100 a ton as the company grows. Image Prototypes of parts of its system, including one at lower left, have been tested. Credit Geoffrey Holmes/Carbon Engineering Carbon Engineering’s machines use a carbon-dioxide-absorbing solution of caustic soda to remove the gas from the air. “The issue at the pilot plant,” Dr. Keith said, “will be to test the equipment at the scale the vendors tell us they need” to provide performance guarantees for a full commercial plant. The process is intended to collect at least 100,000 tons a year of the gas. The concentration of carbon dioxide scrubbed from the flue gases of coal- and gas-fired power plants is about 5 percent to 15 percent, higher than that in the air, where it is about 393 parts per million. “You have to handle much larger volumes of gases” to capture the same amount of carbon dioxide from the air that you would from power plant flue gases, Dr. Goeppert said. “But Dr. Keith is going to be able to capture it with the absorbent he uses.” The recovered carbon dioxide may be sold one day, not only for enhanced oil recovery, but also to feed algae to produce biofuel. It may also be sequestered in places like unmineable coal seams and oil and gas reservoirs, says a new Energy Department report . Gas capture would be extremely important in developing a rational price for carbon emissions, said Dr. Fox of the British mechanical engineering society. “Whatever it costs to take it out of the air and store it away,” Dr. Fox said, “that’s the price polluters would pay if they want to put carbon into the air.” Another advantage of direct air capture is geographic flexibility. “It doesn’t matter where you take the carbon dioxide out,” he said, since the gas is mixed evenly in the earth’s atmosphere. “You could have air capture machines in the Australian desert to account for New York City car emissions.” Most important, air capture could be used to get rid of that last fraction of carbon dioxide that escapes into the air, for example, even from power plants outfitted to collect most of their emissions, said Klaus S. Lackner , a Columbia professor and a board member and adviser to Kilimanjaro Energy , another company working on collecting atmospheric carbon dioxide. “I see direct air capture as the long-term way of dealing with all those emissions that can’t be dealt with in any other way,” he said.
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Greenhouse gas;Carbon Capture;Carbon dioxide;Carbon Engineering;Air pollution;Innovation
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ny0153322
|
[
"nyregion"
] |
2008/01/20
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Boy Stabbed in Robbery at School Dies
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A 15-year-old boy who was stabbed during an after-school robbery at a Long Island high school died early Saturday, the Nassau County police said. The victim, Michael Alguera, was playing handball with two friends on a court at Hempstead High School about 3:30 p.m. Friday when they were confronted by a group of as many as nine people, some of them masked. The group robbed the boys of a cellphone and an MP3 player, then stabbed Michael in the torso. The attackers fled on foot. Michael was taken to Mercy Medical Center in Rockville Centre in serious condition and died about 5 a.m., the police said. The police said that Michael, who lived in Hempstead, was a student at the school. The two friends, ages 15 and 16, were not hurt. Alexander Flor, who said he was a cousin of Michael’s, described him as a “good kid.” “He was just playing handball,” he added. A Nassau County police spokesman, Detective Sgt. Anthony Repalone, said the police were investigating whether the group that attacked the boys was affiliated with local gangs.
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Murders and Attempted Murders;Long Island (NY)
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ny0017517
|
[
"nyregion"
] |
2013/10/22
|
Clock Ticking, Bloomberg Seeks Council Approval of East Midtown Rezoning Plan
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The Bloomberg administration is scrambling to gather enough City Council votes to enact the mayor’s final plan for reshaping New York City’s skyline with a new generation of ever-taller skyscrapers. The proposal would rezone a 73-block area surrounding Grand Central Terminal and allow the kind of sleek skyscrapers the administration says are necessary for the city’s premier office district to stay competitive with London and other world capitals. In some locations, developers would be able to erect towers more than twice the size of current buildings, which would cast the Chrysler Building, the Waldorf-Astoria and St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church into shadow. Many leading figures in the real estate industry, and many construction unions, support the plan, as does the Regional Plan Association, an influential private research organization. But a broad array of Manhattan community boards, preservationists and elected officials contend that the rezoning has been rushed, and could overwhelm a neighborhood whose streets are already congested and subway lines overcrowded. The City Council will have its first hearing on the proposal on Tuesday, and is expected to vote on it within the next month. In pushing through more than 125 rezoning proposals throughout the city, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has usually overcome the obstacles inherent in passing such changes. But with fewer than 75 days left in his term, the political dynamics have changed. The mayor’s clout with the Council is fading. His onetime ally, Christine C. Quinn, the Council speaker, is also a lame duck. As a result, Daniel R. Garodnick, a council member whose district includes much of the area around Grand Central, and who is a candidate for speaker, has emerged as a pivotal figure in the fate of the proposal. Other members of the Council are expected to take their cues from him, and right now Mr. Garodnick is not satisfied. “While the proposal has merit,” Mr. Garodnick said, “it remains incomplete, and despite our best efforts to nail down solutions to outstanding issues, we are running out of time. If we feel we can’t do it within the land use clock we will have no hesitation taking this up with the next administration.” Mr. Garodnick suggested that the Council might be able to pass a modest version of the rezoning in the next four weeks and then take it up in a more expansive way next year. Both the Democratic and Republican candidates for mayor, Bill de Blasio and Joseph J. Lhota, generally support rezoning the district. But like Mr. Garodnick, Mr. de Blasio has faulted the administration for a lack of planning for new residents and office workers and for setting the price for development rights too low, at $250 per square foot. “If these issues can’t be resolved adequately now, in this Council with this administration, then I think we should press the pause button and address these issues in the context of a new rezoning plan next year,” Mr. de Blasio said. Robert Steel, the deputy mayor for economic development, insists that the administration is making headway. Image Michael R. Bloomberg’s plan would affect a 73-block area. Credit Ángel Franco/The New York Times “We’re optimistic,” Mr. Steel said. “We’ve been working our way through all the constituents, the developers, the religious institutions, preservationists. It’s taken a long time, but it’s exciting.” In recent days, Mr. Steel has conferred with council members, State Senators Brad Hoylman and Liz Krueger, and Lola Finkelstein, who heads a task force for four community boards. Mr. Steel has also met with Peter Ward, the president of the powerful hotel workers’ union. Mr. Ward opposes the rezoning because it would not require hotel plans to go through a special approval process that typically allows the union to secure guarantees on wage levels and other workplace issues. Mr. Ward is sending more than 100 union members to the Council hearing on Tuesday. The Bloomberg administration is playing other cards in its bid to nail down support for the rezoning. On Tuesday, it will announce plans for a $100 million bond that will pay for improvements to subway stairwells and platforms below Grand Central. Last Thursday, the administration unveiled proposals to create a public plaza south of Grand Central and pedestrian balconies along the Grand Central viaduct. But so far, opponents have not been persuaded. David W. Levinson, a developer whose project would benefit from the rezoning, said he was worried about the prospects for the proposal, which has been driven by developers’ desire for a measure of certainty. Mr. Levinson controls an aging office building at 425 Park Avenue, between 55th and 56th Streets. He has long planned to demolish the building in order to build a modern, high-end office tower for hedge funds and private equity firms. The building was erected before the adoption of the current zoning, which no longer permits towers of its size. If Mr. Levinson razed it, he could erect a tower only about four-fifths as large. But if he retained 25 percent of the existing steel structure, he could build another the same size, under the current zoning. Back in 2010, Mary Ann Tighe, then head of the Real Estate Board of New York, tried to broker a solution. She asked Amanda Burden, director of the city’s Planning Department, to allow developers like Mr. Levinson to build towers of the same size without incorporating the old steel structure. Such “grandfathering,” she argued, would encourage construction of up-to-date towers in the Grand Central area, where many of the buildings were more than 70 years old and increasingly unattractive to corporate tenants. But Ms. Burden rejected the idea. Then, in June 2012, she released an early version of the plan now on the table, proposing to rezone an area stretching from 39th Street to 57th Street, between Third and Fifth Avenues, for substantially taller buildings. It was far more ambitious than the grandfathering idea the industry had pushed. To keep the process moving forward, the Bloomberg administration has made a number of concessions to real estate interests. Under certain circumstances, new buildings can now include apartments, and some towers can be built on smaller sites than originally envisioned. Also, St. Patrick’s Cathedral and St. Bart’s would be permitted to transfer unused development rights to more sites than are currently permitted. The initial rezoning plan contained a sunrise provision in which developers would have to wait five years before they could start building, to reduce competition with other current city-sponsored developments, like the Hudson Yards and the World Trade Center. But the administration has since revised the rezoning plan to allow Mr. Levinson and a second developer, SL Green, to proceed more quickly. SL Green owns a block bound by 42nd and 43rd Streets, between Madison and Vanderbilt Avenues. The company wants to demolish the three buildings on the site — none are taller than 20 stories — to build a 65-story, 1.6-million-square-foot tower, to be known as 1 Vanderbilt. City officials and proponents of the project say that the new zoning would require them to build more than $100 million in improvements to the subway entrances and platforms, as well as a public space inside the building, with a large train-arrival board and a new entrance to Grand Central Terminal. But opponents say the administration’s proposal, even with myriad revisions, remains deeply flawed and worthy of continuing review.
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Zoning;Commercial Real Estate;Urban Planning;Mike Bloomberg;New York City Council;Midtown Area Manhattan;NYC
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ny0203266
|
[
"world",
"asia"
] |
2009/08/07
|
Journalists Entered N. Korea, Sister Says
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One of the two journalists held captive for months in North Korea conceded to relatives after her release on Wednesday that she had “very briefly” crossed into the Communist country, her sister said Thursday. Lisa Ling, the television personality, revealed that her sister — Laura Ling , 32, a reporter with Current TV — planned to write an editorial explaining the events that led North Korean authorities to detain her and a fellow American journalist, Euna Lee , 36. But Ms. Ling, speaking by telephone on CNN Thursday evening, revealed that the two women did apparently cross into North Korea from China as they were researching a story on human trafficking on March 17. The women were subsequently convicted and sentenced to 12 years hard labor. “She did say that they touched North Korean territory very, very briefly,” Ms. Ling said of her sister, adding later, “She said that it was maybe 30 seconds, and everything just got sort of chaotic. It’s a very powerful story and she does want to share it.” Ms. Ling, a former co-host of The View, said that she would leave it to her sister to divulge the remaining details for her captivity. The women’s return to the United States on Wednesday was set in motion by former president Bill Clinton, who traveled to the reclusive country earlier this week to negotiate their release with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, who granted them a pardon. But until Thursday, it was unclear whether the women had actually crossed the border into North Korea or had simply been captured on the Chinese side. Either way, what followed were more than two months of harrowing confinement, Ms. Ling said on Thursday. She said that her sister had spent much of her time in isolation, with only three small meals a day that consisted primarily of rice with rocks mixed in, small vegetables, and fragments of fried fish “which she developed a reaction to.” Ms. Ling was confined to a small cell, where she would walk in circles for exercise, read books, and occasionally bathe. “Bathing was a little bit difficult because they didn’t have hot water,” Ms. Ling said, “So she would fill up buckets and she would say, ‘O.K., on Saturday I’m going to wash my hair.’” Among Ms. Ling’s only human contact, her sister said, was with the guards who were assigned to her cell. “I think she won a lot of her captors over,” Ms. Ling said. “She had some really lovely things to say about the people who were watching her. She had two guards in her room at all times. And even though they couldn’t speak together, they developed a sort of strange kinship.” In her short time home, Ms. Ling has been racked by a fear of being alone. On Wednesday, exhausted from her ordeal, Ms. Ling wanted to take a brief nap but pleaded for her sister to be there when she woke up, her sister said. She added that her sister’s colleague, Ms. Lee, has also been trying to adjust to her new life at home with her family. “I hear that Euna’s 4-year old daughter does not want her to leave her sight,” Ms. Ling said. “She keeps following her from room to room.”
