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ny0066053
|
[
"nyregion"
] |
2014/06/06
|
A de Blasio Workout: New Routine, No Sweat
|
The very tall man, watched closely by a pair of police officers in business attire, stripped off his sweatshirt and windmilled his arms. He rolled his head in circles, stretching his neck. Then the man, the mayor of New York City, put his hands on his hips and began to swivel his torso side to side like a tree swaying in the wind. None of the other Brooklynites working out at the Prospect Park Y.M.C.A. on a recent morning stopped to gawk at their neighbor, Bill de Blasio, engaged in a series of decidedly unofficial-looking calisthenics. “Before he was mayor, I kind of would kid him a little bit,” Gil Hernandez, a lean 79-year-old, said with a chuckle. “I show him some respect now.” Mockery aside , Mr. de Blasio will soon be wiping down the gym’s equipment for the last time, once his family’s move from Park Slope, Brooklyn, to Gracie Mansion is complete, though he promises he will be seeking a new place to work out alongside ordinary New Yorkers. “I have a very deep affection for this place,” he said in an interview down the street after a workout. “But I’m sure, as they say when you move from school to school as a child — I’m sure I’ll meet new friends.” New friends will learn a secret that old friends like Mr. Hernandez have long known: The most powerful elected official in New York City wouldn’t wow anyone with his feats of strength. He bikes at a middling speed, does not overdo it on the weight machines and barely seems to break a sweat, judging from a couple of recent routines. But he says showing up at the gym is an antidote for the exhaustion that comes with his job. “Chirlane and I have increasingly come to the realization that the more tired you feel, the more you have to go to the gym,” Mr. de Blasio said of his wife, Chirlane McCray, also a Y member. Over an espresso macchiato and a yogurt-and-granola parfait, Mr. de Blasio said the Y was one of the things that had first attracted his wife to Park Slope. She grew up visiting the Y in Springfield, Mass. Judging from her vigor on the elliptical machine, Ms. McCray may also be the fitter of the two. Stanley Mills, a personal trainer who has worked with both of them for years — and takes credit for helping to correct the mayor’s chronic slouching — took a politician’s tack: “Chirlane has a little more endurance,” he said. “Bill has a little more strength.” On a couple of recent mornings, Mr. de Blasio allowed a reporter to tag along to observe his regimen. He walked through the doors between 6:40 and 6:50 a.m., stopping to joke with Margaret Dukes, the young woman working at the front desk. “Margaret rules with an iron fist,” he said, winking. “The other day she told me she didn’t see enough sweat to indicate that I worked out enough.” Ms. Dukes was on to something. Mr. de Blasio, 53, has had surgery on both knees, his left in 2005, his right in 2011, putting high-impact sports off limits, he said, while making it extra important to keep limber and maintain good circulation. Image PREPARE FOR BATTLE Stabilize your body in a plank position and alternate lifting dumbbells. This will work your core and help you pack a good punch. 1 / 5 So upstairs, amid the perspiration and labored breathing of people furiously sprinting, climbing stairs or spinning, Mr. de Blasio plunged into his own workout by lying down on his back. The mayor is a deliberate warmer-upper. Lying partly on a mat (the mats do not fully accommodate his nearly 6-foot, 6-inch frame ), he reached out as far as he could stretch, hugged his knees to his chest, sat up into the butterfly position, shook out his wrists, rolled his ankles, and then dropped to the floor, facing a wall, in a long cat stretch: arms and chest flat on the floor, rump high and pointed toward the rest of the room. Rising, he rocked from tiptoes to heels, a hand on the wall to keep his balance; stretched his calves and quadriceps; windmilled his arms, and then started rolling his head in circles and from side to side. A long-necked shorebird came to mind. Mr. de Blasio had still more stretches to do — his shoulders, and that tree-swaying thing — but he did eventually get to what others might consider part of an actual workout: cycling on a stationary bike. Switching the channel to MSNBC to watch “Morning Joe,” he started pedaling at a pace that looked not much faster than a walk. The woman next to him looked as though she were in the last leg of the Tour de France. The mayor looked as though he had just polished off an early-evening glass of Bordeaux and a Gauloise . (To be fair, he had the resistance set at a respectable 13 out of 25.) Around him, regulars engaged in early-morning socializing. The Prospect Park Y.M.C.A. has a small-town atmosphere: People stop to chat next to their elliptical machines, exchanging family news or networking. Longtime residents mix amiably with newer arrivals in the weight room and in Zumba classes. But even the most talkative gym rats tend to give the mayor a wide berth these days. “We deliberately — I wouldn’t say avoid him — but don’t make a big deal out of it,” Mr. Hernandez said. “When I see him, we make eye contact, that’s about it, unless he asks a question.” Gym regulars may sniff at the mayor’s low-intensity workouts, but they do appear to appreciate his continued loyalty. “Some people say, ‘Why doesn’t he get his own stationary bike? He can afford it,’ ” said John Metres, 61. “I think it’s perspective,” he added. “He wants to seem like he’s still part of the neighborhood. He shovels his own snow . I think it’s nice.” Mr. Metres also praised Mr. de Blasio for being a good citizen at the gym, religiously toweling off the machines after using them. For his part, the mayor said he appreciated being surrounded by friendly faces. “The fact that there are other people there is part of what energizes you,” he said. Mr. de Blasio spent 25 minutes on the bike, then went into the room full of Cybex equipment for some lat pull-downs and ab crunches. He was done in 10 minutes. Over to Ms. Dukes. “I’m so exhausted — I worked out so hard,” the mayor said, whining for effect as he left the building. Ms. Dukes looked him over coolly. “You look really dry, Bill,” she said.
|
Bill de Blasio;Exercise,Fitness;Chirlane McCray;Park Slope Brooklyn;NYC;Prospect Park YMCA
|
ny0282403
|
[
"business",
"dealbook"
] |
2016/07/16
|
Herbalife Settlement With F.T.C. Ends Billionaires’ Battle
|
In the Wall Street dogfight between two billionaire investors, William A. Ackman won a moral victory but Carl C. Icahn won the war over the future of Herbalife, the nutritional supplements company. On Friday, federal regulators imposed stiff sanctions on Herbalife for deceiving buyers and sellers of its products but stopped short of shutting down the company. Mr. Ackman had wagered big on Herbalife’s demise, while Mr. Icahn had been betting on its ultimate survival. In a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission, Herbalife will pay $200 million in consumer relief, hire an outside monitor and make substantial changes to its business practices in the United States that could affect its bottom line, but the company will continue to operate. For nearly four years, Mr. Ackman argued loudly and often that Herbalife was a pyramid scheme that took advantage of customers — at one point staking $1 billion on a decline in Herbalife’s shares in a characteristically brash move to prove his point. He gave numerous public presentations using hundreds of slides and videos to make his case that Herbalife was predatory. He even invoked members of Congress to pressure regulators to take action against the company. In response, Mr. Icahn invested in Herbalife, placing an even bigger bet that it would weather the regulatory scrutiny. Other big Wall Street investors including Daniel S. Loeb and George Soros also piled on against Mr. Ackman. But Mr. Icahn seemed to particularly relish going toe-to-toe with Mr. Ackman, famously calling the hedge fund manager a “crybaby in the schoolyard” when the two men squared off with each other during a live CNBC broadcast in January 2013. To win his bet, Mr. Ackman needed regulators at the F.T.C. to either shut down Herbalife or take some action that would cause shares of Herbalife to crash. Mr. Ackman, founder of the $12 billion Pershing Square Capital Management hedge fund, had said on a number of occasions he expected shares of Herbalife to go to zero. He even appeared in a documentary earlier this year about the tussle, called “Betting on Zero.” Instead, shares of Herbalife shot up more than 10 percent on Friday on the news of the settlement and most recently were trading at $65 a share. “This settlement will require Herbalife to fundamentally restructure its business so that participants are rewarded for what they sell, not how many people they recruit,” Edith Ramirez, the F.T.C. chairwoman, said in a news release announcing the settlement and the filing of a complaint in federal court seeking a permanent injunction and other relief against the company. In a conference call with reporters, Ms. Ramirez said Herbalife had been “deceiving hundreds of thousands of hopeful people” with the belief they could get rich. But she would not say whether or not the company was a pyramid scheme as Mr. Ackman has claimed. The commission’s “focus wasn’t on a particular label,” Ms. Ramirez added. The complaint filed on Friday by the F.T.C. against Herbalife in federal court in Los Angeles does call into question some of the company’s longstanding distribution practices and ways it generates revenue by relying on customers to sell products to friends and relatives. The complaint says, “the overwhelming majority of Herbalife distributors who pursue the business opportunity make little or no money and a substantial percentage lose money.” The agreement with the F.T.C. will require Herbalife to overhaul its system for compensating its customers and recording sales of its supplement drinks and other food products. Over time, the structural changes mandated by the F.T.C. in the settlement and civil complaint could have a long-term impact on Herbalife’s profitability. Image William A. Ackman, whose hedge fund bet about $1 billion that Herbalife would be exposed as an illegal pyramid scheme and forced to shut down. Credit Drew Angerer for The New York Times The settlement with the F.T.C. “does not change our direct-selling business model and will set new standards for the industry,” a spokesman for Herbalife said in a statement. “We agreed to the terms and to pay $200 million because we simply wanted to move forward with our mission.” The company also took a swipe at Mr. Ackman in its statement, saying it had been “under attack by an intransigent short-seller hellbent on a misinformation campaign designed to destroy our company.” Mr. Ackman was noticeably low-key after the announcement of the settlement. His firm released a statement in which it insisted that Herbalife’s business model would fail once the company instituted the structural changes required by the settlement. “We expect that once Herbalife’s business restructuring is fully implemented, these fundamental structural changes will cause the pyramid to collapse,” the statement said. Mr. Ackman’s contention that Herbalife is an unlawful pyramid scheme has focused on the company’s sales practices. Herbalife relies on independent resellers who are rewarded for recruiting new members, and Mr. Ackman argued that these recruitment efforts were more lucrative than the sale of its products. In the near term, the settlement will be bad news for investors in Mr. Ackman’s hedge fund who have lost money investing in his fund over the last year and a half. While Mr. Ackman has restructured the bet against Herbalife — known as a short — reducing it by more than 60 percent, he still has exposure. And he has spent more than $50 million on research and legal fees for his campaign against the company Image Carl C. Icahn, the billionaire trader, took an big bullish bet on Herbalife in opposition to Mr. Ackman. Credit Brendan Mcdermid/Reuters So far this year, Mr. Ackman’s Herbalife bet has lost him 11 percent, according to his most recent investor update. His Pershing Square Holdings fund is down 19.1 percent. In a separate note to investors on Friday, Pershing Square said Herbalife was trying “to spin the settlement remarkably as somehow an endorsement of their business model” and that over the long haul the outcome would be “materially positive for our short position.” Herbalife said on Friday that it would let Mr. Icahn increase his ownership stake to as much as 35 percent from the 18 percent of the company’s outstanding shares he currently holds. The move could set the stage for Mr. Icahn and others to take Herbalife private, an action that would make it difficult to determine the economic impact of the changes in business practices on Herbalife’s bottom line. In a statement, Mr. Icahn said he would ”consider a range of strategic opportunities, including potential roll-ups involving competitors, as well as other strategic transactions.” Mr. Icahn also wasted no time in gloating over his victory. “Unlike many of those that ‘shorted’ Herbalife, we did not rely on one or two research papers prepared by nonexperts,” he said in his statement Friday morning. “While Bill Ackman and I are on friendly terms, we have agreed to disagree (vehemently) on this subject,” Mr. Icahn said, adding that the F.T.C.’s settlement “vindicates our research and conviction.” It was almost two years ago to the day that Mr. Icahn and Mr. Ackman hugged and made up publicly on stage at an investor conference in Manhattan. “It’s not about winning,” Mr. Ackman said at that conference on July 16, 2014. But, he added, “I would love to get Carl out of this stock.” After Friday’s settlement that possibility looks less likely than ever.
|
FTC;Herbalife;William A Ackman;Fines;Carl Icahn;Diet and Herbal Supplements
|
ny0028246
|
[
"technology"
] |
2013/01/01
|
Antivirus Makers Work on Software to Catch Malware More Effectively
|
SAN FRANCISCO — The antivirus industry has a dirty little secret: its products are often not very good at stopping viruses. Consumers and businesses spend billions of dollars every year on antivirus software. But these programs rarely, if ever, block freshly minted computer viruses, experts say, because the virus creators move too quickly. That is prompting start-ups and other companies to get creative about new approaches to computer security. “The bad guys are always trying to be a step ahead,” said Matthew D. Howard, a venture capitalist at Norwest Venture Partners who previously set up the security strategy at Cisco Systems. “And it doesn’t take a lot to be a step ahead.” Computer viruses used to be the domain of digital mischief makers. But in the mid-2000s, when criminals discovered that malicious software could be profitable, the number of new viruses began to grow exponentially. In 2000, there were fewer than a million new strains of malware, most of them the work of amateurs. By 2010, there were 49 million new strains, according to AV-Test, a German research institute that tests antivirus products. The antivirus industry has grown as well, but experts say it is falling behind. By the time its products are able to block new viruses, it is often too late. The bad guys have already had their fun, siphoning out a company’s trade secrets, erasing data or emptying a consumer’s bank account. A new study by Imperva, a data security firm in Redwood City, Calif., and students from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology is the latest confirmation of this. Amichai Shulman, Imperva’s chief technology officer, and a group of researchers collected and analyzed 82 new computer viruses and put them up against more than 40 antivirus products, made by top companies like Microsoft, Symantec, McAfee and Kaspersky Lab. They found that the initial detection rate was less than 5 percent. On average, it took almost a month for antivirus products to update their detection mechanisms and spot the new viruses. And two of the products with the best detection rates — Avast and Emsisoft — are available free; users are encouraged to pay for additional features. This despite the fact that consumers and businesses spent a combined $7.4 billion on antivirus software last year — nearly half of the $17.7 billion spent on security software in 2011, according to Gartner. “Existing methodologies we’ve been protecting ourselves with have lost their efficacy,” said Ted Schlein, a security-focused investment partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. “This study is just another indicator of that. But the whole concept of detecting what is bad is a broken concept.” Part of the problem is that antivirus products are inherently reactive. Just as medical researchers have to study a virus before they can create a vaccine, antivirus makers must capture a computer virus, take it apart and identify its “signature” — unique signs in its code — before they can write a program that removes it. That process can take as little as a few hours or as long as several years. In May, researchers at Kaspersky Lab discovered Flame, a complex piece of malware that had been stealing data from computers for an estimated five years. Mikko H. Hypponen, chief researcher at F-Secure, called Flame “a spectacular failure” for the antivirus industry. “We really should have been able to do better,” he wrote in an essay for Wired.com after Flame’s discovery. “But we didn’t. We were out of our league in our own game.” Symantec and McAfee, which built their businesses on antivirus products, have begun to acknowledge their limitations and to try new approaches. The word “antivirus” does not appear once on their home pages. Symantec rebranded its popular antivirus packages: its consumer product is now called Norton Internet Security, and its corporate offering is now Symantec Endpoint Protection. “Nobody is saying antivirus is enough,” said Kevin Haley, Symantec’s director of security response. Mr. Haley said Symantec’s antivirus products included a handful of new technologies, like behavior-based blocking, which looks at some 30 characteristics of a file, including when it was created and where else it has been installed, before allowing it to run. “In over two-thirds of cases, malware is detected by one of these other technologies,” he said. Imperva, which sponsored the antivirus study, has a horse in this race. Its Web application and data security software are part of a wave of products that look at security in a new way. Instead of simply blocking what is bad, as antivirus programs and perimeter firewalls are designed to do, Imperva monitors access to servers, databases and files for suspicious activity. Image Security experts at the Symantec Security Operation Center in Alexandria, Va. The word “antivirus” is less used on its products. Credit Symantec The day companies unplug their antivirus software is still far off, but entrepreneurs and investors are betting that the old tools will become relics. “The game has changed from the attacker’s standpoint,” said Phil Hochmuth, a Web security analyst at the research firm International Data Corporation. “The traditional signature-based method of detecting malware is not keeping up.” Investors are backing a new crop of start-ups that turn the whole notion of security on its head. If it is no longer possible to block everything that is bad, the thinking goes, then the security companies of the future will be the ones whose software can spot unusual behavior and clean up systems once they have been breached. The hottest security start-ups today are companies like Bit9, Bromium, FireEye and Seculert that monitor Internet traffic, and companies like Mandiant and CrowdStrike that have expertise in cleaning up after an attack. Bit9, which received more than $70 million in financing from top venture firms like Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital, uses an approach known as whitelisting, allowing only traffic that the system knows is innocuous. McAfee acquired Solidcore , a whitelisting start-up, in 2009, and Symantec’s products now include its Insight technology, which is similar in that it does not let any unknown files run on a machine. McAfee’s former chief executive, David G. DeWalt, was rumored to be a contender for the top job at Intel, which acquired McAfee in 2010. Instead, he joined FireEye, a start-up with a system that isolates a company’s applications in virtual containers, then looks for suspicious activity in a sort of digital petri dish before deciding whether to let traffic through. The company has received more than $35 million in financing from Norwest, Sequoia Capital and In-Q-Tel, the venture arm of the Central Intelligence Agency, among others. Seculert, an Israeli start-up, approaches the problem somewhat differently. It looks at where threats are coming from — the command and control centers used to coordinate attacks — to give governments and businesses an early warning system. As the number of prominent online attacks rises, analysts and venture capitalists are betting that corporate spending patterns will change. “Technologies that once were only used by very sensitive industries like finance are moving into the mainstream,” Mr. Hochmuth said. “Very soon, if you are not running these technologies and you’re a security professional, your colleagues and counterparts will start to look at you funny.” Companies have started working from the assumption that they will be hacked, Mr. Hochmuth said, and that when they are, they will need top-notch cleanup crews. Mandiant, which specializes in data forensics and responding to breaches, has received $70 million from Kleiner Perkins and One Equity Partners, JPMorgan Chase’s private investment arm. Two McAfee executives, George Kurtz and Dmitri Alperovitch, left to start CrowdStrike, a start-up that offers a similar forensics service. Less than a year later, they have already raised $26 million from Warburg Pincus. If and when antivirus makers are able to fortify desktop computers, chances are the criminals will have already moved on to smartphones. In October, the F.B.I. warned that a number of malicious apps were compromising Android devices. And in July, Kaspersky Lab discovered the first malicious app in Apple’s app store. The Defense Department has called for companies and universities to find ways to protect mobile devices from malware. McAfee, Symantec and others are working on solutions, and Lookout, a start-up whose products scan apps for malware and viruses, recently raised funding that valued it at $1 billion. “The bad guys are getting worse,” Mr. Howard of Norwest said. “Antivirus helps filter down the problem, but the next big security company will be the one that offers a comprehensive solution.”
|
Computer security;Microsoft;Symantec;Kaspersky Lab;McAfee
|
ny0033228
|
[
"science"
] |
2013/12/17
|
Men Surpass Women in Publishing of Research
|
Despite years of progress for women in science, men continue to dominate scientific publishing in nearly every country, according to new research in the journal Nature. Not only do men publish far more research than their female colleagues, but papers with men as the dominant author are more likely to be cited by other researchers. Analyzing the bylines on more than five million research papers published from 2008 to 2012, the researchers determined that more than 70 percent of the authors were men. Nearly the same percentage holds for lead authorship. Such a gender gap is not consistent with the ratio of male to female science students in most countries, suggesting a “leaky pipeline” is at least part of the problem, said the new paper’s author, Cassidy R. Sugimoto, an information scientist at Indiana University. In almost every country in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, she said, “women are out-matriculating men” in college, “and it’s nearly 50-50 for graduate programs.” “Where we’re losing them is at the full professor rank,” she continued. “Somehow we’re losing women.” She emphasized that this did not mean women were naturally unsuited for scientific work, a line of thinking famously expressed by the economist Lawrence H. Summers in 2005, when he was president of Harvard. “Such a simplistic interpretation dismisses the vast implications embedded in these data,” Dr. Sugimoto wrote. DOUGLAS QUENQUA
|
Science and Technology;Gender;Academic and Scientific Journals;Medicine and Health;Women and Girls;Nature Journal
|
ny0124356
|
[
"nyregion"
] |
2012/08/04
|
Spike Lee to Stick With His Knicks
|
So the question hangs there, big as a basketball. Will this man in his “Republic of Brooklyn” shirt, this filmmaker who made the borough of his childhood a living, breathing character in six movies over 26 years, now forsake his beloved New York Knicks and root for the Brooklyn Nets? Spike Lee shoots a sideways glance suggesting the reporter is guilty of early morning drug use. “I wish I had a dollar for every time people ask me that — I could finance another film,” he says. “No, no and no. Can’t do that. Can’t. “I am orange and blue, baby,” he says in reference to the colors of the Knicks. “Orange and blue.” Suburban nomads, the Nets will open in Downtown Brooklyn in the fall after a 46-year Off Broadway run on Long Island and in New Jersey. Fans, united for generations behind the New York Knicks however dispiriting the ownership (James Dolan, please report to the courtesy desk), the team or the lack of victories, have an alternative. Dislike the peevish fashion in which Mr. Dolan discarded point guard Jeremy Lin? Embarrassed that Knicks management saw fit to drop confetti to celebrate that the team won a game — a single, solitary, first-round game — against the Miami Heat? You can switch. Or not. Sports loyalties are splendidly irrational, and rarely surrendered. And a glowering Knicks versus Nets rivalry comes laden with subtext: There is a shift in the perceived hipness quotient from Manhattan to Brooklyn, not to mention complications of class, race, gentrification and borough identity. If you look hard enough, there’s probably a foodie subtext. We asked Mr. Lee, 55, to ruminate on all this. He came of age within a few hundred yards of the Nets’ new arena; he helped establish a black artistic renaissance in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, in the 1980s; and he remains the personification of the utterly mad Knicks fan. Mr. Lee talked while sitting atop the outdoor stairs that rise at the intersection of Broadway and Seventh Avenue, looking south at the caffeinated nuttiness of Times Square. Surrounded by tourists, in his Yankees cap and lime-green neon sneakers, he is a celebrity hiding in plain sight. He waves his arms at the scene. (Caution: The difficulty for a writer bound by The New York Times’s style is that Spike Lee is gorgeously fluent in New Yorkese, including our birthright use of a certain four-letter word as verb, noun, adjective and adverb.) “The diversity of this place is great,” he says. “But if every” New Yorker “is a millionaire, then New York City is going to suck!” Mr. Lee lived in Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill as a child. Then his mother, the family real estate visionary, bought a brownstone in Fort Greene for the princely sum of $40,000. “Real estate people, they didn’t want to say Fort Greene back then. They’d call it ‘Brooklyn Heights vicinity.’ ” He cackles. Gentrification and its discontents are never-ending New York obsessions; why shy away? “I want everyone to live together in peace and harmony,” he says. “But let’s be honest, sometimes white folks move into Harlem, move into Bed-Stuy, and Fort Greene, and ‘Bogart’ like they’ve been there forever. “That’s that Christopher Columbus” stuff, he says. “You can’t act like you been there forever.” He chuckles again. “Although I will concede the garbage pickup in Fort Greene is a lot better since they moved in.” Mr. Lee is about to release “Red Hook Summer,” yet another of his Brooklyn films that explore religion, race, gentrification and sex in the, God help it, ever more hip neighborhood of Red Hook. With a commanding performance by Clarke Peters as a Baptist preacher, it is the sort of ambitious, dangerous and self-financed film that fewer filmmakers attempt anymore. Most of the film’s action takes place in the public houses, ringed on all sides by gentry. “Tell me where people move when they get pushed out? After you get to Coney Island, it’s the Atlantic Ocean. What they going to do, put public houses on stilts out there?” “Yo!” Enough ruminating. Mr. Lee is yelling at four young people sitting on the stairs. “Hey, y’know, you wearing that Chicago Cubs shirt — how can you wear that [unprintable word].” The youths turn around, startled, then laughing. “All I know,” Mr. Lee continues, smiling broadly, “is that it’s 19-[unprintable word]-08 since the Cubs won the World Series!” They offer him a Cubs shirt. He recoils in mock horror. “Can’t take a Cubs shirt, no way.” Laughing, he returns to the interview and confides: “I mean, like I should be talking? I’m kidding this guy about his Cubs shirt and it’s been 40 years for the Knicks.” Mr. Lee’s sports fandom has a Zelig-like quality. Long before he made his reputation as a director, he was a connoisseur of iconic moments. Willis Reed limps on to Madison Square Garden’s floor for Game 7 in 1970? Thirteen-year-old Spike was there. Mookie Wilson squibs a grounder through Bill Buckner’s legs in Game 6 of the 1986 Mets/Red Sox World Series? He was there, too. “It was like a religious experience,” he says. “We were hallucinating.” The Knicks exert a magnetic pull. As a teenager, he used his student card to buy $4.50 seats in what he calls “Blue Heaven,” a k a the Garden’s cheap seats. He rattles off the names of those Knicks, incantatory: Reed, Bradley, Dave DeBusschere, Walt “Clyde” Frazier, Dick Barnett, Cazzie Russell, Nate Bowman. All right. Fast forward: What happened to Jeremy Lin? Mr. Lee sighs, deeply, as if daydreaming of an old flame. He was there in the front row when the player from Harvard ran rings around Dirk Nowitzki. He saw Mr. Lin “drop 38 points on Kobe Bryant’s head. Insane!” So what happened? Spike shrugs. “Presto! Change-o! Abracadabra, hocus-pocus, he’s gone!” No act of Knicks management/mismanagement has pushed more fans toward the Nets than losing Mr. Lin. It remains a sort of urban mystery to Mr. Lee, like why the doors on the local subway always close just as the express arrives. Mr. Lee is not inclined to second-guess the point guard for taking the money. He even gets leaving the old neighborhood; Mr. Lee relocated from Fort Greene to Manhattan’s East Side because fans were ringing his doorbell at 4 a.m. But who leaves New York? “Orange and blue, the mecca and all the love he got here?” Mr. Lee shakes his head. “Has he ever tried walking around Houston?” Whatever. Mr. Lee will be there when Mr. Lin returns to the Garden as a Houston Rocket. He’ll watch Mr. Lin snake down the lane, and he’ll expect the Knicks to do what they must. “He might get whacked.” There’s that cackle again. “Not personal. Just basketball.” The conversation turns back to all those underachieving athletes he cheers for from his front row seat in the Garden. He frowns. “Look, I hope Carmelo Anthony saw LeBron holding that championship trophy. Amar’e’s my man. But I’m tired of looking up at those old championship banners. “No lollygagging, no half-stepping, no shenanigans, no tomfoolery. Got to get serious, got to.” He expects “a craaaaazy game” when the Knicks appear at the Nets home opener. But he reminds you one last time where he stands. “Orange and blue. My son is going to be orange and blue, and his son after him. And they are going to bury me in these colors.” He pauses a beat. “In Brooklyn.”
|
Lee Spike;New York Knicks;Brooklyn Nets;Brooklyn (NYC);Basketball
|
ny0233355
|
[
"business"
] |
2010/08/01
|
‘Fault Lines’ Concludes Global Economy Remains Vulnerable
|
IN 2005, Raghuram G. Rajan told a meeting of the world’s top central bankers, Alan Greenspan included, that the global financial system was threatened from within and might well be facing a full-blown crisis. At the time, he says, he was roundly criticized. But given what happened a few years later we may not want to dismiss his recent assertion that the global economy is vulnerable to another implosion. In “ Fault Lines : How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy” (Princeton University, $26.95), Mr. Rajan concludes that the financial crisis erupted “because in an integrated economy and in an integrated world, what is best for the individual actor or institution is not always best for the system.” Like geological fault lines, the fissures in the world economic system are more hidden and widespread than many realize, he says. And they are potentially more destructive than other, more obvious culprits, like greedy bankers, sleepy regulators and irresponsible borrowers. Mr. Rajan, a finance professor at the University of Chicago and former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, argues that the actions of these players (and others) unfolded on a larger worldwide stage, that was (and is) subject to the imperatives of political economies. He cites three fault lines: domestic political stresses; trade imbalances among countries; and the tensions produced when financial systems with very different structures interact. All three came together to damage the financial sector in 2008, he says, and could meet again to cause another crisis. The map that Mr. Rajan traces starts with rising income inequality in the United States — a powerful domestic stress. Washington’s response was to provide easy credit, in particular a national home ownership strategy. At the same time, many of the world’s big economies, including Japan, Germany and China, were growing more dependent on American demand for their exports. These nations were left with a relatively weak domestic-oriented sector. A reliance on exports led to huge trade imbalances among countries, creating another fault line. Yet another fault line occurred with the meeting of two distinct financial systems. The first, which he calls an arms-length system, is based on transparency and legal safeguards, like those of the United States and Britain. The second, a relationship system, relies on close, informal ties among people and institutions. Examples of the latter include China, Japan and South Korea. Mr. Rajan says foreign investors from arms-length systems who put capital in countries with relationship systems tend to erect safeguards to lower their risk — like offering short-term loans that can be withdrawn quickly. He describes the potentially destructive consequences of this strategy — directly for the borrowing countries, and indirectly for the global economy. For example, when loans in countries like Indonesia started underperforming in the late 1990s, foreign investors reacted by yanking out their money. Many developing countries then experienced devastating financial crises. Indonesia and other nations that relied on this type of foreign capital thus inadvertently left themselves open to debilitating booms and busts. It’s understandable, then, that some countries turned instead to the perceived safety of export-led growth, with its commitment to an undervalued currency and its buildup of foreign exchange reserves. The consumer-driven United States was an obvious choice to receive these exports, becoming the “demander of last resort.” All of these fault lines met in an amoral global financial system sustained by United States monetary policy. Beginning in the early 1990s, the Federal Reserve chose to keep interest rates relatively low in response to economic recoveries characterized by slow job creation and, in some instances, job losses. “The U.S. political system,” Mr. Rajan notes, “is acutely sensitive to job growth because of the economy’s weak safety nets,” creating pressure for a series of ad hoc policies that have effectively steered the American economy from bubble to bubble and created damaging incentives. With interest rates kept low, financial players sought out riskier investments carrying higher returns. The possibility of government bailouts in the event of catastrophe further distorted attitudes toward risk. MR. RAJAN unpacks how individual choices made by bankers and monetary authorities around the world can be seen as rational responses to the largely hidden flaws in the global financial system. This is not meant to absolve the bankers, he says, some of whom recognized the risk that these systemic flaws posed and profited from it. He makes passing reference to the role of individuals and organizations that fueled the crisis, including bankers who paid themselves huge bonuses, lax regulators and rating agencies that blessed billions of dollars of dubious collateralized subprime debt. But to Mr. Rajan, systems and large historical forces were the primary drivers of financial instability. He concludes with systemic proposals for financial and political reform. These include making failed financial firms easier to break up (thus enhancing market discipline and risk management) and improving access to education that would help most Americans earn a living wage (thus decreasing the political and economic pressure for constant monetary stimulation). Mr. Rajan has written a serious and thoughtful book, but something is missing from his analysis. What is the role of human agency — of effective leadership, employee engagement, public service on the part of concerned citizens newly anxious to play a part in an increasingly interdependent world? If we, as members of a global village, are to create something lasting and good out of the rubble of the 2008 crisis, we need more than efficient interconnected systems. We need effective leadership harnessed to worthy goals — leadership that emanates from all levels of society and that is not for sale.
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Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy (Book);Rajan Raghuram G.;Economic Conditions and Trends;International Trade and World Market;Reform and Reorganization;Books and Literature
|
ny0062274
|
[
"us"
] |
2014/01/10
|
Virginia: Search Ends for Sailor
|
Rescuers called off their search Thursday for a sailor missing since a Navy helicopter with five crew members aboard crashed off the Virginia coast, the Coast Guard said. Two people died in the Wednesday crash, and two others were hospitalized. The Coast Guard had searched an area of 500 square miles by air and sea for more than 30 hours. The Navy also sent out two helicopters to assist. The sailors who died were Lt. Wesley Van Dorn, 29, of Greensboro, N.C., and Petty Officer Third Class Brian Collins, 25, of Truckee, Calif. The missing sailor’s name was not released.
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Helicopter;Fatalities,casualties;Virginia;Plane Crashes and Missing Planes;US Navy;US Military
|
ny0006364
|
[
"sports",
"baseball"
] |
2013/05/02
|
Kelleher’s Observation Helps Save Yankees
|
Moments before Houston Astros pitcher Wesley Wright threw the pitch, the Yankee first-base coach Mick Kelleher told Lyle Overbay to be careful. Kelleher, a former major league infielder, had noticed something seemingly small, but big enough to determine the outcome of the game. With one out and Overbay at first and Eduardo Nunez at third in a tied game in the sixth inning, Kelleher observed that Astros second baseman Jose Altuve had inched in a step closer to home plate. So he reminded Overbay that if the ball were to be hit to Altuve, he could not allow himself to be tagged, or else Houston would turn a quick double play and Nunez would not have a chance to score. Sure enough, Ichiro Suzuki hit a soft grounder to second and Altuve fielded it. His first impulse was to tag Overbay, who remembered Kelleher’s advice and halted in his tracks long enough to allow Nunez to score, making the play of the game in the Yankees’ 5-4 victory over the Astros. “As soon as he hit it, I knew I wasn’t going to be able to get by him,” Overbay said. “So I just stopped and waited.” Unable to apply the tag, Altuve had to throw to first base or risk not even getting the fleet Suzuki, but that removed the force play at second base and required the Astros to tag Overbay. Nunez, sprinting home on contact, touched the plate well before the tag on Overbay, securing the go-ahead run. A typical nine-inning game is replete with slight adjustments, whether it is a catcher noticing a hitter inching forward in the batter’s box, or an outfielder moving two steps to his left before a ball is struck. On Wednesday, Kelleher’s acute observation was the difference in the Yankees taking two out of three games from the Astros. “It was funny,” Overbay said. “Right there, and it was the next pitch. We had talked about it before, but then he noticed that he had gotten closer. He just refreshed it in my mind, and it worked out.” Image Mariano Rivera pitching in the ninth inning against the Astros. Credit Mike Stobe/Getty Images Altuve could have thrown home in a risky attempt to nail Nunez, but he was not positioned for that. And there was almost no chance of the Astros getting Suzuki if they had attempted the traditional 4-6-3 double play. Once the Yankees had the lead, the bullpen took care of the rest, notching the final nine outs for the victory. Mariano Rivera earned his 11th save in 11 opportunities, but he had a big assist from Robinson Cano, and perhaps the baseball gods, as well. Brandon Barnes singled to left field leading off the ninth and was attempting to steal with Matt Dominguez at the plate. Dominguez lined a ball up the middle headed for center field, a potential first-and-third situation with nobody out. But Cano was covering near second base on the play, and that carried him toward the ball. Cano snared the ball and easily tagged Barnes for the second out. Rivera took care of the rest by striking out Marwin Gonzalez. Cano also hit a home run, his eighth of the season. It came in the third inning, and Ben Francisco followed two batters later with his first as the Yankees expanded their lead to 4-0. But starter David Phelps got sloppy in the top of the fourth and gave it all back. With one out, he allowed seven straight batters to reach base, including two in a row that he hit with pitches. That was particularly upsetting to Phelps, who was filling in for the injured Ivan Nova. Phelps said he felt that if he pitched exceptionally well in Nova’s absence, he could earn a spot in the rotation. “I definitely do,” he said. “That’s one of the reasons I’m frustrated with today. I felt like I really could have grabbed the reins and taken care of things. But it’s baseball. Stuff happens and you’ve got to go out and do better next time.” The victory ended a streak of 16 games in 16 days for the Yankees, who went 11-5 during that period. As with Wednesday’s game, things were not always pretty. And occasionally, even the slightest adjustment proved the difference, where it was actually better for a runner to stop so that a game could be won on a slow double-play ball. “You’re going to have to win some ugly ones, too,” Overbay said. INSIDE PITCH In need of another right-handed hitter, the Yankees acquired the infielder Chris Nelson from the Colorado Rockies for cash considerations and transferred Francisco Cervelli to the 60-day disabled list to make room on the 40-man roster. ... Dave Robertson, who pitched a scoreless eighth, injured his left hamstring but said he would be fine. ... Curtis Granderson played in an extended spring training game in Tampa, Fla., Manager Joe Girardi said. Granderson, who is recovering from a broken right forearm he sustained in the first spring training game in February, says he needs between 50 and 70 at-bats before he is ready to rejoin the Yankees. ... Mark Teixeira hit balls off a tee in the batting cage for the first time since injuring his right wrist.
|
Yankees;Astros;Lyle Overbay;Baseball;David Phelps
|
ny0106746
|
[
"us"
] |
2012/04/21
|
Postal Service Seeks to Widen Activities and Revenue
|
WASHINGTON — Well before online bill paying was popular, the Postal Service in 2000 began operating a secure system that would have allowed it to remain the primary conduit for most Americans’ monthly payments. But the Internet industry objected, and Congress successfully pressured the Postal Service to abandon it. The same pattern has repeated several times over the last decade, with the Postal Service identifying a way to cope with the decline of traditional mail, only to have companies — and ultimately Congress — object. The agency’s troubles, which could result in the closing of thousands of post offices and hundreds of mail processing centers as early as next month, have many sources. Some are the inevitable result of technological changes, and others are the result of missteps by the Postal Service. But top Postal Service officials and outside experts say that another, underappreciated factor has been an insistence by Congress that the service not compete directly with private companies, even as companies like FedEx and U.P.S. have encroached on the Postal Service’s turf. Now, with the volume of traditional mail plummeting and with the agency on the brink of running out of cash, the Senate is debating a bipartisan bill that would let it enter into several new lines of business, like shipping beer and wine. And it would create a chief innovation officer to identify new lines of electronic business. The Senate is expected to vote as early as next week on whether to advance the legislation. The bill would also provide retirement incentives intended to cut about 20 percent of the Postal Service’s 547,000 workers, allow the service to study the elimination of Saturday deliveries, and recoup more than $11 billion that the Postal Service overpaid into one of its pension funds. The agency’s leaders, however, say that cost-cutting alone will not improve its fortunes and that it must increase revenue. “A lot of the decline in first-class mail is not going to come back, even if the economy improves,” said Paul Vogel, the chief marketing and sales officer at the Postal Service. “We realize that the development of new products and offering new service is going to have to be a critical part of our business model going forward. We can’t continue to be your grandfather’s post office.” Of course, businesses have good reason to not want to compete with the giant Postal Service. But their opposition to its expansion leaves the agency in a bind: It must be financially self-sufficient like a business, but it is saddled with the burdens of a government agency, like having to deliver mail to every house in the country. Its carriers, in fact, deliver some FedEx and United Parcel Service packages in a partnership with those companies. One of the sponsors of the bill, Senator Thomas R. Carper , Democrat of Delaware, said the legislation has the “potential to push the Postal Service to innovate and experiment with potentially lucrative new lines of business.” Officials from the Postal Service declined to comment on the legislation. But the National Association of Letter Carriers, which hired a Wall Street investment bank to examine new lines of business for the Postal Service, called the bill a stopgap measure because it would allow only a handful of new revenue options. “This bill does not give the Postal Service the freedom and flexibility to come up with new products and services that take advantage of its strengths,” said Jim Sauber, chief of staff for the letter carriers group. “It tinkers with a flawed business model that two years down the line Congress is going to have to deal with again.” The carriers are pushing for more latitude to move into businesses that take advantage of the Postal Service’s network of mail routes, like offering banking services in rural post offices. Since its founding in 1775 as the United States Post Office, with Benjamin Franklin as the original postmaster general, the Postal Service has focused mainly on one thing: delivering the mail. But mail volume, particularly fist-class mail, has dropped sharply, to 168 billion pieces last year from a peak of 213 billion in 2006, because of vast changes in the way Americans communicate, move money and even buy books and music. The stagnant economy also has not helped. Pessimistic projections put the volume at 118 billion by 2020. As a result, the service is losing a staggering $36 million a day, after having generated an annual profit as recently as 2006. Because of a Congressional mandate, the service has to pay $5.5 billion annually into a fund for its future retirees, which has added $20 billion in debt since 2007. The Postal Service is the only federal agency that pre-finances its future retiree health obligations, though the bill would restructure the benefit plan by stretching out the payments over 40 years. Faced with declining revenue, the Postal Service is asking Congress to allow it to close more than 3,700 post offices and 250 processing centers, and to eliminate Saturday delivery of mail. In other countries, post offices double as banks or sell insurance or cellphones. In the United States, Congress has barred the Postal Service from entering many of these areas. In the 1990s, forecasting a decline in first-class mail, the Postal Service tried several nonmail products, like phone cards, money transfers and e-mail accounts. But Congress said the ventures created unfair competition for the private sector and did not seem to make much money. Companies like U.P.S. also objected. According to a 2000 report on the Postal Service’s e-commerce activities by the Government Accountability Office, U.P.S.’s position was that “a government monopoly should not be allowed to use the benefits of its government standing to attack the private sector.” In 2006, Congress restricted nonpostal activities and told the agency to stick with delivering the mail. Even so, in 2008, the agency tried to raise additional revenue by selling postal meter cartridges to corporations, branded with its logo. But the plan was shelved after Pitney Bowes, a major supplier of ink cartridges, appealed to postal regulators who answer to Congress, saying that the service would cause “immediate harm” to its business. The Postal Service said that such restrictions might have cost the agency billions. A 2010 report from the Postal Service’s inspector general said introducing 10 new products like secure e-mail, electronic bill payment and even some banking services could add $9.7 billion annually to Postal Service revenue, which was $66 billion in 2011. But over half of those products would require a change in legislation. Lawmakers like Senator Susan Collins , Republican of Maine, a co-sponsor of the postal reform bill, support limited changes that would allow the agency to increase revenue, like allowing it to sell hunting and fishing licenses and to lease space in its offices to businesses. Ms. Collins does not support the Postal Service offering a broader array of services like banking. The agency did offer banking services between 1911 and 1967, aimed at immigrants who were used to using post offices to deposit money and at people who had lost confidence in the banks. Missteps by the agency have also harmed its ability to enter new areas of business. Audits by the Government Accountability Office show that the agency lost millions in offering electronic commerce services, like money transfers, because the products were poorly marketed. Art Sackler, chairman of the Coalition for a 21st Century Postal Service, a mailing industry group that includes companies like FedEx, said the Postal Service should stick to its core mission. “They haven’t had a good track record when it comes to developing new lines of business,” he said.
|
Postal Service (US);Postal Service and Post Offices;National Assn of Letter Carriers;Senate;Law and Legislation;Collins Susan M;Carper Thomas R
|
ny0113054
|
[
"us",
"politics"
] |
2012/11/03
|
What Romney’s Words Tell Us If He’s Elected
|
WASHINGTON — What would a President Romney have done? For nearly four years, Mr. Romney has attacked President Obama’s responses to the worst economic crisis since the Depression, the decisions that have defined the Obama presidency — on the stimulus package , auto industry rescue, home- foreclosure measures and financial regulation . Mr. Romney has been less clear about what action he would have taken instead. What follows are snapshots of his reactions then and now, which provide a sense of how he might have responded if he had been in the Oval Office and how he might approach economic policy should he be elected president on Tuesday. STIMULUS Mr. Romney was an early advocate of some government action and criticized President George W. Bush for not seeking a stimulus measure before departing. But mostly he slammed Mr. Obama, within days of the inauguration, for the $831 billion package of spending and tax cuts that a Democratic-led Congress soon passed. He called it bloated with spending that would take too long to help the economy. (The total grew to $1.4 trillion as some provisions were renewed.) By the end of 2009 Mr. Romney declared the stimulus a costly failure, though nonpartisan studies found that it had helped create or support millions of jobs. He cited a weak recovery, slower than even the Obama administration’s projections, and a stubbornly high unemployment rate. But Mr. Romney’s own prescriptions were mixed. In February 2009, as the stimulus bill was being enacted, he suggested $450 billion in tax cuts for middle-income Americans and federal money for unspecified “urgent priorities.” He called tax cuts “twice as effective” as spending for spurring the economy, a contention that many economists dispute. That December, Mr. Romney called for Washington to pull back, though unemployment had hit 10 percent. “Shrinking government and reducing government jobs is healthier for the economy, but this option was never seriously considered,” he wrote. His position mirrored that taken by many conservatives at the time in the United States and in Europe, which became something of a laboratory for the idea that Keynesian policy had been proven ineffective and that slashing spending and reducing deficits would lower interest rates, promote investment, shrink the government’s interference in the marketplace and put the economy on a sounder footing for the long run. Britain and other nations that adopted austerity policies encountered deeper economic troubles. In the United States, few nonpartisan economists support government austerity in a downturn. Mr. Romney, suggesting some belief in the central tenet of Keynesian economics — that government spending can temporarily make up for a lack of demand in the private sector — has subsequently said that he would enact budget cuts he supported with an eye toward whether the timing would have a negative impact on a still-weak recovery. AUTO BAILOUT In late 2008 President Bush approved $25 billion in aid for General Motors and Chrysler. Ford, in better shape, declined aid but backed it for the others since liquidating two of the Big Three automakers would bankrupt many suppliers, imperiling Ford. That help proved insufficient. Mr. Obama, advised by a task force he formed after taking office, forced G.M. and Chrysler through a government-managed bankruptcy, lending them $60 billion more so they could keep operating while restructuring. This amount, like the first, had to be repaid. The decision was politically risky, given the growing populist backlash at the time to bailouts like those already given to banks. Mr. Romney opposed the actions by both Mr. Obama and Mr. Bush to provide direct government aid to Detroit, and in November 2008, he wrote an Op-Ed article in The New York Times calling for the companies to be given new management and restructured through the bankruptcy process, with the prospect of government loan guarantees only afterward. He has defended that stance even as the bailout helped the companies return to profitability and add jobs. Mr. Obama’s plan also required a bankruptcy that forced new union contracts, new managers and investments in fuel-saving technologies. The difference was that Mr. Romney ruled out any bridge loan from taxpayers. He said the government should only guarantee private loans, and only when the companies emerged from bankruptcy. “Detroit needs a turnaround, not a check,” he wrote in the Op-Ed article. But there was little if any private financing available to the automakers at the time. Romney ads this week in Ohio say the revived automakers are sending jobs to China, a charge the automakers have denounced as false. One ad ends, “ Mitt Romney has a plan to help the auto industry.” It offers no details, but the Romney campaign has suggested that he would have built more safeguards into any bailout package against moving production from the United States to other countries and that his promised crackdown on China’s trade and currency practices would have discouraged Chrysler from deciding to build Jeeps for the Chinese market in China rather than in the United States. HOUSING The hangover of depressed home values and foreclosures since the housing bubble burst has been perhaps the biggest drag on the recovery, analysts say. Yet remedies are financially and politically complex, as Mr. Obama found. Polls show most Americans oppose bailouts for neighbors who got mortgages they could not afford or owe more than their homes are worth. Incentives for lenders to modify troubled mortgages have helped far fewer people than Mr. Obama predicted. Until recently Mr. Romney offered a free-market alternative: do nothing. Last November in Nevada, the state with the highest foreclosure and jobless rates, he told The Las Vegas Review Journal: “Don’t try and stop the foreclosure process. Let it run its course and hit the bottom.” Mr. Romney did express interest in then “helping people refinance homes.” And more recently he has seemed to suggest that the government policy could have some role in helping spur a recovery. Last week in Reno, he said, without elaboration, “When I’m elected, we’re going to finally get this housing market going.” FINANCIAL REGULATION Mr. Romney has long proposed to “repeal and replace” the 2010 Dodd-Frank law tightening regulation of financial institutions. He has emphasized “repeal” and not defined a replacement. But Mr. Romney, who expressed general support for the role of regulation in the first presidential debate , has offered hints. “There’s some parts of Dodd-Frank that make all the sense in the world,” he said. “You need transparency, you need leverage limits.” Past comments and language in his manifesto, “Believe in America,” suggest that Mr. Romney supports several objectives of Dodd-Frank: Authorizing the government to wind down failing institutions, to avoid a Lehman Brothers-like crash that threatens the system; requiring transparency for complex financial instruments like derivatives, and requiring institutions to keep a larger buffer of capital. He has suggested support for some version of the new consumer-protection bureau, which Congressional Republicans opposed. While calling it “perhaps the most powerful and unaccountable bureaucracy in the history of our nation” in a statement in January, he also proposed “to fix the flaws in this new bureaucracy.” Mr. Romney often attacks Dodd-Frank for supposedly designating five banks as “too big to fail,” freeing them to take risks, confident of a bailout. “We need to get rid of that provision,” he said in the debate. But if his position makes clear his opposition to the “too big to fail” concept, it ignores one thing: such a provision does not exist in the law.
|
Presidential Election of 2012;United States Economy;Federal Budget (US);Romney Mitt;Economic Conditions and Trends
|
ny0023162
|
[
"us"
] |
2013/09/13
|
Godfrey Sperling, Who Made Eggs for Press, Dies at 97
|
“We’re on the record.” With those words, Godfrey Sperling Jr., a journalist with The Christian Science Monitor, opened thousands of breakfasts that became a Washington institution, bringing newsmakers together with news reporters, often to newsmaking effect. Mr. Sperling, who from childhood carried the nickname “Budge,” died on Wednesday, two weeks before his 98th birthday, said his daughter, Mary Sperling McAuliffe. Everyone came to the Monitor breakfasts: Presidents Reagan, Ford, Carter and Clinton, five vice presidents and more cabinet members and assorted newsmakers than anyone could count. Actually, that may not be true. Political reporters are as statistics-crazed as sports fans, and so as the numbers stacked up, the milestones were often noted in the press. The 2,000th breakfast was commemorated in May 1987 with a brief article in The New York Times. It included an estimate by Mr. Sperling that the guests and journalists had by then consumed 120,000 eggs. The final tally of breakfasts (and lunches and dinners) he presided over: 3,241. The questions could be spirited, but the atmosphere tended toward the genteel: The National Journal once compared Mr. Sperling to “Toscanini beckoning the strings and woodwinds while tempering the brass section.” The breakfasts, generally held at a hotel now known as the St. Regis, were a phenomenon of a simpler time, with more cholesterol and less technology. The conversation in Washington today is largely driven by Twitter and other online media. But Mr. Sperling offered real conversations, and those discussions, more often than not, led to news. During one breakfast in 1968, Spiro T. Agnew, then running for vice president, suggested that the Democratic presidential candidate, Hubert H. Humphrey, was soft on Communism. During another earlier that year, Senator Robert F. Kennedy “agonized” for an hour over whether to seek the Democratic presidential nomination, as Time magazine put it in 1970. At a breakfast in 1993, the Republican political operative Edward J. Rollins told reporters that Christie Whitman’s campaign for governor of New Jersey, which he had managed, funneled about $500,000 in “walking around money” to black ministers and Democratic Party workers to dampen their efforts on behalf of the Democratic incumbent, Jim Florio. (Mr. Rollins later retracted his comments.) In 1995, the House speaker, Newt Gingrich, complained about his treatment aboard Air Force One, leading The Daily News in New York to call him a “ crybaby .” Mr. Sperling was first a journalist, not a toastmaster, heading the Chicago, New York and Washington bureaus for The Monitor. “While not The Monitor’s most elegant writer, no one in the bureau out-hustled Budge,” the newspaper’s obituary said. Godfrey Sperling Jr. was born on Sept. 25, 1915, in Long Beach, Calif., and grew up in Urbana, Ill. He graduated from the University of Illinois; it was there, Ms. McAuliffe said, that her father fell in love with journalism, working for The News-Gazette in Champaign. Hedging his bets during the Depression, he attended law school at the University of Oklahoma — largely, Ms. McAuliffe said, because he was able to live rent-free with his sister, who was teaching in the area. He married the former Betty Louise Feldmann in 1942. She died in 2012, not long after the couple celebrated their 70th wedding anniversary. Besides Ms. McAuliffe, he is survived by a son, John; a granddaughter; and a great-grandson. Mr. Sperling joined The Monitor in 1946 after serving in the Army Air Forces and stayed with the newspaper until September 2005. During his days roaming 17 states from The Monitor’s Chicago bureau, he befriended local politicians who would come to national prominence, including Mr. Humphrey in Minnesota, William Proxmire in Wisconsin and Charles H. Percy in Illinois. “It wasn’t that he spent his life in Washington” that made him effective, Ms. McAuliffe said. “It was that he had his roots outside of the Beltway.” The first breakfast, he wrote in a Monitor column, was actually a lunch. Mr. Percy, running for senator, wanted to meet some reporters and wound up talking about even higher aspirations. “That breakfast made a lot of ripples as Senator Percy told of his plans to run for president,” Mr. Sperling recalled years later. “I had another. And another.” He gave up his role in organizing the events in 2002 — or, as he put it, “I finally said goodbye to bacon and eggs and grilled politicians.” But the breakfasts continue, now run by Dave Cook, The Monitor’s Washington bureau chief. Nora Ephron wrote about the breakfasts for Esquire, and devoted a chapter of “Scribble Scribble,” her book of essays on the media, to them, in which Mr. Sperling groused about the events as “a sideline that occupies me, interests me, irritates me.” He added, “If anyone had said to me, the thing you’ll be remembered for is your breakfast group, I would have gone into another career. A breakfast group?”
