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ny0028917
|
[
"us",
"politics"
] |
2013/01/14
|
Sonia Sotomayor Makes Herself at Home in Washington
|
WASHINGTON — Justice Sonia Sotomayor is a proud daughter of New York City, and her adjustment to life in the nation’s capital has been rocky. Do not get her started, for instance, on ordering takeout. “I go to New York, I order food, it’s at my door in 10 to 15 minutes. O.K.?” she said in an interview in her Supreme Court chambers. In Washington, she said, “there isn’t a place I call where it doesn’t take 45 minutes.” “And then getting the food delivered to the Supreme Court? They’ve got to stop at security, security has to call you, you’ve got to go downstairs. By the time you get downstairs you may add another 15 minutes to the 45 minutes. And the food is ice-cold.” There are four justices from New York City these days, each representing a different borough, and it sometimes seems that the court speaks with a New York accent. Justice Sotomayor, who grew up in the Bronx, recalled getting to know Justice Antonin Scalia, who is from Queens and whose friends call him Nino. “One day Nino looked at me and said: ‘You’re a real New Yorker. I love you. You take as well you give,’ ” she said with a big laugh. “And I understood. You know, we’re just out there and up front and fun.” She mentioned a second colleague, Justice Elena Kagan. “I dare say Elena has a little bit of that.” Justice Kagan is from Manhattan, and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who is more reserved, is from Brooklyn. “The boroughs are different,” Justice Sotomayor said, “and so are we.” The occasion for the chat was the publication of Justice Sotomayor’s memoir, “My Beloved World,” this week. It is steeped in vivid memories of New York City , and it is an exceptionally frank account of the challenges that she faced during her ascent from a public housing project to the court’s marble palace on First Street. Justice Sotomayor turns out to be a writer of depth and literary flair, a surprise to readers of her judicial prose. (“I am a lawyer’s judge,” she said on hearing the observation. “I write very technically.”) Image Sonia Sotomayor’s memoir Her chambers are sleek, modern, filled with light and bursting with pottery, art and mementos. There are photographs of her relatives, a group portrait of the four women ever to serve on the Supreme Court and one of Justice Sotomayor with President Obama, who appointed her in 2009 . In a corner, there is a bag overflowing with characters from “Sesame Street,” where she has been known to dispense advice. (“Pretending to be a princess is fun, but it is definitely not a career,” she said in an appearance on the show in November , offering alternatives: “You can go to school and train to be a teacher, a lawyer, a doctor, an engineer and even a scientist.”) And there is a sign of the sort you might find in the novelty section of a gift shop: “Well-behaved women rarely make history.” Justice Sotomayor’s book ends in 1992 with her appointment to Federal District Court in Manhattan. There are only stray references in the memoir to her service there, on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York, where she served from 1998 to 2009, and on the Supreme Court. But her life story, which includes chapters at Princeton, Yale Law School, the Manhattan district attorney’s office and private practice as a civil litigator, illuminates her judicial work. She acknowledged that she entered the Ivy League through “a special door” and that her adjustment was rough. “I felt like an alien landing in a different universe,” she said of her arrival at Princeton. Her childhood was so urban that she was “known to confuse cows for horses.” “I didn’t know what a cricket sounded like,” she said. She was part of a vanguard not always welcomed by the old order. In the book, she recalled letters in The Daily Princetonian “lamenting the presence on campus of ‘affirmative action students,’ each of whom had presumably displaced a far more deserving affluent white male and could rightly be expected to crash into the gutter built of her own unrealistic aspirations.” “There were vultures circling, ready to dive when we stumbled,” she wrote. She did not stumble. On graduating, she was awarded the Pyne Prize, the university’s highest undergraduate award, presented for a combination of academic success and extracurricular work. Asked if the programs from which she benefited are still needed, she was initially vague, perhaps as a consequence of a pending case about the constitutionality of the University of Texas’s affirmative action plan. “We have to look and ensure that we’re paying attention to what we’re doing,” she said, so “that we don’t reflexively institute processes and procedures that exclude people without thought.” Image Justice Sotomayor was escorted by Jorge Posada, the catcher for the Yankees, to throw the ceremonial first pitch at a game in 2009. Her memoir comes out this week. Credit Bill Kostroun/Associated Press Her bottom line, though, was clear. “We’ve