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Ling Laura;Lee Euna;North Korea;News and News Media
|
ny0092708
|
[
"world",
"asia"
] |
2015/08/09
|
4 Years After Fukushima Nuclear Calamity, Japanese Divided on Whether to Return
|
IITATE, Japan — For four years, an eerie quiet has pervaded the clusters of farmhouses and terraced rice paddies of this mountainous village, emptied of people after the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, 25 miles away, spewed radiation over a wide swath of northeastern Japan . Now, Iitate’s valleys are filled again with the bustle of human activity, as heavy machinery and troops of workers wearing face masks scoop up contaminated soil into black garbage bags. They are part of a more than $10 billion effort by the central government in Tokyo to clean up fallout from the 2011 accident and allow many of the 80,000 displaced residents of Iitate (pronounced EE-tah-tay) and 10 other evacuated communities around the plant to go home. Last month, the administration of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe seemed to take a big step toward that goal by adopting a plan that would permit two-thirds of evacuees to return by March 2017, the sixth anniversary of the disaster. But while some evacuees have cheered this chance to return, many more have rejected it. Thousands from Iitate and elsewhere have joined lawsuits or organized groups to oppose the plan by the government, which they say is trying to force residents to go back despite radiation levels that are still far above normal. They accuse Tokyo of repeating a pattern from the early days of the disaster of putting residents at risk by trying to understate the danger from the accident. They say the central government is trying to achieve its own narrow political interests, such as restarting the nation’s powerful nuclear industry, or assuring the world that Tokyo is safe enough to host the Summer Olympics in 2020. Image An evacuated farm in the village. Credit Ko Sasaki for The New York Times “If the national officials think it is so safe, then they should come and live here,” said Kenichi Hasegawa, a former dairy farmer in Iitate who has organized more than 3,000 fellow evacuees — almost half the village’s pre-disaster population — to oppose the return plan. “The government just wants to proclaim that the nuclear accident is over, and shift attention to the Olympics.” This grass-roots rebellion of sorts underscores a deep disconnect between victims in Fukushima and the government in Tokyo, a schism that has plagued Japan’s response to one of history’s worst nuclear disasters. While the government has undertaken a vast and costly cleanup to undo the effects of the accident and allow residents to return, many evacuees reject this course, complaining it was chosen without consulting them. In fact, polls show a majority do not even want to go back. In a telling move in a country where litigation is relatively rare, more than 10,000 have joined some 20 class-action lawsuits to demand more compensation so they can afford to choose for themselves whether to return, or to build new lives elsewhere. This has become an increasingly pressing issue for the tens of thousands of evacuees whose lives remain on hold, living in temporary housing and making ends meet with monthly stipends of about $800 per adult from the nuclear plant’s operator. They have endured this situation since being evacuated from their homes after a huge earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011 knocked out vital cooling systems at three of the Fukushima plant’s nuclear reactors, causing multiple meltdowns that spewed radioactive fallout over the surrounding farming villages and coastal towns. Image Mr. Hasegawa with a radiation survey meter. He opposes efforts to repopulate the contaminated village. Credit Ko Sasaki for The New York Times Within months of the accident, Tokyo was already drawing up plans to clean up an entire countryside polluted by invisible contaminants, something even the central planners of the former Soviet Union could not accomplish around Chernobyl, after the disaster there in 1986. The Abe government’s new timetable, adopted on June 12, calls for accelerating the pace of this cleanup with a “concentrated decontamination effort” over the next two years. It also sets for the first time a clear target date for lifting the evacuation orders on most areas around the plant: about 70 percent of the current evacuation zone — the less-contaminated areas color-coded green and yellow on official maps — would be reopened to human habitation by March 2017. (The most contaminated red-colored areas will remain closed indefinitely.) However, the plan has been met with skepticism, and resistance. A survey last month by the pronuclear newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun showed that eight of the mayors of the 11 evacuated towns dislike the 2017 return date, though some said they had no choice but to accept it. Other mayors, such as Tamotsu Baba of the town of Namie, have offered alternative proposals that push back the return date, and offer more financial support to those who do not want to return. One of the biggest complaints about the new return plan is that it is intended to force evacuees to return by cutting off compensation payments. A provision in the new plan calls for ending monthly payments by March 2018 in favor of subsidies to help them return. Many evacuees say cutting off the monthly payments would compel them to return, since many, particularly those over 50 or so, have failed to find new livelihoods since the disaster. “This is all being done coercively, without listening to the desires of the victims,” said Izutaro Managi, a lawyer who is handling one of the lawsuits, filed on behalf of more than 4,000 people, mostly residents of Fukushima, seeking more compensation. Image Mr. Hasegawa has organized more than 3,000 fellow Iitate evacuees to oppose the return plan. Credit Ko Sasaki for The New York Times Central government officials and the local leaders who support the new return plan say those fears are misplaced. They say the plan gives residents the right to freely decide for themselves whether to go back, and will offer unspecified financial support to those who choose not to. They say the goal is to help the region around the plant recover as quickly as possible by allowing evacuees to end dependence on government handouts and regain economic autonomy. Despite the disagreements, the decontamination effort is now in full swing in the green and yellow evacuation zones. In Iitate, a small farming community once proclaimed one of the most beautiful villages in Japan before the accident, the narrow valleys are filled with workers scraping off the top two inches of soil, which is then put into black bags that are stacked into man-made hills. Across the entire evacuation zone, workers have already filled 2.9 million bags, which will be stored for at least the next 30 years at toxic waste sites that the government is building inside the zone. Even with the massive cleanup, only about one-fifth of the 6,200 displaced residents of Iitate are willing to return, according to a recent head count by village officials. Most of the families with young children, who are at most risk from the radiation, have already restarted lives elsewhere, and express no intention of going back. But even many older evacuees, who say they do not fear the radiation as much, call it too early to return without the prospect of being able to restart their rice or dairy farms in the contaminated soil. Image Workers collect bags of contaminated trash in Iitate. Credit Ko Sasaki for The New York Times One of the village’s most vocal opponents of the return plan is Mr. Hasegawa, 62, whose distrust of the central government remains so deep that he visits his former dairy farm once a month to conduct his own measurements of radiation levels using a Geiger counter. He says his results are consistently higher than those from government monitoring posts, and are not falling anywhere near quickly enough, despite the decontamination efforts, to allow him to restart his dairy farm within two years. At several points near Mr. Hasegawa’s empty home and barns, government inspectors have tied pink ribbons around hot spots where radioactivity remains particularly high. Inside one of the barns, a white board hangs with the names of his herd of 50 cows before the accident. About two-thirds of the names have red circles around them, meaning those cows were sold off after the accident. However, the other third have been crossed off in red ink, meaning those cows were killed on government orders after abandoned cows at other farms started starving to death. Nearby stood a small wooden tablet with a handwritten Buddhist prayer for the dead animals. “Sending us back is just another ploy by officials to avoid taking responsibility for what happened,” said Mr. Hasegawa, who now lives with his aging parents in a cramped, prefabricated apartment an hour from the evacuation zone. Mr. Hasegawa’s opposition has had a personal cost, ending his lifelong friendship with the mayor of Iitate, Norio Kanno, one of the return plan’s most fervent supporters. Mr. Kanno is the leading voice of the minority of villagers who feel the fears of radiation are overblown, and who want to return to their ancestral homes as soon as possible. While Mr. Kanno admits that farmers will probably not be allowed to grow food in Iitate for many years to come, he said the village was drawing up plans to help them switch to flowers and other crops not for human consumption. He said he wanted to lead about 1,000 of the villagers most determined to go back. Once they show that the radiation levels are not so harmful, he said, other residents will follow. He said a quick return was the only way to save the village, more and more of whose residents either die or move away with each year that passes. “Our village’s fight is against the threat of radiation, and everyone reacts differently to that,” said Mr. Kanno, 68, also a former dairy farmer. “Let’s let people decide for themselves whether to go back. This is the way to make Japan a model for how to recover from a nuclear accident.”
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Japan;Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Disaster;Nuclear energy;Japan Earthquake Tsunami;Evacuation;Iitate Japan;Tokyo
|
ny0028775
|
[
"sports",
"football"
] |
2013/01/12
|
Ray Lewis Holds Tight to Faith and a Second Chance
|
OWINGS MILLS, Md. A conversation with Baltimore Ravens middle linebacker Ray Lewis is typically dotted with homespun philosophy, frequent mentions of faith and biblical references. This week Lewis encouraged members of the news media to read Psalm 91, which ends, “With long life I will satisfy him, and show him my salvation.” “For me, through the ups and downs, the roller coasters of 17 years, you have to find a safe place,” Lewis said. “You have to find that place that is very quiet in your head, and anytime I read it, anytime I come across it, my Bible, the first Scripture in there is Psalms 91.” During an interview last year at about this time, I asked Lewis which biblical figure he most closely identified with. Without hesitation, Lewis cited David, who is often depicted as a flawed but righteous king, warrior, musician and poet. It is easy to see where that identification comes from, especially now. When Lewis and the Ravens face Peyton Manning and the Denver Broncos on Saturday, they will be significant underdogs, David against an A.F.C. Goliath. Lewis, with typical certainty, dismissed any doubters. “You know much I have heard man say?” said Lewis, who was thought to be lost for the season when he tore his triceps in October. “Man said I wouldn’t be playing the season again, but I’m back. Man doesn’t dictate what you do or how you do it. If you believe in God, believe in God; have your faith in him. That’s where my faith lies.” Lewis added, in hyperbolic fashion, that the experts never thought Baltimore would win a championship. “My Super Bowl year in 2000, we were never picked one time the entire season to win a game,” he said. “Not one time. But at the end of the day, we held the Lombardi Trophy as Super Bowl champs. That alone taught me a valuable lesson, that nobody on the outside dictates how we play on the inside. Nobody controls what our emotions are.” In many ways real life — and his identification with David — began for Lewis a year before that Super Bowl when his career, indeed his world, was turned upside down. On Jan. 31, 2000, a fight broke out after a Super Bowl party in Atlanta. Two young men were killed, Lewis was implicated, and his young career was imperiled. Lewis and two companions were indicted on charges of murder and aggravated assault. The charges against Lewis were dropped after he agreed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor charge of obstruction of justice and to testify against the other men. He was sentenced to a year of probation. The N.F.L. fined him $250,000. Image The Ravens' Ray Lewis has become a mentor to young players. “I tell them, Trust me, don’t ever take my path,” Lewis once said. Credit Patrick Smith/Getty Images Many critics, then and now, felt that Lewis effectively escaped more serious punishment because of his celebrity. (The two defendants he testified against were acquitted.) A year after his arrest, Baltimore won the Super Bowl, and Lewis was named the game’s most valuable player. He was not invited to Disney World; that seemed a small price to pay. Lewis’s identification with David — the sinner who turns his life around and makes good — makes clear that he understands the moral ramifications of being involved in an event in which two young men lost their lives. Lewis does not make a habit of publicly talking about that fateful night 13 years ago, but his career, whether or not he acknowledges it, has been a testament to redemption and atonement, to making the most of a second opportunity. Lewis has become a force in the community and a mentor to young players. His standard piece of advice to them is not to use his life and career as a model. Follow his advice, not his footprints. “I tell them, Trust me, don’t ever take my path,” Lewis once told me. “Don’t ever do it the way I did it, because everyone won’t make it. You got to be willing to walk in a storm. That’s what I tell people all the time. If there’s something in your life that you know needs changing, make sure you change it before God’s got to change it. Because if God’s got to change it, you ain’t going to like it.” Before the Ravens’ first playoff game, Lewis told his teammates he was retiring after this season. He was typically philosophical. “I talked to them about life, life in general, and everything that starts has an end,” he said. “It’s just life. I told my team that this would be my last ride. And I told them I was just at so much peace in where I am with my decision because of everything that I’ve done in this league. I’ve done it, I’ve done it, man. There’s no accolade that I don’t have individually. “But I’ve never played the game for individual stats. I’ve only played the game to make my team be a better team.” Ozzie Newsome, the Ravens’ president of football operations, said the last 13 years had been a remarkable tribute to Lewis’s evolution. Newsome remembers Lewis’s first news conference after his role in the Atlanta murders was resolved. Lewis stressed resilience. “He said it’s not how many times you get knocked down but how many times you get back up,” Newsome said. He added: “I know he’s a Hall of Fame player. But Ray is a Hall of Fame person.” Some will say yes, some will say no. No one, however, can disagree that the N.F.L.’s David has made the most of a precious second opportunity.
|
Football;Ravens;Ray Lewis;Playoffs;Broncos
|
ny0102508
|
[
"us"
] |
2015/12/12
|
San Bernardino Attackers’ Friend Spoke of ‘Sleeper Cells’ Before Rampage
|
RIVERSIDE, Calif. — The regulars did not take it seriously when Enrique Marquez mused about terrorism at Morgan’s Tavern, a dank dive bar where Mr. Marquez hauled ice, cleaned bathrooms and checked IDs at the door. After a few drinks, he would just start talking — about his money woes, trying to lose weight, wanting to join the Navy. News reports about terrorism were just fodder for more bar talk. “He would say stuff like: ‘There’s so much going on. There’s so many sleeper cells, so many people just waiting. When it happens, it’s going to be big. Watch,’ ” said Nick Rodriguez, a frequent patron who had known Mr. Marquez on and off for the past two years. “We took it as a joke. When you look at the kid and talk to him, no one would take him seriously about that.” But nine days after a husband and wife slaughtered 14 people in a terrorist attack at a county health department meeting, Mr. Marquez, 24, a childhood friend of the husband, Syed Rizwan Farook, has become a crucial if unlikely figure in the investigation of the attack — which was just the kind he discussed when terrorism news reports flashed onto the tavern’s television. While he initially checked himself into a mental health facility after the Dec. 2 massacre in San Bernardino, he has been speaking for hours with federal investigators after waiving his right to remain silent and not incriminate himself, officials say. Federal investigators believe that, more than any other witness, Mr. Marquez, a convert to Islam, has “held the keys” to understanding Mr. Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, and to shedding light on whom they were in contact with in the years leading to the attack, according to one senior law enforcement official. The couple were killed in a shootout with the police. Image Enrique Marquez in an undated social media photo. On behalf of Mr. Farook, Mr. Marquez bought the two assault rifles used in the attack, the authorities say. He told investigators he had done so, in 2011 and 2012, because Mr. Farook believed he could not pass a background check, officials said. Mr. Marquez has also described in detail how he and Mr. Farook had been planning another terrorist attack together in 2012, the authorities say. They appear to have been scared off by arrests related to a separate terrorism ring in Riverside County that was prosecuted in 2012, the authorities said, sending two men to federal prison for a scheme to kill American troops in Afghanistan. Mr. Marquez’s cooperation with investigators could turn out to be very detrimental to his future. His purchase of the assault rifles for Mr. Farook and his planning of an attack in 2012, if proved, would be federal crimes that come with stiff sentences, according to law enforcement officials. While the authorities say they are grateful for his cooperation, they will almost certainly charge him, officials said. Mr. Marquez has not yet been charged with any crime, and he has told investigators he did not know that the couple were plotting the shootings at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino. But Mr. Marquez’s role is particularly concerning because counterterrorism officials believe that he represents a strand of impressionable people at life’s margins with no obvious connections or sympathies with terrorist groups, who can be goaded or enticed toward violence. As investigators burrow into Mr. Marquez’s life, they now suspect that Mr. Farook and Ms. Malik were in the final planning stages of an assault on a location or building, perhaps a nearby school or college, that held many more people than the Inland Regional Center, according to a congressional official who has received briefings from law enforcement. What Investigators Know About the San Bernardino Shooting Officials have discovered a potential link between the attackers and Islamic extremism. Mr. Farook smashed his cellphones and took steps to delete computer files, but investigators have been able to retrieve photographs, including one image of a local high school. On Thursday, divers started searching a lake in San Bernardino where the authorities suspect the couple dumped incriminating electronics, including a computer hard drive. For days, members of Mr. Marquez’s family have lain low inside their palm-shaded home, where smashed windows and a broken garage door are the lingering marks of raids by federal agents. Mr. Marquez’s mother, Armida Chacon, briefly spoke to reporters Thursday, saying that her son and Mr. Farook had simply been friends and that her son is a good person. It is not known whether he has a lawyer. Since he was a child growing up in a single-level beige home on an ethnically diverse block in suburban Riverside, Mr. Marquez fastened himself to Mr. Farook and his family. He and Mr. Farook tinkered on cars in their driveways. He converted to Islam and attended at least one of the same mosques as the Farook family. When Mr. Farook’s older brother, Syed Raheel Farook, married a Russian hairstylist named Tatiana Gigliotti, Mr. Marquez was one of the witnesses. The other was Mr. Farook. Last year, Mr. Marquez married the Russian sister of Raheel Farook’s wife. He later told a friend and people at Morgan’s Tavern that it was a sham marriage for immigration purposes. Bar patrons said he told them he had been paid $5,000 or $10,000 to marry Ms. Gigliotti’s sister, Mariya Chernykh. Image Morgan’s Tavern in Riverside, which employed Enrique Marquez, who the authorities say bought two guns used in an attack. Credit Stuart Palley for The New York Times Mr. Marquez had worked as a security guard at a local Walmart since May, but the company has decided to fire him, said Deisha Barnett, a Walmart spokeswoman. He did mention guns at least once to Mr. Rodriguez, his drinking buddy at Morgan’s Tavern. Again, Mr. Rodriguez said, Mr. Marquez was drunkenly bragging, this time about his work as a security guard. “He was talking about his security card,” Mr. Rodriguez said. “He said something about having guns.” But again, Mr. Rodriguez said, no one took this claim very seriously, either. Mr. Marquez occasionally talked about Islam. Sometimes he came directly from mosque to the bar, Mr. Rodriguez said, adding that this did not deter him from drinking, even though Islam forbids alcohol. Mr. Marquez did avoid eating pork, at least as far as Mr. Rodriguez observed. “He would come and say he just came from praying. He would just come in after and drink, which I never understood.” Mr. Rodriguez said, adding that he did not know what mosque he attended. Mr. Marquez never spoke about any antipathy toward Israel or about the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan, Mr. Rodriguez said. People at at least two local mosques had recollections of Mr. Marquez. Perhaps two years ago, he worked briefly in the bookstore at the Islamic Center of Riverside, congregants there said. “I recall him,” said one congregant, Ahmad Zahran. “He comes in: ‘Hi, how you doing?’ ” But the two never spoke more. “There was nothing alarming about him,” Mr. Zahran said, “or he would have been reported.” Image Guns that were used by Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik. Credit San Bernardino County Sherrif's Department At the Islamic Society of Corona-Norco, Azmi Hasan, the facilities manager, recalled that Mr. Marquez first came to the mosque four to five years ago, shortly after converting at another mosque. At first, he came about once a month, usually to Friday Prayer. “He looked very goofy,” Mr. Hasan said. “He looked like a regular kid.” Members of the Marquez family have not responded to requests for comment, and lawyers for the Farook family did not respond to phone messages on Friday. Ms. Chernykh could not be reached. Mr. Farook’s mother was interviewed by investigators for at least seven hours, and family members have said through their lawyer that they are cooperating with the investigation. Mr. Marquez announced the marital arrangement one day when he came into the bar — which the F.B.I. visited earlier this week — and offered to buy everyone drinks, Mr. Rodriguez, the bar patron, said. It was unusual behavior for Mr. Marquez, who was perpetually short on money; sometimes, he could not afford gas for his car, or he asked people to buy him drinks. He told Mr. Rodriguez that he had posted photographs of himself and his wife at her apartment for the sake of appearances, but that Ms. Chernykh did not live with him and would not so much as kiss him. Viviana Ramirez, 23, a friend, said he did not seem happy with the arrangement. One night, she said, he rode his bike to her house, began drinking and told her that he was married, but that it was an open relationship. “He needed more attention than what she was giving him,” Ms. Ramirez said. Image A screen shot from Mr. Marquez's Facebook page. Ms. Ramirez first met Mr. Marquez through an online “confessions” forum for students at Riverside City College looking for help with problems and a common connection. They were each frequent commenters and struck up a friendship, though not an especially close one, after meeting face to face. By that point, he was no longer a student at the college, according to records, but he told her that he was and that he had almost enough credits to graduate. At no point did he give any indication of an inclination to do harm, Ms. Ramirez said. He discussed wanting to join the Navy, perhaps influenced by Raheel Farook’s military service. He never spoke about religion, and she did not know he was a Muslim, Ms. Ramirez said. He also did not discuss politics. Ms. Ramirez never met any of Mr. Marquez’s friends. Instead, she said, he often discussed music. He liked punk rock. “At first, he was really shy,” she said. “But once you got to know him, he would laugh, joke around. He would never get mad. He had strong feelings that there was no point to getting angry — it was going to pass.” Jerry Morgan, the tavern’s owner, said Mr. Marquez had already been a regular at the bar when he hired Mr. Marquez about three years ago. In addition to working at the door and taking out the trash, Mr. Marquez stayed in continual contact with Mr. Morgan, texting him an hourly count of the number of patrons in attendance and the number of drinks they consumed — so Mr. Morgan could keep tabs on sales and receipts. “He was a goofy kid, a well-behaved kid,” Mr. Morgan said. “Shy. I picked him because of that. He did us right.” Mr. Morgan said that Mr. Marquez never spoke of religion, politics or firearms. Mr. Morgan said he was baffled by to learn that Mr. Marquez had bought two of the weapons used in the attack. “Enrique sold him the gun?” he said during an interview at his bar. “Who the hell would have known?” The F.B.I. came by at 2 a.m. on Monday and interviewed Mr. Morgan. He told them that he last saw Mr. Marquez about a week before the attack, when he dropped by for a few beers. Shortly after the shooting, Mr. Marquez’s friends noticed a cryptic and poorly written post on his Facebook page: “I’m. Very sorry guys. It was a pleasure.”