|
Godfrey Sperling Jr;News media,journalism;US Politics;Obituary;Washington DC
|
ny0051266
|
[
"nyregion"
] |
2014/10/31
|
Boys, 13 and 14, Accused of Rapes at Bronx School
|
Two boys, ages 13 and 14, have been arrested and accused of raping two girls in the auditorium of their middle school in the Bronx two weeks ago, according to the police and prosecutors. The 14-year-old was arraigned on rape charges in Criminal Court in the Bronx on Oct. 19, the authorities said. He pleaded not guilty, one of his lawyers, Jenay Nurse, said. The case of the 13-year-old was referred to city lawyers to investigate for possible prosecution in Family Court because state law generally prevents children 13 and younger from being tried for sex crimes as adults. A criminal complaint said the rapes took place shortly after noon on Oct. 16. A police spokesman said that the two girls were ages 12 and 13, and that a parent of a student at the school told a school official about the assaults, and the official called the police. The charges were reported on Thursday by The Daily News. All of the students are enrolled at the Urban Science Academy on Teller Avenue in the Bronx, the authorities said. “My thoughts are with the students and families affected by this horrible incident,” the schools chancellor, Carmen Fariña, said in a statement. The case against the 14-year-old is being prosecuted by the Bronx district attorney’s office. His lawyers, Ms. Nurse and Desiree Lassiter, said on Thursday that the boys and the girls knew one another. “This case is not about rape,” they said in a statement. “It is about a group of children who not only knew one another but were friends and who cut class together in the auditorium at school.”
|
Rape;K-12 Education;NYC;Bronx;Assault
|
ny0056231
|
[
"sports",
"football"
] |
2014/09/11
|
Steelers (1-0) at Ravens (0-1)
|
8:25 p.m. Eastern, CBS Line: Ravens by 2 ½ The Ravens have been thinking about matters more important than football, but with a short week they have to get back to business quickly if they do not want to start the season two games behind the Steelers in the A.F.C. North. The Ray Rice era in Baltimore is over. Although he was in decline, the options for replacing him are unimpressive. The Ravens’ faith in Bernard Pierce, who started in Week 1, lasted all of one fumble, and although Justin Forsett did well in relief, running for 70 yards and a touchdown, it is hard to believe they want a 28-year-old journeyman to get most of their carries. The Ravens have been saying the right things about focusing on a rivalry matchup with Pittsburgh rather than any off-the-field issues, but their offense was out of sync in Sunday’s loss to Cincinnati, and they have not had much time to sort it out. On the other side of the ball, a weak Ravens defense may struggle to contain a Steelers offense that showed quite a bit of balance Sunday, with Ben Roethlisberger passing for 365 yards, and Le’Veon Bell gaining 197 combined rushing and receiving yards against the Browns. Having lost four of their last six games to the Ravens, the Steelers would gain momentum with a win. Pick: Steelers
|
Football;Ravens;Steelers
|
ny0093535
|
[
"world",
"europe"
] |
2015/08/12
|
Amnesty International Votes for Policy Calling for Decriminalization of Prostitution
|
PARIS — After days of emotional debates and intense lobbying, delegates from Amnesty International voted on Tuesday to support a policy that calls for decriminalization of the sex trade, including prostitution, payment for sex and brothel ownership. The vote came on the last day of a biennial meeting in Dublin of about 400 members of the human rights organization from 60 countries. They had gathered to set the group’s future policies. The proposal about prostitution provoked an aggressive lobbying campaign by international groups opposed to sparing buyers and pimps from penalties. Competing petitions were organized by women’s groups and celebrities— including former President Jimmy Carter, who issued a letter on Monday — appealing to the group to maintain penalties for buyers and to “stay true to its mission.” After two years of research and consultation with its members, Amnesty says it concluded that decriminalization is the best way to reduce risks for prostitutes. The organization contends that they are exposed to arbitrary arrest and detention, extortion and harassment, and physical and sexual violence. With the vote, Amnesty International’s 12-member board will now hammer out the final draft of a policy that the group will use to lobby governments to repeal most laws that forbid the sale and purchase of sex. The group’s resolution called for a policy that “supports the full decriminalization of all aspects of consensual sex work.” “Sex workers are one of the most marginalized groups in the world who in most instances face constant risk of discrimination, violence and abuse,” Salil Shetty, the secretary general of the organization, said in a statement after the vote. The proposal split human rights activists. Amnesty chapters in Sweden and France pressed the group to support a so-called Swedish or Nordic model, now followed in several Scandinavian countries, that spares prostitutes from penalties but sanctions the buyers with heavy fines and prison terms. Lawmakers in France are pushing new legislation to punish buyers that most likely will be voted on in the fall. After the vote, the Coalition for the Abolition of Prostitution, a French organization, vowed that it would no longer work with Amnesty International. “Amnesty chooses impunity for pimps and johns and not protection from sexual abuse for all women,” the coalition’s executive director, Grégoire Théry, said. Margot Wallstrom, Sweden’s foreign minister, said she was concerned about the effect of Amnesty’s new policy because it is a respected organization. “They mixed all these arguments, and that worries me,” she said. “It is a myth about the happy prostitute who does this as a free choice. Unfortunately, I can now hear people saying ‘hurrah’ — all those johns and pimps who run the brothels. It’s a multibillion-euro industry.” Amnesty will give its national chapters leeway to decide whether to support or lobby for decriminalization. “There are no plans to have a major campaign with a focus on this,” said Sarah Beamish, a board member who will help draft the final policy over the next few months. “It’s really up to each section to take this issue up on the local level. There are no plans for a global focus.” Although the vote was taken openly among the delegates, the meeting was closed and the vote count was kept confidential. Ms. Beamish said the resolution had passed “comfortably.”
|
Prostitution;Amnesty International;Sex;Human Rights
|
ny0152862
|
[
"sports",
"olympics"
] |
2008/08/14
|
Phelps’s Splash Fails to Stir Chinese
|
BEIJING — Before he swam to two more victories Wednesday and became the most successful Olympian in any sport with 11 career gold medals, Michael Phelps received a text message from a former high school buddy. “Dude, it’s ridiculous how many times a day I have to see your ugly face,” wrote the friend, identified by Phelps as Tyler Kohler. While Phelps is generating incredible attention in the United States with one record-breaking performance after another, his attempt to win eight gold medals at the Beijing Games is receiving curiously subdued attention in the country where it is taking place. There are empty seats in the Water Cube aquatics center for his races, state-run Chinese newspapers are providing muted coverage and a number of people interviewed on the Olympic Green said that their favorite American athletes here were not swimmers but N.B.A. stars like Kobe Bryant and LeBron James. The world record Phelps set in the 200-meter freestyle Tuesday was relegated to the world report on page 30 of Wednesday’s editions of Titan Sports, a popular Chinese sports newspaper. Another sports daily, The First, played Phelps’s record on page 32, with two photographs and a brief article. A third publication, Guangming Daily, a leading paper for intellectuals that is not read by the mass public, did not mention Phelps at all. “I don’t know the name,” said Yang Quilian, 30, a technician at the gymnastics stadium Tuesday, a day after Phelps participated in an astonishing 4x100-meter relay and won gold. She thought a minute, then said, “Is he the boy in the relay? He did a great job.” Generally, people interviewed did know Phelps and said they liked him and respected his otherworldly swimming ability. His races are carried live on television — though rarely if ever replayed — and generate excitement inside the Water Cube. He even has a nickname here, the Flying Fish. Still, swimming is not an especially popular sport in China. Its elite female swimmers have faded after being involved in embarrassing doping scandals in the 1990s. And no Chinese man had won an Olympic medal in swimming until Zhang Lin took silver in the 400-meter freestyle Sunday after training with an Australian coach. In that light, Phelps’s achievements may be the equivalent of a Chinese athlete winning a host of gold medals in badminton at an Olympics held in the United States. As could be expected, the Chinese news media are more concerned about their own athletes’ victories in sports like gymnastics, diving, badminton, table tennis , fencing and weight lifting . All of China is eagerly awaiting the 110-meter hurdles, where the country’s most popular Olympian, Liu Xiang, hopes to defend his gold medal from the 2004 Athens Games. Phelps also seems to be overshadowed in popularity here by American N.B.A. stars like Bryant and James. The Chinese star Yao Ming has joined the league, which has heavily invested in China. Its games are popular and widely viewed. Bryant and James — two of the world’s greatest players — have made several trips through China and Asia in association with Nike, making appearances, taking part in clinics, boosting their name recognition. Although the Olympics are engaging, they are a novelty held once every four years. The N.B.A., meanwhile, has a season running from late October into June. “The N.B.A. is best,” said Yang Xiu, 23, who works at a newspaper kiosk in the main press center at the Olympics. “We watch almost every game. We know almost every detail, how tall a player is, who can shoot, who can pass. I know Phelps’s race, but I am more familiar with the N.B.A. I can’t swim, but I can play basketball.” A concern about inflaming Chinese nationalism might be at work in the restrained coverage of Phelps, said Susan Brownell, a Fulbright scholar from the United States who is studying the Olympics at Beijing Sport University. Late last year, or early this year, Brownell said, her colleague, Yi Jiandong, wrote a blog post on a popular Web site about how many medals Phelps might win, bringing a vehement response. “It incited a lot of attacks on him from ultranationalists who thought that by simply describing Phelps’s quest, he was saying the U.S. was better than China,” Brownell said, adding that the blog post was eventually removed from the site, QZone. “My guess,” Brownell said, “is that with China doing so well, winning so many gold medals, leading the count, it may be an editorial policy that if you give too much attention to Michael Phelps, there could be a danger of inciting ultranationalism: ‘Why are you writing about him when China is doing so well?’ They are sensitive to ultranationalism. They know the world is watching. They don’t want any ugliness.” A spokesman for Octagon, the management company that represents Phelps, declined to comment beyond saying that Phelps drew a lot of news media and fan attention when he visited China several times in advance of the Games. Phelps is not likely to be distressed by — or even to notice — the modest play he is receiving from the Chinese news media. For much of the world, he is the main draw at the Games. He draws huge crowds of reporters to his formal postrace news conferences and brief postrace chats, which take place in a kind of cattle chute known as the mixed zone. And he stands to make a $1 million bonus from Speedo, the swimwear company, for winning eight gold medals, which should more than compensate for any lack of buzz. Wednesday, Phelps spoke in awed tones of the coverage he is receiving in the United States. “It’s pretty cool to have a country behind you and on your side,” Phelps said. “No matter where any Americans are in the world, they’re watching and cheering. It’s a pretty special feeling.” It might be said that Phelps occupies a special niche — most popular international athlete not competing directly against a Chinese star. For instance, the Cuban hurdler Dayron Robles, who broke Liu’s world record, is viewed as a threat to Liu. Conversely, there is no Chinese star being left in Phelps’s wake, so there is no reason not to appreciate his accomplishments. “He’s big time,” said Sang Lan, a former Chinese national gymnastics champion in vault. “He’s not only defeating his competition, he’s challenging himself all the time.” Some comments posted on message boards affiliated with Tsinghua University in Beijing were bombastically generous in Phelps’s favor. “If he was Chinese, his accomplishments would make him even more popular than Yao Ming and Liu Xiang combined,” said one commenter. Another said, “He is definitely one of the 25 greatest athletes of this century; no, actually, he’s one of the top five in all history.” By Sunday, when Phelps is expected to win his eighth gold medal, perhaps the Chinese news media will respond with the same wide coverage as their American counterparts, said Zhang Chao, 22, a college student. He spread his hand across the top of the front page of a newspaper in the Main Press Center kiosk and said, “Maybe he will be here.”
|
Phelps Michael;Olympic Games (2008);Swimming;Beijing (China)
|
ny0266138
|
[
"world",
"europe"
] |
2016/03/16
|
Brussels Raid Linked to Paris Attacks Erupts in Fatal Shootout
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PARIS — A police counterterrorism raid in Brussels linked to the Paris attacks turned into a chaotic shootout on Tuesday, leaving one suspect dead clutching an assault rifle, at least one other on the run, four officers wounded and an entire neighborhood in a traumatized lockdown. A spokesman for the Belgian federal prosecutor’s office, Eric Van Der Sijpt, said many residents of the apartment building targeted in the raid had fled. He could not say how many suspects were involved. Confusion and conflicting reports over the number of people killed and wounded in the shootout prevailed in the hours after the raid, which started between 2 p.m. and 3 p.m. in a section of Brussels known as Forest and involved both Belgian and French officers. Television coverage showed dozens of officers and police vehicles converging on the neighborhood. Prime Minister Charles Michel said at a news conference Tuesday evening in Brussels that police operations were still continuing. Brussels was the hub of the plotters who carried out the meticulously coordinated Paris attacks on Nov. 13, which killed 130 people and injured 413. Mr. Van Der Sijpt confirmed that one suspect in the Forest raid had been killed and had been found with a Kalashnikov rifle in his hands. He did not identify him. The spokesman said there were several exchanges of gunfire, one at the start of the search. The suspects had been “waiting behind the door,” he said, shooting at the police through it. Three people were injured during that exchange: one French policewoman and two Belgian policemen. Another officer was wounded in an exchange of gunfire with special forces later, Mr. Van Der Sijpt said. The French interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, told reporters that French officers also came under fire during the raid. He spoke at a news conference in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, where he had traveled with the French foreign minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, to express solidarity after a series of deadly attacks on three resort hotels there on Sunday. Since the Paris attacks, French police officers have routinely been working alongside their counterparts in Belgium in the investigation. Live television broadcasts showed dozens of police officers and several police cars descending on the Forest neighborhood. Gunfire erupted sporadically throughout the afternoon. Helicopters circled the area, and some police officers were seen on nearby roofs. The Forest neighborhood, also known by its Dutch name, Vorst, is southwest of the city center. The police evacuated homes in the area, as well as two schools near the building where the raid occurred. Employees from the car manufacturer Audi, which has a building a few blocks away from the house in Forest, were told to stay inside. Marc-Jean Ghyssels, the mayor of Forest, one of 19 municipalities that make up Brussels, told reporters that a police operation was proceeding around a building on the Rue du Dries, one of the streets cordoned off by the police. One man believed to have participated in the Paris attacks, Salah Abdeslam, has been the target of an international manhunt. Mr. Abdeslam, a 26-year-old French citizen who was born in Brussels to parents who had emigrated from Morocco, fled to Belgium after the attacks. On Dec. 10, the police raided an apartment in the Schaerbeek section of Brussels, where they found Mr. Abdeslam’s fingerprint, as well as material that might have been used to assemble suicide belts and traces of an explosive used in the Paris attacks. The other nine men believed to have taken part in the attacks all died. Eight of them ether blew themselves up or were shot on the night of the attacks, while an organizer of the plot, Abdelhamid Abaaoud , died in a police raid north of Paris on Nov. 18. The authorities in Belgium and France have carried out hundreds of raids, and held dozens of suspects for questioning, in the aftermath of the attacks. There was no indication that the raid on Tuesday was directly related to the search for Mr. Abdeslam, the fugitive.
|
Brussels;Paris Attacks;Belgium;Police
|
ny0122904
|
[
"sports",
"golf"
] |
2012/09/21
|
Lexi Thompson Back on Top at Navistar L.P.G.A. Classic
|
Lexi Thompson opened her title defense at the Navistar L.P.G.A. Classic in Prattville, Ala., with a career-best nine-under-par 63 to match the tournament record. Last year, at 16 years old, Thompson won by five strokes.
|
Golf;Thompson Lexi
|
ny0093126
|
[
"us"
] |
2015/08/06
|
Texas ID Law Called Breach of Voting Rights Act
|
A federal appeals panel ruled Wednesday that a strict voter identification law in Texas discriminated against blacks and Hispanics and violated the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — a decision that election experts called an important step toward defining the reach of the landmark law. The case is one of a few across the country that are being closely watched in legal circles after a 2013 Supreme Court decision that blocked the voting act’s most potent enforcement tool, federal oversight of election laws in numerous states, including Texas, with histories of racial discrimination. While the federal act still bans laws that suppress minority voting, it has been uncertain exactly what kinds of measures cross the legal line since that Supreme Court ruling. The Texas ID law is one of the strictest of its kind in the country. It requires voters to bring a government-issued photo ID to the polls. Accepted forms of identification include a driver’s license, a United States passport, a concealed-handgun license and an election identification certificate issued by the State Department of Public Safety. Wendy R. Weiser, the director of the democracy program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, called the ruling “great news for voters in Texas and for the country.” “It does show the continuing relevance of the Voting Rights Act even in its weakened form,” said Ms. Weiser, whose organization helped represent some of the plaintiffs in the suit. “But it’s bittersweet because we’ve now gone through a federal election with this discriminatory voting law in place.” The plaintiffs, including individual voters, civil rights groups and the Department of Justice, said it was discriminatory because a far greater share of poor people and minorities do not have these forms of identification and lack easy access to birth certificates or other documents needed to obtain them. Student identifications, voter registration cards and utility bills are not considered acceptable proof of identity. In a sweeping ruling in 2014, a federal district court in Texas agreed with the plaintiffs about the effect the law had on minority voters. But it also said legislators had intentionally adopted a discriminatory law, a conclusion that could have led to a restoration of federal oversight over Texas voting laws. Although the appeals court upheld the finding of discriminatory effect, the three-judge panel said the lower court must re-examine its conclusion that Texas acted with discriminatory purpose. Texas could appeal to the full Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans or the United States Supreme Court. In a statement issued Wednesday afternoon, Gov. Greg Abbott did not say whether the state would appeal. But the governor did say, “Texas will continue to fight for its voter ID requirement to ensure the integrity of elections in the Lone Star State.” In a 147-page opinion issued in the fall of 2014 after a two-week trial, a district court judge, Nelva Gonzales Ramos, said the law “creates an unconstitutional burden on the right to vote” and blocked its enforcement. She noted the lack of evidence that voter fraud was a threat and cited expert testimony that about 600,000 Texans, mainly poor, black and Hispanic, lacked the newly required IDs and often faced obstacles in obtaining them. Texas appealed her decision to the Fifth Circuit, which, without deciding the issues, put the identification law back into effect, saying it would be too disruptive to change the rules so close to Election Day. The appeals panel said Wednesday that because illegal intent to discriminate had not been established — in passing the law, legislators declared an interest in preventing voter fraud — the district court in Texas should seek ways to alter the voter law short of overturning it entirely. The state could, for example, reinstate the acceptance at the polls of certain forms of identification that may be more easily available. Apparently referring to that part of the ruling, the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, said in a statement Wednesday that the decision was a “victory on the fundamental question of Texas’ right to protect the integrity of our elections,” adding that “our state’s common sense voter ID law remains in effect.” But civil rights advocates focused on the court’s decision to uphold Judge Ramos’s finding that the ID law had a discriminatory effect, thus violating Section 2 of the federal Voting Rights Act. The appeals court said it did not need to decide whether the law also violated provisions of the Constitution, like the 14th Amendment, and it rejected Judge Ramos’s finding that it amounted to an illegal poll tax. The evidence that the law violated Section 2 was relatively strong, said Justin Levitt, an elections expert at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, because the racial difference in impact was striking. Another case, in North Carolina, involves what some say are more subtle effects, and could provide a more telling test of the Voting Rights Act. There, civil rights advocates and the Department of Justice are challenging cutbacks in a range of measures used disproportionately by minorities, including early voting and same-day registration and voting. A second case in Texas, involving a challenge to the state’s redistricting, could also set an important legal precedent. In the Texas ID case, the Fifth Circuit said that Judge Ramos had used improper historical and other evidence to conclude that Texas had intended to discriminate and that the district court should “give further consideration” to the issue. “This is a narrow but important victory coming on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the passage of the Voting Rights Act,” wrote Richard L. Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, and the editor of Election Law Blog.
|
Voting Rights Act;Voter registration;Texas;Discrimination;ID;Black People,African-Americans;Hispanic Americans;North Carolina;Supreme Court,SCOTUS
|
ny0174069
|
[
"sports",
"othersports"
] |
2007/10/29
|
Gordon Still Leads; Johnson Closes In
|
HAMPTON, Ga., Oct. 28 — The frustration poured out of Jeff Gordon over his two-way radio. His racecar was “loose,” he said. It was “terrible.” He once described it as “hell.” It was not total chaos between driver and crew, but Gordon’s team furiously tried to fix a poorly performing car before its driver’s lead in the Chase for the Nextel Cup points race over Jimmie Johnson disappeared here Sunday in the Pep Boys Auto 500 at Atlanta Motor Speedway. Just in time, Gordon and his crew solved some of their issues. It was easy to tell when because the radio was quiet as Gordon made his way from 21st place to finish seventh with a car he had no patience with for most of the race. It may be one of the most highly regarded seventh-place finishes of Gordon’s career. He is convinced the championship will be decided by calamity — that he or Johnson will be ruined by a blown engine or a blown tire, or will be caught up in somebody else’s mistake. For most of this scheduled 325-lap race, Gordon seemed to fear that this would be that race because his car struggled in the turns. The fact that Gordon got his car under control was more significant because Johnson, with the help of a shrewd pit move by his crew chief, Chad Knaus, won the race in a two-lap overtime. Entering the race in second place and trailing Gordon by 53 points, Johnson is now 9 points behind with three races to go. Gordon and Johnson, Hendrick Motorsports teammates, head into those races — at Texas, at Phoenix and at Homestead in Florida — in control of the title race. Clint Bowyer is third, but he is 111 points behind Gordon and would need help to win the title. “We can’t get so caught up in racing each other where we are making mistakes and having issues and running 15th because the 07 can close up,” Johnson, referring to Bowyer’s racecar by its number, said of his duel with Gordon. “My first goal is the top 10 and then start looking for the 24 and start outscoring him from there.” Johnson appeared to be headed toward a sixth- or seventh-place finish, along with Gordon, when a tire blew on the car of the rookie Johnny Sauter, bringing out a caution on Lap 318. The leaders ducked into the pits, except for Denny Hamlin, who stayed on the track. Knaus made a decision to put two tires on Johnson’s car when most pit stops Sunday had been four-tire stops. “When that caution came out, we knew we didn’t have a car capable of winning the race,” Knaus said. “But usually late in the race when cautions do come out, cautions breed cautions, so track position was going to be important. “We were fortunate enough to see some guys taking two tires and we kind of called an audible right there and went with two tires.” Johnson jumped out in second place and was behind Hamlin when the race restarted on Lap 323. Almost immediately, Johnson sensed Hamlin was having a fuel issue. Hamlin stopped in the middle of the track when the green flag dropped. Johnson swerved to miss and found himself in first place with Carl Edwards close behind. Martin Truex Jr. ran into the back of Hamlin, who said after the race that there was water in his fuel, which caused his car to stop. The caution came out, and Johnson was in first place. That sent the race into extra laps. Then Dale Earnhardt Jr. crashed and Johnson won under caution.
|
Gordon Jeff;Johnson Jimmie;Nascar Nextel Cup Series;Automobile Racing;Hendrick Motorsports Inc;Automobiles
|
ny0151268
|
[
"us",
"politics"
] |
2008/08/28
|
Democrats Try to Minimize Stadium’s Political Risks
|
DENVER — When Senator Barack Obama announced in early July that he would give his nomination address in an outdoor stadium in front of 75,000 people, he wowed members of both parties who saw it as an inspired stroke of campaign image making. But as he landed here on Wednesday and prepared to become the first presidential candidate in nearly 50 years to accept his party’s nomination on such a big stage, the plan seemed as much risky as bold. With daunting challenges of logistics, style and substance, the plan was hatched before the Republicans began a concerted drive to paint Mr. Obama as a media sensation lacking the résumé to be president. Now Obama aides are feeling all the more pressure to bring a lofty candidacy to ground level, showing that Mr. Obama grasps the concerns of everyday Americans. On Wednesday, workers were still making changes to Invesco Field, home to the Denver Broncos, so it would feel more intimate, less like the boisterous rallies that served Mr. Obama so well early in the primaries, but also created the celebrity image that dogs him. They were still testing camera angles, so Mr. Obama would appear among the giant crowd, not above it. They took steps to reduce the echo effect, familiar to football fans, of speaking in such a cavernous space. Planners scrapped their idea to turn the audience of 75,000 into a giant phone bank, in response to fears that the cellphone system would crash (people will instead be asked to text-message friends and neighbors to support the campaign, program aides said would be effective nonetheless.) And workers put the finishing touches on the backdrop: faux columns intended to suggest a federal building in Washington and create an air of stateliness. (The McCain campaign named it the Temple of Obama, a label repeated by some commentators.) Mr. Obama shared his rationale for the move when he took the stage at the Pepsi Center on Wednesday night. “We’re going to be moving to Mile High Stadium tomorrow, and I want to let you know why,” he said. “We want to open up this convention to make sure that everybody that wants to come can join in the party and join in the effort to take America back.” Yet for Mr. Obama, the dramatic setting of the speech, which will take place between 10 and 11 p.m. Eastern time, stands in contrast to the “workmanlike” message he intends to offer. “I’m not aiming for a lot of high rhetoric,” he said Wednesday. “I am much more concerned with communicating how I intend to help middle-class families live their lives.” Mr. Obama holed up in a Chicago hotel over the weekend, and worked on the address well into the night this week with a small group of aides. He has studied several acceptance speeches, including Bill Clinton’s in 1992, Ronald Reagan’s in 1980 and John F. Kennedy’s in 1960. Some aides worried about the setting overwhelming the message. But those closest to the planning said they had no regrets and were sticking to the sort of big-event politics that no other candidate has been able to match this year. “We are leaning into this, how can you not?” said Jenny Backus, a campaign strategist working on the convention plan. “This is the enthusiasm gap,” referring to what polls show as excitement for Mr. Obama that Senator John McCain’s campaign has not matched. Dee Dee Myers, a former press secretary to President Clinton, said that delegates in the hall were excited about the stadium event but that it was the party’s senior strategists who were more wary of the setting. “There’s a concern in the campaign about how do you pull this off in a way that makes it about the economic themes they want to hit,” Ms. Myers said. “He needs to get from the stadium to the diner, and it’s a hard thing to pull off.” Mr. Obama’s aides had hoped to upend the traditional convention style. But the prolonged primary fight with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton left the convention in the hands of the party’s career planners. Their flashy stage design, which has been likened to an arcade, had none of the look or feel of the more spare style of the Obama brand. When a close circle of his top advisers presented Mr. Obama with $6 million plans to move his acceptance speech to the football stadium in early July, the candidate asked one question, said Anita Dunn, a senior strategist: “Will it rain?” The campaign produced a raft of meteorological data showing it had rained on Aug. 28 only once in 20 years. (Aides were alarmed, however, to arrive in Denver on Sunday to news of a nearby tornado.) Peter Gage, one of the Obama planners, said he studied photographs of Kennedy’s speech at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, the only other such address to be held in an outdoor stadium in the modern television era. Mr. Gage said the circular stage in Denver was inspired by Kennedy’s. A Sky Cam above the field will provide bird’s-eye views. Mr. Obama’s family will sit on seats on the floor before him, along with voters from swing states. The goal is to highlight ordinary people, and then mobilize them to work for the campaign. The Obama campaign dismissed Republican attempts to turn the night against them. “I know that Senator McCain and his people are shooting barbs on the opulence of our convention from the mountaintop in Sedona from the McCain estate,” said David Axelrod, the campaign’s chief strategist. “I don’t think it warrants a response.”
|
Presidential Election of 2008;Obama Barack;Conventions National (US);Democratic Party;Stadiums and Arenas
|
ny0202794
|
[
"world",
"middleeast"
] |
2009/08/16
|
Radical Leader Killed in Gaza Clashes
|
JERUSALEM — A shootout at a mosque in the southern Gaza city of Rafah between Hamas security men and a more extreme Islamist group called the Warriors of God ended early Saturday with 22 dead, including the group’s leader and a senior Hamas security officer. The Ministry of Interior in Gaza said the leader, Abdel Latif Moussa, died in an explosion at his house near the mosque when fighting resumed after dawn. A ministry spokesman said his death might have resulted from explosives in his house that detonated when security men sought to reach him. Hospital officials in Rafah said the dead included an 11-year-old girl and six Hamas policemen. About 150 people were wounded. By noon on Saturday, Rafah was calm after hours of gun battles. The Warriors of God, which is based there, had taken over the mosque with about 100 men. Mr. Moussa had asserted during Friday Prayer that Hamas was lax in its observance of Islamic law. He announced that the city — and soon all of Gaza — was coming under strict religious law. Hamas, an Islamist but also Palestinian nationalist movement that took over Gaza two years ago, faces rebellion by some splinter groups accusing it of being too liberal. The Warriors of God referred in its literature to taking inspiration from and having links to Al Qaeda, though it is not clear whether those links are real. What is clear is that it wants Gaza to be more aggressively Islamist and to be part of a worldwide jihad, rather than engaged in a fight for a Muslim Palestinian state. Hamas makes a point of saying it does not impose strict Islam on others but merely sets an example. There are, nonetheless, Palestinians in Gaza who are more moderate religiously and who oppose Hamas, complaining of creeping theocracy in its rules and laws.
|
Warriors of God;Islam;Gaza Strip;Palestinians;Terrorism;Hamas
|
ny0008711
|
[
"world",
"europe"
] |
2013/05/13
|
In Britain, a Return to the Idea of the Liberal Arts
|
LONDON — Until very recently, students in Britain who wanted to study more than one or two subjects at college received some blunt advice: “Go west” — to the United States or Canada, where the classical tradition of a broad-based humanistic education has long flourished in liberal arts colleges. Despite their European origins, the liberal arts have been in continual retreat on the Continent, edged out by programs devoted to a single discipline like economics or history. In Britain, the more traditional private schools have carried on the classical approach — many still require students to study both Latin and ancient Greek — but the British system, too, is one of relentlessly narrowing focus. Students, who may take a dozen different subjects at age 14, are expected to filter down to just three or four by age 16 in preparation for applying to study a single subject at university. There are a few exceptions: Students studying natural sciences at Cambridge or Durham University are allowed to take courses across the sciences in their first two years before choosing one for their final-year exams. Oxford offers a number of joint honors degrees allowing students to combine two disciplines, like history and economics or philosophy and physics. The University of Edinburgh offers a similar program combining law and a number of other disciplines. But anyone who wanted to study both the arts and the sciences, or to take courses across a range of disciplines, had to leave the country, until now. This past autumn, King’s College London and University College London both admitted their first cohort of undergraduates to new programs in the liberal arts. The University of Exeter is set to begin offering a similar program next autumn. So are the University of Birmingham and the University of Kent in Canterbury, whose courses will each take four years to complete, making them even more like a U.S. undergraduate degree. Aaron Rosen, deputy director of the liberal arts program at King’s, said the resemblance was entirely intentional. “All of us who teach on the program here are either American or people who have an American component in our own education,” said Dr. Rosen, who did his undergraduate studies at Bowdoin College in his native Maine and then earned a master’s and a doctorate from Cambridge in theology. A specialist in Jewish art, a field he said “most people would say doesn’t exist,” Dr. Rosen said his colleagues’ familiarity with the American system “gives us the opportunity to correct some of the flaws that are endemic in the U.S.” The liberal arts in the United States, he said, “got drunk on their own eccentricity.” “When I was at Bowdoin it seemed like the departments competed to offer the most narrow, irrelevant courses,” he said. “This gives us a chance to dial it back to fundamentals.” Each year, all students on the King’s College program will be required to take one core course — the first one, which looks at London itself, combining history, literature, art and geography, is to be taught by Dr. Rosen. Students will also be required to study a modern language, to choose a major at the end of their first year and to spend part of their second year abroad. “There are trade-offs with the traditional single-subject approach in terms of the number of courses you can take,” said James E. Bjork, head of King’s College’s liberal arts program. But Dr. Bjork, who teaches European history, said that “we think it makes you a better historian, for example, if you spend three years having done other things than just history. It gives you a sense of what’s unique to a subject and what isn’t.” For Carl Gombrich, who directs the University College London program, a broader perspective is second nature. With degrees in mathematics, physics and philosophy, he was an opera singer before becoming an academic. He is also the grandson of Ernst Gombrich, the art historian whose work he cites as the inspiration for his efforts to reach across disciplines. “My grandfather was a brilliant psychologist. Yet he never took an exam in psychology. Instead he said, ‘Let’s think about how we perceive things.’ He was a classic interdisciplinarian.” At U.C.L., core courses, including modules on quantitative methods, approaches to knowledge, language and qualitative thinking, form half the program. “We teach all our students the tools of coding. We teach them all how to understand and use statistics,” Dr. Gombrich said. The other half of core courses is devoted to major pathways: cultures, health and the environment, sciences and engineering, and societies. Perhaps most audacious is the U.C.L. program’s ambition to bridge the chasm dividing what the writer C.P. Snow once described as “the two cultures” of science and the humanities. All applicants will be required to have A-levels, the single-subject exams that serve for both high school graduation and university admissions, in both the humanities and in math or a science. All British universities require A-levels in at least three subjects. Students who study a science as their major will have to study a humanities minor, and vice versa. “We’re determined to be just as science-y as we are arts-y,” Dr. Gombrich said. Graduates will receive a bachelor of arts and sciences degree. Image Reading outside on the University College London campus. Credit Warrick Page for the International Herald Tribune “We’ve taken a big risk,” Dr. Gombrich said, acknowledging that defenders of the traditional single-subject approach might argue the new program lacks depth. “But that’s a rather British view of what depth is,” he said. “If you study psychology, half your courses might be on topics you’re not interested in. Wouldn’t it be better to do a module on child health, or linguistics or embryology?” So far both programs seem popular. “We’ve exceeded our expected applications by 25 percent,” Dr. Gombrich said, adding that applications for next year were up by a further 10 percent. Gabrielle Cecil, a first-year student at King’s College London, said she “fell in love with the course.” “I found deciding which A-levels to take so hard, and applying to study just one at university just seemed impossible,” she said. Ms. Cecil, who grew up on a farm in Cornwall, said that coming to London had also been a big factor, as it was for her classmate Jibran Khan. Mr. Khan had already completed a year studying economics and Arabic when he heard about the course at King’s and decided to apply even though it meant starting his degree all over again. “I liked it that they don’t just let you do one or two subjects. You get to bring them together, which wasn’t true at Edinburgh,” said Mr. Khan, an American who “grew up moving between countries.” Many of the King’s students said they had also considered colleges in the United States. “I was very close to enrolling at Tufts,” near Boston, said Fabian Midby, a Swede who, after taking courses in French, geography, politics, philosophy and film his first year, has decided to major in economics. In addition to being closer to home for European students, with tuition capped at £9,000, or about $14,000, a year for British and European students, both schools are considerably cheaper than comparable U.S. schools. Even American students, who would pay £17,000 at U.C.L. and £15,000 at King’s, would still save a whole year on tuition and living expenses. Dr. Gombrich said he would know the program was a success if, at the end of their three years, liberal arts students did as well or better on their final subject exams as U.C.L. students taking a single subject. And if that calls into question the whole British model, the university’s president, Malcolm Grant, said he did not mind. “I’ve always felt it was a mistake to make students specialize such a young age,” he said in an interview. “At 15, how many people know they want to be scientists — or lawyers?” “This program combines the best of the British model, where you progress from year to year, with the fairly significant amount of choice you have in America,” Dr. Grant said. “If we can continue to attract the smartest students, as we have done in the first year, I think this will become the principal mode of entry into this university,” he said. U.C.L. plans on hold University College London said last week on its Web site that it was seeking a new site for its planned £1 billion Stratford campus after talks fell apart with the council representing Newham, a London borough. According to Times Higher Education , U.C.L.’s plans to build in an area that is currently home to Carpenters Estate , a housing development, prompted protests.
|
Education;College;Great Britain;Cambridge University
|
ny0098387
|
[
"world",
"middleeast"
] |
2015/06/26
|
Palestinians Deliver Accusations of Israeli War Crimes to Hague Court
|
PARIS — Palestinian leaders delivered files documenting what they say are Israeli war crimes on Thursday at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, broadening a new front in the Middle East conflict. The files include descriptions of military operations throughout the occupied territories and in particular last year’s war in the Gaza Strip, Palestinian spokesmen said. One set of papers covers killings of civilians and the treatment of Palestinian prisoners, while another deals with what Palestinians consider to be Israel ’s illegal settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which could meet the definition of war crimes. The long-expected move carried far greater symbolic value than it did legal weight. The Palestinian papers are not considered criminal evidence, but they will be treated as part of the fact gathering by the court’s chief prosecutor, who is continuing an examination she began in January to decide if there is a strong enough case to open a criminal investigation. For the Palestinians, though, it was another step on a long and bloodied road to advance their push for statehood and a crucial part of their drive to hold Israel accountable, before an international court, for its decades-long military occupation of lands the Palestinians claim for a state of their own. Xavier Abu Eid, a spokesman for the Palestine Liberation Organization, said Palestinians had struggled for years in international forums to reach the International Criminal Court. “Whoever says that the Palestinians are trying to politicize the I.C.C. are in fact trying to deny the Palestinians a very basic right to justice,” he said. “We are showing our seriousness to support a preliminary investigation that has already started.” Image The International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, in 2012. Credit Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times Fatou Bensouda, the chief prosecutor, said by telephone that she had met with the Palestinian foreign minister, Riad al-Malki, and other members of his group for close to 45 minutes in her office as they delivered their information. She declined to evaluate the Palestinian documents. “At this stage it is simply information to assist my work,” she said. “I promised to look at it very carefully.” Palestinian spokesmen have described the information presented as “general in nature” but put together by technical teams that were charged with parsing how each situation violated international law. Asked about the settlements, an issue that has not yet come before the court in other cases, Ms. Bensouda said, “The settlements will definitely be part of this examination phase.” The prosecutor declined to say how much time she still needed to decide whether she would open a criminal investigation, a step that requires agreement from a panel of judges. “There is no timeline for a preliminary investigation,” she said. “It will be difficult for me to estimate.” But lawyers following the court believe that she will not wade quickly into one of the Middle East’s oldest and most intractable conflicts. Other trials before the court have faltered and even failed because the prosecution was overconfident and had not built a strong enough case. Another factor complicating the Palestinian case is Israel’s refusal to cooperate with any investigation, which is likely to make access for criminal investigators difficult if not impossible. Egypt, which also borders Palestinian lands, has also not provided access for commissions of inquiry. Emmanuel Nahshon, the spokesman for Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, described the Palestinians’ latest move as a “provocation and an attempt to manipulate the I.C.C.” “We hope that the prosecutor won’t fall into the trap,” he said. Ms. Bensouda said she had consistently called for Israel’s cooperation but had received no response. “But this will not stop my office from going ahead,” she said. Israeli leaders have repeatedly said that the court will be biased and that Israel will use its own courts to deal with any perceived crimes.
|
Palestinians;Israel;War Crimes,Genocide,Crimes Against Humanity;UN;International Criminal Court;Gaza Strip;Military;Fatou Bensouda
|
ny0063889
|
[
"business"
] |
2014/01/25
|
Unions Decline in Public Sector
|
The nation’s union membership held steady at 11.3 percent last year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported, but losses among state and government workers suggest an ominous trend for the future of organized labor. Although the rate of membership didn’t budge, the overall number of members grew slightly, rising about 162,000 to nearly 14.5 million. Unions added about 282,000 new members in the private sector, but that was partly offset by the loss of 118,000 members in the public sector, where budget pressures have meant layoffs and hiring freezes. In Wisconsin, for instance, where Republican lawmakers have moved to limit union bargaining rights, union membership in the public sector fell to just 37.6 percent in 2013, from 53.4 percent in 2011. New York continued to have the highest union membership rate at 24.4 percent, while North Carolina had the lowest rate at 3 percent.
|
Jobs;Labor Unions;Collective bargaining;BLS;Civil service
|
ny0252987
|
[
"nyregion"
] |
2011/10/18
|
How Cheating Cases by Educators at New York Schools Played Out
|
A charter school teacher warned her third graders that a standardized test question was “tricky,” and they all changed their answers. A high school coach in Brooklyn called a student into the hallway and slipped her a completed answer sheet in a newspaper. In the Bronx , a principal convened Finish Your Lab Days, where biology students ended up copying answers for work they never did. These are among the 14 cases of cheating by educators substantiated by New York City ’s special commissioner of investigation for schools since 2002. They represent a tiny fraction of the more than 1,250 accusations of test tampering or grade changing that the special commissioner has received since Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg took control of the city schools — most are handled by the Education Department , which has declined to provide a full accounting of its investigations. But as cheating scandals have engulfed school districts in Atlanta and Washington , as well as in New Jersey and Pennsylvania , a review of these substantiated cases in New York shows that cheating schemes can be mundane or audacious, with motivations that include inflating the statistics used to evaluate a school and helping a favorite student become eligible to graduate. They portray stressed educators who take inappropriate risks — and brash ones who appear to believe they can flout rules with impunity. Three of the cases were announced as they were completed by the special investigator, Richard J. Condon, including one that led to the ouster of Ruth Ralston, an assistant principal at the High School for Contemporary Arts in the Bronx, who investigators found had erased hundreds of student answers on the June 2008 algebra Regents exam. Documents related to the other cases were provided to The New York Times under the Freedom of Information Law. Of the 23 educators named in the investigations, about a third have resigned or have been fired, sometimes after an administrative hearing that is required for those with tenure. Jooyeon Kim, a third-grade teacher at the well-known Harlem Children’s Zone/Promise Academy I, for example, was dismissed in 2009 due to two words: “Alligator Park.” Ms. Kim’s students had been asked to correct the punctuation in a paragraph on the state’s English test in January 2009 that included this sentence: “We saw alligators at an alligator park.” City testing officials noticed that each of her 22 students had made an identical change: first capitalizing both the A and the P in “Alligator Park” (incorrect), then erasing it. They began an investigation, and Ms. Kim, who could not be reached for comment for this article, ultimately acknowledged that she had warned the children, “You’re on the last question, be careful,” saying it was “tricky.” Eight of the children confirmed her account, though investigators did not find evidence that she had actually given them the answer. Teachers at Promise Academy, run by the billionaire investor Stanley Druckenmiller and Geoffrey Canada , are not unionized, so it was easier to fire Ms. Kim than it would have been at a traditional school. “Although we had no hard evidence,” explained Marty Lipp, a spokesman, “the soft evidence led us to make a decision to let her go, because we can’t and won’t tolerate cheating on the tests.” By contrast, only one of eight educators who investigators said had participated in a “herculean and dishonest” effort at the High School for Youth and Community Development in Brooklyn to give students answers before the 2005 biology Regents exam was fired. The others received reprimands. “Students were not merely permitted but were openly encouraged to cheat,” investigators wrote of the case, in which students were given answer keys to copy instead of completing required lab experiments in the days and hours before the exam. Several teachers said the principal, Marie Prendergast, had known about the copying, but investigators found conclusive evidence only that she had failed to properly supervise her staff. She received a counseling memo. “It’s something my staff did,” Ms. Prendergast said in an interview. “I have a different organization, that was an unfortunate incident, but that is not my school now.” She added, “Why are you going to crucify me for something that I was called green and stupid for, but I was exonerated?” Another case led to the retirement of a gym teacher at A. Philip Randolph High School in Manhattan , who was also a track coach, mentoring generations of students who included two Olympic runners. To help one of her athletes graduate in 2007, investigators found that the teacher, Phyllis Anderson, devised a scheme to substitute a failing essay in the student’s global history Regents exam. The girl, who had written an off-topic essay that had earned her a zero, was told to write another one at home, according to the case file. She met a teacher from another school on a Bronx street corner, who passed her the new essay in an envelope. A custodian, investigators said, later slipped it into the test. Ms. Anderson, who now coaches at a private school, said she “was falsely accused of something I could not have done,” adding: “I’m a physical educator. I don’t have access to exams.” Still, she agreed to retire — and to drop a discrimination suit she had filed against the city and her principal — so that the administrative hearing would be dismissed. The other people involved were briefly suspended or reprimanded. In a separate case, Robert Sambone, a teacher and coach, and James Chiarchiaro, an academic coach paid by the National Football Foundation, wanted to help three volleyball players graduate from South Shore High School in the Canarsie neighborhood of Brooklyn. The men secretly filled out bubble sheets for the January 2007 biology Regents, according to investigators, answering 24 of the 30 questions correctly. As the girls took the exams, the men passed them the answer sheets, either tucked into a newspaper or, in Mr. Chiarchiaro’s case, with a hug in a hallway caught on video, investigators said. Mr. Sambone was terminated after an administrative hearing. He declined to comment. Mr. Chiarchiaro, who also lost his job, did not return several phone calls and e-mails. Some cases seemed more like sloppiness than cheating. Kourtney Boyd, for example, failed to record properly 2005 English Regents exam scores of numerous students when she was an assistant principal at Cobble Hill High School; she received a letter of reprimand, and is now principal of a Brooklyn middle school. And in 2009, Kalliopi Hatzivasilis , an assistant principal at the High School of International Business and Finance in Upper Manhattan, acknowledged to investigators that she had changed class grades for 10 to 15 students from failing to passing after they passed their Regents exams, saying she had misunderstood the city’s grading policy. “I was just lazy,” she told investigators, when asked why she did not correct the error after becoming aware of it. Ms. Hatzivasilis, who was demoted and now teaches at the High School for Global Citizenship in Brooklyn, declined to comment. Fatai Okunola, a teacher at Middle School 219 in the Bronx, received a 90-day suspension without pay after investigators said he had written answers on the back of paper rulers for the eighth-grade math exam, and left the classroom while proctoring a test; answers were found on paper on the floor. During his administrative hearing, many of the charges were dismissed. “I denied everything because I didn’t do any of those things,” he said. “I didn’t have money to hire an outside lawyer to fight, so I just leave everything to God.” Two other cases resulting in fines or reprimands involved a teacher who used his early access to the state exam to tutor a student on Long Island , and a paraprofessional in Staten Island who exchanged an e-mail address — and a regular classroom science test — with a student. But in an illustration of the difficulty of proving cheating, investigators confirmed tampering on the 2009 geometry Regents at the Academy for Social Action in Manhattan, but could not determine who had been involved. Mr. Condon, the special commissioner of investigation, generally leaves the question of punishment to the Education Department. But in six cases his office unequivocally recommended termination: Rachel Henderson, the principal of P.S. 811, a special education school in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, whom investigators found had directed members of her staff to fabricate student portfolios; her assistant principal, Rosa Lien; Ms. Anderson, the track coach at A. Philip Randolph; the coaches who helped the Brooklyn volleyball players; and Ms. Ralston. All either resigned, retired or were fired. Ernest Logan, president of the city’s Council of Supervisors and Administrators, said he believed that the process was working. “What I’m starting to hear more and more is that we are looking to see if New York City is not on top of this,” he said, “and I’m telling you, I think that we are probably better at it than anywhere in the country.”
|
Cheating;Richard J Condon;NYC Department of Education;null;K-12 Education;Teachers
|
ny0036425
|
[
"world",
"europe"
] |
2014/03/19
|
Russian Aggression Puts NATO in Spotlight
|
LONDON — Russia’s annexation of Crimea has suddenly revived the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s central role as a counterweight to Moscow, and with it questions about the alliance’s options and ability to act. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. swept into Poland and the Baltic nations on Tuesday with a message of reassurance that their membership in NATO carries the protection of the United States. But given deep Western reluctance to use military force in response to Russia’s aggression, it remains unclear what the alliance’s commitment to collective security means for Ukraine and other nonmembers should President Vladimir V. Putin continue to try to expand Moscow’s influence in the former Soviet bloc. Ian Bond, the director of foreign policy at the Center for European Reform , a London-based research group, said that “Putin has just given NATO something to do, but the question is whether NATO is up to it.” It is now crucial to deter further moves by Mr. Putin, he said. “If Russian forces move into eastern Ukraine,” he said, “what would NATO do?” The Atlantic alliance was designed, as the old phrase went, to keep the Americans in, the Germans down and the Soviets out. Now, with Mr. Putin acting more like a Cold War antagonist, arguing that Russia has the right to defend Russians everywhere, the United States will be under more pressure to sustain and exhibit military strength in Europe despite the much ballyhooed “pivot to Asia.” Since the Ukraine crisis began, the United States, in the context of the alliance, has sent more F-16 fighters to Poland and F-15 fighters to the Baltics. It has begun Airborne Warning and Control System, or Awacs, flights over the Polish and Romanian borders, and has ordered more exercises with warships in the Black Sea. “As NATO allies,” President Obama said on Monday, “we have a solemn commitment to our collective defense, and we will uphold that commitment.” The Ukraine crisis “is a complete reminder of why NATO is useful,” said Jan Techau, director of Carnegie Europe . “If NATO were not in place, this would be a real existential struggle for Eastern and Western Europe, and it isn’t.” Kadri Liik, an Estonian analyst at the European Council on Foreign Relations , said simply: “It’s good to be in NATO right now.” Some officials, like Foreign Secretary William Hague of Britain, have said that the alliance “is not looking at military options here, this is not a Crimean War.” But Mr. Bond at the Center for European Reform said he thinks such statements are a mistake. “There’s a risk Putin will listen to that and think moving into eastern Ukraine is as limited as taking over South Ossetia and Abkhazia: a couple weeks of weak sanctions,” he said. Instead, Mr. Bond said, he would prefer to see active military exercises, and soon. He said that the United States Army in Europe was scheduled to have an exercise in July in Ukraine, “and it might be worth moving that up.” But reinforced American involvement of that sort is also likely to reduce faltering European efforts, in a time of budget constraints, to create a capable European security and defense identity. Video Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. met with Prime Minister Donald Tusk of Poland in Warsaw to assure allies in Eastern Europe that the United States would protect them against any Russian aggression. Credit Credit Kacper Pempel/Reuters As NATO’s long involvement in Afghanistan concludes, the renewed emphasis on Russia and Europe is also likely to delay the alliance’s efforts to turn itself into a global actor, able to deal with threats like terrorism and cyberwarfare. Those goals were supposed to be the focus of the next NATO summit meeting in September, in Wales. A vital task for the Atlantic alliance now is to ensure that Article 5 — its commitment to collective defense — is seen to be firm and strengthened, said Ivo H. Daalder, a former American ambassador to NATO and now president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs . That will mean additional deployments and exercises like November’s Steadfast Jazz , the first Article 5 exercise in more than a decade, which took place near Poland and the Baltics. Far more French troops took part than American ones, something that is likely to change for the next exercise, in 2015, scheduled to take place near the Iberian Peninsula. “Those allies that joined NATO in the last two decades did so fundamentally because they wanted to be under the security blanket provided by the United States and NATO, and the events of the last three weeks remind them that that’s a good thing,” Mr. Daalder said. “But we have to be very serious about defending these 28 states, and you do it through serious contingency planning, serious exercises like Steadfast Jazz and visible deployments of armed forces.” In recent years, even the commitment of Washington to Article 5 has been questioned as the United States has sought an accommodation with Russia and emphasized a growing threat from China. It was not until 2009, a senior NATO official said, that a war-fighting contingency plan to defend the Baltics was even drawn up, five years after they joined the alliance and were promised collective defense. Similarly, the second Bush administration pushed a guarantee of alliance membership for Ukraine and Georgia in 2008 without, the NATO official said, “seriously thinking through how to defend them.” At an alliance summit in Bucharest, Romania, in 2008, Mr. Putin crashed the dinner and said that he regarded Ukraine as an “artificial country,” warning the alliance that Russia would never accept Ukrainian and Georgian membership in NATO. The Bush proposal was rejected by Germany, France and a divided alliance, and Ukraine and Georgia were simply promised that one day they would be members. “It was a mistake to be so hesitant in 2008 and not go in one direction or the other,” Ms. Liik said. “We demonstrated that NATO was not united and provided Russia an opportunity to establish facts on the ground.” Since then, there has been no consensus in the alliance about expansion. At the same time, Russia has moved against Western-leaning governments in both Georgia and Ukraine on the pretext of defending ethnic Russians under threat, creating independent states from Georgia and now annexing Crimea, where Russia’s Black Sea Fleet is based. The alliance has never figured out how to handle the countries, like Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia, stuck between Russia and NATO, said James Goldgeier, dean of the School of International Service at American University. “We never came up with a solution for the insecurity of that area, and we still don’t have one,” he said. “We’ve known for a long time that relations with the United States are not that important to Putin, and making sure Ukraine doesn’t go West is a lot more important to him.” Robin Niblett, the director of Chatham House , the Royal Institute of International Affairs, said that “Putin could not have scripted this better for those who believe in the continuing relevance of NATO.” The alliance is coming home after long years in Afghanistan and its limited but vital role in Libya, Mr. Niblett said, amid divisions within the alliance about its role. “But Putin has raised, even more than Slobodan Milosevic in Kosovo, concerns about events that we thought could no longer happen on the European continent,” he said. “There’s still a 19th- and 20th-century Europe alongside the 21st-century one,” Mr. Niblett said. “We thought Russia could change, was changing. But Putin has taken it in another direction, consolidating power in a crude form.” NATO and the West will have to balance reassurance and provocation. “We need to think about the next generation of Russian leaders and carefully create space for them,” he said. “To encourage Ukraine now to join NATO as some sort of solution would be rash for the security of Europe.”