got a way to go still,” she said. “I mean, clearly, we do.” After her second year at law school, Justice Sotomayor spent a summer working at a prominent New York City law firm, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison . The vast majority of summer associates at big law firms in those days received offers for full-time jobs, but she did not. She called the experience “a kick in the teeth.” Asked why she chose to discuss the matter, she said: “If I write a book where all I’ve ever experienced is success, people won’t take a positive lesson from it. In being candid, I have to own up to my own failures, both in my marriage and in my work environment.” (She married Kevin Noonan, now a biologist and patent lawyer, after graduating from Princeton in 1976. They divorced in 1983.) Justice Sotomayor’s affiliations on the Supreme Court create a complex pattern. She is part of the court’s four-member liberal wing, one of its three women, one of its three Yale Law graduates and one of its four New Yorkers. She is also one of its six Catholics. But she said her experience with Catholic education, at Blessed Sacrament School and Cardinal Spellman High School, was mixed. “It was a different time and a different generation that believed love was discipline,” she said. “Nuns and priests, like every other human being, are products of their environments. I was alien to the nuns and priests, too, because none of them were minorities.” These days, she said, her faith is not entirely conventional. “I am a very spiritual person,” she said, though “maybe not traditionally religious in terms of Sunday Mass every week, that sort of thing.” “The trappings are not important to me,” she said, “but, yes, I do believe in God. And, yes, I do believe in the commandments. And, yes, I do believe in their message of ‘thou shalt not kill,’ ‘thou shalt not steal’ and the rest of it.” Justice Sotomayor said she started to make her peace with life in Washington after “eight months of grieving.” She recalled a morning drive down Rock Creek Parkway that allowed her to see the city fresh. “I thought to myself, ‘This is a really beautiful city,’ ” she said. “It’s a very different life than New York. The pace is really different, and for the breakneck speed at which you live in New York, this could be a little slow at times.” She has moved to a scruffy part of town, near U Street in Northwest Washington. “It has a touch of the East Village in it,” she said. “I picked it because it’s mixed. I walk out and I see all kinds of people, which is the environment I grew up in and the environment I love.” In her book, she confesses that she does not always observe the letter of the law. “I’m a New Yorker,” she wrote, “and I jaywalk with the best of them.”
|
Sonia Sotomayor;Supreme Court;Lawyers;NYC;Books
|
ny0111171
|
[
"technology"
] |
2012/02/20
|
Copyright Cheats Face the Music in France
|
PARIS — The curtain has risen on the third act of one of the most ambitious French musical productions, one whose goal is to end digital piracy. More than two years after France approved a tough crackdown on copyright cheats, the agency that oversees it sent its first cases to the courts last week. Some repeat offenders may temporarily be cut off from the Internet. Studies show that the appeal of piracy has waned in France since the so-called three-strikes law, hailed by the music and movie industries and hated by advocates of an open Internet, went into effect. Digital sales, which were slow to get started in France, are growing. Music industry revenues are starting to stabilize. “I think more and more French people understand that artists should get paid for their work,” said Pascal Nègre, president of Universal Music France. “I think everybody has a friend who has received an e-mail. This creates a buzz. There is an educational effect.” But the curtain has not yet come down for the fallen file-sharers. As a presidential election nears, opposition to the law is heating up. Rivals of President Nicolas Sarkozy , who championed the measure, say that it infringes on civil liberties. His opponents, building on the momentum from a successful campaign to defeat two U.S. congressional bills aimed at curbing piracy, as well as a swell of protest against an international copyright treaty, want to repeal or revamp the French law. The agency that administers the three-strikes system, known by the French abbreviation Hadopi, had sent 822,000 warnings by e-mail to suspected offenders as of the end of December. Those were followed up by 68,000 second warnings, issued through registered mail. Of those, 165 cases have gone on to the third stage, under which the courts are authorized to impose fines of €1,500, or nearly $2,000, and to suspend Internet connections for a month. Éric Walter, the secretary general of Hadopi, said that the relatively low number of third-stage offenders showed that the system had succeeded. “Our work is to explain to people why piracy is a bad thing and why they should stop,” he said during an interview in the agency’s nondescript headquarters