|
Enrique Marquez;Syed Rizwan Farook;Tashfeen Malik;Riverside California;Terrorism
|
ny0037353
|
[
"sports",
"basketball"
] |
2014/03/06
|
Knicks End Skid, but It’s Still a Struggle
|
MINNEAPOLIS — In the midst of an introspective interview at the morning shootaround Wednesday, in which he maintained he was still the right man to coach the Knicks, Mike Woodson succinctly broke down his nose-diving team’s biggest problem. “In order for us to win — and it’s always been that way — we’ve got to do everything right,” Woodson said. That meant efficiency in all facets of the game, with no slip-ups. That has been elusive, to say the least. Woodson could remember only two games all season when that had happened, and the Knicks could not get him a third Wednesday night. But after blowing almost all of a double-digit lead in the second half, the Knicks made just enough shots in a shaky fourth quarter against Minnesota to win, 118-106, and end a torturous seven-game losing streak. With the lead down to 88-86, a 15-2 run from the start of the fourth quarter gave the Knicks enough breathing room despite some rushed shots and unsightly breakdowns, including an acrobatic missed dunk by Iman Shumpert. All five Knicks starters scored in double figures, led by Carmelo Anthony’s 33 points, and Tim Hardaway Jr. added 11 off the bench. Hardaway’s alley-oop dunk gave the Knicks a 15-point lead with less than five minutes to play. The cushion allowed Woodson to pull Amar’e Stoudemire (18 points, 8 rebounds), who was managing a balky left knee, once he reached his 31-minute limit with 6 minutes 37 seconds to play. “We got out to another good start again tonight and sustained it all the way through,” Woodson said. “When they made their run, we didn’t buckle. We held in there and got defensive stops, and then we made some shots tonight.” Point guard Raymond Felton, after four consecutive poor games since his Feb. 25 arraignment on two felony weapons charges, was in the middle of it, contributing 18 points, 8 assists and 4 steals. Felton said a long talk with Woodson on Tuesday, before the Knicks left the Detroit area for Minnesota, helped. “I just did it,” Felton said. “I have no explanation, no word, no meaning, no phrase or anything for it. I just cleared my head and played ball.” Most important, the Knicks held Minnesota’s Kevin Love, the N.B.A.’s top scorer and rebounder in February, to 19 points — 1 in the second half — and 8 rebounds. Love had averaged 32.5 points and 20.5 rebounds in his previous four games against the Knicks, the last a Timberwolves victory at Madison Square Garden in November in which he hit a twisting bank shot to foil a late Knicks run. “We knew the key to our success was going to be keeping those guys off the glass, slowing Kevin Love down, making it tough offensively,” said Tyson Chandler, who guarded Love much of the night. “A lot of stuff goes through him. I knew I was going to catch that matchup. I wanted to make it tough and not give him anything.” Losers of 13 of 15 before Wednesday, the Knicks were facing a Timberwolves team heading the opposite way — winners of six of seven, and coming off a 4-1 trip that revived their slim playoffs hopes. Minnesota also was healthy for the first time since late January, with center Nikola Pekovic and guard Kevin Martin back from ankle and thumb injuries, respectively. Woodson pressed the Knicks for early energy against one of the N.B.A.’s best first-quarter teams, and he kept Stoudemire in the starting lineup alongside Chandler to try to find it. The Knicks needed muscle inside against Minnesota’s rugged frontcourt tandem of Pekovic and Love. Woodson got what he wanted in a 38-point first quarter, which tied a season high. The Knicks scored the first 9 points and jumped to a 19-7 lead, hitting 8 of their first 10 shots. The Knicks led by 66-55 at halftime, shooting 51.1 percent. But a sequence right before intermission could only be called classic Knicks, a sign of why this team has been losing. Anthony capped a terrific first half with a right-wing 3-pointer, giving him 20 points on 8-for-16 shooting. When the shot fell, he stopped, turned toward the crowd and posed. Meanwhile, Love spotted forward Corey Brewer breaking ahead of the field and hit him with a long pass for a layup. After Felton committed his fourth foul early in the third quarter, the Knicks broke down on several possessions. That allowed the Wolves to trim the deficit to 79-75. Chandler committed his fourth foul soon after, but the Knicks still led by 2 going into the fourth quarter and found the will to pull through. “It’s just good to get off this slide,” Woodson said. “Like I told them this morning, until somebody tells us we’re not going to make the playoffs and don’t have a shot at it, we’ve got to keep playing. Stranger things have happened.”
|
Basketball;Knicks;Timberwolves
|
ny0140710
|
[
"world",
"africa"
] |
2008/02/15
|
As Kenyan Rivals Haggle, a Mother Mourns at 2 Graves
|
KATITO, Kenya — It did not take many people to carry the coffins of Wycliffe and Cynthia Awino. They were 7 and 9 years old. The brother and sister were burned to death by a mob last month in Kenya in the explosion of postelection violence. And if there ever was a woman alone, it was their mother, Millicent Awino, who stood by herself at the foot of two freshly dug graves on Thursday, blotting out reality with her hands over her face, as her only children disappeared into the ground. “I only wish to have kids again,” she said. Ms. Awino, 23, is a single mother who was at work packing roses for the equivalent of $2 a day when her children were killed. A mob surrounded the house where they were hiding with 17 other people, barricaded the doors and soaked the walls with gasoline. No one inside had a chance. It was one of the most disturbing episodes in the bloodletting that has convulsed Kenya since a disputed election in December, in which the president, Mwai Kibaki , narrowly beat Raila Odinga , an opposition leader. More than 1,000 people have been killed in clashes between supporters of the two politicians that followed mostly ethnic lines but broke all rules. Old men were chopped in the head with axes. Mothers were stabbed to death in front of screaming babies. The killings seem to have subsided as rival politicians continue to negotiate, but there are open wounds almost everywhere. In the Katito area in western Kenya, where Ms. Awino now lives, about all that is left of the once vibrant Kikuyu community is a string of scorched shops picked clean by looters. Mr. Kibaki is a Kikuyu, and opposition supporters, furious about the election, have methodically hunted down members of his ethnic group. The Kikuyus have taken revenge, massacring Luos, Mr. Odinga’s ethnic group. The Awinos are Luos. They lived in Naivasha, an ethnically mixed town in the Rift Valley that used to be known for its nature walks, fancy hotels and flower farms. Around 7 a.m., Sunday, Jan. 27, Ms. Awino left for work. She was one of the many migrant workers who had flocked to Naivasha for jobs on the flower farms, neatly packing beautiful roses by day and returning to their iron-roofed shanties at night. Two dollars a day is considered a decent wage here, especially for a woman who dropped out of eighth grade to have her first baby at age 14. Wycliffe and Cynthia were left at a neighbor’s. Wycliffe seemed especially caring for a 7-year-old. “Whenever I came home from work, he’d take one look at me and say, ‘Mommy, you’re tired,’ ” Ms. Awino said. The only picture the family has of the children shows them sitting on the grass, Wycliffe with a freshly shaved head, Cynthia wearing a lemon-colored dress. Ms. Awino rushed back to her neighborhood that afternoon when her boss said that Kikuyu gangs were killing Luos. She found her house in ashes. When she reached her neighbors, she collapsed. Her children had been huddling with the others in a back room. They were burned almost beyond recognition. On Thursday morning, Ms. Awino brought the bodies home, two wooden coffins trimmed with lace strapped atop a minibus. Home is now a shack with plastic sheeting for walls on a farm belonging to her ex-husband’s father. The people here are strangers to Ms. Awino. Even though she split up with her husband, custom has it that she still should live on his family’s land. About 20 people came to the funeral. The refreshments were simple, warm Coca-Colas and slices of white bread. Local church members tapped metal rings that rang like bells. The smell of fresh manure wafted up from the fields. The speeches were short. Ms. Awino told the story of how her children were killed. Their father, Morris Okoth, then shared a few words. “There is no need for payback,” he said. Wycliffe went first. Before his three-foot coffin was lowered into its hole, one woman threw herself on it. “Wycliffe! Wycliffe!” she wailed. “Where are you?” Cynthia’s coffin was then covered by shovelfuls of earth. There was no comforting message at the end. There seemed to be nothing to say. Most people walked away with their heads down. The only sounds were soft sobbing and birds chirping.