|
Crimea;Russia;Military;Cold War;NATO;International relations;Vladimir Putin;Barack Obama;Ukraine;Europe
|
ny0259749
|
[
"sports",
"basketball"
] |
2011/01/25
|
High Schoolers at Final Four
|
A high school basketball tournament will take place annually during the men's Final Four. The inaugural All-American Championship will be held in suburban Houston, the site of this year's Final Four, on April 1 and 3. Four teams of players will represent each region of the country. This year's invitational tournament will be in Aldine, Texas. A national panel of experts will select the players. The teams will be led by prominent high school coaches and assisted by coaches from the Final Four city. Cultural and educational events will be part of the tournament. Plans were announced Monday by the sports promoter Gazelle Group. (AP)
|
Interscholastic Athletics;All-American Championship;NCAA Basketball Tournament (Men);Basketball
|
ny0003915
|
[
"us"
] |
2013/04/16
|
Kerry Meets Privately With Parents of Anne Smedinghoff
|
CHICAGO — Secretary of State John Kerry met here privately on Monday with the parents of Anne Smedinghoff, the young State Department officer who was killed this month in Afghanistan. She was the first State Department officer to die in the line of duty since the September attack on the United States diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya. Image Anne Smedinghoff Credit Smedinghoff Family Photo, via Reuters Ms. Smedinghoff, 25, had served as Mr. Kerry’s escort officer during his March trip to Kabul. She died in a car-bomb attack on April 6 while delivering books to a school in Zabul Province. Four other Americans also died in the attack: three members of the military and a Defense Department civilian. Another State Department employee, Kelly Howard, a public diplomacy officer, was seriously wounded. Mr. Kerry, who was visibly moved by the reports of Ms. Smedinghoff’s death, has repeatedly invoked her memory during his travels. Image Secretary of State John Kerry walked from his plane after arriving in Chicago on Monday to visit Ms. Smedinghoff’s parents. Credit Pool photo by Paul J. Richards During a meeting earlier on Monday with American Embassy workers in Tokyo, he said that Ms. Smedinghoff, who grew up in Illinois and was on her second overseas tour when she was killed, had been “full of ideals and full of hopes.” Her life, Mr. Kerry said, had been “wiped out by terrorism, the worst kind of nihilism.” “It doesn’t stand for anything except killing people and stopping the future,” he said. “And so we’re not going to be deterred. We’re going to be inspired.” On his way back to Washington from a 10-day, 6-nation trip, Mr. Kerry descended from his Air Force plane under overcast skies at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago. He walked across the tarmac and was handed a bouquet of yellow flowers, which he carried to the closed meeting with Ms. Smedinghoff’s parents, Tom and Mary Beth Smedinghoff, and siblings.
|
State Department;Anne Smedinghoff;John Kerry;Afghanistan;Fatalities,casualties;Afghanistan War;Bombs
|
ny0257867
|
[
"sports",
"hockey"
] |
2011/01/16
|
Rangers Rally but Lose to the Canadiens Once Again
|
Short-handed for the final 1 minute 5 seconds, the Canadiens hung on to a 3-2 lead to defeat the visiting Rangers on Saturday night for the second time in five days. Carey Price made 31 saves for the Canadiens, who beat the Rangers, 2-1, on Tuesday at Madison Square Garden. Mats Zuccarello drew the Rangers to one behind 6:57 into the third. Brian Boyle, who scored his 15th goal, was denied the tying goal moments later on Price’s pad save. Price made several more stops in the final minute after Montreal defenseman Hal Gill was called for hooking Boyle behind the Canadiens’ net with 1:05 left in the third. Henrik Lundqvist stopped 38 shots for the Rangers, who had scored just one goal in each of its previous two games, including a 1-0 win Thursday over league-leading Vancouver. “I’m not sure what it’s from — from a hard game against Vancouver, I don’t know, it just took us a couple of periods to get going,” Rangers Coach John Tortorella said. “They’re a quick team, but we never got near a puck. We were just so slow in the third period.” Roman Hamrlik and Tomas Plekanec had power-play goals, and the Canadiens scored three times in 2:46 in the first period. Andrei Kostitsyn scored Montreal’s final goal at 16:03. ISLANDERS 5, SABRES 3 John Tavares scored a natural hat trick in the second period and Rick DiPietro, playing for the first time since injuring a groin muscle Jan. 3, made 40 saves to help the Islanders beat the Sabres in Buffalo and snap a three-game losing streak. Tavares’s first goal, a wrist shot under the crossbar from in close at 7:50 of the second period, tied the score at 1-1. He struck again at 10:34 on a power play when he backhanded Matt Moulson’s attempt past Ryan Miller and completed the natural hat trick when he put in a rebound at 13:36, scoring his team-leading 18th goal. “Getting a natural hat trick is always nice,” the 20-year-old Tavares said. “We did a lot of things right.” PANTHERS 3, DEVILS 2 Dmitry Kulikov fired a high wrist shot past Martin Brodeur 3:36 into overtime and the Panthers won their third straight over the Devils at home. Dennis Wideman and Evgeny Dadonov scored power-play goals for Florida. Nick Palmieri and David Clarkson scored for the Devils. RED WINGS 6, BLUE JACKETS 5 Johan Franzen scored 45 seconds into overtime to give visiting Detroit a win over Columbus. Drew Miller had a goal and two assists for the Red Wings. PENGUINS 3, BRUINS 2 Five days after giving up four goals in the final 3:23 to hand a victory to Boston, Pittsburgh recovered from blowing another two-goal lead to beat the Bruins in Boston and win without Sidney Crosby for the second consecutive game. Jordan Staal scored the winner with 16:35 left in the third. Crosby, who remains the league’s leading scorer with 66 points, was sidelined after taking hits to the head in back-to-back games. FLAMES 2, MAPLE LEAFS 1 Olli Jokinen put the winning goal past Jean-Sebastien Giguere in a shootout to lead visiting Calgary past Toronto. Mikhail Grabovski of the Maple Leafs tied the score with 13 seconds left in regulation. IN OTHER GAMES Marcel Goc scored the only goal in the shootout, and host Nashville rallied from a two-goal deficit after two periods to beat Chicago, 3-2 ... Jussi Jokinen scored twice and Eric Staal had a short-handed goal and two assists to lift Carolina over visiting Tampa Bay, 6-4. Steven Stamkos gave the Lightning an early lead with his league-leading 33rd goal ... Ray Whitney scored two goals and added an assist to surpass 900 career points and lead host Phoenix over Anaheim, 6-2 ... Trevor Daley and James Neal had two goals each to lead Dallas over visiting Atlanta, 6-1.
|
Hockey Ice;Pittsburgh Penguins;Crosby Sidney
|
ny0110225
|
[
"business",
"global"
] |
2012/05/23
|
To Czech Industry, Everything Is Nano
|
PRAGUE — Nanotechnology is a young but rapidly developing field that exploits the strange physical properties possessed by microscopic particles about one 800th the thickness of a human hair. The high surface area of a nanoparticle relative to its weight and volume makes it behave differently from larger masses of the same material. Over the past decade or so researchers have been developing nanotechnology applications in a broad range of fields including engineering, electronics, biotechnology, medicine, power generation and environmental protection. Industries based on nanotechnology are a rapidly growing niche in the economy of the Czech Republic, which, although small, is widely respected for its technical prowess. In February, the country had its own pavilion at the International Nanotechnology Trade Fair, Nanotech 2012, in Tokyo. Ten Czech companies took part. One was Advanced Materials-JTJ, which produces photocatalytic coating materials incorporating titanium dioxide nanoparticles, known as FN coatings. The semi-transparent, odorless coatings have the unusual property of purifying the air around them — removing viruses, bacteria, toxins, cigarette smoke and more through a light-activated catalytic process. “We went for one reason, because the commercialization of photocatalysis started there about 20 years ago. We have optimized the product and wanted to demonstrate it,” said Jan Prochazka, the company’s chief executive. “We made lots of contacts, talked to investors, companies and others, who are using first-generation products and want to upgrade.” Over the course of a year, “one square meter of FN-painted facade will clean and decontaminate over three million cubic meters of air,” or 106 million cubic feet, removing several kilograms of pollution, Mr. Prochazka said. As well as cleaning the air, the coating protects the painted surfaces from mold, fungus and the slow accumulation of dirt deposits that cause erosion and discoloring, he said. The process, activated by ultraviolet light — that is, sunshine — is both environmentally friendly and cost-effective. “For many people nano is a question mark, but really, everything is nano, except for gravel, sand and a few other materials,” Mr. Prochazka said in an interview in Prague. “Take a cup of water; you can’t imagine how many nanoparticles are inside.” The Czech government is actively supporting the nano industry through the participation of ministries and universities in research and development programs. At least 26 institutes in the Czech Academy of Sciences, 37 university faculties and nine state-funded research organizations are conducting basic research in various areas of nanoscience, according to CzechInvest, the country’s investment and business development agency. Development of applied nanotechnologies is being pursued by at least 15 research-oriented private companies and 69 manufacturers. Several nanotechnology clusters have also been established, bringing together small or medium-size businesses, academics and researchers. Nanoprogres is one of them. “We have universities, research and development centers and SMEs,” said Liliana Berezkinova, sales and marketing manager for Nanoprogres, using an abbreviation for small and medium-size enterprises. “SMEs can access innovation and universities can find people who can bring their ideas to market. “We pride ourselves on being a cluster with a strong technology transfer focus, business driven. We are looking for products, ” Ms. Berezkinova added. Nanoprogres has chosen to focus on nano-medicine. Its main product is a coaxial nanofiber with properties that enable it to be used as a carrier for substances that cannot be carried by more traditional fibers, making it suitable for a range of possible medical applications, like controlled drug delivery systems. Ms. Berezkinova says nano-medicine is an area that offers particularly exciting possibilities, although one drawback is the relatively long time that it takes to bring new products to market. “Applications in industry are further along than in medicine, because not so much testing is required as when you work with human bodies,” she said. “What we are doing is exciting — the ability to treat disease more gently and efficiently,” she said. “But we have to go through many tests, assurances of safety, and so forth.” Beside environmental applications, like those developed by Advanced Materials-JTJ, the Czech Republic has a well-developed industrial nanotechnology sector. Peter Hawlan, chief executive of Elmarco, a supplier of industrial-scale nanofiber production equipment, says Czech strength in the sector is a logical extension of the country’s industrial heritage. “The nanotechnology industry follows the machinery industry, which has a long tradition in the Czech Republic,” Mr. Hawlan said. “The first industrial-scale nanofiber production equipment was developed in 2004 on the basis of cooperation between Elmarco and the Technical University of Liberec.” The university, in the northern city of Liberec, is one of the country’s leading engineering institutes. “Now, many small or medium-sized companies and other institutions from the nanotechnology area have been founded and this industry is also strongly supported from state funds,” Mr. Hawlan said. Elmarco makes machinery for Nanospider technology, a process for producing a range of organic and inorganic nanofibers. Its products include laboratory-scale electrospinning equipment for research and development; production lines for low to moderate product volumes and high-volume machines. “The technology enables Elmarco to build industrial-scale production equipment without nozzles, needles or spinnerets,” Mr. Hawlan said. The use of Nanospider technology has made it easy to scale up from the laboratory to industrial production, and the technology’s adaptability to high volume production makes it possible to accelerate the introduction of nanofiber products into the market. Uses of nanofibers are being explored in areas as varied as medicine, clothing, air and water filtration systems and electrical batteries. “Nano has always been here — in concrete, mud — the difference is that in the last 20 years we started to see it, now we have the instruments,” Mr. Prochazka said. “Everything is nano and we can use nanoparticles to extend the limits. Nanotechnology will bring us to another world.” Maybe, but getting there may not be so easy for Czech manufacturers, Ms. Berezkinova noted. “We have tradition, people and ideas: The Czech Republic is one of the most advanced; we are definitely at the very front,” in developing new applications, she said. “But the question is, if we can compete at the execution level.” “The U.S., China, Japan sponsor nanotechnology the most — but we can’t complete with their money,” she said. “We need to find businesses to develop and market the products. Technology transfer and commercialization is a big challenge: Our outlook is optimistic — but we can’t lose focus.”
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Nanotechnology;Czech Republic;Medicine and Health
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ny0084660
|
[
"us",
"politics"
] |
2015/10/12
|
A Likely Debate Highlight: Democrats’ Distance From Obama
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The major Democratic presidential candidates disagree with President Obama on trade. They think he has not done enough to push for gun control or to overhaul the immigration system. They believe they could do a better job moving legislation through a Republican-controlled Congress. And on Tuesday night in Las Vegas at the first Democratic primary debate , a new reality will become clear: It’s not Barack Obama’s party anymore. In the seven years since Mr. Obama entered the White House on a wave of excitement, Democrats have developed a complicated relationship with their standard-bearer. And that is especially true for those running for their party’s nomination. Mr. Obama’s legacy and how much a Democratic successor should embrace it will hover over the debate, even as Hillary Rodham Clinton , Senator Bernie Sanders and the other Democratic candidates put forth their specific policy proposals and promises. “It is an existential moment,” said Jon Cowan, a former Bill Clinton administration official who is now president of the centrist think tank Third Way . “If you stand back far enough entering this debate,” he added, “you’ll see the Democratic Party they’re asking to lead, and there’s no question it has moved to the left.” Image Mr. Sanders implied that the president had been naïve to think Republicans would sit down with him. “I think it took the president too long to fully appreciate that," he said. Credit Michael Dwyer/Associated Press Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Sanders promise different approaches from Mr. Obama’s, as much in style as in substance. Both have suggested they could get more accomplished, though Mrs. Clinton does so in more oblique terms. In a podcast interview with the former Obama strategist David Axelrod, Mr. Sanders implied that the president had been naïve to think Republicans would sit down with him. “I think it took the president too long to fully appreciate that,” the Vermont senator said. Last week, Mrs. Clinton told Telemundo that Mr. Obama’s mass deportations were “part of a strategy” to get congressional Republicans on board with a comprehensive immigration overhaul and that the “strategy is no longer workable.” A theme likely to dominate the debate, on CNN, is the problem of economic inequality and with it the implicit critique that although Mr. Obama pulled the economy out of the crisis that enveloped it in 2008, the recovery has left the vast majority of Americans behind. That sentiment has manifested itself on the campaign trail in a populist conviction reflected in the major candidates’ positions on topics including trade agreements and Wall Street regulation. “They may not come out and criticize Obama, but they’ll all be saying, ‘This hasn’t been a good recovery for most people,’ ” said Dean Baker, an economist and a co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research . Mrs. Clinton reflects the party’s tack to the left on domestic issues. Last week, she said she could not support Mr. Obama’s signature trade pact , the Trans Pacific Partnership , which she had championed as secretary of state and which Mr. Sanders had come out forcefully against. She has also proposed doing away with the so-called Cadillac tax on certain health care plans, aligning herself with labor unions on dismantling a key part of Mr. Obama’s Affordable Care Act. Mr. Sanders has also taken aim at the law, saying it does not go far enough to make health insurance affordable for many Americans. Image “We’ve got a pretty dysfunctional mess in Washington,” Mrs. Clinton said at a recent rally. Credit Charlie Neibergall/Associated Press After much criticism from party liberals that the Obama administration did not do enough to punish the Wall Street executives responsible for the financial crisis, Mrs. Clinton on Thursday included in her proposal to regulate Wall Street this clear message: “When people commit crimes on Wall Street, they will be prosecuted and imprisoned.” That stood out as a break with the White House, which “basically took a pass when it came to prosecuting anyone from the financial crises,” Mr. Baker said. While the emphasis on economic populism can be attributed partly to the nature of a Democratic primary contest, during which candidates try to woo labor unions and the liberal activist base, polls show that there is a broader frustration among voters about income inequality. Sixty-one percent of Americans said they believed only a few people at the top had a chance to get ahead in today’s economy, and 66 percent said income and wealth in the United States should be more evenly distributed, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll from June. “The American public is anxious and angry and ready for very deep reform across kitchen table issues,” said Felicia Wong, the president and chief executive of the Roosevelt Institute , a liberal think tank. “And that’s really what’s going on in the electorate right now.” Last week, Mr. Obama hosted a White House summit meeting on how to lift middle-class wages, and at a fund-raiser in Los Angeles on Saturday, he said one of the problems that had not been fully solved during his administration was “the fact that wages and incomes for ordinary Americans are still flat.” But aides point to his plan on college affordability and his efforts to raise the minimum wage, expand overtime pay, and make child care more affordable and accessible. Who’s Winning the Presidential Campaign? History suggests that each party’s eventual nominee will emerge from 2015 in one of the top two or three positions, as measured by endorsements, fund-raising and polling. “In terms of helping middle-class families meet their biggest budgetary stresses, I think Obama has been there,” said Jared Bernstein, a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and a former economic adviser to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. “He hasn’t gone as far in that space as what the candidates are proposing,” Mr. Bernstein added, “but he’s gone part of the way.” Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, said in a briefing last week that Mr. Obama “understands that it is the responsibility of individual candidates to distinguish themselves.” “That means distinguishing themselves from their competitors,” Mr. Earnest continued. “And in some cases, that means distinguishing themselves from the current occupant of the office.” But if the substance of Mr. Obama’s policies will be indirectly debated on Tuesday, so will his style and the criticism that he has not tried hard enough to work with his political opponents. Without mentioning the president, Mrs. Clinton often promotes her ability to work with congressional Republicans, a theme she is likely to lean on heavily in the Tuesday debate. “We’ve got a pretty dysfunctional mess in Washington,” Mrs. Clinton said at a recent rally in Columbus, Ohio. “But I worked across the aisle as a senator for eight years,” she added. “I worked with Republicans as secretary of state. I know there is no substitute for working hard every single day to find common ground.” William A. Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former aide to Bill Clinton, said the candidates would face added pressure to explain precisely how they would move past the bipartisan dysfunction that defined the current administration. “We’ve had two presidents over a period of nearly 16 years who have failed on what was arguably the central promise of both their campaigns,” Mr. Galston said, referring to Mr. Obama and George W. Bush. “To bring a divided country back together.” Still, Mr. Obama is more broadly popular than Mr. Bush was in the fall of 2007, when the country began to take the measure of those who would succeed him. That makes too pointed a repudiation of Mr. Obama’s leadership risky for the Democratic candidates. The president, whose approval rating nationally is roughly 47 percent, enjoys loyal support from key constituencies: African-Americans, who make up a central bloc in Mrs. Clinton’s support, and college-educated white liberals, an important group for Mr. Sanders. On Sunday, Mr. Obama defended his legacy in an interview with CBS News’s “ 60 Minutes ” saying he was “very proud of what we’ve accomplished, and it makes me think I’d love to do some more.” When asked whether he would be elected for a third term if allowed to run, Mr. Obama answered with an unequivocal “yes.”
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2016 Presidential Election;Political Debates;Hillary Clinton;Bernard Sanders,Bernie Sanders;Barack Obama;Democrats
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ny0238588
|
[
"world",
"asia"
] |
2010/06/25
|
New Australian Leader Seen as Softer Alternative to Rudd
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SYDNEY — Australia ’s new prime minister, Julia Gillard, recently joked that she had more chance of being hired to play Australian-rules football than she did of ousting her former boss, Kevin Rudd . But after months of insisting that she would not challenge Mr. Rudd's leadership, Ms. Gillard seized the reins on Thursday in a surprise revolt that left Mr. Rudd fighting back tears at a news conference. Ms. Gillard had long been seen as Mr. Rudd’s likely successor because of her popularity and rank within the Labor Party. She is widely regarded as a softer alternative to Mr. Rudd, whose rigid, bookish personality had become irritating to an electorate frustrated by recent policy bungles. Ms. Gillard, 48, has received much praise for her calm, clear performances in Parliament. Her easygoing, colloquial style stands in direct contrast to Mr. Rudd’s wonkish demeanor. Fighting for the party leadership had been a “tough decision,” she said, one that she chose to undertake after several frank discussions with Mr. Rudd. “I had to make a judgment about what is in the best interests of the nation,” she told Australian Broadcasting Corp. on Thursday. “I came to that judgment with a heavy heart in many ways.” She acknowledged that it had been an emotional day for Mr. Rudd, and pledged to find a place for him in her government. He has also vowed to support her in the next election. The child of working-class parents who were raised in poverty, Ms. Gillard moved to Australia from her native Wales when she was 4 years old. As a baby, she contracted a lung infection that kept her in an oxygen tent for two weeks. Her parents decided to move to Australia when a doctor said she would be unable to lead a normal life and attend school unless she moved to a warmer climate. Ms. Gillard grew up in a suburb of Adelaide, and later studied arts and law at Adelaide University. There, she became a leading figure in university politics and aligned herself with left-leaning causes. She later became one of the first female partners at the law firm Slater & Gordon, where she cut her teeth in industrial law. After three failed attempts to run as a Labor Party candidate, Ms. Gillard was finally elected to represent the Melbourne seat of Lalor in 1998, the same year that Mr. Rudd entered national politics. She cites education and workers’ rights as her keystone issues. “One of the real reasons I got involved in politics at all is the sense of unfairness and lost opportunity, particularly for kids,” Ms. Guillard told Australian Broadcasting Corp. in a 2006 interview. “It does make me burn with anger that someone like my father didn’t get the opportunities he should have had.” Ms. Gillard worked closely with Mr. Rudd throughout much of her early parliamentary career, which was spent in opposition. Mr. Rudd appointed her as his deputy when he was selected as party leader in 2006, and then made her deputy prime minister after his landslide election the following year. As deputy prime minister, Ms. Gillard assumed control of the education, employment and workplace relations ministries, earning her the nickname “Minister for Everything.” There, she was instrumental in leading the government’s “Education Revolution” — a program that included giving a laptop to every high school student in Australia — and unwinding labor laws that had been implemented by the previous conservative government that reduced the power of unions in setting wages and settling disputes. Throughout Mr. Rudd’s tenure, Ms. Gillard remained one of his closest ministers. As such, she claimed her “fair share” of responsibility Thursday for his policy successes and failures, including a school infrastructure program that has been plagued by allegations of waste. Unmarried with no children, Ms. Gillard’s personal life has attracted significant attention. In her first year as deputy leader, one outspoken conservative senator, Bill Heffernan, said she could not understand the needs of Australian families and was unfit to govern because she was “deliberately barren.” He later apologized for the remark. “There’s something in me that’s focused and single-minded,” Ms. Gillard said of her decision not to marry and have children. “I’m kind of full of admiration for women who can mix it together — working and having kids — but I’m not sure I could have.” She lives with her partner, Tim Mathieson, a hairdresser she met in a Melbourne salon just as her career was entering overdrive in 2006. Ms. Gillard’s achievement in becoming the first woman to serve as Australia’s prime minister has been largely overshadowed by the stunning and widely unexpected ouster of Mr. Rudd. It was widely assumed that she would eventually replace Mr. Rudd, provided he could win the next election. But the coup’s timing — and Mr. Rudd’s deeply emotional response — took some of the shine off the day for some women voters and fellow lawmakers. Others were jubilant. “We shouldn’t underestimate the value of symbolism,” Natasha Stott Despoja, a former senator, wrote in an editorial on the Business Spectator Web site. “For many women, especially younger ones, she shows that access to the highest positions of power is possible.”
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Australia;Rudd Kevin;Politics and Government
|
ny0126842
|
[
"business",
"media"
] |
2012/08/22
|
Macy’s Creates ‘Yes, Virginia the Musical’ for Schools
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FOR decades, Macy’s has been on Broadway, literally. Soon, the department store will be there figuratively, too, as it develops a musical for schools around the country. The show, “Yes, Virginia the Musical,” is based on an animated, nonmusical television special, “Yes, Virginia,” that Macy’s has sponsored on CBS since 2009 as part of its Christmas advertising campaign that carries the theme “Believe.” The special is scheduled to return to CBS this fall, and will also appear on Univision, a Spanish-language network. “Yes, Virginia the Musical” is aimed at students in grades three through six, reflecting the ages of the child characters in both the stage and television versions. Macy’s will share “Yes, Virginia the Musical” with schools through a Web site, yesvirginiamusical.com , that offers content like downloadable scripts and scores; production reference materials; video clips of tips and encouraging words from performers like Florence Henderson; and a video of a recent test performance of the musical by children who attend the Stagedoor Manor Performing Arts Training Center in Loch Sheldrake, N.Y. Macy’s, part of Macy’s Inc., is providing the online content free and will not charge accredited schools royalties to perform the musical. Macy’s also plans to give 100 schools grants of $1,000 apiece to help them defray the costs of putting on the musical. (Schools can apply on the Web site for the grants, which will be given to the first 100 accredited schools that apply.) The idea underscores the growing role that entertainment is playing in marketing, particularly for retailers that are seeking to bring pizazz to the shopping experience when more consumers are making purchases online rather than in person. “It’s in keeping with Macy’s being an entertainment brand,” from fireworks on the Fourth of July to the parade on Thanksgiving Day, said Betsy Spence, vice president for integrated marketing at Macy’s, which is to formally announce the initiative on Wednesday. “Ever since the debut of the TV show, we’ve been saying, ‘Wouldn’t this make a great stage show or musical,’ ” said Ms. Spence, who worked on the project with Martine Reardon, chief marketing officer at Macy’s. “Yes, Virginia the Musical” is the third spinoff from “Yes, Virginia.” The first was a DVD of the TV special and the second was a storybook published in 2010 , “Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus,” written by Chris Plehal, who had been a copywriter at JWT New York, the creative agency for Macy’s. Mr. Plehal also wrote the television special, which was created and produced by Macy’s and JWT New York, part of the JWT unit of WPP, in conjunction with the Ebeling Group and the MEC Entertainment division of MEC, a WPP media agency. The idea for a musical that schools could stage grew from seeking ways to “invent a platform for the story of ‘Yes, Virginia’ to be told over and over again,” said Jeff Benjamin, chief creative officer at JWT North America. “That’s what an entertainment brand does today.” Matt MacDonald, co-chief creative officer at JWT New York, said: “It’s Macy’s opening the door to the story, to let other people into the experience and tell their version.” The musical was adapted by two executives at Macy’s Parade and Entertainment Group, Wesley Whatley creative director, who wrote the music, and William Schermerhorn, vice president and creative director, who wrote the book and lyrics. Coincidentally, the JWT executives and Ms. Spence said, when the agency suggested the idea, Mr. Whatley and Mr. Schermerhorn were already working on a musical version of “Yes, Virginia,” for a puppet show outside the Santaland in the flagship Macy’s store. “Yes, Virginia the Musical” and its siblings are based on the letter that an 8-year-old Manhattan girl, Virginia O’Hanlon, wrote to The New York Sun in 1897. The letter was answered by an editor, Francis Pharcellus Church, whose reply ran as an editorial under the headline “Is There a Santa Claus?” The editorial, which came to be known as “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus,” has been reprinted innumerable times. There is a brief glimpse of the 1897 version of Macy’s in “Yes, Virginia,” but no allusion to the store in “Yes, Virginia the Musical,” according to the JWT executives and Ms. Spence. That is to allay concerns that Macy’s is seeking to commercialize the school environment, they said. (There is a Broadway musical, “Here’s Love,” infused with references to Macy’s. It is adapted from the 1947 movie, “ Miracle on 34th Street ,” about Macy’s hiring the real Santa Claus to play Santa at the store.) Would those involved with “Yes, Virginia the Musical” like to see it, too, performed someday on Broadway? “Broadway shows are enormously expensive,” Mr. MacDonald said. “We said, ‘Instead of Broadway, let’s go to Main Street.’ ” “I don’t think we would turn it down,” he added, “but our goal is to see some kid do this in Ames, Iowa, and someday that kid get to Broadway.” Ms. Spence said to never say never. “Eventually, it’s something we’d consider,” she said, adding: “It’s a big undertaking to do a Broadway show. We’re good at big undertakings.”
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Yes Virginia the Musical (Play);Theater;Shopping and Retail;Macy's Inc;JWT;Christmas;Advertising and Marketing;Yes Virginia (TV Program);Yes Virginia the Musical (Play) (Play)
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ny0127961
|
[
"world",
"europe"
] |
2012/06/04
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Hostility Between Muslims and Nationalists Rattles Bonn, Germany
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BONN, Germany — The people who live in the trim row houses with well-tended gardens that line the streets of this spa town along the Rhine like to boast of their city’s tolerance, which dates to its time as the capital of West Germany and home to dozens of foreign embassies. “We used to be a city of diplomats,” said Christa Menden, who owns a flower shop. But since 1999, when the central government moved to Berlin, the capital of the reunited Germany , the diplomats have gone. Now there is a growing population of Muslim immigrant families, many of whom have moved into the neighborhood of Bad Godesberg, filling many of the houses left empty by the shift in capitals. Today Bonn, once tranquil, is a volatile cocktail of social tensions between its Muslim newcomers, who include some German converts as well as immigrants from Arab-speaking countries, with some hard-core elements, and a far-right nationalist group that is mounting a growing campaign against them. Last month, about 200 Muslims, many from other cities, gathered to defend the honor of the Prophet Muhammad after the far-right Pro-NRW party (for North Rhine-Westphalia) threatened to display caricatures of the Prophet during an anti-Muslim rally in front of the King Fahd Academy , an Islamic school built in 1995 by Saudi Arabia’s government. After the authorities tried unsuccessfully to win a court injunction preventing the display, they parked police vans to block the view of the offending cartoons. But after one of the 30 or so rightists climbed on the shoulders of another to flash the cartoon at the Muslims, who had just finished praying, a shower of rocks and shards from smashed flower pots flew at the police in response. “They just exploded,” said Robin Fassbender, a prosecutor in Bonn, who has begun an investigation that could yield attempted murder charges against a 25-year-old Muslim protester who sneaked through the police barrier and stabbed three officers, wounding two seriously. By the time the rioting stopped on May 6, the police said, they had rounded up 109 Muslim protesters. “They viewed the police as an organ of the state that wanted to insult Muslims by failing to prevent the caricatures from being shown,” Mr. Fassbender said. “That is a different dimension of violence than these officers are used to. They are trained to regularly take stones and broken bottles, but not to be specifically attacked like this.” Days earlier the same far-right group held a similar protest in another city, Solingen, where the cartoons of Muhammad were also paraded. The police there detained 32 Muslim protesters after they clashed with officers, throwing stones and charging the barriers separating them from the far-right demonstrators. The violence, which was preceded by a nationwide campaign by Salafists to hand out Korans in cities, has refocused the authorities’ attention on what they call a threat from the conservative Salafist movement. German’s interior minister, Hans-Peter Friedrich, has vowed to take stronger action against the Salafists. While they account for a tiny fraction of the estimated 4.3 million Muslims living in Germany, he noted, nearly all Islamic extremists known to German security officials, including several charismatic preachers, have links to the movement. They have proved adept at using social media and Internet forums to attract young followers in Bonn and surrounding areas. The King Fahd Academy, where the clashes with the police took place, stands incongruously in Bad Godesberg, its gold-topped minaret rising against the deep green bluffs of the Drachenfels crag, where legend has it that Siegfried slew the dragon. The school was intended to offer a traditional Arabic curriculum to children of diplomats stationed in Bonn. The city authorities tried to close the school in 2003 after it emerged that it taught an extreme form of Islam that encouraged a violent rejection of the Western humanistic values enshrined in the German Constitution. A compromise was reached, and the school has become a magnet for Muslim families. Several hundred move to Bonn each year, and Muslims now make up about 10 percent of the city’s population. Many are wealthy Arabs attracted to Bonn’s outstanding medical facilities. The Bonn police spokesman, Harry Kolbe, said, however, that the influx had also brought young Muslims with no jobs or diplomas, who clashed with their wealthier peers. Ms. Menden, whose flower shop sits on a corner opposite the King Fahd Academy, said she was traumatized by watching what had begun as a peaceful protest deteriorate into a street riot beneath her window. At first, Ms. Menden said, young men, many with long beards and traditional Arabic clothing, greeted her politely. She was impressed by how they had laid out their rugs in the center of the street and bent in unison to pray. But at some point, she said, she noticed that several young men were stuffing their pockets with the small slate chips that lined the garden along her exterior wall. “I went over to fuss at them, and one turned and threw the stones back in my face,” she said. Her husband pulled her inside to safety. She said it still upset her to know that the stones from her garden were thrown at the police by the very people who moments earlier had greeted her politely. “I do not feel hate, I do not feel fear,” Ms. Menden said. “I feel disappointment.” Other residents blame the city’s own education system for the troubles. Classes are taught in Arabic at several elementary schools, part of an effort at integration begun in 2003, when several hundred students had to leave the King Fahd Academy. “Years of work on integration were unraveled in that demonstration,” said Annette Schwolen-Flümann, district mayor of Bad Godesberg. Less than an hour after the disturbance, residents swept away the dirt and debris from the overturned flowerpots. Many were Muslims who had sought to keep the peace that Saturday afternoon and were themselves struggling to come to terms with the events. A Muslim woman who gave her name only as Ms. Elbay because, she said, she did not feel comfortable being identified in media outlets, said she has lived behind the parking lot where the rightist group held its demonstration for the past 11 years without any trouble. “It is difficult for us as Muslims,” Ms. Elbay said. “Our image is always being destroyed. We do our best to try to live a normal life; we send our children to integrated play groups, we have German friends, and then these people come and destroy it,” she said, referring to the Muslim demonstrators who had turned violent. Ms. Menden insisted that now she struggled to fight back anger whenever a Muslim neighbor greeted her. Another neighbor, Hans-Peter Weisz, who has lived on the street for 30 years, said his children were frightened that protests would recur there. “You can understand how a hate against foreigners can grow,” Mr. Weisz said, “It’s not good.”
|
Bonn (Germany);Muslims and Islam;Demonstrations Protests and Riots;Immigration and Emigration;Fringe Groups and Movements;Germany
|
ny0058121
|
[
"world",
"middleeast"
] |
2014/09/14
|
Kerry Scours Mideast for Aid in ISIS Fight
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CAIRO — Secretary of State John Kerry received broad assurances but no public commitments from Egypt on Saturday as he continued his tour of the Middle East to try to assemble a coalition behind an American campaign against the extremist group known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. In Baghdad, meanwhile, the new prime minister took a small step toward alleviating the deep alienation that has made some in the Sunni Muslim minority receptive to ISIS: He said Saturday that he had ordered the Iraqi security forces to stop “the indiscriminate shelling” of civilian communities under the control of the militants. Together, the professions of good intentions in Baghdad and Cairo underscored the long road ahead for the Obama administration as it tries to assemble a regional coalition to roll back and dismantle ISIS. After meeting with Mr. Kerry in Cairo, Sameh Shoukry, Egypt’s foreign minister, declared at a joint news conference that “Egypt believes it is very important for the world to continue their efforts strongly to fight this extremism.” But Egyptian officials declined to specify what help they would provide in the campaign against ISIS, and Mr. Shoukry made it clear that he also had in mind fighting Islamist militants at home and in neighboring Libya. Mr. Kerry has already visited Baghdad; Amman, Jordan; and Ankara, Turkey; and he attended an emergency meeting of regional governments in Jidda, Saudi Arabia, in which Arab nations endorsed a coordinated military and political campaign against ISIS. Saudi Arabia has pledged to allow the training of Syrian rebel forces opposed to ISIS at bases in its territory, but no country in the region has publicly detailed what military support it might provide. Early Sunday, Prime Minister Tony Abbott of Australia committed aircraft and military advisers to the effort. He said in a statement that the commitment was a response to a formal request from the United States, adding that combat troops would not be deployed. “The ISIL death cult threatens the people of Iraq, the region and the wider world,” Mr. Abbott said, referring to the group by the acronym for an alternate name, the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant. The Obama administration is keen to enlist material support from regional powers with Sunni Muslim majorities like Egypt, Turkey and Saudi Arabia to avoid the impression that the United States is intervening in a sectarian war on behalf of the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government against its opponents in the Sunni minority, some of whom have lent support to ISIS. Egypt is not expected to make an important military contribution; rather, American officials want Cairo to use its clout as the traditional capital of Sunni Islam — and home to the Al Azhar center of Sunni scholarship — to mobilize public opinion in the Arab world against ISIS. “As an intellectual and cultural capital of the Muslim world, Egypt has a critical role to play,” Mr. Kerry said. After ISIS made headlines around the world for beheading American hostages, militants in Sinai began carrying out beheadings as well, and Egyptian state media seized on the atrocities to underscore that the government’s fight to consolidate its authority at home was part of the same fight as the American battle with ISIS. A senior State Department official traveling with Mr. Kerry said that there were anecdotal accounts that volunteers who had fought with ISIS in Iraq and Syria had later provided tactical advice to the main Egyptian militant group, Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis, while stopping in the Sinai Peninsula on their way back to their homes in Egypt and North Africa. “They stop off and sort of lend their professional skills,” said the State Department official, who could not be identified under the agency’s rules for briefing reporters. “These terrorist groups are beginning to cooperate.” While in Cairo, Mr. Kerry met with President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt, Mr. Shoukry and Nabil al-Araby, the secretary general of the Arab League. During a visit in July, Mr. Kerry sought to strengthen relations with Mr. Sisi by declaring that he was confident that the United States would soon restore military aid it had suspended after Egypt’s military ousted President Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood and waged a bloody crackdown on his Islamist supporters. But Mr. Kerry also pressed Mr. Sisi on certain human rights issues, including the case of three journalists for Al Jazeera’s English-language network who were charged with conspiring with the Muslim Brotherhood to broadcast false reports of chaos. In remarks after their meeting, Mr. Kerry said he had received a very positive response from Mr. Sisi. The next day, an Egyptian judge overlooked an absence of evidence, convicted the journalists and sentenced each one to at least seven years in prison. None of the journalists — a Canadian citizen, an Australian and an Egyptian — have any history of Brotherhood ties or political activism. Mr. Kerry insisted on Saturday that he had not refrained from pressing human rights concerns even as he sought Egypt’s cooperation in fighting ISIS. “The United States does not ever trade its concerns over human rights for any other objective,” Mr. Kerry said. “We had a frank discussion today,” he said, adding that he understood the independence of the Egyptian judiciary. He said he was confident the issues would be addressed “on an appropriate schedule that is controlled by Egyptians, not by me or anybody else complaining.” In Baghdad, Haider al-Abadi, the new Iraqi prime minister, was speaking in a televised news conference about the plight of displaced Iraqis when he declared that he had told the security forces to stop “the indiscriminate shelling” of civilian populations in Sunni towns under the control of ISIS. “I have issued the orders to stop the indiscriminate shelling on cities inhabited by civilians,” Mr. Abadi said, “including cities where ISIS terrorists are operating.” Senior Iraqi officials have acknowledged in recent days that shelling by their armed forces has killed innocent civilians in the course of the battle against ISIS, but Mr. Abadi’s statement appeared to go further. By indicating that an order from the armed forces could curtail the “indiscriminate shelling,” he implied that the shelling had previously been tolerated as a matter of government policy. Such broad-brush attacks on Sunni towns have been part of what many Sunnis called a pattern of sectarian bias by the Shiite-dominated security forces. In a report set to be issued Sunday, the independent group Human Rights Watch said that one Iraqi government airstrike at the beginning of this month hit a school near Tikrit where displaced Sunni families had taken refuge; it killed at least 31 civilians, including 24 children, the group said, calling for an investigation. Human Rights Watch reported in July that 17 Iraqi government airstrikes, including six with barrel bombs, had killed at least 75 civilians and wounded hundreds more in several mainly Sunni areas. The United Nations special representative for Iraq, Nickolay Mladenov, said in a statement that he “welcomed” and “commended” Mr. Abadi’s order.
|
ISIS,ISIL,Islamic State;Egypt;John Kerry;Iraq;Terrorism;US Politics;State Department;Abdel Fattah el-Sisi;US Foreign Policy;US Military
|
ny0122342
|
[
"world",
"middleeast"
] |
2012/09/16
|
Pope Benedict XVI, in Lebanon, Makes Plea for Religious Freedom
|
BEIRUT, Lebanon — Pope Benedict XVI on Saturday implored young Christians not to emigrate from Lebanon, saying they were “meant to be protagonists” as the country moved forward, and urging them to forge closer bonds with Muslim youth. “You are the future of this fine country and of the Middle East in general,” he said. “Seek to build it together.” The pope’s remarks came on the second day of visit to Lebanon, where he has sought to mix a strong advocacy for Christians in the region with calls for tolerance, religious freedom and greater cooperation between faiths. His comments on emigration, delivered at a festive youth rally attended by thousands of people, seemed intended to reach beyond Lebanon’s borders, at the kinds of fears that have led Christians to leave Iraq, Egypt and the Palestinian territories in large numbers. “I am aware of the difficulties which you face daily, on account of instability and a lack of security,” he said. “Your sense of being alone and on the margins.” He added, “Not even unemployment and uncertainty should lead you to taste the bitter sweetness of emigration, which involves an uprooting and a separation for the sake of an uncertain future.” The start of Benedict’s first to the region since 2009 was initially overshadowed by the anti-American protests that surged through the region in reaction to an anti-Muslim video. The pope has not referred to the video directly, presumably to avoid stoking any further controversy at a delicate moment. Benedict’s first appearance on Saturday was at the presidential palace in Beirut, where he spoke to an audience of diplomats and Lebanese politicians — including central players in this country’s long and bloody civil war. Referring to the region’s troubled politics as “interminable birth pangs,” he repeated his contention that Lebanon could serve as an example of coexistence. “It is not uncommon to see two religions within the same family,” he said, speaking of Lebanon. “If this is possible within the same family, why should not be possible at the level of the whole of society?” As the sun set at the youth rally, the pope struck a parental note, cautioning young people to be wary of “parallel worlds” — including drugs, pornography and even social networks, which he said could lead to addiction. Returning to the more grave problems facing the region, the pope greeted young people from Syria, paralyzed by an 18-month civil war, who he said were in attendance. “I want to say how much I admire your courage,” he said. “Tell your families and friends back home that the pope has not forgotten you.”
|
Freedom of Religion;Benedict XVI;Lebanon;Middle East and North Africa Unrest (2010- );Roman Catholic Church;Muslims and Islam
|
ny0219967
|
[
"business"
] |
2010/02/03
|
Shares Rise for 2nd Day on Earnings and Housing Reports
|
Investors rallied on Tuesday behind signs of stability in the housing sector and indications that businesses had bolstered revenue, lifting stocks for a second day. A stream of positive economic data this week has helped shares regain some of the losses they endured amid a steep sell-off in late January. But analysts cautioned that volatility could re-emerge as traders get more details on the state of the United States job market and Greece’s debt woes later this week. “This is still very cloudy water,” said Marc Harris, co-head of global research for RBC Capital Markets. “We know the direction of this market — we expect it to increase 6 to 8 percent this year — but we don’t know how quickly and how consistently we are going to get there.” The source of Tuesday’s momentum was the housing market, which showed signs of renewal despite its persistent struggles: consumers unwilling to make large investments, a flood of foreclosures and an influx of shaky mortgages. A report on pending sales of homes showed a 1 percent increase in December, after a 16 percent decline in November. Compared with a year earlier, pending sales were up 11 percent. Investors welcomed the results, but there were hints of longer-term trouble. Economists said the government’s efforts to prop up the housing industry through a tax credit, which expires in April, were slow to show results. “So far, the tax credit is having hardly any effect at all,” said Patrick Newport, an economist for IHS Global Insight. “It’s going to kick in at some point, but we’re running out of time.” Adding to the optimism over the housing sector, the home builder D. R. Horton announced a first-quarter profit of $192 million, sending shares of the company up nearly 11 percent. The company said sales had increased 23 percent, to $1.1 billion, a welcome sign during an earnings season when investors are focusing on revenue growth. Ford rose 2.43 percent after the company reported sales rose 25 percent in January compared with a year earlier. Ford seemed to benefit from the cloud hanging over Toyota, which last week halted sales and production of eight models as it developed a fix for a defect in accelerator pedals. Toyota said its sales fell 16 percent in January; its shares fell 2.2 percent on Tuesday. The aluminum producer Alcoa rose almost 2.32 percent after it was upgraded by Citigroup, and American Express climbed 2.12 percent after Bank of America upgraded the company and said earnings would continue to grow. At the close, the Dow Jones industrial average was up 1.09 percent, or 111.32 points, at 10,296.85. The broader Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index increased 1.3 percent, or 14.13 points, to 1,103.32, and the technology-dominated Nasdaq composite index rose 0.87 percent, or 18.86 points, to 2,190.06. Tuesday’s gains helped solidify the largest two-day increase for stocks in nearly three months. As stocks rose, oil reached a two-week high, ending the day at $77.23, about 4 percent higher. Stocks have tumbled in recent weeks, raising concerns that the market could be headed for a decline of 10 percent or more. Sean C. Kraus, chief investment officer for CitizensTrust, said investors were slowly regaining confidence. “The market was way oversold, and there’s definitely something of a knee-jerk reaction now on any positive news,” Mr. Kraus said. On Tuesday, traders were also dissecting remarks by Paul A. Volcker, an adviser to President Obama and a former Federal Reserve chairman, who told the Senate Banking Committee that the government should more strictly regulate capital and liquidity levels. Investors have worried that Washington’s crackdown on big banks might hurt future earnings. As stocks climbed, the dollar weakened against most world currencies, though it strengthened slightly against the euro , hovering slightly below $1.40. Gold rose about 1 percent, to $1,114.45 an ounce. Interest rates were steady. The Treasury’s benchmark 10-year note rose 2/32, to 97 26/32, and the yield slipped to 3.64 percent, from 3.65 percent late Monday. Following are the results of Tuesday’s Treasury auction of four-week bills:
|
Stocks and Bonds;Factories and Manufacturing
|
ny0260486
|
[
"us",
"politics"
] |
2011/06/29
|
Palin, in Iowa, 'Still Thinking About' Running
|
PELLA, Iowa — Making a rare visit to early-voting Iowa, Sarah Palin stoked a new round of speculation about whether she would enter the 2012 presidential race — or was continuing a very public flirtation for ends known best to herself. The ostensible reason for her visit on Tuesday was a premiere of a documentary about her years as Alaska governor, not an overtly political appearance. But the timing — one day after Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota announced her candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination in Iowa — raised questions about how much ground Ms. Palin might be losing to rivals who are already lining up donors and building staffs in early-voting states. Arriving here late Tuesday afternoon with her husband, Todd, Ms. Palin said she was still making up her mind. “A lot goes into such a life-changing, relatively earth-shattering type of decision,” she said as she entered the Pella Opera House for the 5 p.m. screening of the film, to be followed by a cookout for 1,000. “Still thinking about it.” Republican leaders in Iowa, which holds the nation’s first nominating contest early next year, acknowledged that Ms. Palin’s celebrity bought her a lot of time — maybe even until Labor Day — but said that remaining above the fray for too long had risks. Gov. Terry Branstad, a Republican, said it was not possible to win Iowa’s caucuses without grass-roots campaigning. “My feeling,” Mr. Branstad said, “is Iowans like candidates who are humble and hard working and who will make the extra effort to see people in all parts of the state and be open and honest and share their plans and vision.” Craig Schoenfeld, an experienced strategist who ran Newt Gingrich’s Iowa operation until he resigned with other staff members this month, said interest in Ms. Palin was overshadowed by Mrs. Bachmann’s entry into the race and by anticipation that Gov. Rick Perry of Texas might also get in. “To be honest,” Mr. Schoenfeld said, “I have not come across a lot of folks that are waiting in the wings for Governor Palin to get in the race.” But Peter Singleton, a self-styled Palin volunteer who has spent seven months traveling in Iowa to build support for her, said an army of workers would materialize if she gave the word. “She has a lot more support in this state than people have any idea,” said Mr. Singleton, who said he did not work officially for Ms. Palin. “The race is wide open right now.” The choice of Pella for the visit seemed no more coincidental than the timing. It is one of the state’s most conservative communities, prosperous thanks to the descendants of Dutch immigrants, with a wooden windmill on the town green. Republicans and independents outnumber Democrats nearly three to one, said Irene Blom, the chairwoman of the Marion County Republican Committee, adding that opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage are big issues. Many Republicans here said their dream candidate for 2012 would have been Mike Huckabee, who won the 2008 Iowa caucuses with the strong support of evangelical Christians but who is not running this time. Absent Mr. Huckabee, residents said they would like to see Ms. Palin enter the race. “I just came from Rotary,” said Joe Becker, the owner of Ulrich’s Meat Market, which ships bologna and beef jerky around the country. “Huckabee supporters would like to see Sarah run.” Vickie Heerema, a teller at the Marion County Bank, said she liked Ms. Palin because “she seems so normal and down to earth and is so open about her life.” Other admirers, though, questioned how electable Ms. Palin was because of her personality and past statements that have sometimes been polarizing. “I don’t know if you want to call it baggage or history, it will be hard for her,” said Mike Rottier, the owner of Stravers Hardware, who added that he appreciated her “straight talk.” There is ample fodder for both views in the documentary, “The Undefeated,” a deeply admiring portrait of Ms. Palin that was made independently but with her tacit cooperation. It portrays her as a decisive chief executive during her 2 ½ years as Alaska governor, who overcame Big Oil and corrupt state politicians. It blames the mainstream news media, no less than quavering mainstream Republicans, for humiliating her during her vice-presidential run in 2008 and ever since. The film is scheduled for a limited theatrical release in several cities later this summer. Arriving here, Ms. Palin said, “I’m very thankful that someone would bother to go to these efforts to make a documentary about the record of my team in Alaska.” She laughed off a remark that her daughter Bristol made earlier in the day that Ms. Palin had made up her mind about whether to run for president. Ms. Palin said she texted her daughter, saying, “You remember, Bristol, what we talk about on the fishing boat stays on the fishing boat.” She repeated that she was still undecided.