behind the Montparnasse train station in Paris. “When the people understand that, they stop. Of course, some people don’t want to understand. Then we have to transfer their dossiers to the justice system.” A report commissioned by Hadopi, which has a budget of €11 million and employs 70 people, showed a sharp decline in file-sharing since the system was put in place. A separate study by researchers at Wellesley College in Massachusetts and Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh suggests that Hadopi has given a lift to legal downloads via the Apple iTunes music store. Since the spring of 2009, when the debate over the measure was raging, through mid-2011, iTunes sales rose much more strongly in France than in other European countries. While there is no proof that Hadopi was responsible, the study says the case for a link was bolstered by the fact that sales of musical genres that suffer from high levels of piracy, like hip-hop, rose much more than sales of low-piracy genres, like Christian and classical music. The researchers calculated that Hadopi resulted in an extra €13.8 million a year worth of iTunes music sales in France. Adding the potential benefit to other legitimate digital music services, including fast-growing online streaming services, which provide music for online playback rather than downloads, the gain could have been substantially larger, they said. “We suggest that with regard to mitigation of sales displacement by piracy, a national anti-piracy policy combined with educational efforts is much more effective in the longer term than a small number of high-profile lawsuits,” the researchers wrote. The question of how to deal with piracy has vexed media executives, exercised policy makers and polarized the public debate in many countries. After sites like Napster appeared more than a decade ago, the recording industry in the United States pursued a campaign of lawsuits against individual file-sharers, but later backed away because of widespread objections. Since then, the U.S. authorities and media industries appear to have focused much of their attention on the supply side of the piracy equation. In January, the U.S. Justice Department shut down Megaupload, a so-called locker service. It charged seven people connected with Megaupload with aiding piracy. The U.S. music and movie industries reached an agreement with major Internet service providers last year to develop a system in which the providers would take “mitigation measures” against accused copyright infringers; those steps could include slowdowns in connection speeds. But the mechanism has yet to be implemented, and it stops short of the French approach, which is enshrined in law and has tougher penalties. Several other countries, including South Korea and New Zealand, have adopted French-style anti-piracy measures. In South Korea, where the law took effect in 2009, music sales rose 12 percent in 2010 and 6 percent in 2011, according to the music industry federation. Sales in other countries mostly continued to decline. Lawmakers in Britain have also approved a three-strikes law, though it has yet to be implemented. But there is other evidence in Europe that tougher online copyright enforcement can lift media industry revenues, at least briefly. Music sales rose 10 percent in Sweden in 2009, for example, after the country tightened up its copyright laws, bringing previously lax standards into line with E.U. norms. Mr. Nègre, at Universal Music, said it was probably no coincidence that Sweden and France had produced the two big European success stories in the legitimate digital music market: the streaming services Spotify and Deezer. These companies — the former was founded in Sweden, the latter in France — resemble pirate sites in that they give users access to millions of songs free, at least for their basic services. Even opponents of Hadopi acknowledge that the law has resulted in a change in online behavior, though they dispute whether its effect on music industry sales has been beneficial. Jérémie Zimmermann, co-founder of La Quadrature du Net, a group that campaigns against restrictions on the Internet, said the law had resulted in increased use of virtual private network software and other anonymity tools. “Apparently some of its intimidation is having a psychological effect,” he said of the three-strikes law, but added: “The political costs of creating an institution like this are tremendous.” Stories like that of Robert Thollot, a teacher who lives near Saint-Étienne, in central France, have not helped. Mr. Thollot was accused of illegally downloading songs by David Guetta and Rihanna, as well as the film “Iron Man 2.” Mr. Thollot argued that someone had pirated his log-on to a nationwide Wi-Fi network and downloaded the material while he was in class. After interviewing him, Hadopi dropped his case. “It’s like when someone steals your bank card number,” said Renaud Veeckman, co-founder of SOS Hadopi, an organization that offers legal help to people who have received warnings from the anti-piracy agency. “Are you