|
Kenya;Kikuyu Tribe;Luo Tribe;Funerals;Kibaki Mwai;Odinga Raila
|
ny0285164
|
[
"science"
] |
2016/09/28
|
Elon Musk’s Plan: Get Humans to Mars, and Beyond
|
GUADALAJARA, Mexico — Elon Musk’s plans to get to Mars start with a really big rocket. He still needs to figure out how to pay for it. For years, Mr. Musk, the billionaire founder of the SpaceX rocket company, has been offering hints and teases of his desire to colonize the big red planet. In a talk on Tuesday at the International Astronautical Congress here, Mr. Musk finally provided engineering details, optimistic timelines and a slick video. “What you saw there is very close to what we’ll actually build,” Mr. Musk said, referring to the rockets and spacecraft in the video. Mr. Musk estimated it would cost $10 billion to develop the rocket, and he said the first passengers to Mars could take off as soon as 2024 if the plans went off without a hitch. For now, SpaceX is financing development costs of a few tens of millions of dollars a year, but eventually the company would look to some kind of public-private partnership. Each of the SpaceX vehicles would take 100 passengers on the journey to Mars, with trips planned every 26 months, when Earth and Mars pass close to each other. Mr. Musk said the first flights would be “fairly expensive” but ticket prices might eventually fall to between $100,000 and $200,000 a person. To establish a self-sustaining Mars civilization of a million people would take 10,000 flights, with many more to ferry equipment and supplies. “We’re going to need something quite large to do that,” Mr. Musk said. It would take 40 years to a century before the city on Mars became self-sufficient, he said. The mood at the conference was almost as giddy as a rock concert or the launch of a new Apple product, with people lining up for Mr. Musk’s presentation a couple of hours in advance. Mr. Musk has talked of his “Mars Colonial Transporter,” but a couple of weeks ago, he suggested that its capabilities would be much greater. He now calls it the Interplanetary Transport System. The booster would include 42 of SpaceX’s new, more powerful Raptor engines. On Monday, he posted an image on Twitter of the first testing of a Raptor. Mars has long been the goal of Mr. Musk and SpaceX. Much of Mr. Musk’s initial wealth came from his tenure as chief executive of PayPal, which was sold to eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion. Afterward, he wanted to undertake a science experiment — to send a greenhouse to Mars and see if Earth plants could grow in Martian dirt. He said the rocket options for launching his project were so lacking that he started SpaceX, which has headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif. SpaceX has established a successful business with its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket launching satellites, and by taking cargo — and soon astronauts — to the International Space Station for NASA. But Mr. Musk has stated often that his loftier goal for SpaceX is to send people to Mars to make humanity a “multiplanetary species” in order to ensure survival in case some calamity like an asteroid strike befell Earth. The new rocket could be used for even more distant trips, to places like Europa, the icy moon of Jupiter. “This system really gives you freedom to go anywhere you want in the greater solar system,” he said. What is less clear is how SpaceX will raise the money needed to bring its Mars dreams to fruition. The new rocket is by far the largest ever. Scott Pace, a former NASA official who is the director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, said Mr. Musk’s vision was plausible technically, but added, “Other than emotional appeal, however, it didn’t really address why governments, corporations or other organizations would fund the effort.” His bottom-line opinion: “Possible, but not probable.” During his talk, Mr. Musk put up a slide titled “Funding.” The first item was “Steal underpants,” a joking reference to a “South Park” episode. He also listed SpaceX’s businesses — launching satellites and sending NASA cargo and astronauts to the space station — and “Kickstarter.” But he admitted that SpaceX would probably not be able to do it alone. “Ultimately, this is going to be a huge public-private partnership,” he said. SpaceX has received much of the financing for its rocket development from NASA, from contracts to take cargo to and from the International Space Station. The United States Air Force is providing $33.6 million for development of the Raptor. Critics of SpaceX and Mr. Musk question whether the Mars dreams are distracting the company from its more mundane business. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket is grounded while investigators try to figure out why one of the rockets on the launchpad exploded this month during fueling before a test firing. On Friday, the company said the failure appeared to be a large breach in the helium system of the second stage, although what caused the breach is not known. However, the company said the investigation had ruled out any connection to the failure last year of a Falcon 9 that disintegrated in flight. (That failure was traced to a faulty strut in the second stage, and SpaceX resumed launching later in the year.) Mr. Musk also faces competition from other billionaires with ambitious space dreams. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, has his own rocket company, Blue Origin , which this month also announced a new rocket, New Glenn, that approaches the Saturn 5 in stature, but is dwarfed by SpaceX’s new rocket. At a talk here, Robert Meyerson, Blue Origin’s president, said the aim of New Glenn was to take people to space, although it will also be able to launch satellites. The images the company released showed the satellite-carrying version. But Mr. Meyerson disclosed that “there are other versions that will have a space vehicle on top.” Mr. Meyerson said Blue Origin had an even larger rocket, to be called New Armstrong, on the drawing board. Mr. Bezos has said his goal is for millions of people to live in space, although he has not mentioned Mars as a destination. With Mr. Bezos’ Amazon wealth, Blue Origin faces less pressure to be profitable as quickly as SpaceX, or public companies like Boeing and Lockheed Martin that have to answer to shareholders. NASA is still talking about its Mars ambitions, too, and its own giant rocket, the Space Launch System, for eventual human missions there. William H. Gerstenmaier, the associate administrator for human exploration and operations, said all of the pieces for a crewed Mars mission were in development, at least to reach Mars orbit, by the 2030s and fit within the agency’s existing budget. “We don’t think we’re going to get a big new budget,” he said. He admitted that in NASA’s plans, astronauts’ setting foot on Mars would take longer, probably not until the 2040s. Mr. Musk was confident that his company could pull off his vision, but he said he would not be among the first colonists, saying he wants to see his children grow up. The chances of dying on that first trip to Mars, he said, are “quite high.”
|
Elon Musk;SpaceX;Private spaceflight;Rocket;Mars
|
ny0254741
|
[
"sports",
"soccer"
] |
2011/07/12
|
For International Soccer Powers, Summer Trips to the U.S.
|
Frank Rijkaard in the summer of 2003 was only weeks from the start of his first season as the manager of Barcelona. But first there was a small matter of a preseason tour of the United States. The tour included games against the European powers Juventus, A.C. Milan and Manchester United. “He looked at the schedule and said, ‘Three friendlies, but this is ridiculous, I might get fired before the season even starts,’ ” said Charlie Stillitano, who organized two summer tours under the ChampionsWorld banner. Rijkaard may no longer be the Barcelona coach and Stillitano may no longer be running the defunct ChampionsWorld, having moved to Creative Artists Agency, but some of the biggest and best international clubs are back in the United States for the World Football Challenge . This time around, it is soccer diplomacy at its best because Stillitano and Creative Artists are working with the marketing arm of Major League Soccer , Soccer United Marketing, to put on 14 games — 5 involving M.L.S. clubs — between Wednesday (when Manchester United opens the tournament against the New England Revolution at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Mass.) and Aug. 6 (when Barcelona plays Club América of Mexico at Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, Tex.). In a busy soccer off-season, a period that has included the Concacaf Gold Cup, the Women’s World Cup, the Copa América and the U-17 World Cup (not to mention the M.L.S. regular season), the World Football Challenge has evolved. “A number of things have changed, beginning with the credibility of M.L.S.,” Commissioner Don Garber said. “In the past, the superclubs came to the U.S. just to build their brands and expand their global footprints, and in many ways exploit their soccer opportunities in the U.S. Now that the league has become better connected to the world, the clubs are coming not only to build their brands, but they are contributing to building the sport in the U.S. Things we have done have given M.L.S. a bounce in its step and resonated with the international football community.” After its match against the Revolution, Manchester United, the reigning English Premier League champion, will spend time in the Pacific Northwest, training at the facilities used by the N.F.L.’s Seattle Seahawks. After a game in Chicago against the M.L.S. Fire on July 23, United will face the M.L.S. All-Star team at Red Bull Arena in Harrison, N.J., on July 27. The matches against M.L.S. teams enable North American fans to see their local clubs, who might not have had their attention in the past, play some of the best in the world. In that way, M.L.S. hopes to increase its appeal. Real Madrid, coached by the mercurial José Mourinho, was scheduled to arrive in Los Angeles on Monday before it plays David Beckham, Landon Donovan and the Los Angeles Galaxy at Memorial Coliseum on Saturday. The other international clubs in the tournament are Manchester City, Juventus, Club América, Chivas Guadalajara and Sporting Club of Lisbon. The other M.L.S. clubs involved are the Vancouver Whitecaps and the Philadelphia Union. Instead of playing in the tournament, the Red Bulls decided to accept an invitation from Arsenal to play in the Emirates Cup (with Paris St. Germain and Boca Juniors) on July 30 and 31 — probably something to do with the Red Bulls having Thierry Henry, a former Gunners star, on the roster. The World Football Challenge has a novel setup: 3 points for a win in regulation, none for a loss in regulation. If a match is tied after 90 minutes, it will go to penalty kicks, with the shootout winner getting 2 points and the loser 1. And in a nod to the points system used in the North American Soccer League, each goal (up to three) will be worth an additional point in the standings. The results of all five M.L.S. clubs in the competition will be combined and count as a single entry. All of the matches will be televised by ESPN and Univision. “We have to make it worth something,” Stillitano said. “And I know the first question José, who likes to be out in California, is going to ask me because he’s so darn competitive: What does the trophy look like? Forget hello. It’s all about the trophy.” Understandable, since it has been a few years since Real Madrid has claimed any major silverware. This year, games will be played in large N.F.L. stadiums and in some of the new buildings constructed for M.L.S. teams. Two of the matches (Manchester City-Vancouver on July 18 and Juventus-Sporting in Toronto on July 23) will be played in Canada. One game (Juventus-Club América on July 26) will be in a baseball stadium — Citi Field, the home of the Mets. Perhaps the biggest game of the tournament, a rematch of May’s Champions League final between Manchester United and Barcelona, will be played at FedEx Field in Landover, Md., on July 30. That game is already sold out. The top teams in the tournament, including United, Real Madrid and Barcelona, will earn $1 million to $2 million a game. Clubs like Manchester City and Juventus are due to receive up to $1 million, while the other international teams make $200,000 to $300,000 for each game. It might be easy, however, to forget that the international clubs are involved in their preseason preparations. The Manchester clubs have scheduled their games earlier in the tournament because the Premier League season begins early in August, while Barcelona does not play its first match until July 30, with a later start to La Liga’s season. “What these clubs are really after, besides making money of course and expanding their brands, is a chance to unwind, take walks outside the hotel and not be bothered as they walk around Beverly Hills,” Stillitano said. “Here, it’s a combination of training and environment that is really second to none. The smarter clubs realize the facilities are excellent. Juventus looked at the Eagles’ facility and were blown away.” While some skeptics will always say that the international clubs come to the United States only to make some money, sell some gear and then head home, to elite teams and players there never really is a meaningless friendly match. Not when there is pride on the line, 70,000 fans in the seats and great players on the field.
|
Soccer;Major League Soccer;Creative Artists Agency;Stillitano Charlie;World Football Challenge
|
ny0073809
|
[
"world",
"europe"
] |
2015/04/29
|
E.U. Envisions Role for Iran in Peace Talks
|
UNITED NATIONS — The European Union’s top diplomat said Tuesday evening that she hoped a final nuclear deal with Iran would clear the way for Tehran to play a “major but positive role” in the conflicts roiling the Middle East, particularly in Syria. The diplomat, Federica Mogherini, who is the European Union’s foreign policy chief, made her remarks before meeting with her Iranian counterpart, Mohammad Javad Zarif. Her comments focused on the last-mile negotiations to prevent Iran from building a nuclear bomb. “I’m also convinced this could lead the way, open the way to a different role of Iran in the region,” Ms. Mogherini told reporters, adding that she hoped that an accord with Iran on the nuclear issue could usher in security and stability to the region. So far, the world powers that led the nuclear negotiations with Iran have insisted that those talks, which face a June deadline, have been separate from any peace talks on Syria. Her remarks signaled a departure from that stance. “The best possible approach you can have is for sure to have on one side a positive outcome of talks so they cannot develop a nuclear weapon and on other side to call for Iran to play a major, a major but positive role in Syria in particular,” she said. Iran is a vital backer of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, and has been notably shut out of peace talks. Ms. Mogherini said nothing specific about the challenges that remained in the nuclear talks, except that she hoped to have “fruitful” conversations in the coming weeks. She is scheduled to meet with Secretary John Kerry in Washington on Wednesday. Separately, Ms. Mogherini suggested that the European Union would seek the Security Council’s support for its proposal to crack down on smuggling rings in Libya that send desperate migrants across the Mediterranean. Human rights groups have criticized the proposal. She said the 28 member states of the Europe Union were keen to make sure that enforcement operations were “in full respect of international law.”
|
Iran;EU;Syria;Federica Mogherini;Nuclear weapon;International relations;Europe;Mohammad Javad Zarif
|
ny0146786
|
[
"nyregion"
] |
2008/07/19
|
In Politics and Parking, Winners Get the Spoils
|
Politics and parking are two of New York City’s most competitive sports — and never more cutthroat than when played in combination. This spring, for instance, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced that he had slashed the number of parking placards doled out by the city to law enforcement agencies and other city departments. Now, after a request by news organizations, some of the winners and losers of the great city parking sweepstakes are beginning to emerge. The results are somewhat puzzling, though not entirely unexpected. In general, the State Assembly, the State Senate and the city’s marshals office (population 44) did rather well in holding onto their permits. The chairmen and district managers of the city’s community boards did not. “Oh my goodness,” Richard C. Hellenbrecht, chairman of Community Board 13 in Queens, said when told that his placard would not be renewed. “That’s not very nice. I’ve been a good boy.” City agencies distribute tens of thousands of these placards to their employees, giving them free street parking privileges at their workplace or around the city while on official business. The cuts were made this spring when Mr. Bloomberg, making good on a promise to reduce the number of placards given out, cut nearly 20,000 from the Police Department and 2,000 from the Fire Department. Officials said that necessity was the criterion used in determining who lost their privileges. As Jason Post, a spokesman for the mayor, put it: “People were asked to justify their needs.” “The mayor only wants placards for people who use them for city business,” Mr. Post explained. “Placards serve a purpose, and the problems come when they are misused or abused.” The mayor’s office on Friday released a list of more than 200 placard-worthy recipients, a small fraction of the total. They include mayoral staff, City Council members and their aides, state lawmakers, community board chairmen and other officials. Some who were no longer on the list made political sense. Representative Vito J. Fossella, for example, lost all three of his three-hour permits plus his sole permit for unlimited parking. Then again, Mr. Fossella, a Staten Island Republican who was charged with drunken driving this year and then admitted to having fathered a daughter in an extramarital relationship, has said he will not seek re-election to Congress in November, eliminating his official need for the placard. The provenance of other pulled permits was somewhat more obscure and could not help piquing the curiosity. Why did Representative Charles B. Rangel, the dean of Harlem Democrats, lose all of his permits while his colleague, Representative Jerrold L. Nadler, was allowed to hold on to one of his? Job changes may have accounted for some of the lost permits. When Matthew Wambua left a City Hall job and moved across the street to work for the city Housing Development Corporation and the city Residential Mortgage Insurance Corporation, his permit did not accompany him. And when Carl Andrews, a former state senator from Brooklyn, was appointed the acting director of the office of intergovernmental affairs for Gov. David A. Paterson this year, he did not keep the placard he had last year, when he was director of intergovernmental affairs in New York City for Gov. Eliot Spitzer. Mr. Rangel, Mr. Nadler, Mr. Wambua and Mr. Andrews did not return phone calls seeking explanation. At Community Board 10 in Harlem, Yasmin Cornelius lost her placard from the city, but then again she also left her job as district manager some weeks ago. Geneva Baim, who replaced Ms. Cornelius, said she would not need Ms. Cornelius’s permit. Ms. Baim said she does not drive. Mr. Hellenbrecht, the chairman of Community Board 13, said he could not recall spilling soup on the mayor in the last few months, though he did admit to having skipped Mr. Bloomberg’s last collegial barbecue. “So, O.K., I didn’t go,” Mr. Hellenbrecht said. “But I certainly don’t think they can possibly keep track.” Another official who lost his placard, Xavier Rodriguez, the district manager of Community Board 5 in the Bronx, said he got his notice to renew around Christmas. Mr. Rodriguez said that he sent it in and that the city must have lost it. “The rhyme and reason and rationale for taking away these permits — it’s just bizarre,” he said. “I mean, for me, it just goes over my head.”