|
Palin Sarah;Presidential Election of 2012;Iowa;Bachmann Michele M
|
ny0283357
|
[
"sports",
"baseball"
] |
2016/07/30
|
Rays Rough Up Ivan Nova in What May Be His Final Start for the Yankees
|
TAMPA, Fla. — For all that the eternally easygoing Ivan Nova has encountered in his career — starting a playoff opener, undergoing Tommy John surgery, getting sent to the bullpen — he seems to greet it all the same way: with a shrug. If Nova were any more laid back, he would be in a hammock. So it was notable on Friday night, after Manager Joe Girardi came to the mound to relieve him in the fifth inning and with the Yankees on their way to a 5-1 loss to Tampa Bay, that Nova turned to the home plate umpire Laz Diaz on his walk back to the dugout. Nova said something and Diaz said something right back. Nova then talked some more, and gestured with his glove. If the complaints were about Diaz’s strike zone, Diaz had a ready retort: Look at the scoreboard. When Nova had finally finished his say, he reached the dugout and fired his glove against the wall. If Nova’s outburst was uncharacteristic, it may also have been his last act as a Yankee. With the non-waiver trade deadline on Monday, Nova an impending free agent and playoff contenders seeking pitching, Nova could find himself in a new uniform soon. “Whatever is going to happen is going to happen,” Nova said afterward. “I don’t have any control about that.” It could be the type of move the Yankees, who remained six games behind Baltimore in the American League East, make regardless of whether they consider themselves buyers or sellers. Nova said he did not want to be traded, but there was also an awareness that as he had begun to pitch well in recent weeks — he had allowed one run in three of his last four starts — he was increasing his attractiveness to other teams. “Sometimes when you hear your name in trade rumors and you pitch extremely well, maybe then you don’t stay,” Girardi said before the game. “All I know is he’s been throwing the ball well and we need him to continue.” But Nova’s command of his fastball and curveball was off from the start. Logan Forsythe hit Nova’s third pitch over the left-field wall, which was not necessarily a bad omen. Earlier this week in Houston, Michael Pineda and C. C. Sabathia surrendered early home runs but still had strong outings. But two batters later, Corey Dickerson smacked a solo homer to right to make the score 2-0. It was not the last battering of Nova. Brad Miller tripled and doubled and scored twice. Evan Longoria doubled. And third baseman Chase Headley prevented at least two more extra-base hits by getting his glove on hard-hit balls. Nova said his words with Diaz were about the strike zone. “I think it’s frustration,” Girardi said. Nova is the latest in a line of promising starting pitching prospects that came up in the Yankees system but never fulfilled their promise. Others, including Phil Hughes, Ian Kennedy and Joba Chamberlain, eventually moved on. Nova, who is from the Dominican Republic, was signed as a 16-year-old in 2004, making him the longest-tenured player in the organization other than Alex Rodriguez. He went 16-4 with a 3.70 earned run average in 2011 but never again approached those heights. He returned last June from Tommy John surgery by throwing six and two-thirds shutout innings but ended the season demoted to the bullpen. As ineffective as Nova was on Friday, there was another, more familiar culprit: the offense. It was the 10th time in 14 games since the All-Star break that the Yankees have scored three runs or fewer. Jake Odorizzi, who lost a no-hitter and the game when Starlin Castro hit a two-run, seventh-inning homer — the Yankees’ only hit — in a 2-1 loss here on May 29, did not need to be nearly so perfect. Odorizzi, who like Nova has been the subject of trade talk, left two runners aboard in the first. Then he sailed into the seventh, by which time he had a 5-0 lead. “He puts the fastball at the top of the zone and that’s not easy to do,” catcher Brian McCann said. The Yankees broke through in the eighth on Mark Teixeira’s run-scoring single, but they could not further dent the Rays. The left-hander Xavier Cedeno came on to retire Didi Gregorius on a fly ball with two on to end the eighth. Rodriguez singled as a pinch-hitter in the ninth, his first at-bat since turning 41 on Wednesday. But Rays closer Alex Colome came on to retire Brett Gardner and Jacoby Ellsbury to end the game. Girardi chose not to use Rodriguez in the seventh, instead letting Rob Refsnyder hit against reliever Kevin Jepsen. “This has been a different guy against right-handers is the bottom line,” Girardi said of Rodriguez. “So, I’m going with what I see and the numbers are telling you. That’s what I’m doing.”
|
Baseball;Yankees;Tampa Bay Rays
|
ny0024798
|
[
"sports",
"tennis"
] |
2013/08/26
|
Gilbert Enjoys Playing Name Games
|
Brad Gilbert is not necessarily the Chris Berman of professional tennis. He began experimenting with nicknames on the air seven or eight years ago, but his nicknames tend to be more off the cuff, more freewheeling, than preplanned. He does not always have carte blanche in sharing them. When he has tried, for instance, to get away with calling Rafael Nadal “Ralph” during a broadcast, his ESPN colleague Chris Fowler has objected to the Americanization. Image Credit Mike Ehrmann/Getty Images “Chris gets so mad at me for calling him that,” Gilbert said. “He banned me from saying that, says I have to call him Rafael or Rafa out of respect. So I need to come up with something better.” On the other hand, Gilbert got away with calling Vasek Pospisil, a relatively unknown Canadian, the Popsicle. “One guy told me that he thought Popsicle was idiotic,” Gilbert said (for the record, Pospisil is pronounced POS-puh-sil). “Then I had other people tell me it was hilarious. I’ve never had a player tell me they didn’t like something. None of them are derogatory; they’re fun.” In the beginning, Gilbert — a former tour player and coach of Andre Agassi and Andy Roddick and an author (“Winning Ugly”) — used the nicknames mostly in the studio or in panel discussions because his courtside analysis was not conducive to it. Image Brad Gilbert tweets nicknames for top tennis players with Araton story But when Gilbert went on Twitter in 2009, he found the perfect forum for being playful. His more than 57,000 followers on @bgtennisnation have become accustomed to his references to Roger Federer as Fedfan. His explanation: “It’s clearly derived from the fact that his fans are the most hard-core on the planet. They care so much about anything said about him, done on him, so I joined him and his fans at the hip.” His favorites include Kerber Baby, for Angelique Kerber; the Genius, for the now-retired Marion Bartoli, who has said her I.Q. is 175; Muzzard, for Andy Murray, which Gilbert can explain only by citing Murray’s typically disheveled look; Jerzy Boy, for the rising Polish player Jerzy Janowicz; Agi Rad, for Janowicz’s countrywoman Agnieszka Radwanska; Granola Bars, for the Spaniard Marcel Granollers;Sloane Ranger, for the American Sloane Stephens; K-Viddy, for Petra Kvitova; SW, for Serena Williams (he noted that SW19 is part of Wimbledon’s address); and the Missile, for the 22-year-old Canadian Milos Raonic, who defeated Pospisil in the Rogers Cup semifinals. The moral of Gilbert’s story: when in doubt, go with the Missile over a Popsicle.
|
Tennis;Brad Gilbert;ESPN;US Open Tennis
|
ny0089685
|
[
"sports",
"golf"
] |
2015/09/26
|
No. 1 Ranking Remains a Slippery Spot for Day, Spieth and McIlroy
|
ATLANTA — Jason Day followed Rory McIlroy to the interview room Wednesday at the Tour Championship and, after taking his seat, smiled and slyly observed, “Rory warmed the seat for me.” Day’s playful aside summed up the variability at the top in men’s golf. The world No. 1 ranking has changed hands four times since the P.G.A. Championship, with different players gracing the spot in five of the past six weeks. On Monday, Day unseated Jordan Spieth, who succeeded McIlroy, who supplanted Spieth, who seized the position from McIlroy in mid-August. If Day is supplanted by McIlroy or Spieth in next week’s rankings, which could happen once the Tour Championship results are final, it will be the first time since 1997 that there has been a change at the top of the men’s game in five consecutive weeks. Back then, Greg Norman relinquished the No. 1 ranking to Tiger Woods, who surrendered it to Ernie Els, who yielded it to Norman, who returned it to Woods. The No. 1 ranking in golf is a jewel whose worth is difficult to appraise. The crown sat so heavy on Spieth’s head, it weighed him down on the course. On the eve of the tournament, Spieth, 22, said, “I was a little caught up in just trying to be there and force being there each hole I played.” The reality, he said, is that over the next several years, “there’s going to be a lot of change that happens, and there’s no denying that.” Spieth added, “The quicker I can accept that, the easier it can be to free me up and to play my own game.” Spieth hit only nine greens Friday, but he scrambled well enough to post the low round of the day, a four-under-par 66, to vault into second place at six under, three strokes behind the front-running Henrik Stenson. Day, 27, had aspired to be No. 1 since he was 12 years old. When he finally reached the summit after the BMW Championship, his fourth victory in six starts, he was struck by how anticlimactic it felt. “It’s not like that one big shining moment or one big sense of relief that, oh, I’ve done it now,” Day said. He added: “But I’m still the same guy as I was the week before I won and got to No. 1. I still feel the same. So it’s great to see my name up there, and it’s pretty cool to be the best player on the planet, but once again, I understand that to be the best, you have to win, and you have to win consistently.” Day posted a 71, as did the 26-year-old McIlroy, and is tied for ninth at even par. McIlroy, who is three under, has spent 95 nonconsecutive weeks at No. 1. He recalled the thrill of reaching the summit for the first time, after weathering a charge by Woods to win the 2012 Honda Classic. “It’s almost like a target; it’s a bull’s-eye,” McIlroy said. So far this week, everyone is taking aim at Stenson, who chased his opening 63 with a 68. Stenson, the 2013 FedEx Cup champion, is No. 6 in the world. He has been as high as No. 2, most recently in March. Getting to No. 1 would be a thrill, he said, “but at the same time, I think for me I would rather win a major championship.” The world rankings are based on a two-year points system, and Stenson said, “Sometimes the system is kind of dragging behind a bit.” Is the world rankings system perfect? Probably not, McIlroy said this month. “You can do it on a one-year point system instead of two,” he said. “I think two years is a reflection of how you played. At the end of the day, it’s just about playing and playing well.” The rankings are like post positions for a Triple Crown race. They are but a starting point. The results will sort out who is the best. “He’s done really well,” McIlroy said, referring to Day, “and I’m just one of the guys that is going to try and make it tough for him to stay there.”
|
Golf;Jason Day;Rory McIlroy;Jordan Spieth;PGA Championship
|
ny0219833
|
[
"world",
"asia"
] |
2010/05/22
|
Pakistani Major Among 2 New Arrests in Bombing
|
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — An army officer and a businessman have been detained as part of a widening inquiry into a circle of Pakistanis who had some knowledge of the activities of the man charged with trying to set off a crude car bomb in Times Square, according to a Western official and an American intelligence official. The army officer was arrested in Rawalpindi, the garrison city that serves as the headquarters of the Pakistani Army, the American intelligence official said. He appeared to have been disaffected, and his involvement with Faisal Shahzad , the Pakistani-American charged with the failed bombing in New York, did not signal the involvement of the Pakistani Army in the attack, the intelligence official said. The arrest of the officer, who holds the rank of major and whose name was not disclosed, and of Salman Ashraf Khan, 35, an executive of a catering company that organized functions for the American Embassy here, suggested the participation of a group of Pakistanis in helping Mr. Shahzad after he returned to Pakistan from the United States last year to plan the bombing, the officials said. Several other Pakistani men have been arrested in the Islamabad area in connection with the case, according to a Pakistani intelligence official who did not offer details about the men’s backgrounds. A senior Pakistani official said Friday that Mr. Khan and the army major were among several Pakistanis being questioned in connection with the Times Square case. Investigators were still sorting out exactly what role, if any, each individual played in helping Mr. Shahzad develop and plan the attack, the official said. The arrest of the army major, which was first reported by The Los Angeles Times, raised questions of whether the Pakistani Army harbored some officers and soldiers sympathetic to the cause of the Pakistani Taliban, the militant group that Mr. Shahzad has told American investigators trained him for his bombing attempt. Mr. Shahzad has said he traveled to North Waziristan, a major base for the Pakistani Taliban, to prepare for the attack. The Pakistani Army has conducted a series of offensives against the Pakistani Taliban in the past year, and the arrest of an officer for working surreptitiously against that policy would be considered an embarrassment for the army, which is the country’s most powerful institution. The spokesman for the Pakistani Army denied earlier this week that an officer had been detained in the Times Square case. He said that an officer had been arrested because he had declined to fight, for religious reasons. Pakistani officials have been reluctant to discuss the Times Square bombing case, and when they have done so they have played down any involvement of the Pakistani Taliban, choosing instead to depict Mr. Shahzad as a lone operator. The nation’s premier spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence , is in charge of the investigation of the case, Pakistani officials have said. Like Mr. Shahzad, the catering executive, Mr. Khan, attended college in the United States. He appears to have been part of a loose network of middle-class, educated Pakistani men here in Islamabad, the capital, who assisted Mr. Shahzad in planning the Times Square attack. The investigation and arrests in Islamabad appeared to concentrate on this informal network, which is suspected of having helped to recruit Pakistanis living abroad who wanted to return home to train for terrorist attacks, a Western official said. They appeared to be motivated by a strong belief in jihadist causes and a hatred of the West, the official said. The network appears to have included Mr. Khan and a close friend, Ahmed Raza Khan, who, like Mr. Khan, was arrested in Islamabad on May 10, Mr. Khan’s father, Rana Ashraf Khan, said. Mr. Shahzad is the son of a retired senior Pakistani Air Force officer, and it appeared that the arrested army major was an acquaintance of Mr. Shahzad’s father, according to a British terrorism expert, Sajjan Gohel, who is familiar with the investigation into the Times Square bombing. The major may have helped Mr. Shahzad get in touch with the Pakistani Taliban and may have helped him travel to North Waziristan, Mr. Gohel said. Mr. Khan’s arrest became public on Friday, after the United States Embassy warned American residents in Pakistan to avoid using his company, Hanif Rajput Caterers, because “terrorist groups may have established links” to it. The embassy sent an e-mail message with the warning and posted it on the embassy’s Web site. Mr. Khan disappeared May 10, when he failed to arrive at the company headquarters after leaving his house in his car, his father, who is the company’s chief executive, said in an interview in Islamabad. Mr. Khan graduated from the University of Houston in 2000, having majored in computer science, and then returned to Pakistan to work in the family’s catering business, his father said. Since graduating, he had not returned to the United States and he was married three years ago, his father said. Rana Ashraf Khan described his son as religious, but “definitely not an extremist.” Asked if his son had negative feelings toward the United States, he said: “To be honest, yes. But that is common.” “I am shocked,” he said of the accusation that his son was connected to the Times Square bombing, saying that his son had organized 900 catering events in the last six months, some for as many as 2,000 guests. The father said his son and his son’s wife lived with him in the family home in Islamabad. Mr. Khan left the home for work at his usual time, about 11 a.m., on May 10, the father said. He never reached the office, according to the account. About noon, a man turned up outside the family’s house in Mr. Khan’s car, parked it and then left in a waiting taxi, the father said. A dinner for 20 people, booked by a senior American diplomat for Saturday night, was suddenly canceled Friday by the United States Embassy, said Fahim Khan, the company’s sales manager. Until several years ago, when security at the embassy was tightened, the company catered the annual ball for the United States Marines, he said. The notice circulated by the United States Embassy came two days after the national security adviser, Gen. James L. Jones, and the head of the Central Intelligence Agency , Leon E. Panetta, arrived in Islamabad to share leads with the Pakistani government on the investigation into the Times Square case. The elder Mr. Khan, who founded the catering company, said that despite frequent requests, the Pakistani authorities had refused to disclose his son’s whereabouts.
|
Pakistan;Shahzad Faisal;Times Square and 42nd Street (NYC);Inter-Services Intelligence;Central Intelligence Agency;Terrorism;Kahn Salman Ashraf
|
ny0233695
|
[
"business",
"global"
] |
2010/08/12
|
Dollar Hits Low Against Yen, Dealing Blow to Japan’s Economy
|
TOKYO — The dollar sank to a 15-year low against the yen on Wednesday, as the Federal Reserve’s pessimistic view of the American economy prompted investors to sell the American currency for safer assets. The strengthening yen comes as a further blow to a Japanese economy that is suffering the effects of deflation . The dollar, which has declined more than 10 percent against the yen in the last three months, dropped to 84.72 yen on the Electronic Brokering Services trading platform late Wednesday — the lowest level since April 1995, when the dollar hit a low of 79.75 yen in the aftermath of the 1985 Plaza Accords, the coordinated effort between major economies to depreciate the dollar. In Japan, the dollar’s decline has ignited fears that too strong of a domestic currency could harm the country’s recovery, led by exporters like Toyota. The yen tends to strengthen against other currencies despite a weak economy at home because Japan still runs a current-account surplus, making a run on the currency unlikely. The yen’s strength has also fueled speculation that the Japanese government may intervene to weaken its currency. A strong yen hurts Japanese exporters by making their goods more expensive overseas and by eroding the value of their repatriated earnings. Japanese officials have held off suggesting that an currency intervention is in the works — a maneuver Tokyo has avoided since March 2004. On Wednesday, the Japanese finance minister, Yoshihiko Noda, said he was “closely watching” currency markets. Indeed, many analysts do not expect Japan to intervene. To be effective, such intervention requires international coordination; moreover, Tokyo has supported Washington’s efforts to pressure China to let its currency appreciate, as part of a commitment among the world’s largest economies to let market forces determine currency levels. With intervention unlikely, the onus has fallen on the Bank of Japan to shore up the country’s faltering economy. The dollar-yen exchange rate is closely correlated with the spread, or difference, between interest rates in the United States and Japan, so by lowering interest rates in Japan, the central bank could help ease the upward pressure on the yen. Pressure increased on the Bank of Japan to act after steps announced by Federal Reserve on Tuesday reinforced expectations that American interest rates would remain at record lows for some time. The Fed’s plan to buy government debt drove down yields in the Treasury markets, narrowing the spread with Japan, which was a factor in the yen’s spike on Wednesday. But Japan’s interest rates are already near zero, limiting the central bank’s policy options. The bank also maintains that the economy is “gradually recovering,” making it difficult for policy makers to justify further monetary easing. At the end of a policy meeting on Tuesday, the bank announced it would leave monetary policy unchanged. “The yen has appreciated to the level at which the B.O.J. has taken actions in the past,” Yunosuke Ikeda, a strategist for Nomura, wrote Wednesday in a research note. “However, we see no sign that the B.O.J. is very concerned about the economy’s downside risks.” “We believe it is unlikely that the B.O.J. would take additional easing steps any time soon,” Mr. Ikeda said, but added that the central bank could get more serious about taking action if the Japanese currency were to hit levels closer to 82 yen to the dollar.
|
Economic Conditions and Trends;Yen (Currency);US Dollar (Currency);Currency;Japan
|
ny0239889
|
[
"nyregion"
] |
2010/12/07
|
Sharing the Dakota With John Lennon
|
Long before its history was marked by the sound of bullets, thousands of fragrant flowers and crowds grievously singing “Imagine,” the Dakota was just another historic Manhattan co-op where among its famous inhabitants lived a musician named John Lennon . Before he was gunned down in front of the building 30 years ago Wednesday, he was the seventh-floor resident who brought sushi to the building’s October potluck. He was known as a protective father and an enterprising real estate collector, irking a few neighbors by buying up five apartments in the building. One of the many quirks and privileges of living in Manhattan is finding neighbors who are famous poets, celebrated scientists and aging jazz musicians. It was no different for residents at the Dakota, who grew used to seeing the former Beatle pass through the building’s entrance in his fur coat. What made the Dakota different from other buildings, besides its distinctive gothic design, was that so many residents were also celebrities that it afforded Mr. Lennon a certain degree of privacy. “This building is chockablock full of famous people,” said Roberta Flack, who lives in the Dakota next door to Yoko Ono . “Most artists like myself tend to keep to themselves.” Mr. Lennon’s and Ms. Ono’s life in the Dakota began in 1973, when they were looking to move from their loft on Bank Street. Bob Gruen, who photographed Mr. Lennon when he lived in New York City, said the couple wanted a home with better security. He said they looked at homes in Greenwich, Conn., and on Long Island before buying the apartment at the Dakota from the actor Robert Ryan, making it past the building’s notoriously picky board. While their early days in the Dakota were rocky and Mr. Lennon briefly left his wife for May Pang, Mr. Gruen said that Mr. Lennon returned by late 1974 and the couple settled into the throes of nesting. Ms. Flack recalled hearing them rehearsing music. Their son, Sean, arrived in 1975. Like many new homeowners, Mr. Lennon and Ms. Ono renovated their kitchen. Mr. Lennon wanted it to resemble the open spaces many artists had in their lofts downtown. Their home “wasn’t particularly stylish,” recalled Stephen Birmingham, author of “Life at the Dakota: New York’s Most Unusual Address,” which was first published in 1979. But Ms. Flack, who agreed to be interviewed with Ms. Ono’s consent, said the apartment was always uncluttered and tasteful. The Lennons socialized with neighbors who also had children. Sean was friends with the children of Warner LeRoy, who owned Tavern on the Green. Paul Goldberger , the architecture critic at The New Yorker, who lived in the Dakota, was invited to a Christmas dinner at the LeRoys’ apartment in the late 1970s and recalled the Lennons being there. He said that the dinner was “warm and very low key,” and that Mr. Lennon chatted with Mr. Goldberger’s future mother-in-law about the music industry. Most neighbors remember him being preoccupied with raising his son. Mr. Birmingham said that when he visited, Mr. Lennon had wrapped packing twine around the staircase to protect Sean. Ms. Flack recalls Mr. Lennon taking Sean out for walks in the park with his bicycle. “Sean loved his dad,” said Ms. Flack, pouring every inflection into the word “loved.” “There was a lot of holding hands and looking up, and a lot of holding hands and looking down.” The Lennons generated the most criticism from neighbors over their real estate purchases. Mr. Gruen said that in addition to two seventh-floor apartments, they bought three other apartments, to use for storage, a work studio for Ms. Ono and an apartment for guests. Ms. Ono, accustomed to being a scapegoat for the breakup of the Beatles, absorbed more than her share of disdain inside the building, too. “There was a little bit of resentment built up against Yoko, more because she kept trying to buy more apartments,” said Mr. Goldberger, who briefly served on the Dakota’s board. “I think people didn’t dare get mad at John Lennon, so she bore the brunt of any resentment.” But Ms. Flack defended their apartment shopping and said she wished she had bought more apartments back then, when they were less expensive. A storage unit once owned by the Lennons sold in 2008 for $801,000. “When you’re John Lennon and Yoko and you have all of the money in the world,” Ms. Flack said, “how come he can’t buy all that he wants?” The Lennons’ real estate purchases did not color the opinions of one Dakota resident. Leonard Bernstein ’s daughter Nina Bernstein Simmons, whose family moved into the Dakota in 1975 when she was 13, said her “great brush with John Lennon” took place at the building potluck when the Lennons brought a platter of sushi. When Ms. Bernstein Simmons stood next to Mr. Lennon at the dessert table, he stared at the sweets and said, “I want something mushy and disgusting,” she said, still remembering his Liverpool accent. “I think I muttered something about the pecan pie looking good,” she added. Leonard Bernstein enjoyed Mr. Lennon’s poetry so much that at the annual potluck, he made his wife, two daughters and son approach Mr. Lennon and then sing an improvised round he had taught them of Mr. Lennon’s poem “The Moldy Moldy Man.” It was one celebrated musician testing his work out on another musician. Ms. Bernstein Simmons said, “I think John was amused by it.”
|
Housing and Real Estate;Lennon John;Ono Yoko;Bernstein Leonard;Goldberger Paul;Manhattan (NYC)
|
ny0231638
|
[
"sports",
"baseball"
] |
2010/09/13
|
Yankees Lose 3rd Straight to Rangers
|
ARLINGTON, Tex. — The visiting clubhouse at Rangers Ballpark has an eclectic décor: a few neon beer signs, a flag of Texas, a set of longhorns, some motivational sayings. One saying hangs above the primary bank of lockers. It reads, “The road to success is always under construction.” So the Yankees learned this weekend, when the Texas Rangers sent them reeling into a crucial series at Tampa Bay with a three-game sweep. The Yankees’ first two losses came after midnight, in the Rangers’ final at-bat. Their third, 4-1 on Sunday afternoon , ended in broad daylight, with chants of “Sweep! Sweep!” echoing through the stands. Dustin Moseley bailed out an undermanned bullpen by working six and two-thirds innings, matching the ace Cliff Lee for much of his outing, before the Rangers ignited a three-run, two-out rally in the seventh with a daring drag bunt. The Yankees have lost six of their last seven games, their only victory coming Wednesday on a game-ending homer by Nick Swisher, but they still lead the Rays by a half-game in the American League East . “What can you say? They played better than us,” said Derek Jeter, who had one of the Yankees’ two hits, a run-scoring double in the sixth, and also walked twice. He added: “We control what happens. We play the teams that we’re tied with or are behind us. We’re right where we need to be.” All of their final 19 games are against division foes, and seven are with the Rays. C. C. Sabathia opposes another talented left-hander, David Price, on Monday in the series opener. “You get a chance to settle it on the field,” Sabathia said. “You don’t have to depend on anyone else.” Losing the first two games did not change the plans of Manager Joe Girardi, who is taking a broad view of the next three weeks. As promised, he rested Alex Rodriguez, who played all 22 innings (and all 9 hours 28 minutes) of the first two games here, to keep him fresh for the Rays series. Already without Brett Gardner, who is scheduled for testing Monday on his sore right wrist, the Yankees are concerned about Nick Swisher, who was a late scratch after feeling persistent soreness in his left knee. “It’s just not getting any better,” said Swisher, shaking his head. “I don’t know what I have to do, but I want to get healthy. I can’t go chasing after a ball in the gap with one leg. That’s not going to do anybody any good.” That diluted lineup presented a minimal challenge for Lee, who is 6-1 with a 2.62 earned run average in his last eight starts against the Yankees. In his last five over all before Sunday, he was 0-3 with an 8.28 E.R.A. as a balky lower back hampered his effectiveness. Well rested and fully healed, Lee began the game by walking Jeter, then set down the next 15 batters. None of them hit a ball into the outfield until Eduardo Nunez spoiled his no-hit bid with a one-out single in the sixth. Jeter doubled him home — it was his 2,900th career hit — to hand a 1-0 lead to Moseley. He had pitched only one-third of an inning this month, but his fastball was crisp and his command was sharp. “I feel like I can go in and throw strikes, and days off don’t affect me too much,” Moseley said. What irked Moseley, though, was walking the leadoff hitter in two consecutive innings. In the sixth, Elvis Andrus stole second, scooted to third on a flyout and scored when Mark Teixeira, after fielding David Murphy’s bouncer, fired home too late to nab him. In the seventh, Ian Kinsler tested the arm of right fielder Greg Golson on consecutive plays, tagging up and advancing to third on a pair of flyouts. Up came Julio Borbon, another speedster, and Jeter wandered toward the mound to share a hunch with Moseley. He thought Borbon might try to drag bunt. “I don’t know if it’s gutsy,” Girardi said. “If you’re good at it, it’s a good play.” Off the bat, Moseley said he thought Borbon struck the ball too hard by the first-base line. But it slowed along the thick infield grass, and Borbon slid safely headfirst. He stole second, and consecutive run-scoring singles by Andrus and Michael Young — his off Jonathan Albaladejo — put Texas ahead, 4-1, a practically insurmountable lead with Lee representing the latest obstacle on the Yankees’ road to success. “This team has worked hard to get to this point where we are in the season, and we still have some baseball left,” Girardi said. “I still believe we can play well down the stretch.” INSIDE PITCH In his first start since sustaining a concussion Tuesday when a foul ball struck him, Jorge Posada was again hit by a foul tip, this one by Nelson Cruz in the sixth inning. He said he felt fine. ... Joe Girardi was noncommittal about the Yankees’ rotation beyond Wednesday, increasing the likelihood that Javier Vazquez will be shifted to the bullpen once again. Vazquez, in line to pitch Friday in Baltimore, has allowed nine runs in nine and two-thirds innings over his last two starts . The Yankees will need to clear space to accommodate Andy Pettitte, who is scheduled to start Sunday. “The way I look at it, if I was pitching great, it wouldn’t be an issue,” Vazquez said. “I’m to blame for not pitching well.”
|
New York Yankees;Texas Rangers;Baseball
|
ny0058316
|
[
"world",
"asia"
] |
2014/09/25
|
On a Shoestring, India Sends Orbiter to Mars on Its First Try
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NEW DELHI — An Indian spacecraft affectionately nicknamed MOM reached Mars orbit on Wednesday, beating India’s Asian rivals to the Red Planet and outdoing the Americans, the Soviets and the Europeans in doing so on a maiden voyage and a shoestring budget. An ebullient Prime Minister Narendra Modi was on hand at the Indian Space Research Organization ’s command center in Bangalore for the early-morning event and hailed it “as a shining symbol of what we are capable of as a nation.” “The odds were stacked against us,” Mr. Modi, wearing a red Nehru vest, said in a televised news conference . “When you are trying to do something that has not been attempted before, it is a leap into the unknown. And space is indeed the biggest unknown out there.” Children across India were asked to arrive at school by 6:45 a.m. Wednesday, well before the usual starting time, to watch the historic event on state television. The Mars Orbiter Mission, or MOM, was intended mostly to prove that India could succeed in such a highly technical endeavor — and to beat China. As Mr. Modi and others have noted, India’s trip to Mars, at a price of $74 million , cost less than “Gravity,” the Hollywood movie. NASA’s almost simultaneous — and far more complex — mission to Mars cost $671 million. Image Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, onscreen, addressed researchers and scientists in Bangalore after the Mars Orbiter successfully entered the red planet's orbit. Credit Jagadeesh Nv/European Pressphoto Agency Success was by no means assured. Of the 51 attempts to reach Mars, only 21 have succeeded, and none on any country’s first try, Mr. Modi noted. Japan failed, in 1999, and China in 2012. But Mr. Modi, who was elected in May with a once-in-a-generation majority in Parliament, has been on something of a roll. And the Mars achievement, which he had almost nothing to do with, will only add to that. Mr. Modi leaves Friday for New York, where he will address the United Nations General Assembly as well as a sold-out, largely Indian-American crowd at Madison Square Garden before heading to Washington for a meeting with President Obama. The Indian Space Research Organization has always had a small budget, and for years it worked in international isolation after many countries cut off technological sharing programs after Indian nuclear tests. It has launched more than 50 satellites since 1975, including five foreign satellites in one June launch. As other countries have rethought their pricey space programs, India’s low-budget affair has gained increasing attention and orders. Its success has been seen as a fulfillment of the kind of state-sponsored self-sufficiency that former Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru cherished but that, in the main, left India impoverished. More recently, India’s technological isolation in defense and other areas has been due in large part to the country’s restrictions on foreign investments and its poor infrastructure. India is now the world’s largest importer of arms because of its inability to make its own and its refusal to let foreign companies open plants owned entirely by them. Image A celebration at a school in Chennai, India. Children across India were asked to come to school early on Wednesday to watch the event on television. Credit Babu/Reuters The country’s most important export is the cheap brainpower of its engineers, based in technology centers like Bangalore and Hyderabad, who provide software and back-office operations for corporations around the world. “Our success on Mars is a crucial marketing opportunity for low-cost technological know-how, which is what we do really well,” said C. Uday Bhaskar, an analyst with the Society for Policy Studies , a New Delhi research center. India’s space program “spent peanuts, and they got it done.” India’s decision to launch Mangalyaan , the name of its spacecraft, came after China’s own mission to Mars failed in 2012. In almost every sphere, the Chinese have outpaced the Indians over the last three decades, but Indian scientists saw an opportunity to beat them to Mars. In just a few months, they cobbled together a mission to send a 33-pound payload of fairly simple sensors to Mars orbit. They used a small rocket, a modest 3,000-pound spacecraft and a plan to slingshot around Earth to gain the speed needed to get there. A mission that began with a November launch in Sriharikota has been flawless since. “In this Asian space race, India has won the race,” Pallava Bagla , author of “Reaching for the Stars: India’s Journey to Mars and Beyond,” said in an interview. Mangalyaan, which is Hindi for “Mars craft,” will remain in an elliptical orbit around Mars, sending back information about weather and methane levels in its atmosphere from sensors powered by three large solar panels.
|
Space;Mars;India;Xi Jinping;Narendra Modi
|
ny0260455
|
[
"sports",
"soccer"
] |
2011/06/11
|
The Best Soccer Player in the U.S.? No, It's Not That Guy
|
LONDON — As soccer evolves in the United States, its attitudes toward the male and female of the species make for curious comparison. David Beckham, in his fifth season in Los Angeles, is still the highest paid player in Major League Soccer — and still more of a celebrity than a consistent performer for the Galaxy. Marta Vieira da Silva, without any doubt the most gifted female player in the world, is week-in, week-out the most compelling player in the Women’s Professional Soccer league. Beckham, now 36, was past his prime as an athlete when he arrived in California in 2007. Marta, 25, is at the peak of her powers. Her tricks, her ability to bemuse whole clusters of opponents in a single movement, make her the female equivalent to Lionel Messi. And Messi is more of a soccer star — on the field — than Beckham ever was. Yet Anschutz Entertainment Group, the owner of the Galaxy might not agree. Even at its lowest projection, the $6.5 million that A.E.G. pays Beckham for actually playing the sport is more than a dozen times the salary that the Western New York Flash pays Marta. And her wage includes endorsement fees and helping to project the game around Buffalo, the third U.S. team she has played for in two years. It is not Marta’s fault that women’s leagues are struggling for a foothold in the United States, and elsewhere. It is also not Beckham’s fault that he is taking what was offered him. The larger issue is that the United States makes Beckham Exhibit A in the inequality of the game. Marta, in fact, has played in the same town as Beckham, for the Los Angeles Sol. She has played for Vasco da Gama, Santa Cruz and Santos in her home nation, and five years for Umea IK in Sweden, a country that appreciates women’s soccer more than most. But having grown up with the boys on the arid plains of her birthplace in northeast Brazil, she had to become a nomad to play for serious money. Marta is not very big. She stands 1.63 meters, a little more than 5-foot-3. She is a bantam in size 4.5 shoes. She darts, dances, feigns with the ball. Her balance is exquisite, her imagination beyond most layers in the men’s game. And her joy is right up there with Pelé, the Brazilian who coined the phrase The Beautiful Game. At the end of this month, the FIFA Women’s World Cup will begin in Germany, and so the Flash will lose its star players — Marta among them — for more than a month. Her absence will not be so that she can play, as Beckham did, for another club team, like AC Milan. Her excuses are not that she was invited to a royal wedding, or to hobknob with some of FIFA’s now discredited senior citizens who promised to vote for England’s prospects in staging a far-off World Cup. Rather, it is to play the game at its highest level, and quite possibly to do her best to knock the United States out of the Women’s World Cup. There is the chance that Brazil and the United States could meet in the quarterfinals, at which stage the U.S. players will no doubt wonder if they can resist her charms with the ball any better than they did when Marta teased and tormented them in the semifinal of the previous World Cup, four years ago. That game was played in the Chinese city of Hangzhou. It was a big match in women’s soccer, Brazil versus the United States before a largely Chinese audience. Marta scored a solo goal that day that is still in the minds of the U.S. players who tried to catch her, never mind win the ball. She ended that tournament as she often does, as player of the whole event and top scorer as well. Her accumulation of FIFA Women’s World Player of the Year stretches back to 2006, and, like the ball, nobody has taken it from her since she got started. But alas for Marta, she cannot sell it like Beckham. Very few people ever could. He was a fine player, a right winger who could deliver a pass over a range of distance up to 40 meters. Yet compared with Messi or Marta, Beckham at his peak was relatively statuesque. He lacked their speed, crucially their change of pace. His talent was singular, theirs is plural. For looks, for ease in fronting a product, and for genuine charm on stage, soccer has probably never known a greater phenomenon than Beckham. One look at the Anschutz group’s Web site would reveal Beckham’s value to the company. He is an instantly recognizable asset, brilliantly marketed and sure one day to add an English knighthood to his name. Even so, one has always wondered what future the United States could ever hope to build around Beckham. His Hollywood image, his relentlessly promoted projection as a moving salesman for a whole range of products, is in stark contrast to the economic reality of the times. His hops across the Atlantic to prolong his England national career or his fling with soccer in Milan curtailed his use to the Galaxy. “I’m not coming here to be a superstar,” he had said at the start. “I’m coming to be part of the team, to work hard, and hopefully to win things. With me, it’s about football.” That is far from the way it turned out. Arriving in the second half of the 2007 M.L.S. season, he played five games for the Galaxy. In 2008, he contributed 25 games, but in the two seasons that followed, due in large part to a severe injury suffered while playing for Milan, he made a total of 18 appearances. Marta, meantime, has hit the roadblocks of U.S. teams going under. Her first American club, the Sol, folded. Her second, in Santa Clara, California, folded. Her third, in the blue collar town of Buffalo, averages little more than 3,000 spectators per game. What Marta does, she does better than anyone else: 111 goals in 103 league games in Sweden, pretty near a goal a game wherever else she plays, and with her team, the Flash, top of the U.S. league this term, she has hit three goals and assisted three goals in a team that has won six and tied two of its eight matches. Her only fault, it would seem, is gender.
|
Soccer;Beckham David;Brazil;World Cup (Soccer)
|
ny0192232
|
[
"business",
"smallbusiness"
] |
2009/02/26
|
Ripples From Peanut Recall Swamp Small Businesses
|
Big food companies were not the only ones troubled by the peanut recall. Small businesses in all corners of the United States bought potentially tainted peanut products from the Peanut Corporation of America and are now part of one of the largest food recalls ever in this country. There is the chef in Las Vegas, for instance, who used them in protein bars, the packager of nuts and dried fruits in Connecticut, the cannery in Montana that sold chocolate-covered nuts and the ice cream manufacturer in New York State. In all, more than 2,100 processed and packaged foods have been recalled in the wake of a salmonella outbreak linked to the Peanut Corporation’s products . More than 660 people became ill, and infection may have contributed to nine deaths, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported. The recall opens a window not only onto the ubiquity of peanuts in food, but also into the complexity of the nation’s food system. Without the resources of big companies, small businesses have a particularly difficult time navigating that system. Even the businesses that thought they had complied with food safety practices ended up with potentially tainted products. And now, in dealing with the recall, they are at a continued disadvantage. While big companies like Kellogg, Kraft and General Mills have the experience and staff to handle recalls, many small businesses have never had to deal with anything like this. Some have had to keep employees on overtime or hire additional help to handle the recall-related work — records have to be searched to identify and track products, and replacement products manufactured. And company officials say they are spending a lot of time reassuring their customers. “It’s not our fault this recall went through,” said Tom Lundeen, who co-owns Aspen Hills Inc., in Garner, Iowa, which makes frozen cookie dough for fund-raisers. “We do everything correct and we have an incredibly high level of quality control, and we still have to pay for the mistakes of P.C.A.” The lesson to small businesses in all this, food safety experts say, is that they need to know their ingredients and the risks, and know what to ask of suppliers. Jenny Scott, a microbiologist and vice president of science policy and food protection for the Grocery Manufacturers Association, a trade group in Washington, said small businesses need to know their suppliers’ food safety culture and practices, and whether the suppliers are capable of doing the right thing. Last week, she helped teach a Web seminar for 60 participants, “The Ingredient Supply Chain: Do You Know Who You’re in Bed With?” Benjamin Chapman, food safety extension specialist at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, went further. “If you’re in the peanut butter industry, you need to be thinking about salmonella,” he said. Learning about suppliers is challenging when the supplier is not local, and the layers of the national food system are difficult to pierce. Stephanie Blackwell said she knew about the danger of salmonella in nuts. She buys pasteurized almonds for Aurora Products, an 11-year-old manufacturing and packaging company she co-owns in Stratford, Conn. She said she required a Certificate of Analysis, essentially a contract for quality and purity, for peanuts she bought from the Peanut Corporation. She said she conducted spot testing of nuts and submitted to outside auditing, as Ms. Scott recommends. She said anyone could eat off her plant’s floor. But she was caught up in the recall and calculates her losses at about $1 million. Plans to hire two people are on hold, she said, raises will probably be trimmed and helping out with Habitat for Humanity, as the company previously did, is now a question mark. She had asked for recall insurance in January before news of one arrived, and is hoping a portion of her costs will be covered. But not all companies have insurance. Mr. Lundeen of Aspen Hills said that only 5 percent of a year’s supply of peanut-themed products were affected by the recall, but product replacement costs are “a lot.” As part of quality control, the company undergoes a mock recall every six months, but in this case, the drill was a prelude to tracking every unit of product and notifying every customer. Jay Littmann, a Las Vegas chef who in 2004 automated production of his power bars, cookies and brownies for Chef Jay’s Food Products to minimize human contact with the food, had to recall 10 products and said he worried that the problem could tarnish the reputation of his products. “I take great pride in my work,” Mr. Littman said. “My name and my picture are on my products.” Now, at trade shows where he would like to do “good will,” he said he finds himself talking about the recall. He has hired a full-time employee for recall work and paid overtime to manufacture more products. “We were compromised because of actions of a food supplier that we trust,” he says. “When something like this happens, it just blows my mind.” Ed Springman, a co-owner of Huckleberry Haven, in Kalispell, Mont., said he knew the peanut supplier for the chocolate-covered peanut candies he outsources the production of, then repackages and labels. Over the years that he and the supplier had been doing business, he met the managers and developed a relationship. But his supplier bought his peanuts from the Peanut Corporation, and when the supplier’s peanuts were recalled, so were his candies. Mr. Springman said it had been a learning experience. The recall affected less than 1 percent of his products and his supplier is paying the recall bills, but the effort has taken a lot of his time. Perry’s Ice Cream, in Akron, N.Y., was more prepared for a recall than most small businesses. Its chief, Robert Denning, said he gathered his crisis management team when he heard the news. The group identified the affected products — eventually about two dozen peanut butter-flavored ice creams and yogurt products, less than 10 percent of the business, he said — then created a communication plan that emphasized consumer health and safety. The company has had its team in place for about 20 years. “I would think it’s a requirement, when you look at the quantity and frequency of recalls,” he said. Byron Chism said his company, Bad Byron’s Specialty Food Products, of Santa Rosa Beach, Fla., was only “brushed” by the recall. Fewer than 30 cases of his barbecue-seasoned roasted peanuts were affected, and the publicity, he says, is generating interest in his Butt Rub Seasoning. But he said he had learned a lesson. “I need to be prepared to communicate with my stores; I need e-mail addresses. If this was something of high alert, you move very slowly when you have to hand-call each store.”
|
Salmonella (Bacteria);Peanuts;Peanut Corporation of America;Food Contamination and Poisoning;Cooking and Cookbooks;Small Business
|
ny0141891
|
[
"world",
"asia"
] |
2008/11/28
|
Suicide Bomber Kills Four in Kabul
|
KABUL, Afghanistan — A suicide car bomber plowed into rush-hour traffic on a commercial boulevard in Kabul on Thursday morning, killing at least four people and wounding 17, the police and hospital authorities said. The bomber was apparently aiming at a passing convoy of foreign military personnel, the Interior Ministry said in a statement, but several witnesses said there were no security forces, either Afghan or foreign, in the immediate vicinity. The explosion occurred about 150 yards from a major traffic circle and a heavily guarded entrance to an access road leading to the American Embassy, raising speculation that the bomber may have intended to attack there but detonated his device prematurely. Within minutes of the attack, the victims had been evacuated, and government investigators had begun sifting through the wreckage. The blast sprayed body parts and pieces of the car in every direction, and shattered windows of nearby buildings. But more than an hour later, the bloodied, twisted body of the suicide bomber still lay in the street, about 50 yards from the blast site, where only the mangled front end of his car remained. According to witnesses, the bomber’s car had been weaving through traffic and then hit a pedestrian and several cars before exploding. “I thought he was drunk,” said Salih Muhammad, 35, a street cleaner who was part of a nine-man crew working that stretch of road when the attack occurred. “Then there was this huge explosion.” Qari Ayob, 37, the owner of a small store near the blast site, said he was in his shop at the time. “At first I felt a huge flame and then heard a very big explosion,” he said. “I felt as if the flame came into my shop. Then a darkness came and it blinded me for a while.” Two members of the cleaning crew were wounded in the blast, and their co-workers took them to a nearby hospital. Mr. Muhammad stood with another street cleaner outside the emergency room waiting for updates on their colleagues. His hands and orange work clothes were stained with the blood of one of his colleagues, whom he had carried from the street. “This is life in Afghanistan, and we’re accustomed to it,” said the second street cleaner, Muhammad Sabir, 49. Noor Agah Akramzada, director of the hospital, said his staff had received 10 people who were wounded and one body. A handwritten notice taped to the wall of the hospital listed the names and ages of the wounded. Officials at a military hospital in the neighborhood said they were treating at least seven other victims. Mr. Ayob, the shopkeeper, said that he felt lucky because at the time of day the explosion occurred, he usually stood in front of his shop warming up in the sunshine. But on Thursday morning he did not. As he spoke, his employees were cleaning up glass from his shop’s shattered window. The store remained open for business. “There is no alternative,” Mr. Ayob said. “This is my job. I need to continue.”
|
Kabul (Afghanistan);Terrorism;Afghanistan War (2001- );Bombs and Explosives
|
ny0252230
|
[
"business",
"global"
] |
2011/11/16
|
Signs of Broad Contagion in Europe as Growth Slows
|
The borrowing costs of nations at the heart of Europe jumped sharply on Tuesday, the latest evidence of broader contagion across the Continent as economic growth stalled. Published data showed that the euro zone economy grew marginally in the third quarter, kept above water by France and Germany, in what analysts interpreted as probably a last gasp before debt problems dragged the Continent into recession . Traders said the big moves in the bond markets came as investors continued to shed exposure to European debt. With few buyers, interest rates on Italian government bonds again rose above 7 percent — the kind of market pressure that last week led to the ouster of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. But they also continued to increase in France, Spain and Belgium. They also moved upward in Finland, Austria and the Netherlands, which have relatively strong underlying financial positions and until recently had mostly been spared the full effects of the financial crisis. “The concern is spilling over to the other candidates that could be next for the domino effect behind Italy,” said Millan Mulraine, an interest rate strategist at TD Securities in New York. “The ubiquitous nature of the increase in yields suggests that the problem is spreading well beyond the troubled peripheral countries.” In recent weeks, the European Central Bank has been regularly buying government bonds to try to push down interest rates. But Mr. Mulraine said the bank bought a smaller amount than usual on Tuesday. Without the central bank’s usual presence in the markets, bond prices fell and yields rose, and investors appeared to worry that a widening circle of European nations could be dragged into the Continent’s problems. “While France has for weeks been under some market pressure, with fears over the country’s AAA-rating to the fore, the likes of the Netherlands and Finland had proved immune,” analysts at Daiwa wrote in a research note. “That no longer appears to be the case.” Yields jumped a quarter of a percentage point in Spain, to nearly 6.35 percent, and about the same in France, to nearly 3.7 percent. They spiked even more in Italy and crossed the 7 percent level, which economists consider unsustainable. The gap between those rates and Germany’s 1.8 percent yield also widened to levels that some analysts saw as alarming. Analysts said they expected the central bank to return to the markets soon, and with a much more aggressive program of bond buying, to put a ceiling on rates. Compounding euro zone anxieties was a report Tuesday that gross domestic product for the region barely grew 0.2 percent from July through September, compared with the previous three months. That was the same growth rate as in the previous quarter. In contrast, the United States economy grew by 0.6 percent in the third quarter from the second, while the Japanese economy grew 1.5 percent. The data from Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union , did nothing to alter a consensus among economists that euro area output had already begun to decline since September. Anxiety about the sovereign debt crisis has led businesses and consumers to cut spending, and government austerity programs have contributed to deep recessions in countries like Greece and Portugal. Economists define a recession as at least two consecutive quarters of declining output. The third-quarter figures “have little bearing on the bigger question — namely how is the sovereign debt crisis going to be resolved and at what collateral damage to the real economy?” Jens Sondergaard, senior economist for Europe at Nomura, said in a note to clients. The huge risk facing Europe is that debt problems and slower growth will create a downward spiral that policy makers may not be able to stop. If economies slow, then government tax revenue will decline. That, along with higher borrowing costs, would increase fears that countries like Italy may not be able to service their debt. In that cycle, confidence and growth suffer further. François Cabau, an analyst at Barclays Capital, said in a note Tuesday that if business confidence continued to fall during the rest of 2011, the downturn “could prove to be larger than we currently expect, depressing private domestic demand even further.” Ample data has pointed to an impending slowdown in the euro area, including reports last week of declines in industrial production and retail sales. The European Commission, citing painful budget-balancing measures that will weigh on output, cut its growth forecast last week for the 17 euro zone nations, to 0.5 percent in 2012, and predicted that Greece’s recession would deepen. But even that gloomy forecast is starting to seem too optimistic. Germany, the largest economy in Europe, has been bucking the downward trend so far. Its economy grew by 0.5 percent in the third quarter, compared with 0.3 percent in the second, according to the data released Tuesday. French growth continued to hold up in the third quarter, but that is not expected to last, either. Olli Rehn, the European commissioner for economic and monetary affairs, said last Thursday that the European Union’s economic recovery had “now come to a standstill, and there is a risk of a new recession.”
|
European Union;European Sovereign Debt Crisis (2010- );Euro (Currency);Interest Rates
|
ny0276761
|
[
"sports",
"ncaabasketball"
] |
2016/02/22
|
Yale Banishes Demons. Next Are Tigers and Lions.