responsible, or are you the victim?” SOS Hadopi has worked with five people whose dossiers have reached the third stage, including Mr. Thollot; all five have been cleared before going to court. This suggests that the actual number of cases that have been forwarded to the justice system may be considerably lower than the 165 third-strike offenders cited by Hadopi. Mr. Walter at Hadopi declined to provide a specific figure. Whether any of the cases of accused pirates will come to court before the first round of the presidential election, scheduled for April 22, is unclear, as is the fate of Hadopi after the vote. To Mr. Sarkozy’s right, the leader of the National Front, Marine Le Pen, says she would scrap the law and replace it with a so-called global license, under which consumers would be free to share content and artists would be remunerated in other ways, perhaps with revenue from new taxes. On the left, the Socialist Party’s nominee for president, François Hollande, also opposes Hadopi. “We think it is ineffective, obsolete and built on false logic,” said Aurélie Filippetti, a Socialist member of the National Assembly who serves as Mr. Hollande’s spokeswoman on cultural matters. The Socialists, some of whom previously championed the global license, backed away from it once Ms. Le Pen took it up. Ms. Filippetti said, however, that there could still be a role for new taxes on Internet service providers, search engines or other Internet companies, with the proceeds being distributed to artists. Mr. Hollande also wants a tougher crackdown on sites that enable copying, and a push to develop better legal digital content offers, she said. Mr. Sarkozy, who announced his candidacy for re-election last week, is sticking to his guns, saying he would try to strengthen Hadopi, giving it more power to crack down on unauthorized streaming and other new forms of piracy. Mr. Walter insisted that politics had played no role in the decision to send the cases to the courts now, before the election. Hadopi is run as an independent agency. “I’m proud to work on one of the only initiatives in the world to say, ‘O.K., we have just been speaking for 10 years, we need to try something,”’ Mr. Walter said. “The point was not to know if it was a good idea or a bad idea; the point was to try something and then to say, ‘What have we learned? What do we know now?”’
|
France;Sarkozy Nicolas;Copyrights and Copyright Violations
|
ny0081577
|
[
"sports",
"football"
] |
2015/11/02
|
The Seahawks-Cowboys Matchup Should Have Been Great. It Wasn’t.
|
It should have been a matchup of N.F.C. heavyweights. The Seattle Seahawks, two-time defending conference champions, traveled to Dallas to face the Cowboys, who entered this season as a playoff favorite. Instead, a disappointing Seahawks team shuffled through an unimpressive 13-12 victory over the injury-riddled Cowboys, and both teams have fallen to the middle of the pack. The nature of the N.F.L. in recent years has led to a great deal of parity, with turnover at the top nearly inevitable, and the early-season collapse of Seattle and Dallas has made way for a new crop of contenders to join Green Bay and Arizona atop the heap in the N.F.C. With the season at or near its midpoint for teams, the Atlanta Falcons and the Minnesota Vikings have each improved dramatically, ostensibly taking the place of the Seahawks and the Cowboys in the wild-card playoff race behind the division-leading teams in Atlanta, Carolina, Green Bay and New York. For the Seahawks, the season got off to a terrible start, due in large part to a two-game holdout by Kam Chancellor, one of the key players in the team’s Legion of Boom secondary. His return has helped, as the team is 4-2 with him in the lineup, but the swagger of the last few seasons is still missing in action. A team that seemed immune to distraction found itself working through numerous controversies, both real and contrived, this off-season. Their goal was to avenge a Super Bowl loss that ended with a Russell Wilson interception instead of a Marshawn Lynch touchdown. Suddenly Chancellor was trying to renegotiate his contract and Wilson was making headlines for his huge new contract, his relationship with a pop star and his claim that the water he endorses can help prevent concussions. Even the tight-lipped Lynch was not immune to the trappings of increased exposure, recording some amusing commercials along with various late-night television appearances. Whether any of those things have actually contributed to the slow start is known only by players in the locker room, but the difference in the team from year to year is stark. Last season, the Seahawks had an above-average offense to go with its star-studded defense, but Russell Wilson has not been efficient enough to justify the new contract. He completed 19 of 30 passes for 210 yards and a touchdown against Dallas, but nearly cost his team the game when Greg Hardy intercepted him in the fourth quarter, leading to the Cowboys taking the lead on a field goal. Wilson had just seven interceptions last season, but is now on