|
Politics and Government;Parking;New York City
|
ny0072143
|
[
"us"
] |
2015/03/08
|
Maine Considers a Property Tax on Some Nonprofits
|
AUGUSTA, Me. — Nonprofit organizations across the country are closely watching Maine as it considers becoming the first state to impose property taxes on hospitals, private colleges and summer camps under a plan put forth by Gov. Paul LePage. Mr. LePage’s proposal has sparked a fiery debate over what impact nonprofits have on their communities and whether they should have to cover the costs for municipal services they receive. David L. Thompson, vice president of public policy for the National Council of Nonprofits, said all states exempted nonprofits from property taxes, either through laws or their constitutions. Mr. LePage, a Republican, has called nonprofits “takers, not givers,” and argues that they need to contribute for services like the police, firefighters and snow removal. His proposal, which is part of his $6.3 billion budget plan, would require organizations to pay taxes to municipalities if their properties were worth more than $500,000. They would pay taxes only on the property value over that threshold and get a 50 percent discount on the rate. In Maine, hospitals, colleges and other groups that are lobbying heavily against the proposal warn that it would force them to raise costs or eliminate jobs. The Good Shepherd Food Bank estimates it would owe $24,500 annually to the City of Auburn under the governor’s plan. A spokeswoman, Clara Whitney, said it also would mean providing 100,000 fewer meals every year. Some nonprofits already provide payments to Maine municipalities in lieu of taxes, but those payments fall well short of covering the services those organizations receive, said Jonathan LaBonte, director of the governor’s Office of Policy and Management. “The governor put this in the budget to start the conversation,” said Mr. LaBonte, who also is the mayor of Auburn. “If municipalities have another approach, the governor has kept that door open.”
|
Nonprofit;Budget;Inheritance Tax and Estate Tax;Property tax
|
ny0124549
|
[
"nyregion"
] |
2012/08/02
|
Property Tax Evasion in City Is Widespread, Report Suggests
|
At the peak of the real estate boom, the owners of a four-story building with a couple of huge billboards in Times Square failed to report money that they received from renting the signs, evading tens of thousands of dollars a year in property taxes. The owners went further than just omitting the billboard income; they appealed to the city for a reduction in taxes for six consecutive years. But after an investigation by the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr. , the owners paid $240,000 in back taxes as part of an agreement settling the matter. On Wednesday, the grand jury that heard evidence in the case, as well as two others that resulted in indictments, issued an unusual report recommending a series of what it said were “desperately needed” changes to the city’s property tax system, including civil sanctions and stiffer penalties for landlords who file false documents and information. The report suggests that this kind of tax evasion may be widespread, citing a survey that found that 60 of 100 property owners cited by the Buildings Department for improper permits had failed to report signage income to the Tax Commission. “Reform is desperately needed,” the report said, to protect the integrity of the city’s tax system and to “maximize the tax receipts that are currently lawfully due.” City officials, who testified extensively before the grand jury, said it was impossible to know how many of the city’s one million property owners were evading taxes by filing false income and expense statements with the Finance Department or the Tax Commission. But with $17 billion in property taxes collected in 2011, Glenn Newman, president of the Tax Commission, said “even a small amount of fraud can result in real money lost.” Members of the city’s real estate industry said the issue might be overblown. “We’re surprised to see this report,” said Steven Spinola, president of the Real Estate Board of New York. “Obviously, anything can be improved. But we believe the overwhelming majority of companies submit accurate statements, many of which are certified.” In recent years, the Real Estate Board and many landlords have complained unsuccessfully to the city about inordinately high tax rates for apartment buildings, which, they say, account for as much as 33 percent of gross income. In the last fiscal year, the owners of 184,000 properties appealed their tax assessments. And in 2011, the Tax Commission granted about $500 million in tax reductions. The grand jury, however, cited studies showing that many properties identified by their owners as vacant or owner-occupied were in fact retail shops. Another study found that owners of unlicensed hotels had filed for tax reductions without reporting all the income they received. The grand jury recommended requiring notarized statements and moving the current deadline for property tax filings back to June, from September, to provide the city more time to evaluate the income and expense statements. They also recommended imposing civil sanctions against owners who file false statements and allowing the Tax Commission to raise the assessed value of a property if it discovers that the owner omitted revenue information. “As the city’s single largest revenue source, the importance of real property tax to the financial well-being of New York cannot be overstated,” Mr. Vance said in a statement Wednesday. “However, some unscrupulous individuals and entities routinely try to cheat the city out of this valuable revenue stream by filing false information with city agencies.” One tax lawyer, who requested anonymity because he did not want to alienate city officials, said that a certified audit for each property would be expensive, and he questioned why officials were seeking additional penalties when there are already substantive sanctions for false statements. The city may be trying to create some momentum for a bill that would change the filing date for tax information, which, he said, did not have much support in the City Council.
|
Property Taxes;Tax Evasion;New York City;Vance Cyrus R Jr
|
ny0271839
|
[
"business",
"economy"
] |
2016/05/27
|
Business Investment Lags, but Housing Sales Surge
|
WASHINGTON — Business spending intentions in the United States weakened in April for a third straight month, and contracts to buy previously owned homes surged to a 10-year high, data released on Thursday showed. Another report showed that the number of Americans seeking unemployment benefits fell last week, supporting views that economic growth is gaining speed. “The weak performance in business capital investment activity suggests that this segment remains a source of drag for the U.S. economic recovery,” said Millan Mulraine, deputy chief economist at TD Securities in New York. “Over all, domestic growth momentum appears to be on the mend.” The Commerce Department said orders for nonmilitary capital goods excluding aircraft, a closely watched proxy for business spending plans, fell 0.8 percent after slipping 0.1 percent the previous month. These so-called core capital goods orders have now declined for three consecutive months. The manufacturing sector remains pressured by lower energy prices, which have eroded profits of energy companies and forced oil field services firms like Schlumberger and Halliburton to slash capital spending budgets. Manufacturing, which accounts for 12 percent of the economy, has also taken a knock from efforts by businesses to slim down an inventory bloat, which has undercut growth in new orders. A strong dollar has been a drag on exports. Shipments of core capital goods, used to calculate equipment spending in the gross domestic product report, rose 0.3 percent last month, reversing March’s 0.3 percent drop. Much of the factory sector weakness has been concentrated in the heavy machinery segment, where manufacturers have also been hurt by reduced demand for agricultural equipment. In April, orders for machinery tumbled 1.9 percent after dropping 0.8 percent in March. In a separate report, the National Association of Realtors said its pending home sales index jumped 5.1 percent last month to its highest level since February 2006. Pending home contracts become sales after a month or two, and April’s surge pointed to further gains in home resales. The housing market is being underpinned by a tightening labor market, which is starting to lift wages, as well as still very low mortgage rates. But a shortage of properties available for sale remains a hurdle and house prices have risen faster than wages, sidelining some first-time buyers. A third report, from the Labor Department, showed initial claims for state unemployment benefits declined 10,000 to a seasonally adjusted 268,000 for the week ended May 21. Claims have now been below 300,000, a threshold associated with a strong job market, for 64 straight weeks, the longest stretch since 1973. The pending homes sales and jobless claims data joined reports on retail sales, housing and industrial production in suggesting the economy was gaining steam after growth slowed to a 0.5 percent annual pace in the first quarter. The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta is currently estimating second-quarter G.D.P. growth at a 2.9 percent rate. The Commerce Department report also showed orders for durable goods, items ranging from toasters to aircraft meant to last three years or more, jumped 3.4 percent last month after increasing 1.9 percent in March. The rise in durable goods orders last month was led by an 8.9 percent jump in bookings for transportation equipment. Orders for civilian aircraft soared 64.9 percent. There were increases in orders for motor vehicles, fabricated metal products, computers and electronic goods, and electrical equipment, appliances and components. Durable goods inventories declined further in April, a good sign for the manufacturing’s future prospects, while unfilled orders increased 0.6 percent. Durable goods shipments rose 0.6 percent after two consecutive months of declines.
|
Manufacturing;Unemployment benefits;Real Estate; Housing;US Economy;Jobs;Commerce Department
|
ny0013059
|
[
"nyregion"
] |
2013/11/26
|
Chilling Look at Newtown Killer, but No ‘Why’
|
NEWTOWN, Conn. — Adam Lanza spent the final months of his life mostly alone in his bedroom. His windows were covered with black trash bags. He was preoccupied with violent video games and created a spreadsheet of some of the worst massacres in American history. Mr. Lanza refused to speak even to his mother, communicating with her only by email, even though their bedrooms shared the same floor of their house on Yogananda Street. He would not eat unless his food was arranged in a particular way on his plate. He hated birthdays and holidays, and forbade his mother from putting up a Christmas tree. He also made her get rid of a cat he did not like. No one else was allowed into his room, including his mother, who nevertheless did her son’s laundry daily because he changed his clothes often. Image Mr. Lanza Among their few outings together were trips to the shooting range. She planned to buy him a gun for Christmas last year. Mr. Lanza, 20, could not connect with people but obsessed over “Dance Dance Revolution,” an interactive video game he played in the lobby of a nearby movie theater, spending as long as 10 hours at a time trying to follow dance routines as they flashed on the screen. Last year, four days before her son killed 20 first graders and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School and then shot himself, Ms. Lanza cooked him some of his favorite meals and then left for a three-day trip to New Hampshire. Ms. Lanza returned on Dec. 13 at 10 p.m. The next morning, her son shot and killed her in her bed. A 48-page report released on Monday by the state’s attorney in Danbury, Stephen J. Sedensky III, offers a vivid and chilling portrait of the young man responsible for one of the nation’s worst mass shootings, and chronicles his rampage in the school. But what it does not answer is why. The long-awaited report does not suggest a motive for Mr. Lanza’s actions, even as it offers a glimpse into his strange, troubled life. It comes nearly a year after the shooting set off a national discussion about gun control, mental health and violence in American popular culture. Image The windows in Mr. Lanza’s room were covered with trash bags. Credit Connecticut State Police In that time, families of the Sandy Hook Elementary victims have struggled to put their lives back together, the town has tried to heal and the school has been razed. But, until Monday, little information compiled by investigators had been publicly released. Even basic facts, like the path Mr. Lanza took inside the school, were kept secret. After the shooting, the Connecticut General Assembly passed bills to limit what could be made public. The state also fought to prevent the release of the recordings of the emergency calls to 911 from people inside the school. At a hearing on Monday before the report’s release, Judge Eliot Prescott of New Britain Superior Court said that he would review the tapes and soon decide whether to release them. The report was based on voluminous evidence and interviews conducted by the Connecticut State Police and the state’s attorney’s office, along with federal authorities. It marks the end of the investigation. Investigators struggled to make sense of “contradictory” descriptions of Mr. Lanza by those who knew him. The report notes that while “significant mental health issues” affected his ability to live a normal life and interact with others, it remained unclear if they contributed in any way to his actions last December. Mr. Lanza received a diagnosis in 2005 of an autism variant known as Asperger’s syndrome, but there is no evidence that people with Asperger’s are more likely than others to commit violent crimes. Image An aerial photograph of Sandy Hook Elementary School on Dec. 14, 2012, the day of the mass shooting. Credit Julio Cortez/Associated Press Mr. Lanza was treated by mental health professionals, according to the report, but none of them saw anything that predicted his future behavior. “Tutoring, desensitization and medication were recommended,” the report said. “The shooter refused to take suggested medication and did not engage in suggested behavior therapies.” There were reports of troubling behavior as early as the fifth grade, when Mr. Lanza produced “The Big Book of Granny” for a class project. The main character had a gun in her cane and shot people. In 2006, as a seventh grader, Mr. Lanza was described by a teacher as intelligent but obsessed with violent imagery. His mother noted a change in his behavior around that time. He stopped riding his bicycle or climbing trees. He no longer showed interest in his saxophone, dropping out of a school band. His life turned increasingly inward. Image A rifle, as it was found in Mr. Lanza’s home. Credit Connecticut State Police Investigators found a wealth of disturbing digital evidence at the Lanza home, but were not able to recover any information from one hard drive that he had destroyed. Mr. Lanza had two videos showing suicide by gunshot, a five-second video dramatization showing a child being shot, and images of Mr. Lanza himself holding a gun to his head. He collected information on gun violence, including newspaper articles from 1891 “pertaining to the shooting of schoolchildren,” the report said. He used spreadsheets to chronicle mass shootings. He also had “materials regarding the topic of pedophilia and advocating for the rights for pedophiles.” The report made a point of noting that the materials were not child pornography, and the report did not otherwise address pedophilia. Mr. Lanza was enthralled by violent video games, including one called “School Shooting,” a modified version of another online game. His mother, Nancy Lanza, who separated from his father, Peter Lanza, in 2001, lived alone with Adam. She was concerned about him, saying she could not have a job because he required her constant attention. It was unclear how aware Ms. Lanza was of his strong interest in death and violence, and she continued to provide him with weapons. Image Mr. Lanza changed his clothes often; his mother did his laundry daily. Credit Connecticut State Police “The mother wanted to buy the shooter a CZ-83 pistol for Christmas and had prepared a check for that purchase to give the shooter,” the report said. “The mother never expressed fear of the shooter, for her own safety or that of anyone else.” An associate of the father said Peter Lanza, a tax director for the energy and finance division of General Electric in Stamford, was baffled by his son’s attitude toward him, and every attempt to reach out to the son was rejected. The two had not spoken in two years, said the associate, who asked for anonymity because he did not want to be identified with the attack. As details of the report were made public, there was disbelief expressed by some people that Ms. Lanza could not have been aware of the darkness building within her son. Michele Gay, whose daughter Josephine was killed at the school, read the report and said of Mr. Lanza’s bizarre behavior: “You would want treatment for someone like that. The problem here is that he was completely isolated from anyone but his mother, and the mother did not have the ability or understanding to help her son.” Ms. Gay said she found it particularly hard to fathom why Ms. Lanza would want to give her son a gun for Christmas. By 2012, the report said, Mr. Lanza was also estranged from his older brother, Ryan, who had also moved away. Ms. Lanza was planning to move from Newtown, possibly to Washington or to North Carolina, with Adam. To prepare the house for sale, she intended to buy a recreational vehicle for Adam to sleep in because he refused to go to a hotel. Image No information was recovered from a destroyed hard drive. Credit Connecticut State Police Mr. Lanza carefully planned his attack. According to information from a GPS device he owned, he drove to the vicinity of the school one day before the assault, while his mother was out of town. When he went to Sandy Hook Elementary on Dec. 14, he was armed with 30-round magazines for a Bushmaster .223-caliber rifle, along with several other weapons. Shortly after 9:30 a.m., he blasted his way through the plate-glass window at the locked front entrance. In less than 10 minutes, Mr. Lanza fired 154 rounds from the rifle, killing the 26 children and staff members. At 9:40, he took his own life with a pistol. “He was wearing a pale green pocket vest over a black polo-style short-sleeve shirt over a black T-shirt,” the report said. “He had yellow-colored earplugs in each ear. He was wearing black cargo pocket pants, black socks, black sneakers, a black canvas belt and black fingerless gloves on each hand. He had an empty camouflage drop holster that was affixed to his right thigh.” Relatives of the victims were permitted to view a draft of the report earlier this month. After nearly a year of speaking with investigators, sharing stories with other families of victims and endless news media accounts, some said there was little surprising in the draft report. The family of Victoria Soto, a first-grade teacher whom Mr. Lanza killed as she tried to keep her students out of the line of fire, released a statement noting that there were some questions that could never be answered. “While others search for the answer as to why this happened, we search for the how,” the statement read. “How can we live without Vicki? “So, yes, we have read the report. No, we cannot make sense of why it happened. We don’t know if anyone ever will. We don’t know if we will ever be whole again. We don’t know if we will go a day without pain. We don’t know if anything will ever make sense again.”