|
PHILADELPHIA — Yale may always be, as its fictional alumnus C. Montgomery Burns once put it on “The Simpsons,” first in gentlemanly club life, but in Ivy League men’s basketball, it has not finished alone in first since 1962. Putting aside the five teams that have never appeared in the N.C.A.A. tournament, Yale’s 53-season tournament drought is, according to the N.C.A.A., the second-longest in Division I (bested, if that is the word, by its conference rival Dartmouth). But this year, that dry spell could end. By beating Penn, 79-58, on Saturday night, Yale (18-6, 9-1) retained a precarious hold on the Ivy League lead and continued to threaten to shatter one of college basketball’s most ignominious streaks. “Everybody’s in the same boat,” James Jones, Yale’s coach for 17 seasons, said, referring to the Ivy League’s contenders, which include Princeton, a half-game back in the standings, and Columbia, a game back. Yale and Princeton split their games. Princeton, which beat Columbia on Feb. 13, hosts the Lions on Friday; Yale, which beat the Lions on Feb. 5, will travel to Columbia for its final game of the regular season, on March 5. “All we need to do is go out, try to take care of business as best we can each and every week,” Jones said. “One at a time. Coach speak, but that’s really what you’ve got to do.” A few days earlier, Joseph Vancisin, the coach of Yale’s tournament team in 1961-62, had expressed an optimism that probably comes more easily to retirees. “From all I can read and gather from former players, Yale’s going to win it all this year,” Vancisin, 93, said by telephone. Image Justin Sears of Yale, which leads Princeton and Columbia in the Ivy League standings. Sears could repeat as the conference’s player of the year. Credit Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times The best player on that squad, Rick Kaminsky, recalled that season in a separate interview. “It was great,” he said. “I hope they can do it again.” Saturday’s game might have made an impact beyond the standings: It allowed Yale to confront and, at least temporarily, banish its haunting memories from decades of games at the Palestra, Penn’s airy old field house, where blunt lights bathe the court and leave the upper stands in shadows. This was Yale’s first game at the arena since a heartbreaking loss to Harvard in March — a one-game playoff between two first-place teams that could happen only in the Ivy League, which, uniquely among the 32 Division I conferences, does not stage a championship tournament to determine the team that receives its automatic N.C.A.A. tournament bid. The Yale senior Javier Duren missed a floater at the buzzer, and Harvard won , 53-51, prolonging Yale’s tournament drought. It was the second such playoff that Jones’s Bulldogs had contested. At the end of the 2001-2 season — with Princeton also involved in a three-way tie for first — Penn beat Yale , 77-58. There have been a few reports that a conference tournament is on the way, perhaps next season. (Several conference officials declined to comment or did not respond to interview requests.) According to The Yale Daily News , the tentative plan is to hold the tournament — where else? — at the Palestra. A Yale spokesman confirmed that a one-game playoff this season against either Princeton or Columbia would be expected to take place at the Palestra. After Saturday’s game, the senior forward Justin Sears, who could repeat as the conference’s player of the year, dismissed the drama of returning to the scene of a tragedy. “I didn’t think about it,” he said. “Coach didn’t mention it. This is a new team, new look.” Yale has gone the last four games without its captain, Jack Montague, a senior guard who is second on the team in assists per game and first in steals but who is on a leave of absence for unspecified personal reasons. Montague helped Yale jump to a 6-0 start in conference play that included a 79-75 win over Princeton. Without him, the Bulldogs lost at Princeton, 75-63, on Friday night. Still, Yale’s strength is its defense, which entering Sunday ranked 31st over all in the efficiency rating listed at the college basketball analytics website kenpom.com. Yale held Penn, which was averaging 69 points per game, to 26 points in the second half Saturday. On offense, Yale’s most valuable asset is Sears, who is fourth in the conference in scoring, at 17.0 points per game. He displayed exceptional wiliness Saturday in using his 6-foot-8, 205-pound frame to receive the ball in the low post and back his defender down. He finished with 31 points and 9 rebounds, each figure a game high. “I honestly could sit here and tell you I think he could have got 40 and 20,” Jones, the coach, said of Sears. Kaminsky, the leading scorer on the 1961-62 team, was, by his own admission, a less dominant offensive player. “I was about 6-2 ½, 210 pounds — not your classic basketball player,” Kaminsky said. “I could shoot well. I was a good rebounder. Played real good defense.” That team ran the shuffle offense, which is heavy on picks and light on isolation plays, to compensate for its shortcomings in talent. Vancisin, the coach, said he picked up the system during his time as an assistant coach at Minnesota and Michigan. His teams would play Oklahoma, whose coach, Bruce Drake, had invented the offense. Referring to John J. Lee Jr., who led Yale to the 1957 Ivy title, Vancisin said, “There weren’t five Johnny Lees or Rick Kaminskys at Yale all at once.” (Lee, drafted by the Knicks, instead entered the oil business, a far more lucrative career at the time.) The 1961-62 Bulldogs gave Kentucky and Connecticut good games and beat out-of-conference opponents in Holy Cross, Fordham and Tennessee. In the first round of the N.C.A.A. tournament, they faced Wake Forest, which went on to the Final Four. Center Dave Schumacher had a chance to put Yale ahead late with a free throw, but he missed, sending the game to overtime. Yale lost, 92-82. That game, too, took place at the Palestra. After that loss, Kaminsky said, Yale figured it had a dynasty in the making because most of the team’s stars were underclassmen; Kaminsky himself was just a sophomore. “This whole group will be back next year to try and do it again,” a Yale Daily News columnist wrote at the time. “It is our considered opinion that they will succeed.” Unfortunately for the Bulldogs, a prized recruit from Missouri — who had stayed in Kaminsky’s dorm room when he had visited Yale’s campus — ended up choosing Princeton and began his basketball career there the following season. That player, Bill Bradley, went on to be an Olympic gold medalist and a two-time N.B.A. champion with the Knicks (not to mention a United States senator). He also led Princeton to three Ivy League titles. “Bill was a good guy — we got along fine,” Kaminsky said, adding: “We’ve stayed friends. We could have been better friends had we been teammates.”
|
College basketball;NCAA Men's Basketball,March Madness;Ivy League;Yale;Princeton;Columbia;University of Pennsylvania;Playoffs
|
ny0207377
|
[
"us"
] |
2009/06/19
|
DNA Tests Prove Michigan Man, Searching for Origins, Was Not Kidnapped Toddler
|
KALKASKA, Mich. — In a dizzying matter of hours this week, the story of John Barnes, a local man who said he thought he was abducted as a toddler from his real parents outside a Long Island grocery store in the 1950s, bubbled forth in this pine-filled Michigan village of a few thousand people and raced onto a national television stage. Mr. Barnes, a quiet, polite, unemployed man whose wife works at a local grocery store, said he had long felt different from the people he was told were his parents and siblings. He had been pondering his origins for years, and his Internet research led him to the sister of a child kidnapped decades ago and miles away. By Wednesday, reporters from around the country swarmed this quiet village near Traverse City known for snowmobiling and fishing. On Thursday morning, Mr. Barnes told his story on NBC’s “Today,” along with his would-be sister. And Thursday night, federal authorities announced that DNA tests had showed that Mr. Barnes was not the boy who had been kidnapped, and people here concluded that Mr. Barnes was, in all likelihood, just Mr. Barnes of Kalkaska after all. By then, though, the story had captivated residents of Kalkaska — some hopeful that it was true, others smirking at it all along. It also left a giant rift within the Barnes family, who said they learned of their relative’s puzzling claim only when reporters began appearing at their doors. “It’s a mystery to me,” Lynn Jenkins, a 76-year-old potato farmer, said to his friends inside the Trout Town Country Cafe on Thursday morning. The group debated whether Mr. Barnes’s blond hair and bone structure matched the Barnes family’s looks, talked about what kind of DNA testing might convince them either way, and pondered how, if the story were true, the Barnes family would have ended up with a kidnapped child. There have been many leads over the years in the case of Steven Damman, who was 2 years and 10 months old when he vanished on Oct. 31, 1955, from outside the Long Island grocery store as his mother shopped inside. The boy’s sister, Pamela, a 7-month-old baby, left in a carriage beside him, was not taken. At the time, the case drew enormous notice. Bloodhounds and 2,000 people searched for the boy, while sound trucks broadcast his description and people were told to search their vehicles’ trunks. False sightings and fake ransom notes came. Hundreds of people called in tips, none of which led to an answer. As the years went by, the kidnapping rarely was discussed within the Damman family. But a few months ago, Pamela Damman Horne, Steven’s sister, now in her 50s, received a handwritten letter and a clump of photographs from Mr. Barnes, a stranger. Ms. Horne and Mr. Barnes submitted to a private, preliminary DNA test which, the authorities say, had not ruled out the possibility they were related and which led to the more sophisticated tests by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. On Thursday, Mr. Barnes told “Today” about his long-held feelings about the Barnes family. “I just knew I didn’t come from these people,” he said. But at the home of Dick Barnes, 75, who raised John Barnes along with an older brother, Richard Jr., and a younger sister, Cheryl, the claims seemed astounding and absurd. Cheryl Barnes, 50, found herself greeting reporters at her father’s front porch and trying to prove that her brother was her brother. “This is all out of nowhere,” she said. “He’s always saying something, and now it’s this? Is he saying our dad is a kidnapper?” In town, Josh Perttunen, the editor of the local newspaper, The Leader and the Kalkaskian, said he believed most locals had hoped the story would prove true. “I think we’ve all had a moment in our lives where we didn’t fit in,” said Mr. Perttunen, 27. By Thursday’s end, though, the answer had reached Kalkaska and well beyond. In Newton, Iowa, Jerry Damman, the father of the boy who vanished, sounded tired. “I have mixed feelings about this,” said Mr. Damman, 78. “Naturally, it’s a disappointment in some ways.”
|
Kidnapping;Barnes John;DNA (Deoxyribonucleic Acid);Michigan;Long Island (NY)
|
ny0072236
|
[
"us"
] |
2015/03/01
|
Targeting Inequality, This Time on Public Transit
|
SEATAC, Wash. — On Sunday, the county transit system for the Seattle metropolitan area began hurtling down a road that few cities have traveled before: pricing tickets based on passengers’ income. The project, which is being closely watched around the nation, gives discounts on public transportation to people whose household income is no more than 200 percent of the federal poverty level — for instance, $47,700 or less for a family of four under the 2014 guidelines. The problem it addresses is that many commuters from places like SeaTac, an outlying suburb, are too poor to live in Seattle, where prices and rents are soaring in a technology-driven boom. If they are pushed out so far that they cannot afford to get to work or give up on doing so, backers of the project said, Seattle’s economy could choke. “I would characterize this as a safety valve,” said Dow Constantine, the King County executive and chairman of Sound Transit , a transportation agency serving multiple counties in the region. From 1999 to 2012, Mr. Constantine said, 95 percent of the new households in King County have been either rich or poor, earning more than $125,000 a year or less than $33,000, with hardly anything in between. “It’s people doing really well, and people making espresso for people who are doing really well,” he said. At 12:01 a.m. on Sunday, buses, trains and passenger ferries in the county began charging only $1.50 per ride — more than 50 percent off peak fares — to riders like Basro Jama, who lives in Tukwila, just south of Seattle. Image Buses in downtown Seattle last week. King County’s new ORCA Lift program will provide discounted fares to low-income passengers on buses, trains and passenger ferries. Credit Ian C. Bates for The New York Times Ms. Jama, 27, an immigrant from Somalia who is raising two young children by herself, earns less than $25,000 a year after taxes from her full-time job cleaning office buildings in downtown Seattle at night. She enrolled last week in the first wave of sign-ups for the ORCA Lift reduced-fare program, which transit administrators said could reach perhaps 100,000 people. (ORCA, or “one regional card for all,” is King County Metro Transit’s name for its fare card.) ORCA Lift is run by King County Metro Transit, but the discount will apply to all passenger public transit in the county, including that of other agencies, like Sound Transit. The program hinges on smart-card technology, an aggressive outreach effort by King County officials to people like Ms. Jama, and a liberal political establishment that believes the region’s economy is unbalanced and vulnerable in its growing divisions of poverty and wealth. Politicians and voters have raised the minimum wage based on that argument, with an increase to $15 an hour, more than twice the federal level, approved by voters in SeaTac in 2013 and by the Seattle City Council in 2014. The reality of public transportation in America is that almost all of it is heavily subsidized by government, no matter how rich or poor the riders are. And those budgets, not least in Seattle, have been under severe stress. More than 70 percent of the nation’s transit systems cut service, raised fares or both during the recession and its aftermath, according to the American Public Transportation Association , a trade group. King County Metro Transit has raised fares six times since 2008, including an increase of 25 cents that kicks in on Sunday. But income-based pricing is logistically complicated, which is partly why it has rarely been tried on any large scale, transportation experts said. San Francisco, which many in Seattle see as a kind of big brother to the south — sometimes to be emulated, other times to be scorned — got there first with a fare program called Muni Lifeline, which started in 2005. But after 10 years, Muni Lifeline remains tiny, with fewer than 20,000 card holders in a system that serves about 350,000 people a day. Smaller, tentative experiments are underway elsewhere. Greene County , Ohio, near Dayton, recently started a program for low-income riders, with social service agencies buying travel vouchers and distributing them to their clients. In other places, like western Pennsylvania , nonprofit groups have jumped in to provide bus service to the poor. But at least for the moment, all eyes are on Seattle, transportation experts said. “What Seattle has done is what others might consider,” said Art Guzzetti, vice president for policy at the American Public Transportation Association. “Everyone is watching.” Image Basro Jama with her children, Zulsaria, left, and Shusri. Ms. Jama, of Tukwila, Wash., expects to save $10 or more a week. Credit Ian C. Bates for The New York Times The distinctions start with scale and ambition: King County has about two and a half times San Francisco’s population, and in aiming for enrollment numbers San Franciscans could only dream of, it is relying on what transit experts say is the most innovative idea of all: tools honed by the Affordable Care Act. A countywide system of more than 40 health clinics, food banks, community colleges and other sites run by nonprofit groups was put together to enroll residents in health insurance, and those partners were re-enlisted in the last few weeks to start registering people for ORCA Lift. That is how Ms. Jama got her little blue card. She went to a health clinic here in SeaTac on Tuesday morning to have a doctor look at one of her children. While she was there, a worker for a nonprofit called Global to Local — a member of the ORCA Lift team tasked with connecting residents to health and social services from a kiosk in the lobby — asked Ms. Jama if, by chance, she was a transit rider. Ms. Jama said yes. She also happened to have a recent pay stub in her pocket, verifying her income. Fifteen minutes later, she had the card in her hand. Though it works like a regular transit pass, the card will remove only $1.50 for a fare. It is good for two years without the need for users to reconfirm their income. County officials said they did not anticipate big wage increases. “What’s the trick in it?” Ms. Jama asked softly, glancing down at the card and up at Amy Samudre, the program manager at Global to Local who had processed her application. “No trick,” Ms. Samudre replied with a little shrug. The discount ORCA Lift provides might sound trivial to some, but for Ms. Jama, it is clearly not. The $10 or more a week that she will save on commuting represents a raise of almost 2.5 percent in her take-home pay. She said she might use the money for a special treat. “That’s like taking my kids to McDonald’s,” she said. “Two Happy Meals is $9.”
|
Seattle;Public Transit;Commuting;Income Inequality;Price
|
ny0268045
|
[
"sports"
] |
2016/03/14
|
N.C.A.A. Tournament 2016: First-Round Tipoff Times
|
All times are Eastern. Play-In Games At UD Arena Dayton, Ohio. Tuesday, March 15 Florida Gulf Coast (20-13) vs. Fairleigh Dickinson (18-14), 6:40 p.m. Vanderbilt (19-13) vs. Wichita State (24-8), 9:10 p.m. Wednesday, March 16 Holy Cross (14-19) vs. Southern (22-12), 6:40 p.m. Michigan (22-12) vs. Tulsa (20-11), 9:10 p.m. EAST REGION ROUND OF 64 Thursday, March 17 At PNC Arena in Raleigh, N.C. North Carolina (28-6) vs. Florida Gulf Coast-Fairleigh Dickinson winner, 7:20 p.m. Southern Cal (21-12) vs. Providence (23-10), 9:50 p.m. At Wells Fargo Arena in Des Moines, Iowa Indiana (25-7) vs. Chattanooga (29-5), 7:10 p.m. Kentucky (26-8) vs. Stony Brook (26-6), 9:40 p.m. Friday, March 18 At Barclays Center in Brooklyn, N.Y. West Virginia (26-8) vs. Stephen F. Austin (27-5), 7:10 p.m. Notre Dame (21-11) vs. Michigan-Tulsa winner, 9:40 p.m. At Scottrade Center in St. Louis Wisconsin (20-12) vs. Pittsburgh (21-11), 6:50 p.m. Xavier (27-5) vs. Weber State (26-8), 9:20 p.m. SOUTH REGION ROUND OF 64 Thursday, March 17 At Dunkin’ Donuts Center in Providence, R.I. Miami (25-7) vs. Buffalo (20-14), 6:50 p.m. Arizona (25-8) vs. Vanderbilt-Wichita State winner, 9:20 p.m. At Wells Fargo Arena in Des Moines, Iowa Colorado (22-11) vs. UConn (24-10), 1:30 p.m.. Kansas (30-4) vs. Austin Peay (18-17), 4 p.m. 2016 Men’s N.C.A.A. Tournament Bracket Kansas, North Carolina, Virginia and Oregon are the top seeds in the N.C.A.A. men’s basketball tournament. Friday, March 18 At Barclays Center in Brooklyn, N.Y. Villanova (29-5) vs. UNC Asheville (22-11), 12:40 p.m. Iowa (21-10) vs. Temple (21-11), 3:10 p.m. At Spokane Veterans Memorial Arena in Spokane, Wash. California (23-10) vs. Hawaii (27-5), 2 p.m. Maryland (25-8) vs. South Dakota State (26-7), 4:30 p.m. MIDWEST REGION ROUND OF 64 Thursday, March 17 At PNC Arena in Raleigh, N.C. Texas Tech (19-12) vs. Butler (21-10), 12:40 p.m. Virginia (26-7) vs. Hampton (21-10), 3:10 p.m. At Pepsi Center in Denver Iowa State (21-11) vs. Iona (22-10), 2 p.m. Purdue (26-8) vs. UALR (29-4), 4:30 p.m. Utah (26-8) vs. Fresno State (25-9), 7:27 p.m. Seton Hall (25-8) vs. Gonzaga (26-7), 9:57 p.m. Friday, March 18 At Scottrade Center in St. Louis Dayton (25-7) vs. Syracuse (19-13), 12:15 p.m. Michigan State (29-5) vs. Middle Tennessee (24-9), 2:45 p.m. WEST REGION ROUND OF 64 Thursday, March 17 At Dunkin’ Donuts Center in Providence, R.I. Duke (23-10) vs. UNC Wilmington (25-7), 12:15 p.m. Baylor (22-11) vs. Yale (22-6), 2:45 p.m. Friday, March 18 At Chesapeake Energy Arena in Oklahoma City. Oregon State (19-12) vs. VCU (24-10), 1:30 p.m. Oklahoma (25-7) vs. Cal State Bakersfield (24-8), 4 p.m. Texas A&M (26-8) vs. Green Bay (23-12), 7:20 p.m. Texas (20-12) vs. Northern Iowa (22-12), 9:50 p.m. At Spokane Veterans Memorial Arena in Spokane, Wash. Oregon (28-6) vs. Holy Cross-Southern winner, 7:27 p.m. Saint Joseph’s (27-7) vs. Cincinnati (22-10), 9:57 p.m.
|
College Sports;Basketball
|
ny0144994
|
[
"business",
"media"
] |
2008/10/30
|
Hanging Out at a Mall for the Holidays
|
THOUGH many retailers are closing and cutting back, Teen Vogue is taking its franchise to the mall. The magazine is opening a store, called the Teen Vogue Haute Spot, in the Mall at Short Hills in New Jersey. But the magazine does not intend to sell merchandise. Instead, the store will be a place for girls to relax, try on clothes and drink smoothies — all while marketers woo them. “We feel we’ve created a retail environment that doubled as a place where they could come together, be girls, and shop together,” said Laura McEwen, the publisher of Teen Vogue. The Haute Spot is a so-called pop-up concept, meaning that the store is not permanent. The location will be open Nov. 28 through Dec. 26. Teen Vogue, part of Condé Nast Publications, will also open two stores in March and April to promote prom wear (the locations are not set, but they will be in malls on the East and West Coasts). And in August, it will open two locations featuring back-to-school gear. The stores will offer free snacks, informal modeling, a perfume bar, a makeup station, charging stations for cellphones and iPods, a gift-wrapping counter and racks of clothes. Stylists and attendants at the store will advise visitors on lipstick, shoes and outfits. And, to the delight of retailers, they will whisk visitors to stores in the mall where they can buy the products. “We’re not actually selling products, because our goal is to encourage people to shop in the mall,” Ms. McEwen said. More than 20 Teen Vogue advertisers are participating, including Clinique, Armani Exchange and Aldo. As most forecasts predict a tough holiday season for retailers, sponsors of the Haute Spot said they were happy to support a concept to drive traffic. “The thing that was attractive to us is it’s not a high-pressure environment,” said Denny Downs, Clinique’s executive director for marketing in North America. “We wanted them to have the ability to play, and learn about our product. We’re looking at it more as a marketing opportunity than a sales opportunity, but because of the location, it could easily make the leap.” Store clerks and employees, he said, “can walk them down the mall to Bloomingdale’s or Nordstrom, and take it from there.” Teen Vogue did not charge most advertisers to participate in the store. Instead, it was offered as a perk to some top advertisers, while some were asked to buy an extra page or two in the December/January issue of Teen Vogue. The magazine brought in six new advertisers as a result of the store, Ms. McEwen said. Ad pages at Teen Vogue were down 4.8 percent for the first nine months of the year, but ad revenue was up 4.6 percent, according to Publishers Information Bureau. The magazine is also using the store to promote itself: for instance, editors will visit and offer fashion and makeup advice. “They’re at that age where they’re very impressionable and aspirational,” Ms. McEwen said of the magazine’s readers. “They want contact.” She said she was not worried that only a small percentage of its overall readership lives near enough to visit the store. “Instead of doing something that has very large numbers, we think high-quality communication to a very select number has been very successful for us,” she said. Teen Vogue frequently holds events where attendance is limited. Other such programs include Fashion University, at which 500 girls are invited to New York to listen to lectures by designers; and Rock Meets Runway, a competition for girl rock bands. “Several hundred girls every day tell several hundred girls, who tell several hundred girls,” Ms. McEwen said. “It’s a viral thing.” She said the success of the store would be measured by the number of visitors, e-mail addresses collected, and visits to the Teen Vogue Web site and to advertisers’ sites. Several media companies are also opening stores, but are selling merchandise rather than promoting other retailers. Sports Illustrated opened its first retail store at the Detroit airport in September, and was installing airport kiosks that display sports scores and archived articles. Other companies including CNN, USA Today, CNBC and the Fox News Channel also have their names on airport stores. Most of these locations are not operated by the companies, but by airport retailers. Zain Raj, the chief executive of the marketing firm Euro RSCG Discovery, part of Havas, said many other companies sell merchandise not connected to their brands. Teen Vogue’s decision not to sell anything would help raise its profile among its audience. Mr. Raj, who is not involved in the Haute Spot, suggested that publications should “basically get people wedded to the brand proposition for the long term.”
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Advertising and Marketing;Teen Vogue;Retail Stores and Trade;Vogue;Magazines;Conde Nast Publications Inc;Mall at Short Hills
|
ny0137264
|
[
"business"
] |
2008/05/16
|
Bernanke Says Banks Need More Capital
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Ben S. Bernanke , the Federal Reserve chairman, pushed banks on Thursday to keep raising capital in the aftermath of losses from the credit crisis to avert deeper damage to the economy. “Firms are hunkering down,” Mr. Bernanke said at the Chicago Fed conference on credit markets. “They have at least partially replaced the losses with new capital raising, but not entirely. They are being rather conservative in making new loans, which has implications for the broader economy.” Mr. Bernanke’s remarks reflect concerns he and other Fed officials expressed this week that financial markets had yet to return to normal. The Fed chief also said the central bank was considering strengthening its guidance to banks on how they manage risk after “weaknesses” that contributed to the crisis. While banks and securities companies have raised about $244 billion of capital since July, they may have further to go after write-downs and credit losses in excess of $333 billion. Mr. Bernanke and the Treasury secretary, Henry M. Paulson Jr., have repeatedly said firms should keep increasing their funds to ease the impact of the credit squeeze. Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase are among companies raising capital this quarter. IndyMac Bancorp, a major independent home lender, said this week that it planned to raise a “slug” of money from outside investors. Mr. Bernanke said that senior bank executives needed to take a leadership role in strengthening risk management. The strongest banks did not rely on credit-rating companies and took into account the danger of a slump in access to funds, he said. “I have been encouraged by the recently demonstrated ability of many financial institutions, large and small, to raise capital,” Mr. Bernanke said. He did not discuss the path of interest rates or the outlook for the economy. The Federal Open Market Committee next meets June 24-25. Investors expect the central bank’s next move will be to raise, rather than lower, the benchmark rate from 2 percent, according to futures prices. Mr. Bernanke said the credit crisis continued to confound the economy. “Events continue to unfold,” he said, adding that “the financial stress we continue to experience” stemmed from a separation of lending and distribution of credit to investors. Sovereign wealth funds have contributed as much as a third of the capital banks have raised, which has been “very positive,” Mr. Bernanke said in response to questions. “It has been very constructive to have this source of funding coming into our banking system,” he said. Banks are likely to heed the chairman’s advice, said David Resler, chief economist at Nomura Securities International in New York. Mr. Bernanke is “just reminding us there’s more wood to cut here,” he said. “They’re going to continue to float new debt or equity into a market that’s going to be a little more receptive to it because they see this as part of a process that’s putting the problems behind them.” The flight from risk since August has made financial institutions reluctant to lend to each other, driving up banks’ borrowing costs. That has increased the threat to economic growth already posed by the worst housing recession in a quarter-century. The Fed has created three new types of loans to financial companies since December to alleviate credit strains, including direct lending to firms other than commercial banks for the first time since the Great Depression. Mr. Bernanke said the Fed was reviewing how supervisors approach bank examinations. “Supervisors must redouble their efforts to help organizations improve their risk-management practices,” Mr. Bernanke said.
|
Bernanke Ben S;United States Economy;Banks and Banking;Economic Conditions and Trends
|
ny0269843
|
[
"business",
"smallbusiness"
] |
2016/04/07
|
A Cocktail Shot Company Looks Beyond Beer Pong
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Mention the word “shots” and visions of frat boys from the cult movie “Animal House” often come to mind, with the Delta Tau Chi boys chugging Jack Daniels. They didn’t care about quality, health or taste. The aim was to get drunk as quickly as possible at the cheapest price. But two New York entrepreneurs are shaking up that image and adding a little sophistication with their ready-to-drink cocktail shots, called LIQS . They use premium spirits, real fruit juices and low sugar to create premixed cocktails in sealed 50-milliliter plastic shot glasses. “You don’t need ingredients, a shaker, shot glasses or bartending skills — it’s pre-made and you can enjoy it almost anywhere,” said Harley Bauer, who co-founded the company in 2013. It comes in five flavors. Millennials have been particularly receptive. About 62 percent already buy ready-to-drink alcoholic beverages for the convenience, according to a December 2015 report by Mintel, a market research group. And LIQS’s natural juices and high-quality spirits appeal to the group’s penchant for healthier ingredients. Industry experts say LIQS, short for “liquor shots,” is in the right space at the right time. Television shows like“Sex and the City,” “Mad Men” and, more recently, “Boardwalk Empire” and “Billions” helped bring high-quality spirits and cocktails into vogue, said Frank Coleman, senior vice president of the Distilled Spirits Council, a trade group. Also, the 2008 recession prompted a surge in consumers hunting for easy and cheaper ways to make cocktails at home, he said. Cocktails may be trending big, but at least one expert isn’t sure cocktail shots will be equally fashionable. “Shots are not usually meant to savor or drink or sip,” said Beth Bloom, a food and drink analyst at Mintel. “Shots are the thing you drink to get to the end — which is drunkenness.” And millennials are shunning the drink-till-you-drop fad, preferring higher-quality drinks in moderation. “Beer pong is passé,” she said. Mr. Bauer dismisses that idea. “You can sip it, you can shoot it, you can pour it over ice in a martini glass if you wanted to.” Image A server, at center, offering LIQS to a crowd at New York’s Webster Hall last month. Credit Krista Schlueter for The New York Times LIQS sales hit $600,000 in 2015, up from $250,000 in its first full year in 2014. Mr. Bauer is projecting sales of at least $1.5 million in 2016, $4.5 million in 2018 and $7 million to $10 million in 2020. Mr. Bauer and Michael Glickman are the brains behind LIQS. Born in Brooklyn in October 1977, Mr. Bauer caught the entrepreneurial bug early on, watching his father, Victor, build a thriving beer and soda distribution company. As a teenager, he spent summers working for his father, delivering crates to bars and clubs. “I was a scrawny 5-foot-9, 130-pound kid, and I’d be hauling a keg of beer that weighed twice as much as I did,” he said with a laugh. He honed his marketing skills, working at entertainment firms, including the William Morris Agency and Flutie Entertainment, before taking a job and an ownership stake in his brother Jason’s Crumbs cupcake company in 2006. At Crumbs, he coordinated the company’s West Coast expansion to 30 stores from four over 24 months. After the 51-store chain was sold and taken public in 2011, he left and searched for new investments. Mr. Glickman, 47, was born in the Bronx. At 17, he started his first business, creating a phone directory for the newly built Valley View Mall in 1985 in Roanoke, Va., where store owners paid him to list their numbers in his book. In 1986, he started a portrait photography business, and in 1989 he built custom computers to pay his way through college. After graduating from Georgia State University with a bachelor’s degree in business administration and marketing in 1992, he started his own company, Performance Event Marketing, which served such clients as Chivas Regal, IBM, Amazon, and HBO. He sold the firm in 2004 and began consulting. It was during business trips, which kept him on the road four months of the year, that Mr. Glickman came up with the cocktail shots idea. He wanted a convenient way to grab a cocktail at the end of a long day that didn’t require going to a bar, buying big bottles or mixing ingredients. When a graphic designer friend introduced Mr. Glickman to Mr. Bauer in 2012, Mr. Bauer loved the cocktail shots idea, and the two agreed to build out the concept. Mr. Bauer, his father and his brother invested $800,000 to start LIQS. The founders hired two former Bacardi executives as advisers, retained a well-known bartender, Alex Ott of Manhattan , to create the cocktail flavors, and spent about 10 months developing the shots. Finding a distillery was the biggest hurdle. “Almost every distillery is set up to fill 750- milliliter bottles or a 50-milliliter airplane bottle,” Mr. Bauer said. They approached more than 40 companies, before finding one willing to make custom molds and retool their machines to fill and seal the contoured shot glasses, Mr. Glickman said. Image By 2020, the maker of LIQS shots expects to be in more than 30 markets in the United States. Credit Krista Schlueter for The New York Times In late 2013, LIQS debuted in Miami. The founders used coffee shops and rental cars as offices and went door-to-door, selling the shots to liquor store managers. “My rental car was like a storage facility — it carried the product, racks, posters, stickers, buttons and T-shirts,” Mr. Bauer said. They hustled, handing out samples at more than 50 charity galas and hip Miami parties. They expanded into Massachusetts and Texas in August 2014, and into Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, and Alberta, Canada, in June 2015. By 2020, they expect LIQS to be in more than 30 markets in the United States. LIQS’s closest competitor is Twisted Shotz, which offers 25-milliliter shot-size cocktails. It caters to the college crowd, with its high sugar levels, artificial flavors and neon-colored drinks carrying names like Porn Star, Sex on the Beach and Miami Vice. Another rival, BuzzBallz, makes ready-to-drink cocktails with premium spirits similar to LIQS, but they are packaged in 200-milliliter containers. Other companies attract a different customer. Ludlows offers cocktails in jelly shots, Gasolina sells them in 200-milliliter pouches and Daily’s offers frozen pouches. “LIQS is very different — nobody is really doing it,” said Barbara Oaktree, owner of Diplomat Wines & Spirits in New York. She initially ordered three cases for one store. “Within two months, they were sold out.” She now sells LIQS at all four of her company’s stores. But David Manno, a buyer for Gramercy Wine & Spirits, thinks LIQS’s $7.99 retail price for a three-pack is too high — especially when it contains only 20 percent alcohol. “Eight dollars for three weak drinks is kind of a lot,” he said. Still, LIQS is “carving out something new,” he said. Michael Weinstock, an angel investor, first heard about LIQS in 2014 but waited a year before investing. “I wanted to see proof of concept before I invested,” said Mr. Weinstock, who had previously invested in a craft beer business that failed. In May 2015, he jumped in. To date, the LIQS founders have raised $2.5 million, and they are in the process of raising $2 million more. Mr. Glickman expects the company to turn a profit by 2018. He anticipates growth through the addition of new flavors and expanding into new markets, music festivals, clubs and stadiums. Several investors speculate that the company will probably be bought by a deep-pocketed player in the spirits industry down the line. But most are in no hurry to exit. “You need to have patience,” said Bill Wise, a LIQS investor. “You never want to sell too early.”
|
Alcohol;LIQS;Cocktail;Small business
|
ny0077374
|
[
"us"
] |
2015/05/08
|
Georgia: Sheriff Accused of Shooting Stays on Job
|
Sheriff Victor Hill on Thursday vowed to continue on the job, a day after he was charged with reckless conduct in the shooting of a real estate agent that he called a “tragic accident.” Sheriff Hill shot a friend, Gwenevere McCord, 43, in the model home of a new subdivision near Lawrenceville on Sunday, the police said. The sheriff told a 911 dispatcher he was conducting police training exercises and accidentally shot her, the authorities said. “While focused on the recovery and healing of Gwenevere, I will simultaneously continue with my duties and responsibilities as the sheriff of Clayton County,” he said in a statement. No alcohol or drugs were involved, according to a police report. Sheriff Hill was arrested Wednesday on a charge of reckless conduct, a misdemeanor, and released on bond. Ms. McCord, shot in the abdomen, has been unable to tell investigators what happened and Sheriff Hill has refused to do so, District Attorney Danny Porter said. Ken Vance, executive director of the Georgia Peace Officer Standards and Training Council, said the charge was unlikely to have any immediate impact on the sheriff’s ability to serve, but the organization was opening an investigation into whether he would be able to retain his certification.
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Victor Hill;Police Brutality,Police Misconduct,Police Shootings;Gwenevere McCord;Clayton County
|
ny0111334
|
[
"sports",
"baseball"
] |
2012/02/27
|
Yankees’ Pitchers Built for Gridiron, at Home on the Mound
|
TAMPA, Fla. — Throughout his tenure as the general manager of the Yankees , Brian Cashman has been almost obsessed with big, hulking pitchers, men who stand tall or round, or both, and look daunting from 60 feet 6 inches away. That infatuation caused him to sign, or re-sign, behemoths like David Wells and Bartolo Colon, or more elongated body types represented by Randy Johnson and Andrew Brackman, who are each listed at 6-10. But this year Cashman, who is 5-7, 160 pounds, has outdone himself. In assembling a starting rotation so massive, so imposing in height and weight that no one in these parts can remember one so large, he appears intent on bringing the baseball Giants back to New York. In fact, most of the pitchers could also qualify as linemen for the football Giants. Across the front line is C. C. Sabathia , who is listed at 6-7 and said he came into camp weighing roughly 290 pounds. His new locker partner and fellow leviathan is Michael Pineda, who also checks in at 6-7 and said he weighs 280. Ivan Nova is listed at 6-4, 225; Phil Hughes is 6-5, 240; Freddy Garcia, whose broad shoulders and boxlike frame seem to fill up the doorway, is listed at 6-4, 250. Finally, there is the newcomer Hiroki Kuroda, who at 6-1 and 190 provides experience and savvy, as well as a control case to bring down the average size of the six current starters to a more manageable 6-42/3, 245.8 pounds. And that does not include the 6-8, 260-pound Dellin Betances, who is most likely headed to the minor leagues for now. “I never felt so small before I walked in here,” Kuroda said through his interpreter. “If these guys ever came to Japan, everyone would be overwhelmed.” Just standing on the side during practice, they look intimidating. On Saturday, they went through their daily paces, running around the field at the end of practice, and possibly setting local seismographs into action. “They’re ginormous,” marveled the beefy Wells, now an instructor at Yankees camp. “I’ve never seen a rotation that big, and that includes me. I mean, I wasn’t yoked like most of these guys; I was just fat. But with that size, it can be intimidating.” At the front of the rotund rotation are Sabathia and Pineda, the biggest starting pitcher tandem in baseball, according to Major League Baseball’s spring rosters of all 30 teams. (The largest player to have played in the majors is believed to be first baseman Walter Young of the 2005 Baltimore Orioles, who was said to be 322 pounds.) Tampa Bay’s Jeff Niemann is a gargantuan figure at 6-9, 285, but he does not have a sidekick. Same with Jonathan Broxton, a reliever for the Kansas City Royals who is listed at 300 pounds, or the Orioles’ corpulent Tommy Hunter, at 6-3, 280. The Miami Marlins have the potential to match up pound for pound with the Yankees, especially if Carlos Zambrano (6-5, 270) makes the team and lines up with Josh Johnson (6-7, 248) and reliever Jose Ceda (6-4, 280). But the Yankees, particularly Sabathia and Pineda, stand out as so big that some looked to other sports to make a better comparison. “I would feel good having any of them as a front line in basketball,” Alex Rodriguez said. “They are monsters. I’ve never seen a rotation like that. They are big right across the board, but you’ve definitely got your four and your five in C. C. and Pineda.” But Sabathia, a former high school football star who could have played tight end in college, and Pineda would not look out of place on a football line. They are bigger than all but one of the five starting offensive linemen on the 1986 Super Bowl champion Giants. Right tackle Karl Nelson, listed at 6-6, 285, clipped Pineda by five pounds, but he was an inch shorter. The average size of that offensive line, according to figures provided by Pro-Football-Reference.com , was 6-3 ½, 270, meaning that with a few more bowls of pasta, Garcia or Hughes could have joined in. David Robertson, who at 5-11, 195 is a little above average but tiny by pitching standards, was, no surprise, a field-goal kicker in high school, and would have felt secure standing behind a line of Sabathia, Pineda, Nova, Hughes and Garcia. “I would definitely feel comfortable,” he said. “But I wouldn’t be able to see over them.” Cashman pointed out that Robertson and closer Mariano Rivera — who has made a fine career for himself at 6-2, 185 — demonstrate that sheer height and bulk are not the only criteria needed to be a good pitcher. Tim Lincecum of the San Francisco Giants is 5-11 and 165, and he won Cy Young Awards in 2008 and 2009, and the 5-10, 185-pound Billy Wagner has 422 saves. But still, Cashman loves those big fellas. “I’m addicted to those big, hard throwers,” he said. “The other day I looked out at that pitching group and Phil Hughes looks small with those other guys hulking over him, and he is not a small guy.” Of course, the pitchers must have arms to go with their heft, and Sabathia and Pineda have them. Pineda, who turned 23 in January, said he needed to lose 10 pounds to reach his optimal weight. For now, his baby fat makes him resemble a younger, taller Armando Benitez. For Sabathia, who grew to over 300 pounds during the latter half of last year, fighting to stay within the limits of a big but productive and healthy pitcher is more of a chore. He said he lost 10-15 pounds this off-season (it seems to be even more) and he intends to keep it off. “It’s something that’s up to me to maintain,” he said. “I’ve got a lot of help around here, so it shouldn’t be hard.” But for someone like Wells, the supersize Sabathia is a hero, and Wells does not want him to lose too much weight. Although he is 8 inches and more than 100 pounds heavier than Lincecum, Sabathia, too, has won a Cy Young Award. “He’s a role model for big guys,” Wells said, “so I’m his biggest fan. He’s athletic. He gives hope for other guys who struggle to lose some pounds. He shows you don’t have to lose that much. As long you pitch well and can shut them up, you can be as big as you want. I always say, You don’t run the ball to the plate.” Wells, who is still almost comically listed as 6-3, 187, said the most weight he ever carried to the mound was 278 pounds — almost none of it muscle. That was in 2001 with the Chicago White Sox after he injured his back and could not work out. Throughout his career, teams begged him to lose weight, but he never thought it was particularly relevant to his pitching. “I think it was more of them just wanting me to look good standing around the hotel lobby instead of having any mound presence,” he said. Toward the end of his career, Wells usually stood out as one of the biggest pitchers in baseball. But as the years go by, pitchers seem to get bigger, in longitude and latitude. The Yankees’ pitching coach, Larry Rothschild, who has been playing or coaching professionally since 1975, said he had never seen a staff this big, let alone worked with one. “I think it is going that way in general,” he said. “I think 250 is the old 220, from about 10-15 years ago. Hey, hopefully, size matters.”
|
Baseball;New York Yankees;Cashman Brian;Sabathia C C;Pineda Michael;Nova Ivan;Wells David
|
ny0042327
|
[
"nyregion"
] |
2014/05/17
|
Connecticut G.O.P. Weighs a Full Field for Governor
|
STAMFORD, Conn. — This state’s Republicans, counting on widespread concern over Connecticut’s financial picture to lift their electoral fortunes, descended upon the Mohegan Sun resort in Uncasville on Friday to begin to select a challenger to the Democratic governor, Dannel P. Malloy. With Tom Foley, a Greenwich businessman whom Governor Malloy defeated in 2010, facing competition in his second attempt from credible rivals like John McKinney, the State Senate minority leader, and Mayor Mark Boughton of Danbury, it appeared likely that the party would not avoid the necessity of a primary election on Aug. 12. The nominating contest was to begin on Saturday. Anyone who receives 15 percent of the delegates’ votes on any ballot is entitled to force a primary vote. Mr. Malloy, who is contending with shrinking budget surpluses, high unemployment and a heavy debt burden, recently canceled a much-promoted $55-per-person tax refund. Economic and fiscal problems have hurt his standing with voters: A poll this month by Quinnipiac University found that more respondents said he did not deserve to be re-elected than did, 48 percent to 44 percent. The same survey found Mr. Malloy in a dead heat with Mr. Foley, a former ambassador to Ireland. The governor fared better, but not much, in head-to-head contests against the other hopefuls: He led 44 percent to 40 percent against Mr. McKinney, and 44 percent to 39 percent against Mr. Boughton. Among Republicans surveyed about their preference for the party’s nominee, Mr. Foley had the support of 39 percent; Mr. Boughton, 9 percent; and Mr. McKinney, 8 percent. Two other contenders are Mark Lauretti, the longtime mayor of Shelton, and Joe Visconti, a West Hartford contractor and Tea Party favorite. A sixth candidate, Martha Dean, a lawyer from Avon who often assists gun owners and other defenders of the Second Amendment, bowed out shortly after Quinnipiac’s poll showed her trailing the better-known candidates. Pro-gun delegates who supported Ms. Dean’s candidacy could become one swing factor in the Republican contest, but one that would come at a price if their backing energizes antigun voters in November. The issue is a powerful and polarizing one in Connecticut, where emotions are still raw from the Newtown shootings in 2012. Image Delegates gathered on Friday for the convention in Uncasville, Conn. Credit Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times Mr. Foley is a gun owner. Mr. Boughton had been a member of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, a vocal organization backed by former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York. But Mr. Boughton ended his affiliation in April, citing what he said was the group’s shift from the enforcement of existing gun laws to the creation of new ones, and his sympathy for “the rights of law-abiding gun owners and sportsmen in Connecticut.” The move was widely seen as an appeal to the pro-gun faction of the Republican base and was applauded by the president of the Connecticut Citizens Defense League, Scott Wilson. For his part, Mr. McKinney, whose district stretches from Newtown south to the Long Island Sound, portrayed his moderate views on gun control as a strength, suggesting he was the candidate Democrats would least like to see on the Republican ballot. He voted for the 2013 bill that tightened restrictions on weapons in Connecticut and wears a grade of F from some pro-gun groups as a badge of honor. “There are people who are not happy with that vote and I know that,” he said. “I represent Newtown and I did what I thought was best, representing the people who sent me to Hartford.” Still, Mr. McKinney said he was confident of elbowing his way into a primary. With only 20 percent of the state’s 2.1 million voters registered as Republicans, compared with the 37 percent who are Democrats, he said party members knew that they “won’t win a statewide election if we only rely on Republican votes.” Whomever the Republicans choose will still face an opponent with the advantage of being an incumbent. But Republicans say that there are a lot of reasons to expect a different outcome — even if the race turns into a rematch between familiar rivals. Mr. Foley, for instance, is in the lead on fund-raising. His campaign announced on Thursday that it had taken in more than $250,000 in contributions, nearly $100,000 more than Mr. Malloy, who was endorsed by Democrats on Friday in Hartford. Under new public-financing rules, a candidate who successfully collects $250,000 from 2,500 voters becomes eligible for millions of dollars in public funding for his campaign. Mr. Foley, who paid $11 million for his own campaign in 2010 and was criticized heavily for it, has not yet completed the paperwork to apply for public financing, but appears to be serious about availing himself of the system. Speaking from the convention, Mr. Foley said that if he advanced, he did not expect a repeat of the last race, mostly because “we have Dan Malloy’s record, which people aren’t happy with.” “This is going to be a referendum on his leadership in Connecticut,” he said.
|
Gubernatorial races;Republicans;Connecticut;Dannel P Malloy;Mark Boughton;Tom Foley;John McKinney
|
ny0155797
|
[
"nyregion"
] |
2008/06/18
|
Workshop on Preparing for Calamities Focuses on the Flu
|
Be afraid, be very afraid. There is no telling what the next disaster will be. Another terrorist attack? A steam pipe explosion like the one that shut down several blocks of Lexington Avenue a year ago? Or perhaps a pandemic flu that would cripple New York City’s economy by making people afraid to go to work or ride on subways and buses? That was the message at a daylong workshop conducted on Tuesday by the city’s health and emergency management agencies, intended to give businesses tips on how to cope with the potential calamities. The workshop had all the portentous, overwrought atmosphere of movies about how the world is coming to an end and everyone had better be ready, from “War of the Worlds” to the latest M. Night Shyamalan film. Only in this faux disaster, the participants — some of whom have spent years immersing themselves in the subject — were treating it with deadly earnestness. The possibility of an influenza pandemic was the disaster du jour. Dr. Isaac B. Weisfuse, the city’s deputy health commissioner for disease control, told an audience of about 300 business people that since history repeats itself, he considers it likely that there will be a worldwide outbreak of flu, possibly a mutation of the current avian flu, sometime in the 21st century, just as there were killer disease epidemics in virtually every other century. “Everybody in the whole state — local governments, businesses large and small, families — should be preparing,” Dr. Weisfuse told the gathering at New York University. Just as Americans built bomb shelters and stocked them with crackers during the Cold War, the city has been stockpiling supplies to combat pandemic flu, Dr. Weisfuse assured his audience. He announced that 25 million surgical face masks — known as P.P.E.’s, short for “personal protective equipment” — are secreted in a New York City warehouse. “I’m very proud of this collection,” Dr. Weisfuse said, showing a slide of the rows upon rows of boxed-up masks, like the treasure in an Indiana Jones movie. “We have more face masks than you could ever imagine.” But, still not enough. The stockpile is equal to three for each of the city’s eight million residents, and epidemiologists recommend changing those face masks twice a day. “Look at all these lovely boxes,” Dr. Weisfuse said. “They’re going to be empty after about a day and a half of pandemic.” (One audience member, who said he managed a 42-story residential high-rise, wondered how many microns of particle size the mask should be able to guard against. Dr. Weisfuse replied, in essence, that it does not mater, because the masks are so loose that some germs are bound to escape from the sides.) In an indication of how hot the topic is, a competing workshop on preparing employers for pandemic flu has been scheduled for Thursday at the Javits Convention Center, sponsored by, among others, Roche, the maker of Tamiflu, an antiviral treatment used to treat and prevent seasonal flu. At Tuesday’s session, city officials said they were thinking far beyond the common flu. The city has access to enough antiviral medications to give more than two million people a five-day course of treatment, a supply based on the expectation that a pandemic flu would attack about 25 percent of the population, Dr. Weisfuse said. It is up to individual businesses to decide whether to stockpile their own antiviral medications, and they run the risk of having to replace them at the end of their current five-year shelf life. There are also legal and ethical implications in determining who should get the medication if there is not enough, he said. (The government has posted some guidelines for distributing medication, with national security workers, health care workers, emergency services workers, drug manufacturers, elected officials and infrastructure workers ranking high on the list.) The federal government has 20 million to 30 million prepared doses of vaccine, he said, which would probably be reserved for health care workers and the military. But Dr. Weisfuse noted that this stockpile was based on the existing strain of avian flu, H5N1, which is not easily transmitted from person to person, and said the real threat would come from a mutation in the existing strain. “We don’t know if the prepared vaccination is going to be very useful,” he said, noting that flu germs have been adept at developing drug resistance. “It may be that we’re kind of all up the creek, because we have no treatment regimens that would be effective.” Controlling a pandemic and keeping a city running at the same time is a delicate balancing act: how to keep mass transit running so people can get to work, while advising people to stay out of crowds, where flu can spread by coughing? “We know people are more likely to walk,” Dr. Weisfuse said, “which, quite frankly, wouldn’t be a bad thing, for obesity , exercise.” The city’s quintessential urbanness could be its silver lining. “One of the beauties of living in New York City is that we have no big poultry production farms,” like, say, Pennsylvania, Dr. Weisfuse said, with a hint of glee. But the city does have live poultry markets, and city officials are making plans to cull diseased birds from those markets. In any case, Dr. Weisfuse dismissed that problem as “small potatoes.” So, someone in the audience asked, what are the chances? “Let’s look at history,” Dr. Weisfuse replied, and then he ticked it off: pandemics in 1968, 1957 and 1918 (the worst, in which an estimated 30 million to 50 million people died). “By that criterion,” he said, “we’re kind of due.”