pace for 12. The Seahawks have run the ball fairly well with Marshawn Lynch and Thomas Rawls, but the team’s biggest problem has been an inability to finish off drives, scoring touchdowns on only 33 percent of red zone attempts coming into the game, which was the worst mark in the N.F.L. They failed to score on two red-zone attempts against Dallas. While the Seahawks’ defense gives the team reason to remain optimistic, the same is not necessarily true for Dallas. The Cowboys have been given every opportunity to stay in the N.F.C. East race, with the Giants, the Redskins and the Eagles all struggling, but the team’s offense has been completely inept since losing Tony Romo to a broken clavicle in Week 1. After Brandon Weeden proved incapable of running the offense, he lost his job to Matt Cassel who has been just as bad. After a three-interception performance last week against the Giants, Cassel completed 13 of 25 passes for only 97 yards against the Seahawks despite the return of Dez Bryant, who had missed five games with a foot injury. Bryant, the All-Pro wide receiver, did not get his first reception until midway through the third quarter and he finished his first game back with only two catches for 12 yards. Seattle is .500 and has plenty of winnable games left on the schedule, as well as two games against the N.F.C. West-leading Cardinals that could tip the balance of the division. It would seem they just need some sort of wake-up call if they are going to reassert themselves as a top team. Beating Dallas did not hurt, but it was not very convincing. For Dallas the outlook is far more grim. No wake-up call appears to be on the horizon.
|
Football;Dallas Cowboys;Seahawks
|
ny0232882
|
[
"nyregion"
] |
2010/08/26
|
A Bronx Hoarder’s Painstaking Bid to Find the Floor
|
The door to the apartment would open only six inches. The owner squeezed himself inside, grabbed the top rung of a wooden bed frame and hoisted himself over a mountain of objects — a stepladder, a bird cage, a pile of wood planks — until he was standing atop a waist-high ridge made of the flotsam of his life. There was a batting helmet. A telephone shaped like a sports car. A tea-colored lampshade. A dozen broken umbrellas hung in a neat row from the bed frame, rising from the rubble like the mast on a shipwreck. The floor was entirely hidden. Over there — the man pointed toward a boulder of suitcases blocking a doorway — was the kitchen. The owner of all this, the occupant of the 500-square-foot apartment in the Bedford Park section of the Bronx, is a trim 54-year-old with short white hair, a thin gray mustache and a nervous, high-pitched voice. He asked not to be named for fear of public shame. He tucks his T-shirt into his blue jeans. He has a weakness for puns. And he is a hoarder, an obsessive collector who has watched, over more than two decades, an ocean of plastic bags and rotting furniture swallow his bedroom, then his apartment, and then his life. “It’s little by little,” he said, stumbling to explain his compulsion. “If I don’t need it now, I’m going to need it later. It’s almost like you don’t know what’s going on and then you’re like, ‘Where am I? What am I going to do now?’ ” A social service organization near his home in the Bronx has stepped in to help answer that question. The organization, Part of the Solution , enlisted Kristin P. Bergfeld and her company, Bergfeld’s Estate Clearance Service , which specializes in hoarding cases, to help him sort through the mess and haul away the truckloads of castoffs he does not need. “What we’re doing,” Ms. Bergfeld told the man as they tackled the mountain this week, “is getting your light out of a bunch of stuff so you can shine.” Hoarders have long held a special grasp on popular imagination. One of the best-known cases was that of the Collyer brothers , whose bodies were found in 1947 inside their booby-trapped Harlem brownstone packed with more than 100 tons of phone books, newspapers and tin cans. Today, two cable-television shows — “ Hoarders ,” on A&E, and TLC’s “ Hoarding: Buried Alive ” — compete to lure viewers into hoarders’ overstuffed homes. The cleanup effort in the Bedford Park apartment this week played out like a real-life episode, only without the spooky music and sound effects. Researchers say hoarding, which is sometimes connected to obsessive-compulsive disorder, is surprisingly common: 2 percent to 5 percent of the United States population suffers from excessive collecting and clutter, said Dr. Gail S. Steketee, co-author of “ Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things .” She said experts were considering classifying it as its own mental disorder. Every hoarder’s habit is distinct — some are obsessive shoppers, others cannot bear to throw anything away. The man in Bedford Park, a gifted repairman and tinkerer, is consumed by a need to salvage broken castaways. “I’ve seen him fix a watch using the cut-up top of a cat food can lid,” said Antonietta Bertucci, who works for Part of the Solution and has known him for five years. “He made a seat for a bicycle