|
Sandy Hook Elementary Shooting;Sandy Hook Elementary School Newtown Conn;Adam Lanza;Newtown CT
|
ny0224915
|
[
"world",
"asia"
] |
2010/10/05
|
Afghan Election Official Is Held, Police Say
|
KABUL, Afghanistan — After a raft of complaints about fraud in the parliamentary elections in Khost Province, the provincial police arrested the provincial head of the Independent Election Commission on Monday, police officials said. Shahzada Hassan, the chief election officer in Khost, was accused by candidates and observers of taking bribes in exchange for important election posts. Mr. Hassan was arrested after the Independent Election Commission in Kabul forwarded his name for legal action. The commission chairman, Fazal Ahmad Manawi, had warned that if the commission found evidence of illegal activity among its employees, it would refer those under suspicion to the attorney general’s office for legal action. In a country that is no stranger to election fraud, the problems in Khost Province stood out. Of 206 written complaints filed to the Electoral Complaints Commission after the Sept. 18 parliamentary elections, the board rated all but 6 as “high priority,” so serious that they could change the outcome of the election in the province. The provincial police said they had detained Mr. Hassan at the request of the Ministry of Interior in Kabul, but Mr. Hassan, reached on his cellphone on Monday night, said, “I have not been detained by anybody.” “I am here in the guesthouse of the Khost police for security reasons,” he said. “I came here voluntarily.” He accused losing candidates of spreading accusations of wrongdoing against him. “There are 63 candidates running for five seats,” Mr. Hassan said, “so only five of them can go to Parliament and the rest cannot, and they spread these rumors.” But even some candidates who are certain to be seated in Parliament disagreed with his account. Saiyra Sharif, a popular candidate, who was the third-highest vote getter in the province, said she was relieved to hear of Mr. Hassan’s detention. “If you ask anybody familiar with the election in Khost, they will tell you what a bad man he is,” she said. “He was ready to do anything for the money,” Ms. Sharif said. “Even a low-rank employee had to pay him to be recruited to work for the Independent Election Commission in Khost, and he was selling district field coordinator posts repeatedly to several people and to several candidates.” ¶ In Kandahar on Monday, four police officers were killed and seven others were wounded when a series of roadside bombs exploded as their convoy passed, according to a doctor at Mirwais Hospital in Kandahar. ¶ Also on Monday, the former chief of a district of Kandahar Province was killed by a group of armed men, believed to be Taliban, and gunmen shot the deputy mayor, Noor Ahmad Nazari, in front of his home. NATO troops took him to the military hospital for treatment.
|
Afghanistan;Elections;Legislatures and Parliaments
|
ny0151595
|
[
"science"
] |
2008/08/19
|
Rwanda: Hospital’s Design Keeps Fresh Air in Mind
|
In the dark corridors and congested waiting rooms of rural hospitals in sub-Saharan Africa, tuberculosis can spread like a rumor in a small town. A patient who comes in with a broken leg might leave with a deadly disease. Recently, several global health aid groups have been trying not only to contain and treat recalcitrant infectious diseases like tuberculosis, but also to promote new ways of building hospitals in the world’s poorest rural areas. In July, builders broke ground on a new hospital in Rwanda ’s Burera district, near the Uganda border. The design relies on simple features to reduce the spread of airborne disease: outdoor walkways instead of enclosed halls, waiting rooms alfresco and large windows staggered at different levels on opposing walls to keep air circulating. The hospital’s construction is being overseen by Rwanda’s Ministry of Health; Partners in Health, a nonprofit group based in Massachusetts; and the Clinton Foundation. It was designed by graduate students at Harvard’s design school. “It’s not revolutionary or difficult,” said Dr. Peter Drobac, a clinical adviser to Partners in Health who has worked at hospitals in various developing countries over the past 10 years, and who is advising the Rwandan government. “But your average hospital in rural Africa would have long, dark hallways and the windows shut.” A study published last year in the journal PLoS Medicine found that tuberculosis hospitals in Lima, Peru, that had big, open windows and high ceilings had better air exchange than hospitals with high-powered mechanical ventilation systems.
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Medicine and Health;Hospitals;Third World and Developing Countries;Tuberculosis;Buildings (Structures);Rwanda
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ny0188852
|
[
"world",
"asia"
] |
2009/04/22
|
A Workers’ Paradise Found Off Japan’s Coast
|
HIME ISLAND, Japan — If Marxism had ever produced a functional, prosperous society, it might have looked something like this tiny southern Japanese island. At first glance, there is little to set Hime (pronounced HEE-may) apart from the hundreds of other small inhabited islands that dot the coasts of Japan’s main isles. The 2,519 mostly graying islanders subsist on fishing and shrimp farming, and every summer hold a Shinto religious festival featuring dancers dressed as foxes. But once off the ferry, the island’s sole public transportation link to the outside, visitors are greeted by an unusual sight: a tall, bronze statue of Hime’s previous mayor, rare in a country that typically shuns such political aggrandizement. Rarer still is that the statue was erected by his son, who is the island’s current mayor. In fact, the father, who died in 1984, and the son, who succeeded him, have won every mayoral election in Himeshima, the island’s village, for 49 years — without once being challenged by a rival candidate. And it is not just the cult-of-personality politics that smack of a latter-day workers’ paradise. This sleepy island, just off Japan’s main southern island, Kyushu, has recently come under unaccustomed national media attention for a very different reason: it invented its own version of work-sharing four decades before the current economic crisis popularized the term. Under Hime’s system, village employees earn about a third less pay than public servants elsewhere in Japan, though they work the same hours. This has allowed the village to create more jobs: it now directly or indirectly employs a fifth of all working islanders. Most of the rest are engaged in fishing, also government-subsidized. In fact, village officials say, there are few fully private-sector jobs on the island. Islanders admit to the socialist parallels, even while proclaiming themselves political conservatives who vote for the governing right-wing Liberal Democratic Party. Some jokingly take the analogy a step further, comparing themselves to a much more repressive family-run regime in Japan’s geopolitical neighborhood. “Hime Island is North Korea , just a livable version,” Naokazu Koiwa said with a laugh. Mr. Koiwa, 32, repairs fishing boats. Unsurprisingly, the current mayor, Akio Fujimoto, flatly rejects the North Korean comparison. Rather, he and most other islanders call Hime a repository for traditional Japanese values, like economic egalitarianism and social harmony. They say the rest of the nation has lost these in an embrace of more competitive capitalism, especially under the prime ministership of Junichiro Koizumi from 2001-6. “Our thinking is, ‘let’s all share the economic pie and get along, instead of giving all of it to the rich,’ ” said Mr. Fujimoto, whose father, Kumao Fujimoto, devised the work-sharing system in the 1960s. “Avoiding competition is the traditional Japanese way.” Now, with the current crisis causing a national questioning of American-style laissez-faire economics, and business leaders and unions seeking alternatives to widespread job cuts, Hime’s work-sharing scheme is suddenly being held up as a new model. Islanders call it ironic that the current crisis has made traditional values appear progressive, even utopian. Nor does the island’s penchant for equality stop at work-sharing. At an annual village ceremony to mark the coming of age of 20-year-old islanders, women are forbidden to wear traditional kimonos for fear the differences in quality could reveal their households’ economic status. Dismayed by the inconsistent television reception across this mountainous island about half the size of Key West , the current mayor installed a free cable TV system that now reaches 97 percent of homes. Even by clannish Japan’s standards, the island seems a friendly, close-knit place. Islanders cheerfully greet passing strangers. Roads, parks and even public toilets are immaculate. Doors are left unlocked, and the island has only one policeman. Mr. Fujimoto also cites traditional attitudes to explain his own political longevity, a claim most islanders seem to accept. He says islanders shun public elections because of a deep-rooted abhorrence of confrontation. He said the last time the village held a mayoral election, in 1955, it split the island, creating ill feelings that took a generation to heal. To avoid a repeat of such trauma, he said, the island decided to choose mayors by consensus, finding someone on whom everyone could agree beforehand. Last year, Mr. Fujimoto won his seventh straight four-year term, once again by default in an uncontested election. “My job is to prevent elections by keeping everyone equal, and thus happy,” said Mr. Fujimoto, 65, sitting in a modest office in the village hall. His only visible sign of authority was a buzzer on his desk that he pushed to summon an assistant. Mr. Fujimoto said he would resign immediately if a serious rival appeared in an election. “That would be a sign the village has lost confidence in me,” he said. Many islanders say Mr. Fujimoto is able to stay in office partly because of the reverence still felt here for his father, who lifted Hime from postwar poverty by turning it into a loyal source of votes for the Liberal Democratic Party, which rewarded the island with generous public works. “We have our own little personality cult,” said Shokai Dozono, a Buddhist monk who runs one of the island’s two temples. The island and its mayor also have outside critics. Keizo Nagai, the ombudsman for Oita prefecture, which includes Hime, calls the island the least transparent local government in the prefecture. He criticized it for refusing to make information like detailed budget records available to non-islanders, which he attributed to a closed local culture rather than to a cover-up of wrongdoing. “Hime Island acts like an independent kingdom,” Mr. Nagai said. Many islanders say they accept the status quo simply because life here is comfortable. They say rocking the boat would only ostracize them on an island where everyone knows one another. “Everyone is basically satisfied,” said Shusaku Akaishi, 29, who works at his family’s gas station. “This is a conservative place.” That conservatism is strong enough at times to annoy even Mr. Fujimoto. His biggest complaint is that traditional attitudes prevent him from extending family control of the mayor’s office for another generation, because he has only a daughter. “Hime Island can’t be run by a woman,” he sighed. “This place is too medieval for that.”
|
Japan;Economy;Local government
|
ny0032667
|
[
"us"
] |
2013/12/18
|
Massachusetts: Student Is Charged in Bomb Threat
|
Federal prosecutors have charged a Harvard student with making bomb threats that led to the evacuation of four campus buildings and the cancellation of some final exams on Monday. The United States attorney’s office on Tuesday charged the student, Eldo Kim, 20, of Cambridge, with emailing the 8:30 a.m. hoax messages with a subject line “bombs placed around campus” to the Harvard police, two university officials and The Harvard Crimson newspaper. Investigators from several agencies searched the buildings for hours before determining there were no explosives.
|
Bombs;K-12 Education;Harvard Crimson;Cambridge England;College;Harvard;Threat;Eldo Kim
|
ny0078232
|
[
"us"
] |
2015/05/14
|
Missouri Passes Anti-Union Bill, but It Isn’t Veto-Proof
|
JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. — The Republican-controlled Missouri General Assembly on Wednesday approved legislation that would enact a so-called right-to-work policy in the state, but it fell far short of the required number of votes to overcome a likely veto from Gov. Jay Nixon. The bill would bar employers from making representation fees or union dues a condition of employment. Twenty-five other states, including all of Missouri’s neighbors except Illinois and Kentucky, already have such laws. “Freedom to work is necessary if Missouri wishes to regain a competitive standard with the states that surround us,” said Eric Burlison, Republican of Springfield, who sponsored the bill. “It will encourage job growth and help unions become stronger.” The House gave final approval to the bill by a vote of 92 to 66, far short of the 109 votes required to override a veto. Senate Republicans passed the bill 21 to 13 on Tuesday, short of the 23 votes they would need to overturn a veto. Republicans dominate the Legislature with veto-proof majorities in both the House and Senate, and opposition to the bill did not fall perfectly along party lines. In the House, the bill was opposed by 23 Republicans, and in the Senate, four Republicans voted no, including Senate President Pro Tempore Tom Dempsey, Republican of St. Charles. Governor Nixon, a Democrat from Jefferson County, said Thursday that he would veto the bill. “Attacking workers and weakening the middle class will not create jobs,” the governor said in a statement issued by his office. “In fact, rolling back the rights of working people would weaken our economy by lowering wages and making it harder for middle-class families to move up the economic ladder. This bill also takes the extreme step of subjecting Missouri employers to criminal and unlimited civil liability, which would stifle growth and discourage investment in our state. At a time when our economy is picking up steam and businesses are creating good jobs, this so-called right-to-work bill would take Missouri backwards.” James Harris, a lobbyist for the Adam Smith Foundation who has advocated the bill’s passage, said, “It’s a long way until September, but Governor Nixon has been overridden more than any governor in Missouri’s history.”