|
Influenza;Disasters;New York City
|
ny0006483
|
[
"technology"
] |
2013/05/18
|
Hunting for Syrian Hackers’ Chain of Command
|
It’s the question of the moment inside the murky realm of cybersecurity: Just who — or what — is the Syrian Electronic Army? The hacking group that calls itself the S.E.A. struck again on Friday, this time breaking into the Twitter accounts and blog headlines of The Financial Times. The attack was part of a crusade that has targeted dozens of media outlets as varied as The Associated Press and The Onion, the parody news site. But just who is behind the S.E.A.’s cybervandalism remains a mystery. Paralleling the group’s boisterous, pro-Syrian government activity has been a much quieter Internet surveillance campaign aimed at revealing the identities, activities and whereabouts of the Syrian rebels fighting the government of President Bashar al-Assad. Now sleuths are trying to figure out how much overlap there is between the rowdy pranks playing out on Twitter and the silent spying that also increasingly includes the monitoring of foreign aid workers. It’s a high-stakes search. If researchers prove the Assad regime is closely tied to the group, foreign governments may choose to respond because the attacks have real-world consequences. The S.E.A. nearly crashed the stock market, for example, by planting false tales of White House explosions in a recent hijacking of The A.P.’s Twitter feed . The mystery is made more curious by the belief among researchers that the hackers currently parading as the S.E.A. are not the same people who started the pro-Assad campaign two years ago. Experts say the Assad regime benefits from the ambiguity. “They have created extra space between themselves and international law and international opinion,” said James A. Lewis, a security expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The S.E.A. emerged during the Syrian uprisings in May 2011, they said, to offer a pro-Assad counternarrative to news coming out of Syria. In speeches, Mr. Assad likened the S.E.A. to the government’s own online security corps, referring to the group as “a real army in a virtual reality.” In its early incarnation, researchers said, the S.E.A. had a clearly defined hierarchy, with leaders, technical experts, a media arm and hundreds of volunteers. Several early members belonged to the Syrian Computer Society, a technical organization run by Mr. Assad before he became president. Until last month, digital records suggest, the Syrian Computer Society still ran much of the S.E.A.’s infrastructure. In April, a raid of S.E.A. Web domains revealed that the majority were still registered to the society. S.E.A. members initially created pro-Assad Facebook pages and spammed popular pages like President Obama’s and Oprah Winfrey’s with pro-Syrian comments. But by the fall of 2011, S.E.A. activities had become more premeditated. They defaced prominent Web sites like Harvard University’s with pro-Assad messages, in an attack a spokesman characterized as sophisticated. At some point, the S.E.A.’s crucial players disappeared and a second crop of hackers took over. The current group consists of roughly a dozen new actors led by hackers who call themselves “Th3 Pr0” and “The Shadow” and function more like Anonymous, the loose hacking collective, than a state-sponsored brigade. In interviews, people who now identify as the S.E.A. insist they operate independently from the Assad regime. But researchers who have been following the group’s digital trail aren’t convinced. “The opportunity for collaboration between the S.E.A. and regime is clear, but what is missing is proof,” said Jacob West, a chief technology officer at Hewlett-Packard. As governments consider stronger responses to malicious cyberactivity, Mr. West said, “the motivation for Syria to maintain plausible deniability is very, very real.” Image The Syrian Electronic Army claimed responsibility for hacking The Financial Times on Friday. Long before the S.E.A’s apparent changing of the guard, security researchers unearthed a stealthier surveillance campaign targeting Syrian dissidents that has since grown to include foreign aid workers. Morgan Marquis-Boire, a researcher at the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, uncovered spyware with names like “Dark Comet” and “BlackShades” sending information back to a Syrian state-owned telecommunications company. The software — which tracked a target’s location, read e-mails and logged keystrokes — disguised itself as an encryption service for Skype, a program used by many Syrian activists. Mr. Marquis-Boire has uncovered more than 200 Internet Protocol addresses running the spyware. Some were among the few kept online last week during an Internet disruption in Syria that the government blamed on a “technical malfunction,” but experts described as a systematic government shutdown. S.E.A. members deny spying on Syrian civilians. “We didn’t do that and we will not,” the hacker who identifies himself as Th3 Pr0 wrote in an e-mail. “Our targets are known,” he wrote, referring to the group’s public Twitter attacks. Researchers have tracked several of those attacks — including that on The Onion and another against Human Rights Watch in March — to a server in Russia, which they believe is redirecting attacks from Syria. Last weekend, researchers traced one attack back to a Syrian I.P. address registered to Syriatel, a telecommunications company owned by Rami Makhlouf, Mr. Assad’s first cousin. Dissidents say that connection is proof the S.E.A. is backed by the Assad regime and claim that the Twitter attacks are just the outward-facing component of a deeper surveillance campaign. “There is no doubt they are the same,” said Dlshad Othman, a Syrian in Washington who helps dissidents get rid of the spyware. The smoking gun, Mr. Othman and others say, was an S.E.A. attack last year on Burhan Ghalioun, a Syrian opposition leader. Shortly after Mr. Ghalioun’s Facebook page was hacked, it began serving spyware to fans. Mr. Ghalioun’s e-mails also showed up on a S.E.A. leak site. The other potential link, they say, is a list of opposition leaders that surfaced in July, after S.E.A. members boasted they could help the regime quickly search for the names of opponents. Mr. Othman said the boasts were proof the S.E.A. worked with the regime and kept tabs on dissidents. Ironically, that opposition search most likely led to the S.E.A.’s internal shake-up. Activists say encryption on the document was cracked, and in July it popped up on Pastebin , a Web site for anonymous postings. “There was a view that the government blamed the S.E.A. for the leak,” said John Scott-Railton, a Citizen Lab research fellow. In the days that followed, Facebook accounts for known S.E.A. members went dark. S.E.A. aliases that researchers had been tracking suddenly vanished. New members with different monikers assumed the group’s name. Researchers say the hackers behind the recent spate of Twitter hacks are far less organized. Outside Syria, the Twitter attacks made people take note of the S.E.A. But inside Syria, they barely registered. Dissidents there are more concerned with the mounting spyware infections and imprisonments. And researchers have seen the spyware tracking a new target: aid workers. “The Syrian opposition are quite paranoid and aware of the stakes,” Mr. Marquis-Boire said. “But then you get foreign aid workers who show up to do good work, but are not as paranoid about their operational security.” “It’s a smart move if you think about it,” he added.
|
Syria;Financial Times;Hacker (computer security);Syrian Electronic Army;News media,journalism;Cyberwarfare;Bashar al-Assad
|
ny0262989
|
[
"world",
"asia"
] |
2011/12/18
|
Secretary Eyes Cuts in Marines and the Navy
|
KABUL, Afghanistan — On a trip to Afghanistan to visit Navy and Marine forces, the secretary of the Navy, Ray Mabus , said Saturday that he expected both branches to reduce their numbers after the Iraq and Afghan wars, and to return to their seafaring roots — although both will have some new areas of focus. The Marines increased their numbers by about 27,000 in 2006 and 2007 to meet the demands of fighting the war in Iraq and the increase in troops there. “The Marines are going to get smaller,” Mr. Mabus said. “And, they are going to get lighter because the equipment they’ve had for these land wars has been heavier and larger.” Mr. Mabus declined to put an exact number on the Marines’ reduction in the coming years, but he said that rather than being across-the-board personnel cuts, any reductions would be tailored to the service’s needs and then would be achieved primarily through attrition. There are currently 19,395 Marines in Afghanistan, with a vast majority in southern province of Helmand, according to the military. There is also a substantial Marine presence in Nimruz Province, which has a long border with Iran. The Navy has 4,892 sailors spread throughout the country. The Navy may reduce somewhat in size, but above all it will go back to its “core competencies,” Mr. Mabus said. It will retain some new specialties, including explosive ordnance disposal, he said. Mr. Mabus suggested that with increasing delicacy about the presence of American bases in countries from Iraq and Saudi Arabia to Afghanistan, the naval services would become more important because they offered ways to deploy troops that did not rely on land bases. “Naval forces can do everything they need to do without impinging on anybody else’s sovereignty, without setting foot on land,” Mr. Mabus said, “and they bring everything they need, whether it’s air power with carrier strike groups, whether it’s Marines with all the equipment they need, including air and an amphibious strike groups. “It will be increasingly important in the years ahead that you can use the same platforms, the same people, the same equipment to do everything from high-end combat, to irregular warfare to humanitarian assistance, disaster relief and engagement and do it all in a self-contained unit, whether it’s a carrier strike group or an amphibious ready-group,” he said. One area that sounds as if it will not face cuts and could even be augmented is the Navy Seal teams, which are part of both the Naval Command and the Special Operations Command. It was an elite Seal group unofficially called Navy Seal Team 6 that carried out the mission that killed Osama Bin Laden in May. “You’ll continue to see an emphasis on special forces because of the unique capabilities they bring in combat, in engagement, in training, in cultural things,” he said. Mr. Mabus is also here looking at some of the efforts to move the Navy and Marines toward renewable energy. During the war in Libya, oil prices increased $30 a barrel, which added $1 billion a year to the fuel bill for the Navy and Marines, he said. The Marine Corps, in particular, is investing heavily in portable solar blankets to generate the energy that it had been getting from batteries, and is trying out solar panels as well as more efficient generators. The reason for the focus is that it has become increasingly clear to military planners that the dependence on fossil fuels is the Navy and Marines’ biggest vulnerability — in cost and mobility, Mr. Mabus said. Ships are most vulnerable when they are refueling — the Navy destroyer Cole was bombed by Al Qaeda while it was refueling in the port of Aden in Yemen, for example — and guarding fuel convoys in Afghanistan has been particularly hazardous for American Marines: one dies for every 50 fuel convoys that come into Afghanistan, he said. “We’re not doing this because it’s the flavor of the month or trendy,” he said of the effort to use alternative energy sources.
|
United States Defense and Military Forces;Afghanistan War (2001- );Iraq;Mabus Ray;United States Marine Corps;United States Navy;Iraq War (2003-11)
|
ny0237669
|
[
"business"
] |
2010/06/09
|
McDonald’s Offers Cash in Recall of Shrek Glasses
|
McDonald’s is taking the unusual step of paying customers a premium to return Shrek drinking glasses that it has recalled because of concerns that cadmium used in the paint on the glasses could come off on children’s hands. The company will pay customers $3 for every glass they return. The company had been selling the glasses for $1.99 with a food purchase and $2.49 without food. It announced on Friday that it was recalling millions of the glasses, which are painted with characters from the movie “Shrek Forever After.” “It’s highly unusual to see a company that executes a recall pay any premium over the regular purchase price,” said Don Mays, senior director of product safety for Consumer Reports. He said that only 10 to 30 percent of consumers responded in a typical recall. “If you offer a premium, it’s more apt to get consumers to respond to a recall and helps to get those unsafe products out of somebody’s home,” Mr. Mays said. McDonald’s gave further details about the recall on Tuesday, including the price it would pay for returned glasses. It said customers could bring the glasses into any of its restaurants beginning on Wednesday and receive refunds in cash. They are not required to bring a receipt. The premium was meant to account partly for taxes that customers may have paid, said Ashlee Yingling, a McDonald’s spokeswoman. “We are making sure our customers are fairly compensated for the recall experience,” she said in an e-mail message. While 12 million of the Shrek glasses were intended for distribution in the United States, about 7.5 million were sold to consumers, the company said last week. McDonald’s announced the recall after the Consumer Product Safety Commission said that tests on the glasses showed that low levels of cadmium, a heavy metal identified as a carcinogen, could come off on the hands of a person holding the glasses. The commission said, however, that the glasses were not considered toxic and that the risk to children was low. The level of cadmium in the glasses, according to the commission, was much lower than the level of the metal found in some children’s jewelry that prompted three recalls earlier this year, including the recall of 55,000 necklaces sold at Wal-Mart. In the case of the jewelry, officials worried that children could suck on pieces or swallow them and that high levels of cadmium could be absorbed into their bodies. The federal government has set a limit for the amount of cadmium that can be used in toys. The safety commission is working to set acceptable levels for other products. Long-term exposure to cadmium has been associated with a variety of health problems, including kidney and bone ailments. While the recalled jewelry was made in China, the recalled glassware was manufactured in the United States, by Arc International. Walt Riker, a McDonald’s spokesman, said last week that the company did not know where the paint used on the glasses came from, but he said that it did not come from China. Cadmium is used in some paints to make bright colors, but industry representatives said that it was unusual for paints containing cadmium to be used in consumer products like glassware. “To me the whole thing about the McDonald’s glasses is very much a mystery, and why they would be putting cadmium pigments in there,” said Hugh Morrow, a consultant for the International Cadmium Association and a former president of the trade group in North America. “Our position is that cadmium pigments should not be painted on consumer glasses.” Meanwhile, McDonald’s announced on Tuesday that sales at stores in the United States that were open at least 13 months rose 3.4 percent in May , compared with those in the month a year earlier. The company said that the sales increase was due in part to the popularity of Shrek-themed promotions for its Chicken McNuggets and Happy Meals. The statement on the monthly results did not mention whether the glassware promotion, which began on May 21, had also lifted sales.
|
McDonald's Corp;Recalls and Bans of Products;Glassware;Metals and Minerals
|
ny0265625
|
[
"sports",
"skiing"
] |
2016/03/20
|
Shiffrin Wins Eighth Consecutive Slalom
|
Mikaela Shiffrin of the United States racked up her eighth successive World Cup win in the slalom Saturday in St. Moritz, Switzerland, while Thomas Fanara’s first victory topped an all-French podium in the giant slalom on the next-to-last day of the finals. Shiffrin again won by a large margin and is unbeaten in slalom racing since February 2015, but she missed five races during a two-month injury layoff and could not capture a fourth successive crystal globe in the discipline. Frida Hansdotter of Sweden clinched the World Cup slalom title earlier this month. ■ Thomas Fanara of France edged out his teammate Alexis Pinturault in the men’s giant slalom at the season-ending World Cup finals in St. Moritz, Switzerland. Fanara, who was the fourth fastest in the first run, beat Pinturault by 0.02 of a second. Mathieu Faivre of France was third. Faivre was first in the opening run, 0.2 of a second ahead of Pinturault, who had won four races in the discipline this season. Marcel Hirscher of Austria had also won four giant slalom races this season to successfully defend his World Cup title. He had also already secured a fifth successive overall title. Hirscher finished fifth, 0.92 of a second behind Fanara. ■ Gabriela Soukalova of the Czech Republic won the women’s biathlon World Cup overall title for the first time as Finland’s Kaisa Makarainen clinched the 10-kilometer pursuit race, in Khanty-Mansiysk, Russia.
|
Skiing;Mikaela Shiffrin;Alpine skiing;World Cup Skiing
|
ny0291974
|
[
"business",
"international"
] |
2016/01/14
|
Lawyer for Iran’s Central Bank Faces Skepticism at Supreme Court
|
WASHINGTON — A lawyer for Iran’s central bank faced skepticism at the Supreme Court on Wednesday as he tried to persuade the justices that his client should not have to pay nearly $2 billion to victims of terrorist attacks. The case was brought by the families of Americans killed in terrorist attacks sponsored by Iran, including relatives of those who died in the 1983 Marine Corps barracks bombing in Lebanon. They have won billions of dollars in court judgments against Iran in American courts. The question in the case, said Theodore B. Olson, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, is whether his clients can collect from assets of the bank held in the United States. American courts, he said, have already determined that “the government of Iran sponsored terrorism that killed and maimed American citizens.” The plaintiffs seek to collect money from Bank Markazi, Iran’s central bank, relying on a 2012 federal law, the Iran Threat Reduction and Syria Human Rights Act, that sought to make the task easier by specifying assets of the bank that could satisfy the plaintiffs’ judgments. The bank says the law violates the Constitution because it is focused on a single case. The arguments on Wednesday, in Bank Markazi v. Peterson, No. 14-770, took place at a delicate moment in relations between the United States and Iran, coming just months after the two countries signed a nuclear agreement. Several justices said the court should be wary of intruding on judgments made by Congress and the president in the conduct of foreign affairs. “The political branches have a great deal of power in this area, even when it comes to very particular controversies,” Justice Elena Kagan said. Jeffrey A. Lamken, the bank’s lawyer, argued that Congress had breached the boundaries of the separation of powers when it enacted the 2012 law, which he said was concerned with “one and only one specified case.” “Congress enacts laws,” Mr. Lamken said. “It doesn’t adjudicate specific cases.” But Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said that many cases had been consolidated under a single title and docket number. “There are 19 judgments involving thousands” of victims, she said. Justice Antonin Scalia was also unpersuaded. “Where do you get the notion that Congress can only act by generality?” he asked. Mr. Lamken responded that quite specific laws may be proper if they concern issues like bridges, parcels of land or presidential papers. But he said Congress crossed a constitutional line in directing the outcome of a pending case. Justice Scalia did not accept the distinction. “Is it magic,” he asked, “that the individualized law that it enacts happens to affect a particular case?” Several justices said that such laws may raise problems under the Constitution’s equal protection and due process clauses. But they suggested that they did not see the separation-of-powers problem pressed by the bank. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who is often concerned with the institutional role of the courts, was the leading voice on the other side. “Congress can tell us how to rule in cases pending before us?” he asked skeptically. Edwin S. Kneedler, a lawyer for the federal government, also argued in favor of the plaintiffs. He drew a distinction between laws intended solely to pick a winner in a pending case and ones that change the applicable law, even if only for a pending case. Chief Justice Roberts said that was a distinction without a difference. “You’re saying Congress has to be cute about it,” he said. Mr. Kneedler essentially agreed. “As long as Congress is amending the law,” he said, “that is not a separation-of-powers problem.” In rebuttal, Mr. Lamken, the bank’s lawyer, said that approach sent a cynical message: “If you want to win your case in court, don’t hire a lawyer. Hire a lobbyist.”
|
Supreme Court,SCOTUS;Iran;Terrorism;Theodore B Olson;Banking and Finance;Lebanon;Lawsuits
|
ny0100691
|
[
"business",
"dealbook"
] |
2015/12/29
|
Valeant’s Latest Fix Underscores Its Challenges
|
Valeant Pharmaceuticals’ latest fix reinforces its challenges. The drug company has appointed three executives to take the reins while its chief executive, J. Michael Pearson, is on medical leave, and three board members to oversee and guide them. The double triumvirate shows how reliant on one man Valeant has become. Mr. Pearson, who has been hospitalized with a serious case of pneumonia, is the architect of the company’s serial acquisitions strategy. This business model and Mr. Pearson’s leadership have come under intense scrutiny. Critics have attacked the company’s accounting, its stifling $30 billion debt load and its price increases on acquired drugs. As a result, Valeant’s market capitalization has plummeted by 60 percent since August. This loss of faith by investors has forced the company to switch to integrating businesses, instead of buying new ones, and paying off debt. The company’s prompt action in addressing Mr. Pearson’s illness by disclosing and appointing interim leadership is commendable. And there’s a good chance Mr. Pearson could be back shortly. But the structure is convoluted. The general counsel, Robert Chai-Onn; the chairman; Ari Kellen; and the chief financial officer, Robert Rosiello, will share management responsibilities in a newly created office of the chief executive. The board has also created a committee to “oversee and support” the office of the C.E.O. This, too, comprises three members: Robert Ingram, the lead independent director; Mason Morfit, president of the big stakeholder ValueAct Capital; and Howard Schiller, the former chief financial officer. The company says this reflects Valeant’s nontraditional organizational philosophy. It relies on what it says is a deep bench of qualified executives working in areas of expertise rather than a traditional hierarchy with roles such as a chief operating officer. Mr. Chai-Onn has been at Valeant for a decade; Mr. Rosiello advised the company for eight years before joining the firm as finance boss. Moreover, the additional board oversight could augur better corporate governance if it leads to the company’s eventual separation of the roles of chairman and chief executive. Investors are more worried that this structure reflects the fact Mr. Pearson can’t be replaced easily, and increases the risk of executive and board infighting. These fears sent the stock down 10 percent Monday morning. More turmoil is the last thing Valeant needs.
|
Pharmaceuticals;Appointments and Executive Changes;Valeant Pharmaceuticals International;Mike Pearson
|
ny0175237
|
[
"nyregion"
] |
2007/10/01
|
Yale Law, Newly Defeated, Allows Military Recruiters
|
NEW HAVEN, Sept. 30 — For five years, Yale Law School has fought to restrict military recruiters from its job fairs because of the Pentagon’s policy that bars openly gay or bisexual people from the military. But with the federal government threatening to withhold $350 million in grants if the university does not assist the recruiters, that fight will all but end on Monday. After an appeals court ruled in favor of the Defense Department on Sept. 17, the law school said it would allow recruiters from the Air Force and Navy to participate in a university-sponsored job interview program for law students on Monday afternoon. For now, the legal battle to stop the recruiters is over, said Robert A. Burt, a Yale law professor and the lead plaintiff in the case. “The judges who hold office at the moment disagree with us,” Professor Burt said. “We must wait for history to vindicate our position.” At question is a statute called the Solomon Amendment, which allows the federal government to withhold funds from universities that do not extend the same welcome to military recruiters as they do to other recruiters. Since 1978, Yale Law School has required recruiters to sign a pledge of nondiscrimination. Military recruiters would not do that because of the Defense Department’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, which permits homosexuals to serve in the armed forces as long as they keep their sexual orientation private. But in 2002, the federal government threatened to withhold the millions it grants to Yale every year, mostly for medical and scientific research, if the law school did not accommodate the recruiters. The law school complied, but 45 members of its faculty filed suit, challenging the law as an infringement on free speech and association as well as academic freedoms. (Yale College has not restricted the activities of military recruiters.) A district court agreed in 2005, and the law school again ceased to assist military recruiters. But in a broader case, the United States Supreme Court last year unanimously sided against a consortium of about three dozen law schools and universities seeking to bar recruiters from their campuses. Because of that decision, the ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in Manhattan against the professors last month was widely anticipated here. Still, that did not lessen the ruling’s sting for gay rights advocates like Sara Jeruss, a third-year law student and the co-chairwoman of OutLaws, an organization of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender students at the law school. “We’re disappointed by it,” Ms. Jeruss said recently in an interview. “We obviously wish the government wasn’t forcing discrimination on us.” But given the Supreme Court’s ruling, Professor Burt said, there was little chance the appeals court would side with the professors, and even less of a chance that such a ruling would survive on another appeal to the high court. That left the law school out of options. “We had a choice, which is we could continue to exclude the military, and Yale University would have lost $300 million per year,” Professor Burt said in an interview here recently. “We’re not going to bring the medical school and the whole science enterprise to its knees.” And so the law school obliged when officials from the Judge Advocate General’s Corps in the Air Force and Navy asked to be part of the law school’s fall job interview program, which begins Monday afternoon at a hotel near the campus. Yale will be one of nearly 200 law schools that the Air Force’s judge advocate corps will visit this year, said Capt. Eric Merriam, the chief of recruiting for the corps. “We appreciate the opportunity to explain the opportunities for qualified attorneys to serve the United States as members of the Air Force JAG Corps,” he said. Still, the court decision does not appear to have stifled any bitterness over the recruiters’ visit. A coalition of law school faculty, students and staff members were to release a letter on Monday strongly disagreeing with the don’t ask, don’t tell policy, and gay rights activists at the law school planned a silent protest for the afternoon. And not everyone here thinks that the fight was worth it. Stephen Vaden, a third-year law student and an opponent of don’t ask, don’t tell, said the school would be better able to effect change in the military’s policies if more students were exposed to career opportunities within the armed forces. “I think that those individuals who want to change the don’t ask, don’t tell policy are going about it in completely the wrong way,” said Mr. Vaden, president of the Yale Law Republicans. “Standing in the courtroom, screaming ‘Discrimination!’ and trying to ban them from the law school,” he added, “they’re doing themselves more harm than good.” Ms. Jeruss and other students said that their protest was not aimed at the recruiters personally, and Captain Merriam said that the JAG Corps’ recruitment efforts would not be affected by any dissent at Yale. But students promised that as long as the don’t ask, don’t tell policy was in effect, they would demonstrate whenever military recruiters travel here. “We may not be able to stop the recruiters from coming, but we certainly still have the ability — and I think, the responsibility — to speak out,” said Addisu Demissie, a third-year law student. “That’s what we have left.”
|
Draft and Recruitment (Military);Homosexuality;Law and Legislation;Colleges and Universities;Yale University
|
ny0026035
|
[
"us"
] |
2013/08/14
|
Study Offers a Picture of Young Immigrants Seeking a Reprieve From Deportation
|
A new study by the Brookings Institution presents what the group calls “an emerging portrait” of young immigrants who have sought a temporary reprieve from deportation under a year-old program that is one of President Obama’s signature immigration initiatives. The study shows that the population of applicants, who must be between 15 and 30 years old, is heavily skewed toward the younger end of that spectrum: most were under 21 and more than a third were younger than 19. In addition, two out of every three applicants for the program, known as deferred action, were under 11 when they arrived in the United States and almost one-third were 5 or younger, said the study, which will be released on Wednesday. Nearly three-quarters of the applicants have been here for at least a decade. Immigrants’ advocates have long argued that many young unauthorized immigrants should be granted an expedited path to legal status because they were brought to the United States as young children through no fault of their own and, having grown up in the country, were essentially American in all but legal status. The Brookings findings, the first of their kind, may well be used to bolster this case. “If we think about what they’ve done in their lives and how they’ve spent their time in this country, the fact is that they’ve been part of the American school system,” said Audrey Singer, co-author of the report and a senior fellow at Brookings, a nonpartisan research organization. “This is one of the big things that makes them American.” More than 557,400 immigrants had applied for deferred action as of the end of June, according to the latest government figures, and nearly 400,600 of those — or about 72 percent — have been accepted, with the vast majority of the remaining applications still under review. The Brookings study was based on a review of applications obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request to the Homeland Security Department. The data covers the period from Aug. 15, 2012 — the first day applications were accepted — to March 22, 2013, and includes the first 465,509 applications received by the department. United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, the division of the Homeland Security Department that has been processing the applications, has released monthly data about the program, including the number of applicants and recipients; states of residence; and the countries from which the largest subpopulations of applicants come. But the Brookings study offers deeper statistical insight, including applicants’ geographic distribution, age, gender and year of arrival in the United States. The applicants came from some 192 countries, Brookings found. About three-quarters were born in Mexico, and the top 25 countries account for more than 96 percent of all applicants, the study said. The report also noted that only 4 percent of applicants were Asian, fewer than expected, the authors said. China, for instance, does not appear among the 25 countries with the largest number of immigrants who have applied for the reprieve. The applications have come from all 50 states and the District of Columbia, as well as Puerto Rico, Guam and the Virgin Islands, Ms. Singer said. Most applicants, however, live in states with large foreign-born populations, including California, Texas, New York, Illinois and Florida. But New Jersey, which has the fifth-largest immigrant population in the country, ranks in ninth place for applications, behind North Carolina, Arizona and Georgia, the study said. The volume of applications was at its highest in the early months of the program, peaking at about 116,200 in October, according to government statistics. Since then, the number of applicants has dropped sharply, dipping to a low of about 18,300 in June. Ms. Singer and her co-author, Nicole Prchal Svajlenka, a research analyst, offer several likely reasons for this tapering. Applicants with the most straightforward cases — including younger people enrolled in school, recently graduated, or living with their parents — have an easier time showing that they have continuously resided in the United States since June 2007, one of the criteria for approval, and therefore may have applied earlier, the authors wrote. In addition, young people “have more support than their older counterparts through nonprofit organizations,” particularly those that are working with high schools and colleges, the study said. “Older applicants, especially those living independently from parents, and those not enrolled in school, may have a harder time documenting that they have been living in the United States continuously since 2007.”
|
Immigration;DACA;Brookings;Audrey Singer;Nicole Prchal Svajlenka;Citizenship
|
ny0060663
|
[
"business"
] |
2014/08/15
|
ThyssenKrupp Earnings Bounce Back
|
LONDON — The German steel-making conglomerate ThyssenKrupp said on Thursday that it earned 39 million euros in the second quarter, compared with a loss of €395 million in the period a year earlier. Sales rose 8 percent to €10.7 billion, it said. The data suggest that ThyssenKrupp is continuing to recover after several difficult years. The improvement comes after a rough 2013, in which its stock price plunged and it was forced to raise capital by selling new shares. ThyssenKrupp’s stock price was up 1.7 percent in midday trading in Europe. “We are moving in the right direction,” the company’s chief executive, Heinrich Hiesinger, said in a statement. Mr. Hiesinger, a former executive at Siemens who became chief of ThyssenKrupp in 2011, has tried to revive the company’s fortunes by cutting costs and by selling assets like a money-losing steel plant in the United States that it jettisoned last year. ThyssenKrupp’s chief financial officer, Guido Kerkhoff, said by telephone on Thursday that the company was benefiting from investments to expand nonsteel businesses like auto components and elevators in countries like China and India, as well as from cost-cutting that was “helping us to catch up where we are lagging behind.” Although it remains the largest steel maker in Germany, ThyssenKrupp, like its rival Voestalpine in Austria, is making its major investments in activities beyond steel, which remains a difficult business because overcapacity around the world is keeping a downward pressure on prices. The bulk of the company’s profit in the second quarter came from a unit that makes elevators and escalators, and from another division, called Industrial Solutions, that includes activities like building fertilizer plants and making giant machines for mines. ThyssenKrupp also has a large business that furnishes components for automobiles and other machinery. “Most of the earnings are now related to capital goods,” Jeff Largey, an analyst at Macquarie Securities in London, said. “Thyssen is more of an industrial conglomerate.” ThyssenKrupp’s profit in the quarter from European steel making, which is highly cyclical, rose more than sixfold to €92 million, or about $123 million, before interest and taxes. ThyssenKrupp’s future performance is likely to depend greatly on whether the economies in Europe and those of important countries like China continue to grow and are not set back by instability in the Middle East. The company said it was seeing improvement in the construction industry in Western Europe, which has been in the doldrums for several years. ThyssenKrupp also said that the auto sector, a major consumer of steel, was benefiting from stable growth in the United States and a recovery in Europe. ThyssenKrupp does not seem to have been hit yet by the events in Ukraine; Mr. Kerkhoff noted that Russia and Ukraine amounted to less than 1 percent of its total sales.
|
ThyssenKrupp;Earnings Reports;Steel Iron;Germany;Heinrich Hiesinger
|
ny0232979
|
[
"business",
"global"
] |
2010/08/21
|
Nespresso and Rivals Vie for Dominance in Coffee War
|
PARIS — George Clooney and John Malkovich aren’t the only coffee lovers fighting over a Nespresso these days. A coffee war has broken out in Europe pitting the Swiss food giant Nestlé against the struggling American food group Sara Lee as well as a former Nestlé executive. They are at odds over the worldwide monopoly Nespresso has long held on the lucrative espresso pods that fit its coffee-making machines. Helping propel its popularity in Europe is a sleekly wry English-language ad campaign featuring Mr. Clooney and Mr. Malkovich . With billions at stake, Nespresso has sued its rivals, accusing them of making cheaper copycat pods that violate the intellectual property it created in developing a system to make a convenient homemade cup of espresso that it claims can best a barista. The first court test could begin next month here, where Nespresso’s competitors recently put their pods on grocery store shelves in hopes of establishing a beachhead to make inroads throughout Europe and into the United States. “Nestlé has spent millions of dollars on innovation and research in Nespresso over many years,” said Richard Girardot, chief executive of Nestlé Nespresso. “So when someone comes along with a pure copy of the product, we have to protect ourselves.” But Nespresso’s rivals say that Nestlé is trying to lock them out of one of the fastest-growing segments of the coffee market: pods now account for 20 to 40 percent of the value of ground coffee sales in the $17 billion European coffee market, according to Euromonitor International. “What they’re doing is similar to Hewlett-Packard or Epson trying to forbid generic cartridges,” said Jean-Paul Gaillard, who ran Nespresso for a decade but who now is being sued by Nestlé for devising a biodegradable version of its capsule. “They are trying to stop copies — but our product is not a copy,” he said. Competitors have emerged to other single-serve coffee products, but Nestlé is the first to take legal action to try to ward generics away from the gold mine of coffee by the pod. “The real margins now are in capsulized coffee,” Mr. Gaillard said, “where you basically sell five grams of coffee for five times the price of what you’d get from regular roasted ground.” Sales have leapt 30 percent a year, on average, over the last decade, ever since Nespresso underwent an aggressive makeover that transformed it from a humdrum office coffee product to a must-have item among chic urbanites. Through star-studded advertising in Europe and Asia and a growing network of clubby boutiques now numbering 200, it lures upscale customers, whether in New York, Paris or Shanghai. Since 2000, when Nespresso started to break even, the company has sold more than 20 billion capsules through its boutiques and Web site at about 43 to 62 cents apiece. The price of its machines start around $190 and soar beyond $2,500. Given similar projections for future growth, others started trying to angle in. Nestlé has not made that easy: it owns the patents — 1,700 of them — on its personal espresso system, which Mr. Malkovich, playing God in Nespresso’s most recent European ads, trades for Mr. Clooney’s soul. Many of the patents are set to expire in 2012, and Nestlé has been working on other ways to prevent competitors from hacking a system that uses unique water dynamics to pump an espresso kissed with foam out of a hermetically sealed aluminum capsule. Sara Lee, which has been trying since 2005 to engineer a recovery, recently broke through. In mid-July, it put its own plastic perforated version of the capsule, the L’Or, in French supermarkets, at a price of 37 cents. So far, it has sold 30 million capsules, a spokesman said. “Coffee is Sara Lee’s No. 1 business; it accounts for well over 50 percent of their earnings,” said Tim Ramey, an analyst at D. A. Davidson & Company in Portland, Ore. “The single-serve coffee business is the piece that’s growing fast, so it’s important for them.” Sara Lee has its own low-cost version of a personal espresso machine, the Senseo, whose pods alone had sales of $555 million in the fiscal year that ended June 30. Senseo is a top seller in the American market and a rival to other single-serve coffees in the United States, like Green Mountain. About 27 million Senseo machines were sold in the last decade, compared to about eight million Nespresso machines. But the real gold mine is in pods. Sara Lee insists that its capsules do not violate Nestlé’s patents. “In terms of shape, size, color, material — the whole product is different,” said Ernesto Duran, a spokesman for Sara Lee. If Sara Lee is confident, so is Mr. Gaillard, who started the Ethical Coffee Company three years ago to grab a piece of a market he knows inside out. He takes credit for dreaming up the way to make Nespresso a breakthrough product when he was the top executive there from 1988 to 1997, a claim that elicits long moments of silence from current executives. “I wanted to create the Chanel of coffee, and decided to make Nespresso chic and bobo,” he said. “The idea was to keep it to the level of people who have a doorman.” In 1998, he shifted to running Nestlé’s frozen sweets division in the United States, but said he quit a year later to join a rival, Mövenpick, after becoming “bored with ice cream .” He left there three years later and quickly decided to start his own coffee business. “I started looking at the Nespresso patents, and I said, ‘My God, there is something I can do even better which they did not see.’ ” He started manufacturing a biodegradable capsule that sells for about 32 cents and whose water-flow dynamics, he said, were different from Nespresso’s and did not pollute the way aluminum and plastic capsules did. Soon after his pods hit the shelves of the French supermarket Casino, he said Nestlé representatives paid one of its stores a visit. “A few guys came to the store and said, ‘We want 2,000 capsules.’ When the manager asked why, they said they were from Nestlé and had the right to buy,” Mr. Gaillard said. Last month, Nestlé persuaded the French police to raid two factories to seize more Ethical Coffee capsules; 35 million have been sold since the end of May. “Nestlé is not sitting back at all,” said Richard Withagen, an analyst at SNS Securities in Amsterdam. “They are fighting the entry of Sara Lee and Mr. Gaillard, and they are also working on new patents and a new kind of machine for the future.” Until the courts rule, each company is trying to persuade consumers that their coffee is king. All three cite tests they claim show that theirs tastes best. There are even several gushing Nespresso blogs that appear to be independent, but which Mr. Gaillard notes all vote down the taste of rival pods, often using strikingly similar language. Whatever the taste, any competitor might still have to work hard to attract the type of shopper willing to spend a few hundred dollars for a sleek Nespresso machine and entrée to its boutiques. Remy Romana, 26, walked out of a store on the Avenue Victor Hugo in Paris recently with $120 worth of capsules, enough for a few weeks. “Most of my friends have a Nespresso machine, especially in Paris,” he said. He recently tried a L’Or capsule and found the taste “a little less good” than Nespresso. A price difference of about 6 cents, he said, was not enough to make him give up the pampered atmosphere of buying pods in Nespresso’s stores. “The Nespresso coffee is more expensive per capsule,” he shrugged. “But it’s still less expensive than paying 1.50 euros for an espresso at a cafe.”
|
Coffee;Nestle SA;Sara Lee Corp;Advertising and Marketing;Europe
|
ny0161619
|
[
"technology"
] |
2006/04/13
|
Run Windows and Mac OS Both at Once
|
ONLY a week ago, Apple released what seemed like an astonishing piece of software called Boot Camp. This program radically rewrote the rules of Macintosh-Windows warfare -- by letting you run Windows XP on a Macintosh at full speed. Now, some in the Cult of Macintosh were baffled by the whole thing. Who on earth, they asked, wants to pollute the magnificence of the Mac with a headache like Windows XP? Back in the real world, though, there was plenty of interest. Lots of people are tempted by the Mac's sleek looks and essentially virus-free operating system -- but worry about leaving Windows behind entirely. Others would find happiness with Apple's superb music, photo and movie-making programs -- but have jobs that rely on Microsoft Access, Outlook or some other piece of Windows corporate-ware. Even many current Mac fans occasionally steal covert glances over the fence at some of the Windows-only niceties they thought they'd never have, like QuickBooks Online, AutoCad for architects, high-end 3-D Windows games, or the occasional bullheaded Web site that requires Internet Explorer for Windows. Few could have guessed that only days later, Boot Camp would be eclipsed by something even better. Boot Camp remains a free download from Apple.com. It's a public beta, meaning it's not technically finished. It's available only for Mac models containing an Intel chip. (So far that's the 2006 Mac Mini, iMac and MacBook Pro laptop.) The uncomplicated installation process takes about an hour, and entails burning a CD, inserting a Windows XP installation CD (not included), and waiting around a lot. Then you designate either Mac OS X or Windows as your "most of the time" operating system. You can also choose an operating system each time you start up the computer. If you choose Windows, then by golly, you're in Windows. You can install and run your favorite Windows programs -- speech recognition, business software, even games -- and, incredibly, they run as fast and well as they ever did. Correction: they run faster than they ever did. Most people comment that an Intel Mac runs Windows faster than any PC they've ever owned. And if the Windows side ever gets bogged down with viruses and spyware, you can flip into Mac OS X and keep right on being productive. Boot Camp's problem, though, is right there in its name: You have to reboot (restart) the computer every time you switch systems. As a result, you can't copy and paste between Mac and Windows programs. And when you want to run a Windows program, you have to close everything you were working on, shut down the Mac, and restart it in Windows -- and then reverse the process when you're done. You lose two or three minutes each way. NO wonder, then, that last week, the corridors of cyberspace echoed with the sounds of high-fiving when a superior solution came to light. A little company called Parallels has found a way to eliminate all of those drawbacks -- and to run Windows XP and Mac OS X simultaneously. The software is called Parallels Workstation for Mac OS X, although a better name might be No Reboot Camp. It, too, is a free public beta, available for download from parallels.com. You can pre-order the final version for $40, or pay $50 after its release (in a few weeks, says the company). Parallels, like Boot Camp, requires that you supply your own copy of Windows. But here's the cool part: with Parallels, unlike Boot Camp, it doesn't have to be XP. It can be any version, all the way back to Windows 3.1 -- or even Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, OS/2 or MS-DOS. All of this is made possible by a feature of Intel's Core Duo chips (called virtualization) that's expressly designed for running multiple operating systems simultaneously. In the finished version, the company says, you'll be able to work in several operating systems at once. What the heck -- install Windows XP three times. If one becomes virus-ridden, you can just delete it and smile. But before your head explodes, consider the most popular case: running one copy of Windows XP on your Mac. Suppose you're finishing a brochure on your Mac, and you need a phone number from your company's Microsoft Access database. You double-click the Parallels icon, and 15 seconds later -- yes, 15 seconds -- Windows XP is running in a window of its own, just as you left it. You open Access, look up and copy the contact information, click back into your Mac design program, and paste. Sweet. Using Boot Camp, you'd restart the computer in Windows, look up the number -- but then what? Without the ability to copy and paste, what would you do with the phone number once you found it? Write it on an envelope? Parallels is very fast -- perhaps 95 percent as fast as Boot Camp. (It's definitely not a software-based emulator like Microsoft's old, dog-slow Virtual PC program.) It's even fast enough for video games, although not the 3-D variety; for now, those are still better played in Boot Camp. So if Parallels' side-by-side scheme is so superior, should Apple just fold up its little Boot Camp tent and go home? It's much too soon to say. Turns out Apple's and Parallels' definitions of "beta" differ wildly. The Boot Camp beta feels finished and polished. Parallels, on the other hand, is obviously a labor of love by techies who are still novices in the Macintosh religion of simplicity. Its installation requires fewer steps than Boot Camp (there's no CD burning or restarting the Mac), but even its Quick Installation Guide is filled with jargon like "virtual machine" and "image file." (Parallels says it's completely rewriting its guides.) The dialogue boxes look a little quirky, too. And to get the best features -- like copying and pasting between operating systems and enlarging the Windows window to nearly full-screen size -- you're supposed to install something called Parallels Tools. They ought to be installed automatically. Even then, as of the current version (Beta 3), some features are missing in the Windows side: your U.S.B. jacks won't work, for example, and DVD's won't play (CD's do). Sometimes, beta really means beta. Note, too, that while it's easy to copy text between Mac OS X and Windows programs, copying files and folders is trickier. You don't actually see a Windows "hard drive," as you do when using Mac OS X with Boot Camp. To drag icons back and forth, you have to share the "Mac" and the "PC" with each other over a "network" that you establish between them. Things sure get weird fast when you're running two computers in one. Now, if you're a Mac fan, knowing that you can run Windows software so easily in Mac OS X might make your imagination run wild with possibilities. One of them, unfortunately, is a buzz killer of epic proportions: If such a feat becomes effortless, will the world's software companies lose their incentive to write Mac versions of their programs? No one can say. But if that fate can be avoided, then the Uni-Computer will be a win-win-win. The Mac will be known as the computer that can run nearly 100 percent of the world's software catalog. Microsoft will sell more copies of Windows. Consumers will enjoy the security, silent operation and sophisticated polish of the Mac without sacrificing mission-critical Windows programs. Apple, no doubt, is also gleefully contemplating the reaction of the masses when they experience Mac OS X and Windows side by side, day in and day out. Its Web site makes the point without much subtlety: "Windows running on a Mac," it says, is "subject to the same attacks that plague the Windows world. Sobe sure to keep it updated with the latest Microsoft Windows security fixes." Ouch! So in the course of seven days, the brilliant but technical Windows-on-Mac procedure written by a couple of hackers last month -- OnMac.net -- has become obsolete, and two more official ways to do the unthinkable have been born. You can use Boot Camp (fast and feature-complete, but requires restarting) or, in a few weeks, the finished version of Parallels (fast and no restarting, but geekier to install, and no 3-D games). Can't decide? Then install both. They coexist beautifully on a single Mac. Either that, or just wait. At this rate of change and innovation, something even better is surely just another week away. David Pogue E-mail: [email protected]
|
APPLE COMPUTER INC;MICROSOFT CORP;COMPUTER SOFTWARE;COMPUTERS AND THE INTERNET
|
ny0251885
|
[
"business"
] |
2011/02/25
|
Toyota to Recall Over 2 Million Vehicles for Gas Pedal Flaws
|
DETROIT — Floor mats and accelerators continue to plague Toyota . Toyota said on Thursday that it was recalling another 2.17 million vehicles to fix problems that could cause their accelerator pedals to become stuck, a setback in its efforts to rebound from the uncertainty that swirled around the carmaker last year. Toyota initiated two new recalls on Thursday, covering about 769,000 sport utility vehicles and 20,000 Lexus sedans, and added nearly 1.4 million vehicles to its November 2009 recall related to what Toyota called “floor mat entrapment.” Since 2009, Toyota has recalled more than 14 million vehicles globally, with most connected to the floor-mat issue or a defect in the design of the accelerator pedal. The affected models are the 2004-6 Toyota Highlander , the 2004-7 Lexus RX, the 2006-7 Lexus GS, the 2003-9 Toyota 4Runner , the 2008-11 Lexus LX 570 and the 2006-10 Toyota Rav4. Federal regulators said the announcement concluded their investigation into whether Toyota had recalled enough vehicles. “The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reviewed more than 400,000 pages of Toyota documents to determine whether the scope of its recalls for pedal entrapment was sufficient,” the agency’s administrator, David Strickland, said in a statement. As a result of the review, he added, the agency “asked Toyota to recall these additional vehicles, and now that the company has done so, our investigation is closed.” The news came a few weeks after the agency delivered a victory for Toyota in concluding that it could not find flaws in the electronics system to explain reports of sudden acceleration, as some critics and lawyers suing the company have asserted. The transportation secretary, Ray LaHood, said at that time that the problems were limited to two previously revealed defects and that Toyota’s cars were safe to drive. The safety agency forced Toyota to pay $48.8 million in three separate fines for waiting too long to announce the sudden-acceleration recalls and an unrelated 2005 recall. Each of the fines was the maximum allowed by law. Though recalling millions more vehicles looked bad, lumping them all into one announcement could help the company finally put the problem behind it, said David Thomas, senior editor of Cars.com , which follows the auto industry. “I think they’re trying to put the final chapter on it,” Mr. Thomas said. “Their sales are already seriously damaged from the first rounds. A large chunk of the people who used to just go back and get another Toyota without thinking twice are now thinking twice, and they’re never going to get that back.” Toyota was the only major carmaker to report a decline in sales in 2010. It sold 0.4 percent fewer vehicles, while the rest of the industry grew 13.4 percent. Toyota said several different issues were involved in the latest recalls. On the GS sedans, dealers will modify the shape of a plastic pad embedded in the driver’s side floor carpet because it could interfere with the accelerator pedal. Owners will receive notices by mail starting in March. On the Highlander and RX S.U.V.’s, Toyota said dealers would replace the driver’s side carpet cover and two clips that keep those covers in place. If one clip is installed improperly, the cover could interfere with the accelerator pedal arm, causing it to become stuck or partly depressed. Owners of those models will receive an interim notice explaining how to inspect for the problem and inviting them to have a dealer perform an inspection, and a second notice when replacement covers are available. Owners of the 4Runner, LX 570 and Rav4, which were added to the floor-mat recall in 2009, will receive one notice informing them of the problem and another after a remedy is developed.
|
Toyota Motor Corp;Recalls and Bans of Products
|
ny0022053
|
[
"world",
"europe"
] |
2013/09/26
|
Day Devoted to Hoisting Guinness Starts to Leave a Bitter Taste
|
DUBLIN — Bars across Ireland will be thronged on Thursday with early evening drinkers. Groups of inebriated young people will be staggering around the streets, and hospital emergency rooms will be packed. No, this is not St. Patrick’s Day. It is Arthur’s Day — an annual paean to Guinness first concocted by marketing gurus in 2009 to promote the 250th anniversary of the drink so intimately associated with Ireland. But to a growing chorus of critics, it is becoming a national embarrassment. Eamonn McCann, a journalist and political activist, put it succinctly in his column in The Belfast Telegraph. “Has there ever been a scam like Arthur’s Day,” he wrote, “as contemptuous of the people it targets, as disrespectful of the culture and especially of the music it misuses to make its play, as depressing in the extent to which the people made fools of simper with pleasure and cry out for more?” Diageo, the multinational drinks company that owns the Guinness brand, says the shindig brings together three celebrated strands of Irish culture: Guinness, the pub and music. Its promotional material exhorts people “to paint the town black” — the color of a Guinness stout — and calls the day “a remarkable celebration of those who make things happen.” The company is promoting the 1759 anniversary year to encourage people to be in a bar by 5:59 p.m. (or 17:59) to raise a glass to Arthur — that’s Arthur Guinness, the brewery’s founder. Diageo’s critics say that it is all an empty ritual aimed at promoting the company’s brands, and that there is nothing to celebrate in binge drinking. Although Diageo is at pains to emphasize a message of drinking responsibly, there were reports of a 30 percent increase in ambulance calls in central Dublin after last year’s event. Dr. Stephen Cusack, a physician in Cork, likened the streets of that city to the “last days of Sodom and Gomorrah.” This year , over 1,000 musicians are scheduled to perform at 500 locations across Ireland, with smaller events taking place in 43 countries including Malaysia, Spain, Singapore, Italy, Indonesia, Germany and the United Arab Emirates. In Ireland, the expected acts will range from local up-and-coming talent to more well-known names like Bobby Womack, The Script and Emeli Sandé . The 2009 promotion was hailed as a tremendous success, not only by Diageo but also by many hard-pressed publicans, whose businesses have come under severe pressure from the economic downturn, below-cost sales of alcohol in supermarkets, antismoking legislation and, in the case of rural pubs in particular, a crackdown on drunken driving. In the three years since then, politicians have also been eager to talk up the tourism potential of Arthur’s Day, and the Irish news media have carried overwhelmingly uncritical coverage of the events associated with it, generating enormous free publicity for the Guinness brand. But a backlash has begun in earnest, with an unlikely alliance of critics blasting the event on health, cultural and even artistic grounds. Image Its creators say the day celebrates three strands of Irish culture — Guinness, the pub and music. Credit Paulo Nunes dos Santos for The New York Times In many ways, the day has been caught in the cross-fire of an increasingly heated debate about society’s relationship with alcohol. Alcohol Action Ireland , a group campaigning for policy changes, estimates that alcohol is so cheap in Irish supermarkets it takes the equivalent of only an hour’s work at minimum wage to buy the weekly recommended intake. Dr. Stephen Stewart, director of the Center for Liver Disease at the Mater Hospital in Dublin, said this week in a statement that cirrhosis of the liver was reaching epidemic proportions across Ireland, particularly among younger people, the age group most likely to fill the bars on Thursday night. “We have a progressively worsening relationship with alcohol in Ireland, which manifests itself in the increasing numbers of young people dying from alcohol-related illnesses,” he said. “Alcohol is more affordable than ever. Alcohol is more acceptable than ever. Alcohol is more available than ever. We need measures to address this epidemic. Where does Arthur’s Day fit into all of this?” Echoing that sentiment, Dr. Frank Murray, chairman of the policy group on alcohol of the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland, branded the day “irresponsible.” Yet for many local entertainers who are short of cash, Arthur’s Day provides much-needed income. Many of them express misgivings in private but can ill-afford to pass up a paycheck. That changed somewhat this year, when some prominent artists derided the event. Though still relatively few in number, their voices have been growing louder, foremost among them Ireland’s best-known folk singer, Christy Moore . Mr. Moore called the day “Arthur’s Alcoholiday” and questioned the promotion of the symbiotic relationship between alcohol and Irish culture. Mike Scott, the founder of The Waterboys , and Steve Wall, the lead singer with The Stunning , have joined those calling for a boycott. “Paint the town black? My town is already black with unemployment, shootings, depression, a lack of paying gigs and a lack of Irish artists on daytime radio,” Mr. Wall wrote on his Facebook page. “No thanks Diageo ... go paint your own town black. We need some light.” However, advocates of personal responsibility note that Diageo is not forcing Guinness down anyone’s throat. They claim the day has become an easy target for groups that advocate greater regulation for alcohol. Speaking this week on RTE radio, a Diageo executive said the company would continue to sponsor the event as long as the public backed it. And that may be the rub. With the event having generated huge debate this year in mainstream and social media, some commentators have begun to wonder if the publicity-attuned Diageo may ultimately decide that the hangover simply is not worth it.
|
Guinness;Ireland;Alcohol;Diageo;Beer;Dublin;Alcohol abuse
|
ny0187505
|
[
"world",
"asia"
] |
2009/04/17
|
Britain and France Criticize Sri Lanka Rebels
|
PARIS — Britain and France issued on Thursday a strongly worded criticism of the Tamil Tiger rebels for preventing civilians from leaving the small conflict zone in the north east of Sri Lanka . “It is clear that the L.T.T.E. have been forcefully preventing civilians from leaving the conflict area and we deplore their determination to use civilians as a human shield,” the British foreign secretary, David Miliband, and his French counterpart, Bernard Kouchner, said in a joint statement. Sri Lanka imposed a two-day cease-fire Monday after President Mahinda Rajapaksa ordered the military to restrict operations to a defensive nature for the Sri Lankan New Year. The cease-fire was lifted late Tuesday amid counter claims about confrontations between the Army and the Tamil Tigers, also known as the L.T.T.E., for the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. Britain and France said they were “deeply concerned that there was no large scale movement of civilians away from the conflict area to safety as we had hoped to see, in the short period allowed for the pause.” John Holmes, the United Nations humanitarian affairs coordinator, said Wednesday in New York that Sri Lankan civilians were being used as human shields by rebels holding out in a tiny sliver of land in the north east of the island. Mr. Holmes said the cease-fire was insufficient to land relief supplies and to allow civilians to escape. International pressure is also increasing on the government to protect civilians from the fighting. In their statement on Thursday, Paris and London urged President Rajapaksa to announce a new pause in hostilities. “Both sides must abide by their obligations under international humanitarian law and do all they can to protect civilians,” the statement said. Mr. Holmes called on the Sri Lankan government to stop shelling civilian areas and urged the rebels to let non-combatants leave. Advocates of the Responsibility to Protect, a project that advances the idea of foreign armies intervening to protect civilians, petitioned the Security Council to act to prevent ”mass atrocities” against an estimated 100,000 civilians trapped in the safety zone, a coastal area of about 20 square kilometers, or 7.7 square miles, in the north east of the island. Brig. Udaya Nanayakkara, the spokesman for the Sri Lankan military, said by telephone from Colombo that there had been no “no activity” on the battlefield Thursday. He said government troops remained on the outskirts of the zone, where they are “observing activity.” A report from the Ministry of Defense Web Site said Thursday that the army had made some advances along the coast on Wednesday, killing 13 rebels and injuring 15. Brigadier Nanayakkara said that 135 civilians had managed to flee the conflict zone on Wednesday, but that there were no further escapees to report on Thursday. The military also says that the rebels are preventing civilians from leaving and using them as human shields. TamilNet, a pro-rebel Web site, said Thursday that the Sri Lankan Army had intensified its offensive against the safety zone “deploying maximum fire power in the fighting.” On Wednesday, the site reported that the Sri Lankan Army had attacked the zone “killing and maiming hundreds of civilians.” Independent media have been unable to verify the claims as they are restricted from the conflict zone area; both sides regularly exaggerate details. Separately, the Ministry of Defense said in a statement that President Rajapaksa had made a “goodwill” visit to the town of Kilinochchi, a former rebel stronghold and the scene of recent fighting, on Thursday. It said it was the first visit to the region by a Sri Lankan head of state in nearly three decades. The government in Colombo on Monday dropped Norway as a peace mediator, accusing Oslo of failing to protect its mission there from Tamil protesters.