out of scrap pieces of metal that he’ll find lying on the sidewalk. He has a very MacGyver -type mind.” The man, who used to work in an industrial laundry room, has lived in the co-op apartment since 1988, when he bought it for about $20,000. From the hallway, it looks like every other apartment in the 56-unit red-brick building. But a crew of five workers, some in full-body protective suits and face masks, spent two days this week emptying the place of moldy sofas, piles of chairs and folding tables, and filling more than 350 trash bags. Instead of simply transferring all the apartment’s contents into a trash bin, they sifted through each item, saving a portable television the man wanted, and throwing out two bar stools he decided he could live without. The workers began on Monday morning by unearthing an old bicycle buried beneath a mound of apple juice bottles, roasting pans and beach chairs. Within 45 minutes, they had cleared enough space to open the door all the way for the first time in years. Throughout the day, Ms. Bergfeld kept checking the handwritten list of what to keep and what to throw away that she had asked the man to compile. “This way there’s less grief, less resentment, less backlash and more a sense that he’s rebuilding his life,” she said. Diagnosed as having a mental illness that he would not detail, the man scrapes by on a Social Security disability check of about $700 a month. He sees a social worker regularly, and has eaten many of his meals at the soup kitchen run by Part of the Solution, near the New York Botanical Garden, for years. The staff there knew him as an unusually friendly client who kept himself neat and could fix anything. Until he asked for help with his bills, they knew little about his living conditions. “We asked, ‘Why don’t you use your stove?’ ” Ms. Bertucci said. “He said, ‘Well, because I put stuff on top of it.’ Then he felt comfortable enough to tell us: ‘I have tons of stuff. I keep everything.’ ” He has gone without electricity for years, after failing to resolve a billing dispute with Consolidated Edison. At night, guided by only a flashlight, he would crawl between a rusty bicycle and an upended sofa into the small part of his bed that remained uncovered by a tangle of folding chairs, stepladders and side tables. He would bathe with a washcloth and a bucket: Metal bed rods and plastic bags long ago claimed the shower. He said that he tried to get help five years ago from the city’s Adult Protective Services agency, which sent workers to clear his apartment, but that after a day or so of cleaning, he could not bear the indiscriminate sweep of his belongings any longer. He barricaded himself inside until the movers left, then began rebuilding his mountains. This time, however, he said he was ready to change. “I want to have people come visit me, that’s the main thing,” he said. “I’ve never been with anybody, and I blame it on my mess.” He began to cry. “Sometimes I feel like, just let me get buried.” Ms. Bergfeld has been clearing homes for 23 years. She said this apartment, covered with roaches and mouse droppings, was a routine job. Normally, it would cost about $6,000 to clean it out, but she did the project pro bono and also arranged for Sleepy’s to donate a new bed, Anderson/Ross Temporary Personnel Services to provide workers and Perna Carting and Junk Junkies to haul the detritus to the dump. Ms. Bergfeld said she would continue donating her services to others in need. As the cleaners worked, a bizarre stream of items poured out of the apartment: a framed painting of George Washington, a yellow tow truck strap, a bag of boxing gloves, a circular saw, piles of doorknobs. By 11:15 a.m., the living room floor — hardwood, it turned out — was peeking through. Despite the man’s colossal mess, neighbors have lodged no complaints about his apartment — mainly because they were unaware of it. “I didn’t know someone was living in such conditions,” said Thomas Pachla, a member of the building’s co-op board. “This is a hazard for all tenants. It’s shocking and kind of scary.” By 12:05 p.m., the apartment’s owner could enter the kitchen. He was pleased at the progress, but nervously checked each bag to make sure he was not losing things he needed. Among the items he insisted on keeping were a cotton candy machine, a toy trumpet, a near-life-size horse doll and a toilet seat decorated with seashells. “Sometimes I need stuff,” he explained. Ms. Bergfeld said she sometimes had to return to homes she had already cleared. But Munir Pujara, a lawyer at Part of the Solution, said the organization and a social worker would help the man maintain the apartment. At the end of the day on Tuesday, the man stood inside his living room, which felt as spacious as a football stadium. The walls needed painting, the bathroom needed serious work and a cluttered bookcase still needed to be pruned. But the man said that for the first time in decades he felt proud of his home. “It’s like I have too much space,” he said. “I’ll be able to move around and do things that other people do.”