|
Missouri;Labor Unions;Jay Nixon;Legislation;Jobs;State legislature
|
ny0242562
|
[
"world",
"asia"
] |
2011/03/19
|
Japanese Unable to Evacuate Struggle to Endure
|
YAMAGATA, Japan — Some are stuck in their homes, fearful of radiation, heeding government warnings to stay indoors, cut off without electricity or phone service. Others want to leave but have no gasoline. Still more, those whose homes were ruined, wait helplessly for evacuation at crowded shelters. All face dwindling supplies of heating fuel, food and water. A week after an earthquake and tsunami devastated their communities and set off the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl, the plight of the thousands still stranded in areas near the stricken reactors — many too old or infirm to move — has underscored what residents say is a striking lack of help from the national government to assist with the evacuation of danger zones or the ferrying of supplies to those it has urged to stay inside. “Those who can leave have already left,” Nanae Takeshima, 40, a resident of Minamisoma, a city of 70,000 about 16 miles from the nuclear plant that lies within the area covered by the advisory to stay indoors, said by phone from her home. “Those here are the ones who cannot escape.” Instead, the task has fallen to some local governments and even private companies and organizations that have made limited but heroic efforts to help those left behind, adding to the burden of coastal communities already overwhelmed by tens of thousands of people left homeless and the search for bodies, which the nuclear evacuations have now made impossible. Residents reached by telephone said the order by the government to evacuate a 12-mile radius around the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, as well as the request for those who live 12 to 18 miles away to stay indoors, has turned communities like Minamisoma into virtual ghost towns, populated mostly by the unwilling and the unlucky. One is Masahiro Sakashita, who had prepared for the worst from the very beginning, but knew he could not leave. The director of the Fukujuen elderly care center, just 15 miles from one reactor, he sent his younger employees home as Japan ’s battle to prevent nuclear catastrophe started, telling them to flee. He and 19 other senior staff members stayed behind to keep caring for the center’s 100 or so mostly bedridden residents, the oldest of whom is 102. He said they were cut off from the outside world, with electricity and delivery of food and other supplies disrupted. “I figured that at most we had enough food and water to last five, maybe six days,” said Mr. Sakashita, who spoke by phone from Minamisoma. “We were going to stay with them to the end.” The end came Friday, when a similar care center in distant Yokohama, near Tokyo, volunteered to take in Fukujuen’s residents after seeing their plight reported on television and sent six buses to rescue them. Minamisoma has been using buses to begin evacuating the tsunami survivors and other residents to areas farther away from the nuclear plant. Other cities have helped by sending buses, as have some local companies. One is the Shima Company, an auto-scrapping business in Minamisoma, which hired buses to take more than 170 of its employees and their families to the city of Yamagata, 55 miles away, the company’s vice president, Kazuki Shima, said on Twitter. With the help of other cities and the Fukushima prefectural government, Minamisoma has also moved all the tsunami survivors in 8 of its 29 shelters to other areas. At Haramachi No. 1 Elementary School, buses came Thursday to take about 300 survivors and other nearby residents to Gunma Prefecture, outside Tokyo. The principal, Atsuo Takano, who runs the school’s shelter, said that the school had begun to fill again with new refugees, those driven from their homes because they ran out of food and fuel. While he has sent his own family to an inland city for safety, he said he would keep working until the last person in the school’s shelter was safely evacuated. “Of course I’m worried, but I am responsible for this school,” he said. “They told us that nuclear power was 100 percent safe, but we see now that nothing can ever be 100 percent safe.” Many of those left behind are elderly people whose houses survived the earthquake, but who feel abandoned as other residents flee the nuclear crisis. They say city officials and the police are nowhere to be seen, while stores and offices are closed and streets are empty. Hatsuko Arakawa, 78, said that despite the fact that her city, Iwaki, was outside the area covered by the government order to stay indoors, delivery trucks refused to enter. As a result, she said, she felt marooned in her home, with no more propane for her heater and dwindling supplies of rice and water. She endures the winter cold by spending the entire day wrapped in a futon. “Unlike those in the refugee centers, I have no contact with the outside,” she said. “My supplies are reaching their limits.” Misao Saito, 59, said he stayed in Soma, a small port city 27 miles north of the nuclear plant, because of his parents, who are too old and infirm to flee. He said his 80-year-old father had a bad leg, while his mother, 85, suffered from mild dementia. They now live together in an elementary school that was turned into a shelter after the tsunami damaged their home. Mr. Saito, a fisherman, said he had no way to make a living because the waves destroyed Soma’s fishing harbor. “It’s scary, but when it comes to the nuclear accident, I have no choice but to die here,” he said. “I think this is the government’s fault. The prime minister should have had a better grip on what was happening at that nuclear plant.” Some of those who remained said they did so by choice. One, who asked that she be only partly identified as Misako W., seemed proudly defiant in her desire to remain in Minamisoma with her husband, a banker. She was also angry about her community’s fate. “Minamisoma is defunct,” she said. She asked that her full name not be used because she feared discrimination in the future because of the nuclear crisis, just as survivors of the 1945 atomic bombings were ostracized out of a misplaced fear that they could spread radiation sickness. “Many here have lost their homes, and now they have to fight the fear of the nuclear plant,” she said. “An earthquake, tsunami and now nuclear fears — there is no other place in the world as unfortunate as here.”
|
Japan;Japan Earthquake and Tsunami (2011);Refugees and Displaced Persons;Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (Japan);Radiation
|
ny0008889
|
[
"business"
] |
2013/05/22
|
MetLife Will Repatriate an Offshore Reinsurance Unit
|
MetLife, the nation’s largest life insurer, said Tuesday that it would make its business more transparent by moving some deals for hedging risk back to the United States from offshore, pleasing regulators but underwhelming the stock market. For a number of years, MetLife has been using a Bermuda subsidiary, Exeter Reassurance, to reinsure several billion dollars’ worth of variable annuity contracts, in which customers pay in advance to receive guaranteed payments in retirement. By buying the reinsurance, MetLife was able to remove the obligations to these policyholders from its balance sheet. Such transactions have become extremely popular in the life-insurance business in recent years, and regulators at the New York State Department of Financial Services have been investigating the deals since last July. The department’s superintendent, Benjamin M. Lawsky, recently called them “financial alchemy.” “Let’s call it shadow insurance,” Mr. Lawsky said in a speech in April, recalling the so-called shadow banking system that appeared in the run-up to the financial crisis. MetLife and other insurers have been trying to cope with the Federal Reserve’s long-running policy of keeping interest rates very low to help revive economic growth. Many life insurers are having trouble because they normally buy bonds to make good on annuities they sold in the past, and they cannot get the yields they need in the current low-rate environment. They can reduce the obligations on their balance sheets, however, by shifting them to reinsurers. Image MetLife plans to merge Exeter Reassurance, of Bermuda, with other state-regulated units. Credit Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times But buying reinsurance from an off-balance-sheet subsidiary “does not actually transfer the risk for those insurance policies off the parent company’s books,” Mr. Lawsky said in his speech. By law, reinsurance must involve a real transfer of risk; otherwise insurers are not supposed to use it to improve their balance sheets. Mr. Lawsky said questionable reinsurance deals throughout the industry were increasing the likelihood that policyholders would not receive their payments at some point. He also expressed concern that they were causing systemic risk within the broader economy, the way the booming growth of mortgage-backed securities had done in the years before 2008. MetLife’s chief executive, Steven A. Kandarian, said in an annual presentation to investors on Tuesday that repatriating MetLife’s policy obligations from Exeter “proactively addresses recent regulatory concerns” about such deals, adding that Mr. Lawsky’s inquiry had been an important factor. He also said the change would put MetLife in a better position to comply with new collateral requirements put in place by Congress after the financial crisis. Mr. Lawsky issued a statement on Tuesday praising MetLife’s decision, saying the company had “acted wisely in bringing this subsidiary back to the United States, where it will be subject to stronger rules and oversight.” MetLife said the transaction, which it expects to complete next year, was also part of an effort to lower the risk of its variable annuities business. It also said it was ratcheting back on sales of the annuities, aiming for $10 billion to $11 billion worth this year, compared with $28.4 billion in 2011. MetLife’s shares closed down 1 percent, or 48 cents, to $42.82. When MetLife’s transaction is complete, it will have returned Exeter to the United States and merged it with three state-regulated MetLife units: the MetLife Insurance Company of Connecticut; the MetLife Investors U.S.A. Insurance Company, now based in Delaware; and the MetLife Investors Insurance Company, based in Missouri. A spokesman said it was not yet clear where the merged company would be based.
|
Regulation and Deregulation;Life insurance;Relocation;MetLife;Exeter Reassurance
|
ny0257912
|
[
"technology"
] |
2011/01/28
|
Kinect Gives Microsoft’s Revenue a Lift
|
Microsoft rode strong sales of its new Kinect game device and its mainstay software products to deliver robust quarterly profits and sales . The world’s largest software company trails Apple and Google in fast-growing markets like smartphones and Internet search. But the financial results for its second quarter, which ended in December, showed that Microsoft remained a powerhouse in the business market and was benefiting from increased corporate spending as the economy improved. Microsoft’s revenue got an added lift from a popular new game product, Kinect, a $150 add-on for its Xbox consoles, which uses gesture recognition to allow people to play games with body motions instead of controllers. Eight million Kinect devices were sold in its first 60 days, during the holiday season, far more than Microsoft’s initial projection of five million. Both the company’s sales and profit easily surpassed Wall Street’s expectations. Net income was $6.6 billion, or 77 cents a share. That was well above analysts’ consensus estimate of 68 cents a share, as compiled by Thomson Reuters. A year earlier, Microsoft reported earnings of 74 cents a share, though that included $1.7 billion in deferred revenue recognized for sales of the Windows 7 operating system. In 2009, during several weeks before Windows 7 became available, Microsoft guaranteed to upgrade users who bought personal computers. Those operating system sales were not recognized until Windows 7 shipped in October 2009. The effect, said Peter Klein, chief financial officer, was that revenue in the year-earlier quarter was “overstated by $1.7 billion, if you will.” Without the one-time addition, earnings in the year-earlier quarter would have been 60 cents a share. The company reported revenue of $19.95 billion, compared with analysts’ average estimate of $19.2 billion. A year earlier, Microsoft had revenue of $19 billion, though that was also buoyed by the $1.7 billion in deferred revenue that was recognized. Including the deferred number, Microsoft’s revenue rose 5 percent, and earnings per share increased 4 percent from the year-earlier quarter. Excluding the deferred number, revenue grew 15 percent and earnings per share by 28 percent. “We had very good top-line and bottom-line growth,” Mr. Klein said in an interview. “I couldn’t be more pleased.” Microsoft also enjoyed strong growth from its sales of Office productivity programs and data-center server software to businesses. The division that includes Office word processing, spreadsheet and presentation applications, and Sharepoint software that workers use to collaborate, grew by 24 percent, to more than $6 billion. And revenue at the Microsoft unit that sells computer server software, used in corporate data centers, increased 10 percent, to nearly $4.4 billion. Microsoft’s results are mainly a barometer of business spending on software, despite its prominent efforts in consumer businesses with products like Xbox video consoles and Zune music players. Only 20 to 25 percent of the company’s business comes from sales to consumers, Forrester Research estimates. The rest are sales to business customers. “Microsoft is very much a business-oriented company,” said Andrew Bartels, an analyst for Forrester. “They want to be Apple, but they are more like I.B.M.” In the last three months of 2010, Microsoft estimated that personal computer sales increased by 2 to 4 percent, to 90 million machines. License sales of Windows, the dominant PC operating system, were about flat for the quarter. Since it went on sale, Windows 7 has sold more than 300 million licenses, the company said. Microsoft’s entertainment and devices division, which includes Kinect and Xbox, grew by 55 percent, to about $3.7 billion. Revenue at the company’s online services unit, which includes the Bing search service, increased 19 percent, to $691 million. In a conference call, Microsoft executives said Bing’s share of the search market was increasing, advertising sales were rising and progress was being made in its partnership with Yahoo, in which Microsoft handles search queries originated by Yahoo. But the online division continued to be a big money loser. That business lost $543 million in the quarter, more than the $463 million in the year-earlier quarter. Microsoft’s catch-up product in smartphones, Windows Phone 7, was introduced in late October, seeking to gain ground on the iPhone from Apple and Android software from Google. The company said that its smartphone software was on nine different devices, which are offered by 60 wireless carriers, and that developers were publishing applications that run on Windows Phone 7 at a rate of 100 a day. Sandeep Aggarwal, an analyst at Caris & Company, estimates that two million handsets running Windows Phone 7 have been shipped in its first two months. By contrast, Android-based phones, he said, are being sold at a pace of nine million a month. “Microsoft is at least in the game,” Mr. Aggarwal. “But so far, the numbers are not really impressive.”
|
Microsoft Corp;Company Reports
|
ny0110022
|
[
"business"
] |
2012/05/06
|
Troubled Mortgage Unit Threatens Ally Financial
|
WHEN General Motors was bailed out, the government sank $17 billion of taxpayers’ money into G.M.’s troubled finance arm, GMAC . Three years on, we’re still waiting for the payback. While the Treasury Department sold most of its holdings in G.M. last year, it unloaded only a small portion of its stake in GMAC, which is now known as Ally Financial. Taxpayers today own roughly a quarter of G.M., but they still own 74 percent of Ally. G.M. is making a lot of money (last week, it reported a first-quarter profit of $1.32 billion) but all is not going smoothly at Ally. While the company’s overall numbers are improving, its mortgage unit is in deep trouble. That unit, Residential Capital, missed a $20 million debt payment in mid-April. Given that it has roughly $300 million in debt payments coming due from now till June, speculation is rife that ResCap will file for bankruptcy. It’s no shock that an aggressive mortgage originator like ResCap is experiencing hard times. Like others in the industry, it has absorbed enormous losses from bad loans. ResCap also faces a flood of demands to buy back the mortgages it sold to investors and guarantors. These parties contend ResCap breached promises when it sold the loans. Clearly, ResCap is a burden Ally wants to shed. Gina Proia, a spokeswoman for Ally Financial, said that maximizing value for shareholders, including taxpayers, was the company’s top priority and that “addressing the risks in the mortgage business is crucial to successfully pursuing strategies that would best position the company.” A bankruptcy is always messy. But a bankruptcy inside a financial holding company that also owns a bank could be particularly ugly. What might be the unintended consequences? Taxpayers might wonder, for instance, whether a ResCap bankruptcy would hurt Ally’s other operations — and its ability to pay them back. Granted, the old GMAC has had some success rebuilding itself as Ally Financial. Overseen by Michael A. Carpenter, a former top executive at Citigroup, the company generated net income of $310 million in the first quarter of 2012, versus $146 million in the same period last year. Ally Bank had $47.2 billion in deposits at the end of the first quarter, with retail deposits up $1.6 billion, or nearly 6 percent. It renewed $15 billion in auto-loan credit facilities that quarter. So far, the company has paid $5.5 billion in stock dividends to the Treasury. Ally Financial has $11 billion in long-term debt coming due this year. As of March 31, it had $24.5 billion in liquidity. Such apparent strengths aside, worries over a ResCap bankruptcy prompted Fitch Ratings to warn last month of a possible downgrade in Ally’s senior debt rating, already a junk-bond-grade BB-minus. “These kinds of developments create uncertainties and it is very hard to predict how they play out,” said Christopher Wolfe, a Fitch analyst. ResCap had $653 million in cash and cash equivalents on its balance sheet at the end of the first quarter, more than enough to pay the debt maturing in coming weeks. Skipping the $20 million debt payment last month, however, sent a clear message that ResCap is in asset-protection mode. For the moment, depositors and creditors of Ally Financial seem relatively unfazed. That’s surprising, given the deep ties between Ally Financial and ResCap. As of March 31, for example, Ally had extended $1.4 billion in financing to ResCap. Ally concedes that it might not be paid back if ResCap went bankrupt. Ally also covered ResCap’s $110 million cash payment in a foreclosure settlement with state attorneys general earlier this year. And Ally’s most recent quarterly report estimated that losses related to ResCap’s litigation and loan repurchase obligations could reach $4 billion more than it has set aside. “ResCap’s ability to pay for any such losses is very limited,” the filing noted. Disappointed claimants would almost certainly try to move up the corporate ladder to Ally for payment. Ally could face other costs from a ResCap bankruptcy. For instance, Ally might have to pay more for its financing if investors become spooked or tire of protracted litigation. If yields on Ally’s almost $100 billion in debt, with an average maturity of 3.5 years, rose by one percentage point, that would cost the company $3 billion on a present value basis. This is not an aggressive estimate; after the ResCap bankruptcy talk took hold, spreads on Ally Financial credit default swaps increased by one percentage point. ANOTHER danger would be the acceleration of all the repurchase claims lodged against ResCap by investors and mortgage guarantors. The unpaid principal balance on these loans is estimated to be $34 billion currently, but that figure could grow in a bankruptcy filing as additional claimants come out of the woodwork. That’s what happened in the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, for example. Although repurchase claimants would be considered general unsecured creditors in a ResCap bankruptcy, the put-back demands would very likely be somewhat senior to those of other unsecured creditors because of their contractual nature. Moreover, the litigation surrounding these claims is sure to go on for years. Almost four years after Lehman filed for bankruptcy, the residential mortgage repurchase demands represent the largest group of disputed claims remaining in the matter, according to a January 2012 report on the Lehman estate. If ResCap continued operating, however, many of these repurchase claims could be defeated, in part because statutes of limitations covering the disputes are expiring. Other litigation would also ensue. For example, Ally purchased assets from ResCap in a series of complex transactions during 2007 and 2008 and creditors would probably scrutinize valuations in those deals, as well as whether Ally’s board conducted satisfactory due diligence on them. Is there an alternative to bankruptcy? Experts say that out-of-court restructurings often work well in these situations. Such a deal would have costs for Ally, but it could be less expensive than a ResCap bankruptcy. Timothy G. Massad, assistant secretary for financial stability at the Treasury, said the government was working closely with the Ally board. “Successfully addressing the legacy liabilities at ResCap would put taxpayers in a stronger position to continue recovering their investment in Ally,” he said. ResCap’s board, which is separate from Ally’s, will ultimately decide the matter. Those directors declined to comment, through the Ally spokeswoman. Given the ties between ResCap and its parent company, Ally will almost certainly have to write a check to escape this mess. The only question is how big that check will have to be.