|
Sri Lanka;Defense and Military Forces;Civilian Casualties;Civil War and Guerrilla Warfare;France;Great Britain
|
ny0245914
|
[
"world",
"middleeast"
] |
2011/04/01
|
Syria Offers Changes to Ward Off Protests
|
CAIRO — As Syria braced for renewed antigovernment demonstrations, the government announced new measures on Thursday seemingly aimed at addressing the protesters’ demands. But analysts said they were doubtful that the changes, coming a day after President Bashar al-Assad pointedly refused to make concessions, would amount to more than window dressing, and activists promised to go ahead with plans for a nationwide protest on Friday. The protest could be a critical test of the strength of the movement, which in a little over two weeks has posed an unprecedented challenge to the four-decade iron rule of the Assad family. The police and the military have responded aggressively to check the protests; activists say at least 103 people have died. Mr. Assad’s speech to the nation on Wednesday, in which he called the protesters dupes and agents of a foreign conspiracy, left little doubt that the hard line would continue. Ammar al-Qurabi, a Syrian activist currently in Cairo, said the speech and the violence of the last two weeks could discourage some from protesting on Friday, but he said he remained optimistic. “People are afraid to protest tomorrow, but there are many who are upset about the speech and what is happening in the country right now, and a good many of them will not be afraid to take to the street,” he said. “Of course I am nervous; my people are being killed in the street,” he added. “The president’s speech was very threatening.” Mr. Assad, in his first public address since the unrest began, said the democracy protests were merely a disguise for a foreign conspiracy to “fragment Syria, to bring down Syria as a nation, to enforce an Israeli agenda.” He acknowledged popular demands for reform but insisted that protesters had been “duped” into damaging the nation on behalf of its enemies, and vowed that the country would not bow to foreign pressure. “It is clear from Bashar’s speech that he is threatening Syrians who go to the street,” said Radwan Ziadeh, a Syrian human rights activist and visiting scholar at George Washington University in Washington. “He ended the speech by saying, ‘This is a battle and we are ready to fight it.’ But against who?” That question appeared to be answered just hours after the speech, when security forces opened fire upon pro-democracy demonstrators in the coastal city of Latakia, a stronghold of the ruling Baath Party and the Shiite Alawi sect that dominates it. Witnesses and activists gave conflicting reports of from 2 to 15 protesters killed. In one video posted to YouTube, protesters in Latakia can be seen and heard chanting, “The people just want freedom.” In a second, screaming demonstrators carry bloody bodies down the street. Nonetheless, the Facebook group Syrian Revolution 2011, which has more than 100,000 fans, urged Syrians to take to the streets on Friday. “What we have understood from the speech is that we have no choice but to remove the regime,” the group said in a statement posted Thursday. Mr. Assad’s harsh words on Wednesday contrasted with the conciliatory tone of two government announcements on Thursday creating new committees to address the protesters’ concerns. One committee was appointed to investigate deaths in Dara’a and Latakia, two cities where the government has cracked down on protesters, according to the state news agency. Syrian Human Rights Information Link, an activist organization, has documented the names of 103 people killed across the country since the protests began March 15, including at least 73 in Dara’a and 10 in Latakia. It was not clear if the number for Latakia included those killed Wednesday night. The government also announced the creation of a committee to study lifting the emergency law imposed in 1963 and replacing it with legislation “that secures the preservation of the country’s security, the dignity of citizens and combating terrorism,” according to the state news agency. Lifting the emergency law has been a major demand of the protesters. Among its provisions, the law silences dissent and allows security forces to detain citizens without charge. Activists expressed little faith that the government would expand political freedoms in any meaningful way. Mr. Ziadeh said he feared that replacing emergency law with antiterrorism laws would constitute only a cosmetic change. “They will put the same restrictions on basic rights into the terrorism law that they put into the emergency law,” he said. “The emergency law might be lifted but the state of emergency that governs every aspect of our lives will be the same."
|
Middle East and North Africa Unrest (2010- );Politics and Government;Demonstrations Protests and Riots;Baath Party;Assad Bashar Al-;Syria
|
ny0186406
|
[
"world",
"asia"
] |
2009/03/13
|
American Envoys Try to Defuse a Political Crisis in Pakistan
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RAIWIND, Pakistan — In an effort to defuse the Pakistani political crisis, the American ambassador, Anne W. Patterson, traveled to see the opposition leader Nawaz Sharif to urge him to reconcile with Pakistan’s president, Mr. Sharif said. Later on Thursday, the Obama administration’s special envoy to Pakistan, Richard C. Holbrooke , spoke by video conference call to Pakistan’s president, Asif Ali Zardari , Mr. Zardari’s office announced. Mr. Holbrooke also spoke to Mr. Sharif by telephone, Mr. Holbrooke’s office said. The involvement of two senior American officials prompted speculation here that the United States was trying to broker a deal that would ease the standoff between the rivals and end the potential for violence as a coalition of opposition and citizens’ groups prepared for a march that the government had banned. The Obama administration apparently fears that the rising tensions between the politicians could further derail Pakistan’s efforts to quell a growing insurgency by Al Qaeda and the Taliban . Mr. Sharif, who plans to appear at antigovernment rallies this weekend, said he told Ms. Patterson that the next move was up to Mr. Zardari. “We went out of our way to show patience, tolerance, despite the broken promises of Mr. Zardari,” Mr. Sharif said. “All of a sudden they struck, they delivered a very heavy blow; it was like you stab someone in the back.” Mr. Sharif made several demands of Mr. Zardari: remove the federal rule imposed on his home base, Punjab Province; rescind the judicial ruling that denied Mr. Sharif and his brother the right to run in elections; and restore an independent judiciary. The government has said it acted to restore law and order and subdue Mr. Sharif, whom it accused of trying to foment revolution and court Islamists to buttress his power. Mr. Sharif’s supporters accuse the government of suppressing dissent. A presidential spokesman pointed out Friday that Mr. Sharif’s history was less than perfect. “Mr Sharif has a long history of taking unreasonable positions and pretending to be principled,” said the spokesman, Farhatullah Babar. “As someone who ordered his party supporters to storm the Supreme Court in 1998, his claims to fight for judicial independence sounds so hollow.” On Wednesday night, Mr. Holbrooke spoke to Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani , who has distanced himself from Mr. Zardari by saying that federal rule of the provincial assembly in Punjab should end quickly. The crackdown against protesters continued Thursday as hundreds of police officers in riot gear used batons against lawyers and protesters outside the Sindh High Court in Karachi. More than a dozen lawyers were arrested, including a leader of the movement, Munir Malik, who was imprisoned during President Pervez Musharraf ’s rule, and a leader of Jamaat-e-Islami, a right-wing Islamic party that supports the lawyers. Later, the police in Karachi took the keys of the buses and vans lined up at a toll plaza, hoping to halt a long march from several sites in Pakistan that is expected to converge on Islamabad, the capital, on Monday. Lawyers dressed in black suits scuffled with the police at the toll plaza, and several were dragged into police vans. The government imposed a law in the two most populous provinces, Sindh and Punjab, that prohibits any gathering of more than four people. The police have arrested hundreds of political workers of Mr. Sharif’s party. In an interview here lasting more than an hour, Mr. Sharif said the impression in Washington that he was too close to radical Islamists was misconceived. Mr. Musharraf and Mr. Zardari had spread the idea as a way of settling political scores, he said. One reason Mr. Sharif is seen by some American officials as being sympathetic to the Islamists is that he introduced legislation as prime minister that called on the federal government to enforce Islamic law. The bill passed the lower house of the Parliament but failed in the upper house. Mr. Sharif said he was well aware of the terrorist threat to Pakistan, but as the Obama administration was now doing, he said, Pakistan had to see what “new approaches” should be used to deal with the insurgency. He made it clear he believed that a dialogue with those militants who would talk was preferable to military actions, and he said he believed in mobilizing the nation in a “united front” against terrorism. He accused Mr. Zardari of failing to curb insurgents in two areas now controlled by the Taliban. “These matters are so huge, Mr. Zardari fails to gauge the magnitude of those problems in the tribal areas, in Swat ,” he said. “If we start fighting democracy, how are we going to fight terror?” Mr. Sharif said. Mr. Sharif was prime minister twice in the 1990s. His second term ended when he was ousted in October 1999 in a coup by Mr. Musharraf, then a general. From his time as prime minister, Mr. Sharif talks of warm feelings toward former President Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton , now secretary of state. In July 1999, Mr. Sharif rushed to Washington to seek Mr. Clinton’s help in ending a nuclear standoff between India and Pakistan. Many Pakistani commentators have worried that the army will oust the civilian government if the conflict between Mr. Zardari and Mr. Sharif persists. But Mr. Sharif said he doubted that the military under Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani , who served as his deputy military secretary during his first term as prime minister, would do so. “I think he is a decent man and a professional soldier,” he said. Mr. Sharif was lying low on Thursday at the mansion that serves as his headquarters on a farm that he inherited from his father. The government sent him a letter on Thursday warning him about security threats. But he appeared unfazed and said he would join a rally in Lahore on Saturday. He had not decided whether to join the sit-in in Islamabad that the government had explicitly banned. But his party members will. “The government should allow the sit-in in the capital and ensure the peace,” he said.
|
Nawaz Sharif;Asif Ali Zardari;Pakistan;null;Politics;US Foreign Policy
|
ny0113719
|
[
"technology"
] |
2012/11/11
|
Biometric Data-Gathering Sets Off a Privacy Debate
|
“PLEASE put your hand on the scanner,” a receptionist at a doctor’s office at New York University Langone Medical Center said to me recently, pointing to a small plastic device on the counter between us. “I need to take a palm scan for your file.” I balked. As a reporter who has been covering the growing business of data collection, I know the potential drawbacks — like customer profiling — of giving out my personal details. But the idea of submitting to an infrared scan at a medical center that would take a copy of the unique vein patterns in my palm seemed fraught. The receptionist said it was for my own good. The medical center, she said, had recently instituted a biometric patient identification system to protect against identity theft . I reluctantly stuck my hand on the machine. If I demurred, I thought, perhaps I’d be denied medical care. Next, the receptionist said she needed to take my photo. After the palm scan, that seemed like data-collection overkill. Then an office manager appeared and explained that the scans and pictures were optional. Alas, my palm was already in the system. No longer the province of security services and science-fiction films, biometric technology is on the march. Facebook uses facial-recognition software so its members can automatically put name tags on friends when they upload their photos. Apple uses voice recognition to power Siri. Some theme parks take digital fingerprints to help recognize season pass holders. Now some hospitals and school districts are using palm vein pattern recognition to identify and efficiently manage their patients or students — in effect, turning your palm into an E-ZPass. But consumer advocates say that enterprises are increasingly employing biometric data to improve convenience — and that members of the public are paying for that convenience with their privacy. Fingerprints, facial dimensions and vein patterns are unique, consumer advocates say, and should be treated as carefully as genetic samples. So collecting such information for expediency, they say, could increase the risks of serious identity theft. Yet companies and institutions that compile such data often fail to adequately explain the risks to consumers, they say. “Let’s say someone makes a fake ID and goes in and has their photo and their palm print taken as you. What are you going to do when you go in?” said Pam Dixon, the executive director of the World Privacy Forum, an advocacy group in San Diego. “Hospitals that are doing this are leaping over profound security issues that they are actually introducing into their systems.” THE N.Y.U. medical center started researching biometric systems a few years ago in an effort to address several problems, said Kathryn McClellan, its vice president who is in charge of implementing its new electronic health records system. More than a million people in the New York area have the same or similar names, she said, creating a risk that medical personnel might pull up the wrong health record for a patient. Another issue, she said, was that some patients had multiple records from being treated at different affiliates; N.Y.U. wanted an efficient way to consolidate them. Last year, the medical center adopted photography and palm-scan technology so that each patient would have two unique identifying features. Now, Ms. McClellan said, each arriving patient has his or her palm scanned, allowing the system to automatically pull up the correct file. “It’s a patient safety initiative,” Ms. McClellan said. “We felt like the value to the patient was huge.” N.Y.U.’s system, called PatientSecure and marketed by HT Systems of Tampa, has already scanned more than 250,000 patients. In the United States, over five million patients have had the scans, said Charles Yanak, a spokesman for Fujitsu Frontech North America, a division of Fujitsu, the Japanese company that developed the vein palm identification technology . Yet, unless patients at N.Y.U. seem uncomfortable with the process, Ms. McClellan said, medical registration staff members don’t inform them that they can opt out of photos and scans. “We don’t have formal consent,” Ms. McClellan said in a phone interview last Tuesday. That raises red flags for privacy advocates. “If they are not informing patients it is optional,” said Joel Reidenberg, a professor at Fordham University Law School with an expertise in data privacy, “then effectively it is coerced consent.” He noted that N.Y.U. medical center has had recent incidents in which computers or USB drives containing unencrypted patient data have been lost or stolen, suggesting that the center’s collection of biometric data might increase patients’ risk of identity theft. Ms. McClellan responded that there was little chance of identity theft because the palm scan system turned the vein measurements into encrypted strings of binary numbers and stored them on an N.Y.U. server that is separate from the one with patients’ health records. Even if there were a breach, she added, the data would be useless to hackers because a unique key is needed to decode the number strings. As for patients’ photos, she said, they are attached to their medical records. Still, Arthur Caplan, the director of the division of medical ethics at the N.Y.U. center, recommended that hospitals do a better job of explaining biometric ID systems to patients. He himself recently had an appointment at the N.Y.U. center, he recounted, and didn’t learn that the palm scan was optional until he hesitated and asked questions. “It gave me pause,” Dr. Caplan said. “It would be useful to put up a sign saying ‘We are going to take biometric information which will help us track you through the system. If you don’t want to do this, please see’ ” an office manager. Other institutions that use PatientSecure, however, have instituted opt-in programs for patients. At the Duke University Health System, patients receive brochures explaining their options , said Eliana Owens, the health system’s director of patient revenue. The center also trains staff members at registration desks to read patients a script about the opt-in process for the palm scans, she said. (Duke does not take patients’ photos.) “They say: ‘The enrollment is optional. If you choose not to participate, we will continue to ask you for your photo ID on subsequent visits,’ ” Ms. Owens said. Consent or not, some leading identity experts see little value in palm scans for patients right now. If medical centers are going to use patients’ biometric data for their own institutional convenience, they argue, the centers should also enhance patient privacy — by, say, permitting lower-echelon medical personnel to look at a person’s medical record only if that patient is present and approves access by having a palm scanned. Otherwise, “you are enabling another level of danger,” said Joseph Atick, a pioneer in biometric identity systems who consults for governments, “instead of using the technology to enable another level of privacy.” At my request, N.Y.U. medical center has deleted my palm print.
|
Biometrics;New York University Langone Medical Center;Privacy;Electronic Health Records
|
ny0048615
|
[
"world",
"europe"
] |
2014/11/06
|
Vojislav Seselj, on Trial for War Crimes, Is Offered Temporary Release
|
The United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague has proposed a temporary release for Vojislav Seselj, a Serb nationalist leader, whose health has seriously deteriorated while awaiting the end of his long-running trial. In a decision published Wednesday, the judge in charge of his case suggested that “to avoid the worst-case scenario,” Mr. Seselj should return to Serbia “to receive treatment in the most suitable environment.” Mr. Seselj had surgery for colon cancer last year, but Serbian doctors who recently visited him in jail in The Hague publicly disclosed that his cancer had spread to his liver. Mr. Seselj, a firebrand politician, surrendered in 2003, and his enduring presence in The Hague has become an embarrassment for the Yugoslavia tribunal. His case has been delayed repeatedly because of obstruction by Mr. Seselj and because of a dispute among judges that led to one of the judges’ being replaced. Mr. Seselj was charged with inciting others to commit war crimes in Croatia and in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1990s by creating a militia and sending its members off with incendiary speeches. He was also tried for contempt of court when he was accused of disclosing the names of protected witnesses. His judges proposed this year that he could await his verdict in Serbia, but Mr. Seselj refused, saying he would not abide by court rules to remain under house arrest and avoid political activities. Moreover, he has been demanding that the tribunal pay him 12 million euros (about $15 million) for trial costs and damages. The Serbian government said Wednesday in a letter that it would take custody of Mr. Seselj, but only if he consented. Mr. Seselj’s consent is far from certain, a lawyer familiar with the case said.
|
Vojislav Seselj;Serbia;War Crimes,Genocide,Crimes Against Humanity;International Criminal Court;Bosnia and Herzegovina;Croatia;UN;International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia
|
ny0186954
|
[
"business"
] |
2009/04/02
|
Wall Street Higher Amid Latest Jobless Report
|
Wall Street continued to rally Wednesday, lifting shares from some of their worst levels in more than a decade. Investors essentially shrugged off a report that said the economy had lost 742,000 jobs in the private sector in March. Instead, they seemed to focus on an increase in the number of pending home sales, and a slight rise in a survey of manufacturing conditions. The Dow Jones industrial average, which fell more than 100 points at the open, rose 152.68 points, or 2 percent, to 7,761.60. The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index jumped 13.21 points, or 1.66 percent, to 811.08, while the Nasdaq composite index gained 23.01 points, or 1.51 percent, to 1,551.60. “Any given day is subject to this outsized bear market rally volatility,” said Douglas Peta, an independent market strategist. “Although the economic data were disappointing, they were not as bad as people’s worst fear. They were not quite as bad as the whisper number.” Telecommunications companies and businesses that make raw materials like plastics and chemicals led the gains, and major banks like JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs finished higher. Shares of several automakers also rose, even as the companies reported another dismal month of sales in March. Despite the strong start to the second quarter of the year for markets, analysts wondered how long the momentum would last. “Every week that goes by they get more and more uncertain that this is just another dead cat bounce, another bear trap,” said Randy Cass, founder of First Coverage. Analysts said that investors also seemed to be speculating that the Financial Accounting Standards Board would change accounting standards that govern how companies value their assets. The board, which has been under pressure to ease mark-to-market accounting rules, will meet Thursday. Investors were also awaiting the outcome of the Group of 20 meeting in London being attended by President Obama and other leaders. Mr. Obama, appearing with the British prime minister, Gordon Brown, tried to play down talk of a rift between the United States and European nations as they try to repair their economies. Even though markets surged higher, the new employment data increased worries about the government’s release of monthly unemployment statistics on Friday. Economists estimate the government will report 660,000 job losses in March, and that the unemployment rate will climb to 8.5 percent, from 8.1 percent. Businesses with more than 500 workers cut 128,000 jobs, while small and medium-size companies slashed 614,000 positions, according to the report from Automatic Data Processing and Macroeconomic Advisers. Although investors have seized on glimmers of hope in recent reports on retail spending, factory orders and consumer prices, the jobs report from ADP underscored the relentless weakness in the labor market. Some 4.4 million jobs have vanished since the recession began in December 2007, and economists expect that the unemployment rate will crest at 10 percent. The price of the Treasury’s 10-year note rose 2/32, to 100 26/32. The yield, which moves in the opposite direction from the price, fell to 2.65 percent, from 2.66 percent late Tuesday. Following are the results of Wednesday’s auction of 13-day and 56-day cash management bills:
|
Stocks and Bonds;United States Economy
|
ny0158121
|
[
"business"
] |
2008/12/11
|
Justices Look at Maternity, Bias and Pensions
|
WASHINGTON — The argument of an employment discrimination case at the Supreme Court on Wednesday was full of references to one of the court’s more controversial decisions in recent years — the 2007 ruling against Lilly M. Ledbetter. Ms. Ledbetter lost her case because she had discovered the disparity between her pay and that of her male colleagues too late. The later effects of past discrimination, the court ruled last year in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, a 5-to-4 decision, do not restart the clock on the statute of limitations. President-elect Barack Obama has supported efforts to overturn that decision in Congress. The case that was argued Wednesday, AT&T v. Hulteen, No. 07-543, raised broadly similar issues. Noreen Hulteen and three other women took pregnancy leaves from AT&T from 1968 to 1976. When the company calculated their pension benefits on their retirements decades later, it did not give them full credit for the leaves. The women and their union sued under the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978, which made discrimination based on pregnancy-related conditions a form of sex discrimination. AT&T responded with two arguments. One was that it had done nothing wrong by treating pregnancy leaves differently from other kinds of leave before the 1978 law was enacted. Its discriminatory conduct was lawful when it occurred, the company said. And its later reliance on that conduct in calculating benefits did not turn that lawful conduct into illegal discrimination. If it had done something wrong, the company went on, the plaintiffs should have sued long ago, and they would be barred by the statute of limitations from suing now. That was, the company said, consistent with Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.’s opinion for the majority in the Ledbetter case. “Current effects alone,” Justice Alito wrote last year, “cannot breathe life into prior, uncharged discrimination.” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who dissented in the Ledbetter case, appeared unpersuaded on Wednesday. The plaintiffs would have had no reason to sue when they returned from their pregnancy leaves, she said. “Nothing had happened to them,” she said, “except there was a bookkeeping entry.” Carter G. Phillips, representing AT&T, said that immediate seniority determinations also turned on how leaves were calculated. “That’s an actionable claim,” he said, one that should have been pursued at the time and is no longer available. Ledbetter was the culmination of a line of cases helpful to the company. But several justices said another case, Bazemore v. Friday in 1986, might be a better fit. There, Justice William J. Brennan Jr. said that previously lawful pay discrimination based on race could not be used as the baseline for pay after the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. “Each week’s paycheck that delivers less to a black than to a similarly situated white is a wrong actionable under Title VII” of the 1964 law, Justice Brennan wrote, “regardless of the fact that this pattern was begun prior to the effective date of Title VII.” Justice David H. Souter said the Bazemore decision might provide a good analogy. “Why can’t you make exactly the same kind of analysis here?” he asked. “Why isn’t the payment of the retirement benefit exactly on par with the payment of the salary in Bazemore?” In response, Mr. Phillips said, “That’s certainly not an implausible way of trying to look at this.” But he said that the Ledbetter decision was a closer fit. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission supported the plaintiffs in the Hulteen case in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco, which ruled in their favor. But the federal government appeared on behalf of the company on Wednesday. Members of the commission “are taking a position that is 180 degrees opposite yours,” Justice Ginsburg said to Lisa S. Blatt, an assistant attorney general. Ms. Blatt said that was “absolutely correct” and that the Ledbetter decision had explained that the commission’s views on the interpretation of Supreme Court precedents are “entitled to no special deference.” Kevin Russell, representing the plaintiffs, said his clients “weren’t required to challenge this discrimination” when it happened “because it wasn’t a completed, unlawful employment practice at the time.” “At the time that these leaves are taken typically,” he added, “the person is years away, perhaps decades away, from even vesting in their benefits pension.”
|
Discrimination;Women;Courts;Pregnancy and Obstetrics;Decisions and Verdicts
|
ny0187028
|
[
"business"
] |
2009/04/20
|
U.S. May Convert Bank Bailouts to Common Stock
|
WASHINGTON — President Obama ’s top economic advisers have determined that they can shore up the nation’s banking system without having to ask Congress for more money any time soon, according to administration officials. In a significant shift, White House and Treasury Department officials now say they can stretch what is left of the $700 billion financial bailout fund further than they had expected a few months ago, simply by converting the government’s existing loans to the nation’s 19 biggest banks into common stock. Converting those loans to common shares would turn the federal aid into available capital for a bank — and give the government a large ownership stake in return. While the option appears to be a quick and easy way to avoid a confrontation with Congressional leaders wary of putting more money into the banks, some critics would consider it a back door to nationalization , since the government could become the largest shareholder in several banks. The Treasury has already negotiated this kind of conversion with Citigroup and has said it would consider doing the same with other banks, as needed. But now the administration seems convinced that this maneuver can be used to make up for any shortfall in capital that the big banks confront in the near term. Each conversion of this type would force the administration to decide how to handle its considerable voting rights on a bank’s board. Taxpayers would also be taking on more risk, because there is no way to know what the common shares might be worth when it comes time for the government to sell them. Treasury officials estimate that they will have about $135 billion left after they follow through on all the loans that have already been announced. But the nation’s banks are believed to need far more than that to maintain enough capital to absorb all their losses from soured mortgages and other loan defaults. In his budget proposal for next year, Mr. Obama included $250 billion in additional spending to prop up the financial system. Because of the way the government accounts for such spending, the budget actually indicated that Mr. Obama might ask Congress for as much as $750 billion. The most immediate expense will come in the next several weeks, when federal bank regulators complete “stress tests” on the nation’s 19 biggest banks. The tests are expected to show that at least several major institutions, probably including Bank of America , need to increase their capital cushions by billions of dollars each. The change to common stock would not require the government to contribute any additional cash, but it could increase the capital of big banks by more than $100 billion. The White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel , alluded to the strategy on Sunday in an interview on the ABC program “This Week.” Mr. Emanuel asserted that the government had enough money to shore up the 19 banks without asking for more. “We believe we have those resources available in the government as the final backstop to make sure that the 19 are financially viable and effective,” Mr. Emanuel said. “If they need capital, we have that capacity.” If that calculation is correct, Mr. Obama would gain important political maneuvering room because Democratic leaders in Congress have warned that they cannot possibly muster enough votes any time soon in support of spending more money to bail out some of the same financial institutions whose aggressive lending precipitated the financial crisis . The administration said in January that it would alter its arrangement with Citigroup by converting up to $25 billion of preferred stock, which is like a loan, to common stock, which represents equity. After the conversion, the Treasury would end up with about 36 percent of Citigroup’s common shares, which come with full voting rights. That would make the government Citigroup’s biggest shareholder, effectively nudging the government one step closer to nationalizing a major bank. Nationalization, or even just the hint of nationalization, is a politically explosive step that White House and Treasury officials have fought hard to avoid. Administration officials acknowledged that they might still have to ask Congress for extra money. Beyond the 19 big banks, which are defined as those with more than $100 billion in assets, the Treasury has also injected capital into hundreds of regional and community banks and may need to provide more money before the financial crisis is over. Treasury officials say they have more money left in the rescue fund than might be apparent. Officials estimate that the fund will have about $134.5 billion left after the Treasury completes its $100 billion plan to buy toxic assets from banks and after it uses $50 billion to help homeowners avoid foreclosure. In practice, the toxic-asset programs are not expected to start for another few months, and it could be more than a year before the Treasury uses up the entire $100 billion. Likewise, it will be at least a year before the Treasury uses up all the money budgeted for homeowners. But the biggest way to stretch funds could be to convert preferred shares to common stock, a strategy that the government seems prepared to use on a case-by-case basis. Ever since the Treasury agreed to restructure Citigroup’s loans, officials have made it clear that other banks could follow suit and convert their government loans to voting shares of common stock as well. In the stress tests now under way, regulators are examining whether the big banks would have enough capital to withstand an economic downturn in which unemployment climbs to 10 percent and housing prices fall much further than they already have. As their yardstick, regulators are expected to examine a measure of bank capital called “tangible common equity.” By that measure of capital, every dollar a bank converts from preferred to common shares becomes an additional dollar of capital. The 19 big banks have received more than $140 billion from the Treasury’s financial rescue fund, and all of that has been in exchange for nonvoting preferred shares that pay an annual interest rate of about 5 percent. If all the banks that are found to have a capital shortfall fill that gap by converting their shares, rather than by obtaining more cash, the Treasury could stretch its dwindling rescue fund by more than $100 billion. The Treasury would also become a major shareholder, and perhaps even the controlling shareholder, in some financial institutions. That could lead to increasingly difficult conflicts of interest for the government, as policy makers juggle broad economic objectives with the narrower responsibility to maximize the value of their bank shares on behalf of taxpayers. Those are exactly the kinds of conflicts that Treasury and Fed officials were trying to avoid when they first began injecting capital into banks last fall.
|
null;TARP,2008 Bailout,Emergency Economic Stabilization Act;Treasury Department;Barack Obama;Rahm Emanuel;Bank;Citigroup
|
ny0250917
|
[
"nyregion"
] |
2011/02/09
|
Case Dismissed in Falling Death of Ex-Ambassador’s Child
|
A real estate broker was cleared on Tuesday of misdemeanor charges that he served alcohol to the under-age daughter of a United States ambassador before she fell to her death from a Midtown high-rise building in August. Prosecutors told a Manhattan judge that there was not enough evidence to prove that the broker, Ilan Nassimi, had served alcohol to minors at a party in his apartment, from which Nicole John, 17, the daughter of Eric G. John, the ambassador to Thailand at the time, fell to her death. The investigation revealed that Ms. John had consumed alcohol before arriving at Mr. Nassimi’s party, an assistant district attorney said in court. A judge then dismissed the charges. Ms. John was found unconscious at 4:14 a.m. on Aug. 27 on a third-floor landing of Herald Towers at 50 West 34th Street. She was pronounced dead at the scene. The police said the fall appeared to have been accidental. Ms. John, a student at Parsons the New School for Design, had been out with friends at Tenjune, a club in the meatpacking district, the police said, before going to Mr. Nassimi’s party on the 25th floor of Herald Towers.
|
Falls;Decisions and Verdicts;John Nicole;John Eric G;Midtown Area (NYC)
|
ny0181697
|
[
"business",
"media"
] |
2007/12/03
|
Puppets Are Rescued After a Seamy Spoof
|
Even though 23 years had passed since Rusty the Rooster and Jerome the Giraffe last appeared in a Canadian television production, the children of their creator, Bob Homme, were less than pleased. Last week, the family’s anger over the unauthorized use of the puppets, stars of “The Friendly Giant” children’s program, led to their removal from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s museum along with dozens of other items from the show, which ran for 26 years on the network. The dispute stems from a comedy sketch broadcast in October during the Gemini Awards, English-speaking Canada’s version of the Emmys. It depicted the “Felt With Feelings” home for retired television puppets. “All these puppets are bored,” an actress playing a nurse said at one point. “All they do is drink, smoke and have sex.” None of Mr. Homme’s four children watched the show, but his daughter, Ann Barlow, looked into it after a review in The Globe and Mail, a Toronto newspaper, mentioned that the program included “a deeply unfunny bit about a retirement home for puppets.” “It was obvious to me that it was something that my father, had he been alive, he would have never approved,” said Richard Homme, one of the actor’s sons. “He was fussy about keeping the program’s image intact.” Bob Homme died in 2000. Mr. Homme created Jerome and Rusty in 1954 for a local television station in his native Wisconsin. Four years later, he took the puppets to Toronto and the CBC. Mr. Homme assumed giant stature by using miniature props and spent the show’s 15 minutes chatting and playing music with the puppets. (The program was syndicated to public television stations in the United States.) Several years ago, the family lent the puppets and other items to a small museum in the lobby of the CBC’s Toronto broadcasting center. Jeff Keay, a CBC spokesman, acknowledged that the network should have obtained permission to use the puppets and said it had apologized to the family. The employee who lent the puppets to the awards show’s producers, he said, was “relatively new.” The Friendly Giant items are now in storage. Richard Homme said the family might donate them to the Canada Science and Technology Museum in Ottawa.
|
Puppets;Canadian Broadcasting Corp;Television;Canada
|
ny0182445
|
[
"world",
"asia"
] |
2007/12/29
|
A Joker Woos a President, and Keyboards Clatter
|
Hong Kong YOU never know what to expect from Namu. She’s a sex symbol who wrote a best seller. She’s a TV star and lingerie designer, an ex-model and ex-singer. She opened both a museum dedicated to tribal culture and what she calls a “love hotel,” outfitted with opium beds. She’s a jet-setter and perennial gossip-magnet, and sometimes it seems as if all of China either loves her or loves to hate her. Yang Erche Namu, 41, cultivates an image of fearlessness with stories like how she fled her isolated village in the Himalayas at 14 as her mother hurled rocks at her back. But something had obviously unnerved her the other day, even as she made her usual entrance, with long swinging hair, tight black dress, jangling jewelry and teetering heels. Her mobile phone was beeping madly, which was nothing new. Nor was it that she had provided the masses with yet another juicy tidbit: a video of her marriage proposal to President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, which was posted on a news Web site just days before news media reports linked him with the Italian ex-model Carla Bruni. But this time, Namu, as she calls herself, seemed genuinely taken aback by the vehemence of the Chinese public’s reaction. “I’m a bit scared,” she said. “Well, maybe not scared. A bit uncomfortable. Every single newspaper has ‘Namu has proposed to Sarkozy.’ They are saying that this woman has made the country lose face.” COMMENTS about her on Chinese blogs are full of obscenities, condemnations and threats. It does not help that she once caused a stir by saying she preferred Western lovers to Chinese ones. Namu is well aware that, particularly in China today, small actions have the power to set off mass discontent. Mobs of Web users have been known to identify, locate and harass people they read about, usually for what are seen as moral lapses, like sexual infidelity. Cybervigilantes send huge volumes of abusive messages to the phones, faxes and electronic mailboxes of their targets; some victims have even been stalked by thugs. Being a provocateur has its downside. The government has been known to clamp down on almost anything that becomes suddenly too popular and outside its control. Namu noted that “Super Boy,” a talent-hunt program on which she was a judge, had been removed from Chinese television; she said it was a move against her “for being too famous.” The Sunday Times of London had run an article with the headline “How Yang Erche Namu gave China the right to vote,” and the subtitle “Hundreds of millions of Chinese are voting for the first time — for their TV idols.” She was hoping her latest publicity stunt, wooing Mr. Sarkozy in public, would not cause problems, particularly since having married and divorced an American photographer for National Geographic, she is now an American citizen. “Chinese people lack a sense of humor,” she said. Then, as dramatically as she had begun, she changed tone. She cracked a wide smile and explained that it had started as a joke. Several months ago, the Chinese edition of Cosmopolitan asked her to write an article about eligible bachelors and gave her a list, mostly actors from Hong Kong or mainland China. She responded that she had nothing good to say about any of them. “I never date actors,” she said. “After all, I was one myself. They can be self-centered and in love with their own image. Male actors can be stingy, both financially and sexually.” She was reading in the bath when she came across an article about Mr. Sarkozy’s divorce. “I thought, ‘I have my idea!’ What a great eligible bachelor. I’ve always loved the way he dresses, the way he talks, the way he takes his mother traveling with him. I think he must be a good kisser.” Soon after, she made the video. She joked that her name, pronounced somewhere between “namoo” and “lamoo,” sounded like the French “l’amour.” “It’s a song in France,” she said, and started to sing “L’amour, l’amour, l’amour, l’amour,” while tapping her fingertips on the table. “If I become the first lady of France, they will already have a song for me,” she said. “I will be a historic first, the first Chinese French president’s wife. I will have giant parties in the Louvre’s gardens and serve yak butter tea.” LIKE many other aspects of her life, the proposal was out of step with Namu’s ethnic heritage. She comes from the Mosuo, a tiny minority group of about 40,000 people who have their own language and religion. They are rare among Chinese ethnic groups in that they are matrilineal and do not believe in wedding vows. Instead they have so-called walking marriages, a system of serial monogamy. As long as they stay within the Mosuo community, women can choose and change lovers at will, have children with multiple men and raise their families in extended, female-headed households. After leaving her village, where there were no telephones or flush toilets, Namu made it to Shanghai, where she pursued her pop-star career. But she has often used her background to draw attention to herself. In 1997, she became known in her home country for her Chinese-language memoir, “Leaving the Kingdom of Daughters,” whose description of her foreign lovers caused ripples among more conservative segments of society. NAMU made her name internationally when her English-language memoir, “Leaving Mother Lake” (Little, Brown, 2003), became a best seller. She worked with an anthropologist, Christine Mathieu, to tell of her upbringing among the Mosuo near Lugu Lake in a remote part of southwestern China. She became better known to American and British audiences when she was featured in a 2004 documentary about the Himalayas by Michael Palin, formerly of Monty Python. Namu says she used these opportunities to bring tourism and much-needed development to her people. Her detractors accuse her of sensationalizing the Mosuo and exploiting her roots to further her own celebrity. Criticism increased when sex tourists began flooding in. “Now we have a road, and we don’t have to walk seven days to get out,” Namu said, defending her work in the area. “Kids can go to school. But people still say bad things about me. How can I be responsible for everything? I am exhausted from their needs and criticism.” She said she tried to counter negative stereotypes. “That’s one of the reasons I built a museum,” she said. “Tourists were not really seeing the place.” Still, she has no qualms about also profiting from tourism. Her own Web site, Namu.com.cn , features advertisements for the two guesthouses she built, including her so-called love hotel. “It’s beautiful,” she said, “and is based on the 14 positions.” Which 14 positions? “You know, like in the Kama Sutra, only Chinese,” she said, adding, “I was thinking of drawing a map to show the 14 positions, but I didn’t have time.”
|
China;Computers and the Internet;Namu Yang
|
ny0148626
|
[
"world",
"asia"
] |
2008/09/27
|
Pakistan’s Faith in Its New Leader Is Shaken
|
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — A week after the bomb attack on the Marriott Hotel here, Pakistan is struggling to deal with a financial meltdown and a terrorism threat that has moved to the nation’s heart and badly shaken confidence in the new government among Pakistanis, diplomats and investors alike. In New York on Friday, President Asif Ali Zardari met with representatives of a group of donor countries, including the United States and Saudi Arabia, who were trying to come up with $5 billion to prevent Pakistan from defaulting on its debt. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said afterward that the United States would work toward Pakistan’s economic stability. But no decisions were made, according to participants, except that the donors would meet again in Abu Dhabi next month. As the financial situation has deteriorated, diplomats here have become increasingly uneasy about the government’s capacity to prevent further attacks on the scale of the hotel bombing, which killed at least 53 people and wounded more than 250 others. “The cabinet in Islamabad is confronted with a general breakdown of the state,” said an editorial in the Friday issue of The Daily Times, a newspaper that generally supports the government of President Zardari. In an extraordinary attempt at calming the jitters, Rehman Malik, the senior adviser at the Interior Ministry, met Friday with more than 50 ambassadors to try to reassure them that their embassies and their staffs would be safe. Mr. Malik’s audience went into the meeting with “very deep concern,” a senior diplomat said. They came out barely reassured, he said. He and another Western ambassador, neither of whom wanted to be identified when commenting on domestic matters, said they were disturbed that Mr. Malik did not report any progress on the investigation into the Marriott bombing, or how it was carried out. “If they start arresting groups, that would reassure us,” the senior diplomat said. Mr. Malik used a PowerPoint presentation to outline new security measures that included more police officers around the enclave where many embassies are situated, and more concrete barriers and closed-circuit television cameras. But a second ambassador said that although Mr. Malik showed “good will,” there were grave doubts about the government’s ability to finance and follow through on the steps. The American Embassy closed its visa section on Thursday and Friday after what it called continuing threats. Embassy staff members were encouraged to work from home. All American government employees were forbidden, according to embassy orders, to stay at hotels in Pakistan’s main cities. The bombing has cast gloom over the capital that is compounding the economic troubles that outlasted the administration of President Pervez Musharraf. Lawyers and businessmen have talked about moving away, particularly to Dubai or Malaysia. Foreign investment had almost dried up before the attack, they said, and now some worried it would disappear altogether. Some of Pakistan’s biggest businessmen had already shipped capital abroad, crimping new business ventures. Moody’s, the international credit rating agency, cut Pakistan’s credit outlook from “stable” to “negative” on Tuesday, citing dwindling foreign exchange reserves, risks from extremists and high inflation. Foreign exchange reserves have shrunk to $5.7 billion, with only about $3 billion available to cover payments for oil and food, according to the International Monetary Fund. A major disappointment for the government has been the failure of Saudi Arabia, a traditional benefactor, to announce concessions on oil. In past economic crunches, Saudi Arabia has agreed to defer payment for the 100,000 barrels of oil Pakistan imports daily from the kingdom, the economists said. That has not happened this time, and even with the recent drop in oil prices, Pakistan is eating through its reserves at the rate of about $1.25 billion a month, Pakistani economists say. “The international community cannot allow Pakistan to become a failed state,” said a senior economist from one of the international financial institutions trying to salvage the economy. Diplomats and others are weighing what steps to take for themselves. British Airways announced this week that it was suspending all flights from London to Islamabad, the only direct connection between Europe and Pakistan. At a meeting on Friday, senior officials of the United Nations agencies in Pakistan postponed a decision on whether to send family members of their foreign employees home, participants said. Such a move would have sent an unmistakable signal that the security situation was grave. It would also likely have prompted some of the 250 United Nations employees to leave with their families, threatening projects ranging from Unicef’s efforts to immunize children against polio to the World Food Program’s distribution of food. Of most concern, the ambassadors said, is lax security in the capital. On the night of the bombing, the policemen along the roads in the center of the city, which is designated a high-security “red alert zone,” were sitting on the curb eating in the ritual breaking of the Ramadan fast, the senior diplomat said. That was one reason it was so easy for the truck to approach the Marriott without scrutiny, he said. Pakistani officials and Western diplomats said they believed that the attack had been organized by the Pakistani Taliban, who work with Al Qaeda in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan. Most troubling was the likelihood that the huge amount of explosives — estimated at 1,300 to 2,200 pounds — had been loaded onto the truck over time in relatively small quantities. It seemed likely that the truck was prepared somewhere within Islamabad, according to a Pakistani intelligence official who declined to be identified by name because he was not authorized to talk on the matter. He said the suicide bomber who drove the truck came from a training camp in Waziristan, a Qaeda stronghold. The explosives used for the bomb were TNT and RDX, mixed with aluminum oxide, said Talat Masood, a retired army general and a former director of Pakistan’s largest munitions and weapons factory. Such explosives are commonly found in anti-tank mines, Mr. Masood said. The explosives could have come from stores left behind by the Soviets when they left Afghanistan, he said. He said he was confident that investigators would discover the “signature” that would reveal where the explosives came from. Though the death toll published by Pakistani newspapers is 53, foreign embassies said they had been informed by the Pakistani foreign office that more than 60 had died. Two American military men — Petty Officer Third Class Matthew J. O’Bryant, 22, of Duluth, Ga., a Navy cryptologic technician, and Maj. Rodolfo I. Rodriguez, 34, of El Paso, from the Air Force’s 86th Construction and Training Squadron at the Ramstein Air Base in Germany, died in the attack, the American Embassy said. A third American, described as a contractor for the State Department, is unaccounted for, the embassy said. Even Pakistanis accustomed to suicide bomb attacks against government installations have been shaken by the attack on a landmark hotel and the prospect of more assaults on soft targets. At a shopping center in Islamabad, Akhlaq Abbasi, 60, leaned on his counter and surveyed his empty store. Sales of fabric for men’s suits and drapes, and cloth for women’s traditional dress had evaporated since the Marriott attack, he said. Babar Sattar, a prominent lawyer, talking over a cup of coffee at McDonald’s, said he would stay. But everyone was depressed, he said. “The government’s first reaction was: ‘We’ve done all we could.’ That’s what really terrifies people. There seems no way to stopping the attacks.”
|
Pakistan;Bombs and Explosives;Finances;Economic Conditions and Trends;International Relations;Politics and Government;Terrorism;Marriott Hotel;Zardari Asif Ali
|
ny0135078
|
[
"nyregion"
] |
2008/04/17
|
New Leader of State Police Discusses His Own Financial Missteps
|
ALBANY — Gov. David A. Paterson’s nominee to take over the beleaguered State Police, Harry J. Corbitt, was confirmed by the Senate on Wednesday after promising this week to repair the agency’s reputation and to conduct a review of the security detail provided to governors. Mr. Corbitt, a Vietnam veteran, joined the State Police in 1978 and rose through the ranks from trooper to deputy superintendent in charge of internal affairs; he will earn $136,000 as superintendent, effective immediately. A review of state records indicated that Mr. Corbitt, 60, has had some difficulty keeping his own financial house in order in the past, though he never declared bankruptcy and, in an interview on Wednesday night, spoke openly about the steps he took to get back on his feet. Records show that Mr. Corbitt had four judgments against him by three creditors in 2000 and 2001, totaling nearly $22,000. Mr. Corbitt said that when he became overextended with credit card debt in the 1990s — he had four children, two of whom were in college — he had the misfortune of turning to Andrew F. Capoccia. Mr. Capoccia was a lawyer who billed himself — and his army of 170 lawyers — as a financial savior for people drowning in debt. Mr. Capoccia was disbarred in 2000, sued by Attorney General Eliot Spitzer and indicted by federal prosecutors. He is now serving jail time for fraud and other charges. “I don’t know how much debt I was in, but I was in over my head,” Mr. Corbitt said. “I wasn’t trying to get out of my obligations; I was just defrauded.” Perhaps he was one of the luckier ones. In 2001, Mr. Spitzer said that more than 1,000 clients of Mr. Capoccia’s had been forced to declare bankruptcy. “I ended up taking care of my obligations the hard way,” Mr. Corbitt said. “I didn’t file for bankruptcy, and I didn’t miss a payment with the I.R.S.” He now turns to the formidable challenge of restoring an agency for which he worked for more than 25 years. The State Police came under scrutiny after a report by Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo last summer that found that the administration of Governor Spitzer misused the agency while gathering travel documents on Joseph L. Bruno, the Senate majority leader and the state’s top Republican. Mr. Paterson, who took office on March 17 after Mr. Spitzer resigned amid a prostitution scandal, asked Mr. Cuomo late last month to conduct a sweeping review of the police to determine if it had been inappropriately collecting information on politicians, among other things. “Abuse of power is a terrible thing,” Mr. Corbitt said during his confirmation hearing on Tuesday. “What happened to Senator Bruno was inappropriate.” Even as Mr. Corbitt was confirmed, a high-ranking Republican senator, Dale M. Volker of the Buffalo area, raised new questions about the agency’s past during the confirmation hearing, saying he had been followed by someone affiliated with the State Police. “Sometimes I thought I was being paranoid, but I know I wasn’t being paranoid,” he said. A State Police spokesman had no comment on any aspect of the hearing. Mr. Volker, a former police officer, is chairman of the Senate’s codes committee, which has jurisdiction over law enforcement issues. Questions were also raised at the hearing about whether troopers should have reported Mr. Spitzer if they had evidence he was meeting with a prostitute. Mr. Corbitt said that troopers have a duty to report crimes to their superiors. He also said he would fully cooperate with Mr. Cuomo’s investigation and order an internal investigation of the agency’s executive service detail, which includes the governor’s security detail and the uniformed officers who patrol the Capitol. “The mission before me is basically to restore confidence not only to the senators and assemblymen, or Assembly people, but to the citizens of the State of New York,” Mr. Corbitt said. “That’s going to be a difficult task.”
|
Police;Corbitt Harry J;New York State
|
ny0071499
|
[
"sports",
"ncaabasketball"
] |
2015/03/19
|
Kansas, a No. 2 Seed, Limps Into the N.C.A.A. Tournament
|
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — At the end of a brief practice the day before the Big 12 tournament quarterfinals at Sprint Center here, Kansas forward Cliff Alexander, a freshman, left the court with his gray T-shirt drenched in sweat. Alexander, embroiled in an eligibility issue with the N.C.A.A., had no reason to hold back because he would not be playing in the tournament. Alexander watched the Jayhawks’ three games from the same place, the far end of the bench, never taking off his sweats. The Jayhawks still made it to the championship game without him and with forwards Perry Ellis and Landen Lucas playing hurt. But in the final, Kansas squandered a 17-point second-half lead and lost to Iowa State, 70-66 . The loss stung. Earlier this month, Kansas (26-8) wrapped up its 11th consecutive Big 12 regular-season championship, tying the second-longest streak in N.C.A.A. history behind U.C.L.A.’s 13 Pacific-8 or Pacific-10 titles from 1967 to 1979. That was noteworthy because the Jayhawks had lost Andrew Wiggins and Joel Embiid to the 2014 N.B.A. draft, and Coach Bill Self was not sure whether the Jayhawks could win even 10 conference games. (They finished 13-5.) The loss to Iowa State aside, Kansas did enough to secure a 26th consecutive N.C.A.A. appearance, the nation’s longest active streak, and a No. 2 seed in the Midwest Region. That is what happens when you play the strongest schedule in the country and in a conference ranked No. 1 in the Ratings Percentage Index. An N.C.A.A. Bracket for Risk-Takers For this bracket, the more unusual that your picks are, the more points you’ll receive — so long as those picks are correct. But the Jayhawks limped to the finish. Ellis, the team’s leading scorer at 13.8 points a game, sprained his right knee against West Virginia on March 3, missing the final regular-season game, at Oklahoma, and Kansas’ first Big 12 tournament game. Self suspended guard Brannen Greene, a sophomore, for the Oklahoma game for violating team rules. And Alexander, averaging 7.1 points and 5.3 rebounds a game, sat the last six games while the N.C.A.A. investigated a possible rules violation. Lucas played with hip and back soreness. “We need to get our team back,” Self said. “This isn’t an excuse, but we need to get back healthy.” Self is not counting on Alexander playing Friday when Kansas faces 15th-seeded New Mexico State (23-10) in a round of 64 game in Omaha, or in games beyond that. Kansas could face Wichita State (28-4) in the second round if the Shockers get by Indiana (20-13), a potential matchup of particular interest to Ellis, who grew up in Wichita. “It’s been the best inconsistent year I’ve had, probably, with our team,” Self said. “Of our 13 wins in-league, you can say we played pretty good in about seven of them. There have been times where we’ve not won and played better, and sometimes we’ve won and haven’t played as well. Hopefully, we can straighten that out when it counts the most.” Ellis wore a knee brace in the semifinals and finals. He shot 6 for 21 from the field (28.6 percent) and often settled for jump shots. He sat out the final 7 minutes 50 seconds of the semifinal after colliding with Baylor’s Lester Medford on the baseline. Ellis later insisted that he had banged his quadriceps, not his knee. He struggled in the second half of the final, managing 2 points and a rebound. Image Cliff Alexander (2), who averages 7.1 points and 5.3 rebounds a game, has sat the last six games while the N.C.A.A. investigates a possible rules violation. Credit Jamie Squire/Getty Images “Perry obviously didn’t look himself,” said Iowa State forward Georges Niang. “He didn’t seem as aggressive as Perry usually is. One guy can’t really guard Perry Ellis. He’s a tough matchup. When he gets into the seam and puts pressure on the defense, you have to collapse, and then he kicks it out to other guys.” Ellis told reporters Sunday night in Lawrence, Kan., that his knee was improving with treatment. “I was glad to get out there,” he said. “It’s all about confidence and the mind-set. It’s getting better and better as time goes on.” Self hopes the six days of rest before Friday will permit Ellis and Lucas to heal. Guard Wayne Selden Jr.’s back-to-back 20-point games in the Big 12 tournament helped, but the Jayhawks most likely need a healthy Ellis to advance. The Jayhawks’ offense lacks inside presence without Ellis. Lately, Self has given more playing time to Hunter Mickelson, a 6-foot-10 junior transfer from Arkansas who can block shots. “We’re pretty resilient,” Mickelson said. “That’s kind of how we’ve been going the latter part of the season, kind of grinding out games that are pretty close, pretty tough. We can’t keep doing that. We have to start playing a whole lot better.” Image Perry Ellis (34), who sprained his right knee on March 3, wore a knee brace in the semifinals and finals of the Big 12 tournament. Credit Jamie Squire/Getty Images Yahoo Sports reported a link between Alexander’s mother, Latillia, and a financial firm that extends loans to athletes who have declared for the N.B.A. and N.F.L. drafts, based on a Uniform Commercial Code filing in Illinois. Such a loan to Alexander would violate N.C.A.A. rules. The family lives in Chicago. In a statement released to multiple media outlets last week, Alexander’s lawyer, Paul K. Stafford, said Alexander provided phone, text and bank records to the N.C.A.A. “Mr. Alexander has been ready, willing and able to be interviewed since March 2,” Stafford said in the statement, “yet he has been informed that the N.C.A.A. will not interview him until they receive additional documents that are not his documents, the content of which he has no knowledge, and documents which have never been in his control or possession.” Stafford did not immediately respond to an email seeking further comment. “It would be nice to get him back, but it’s out of our hands,” Self said. “I’m not asking every day where is it, because there’s no reason to. We’ll know if there’s any movement on it, and there’s been absolutely no movement. “It’s very frustrating for him, but he’s been a stud. This is what’s frustrating: He’s probably practiced better than he has all year long.”
|
College basketball;University of Kansas;NCAA Men's Basketball,March Madness;Cliff Alexander;Bill Self;Wayne Selden Jr.;Landen Lucas;Perry Ellis
|
ny0068206
|
[
"sports"
] |
2014/12/17
|
The Best Sellers: Filed Under Sports
|
The best-selling sports books in November 2014, according to the New York Times best-seller list. 1. UNBROKEN , by Laura Hillenbrand (Random House) . An Olympic runner’s story of survival as a prisoner in World War II. 2. THE BOYS IN THE BOAT , by Daniel James Brown (Penguin) . The University of Washington’s eight-oar crew and its quest for a gold medal at the 1936 Olympics. 3. JETER UNFILTERED , by Derek Jeter with Anthony Bozza (Jeter Publishing/Gallery Books) . The former Yankees shortstop and captain looks back over his career, with photographs from his recently concluded final season, as well as older ones. 4. YOU CAN’T MAKE THIS UP , by Al Michaels with L. Jon Wertheim (Morrow/HarperCollins) . The veteran sportscaster, the voice of “Sunday Night Football,” recalls players and games he has observed. 5. BLEEDING ORANGE , by Jim Boeheim with Jack McCallum (HarperCollins) . The Syracuse men’s basketball coach shares the pleasures and perils of his lengthy career. 6. THE TERRIBLE AND WONDERFUL REASONS WHY I RUN LONG DISTANCES , by The Oatmeal (Andrews McMeel) . A confessional in comic form, from the website. 7. FULLY ALIVE , by Timothy P. Shriver (Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus & Giroux) . The head of the Special Olympics shares insights gained through spending time with and campaigning for athletes with special needs. 8. FOXCATCHER , by Mark Schultz with David Thomas (Dutton/Penguin) . The brothers Mark Schultz and Dave Schultz, Olympic-gold-medal-winning wrestlers, had what came to be a fatal relationship with John du Pont. 9. PARCELLS , by Bill Parcells and Nunyo Demasio (Crown Archetype) . Reflections on the life and career of the former N.F.L. coach. 10. READY TO RUN , by Kelly Starrett with T. J. Murphy (Victory Belt Publishing) . How to run more naturally while avoiding injury. Image And One 18. PLAYING IT MY WAY , by Sachin Tendulkar and Boria Majumdar (Hodder & Stoughton) . The autobiography of the celebrated international cricket player.
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Books;Sports;Derek Jeter;Jim Boeheim;Laura Hillenbrand
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ny0111630
|
[
"world",
"asia"
] |
2012/02/28
|
Japan Considered Evacuating Tokyo During Nuclear Crisis, Report Says
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TOKYO — In the darkest moments of last year’s nuclear accident, Japanese leaders did not know the actual extent of damage at the plant and secretly considered the possibility of evacuating Tokyo, even as they tried to play down the risks in public, an independent investigation into the accident disclosed on Monday. The investigation by the Rebuild Japan Initiative Foundation , a new private policy organization, offers one of the most vivid accounts yet of how Japan teetered on the edge of an even larger nuclear crisis than the one that engulfed the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. A team of 30 university professors, lawyers and journalists spent more than six months on the inquiry into Japan’s response to the triple meltdown at the plant, which followed a powerful earthquake and tsunami on March 11 that shut down the plant’s cooling systems. The team interviewed more than 300 people, including top nuclear regulators and government officials, as well as the prime minister during the crisis, Naoto Kan . They were granted extraordinary access, in part because of a strong public demand for greater accountability and because the organization’s founder, Yoichi Funabashi, a former editor in chief of the daily newspaper Asahi Shimbun, is one of Japan’s most respected public intellectuals. An advance copy of the report describes how Japan’s response was hindered at times by a debilitating breakdown in trust between the major actors: Mr. Kan; the Tokyo headquarters of the plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power, known as Tepco; and the manager at the stricken plant. The conflicts produced confused flows of sometimes contradictory information in the early days of the crisis, the report said. It describes frantic phone calls by the manager, Masao Yoshida, to top officials in the Kan government arguing that he could get the plant under control if he could keep his staff in place, while at the same time ignoring orders from Tepco’s headquarters not to use sea water to cool the overheating reactors. By contrast, Mr. Funabashi said in an interview, Tepco’s president, Masataka Shimizu, was making competing calls to the prime minister’s office saying that the company should evacuate all of its staff, a step that could have been catastrophic. The 400-page report, due to be released later this week, also describes a darkening mood at the prime minister’s residence as a series of hydrogen explosions rocked the plant on March 14 and 15. It says Mr. Kan and other officials began discussing a worst-case outcome if workers at the Fukushima Daiichi plant were evacuated. This would have allowed the plant to spiral out of control, releasing even larger amounts of radioactive material into the atmosphere that would in turn force the evacuation of other nearby nuclear plants, causing further meltdowns. The report quotes the chief cabinet secretary at the time, Yukio Edano, as having warned that such a “demonic chain reaction” of plant meltdowns could result in the evacuation of Tokyo, 150 miles to the south. “We would lose Fukushima Daini, then we would lose Tokai,” Mr. Edano is quoted as saying, naming two other nuclear plants. “If that happened, it was only logical to conclude that we would also lose Tokyo itself.” The report also describes the panic within the Kan administration at the prospect of large radiation releases from the more than 10,000 spent fuel rods that were stored in relatively unprotected pools near the damaged reactors. The report says it was not until five days after the earthquake that a Japanese military helicopter was finally able to confirm that the pool deemed at highest risk, near the No. 4 reactor, was still safely filled with water. “We barely avoided the worst-case scenario, though the public didn’t know it at the time,” Mr. Funabashi, the foundation founder, said. Mr. Funabashi blamed the Kan administration’s fear of setting off a panic for its decision to understate the true dangers of the accident. He said the Japanese government hid its most alarming assessments not just from its own public but also from allies like the United States . Mr. Funabashi said the investigation revealed “how precarious the U.S.-Japan relationship was” in the early days of the crisis, until the two nations began daily informational meetings at the prime minister’s residence on March 22. The report seems to confirm the suspicions of nuclear experts in the United States — inside and outside the government — that the Japanese government was not being forthcoming about the full dangers posed by the stricken Fukushima plant. But it also shows that the United States government occasionally overreacted and inflated the risks, such as when American officials mistakenly warned that the spent fuel rods in the pool near unit No. 4 were exposed to the air and vulnerable to melting down and releasing huge amounts of radiation. Still, Mr. Funabashi said, it was the Japanese government’s failure to warn its people of the dangers and the widespread distrust it bred in the government that spurred him to undertake an independent investigation. Such outside investigations have been rare in Japan, where the public has tended to accept official versions of events. He said his group’s findings conflicted with those of the government’s own investigation into the accident, which were released in an interim report in December . A big difference involved one of the most crucial moments of the nuclear crisis, when the prime minister, Mr. Kan, marched into Tepco’s headquarters early on the morning of March 15 upon hearing that the company wanted to withdraw its employees from the wrecked nuclear plant. The government’s investigation sided with Tepco by saying that Mr. Kan, a former social activist who often clashed with Japan’s establishment, had simply misunderstood the company, which wanted to withdraw only a portion of its staff. Mr. Funabashi said his foundation’s investigators had interviewed most of the people involved — except executives at Tepco, which refused to cooperate — and found that the company had in fact said it wanted a total pullout. He credited Mr. Kan with making the right decision in forcing Tepco not to abandon the plant. “Prime Minister Kan had his minuses and he had his lapses,” Mr. Funabashi said, “but his decision to storm into Tepco and demand that it not give up saved Japan.”
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Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Disaster;Japan Earthquake Tsunami;Tokyo;Japan;Nuclear energy;Tokyo Electric Power;Naoto Kan;Masao Yoshida;Yukio Edano
|
ny0255670
|
[
"us"
] |
2011/09/15
|
Arthur Evans, 68, Leader in Gay Rights Fight, Is Dead
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Arthur Evans , who helped form and lead the movement that coalesced after gay people and their supporters protested a 1969 police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a Greenwich Village gay bar, died on Sunday at his home in San Francisco. He was 68. The cause was a heart attack, his friend Hal Offen said. Mr. Evans was found to have an aortic aneurysm last year. Mr. Evans was not at the Stonewall disturbances, but they fueled in him a militant fervor and inspired him to join the Gay Liberation Front , an organization started during the wave of gay assertiveness that followed. For Mr. Evans and other militants, however, the group was not assertive enough. They worried that it was diluting its effectiveness by taking stands on issues beyond gay rights — opposing the Vietnam War and racial discrimination, for example. So in December 1969 they split off to found the Gay Activists Alliance , choosing a name to suggest more aggressive tactics. Based in New York, the alliance became a model for gay rights organizations nationwide, pushing in New York for legislation to ban discrimination against gay men and lesbians in employment, housing and other areas. Mr. Evans wrote its statement of purpose and much of its constitution, which began, “We as liberated homosexual activists demand the freedom for expression of our dignity and value as human beings.” To attract attention the alliance staged what its members called “zaps,” confrontations with people or institutions that they believed discriminated against gay people. Among other incidents, they confronted Mayor John V. Lindsay of New York, went to television studios to protest shows perceived as anti-gay, demanded gay marriage rights at the city’s marriage license bureau, and demonstrated at the taxi commission against a regulation, since abolished, requiring gay people to get a psychiatrist’s approval before they could be allowed to drive a taxi. In the fall of 1970, Mr. Evans and others showed up at the offices of Harper’s Magazine in Manhattan to protest an article it had published sharply criticizing gay people and their lifestyle. It was Mr. Evans’s idea to bring a coffee pot, doughnuts, a folding table and chairs for a civilized “tea party.” When the editor, Midge Decter, refused to print a rebuttal as the group demanded, Mr. Evans erupted. “You knew that this article would contribute to the oppression of homosexuals!” he yelled, according to the 1999 book “Out for Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America” by Dudley Clendinen, a former reporter for The New York Times, and Adam Nagourney, a current Times reporter. “You are a bigot, and you are to be held responsible for that moral and political act.” Arthur Evans was born on Oct. 12, 1942, in York, Pa. His father was a factory worker who had dropped out of elementary school, and his mother ran a beauty shop in the front room of the family house. Mr. Evans attended Brown University on a scholarship and there joined a group of self-styled “militant atheists .” He left Brown after three years and headed for Greenwich Village, having read in Life magazine that it welcomed gay people. In New York, he transferred to City College and switched his major from political science to philosophy. Graduating in 1967, he entered the doctoral program in philosophy at Columbia, where he studied ancient Greek philosophy and participated in antiwar protests. But, becoming disenchanted with academia, he withdrew from Columbia in 1972 and moved to rural Washington State, where he and a companion, calling themselves the Weird Sisters Partnership, homesteaded a small patch of forest land and lived in a tent. When the Washington experiment failed, Mr. Evans and his companion moved to San Francisco. There, he and Mr. Offen opened a Volkswagen repair business they named the Buggery. While living in Washington, Mr. Evans had spent his winters in Seattle researching the historical origins of the counterculture. After settling in San Francisco, he wrote “Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture,” a 1978 book tracing homophobic attitudes to the Middle Ages, when people accused of witchcraft, the book contended, were being persecuted in part for their sexuality, often their homosexuality. He went on to write “Critique of Patriarchal Reason” (1997), arguing that misogyny and homophobia have influenced supposedly objective fields like logic and physics. Mr. Evans is survived by his brother, Joe. Growing up, Mr. Evans had hid his sexual orientation, though he himself was aware of it at 10, he said. By November 1970, when he was scheduled to appear on “The Dick Cavett Show” with other gay leaders, he had still not told his parents that he was gay. But, by his account, he did tell them he was going to be on national television. Thrilled, they told friends and neighbors to tune in. Mr. Evans later said he regretted his handling of the matter.
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Evans Arthur;Homosexuality;Human Rights and Human Rights Violations;Deaths (Obituaries);Gay Activists Alliance
|
ny0029968
|
[
"world",
"europe"
] |
2013/06/11
|
Danube Crests Near Record Level in Budapest
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BUDAPEST — The Danube, which normally bisects Budapest as a gently rolling swath of silver, hovered at historic levels Monday, as the Hungarian capital struggled as record floods battered Central and Eastern Europe. An unusually wet spring has swollen the Danube, the Elbe and several of their tributaries across Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany and Hungary , forcing the evacuation of tens of thousands of people, disrupting rail and road traffic, and causing damage that some preliminary estimates have put at several billion dollars. The authorities in Budapest declared a state of emergency last week, anticipating that the Danube would crest at record levels in the north of the country. A proposal to extend the state of emergency was to be submitted to Parliament on Monday. The Danube peaked at 8.91 meters, or about 29 feet, Sunday night. That exceeded the record of 8.6 meters, set in 2006, but remained below the 9.3-meter flood walls protecting central Budapest. State television showed Prime Minister Viktor Orban at work on the defenses along the Danube on Monday. At a news conference in the capital he warned that the dwindling floods could also cause difficulties. “Water levels in the southern areas will also be higher than any time so far,” Mr. Orban said. “Defending the segment below Budapest will also be a huge task. “As a result I’m asking for the same courage, determination and organization that we witnessed in the last days.” In Germany, a dike on the Elbe River burst overnight Sunday, flooding the village of Fischbeck and forcing 1,200 people to flee their homes. In the eastern German city of Magdeburg, the Elbe had begun to recede early Monday, after reaching a record 7.46 meters the previous day. The rising waters severed rail traffic from Berlin to many areas in western Germany, forcing trains to be diverted along many key routes as the mass of water surged north. The authorities in eastern Germany kept watch on dikes along the flood route, which stretched some 40 kilometers, or 25 miles, by Sunday. Already strained by the task of reinforcing sodden dikes with thousands of sandbags, emergency officials had a new concern when a group calling itself the Germanophobe Flood Brigade threatened in a letter to attack the barriers. Holger Stahlknecht, the top security official for the state of Saxony-Anhalt, on Sunday ordered more helicopters to patrol the flooded area and increased security along the dikes, telling the German news agency DPA, “We are taking the letter seriously.” Image Cars emerged at a car dealership in Fischerdorf, Germany, as flood waters of the Danube receded on Monday. Credit Wolfgang Rattay/Reuters Germans from across the country responded to calls over social networking sites to organize and help protect threatened areas, winning praise from President Joachim Gauck, who toured the flooded areas Sunday. In 1997, less than a decade after the reunification of East and West Germany, record flooding along part of the Oder River in the east became a rallying point . “Germany is a country of solidarity,” Mr. Gauck said after meeting a few of the thousands of people from the country’s former east and west who flocked to stricken villages to help fill and pile the thousands of sandbags needed to hold back the rising waters. In Hungary on Monday, road and rail traffic was restricted in Budapest and other areas along the Danube, although the authorities suggested that most of the capital would stay dry. About 1,200 people throughout the country had been evacuated from their homes. The Hungarian government deployed 7,000 soldiers, supported by several thousand volunteers, to reinforce dikes along the river. Officials said dikes would have to be protected for about a week until the flooding fully subsided. In the capital, water welled up from the sewage systems in some places, prompting fears that the Danube was endangering flood defenses and subway stations Crowds of onlookers gathered Sunday night to stare in amazement at the river that runs across the city. Tourists and locals alike struck poses for cameras in front of the gray body of water that looked more like a large lake than a river, surrounded by some of the city’s most famous landmarks. This year’s flooding on the Danube has already surpassed water levels measured in 2006, when all of Hungary’s major rivers swelled beyond their banks, costing about $110 million in flood defenses. In recent years, specialists have warned repeatedly of the danger and cost of the failure to develop a comprehensive flood defense system for the country. The national water authority declined to comment Sunday, but an assessment published on its Web site found that the decreased drainage capacity of the Hungarian flood protection system was due largely to increased building on former floodplains along rivers. The European Environment Agency warned Wednesday that flooding was likely to increase in Europe for several reasons, including climate change, said Hans Bruyninckx, the agency’s executive director. “But in many cases,” he said, “flood risk is also the result of where, and how, we choose to live.”
|
Flood;Danube;Europe;River
|
ny0089170
|
[
"sports",
"football"
] |
2015/09/16
|
Marshawn Lynch’s Mother Criticizes Coordinator
|
Marshawn Lynch’s mother used a post on Facebook to call for the firing of the Seattle Seahawks’ offensive coordinator, Darrell Bevell. Lynch’s mother, Delisa Lynch, posted her comments late Monday after her son was stopped on a fourth-and-1 run in overtime as Seattle lost to St. Louis, 34-31, on Sunday. Delisa Lynch called Bevell the “worst play caller ever” and wrote that the play against the Rams had been called to justify Seattle’s not calling a run from the 1-yard line near the end of the Super Bowl when Russell Wilson’s pass was intercepted by New England’s Malcolm Butler. ■ Oday Aboushi, a reserve offensive lineman who was suspended for the Jets’ opener for violating the league’s substance-abuse policy, was waived. The Jets cut Aboushi one day after he was eligible to rejoin the active roster. Aboushi, a fifth-round draft pick from Virginia in 2013, started 10 games last season at left guard. Given a chance during training camp to unseat Willie Colon at right guard, Aboushi lagged behind the competition and never posed a serious threat. BEN SHPIGEL ■ Eric Grubman, the N.F.L.’s point man on Los Angeles, said he has decided that officials from San Diego and St. Louis who are trying to keep their N.F.L. teams won’t make presentations on their stadium plans at the owners’ meeting next month. Grubman said that after talking to owners, he felt the Committee on Los Angeles Opportunities would want to speak to the presenters in some detail and the owners might instead benefit from a back-and-forth discussion about the potential projects.
|
Football;Marshawn Lynch;Oday Aboushi;Darrell Bevell;Eric Grubman;Facebook;Seahawks;Jets
|
ny0026019
|
[
"nyregion"
] |
2013/08/14
|
Sharp Debate by Rivals for Brooklyn Prosecutor
|
In the first head-to-head debate in the race for the Brooklyn district attorney’s office, Kenneth P. Thompson sought to portray his opponent, the 23-year incumbent Charles J. Hynes, as the out-of-touch chief of an office run amok. Mr. Hynes countered by dismissing Mr. Thompson’s record, which he said contained little significant management experience, and accusing him of mishandling his cases. The two candidates, both Democrats, skated on the edge of civility on Tuesday night as they attacked each other on point after point in the debate, which lasted about half an hour and was broadcast on NY1. Mr. Hynes, who is often known as Joe, projected an aura of confidence, and impatience, as he relied on his long tenure in the district attorney’s office for a ready supply of comebacks to Mr. Thompson, who said Brooklyn was “suffering under the failed leadership of Joe Hynes.” Mr. Thompson, 47, spoke of recent reports about misbehavior by staff members in Mr. Hynes’s office, among them allegations that prosecutors there manipulated witnesses in multiple murder trials. Some of those are being reviewed by Mr. Hynes’s office, which has come under scrutiny for some wrongful homicide convictions. Mr. Hynes, 78, defended his staff, but quickly pivoted to a point he used several times. “He has no record to speak of,” he said, noting that Mr. Thompson was not promoted to a supervisory role in his five years as a federal prosecutor in the United States attorney’s office in the Eastern District of New York. “I think it’s strange that he thinks that with that kind of background he has the ability to run an office with 1,200 people.” Mr. Thompson seized the opportunity to introduce himself to voters, pointing out that he had started his own law firm, Thompson Wigdor. He cast himself as a defender of civil rights, mentioning that he had helped push the Justice Department to reopen an investigation into the 1955 murder of Emmett Till. “I’ve hired, I’ve fired, I’ve managed that law firm,” he said. But Mr. Hynes criticized Mr. Thompson’s handling of his most high-profile client, the hotel housekeeper who accused Dominique Strauss-Kahn of sexually assaulting her in 2011. “You are one of the most rash people I’ve ever met,” he said, faulting Mr. Thompson for repeatedly criticizing the prosecutors in that case. The debate over experience highlighted the fact that history is on the incumbent’s side: It is rare for sitting district attorneys in New York to be voted out of office. But with Mr. Hynes being dogged by negative publicity, Mr. Thompson has picked up significant endorsements, including those of Representatives Hakeem Jeffries and Yvette D. Clarke. Earlier on Tuesday, he sewed up the rest of the Brooklyn Congressional delegation with the endorsements of Jerrold Nadler and Nydia M. Velázquez, both Democrats. (Representative Michael G. Grimm, a Republican who represents a sliver of Brooklyn in addition to all of Staten Island, has not made an endorsement.) But Mr. Hynes has cemented his strong Democratic base, winning the support of several Brooklyn politicians with ties to the minority communities whose support Mr. Thompson, who is black, is counting on — including Letitia James, a prominent city councilwoman who has been friends with Mr. Thompson for years. The two candidates frequently spoke over each other as the debate turned to Mr. Hynes’s record. Mr. Thompson criticized Mr. Hynes for not speaking out on the Police Department’s stop-and-frisk tactics, which a federal judge this week ruled violated the rights of minorities in New York. “The people of Brooklyn have been let down by this D.A., because he sat 19 stories in the sky, shrugged his shoulders while tens of thousands of young men were having their rights violated on the streets he was charged to protect,” Mr. Thompson said. Mr. Hynes said his office did not set police policy, but listed programs he said he had instituted to divert young minority men from prison. He said the reason his felony conviction rate was the second-lowest in the city is that he often recommended charges against drug offenders be dismissed, sending them to alternative treatment programs instead of prison. Although Mr. Hynes has been criticized for weak prosecution of sexual abuse in the Orthodox Jewish community, Mr. Thompson endured his own share of criticism recently from David Greenfield, an Orthodox councilman, who accused Mr. Thompson of planning to “target” Jews. Mr. Thompson disputed the accusation, but Mr. Hynes stood by Mr. Greenfield. Even during the lightning round, which the moderator, Errol Louis of NY1, introduced in an attempt to “lighten up” the proceedings, the candidates found much to bicker about, although there were some moments of agreement: both admitted to trying marijuana (“Didn’t like it, but yes,” Mr. Hynes said). Asked if they watched “Homeland,” the television show, Mr. Thompson said yes. Mr. Hynes asked: “Who’s got time to watch TV? Oh — he does.”
|
Political Debates;Democrats;Brooklyn;DA Elections;NYC;Kenneth P Thompson;Charles Hynes
|
ny0127790
|
[
"us"
] |
2012/01/25
|
John Kiriakou’s Path From Ambitious Spy to Federal Defendant
|
WASHINGTON — In March 2002, John Kiriakou coordinated a team of fellow Central Intelligence Agency officers and Pakistani agents that descended upon a house in Pakistan where they believed they might find Abu Zubaydah , a high-level figure in Al Qaeda . Rushing into the house amid the bloody aftermath of a shootout, Mr. Kiriakou seized a heavily wounded man, photographed his ear, and used his cellphone to send the image to an analyst. “It’s him,” the analyst reported back after comparing the shape of the ear to file photographs of Abu Zubaydah. Mr. Kiriakou, who recounted the episode in a 2010 memoir , and his colleagues had captured alive the first big target in the Qaeda hierarchy after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington — “one of the brightest moments of my professional life,” he described it. Now, Mr. Kiriakou is embroiled in another drama. The same government that a decade ago sent him to risk his life taking on Al Qaeda is now trying to send him to prison for as much as 30 years, charging him with disclosing classified information — the identity of two former colleagues who participated in interrogating detainees — to journalists. Several friends said the C.I.A. this week abruptly fired his wife, who had worked as an analyst there since before the couple met; specifically, one said, she was called, while on maternity leave, and told her to submit her resignation. (The agency declined to comment.) Mr. Kiriakou’s lawyer Plato Cacheris said Tuesday that his client would plead not guilty, but could not discuss the matter. Friends and former colleagues say that Mr. Kiriakou is determined to fight the case. The grandson of Greek immigrants, Mr. Kiriakou, 47, grew up in New Castle, in western Pennsylvania’s steel country. His parents, both now dead, were elementary school teachers, and his father eventually became a principal, a childhood friend recalled. The friend, Gary Senko, still lives in New Castle and has remained friends with Mr. Kiriakou; the two were in each other’s weddings, he is the godfather of Mr. Kiriakou’s daughter, and they text each other during Pittsburgh Steelers games. As a high school student, he said, Mr. Kiriakou played in the school band and was an honor student, taking an interest in politics and making clear that he had set his sights on the wider world. “We joked that he was going to run for president some day,” Mr. Senko recalled. Mr. Kiriakou attended George Washington University on a partial scholarship, majoring in Middle Eastern Studies. He applied to the C.I.A. at the suggestion of a professor, Dr. Jerrold M. Post , who had served at the agency, according to Mr. Kiriakou’s 2010 memoir, “The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the C.I.A.’s War on Terror.” He began as an analyst and learned Arabic, but eventually trained as an operations officer, working in Athens and the Middle East. His book recounts several adventures, including ambushing and disarming a trainee after learning the man had been directed to kill him by a terrorist group. He was dispatched to Pakistan after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, hunting down Qaeda figures. When he returned home to Northern Virginia, however, Mr. Kiriakou had difficulties. His first marriage had broken up earlier, and he fought a bitter custody battle with his former wife over their two sons. He later married his current wife; they now have three children. In his book, Mr. Kiriakou describes strains with a supervisor over the time required by his family responsibilities. He decided to resign from the agency in 2004, and worked for several years at the auditing firm Deloitte, analyzing security risks for businesses overseas. In late 2007, Mr. Kiriakou waded into the public debate over the C.I.A.’s use of the suffocation tactic called waterboarding . He gave an interview to ABC News saying it had elicited good information from detainees, but that the country should no longer use the technique because “we’re Americans and we’re better than this.” Suddenly a controversial figure, he was asked to leave Deloitte, according to several friends and former colleagues. A Deloitte spokeswoman confirmed his employment, but said the firm could not comment further because of a confidentiality policy. The interview got him trouble in another way. He described Abu Zubaydah as having started cooperating with investigators within seconds of being waterboarded. In fact, according to a document made public in 2009, the C.I.A. waterboarded him 83 times, and Mr. Kiriakou later admitted that he did not personally witness any waterboarding sessions. Over the course of 2008, however, reporters sought Mr. Kiriakou out for interviews about the C.I.A.’s counterterrorism work. Court documents charge that he provided the name of a covert official to one journalist that summer, who in turn passed it on to a legal team defending Guantánamo Bay detainees. Mr. Kiriakou is also accused of helping another reporter, Scott Shane of The New York Times, learn or confirm the name of another official involved in the interrogation program, which The Times published in a June 2008 article . A Times spokeswoman said that neither the newspaper nor Mr. Shane had been contacted by investigators or provided any information to them. Mr. Kiriakou was also battling the C.I.A.’s Publication Review Board that summer over what he could include in his memoir, which he would later try to sell to a movie studio; in recent months, he has also been trying to interest producers in a potential television show, friends say. “I’m guessing they’ll let us publish a good chunk of the Abu Zubaydah story,” he wrote in a June 2008 e-mail to his co-author, according to the criminal complaint. “They objected to some of the details of the planning for the capture, but what I propose doing is telling them that we’ve fictionalized much of it (even though we haven’t).” Mr. Kiriakou has been a security consultant for several movies, traveling to Afghanistan to assess if young actors in “ The Kite Runner ” might be at risk of reprisals after the film’s release because of its negative portrayal of aspects of Afghan society. (He decided they were, and the studio took steps to safeguard them.) He also vetted potential Middle Eastern subjects for the movie “Brüno,” in which a flamboyantly gay character carries out ambush interviews of real people. In 2009, Mr. Kiriakou joined the Democratic staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, led by Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts. He worked as an investigator on several counternarcotics and counterterrorism reports, leaving after a year. In 2010, Mr. Kiriakou was able to publish his book, which is said to have received a chilly reception from some former colleagues. While he wrote that the C.I.A. “became a second family — one I came to respect and even love,” he added, “The revelations in the so-called torture memos have muted my own enthusiasm for the way the agency conducts its business.”
|
Kiriakou John;Zubaydah Abu;Central Intelligence Agency;Espionage and Intelligence Services;Al Qaeda;Torture;Detainees;Classified Information and State Secrets
|
ny0038290
|
[
"world",
"africa"
] |
2014/04/03
|
After Sobs, Prayers and Illness in Court, Pistorius May Testify
|
PRETORIA, South Africa — Listening to the prosecution lay out its case against him at his murder trial over the past month, Oscar Pistorius could not keep silent, or still. He sobbed, prayed, threw up, buried his face in his hands and covered his ears, a response to the graphic and upsetting evidence, and, perhaps, to the grim reality of his own changed circumstances. But through all the testimony — about the lethally expanding bullets he kept in his gun; about the horrific wounds suffered by the victim, his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp; about his own mercurial temperament, obsession with firearms and irrationally jealous nature — Mr. Pistorius, the world’s most famous Paralympic athlete, has not spoken in his own defense. That will most likely change on Monday, when the case resumes after a weeklong recess and Mr. Pistorius is expected to take the stand. And though he has already provided the court with a written account of how, he says, he shot Ms. Steenkamp because he mistook her for an intruder, his testimony will be crucial as he tries to rebut the prosecution’s case: that he killed her in a violent rage as the two argued late into the night. “We need to know what he thought, and it’s impossible to rely on that defense without him testifying,” said Kelly Phelps, a senior lecturer in law at the University of Cape Town, referring to Mr. Pistorius’s explanation. “What other evidence can the court rely on to determine what you were thinking?” In truth, no one else can say for sure what Mr. Pistorius was thinking in the early hours of Feb. 14, 2013, when he took his 9-millimeter pistol and pumped four shots through the bathroom door of his house while Ms. Steenkamp cowered inside, her hands folded over her face in a futile attempt to defend herself. Perhaps even he is not altogether certain. But from the defense’s point of view, the story he has told is the only one that can save him from a murder conviction. Image Oscar Pistorius and Reeva Steenkamp in Johannesburg in February 2013. Credit Reuters With his charismatic good looks, fast cars and beautiful girlfriends, Mr. Pistorius, 27, is not just a world-famous sports star; he is, or was, a bona fide South African hero whose story of triumph over a disability provided an inspirational story for a nation. Born without a fibula in either leg — the fibula is the bone that runs alongside the tibia from the ankle to the knee — he had his lower legs amputated when he was a baby and became a superstar sprinter on curved carbon-fiber prostheses, campaigning successfully for the right to compete against able-bodied athletes. He had a reputation for courage, generosity and personability. Now South Africa has been exposed to a different, ugly side of him. The meaning of his broken-man demeanor in court has been a matter of great debate here, as people discuss which part represents the real Mr. Pistorius. That Mr. Pistorius shot and killed Ms. Steenkamp has never been in doubt, and legal experts here say he will have a tough time winning a complete acquittal. South Africa abolished trial by jury in 1969, so the case is being heard by a judge, assisted by two officials known as assessors, who might be less likely than a jury to be swayed by emotion. The most serious charge against him, premeditated murder, is punishable by a minimum 25-year prison sentence. A lesser charge, culpable homicide, would apply if the judge determined that Mr. Pistorius believed that he was in danger and acted in what he thought was self-defense; the penalty for that is at the discretion of the judge, and it does not necessarily mean prison time. Martin Hood, a lawyer specializing in firearms law, said that Mr. Pistorius would have a hard time squaring his actions that night with evidence that before he got his gun license, he had to pass a test showing he understood that it was illegal in South Africa to fire a gun at someone unless one was directly threatened. He also said Mr. Pistorius’s case had been damaged by the accounts of neighbors who said they heard a man and a woman arguing, and a woman screaming, around the time the shots were fired, apparently contradicting Mr. Pistorius’s statement that he believed Ms. Steenkamp was in bed when he heard noises in the bathroom and got up to investigate. Mr. Pistorius’s testimony will be crucial in establishing his credibility, Mr. Hood added, but will leave him at risk if the prosecution can poke holes in his account, exploit his vulnerable state or, worse, provoke him to anger. Video Text messages between the track star Oscar Pistorius and Reeva Steenkamp, the girlfriend he is accused of fatally shooting, were presented in a South African court. Credit Credit Siphiwe Sibeko/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images In Ms. Phelps’s view, the most damning testimony against Mr. Pistorius came from text messages, read aloud in court, in which Ms. Steenkamp described Mr. Pistorius acting jealously and petulantly. “I’m scared of you sometimes,” she said in one. “Up until the messages, they hadn’t put any evidence on record to explain why he would intentionally murder her,” Ms. Phelps said, speaking of the prosecution’s case. She added: “Their version was that a man with no proven record of violence, who by all accounts was in a happy, loving relationship, woke up one day and decided to murder this girlfriend, which wasn’t plausible. This gives them plausibility.” The trial has been expensive, and Mr. Pistorius has had to sell off the possessions he amassed so proudly at the height of his success. He recently put his house on the market. Mr. Pistorius has also lost much of the good will he worked so hard to earn. South Africans who have been following the case say they keep coming back to Mr. Pistorius’s courtroom demeanor — the tears, the retching, the apparent despair of a broken, ruined man — and many say they are not convinced. Liza Grobler, a criminologist interviewed on the television channel News 24 , said she interpreted Mr. Pistorius’s behavior as “emotional shock” stemming from his realization of “what he’s capable of doing” and the terrible effect it has had — primarily on himself. “It doesn’t prove remorse; it doesn’t prove guilt; and it doesn’t prove innocence,” she said. In Johannesburg, Thalbani Mlalazi, 42, a businessman, said he felt an overwhelming disappointment about the case. “You know, he was my role model,” he said.
|
Johannesburg;Oscar Pistorius;Reeva Steenkamp;Murders;Pretoria South Africa;South Africa
|
ny0237000
|
[
"world",
"asia"
] |
2010/06/29
|
Quest to Neutralize Afghan Militants Is Showing Glimpses of Success, NATO Says
|
KABUL, Afghanistan — Despite deepening pessimism back home and disarray in the top American military ranks, officials insist that the buildup of soldiers in Afghanistan is beginning to show results: Commando raids over the last four months have taken scores of insurgent leaders out of action, in a secretive operation aimed partly at pressuring the Taliban to reconcile with the Afghan government. About 130 important insurgent figures have been captured or killed in Afghanistan over the past 120 days, about the time that commanders turned their attention from the fight around Marja to a much more complex campaign around Kandahar, according to NATO military statistics. The targets have included Taliban shadow provincial governors and military commanders, as well as district-level financiers, trainers and bomb makers. At the same time, American military officials say that the greater number of troops, along with more trained Afghan security forces, is allowing NATO forces “to confront the Taliban in places where they had not been confronted in the past,” said Brig. Gen. Josef Blotz, the NATO spokesman here. “This is tough, but we are in” the fight, he said. He predicted that given more time, there would be progress. Still, with the American military leadership in some chaos after the firing last week of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top commander here, the overall numbers are not encouraging. For NATO soldiers, the last month has been the most deadly of the nine-year war, with 95 deaths so far in June, more than twice as many as a year ago, according to icasualties.org , a Web site that tracks official casualty reports. Afghan soldiers have not fared much better. Instability has worsened in several provinces that previously had been troubled, but not outright violent. In Oruzgan, the Taliban brutally attacked members of the Hazara minority last week, and in Ghazni there have been at least two school burnings in the past two weeks. In a report to Parliament earlier this month, the acting interior minister, Munir Mangal, said that while only 8 districts are under Taliban control, another 114 are “high threat” districts. That is about 30 percent of the country. Some senior NATO officers say that military intelligence has picked up initial indications that the increased Special Operations missions aimed at provincial insurgent commanders inside the country have provoked some Taliban leaders to begin internal discussions of whether to accept offers of reconciliation with the government. But the intelligence, gathered from detainee interrogations and intercepts of insurgent communications, is open to interpretation, and other senior American and alliance officials say it is too early to conclude that many Taliban leaders are inclined to lay down their arms. Indeed, the missions carry a significant political risk, when civilian casualties undermine the good will of the Afghan people. The Special Operations raids have caused an unspecified number of innocent deaths that have outraged the local population, frustrated the Afghan government’s efforts to attract more supporters across the nation — and prompted a tightening of allied rules on the use of lethal force. Despite the loss of civilian life and political damage, senior officers who track the raids say that no shots are fired about 80 percent of the time, as American, allied and Afghan commando units are able to surprise their targets, usually under cover of night. Despite differing assessments of the effect of the Special Operations campaign inside Afghanistan, senior military officials agree that potential reconciliation with the leadership of the Afghan Taliban, and the reintegration of its low-level fighters, will occur only when the government can negotiate from a position of strength. The Special Operations campaign operated by American, Afghan and alliance forces inside Afghanistan was discussed during a weekend visit to the headquarters here by Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. As described by senior alliance military officers, the campaign is especially focused in the south, against the Afghan Taliban that previously ruled the country from their spiritual base in Kandahar and welcomed leaders of Al Qaeda in a haven. The Afghan Taliban is a separate insurgent organization from the Haqqani network, based inside Pakistan and said to be included in proposals by Pakistan to broker a power-sharing deal to end the war. The missions aimed at Taliban leaders are to pressure some fighters to lay down their arms, as well as to demonstrate to mid- and higher-level commanders that reconciliation would be the wiser path. Lt. Gen. David Rodriguez, the No. 2 American commander in Afghanistan, said that “there has been some reactions to our operations” and that “we have seen some local people start talking about these things.” Military officers acknowledge that these capture-or-kill missions are not an end in themselves, but are meant to establish an elusive strategic advantage at the start of a broad campaign to neutralize the Taliban. The campaign has been given a high priority, with a tripling of these elite Special Operations units over the past year. Special Operations forces are carrying out an average of five raids a day against a constantly updated list of high-value targets, mostly in southern Afghanistan — the focus of the troop increase ordered by President Obama — but also in the east and the north. Officials said that the specific person on the raid’s target list is found a little more than half the time, but that even when they miss the primary target, the raiders round up other insurgents, leading to another 500 suspects detained over the past four months. One specific sign of damage to the insurgent hierarchy from the accelerated Special Operations missions is that replacements for midlevel Taliban leaders taken out of the fight are increasingly younger, dropping in average age to the mid-20s from the mid-40s, according to alliance reports. A number of insurgent leaders also have left their provincial bases inside Afghanistan and sought refuge in Pakistan, officials said. “We are seeing signs of damage to the insurgent leadership,” said one senior NATO official in Kabul. “There are some signs of fatigue.” McChrystal to Retire WASHINGTON (Reuters) — Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who was fired last week as the commander of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan by President Obama over derisive remarks about senior administration officials, told the Army on Monday that he planned to retire, an official said.
|
Afghanistan War (2001- );United States Defense and Military Forces;Taliban;Afghanistan;Defense and Military Forces;North Atlantic Treaty Organization
|
ny0241933
|
[
"us"
] |
2011/03/11
|
Texas May Consider a Bill Forcing Losers in a Suit to Pay Opponents’ Legal Fees
|
Loser pays; everyone wins. It is the perfect sound bite in what could be the next tort reform battle in Texas: a push to require the losing parties in litigation to pay their opponents’ legal fees. Also known as the English Rule, because of its prevalence in Britain, the loser-pays approach, advocates say, is the cure for courts choked with the costs of “junk” lawsuits. But opponents say it obstructs all litigation — without regard to merit — and keeps those with plausible legal claims from seeking justice. In his February State of the State address, Gov. Rick Perry praised a loser-pays approach that would require “those who sue” to pay lawyers’ fees. The prospect of a one-way system has put the state’s plaintiff bar on high alert. A Republican legislative staffer who has seen a draft bill and asked not to be named in order to protect his dealings with the governor said Mr. Perry’s office had been shopping one-way loser-pays legislation to lawmakers. Catherine Frazier, the governor’s spokeswoman, said Mr. Perry was working closely with Representative C. Brandon Creighton, Republican of Conroe, and Senator Joan Huffman, Republican of Southside Place, to develop tort reform legislation. Which version of loser-pays will ultimately make it into the legislation is unclear. Jenni Sellers, Mr. Creighton’s chief of staff, said that the legislation had yet to be completed and that it would include a provision for the early dismissal of frivolous lawsuits. She said Mr. Creighton thinks any loser-pays proposal should be fair to both sides. He believes “it’s a two-way street,” Ms. Sellers said. “Not just plaintiffs pays, but whoever the loser is ends up paying.” But in an op-ed article published Monday in The Midland Reporter-Telegram, Mr. Creighton, along with six of his House colleagues, used language that suggested a focus on plaintiffs: “A plaintiff should be required to pay the defendant’s legal fees in cases where a court determines that a lawsuit is groundless or where a jury determines a suit is frivolous.” Any type of loser-pays proposal would receive a tepid response from the legal community across the ideological spectrum, said Thomas M. Melsheimer, a business and white-collar criminal defense litigator in Dallas with the firm Fish & Richardson. “It’s really hard to imagine there being much grass-roots support for it once people understand that it could make the ordinary citizen suing Wal-Mart pay for Wal-Mart’s legal fees if they lose,” Mr. Melsheimer said. W. Mark Lanier, a plaintiffs’ lawyer in Houston, said he did not have a problem with a loser-pays system, “as long as it’s fair.” But Mr. Lanier said a one-way approach focused on plaintiffs was “blatantly anti-Texan” because of the barrier it would create for those who cannot afford the risk of having to pay a defendant’s legal fees. Legal scholars also question whether frivolous litigation is even a significant problem, said Charles M. Silver, a professor at the University of Texas School of Law. No serious academic study outside of the context of securities class actions has found it to be an issue in the United States, Mr. Silver said. And in Texas, since the enactment of the Legislature’s 2003 tort reform package, which included a $250,000 cap on compensation for noneconomic damages in medical malpractice cases, the idea that plaintiffs are now filing suits that are not overwhelmingly meritorious is “just ridiculous,” he said. Representative Will Hartnett, Republican of Dallas, who sits on the Judiciary and Civil Jurisprudence Committee, said it is unlikely that loser-pays legislation will gain traction this session. “I know there are a lot of Texans interested in some form of loser-pay legislation,” Mr. Hartnett said. “But I think it will have an uphill battle this session, given all the other pressing items that the Legislature has to deal with."
|
Texas;Suits and Litigation;Law and Legislation
|
ny0098339
|
[
"us"
] |
2015/06/26
|
Justices Back Broad Interpretation of Housing Law
|
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Thursday endorsed a broad interpretation of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, allowing suits under a legal theory that civil rights groups say is a crucial tool to fight housing discrimination. “Much progress remains to be made in our nation’s continuing struggle against racial isolation,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority in the 5-to-4 ruling. “The court acknowledges the Fair Housing Act’s continuing role in moving the nation toward a more integrated society.” The court divided along familiar lines, with its four more liberal members — Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan — joining Justice Kennedy. The question in the case was whether plaintiffs suing under the housing law must prove intentional discrimination or merely that the challenged practice had produced a “disparate impact.” Drawing on decisions concerning other kinds of discrimination, Justice Kennedy said the housing law allowed suits relying on both kinds of evidence. The first kind of proof can be hard to come by, as agencies and businesses seldom announce that they are engaging in purposeful discrimination. “Disparate impact,” on the other hand, can be proved using statistics. Texas Dept. of Housing and Community Affairs v. Inclusive Communities Project The Supreme Court, in a 5-to-4 vote, endorsed a legal theory that civil rights groups say is crucial to fighting housing discrimination. Justice Kennedy wrote that the history of the law and of the civil rights movement supported the broader interpretation. “In April 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tenn., and the nation faced a new urgency to resolve the social unrest in the inner cities,” Justice Kennedy wrote. Congress responded, he went on, by passing the Fair Housing Act. Civil rights groups and the Obama administration, fearing an unfavorable ruling from the Supreme Court, had worked hard to keep the issue away from the justices. Two earlier cases on the question were withdrawn just before they were to be argued. The latest case , Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. Inclusive Communities Project, No. 13-1371, was brought by a Texas group that favors integrated housing. The group helps its clients, who are mostly lower-income black families, find housing in the Dallas suburbs, which are mostly white. The families use housing vouchers, but not all landlords accept them. Landlords receiving federal low-income tax credits, however, are required to accept the vouchers. The fair housing group argued that state officials had violated the Fair Housing Act by giving a disproportionate share of the tax credits to landlords in minority neighborhoods. The Supreme Court returned the case to the lower court for further proceedings, cautioning that allowing disparate-impact suits did not mean that they should always succeed. Indeed, Justice Kennedy expressed concern about “abusive disparate-impact claims” and suggested that the case before the court would face headwinds. “This case,” Justice Kennedy wrote, “may be seen simply as an attempt to second-guess which of two reasonable approaches a housing authority should follow in the sound exercise of its discretion in allocating tax credits for low-income housing.” In dissent, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote that the majority had misread the housing law and the court’s own precedents. “And today’s decision,” he added, “will have unfortunate consequences for local government, private enterprise and those living in poverty. Something has gone badly awry when a city can’t even make slumlords kill rats without fear of a lawsuit.” The fair housing law, Justice Alito wrote, bars discrimination “because of” race. He gave several examples of why the phrase should be understood to refer only to intentional discrimination. For instance, he wrote, “of the 32 college players selected by National Football League teams in the first round of the 2015 draft, it appears that the overwhelming majority were members of racial minorities.” “Teams presumably chose the players they think are most likely to help them win games,” Justice Alito added. “Would anyone say the N.F.L. teams made draft slots unavailable to white players ‘because of’ their race?” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas joined Justice Alito’s dissent, which was almost half again as long as the majority opinion.
|
Supreme Court,SCOTUS;Real Estate; Housing;Discrimination;Affordable housing;Texas
|
ny0280500
|
[
"world",
"americas"
] |
2016/10/21
|
Las Vegas, Known for Excess, Was Perfect Backdrop for Presidential Debate
|
LAS VEGAS — Outside the Four Queens casino in downtown Las Vegas, just past Elvis and a pregnant burlesque dancer, stood “Baby Donald” — a rotund man in a rubber Donald J. Trump mask, wearing a diaper and clutching a giant baby bottle. “Make my diaper great again,” his T-shirt read. Baby Donald was actually Cary Darling, a 50-year-old father of two working for tips to support his family. It could be risky. While most Trump supporters were friendly, one spat in his face and another harassed him and urged him to hang himself. Then there was the time a tourist mistook Mr. Darling’s character for a political promotion and, after cursing Mr. Trump, punched him in the face. “This is a really weird election,” Mr. Darling said. America’s political divides can be felt even in the country’s sin city, the desert oasis where dazzle and extravagance are a way of life. In a sense, it was Las Vegas’s proud reputation for lurid excess, for being a place where almost anything goes, that seemed to make it the perfect backdrop for the third and final American presidential debate, which took place here on Wednesday night. Image Las Vegas proved to be an apt host for the debate, part of America’s extravagant process of choosing a president. Credit Declan Walsh/The New York Times The debate had none of the splashy excess of the casino mega-resorts a few miles away, along the city’s million-watt main strip, where one hotel is shaped like an Egyptian pyramid and there is a bewildering choice of shows featuring famous magicians, singers, circus acts and strippers. Yet, in its own way, the event was an apt reflection of America’s elaborate process of choosing a president — an exhausting, 18-month marathon of elections, debates and TV-driven rituals costing hundreds of millions of dollars, now grinding toward its climax with the vote on Nov. 8. The Las Vegas debate cost $8 million to put on and was almost a year in the making, said Valarie Segerra, one of the organizers. The stage had been trucked 2,500 miles across the country to the venue on the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, campus. Organizers erected three miles of fencing and strategically placed 190 shipping containers to guard against terrorist attacks. Power and internet backup systems had to be provided; 1,000 student volunteers were recruited to guide visitors. The giant arena that hosted the debate had previously held major boxing matches and rodeo competitions. The Commission for Presidential Debates, the nonprofit group that organized the debates, used giant black drapes to set aside a section for this encounter, and it set specific requirements for the climate inside: The temperature had to hover between 63 and 65 degrees, and the humidity had to be less than 50 percent. The debates commission, which has organized every debate since 1988, calibrates every aspect to ensure parity. The same stage used in the first two debates was used in Las Vegas. Anything that could provide a perceived advantage — who stands left or right on the stage, who walks out first, whether they shake hands — was previously decided with the candidates through consensus or a coin toss, said Peter Eyre, a commission spokesman. “We want them to be as equal as possible,” he said. He declined to comment on the controversy that erupted at the previous debate, in St. Louis, when Mr. Trump tried to bring three women who had accused Hillary Clinton’s husband, former President Bill Clinton, of sexual misconduct, into the V.I.P. box. The debates, political theater writ large, are part of a proud American tradition that stretches back to 1858, when Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas argued over slavery during a race for a Senate seat from Illinois. With 150,000 hotel rooms and an array of cavernous conference halls, Las Vegas was well equipped to accommodate the thousands of journalists who descended on the city, although it had never previously hosted a presidential debate, or indeed, any national political event. Mr. Trump owns 50 percent of a shimmering gold hotel here, now at the heart of a heated labor dispute. (He refuses to recognize the powerful Culinary Workers Union, which is campaigning for Mrs. Clinton in the election). After a grinding campaign season, some reporters made the most of the city’s attractions. The team from Fox News set up a studio on the rooftop of the MGM Grand, overlooking the strip. On the eve of the debate, the anchor Steve Doocy celebrated his birthday alongside a group of tiara-wearing choral singers. Nearby another reporter was filmed twirling in the pool, still wearing his shirt and tie, surrounded by synchronized swimmers. “I saw him drinking beer a minute ago,” Mr. Doocy said. “Next thing you know he’s in an inner tube with these ladies.” In all, over 5,000 journalists traveled to Las Vegas for the debate. They clustered in studios, set up live positions and gathered in a giant hall. CNN alone had set up three temporary studios, erected six other interview positions and deployed at least 30 cameras. Image Over 5,000 journalists traveled to Las Vegas for the debate. Credit Declan Walsh/The New York Times On Wednesday, four hours before the debate started, guests and anchors cycled on and off an outdoor stage on the college campus with an air of practiced familiarity. Behind the TV set was another scene that has become a ritual of political elections: dozens of supporters of the candidates holding aloft giant signs, jostling to be seen in the background of the TV shot. Clinton supporters wore pink T-shirts for Planned Parenthood. As the studio guests talked, Trump supporters yelled, “CNN for Donald Trump,” a sarcastic reference to the network, which has been derided by Mr. Trump as the Clinton News Network. When the debate started hours later, at 6 p.m., journalists crowded into a vast hall to write, comment and talk about the event, which had the air of a keenly anticipated theatrical performance. In the press center, 50 televisions hung from the roof, relaying the proceedings. A hush fell over the hall during the debate The silence was broken just a few times, usually when one of the candidates let rip a zinger, like Mr. Trump’s reference to illegal immigrants as “bad hombres,” or Mrs. Clinton’s taunts about his hotel. Yet at the end, instead of applause, there was silence. For once in Vegas, a performance had ended without a reaction. More important was the reaction of the roughly 70 million Americans watching across the country. Mr. Darling, the Baby Trump, was not among them. Avoiding the debate parties, he stayed home to watch a movie with his sons. He couldn’t wait for the vote on Nov. 8, he said Thursday, “so all of this will finally be over.”
|
2016 Presidential Election;University of Nevada; Las Vegas;Las Vegas;Political Debates
|
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