|
Ally Financial Inc;Residential Capital LLC;GMAC LLC;Mortgages;Carpenter Michael A;Bankruptcies
|
ny0289223
|
[
"world",
"americas"
] |
2016/01/04
|
3 Held in Killing of New Mayor in Mexico
|
MEXICO CITY — Three people, including a minor, were being held by the authorities on Sunday in the killing of the newly inaugurated mayor in Temixco, a central Mexican city. Gov. Graco Ramírez of the state of Morelos, which contains Temixco, blamed organized crime for killing the mayor, Gisela Mota, 33, a former federal lawmaker who had been sworn in as mayor less than a day before she was shot in her home on Saturday morning. Mr. Ramírez ordered more security measures for all of the state’s mayors, though he gave no details on what that involved. Ms. Mota’s center-left Democratic Revolution Party released a statement describing her as “a strong and brave woman who, on taking office as mayor, declared that her fight against crime would be frontal and direct.” Bishop Ramón Castro Castro of the nearby city of Cuernavaca celebrated Mass at Ms. Mota’s home on Sunday and later spoke critically of a state where some areas are in control of organized crime. “One theory could be that it was a warning to the other mayors,” Bishop Castro said to reporters. “If you don’t cooperate with organized crime, look at what will happen to you. It’s to scare them.” After Ms. Mota’s killing, two suspects were killed in a clash with the police and three others were arrested, officials said. They were a 32-year-old woman, an 18-year-old man and the minor. The officials gave few other details, though the state’s attorney general, Javier Pérez Durón, said the suspects had been linked to other crimes. Temixco, with about 100,000 people, is a suburb of Cuernavaca, a city famed among tourists for its colonial center, gardens and jacaranda-decked streets. “The city of eternal spring” was long a favorite weekend getaway for people from nearby Mexico City. But drug and extortion gangs have plagued the area in recent years, driving away some tourists and residents. The expressway — as well as drug routes — between Mexico City and Acapulco cuts through Cuernavaca and Temixco. Neither the governor nor prosecutors indicated which criminal organization might be involved. Drugs, kidnappings and extortion in the area were once under the control of the Beltrán Leyva cartel, but that group’s collapse a few years ago unleashed fierce competition among its progeny and rivals in Morelos and the neighboring states of Guerrero and México. An organization representing mayors in the country, the Association of Local Authorities of Mexico, issued a statement saying nearly 100 mayors had been killed across Mexico over the past decade, “principally at the hands of organized crime.”
|
Murders and Homicides;Mexico;Gisela Mota;Temixco;Mayor;Organized crime;Democratic Revolution Party Mexico
|
ny0032556
|
[
"us"
] |
2013/12/20
|
Judge’s Party Switch Gives Democrats Something to Build On
|
When Lawrence E. Meyers won a seat on the statewide Court of Criminal Appeals in 1992, he was the first Republican elected to the state’s highest criminal court. This month he made history again. After switching parties, Mr. Meyers, who had been a judge in Fort Worth, became the first Democrat to hold statewide office in Texas in the 21st century. Now he is running for a spot on the all-Republican Texas Supreme Court. Though Mr. Meyers was not elected to his current post as a Democrat, his high-level defection has given the party a shot of momentum and some bragging rights ahead of the 2014 elections, said Gilberto Hinojosa, the chairman of the Texas Democratic Party. But Republican officials suggest that the switch was more about their party’s cramped races and not an indicator of any sea change. Democrats have not had one of their own in statewide elected office since the late 1990s, and nearly every person switching parties in the last two decades has gone in the opposite direction. “With this and the candidates that we are fielding in this election, I think people are saying, wow, this is a totally different Texas Democratic Party,” Mr. Hinojosa said. Mr. Meyers, who has flirted with party-switching in the past, did not respond to requests for comment. Mr. Hinojosa said Mr. Meyers had told party officials he was a big fan of State Senator Wendy Davis, the Democratic candidate for governor, and indicated that he had grown uncomfortable with the rightward shift of the Texas Republican Party. Mr. Hinojosa said the party had been in talks with Mr. Meyers about the switch for about three months. Image Judge Lawrence E. Meyers Credit Rodger Mallison “He just said, I can’t do this anymore,” Mr. Hinojosa said. “He’s been thinking about this for quite some time.” Mr. Meyers is the longest-serving member of the Court of Criminal Appeals. In Texas, appellate responsibilities are split: Criminal matters go to the appeals court, while the Supreme Court hears civil disputes. Mr. Meyers was elected to the appeals court in 1992, a time when Republicans began displacing Southern Democrats as the dominant force in Texas politics. In six years, the court went from all Democratic to all Republican. And the Republican Party has swept every statewide election since 1998, when George W. Bush was elected to a second term as governor. Now Texas stands out as the only reliably Republican state where non-whites make up a majority of the population, and Mr. Meyers is betting that the tide is turning back toward the party of Lyndon Baines Johnson. Democrats point to two San Antonio politicians who recently left the Republican Party as more evidence of a resurgence.Steve Munisteri, the chairman of the Texas Republican Party, finds the claim dubious. In fact, he says, the more Democrats talk about party switching, the better. Since 2008, Mr. Munisteri said, 248 Democrats, many of them county officials in rural areas, have defected to the Republican Party. “We don’t put out a release when we have party switchers because it happens so often. I had two this morning,” Mr. Munisteri said this week. “By our count, it’s 248-3.” Mr. Munisteri theorized that Mr. Meyers had merely found the Republican Party too crowded. As a Democrat, Mr. Meyers faces no primary opponent, and because he is not up for re-election until 2016, he can run again as a sitting judge in two years. His most likely opponent in November is Justice Jeff Brown, who was appointed to the Supreme Court in September by Gov. Rick Perry and is facing his first statewide election. Mr. Brown said he was focusing on his primary for now but would not take victory for granted if he was the nominee. “I’m going to act like Democrats and Republicans are evenly matched in Texas,” he said.
|
Lawrence E Meyers;Texas;State supreme court;Democrats;Republicans
|
ny0280694
|
[
"business"
] |
2016/10/31
|
Treasury Auctions Set for the Week of Oct. 31
|
The Treasury’s schedule of financing this week includes Monday’s regular weekly auction of new three- and six-month bills and an auction of four-week bills on Tuesday. At the close of the New York cash market on Friday, the rate on the outstanding three-month bill was 0.23 percent. The rate on the six-month issue was 0.49 percent, and the rate on the four-week issue was 0.17 percent. The following tax-exempt fixed-income issues are scheduled for pricing this week: MONDAY Florida Board of Education, $140.4 million of general obligation unlimited tax refinancing bonds. Competitive. Florida Department of Transportation Turnpike Enterprise, $137.3 million of revenue bonds. Competitive. TUESDAY Bellevue, Wash., School District No. 405, $239.2 million of general obligation unlimited tax bonds. Competitive. North Kansas City School District No. 74, Mo., $114 million of general obligation unlimited tax bonds. Competitive. Ohio, $150 million of general obligation unlimited tax bonds. Competitive. WEDNESDAY Clackamas County, Ore., $53.2 million of general obligation unlimited tax bonds. Competitive. Loudoun County, Va., Economic Development Authority, $60.9 million of revenue bonds. Competitive. Virginia Residential Authority, $65 million of revenue bonds. Competitive. THURSDAY Illinois, $480 million of general obligation unlimited tax bonds. Competitive. Sullivan County, N.Y., $85 million of general obligation limited tax bonds. Competitive. ONE DAY DURING THE WEEK Beverly Hills, Calif., Unified School District, $57 million of general obligation refinancing bonds. Citigroup Global Markets. California Municipal Finance Authority, $78.7 million of California Baptist University revenue bonds. D.A. Davidson & Company. California Statewide Communities Development Authority, $115.4 million of revenue bonds. D. A. Davidson & Company. California Statewide Community Development Authority, $91 million of Redlands Community Hospital revenue bonds. Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Camden County, N.J., Improvement Authority, $60 million of county guaranteed loan revenue bonds. Wells Fargo Securities. Canaveral Port Authority, Fla., $59.8 million of port improvement and revenue refinancing bonds. PNC Capital Markets. Chicago, $1.1 billion of O’Hare International Airport general airport senior lien revenue refinancing bonds. Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Connecticut Housing Finance Authority, $170.3 million of housing mortgage finance program bonds. RBC Capital Markets. Hillsborough County, Fla., $115.7 million of solid waste and resource recovery revenue refinancing bonds. J. P. Morgan Securities. Illinois Finance Authority, $111 million of Swedish Covenant Hospital tax exempt bonds. Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Indiana Finance Authority, $95.2 million of revenue bonds. B. C. Ziegler & Company. Iowa Finance Authority/Palm Beach County Health Facilities Authority, $93.1 million of revenue bonds. B. C. Ziegler & Company. Johns Hopkins Health System, $500 million of taxable revenue bonds. Jefferies. Knox County, Tenn., Health, Educational and Housing Facility Board, $188 million of Covenant Health hospital revenue bonds. Citigroup Global Markets. Louisiana Public Facilities Authority, $92.2 million of Tulane University taxable revenue and taxable refinancing bonds. Raymond James. Louisiana State University, $139.6 million of auxiliary revenue refinancing bonds. Raymond James. Mesquite Independent School District, Tex., $86.2 million of unlimited tax school building bonds. RBC Capital Markets. Montana Facility Finance Authority, $140.3 million of Benefis Health System Obligated Group hospital revenue bonds. J. P. Morgan Securities. New Hope, Tex., Cultural Education Facilities Finance Corporation, $150 million of debt securities. Piper Jaffray. New York State Housing Finance Agency, $53.5 million of affordable housing revenue bonds. Loop Capital Markets. Oklahoma City Water Utilities Trust, $85 million of debt securities. BOK Financial Securities. Orange County, Fla., Health Facilities Authority, $157.3 million of revenue bonds. Herbert J. Sims & Company. Phoenix Civic Improvement Corporation, Ariz., $230.6 million of junior lien wastewater system revenue refinancing bonds. Morgan Stanley. Pocono Mountain School District, Pa., $67 million of general obligation bonds. Boenning & Scattergood. Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, $733 million of debt securities. Citigroup Global Markets. San Bernardino, Calif., Municipal Water Department, $50 million of water revenue bonds. Raymond James. Seminole County, Fla., School Board, $51 million of certificates of participation. Bank of America Merrill Lynch. South Carolina Jobs-Economic Development Authority, $101 million of Anmed Health Project hospital revenue refinancing bonds. Bank of America Merrill Lynch. South Dakota Housing Development Authority, $116 million of homeownership mortgage bonds. Citigroup Global Markets. Spokane County, Wash., $82 million of limited tax general obligation refinancing bonds. Barclays Capital. Sumter Landing Community Development District, Fla., $352 million of taxable senior recreational revenue bonds and taxable subordinate recreational revenue bonds. Citigroup Global Markets. University of Oklahoma Board of Regents, $63.9 million of general revenue and refinancing tax exempt bonds. Wells Fargo Securities. Virginia Resource Authority, $129.9 million of pooled financing program bonds. Raymond James. Westlands Water District, Calif., $52 million of revenue refinancing bonds. Citigroup Global Markets.
|
Stocks,Bonds;Auction;Municipal bond
|
ny0135463
|
[
"sports",
"othersports"
] |
2008/04/07
|
Edwards Wins Third Race of Year
|
FORT WORTH (AP) — Carl Edwards ran away with the Samsung 500 on Sunday at Texas Motor Speedway, holding off Jimmie Johnson in a two-lap overtime sprint to the finish to earn his Nascar Sprint Cup series-best third victory of the season. Edwards had the field covered for most of the race, at one point building a lead of more than seven seconds over Johnson. But two late cautions — one for debris with 39 laps to go and another for oil on the track with 5 to go — gave Johnson a shot. But Edwards easily pulled away on each restart. Edwards won for the first time since his team was accused of cheating after his win last month in Las Vegas because the cover was missing from his oil tank. Johnson was second as Hendrick Motorsports remained winless in seven races this season. “I didn’t have anything at the end for Carl,” Johnson said. Kyle Busch was strong early but faded to third. Ryan Newman was fourth and Denny Hamlin overcame last-lap contact with Clint Bowyer to finish fifth. Bowyer faded to 10th. Jeff Burton retained his points lead by finishing sixth.
|
NASCAR;Car Racing;Jimmie Johnson;Kyle Busch;Carl Edwards
|
ny0110067
|
[
"sports",
"basketball"
] |
2012/05/06
|
Shaquille O’Neal Earns His Doctorate in Education
|
The former N.B.A. star Shaquille O’Neal received his doctoral degree in education from Barry University alongside 1,100 other students during commencement ceremonies in Miami Shores, Fla. O’Neal high-fived other graduates as he made his way back to his seat along with his manager, Cynthia Atterberry, who received a doctorate in education. O’Neal compiled a cumulative grade point average of 3.813 while completing 54 credit hours at Barry, mostly through online courses and video conferencing over the last four years. O’Neal’s doctoral project explored how business leaders use humor in the workplace.
|
O'Neal Shaquille;Basketball;Graduate Schools and Students;Education
|
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