|
Hoarding;Bronx (NYC);Part of the Solution
|
ny0059436
|
[
"science"
] |
2014/08/10
|
J. W. Hastings, 87, a Pioneer in Bioluminescence Research, Dies
|
J. Woodland Hastings, a Harvard biochemist whose improbable discovery of how bacteria communicate became the foundation for groundbreaking research in the development of more effective antibiotics, died on Wednesday at his home in Lexington, Mass. He was 87. The cause was pulmonary fibrosis, his family said. Dr. Hastings devoted much of his career to studying bioluminescence, the light emitted by organisms like bacteria, fireflies and jellyfish. He was known for recognizing overarching biological processes in the humblest of organisms. “One of Woody’s great fortes was coming up with concepts,” Ken Nealson, a microbiologist who worked with Dr. Hastings, said in an interview on Thursday. “He would see things other people wouldn’t see.” In the late 1960s, Dr. Hastings and Dr. Nealson, then a postdoctoral fellow, noticed something curious about cultures of the luminescent marine bacterium Vibrio fischeri. (V. fischeri floats freely in the ocean and appears in greater concentrations in fish and squid.) The bacteria glowed intensely only after they reached a certain density — in a sense behaving like an army that waits until it has mustered enough troops to launch an attack. Dr. Hastings and Dr. Nealson surmised that the tiny organisms must be able to recognize the concentration of their fellows, probably through a signaling substance that they release and that then travels among them. Researchers later theorized that the bacteria’s behavior was an evolutionary adaptation that would allow them to conserve energy until there were enough present to create a powerful glow. Once bacteria achieve a certain concentration, they can then take action en masse to fight an infection, say, or, conversely, cause one. The idea that bacteria can communicate across cell barriers was initially met with skepticism. Dr. Nealson, now an environmental science professor at the University of Southern California, said editors of scientific journals would say: “ ‘We can’t find anything wrong with this paper, but it’s absurd. Bacteria don’t do this.’ ” “I think I would have given in to the criticism,” Dr. Nealson added. “Woody had a lot more experience and was tougher than me.” Their theory on the communicative power of bacteria, which came to be called quorum sensing, was not widely accepted until researchers, in the mid-1980s, identified the molecule that allows V. fischeri to communicate and the process by which it stimulates illumination. And it was not until the 1990s that scientists recognized how common quorum sensing is among various kinds of bacteria. Variations of the process appear in innumerable bacteria, from the benign V. fischeri to potentially deadly pathogens like E. coli. Researchers are now investigating a variety of applications based on the idea, like antibiotics that could disrupt a specific infection without otherwise harming the host. One area of interest is impeding the formation of biofilms. Biofilms, dense coagulations of bacteria like dental plaque, are responsible for an estimated 65 percent of bacterial infections and make bacteria more resistant to antibiotics. Drugs designed to silence communications among germs could theoretically keep them from massing. John Woodland Hastings was born to Vaughan and Katherine Hastings in Salisbury, Md., on March 24, 1927. He left home at 10 to attend choir school at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan, then attended the Lenox School for Boys in Massachusetts on a scholarship. He received a bachelor’s degree in biology from Swarthmore College in 1947 and his master’s and doctorate from Princeton University. While at Princeton, he studied bioluminescence with E. Newton Harvey, a leader in the field, and became fascinated. Over the next two years, on a postdoctorate fellowship at Johns Hopkins University, he studied the biomechanical process that makes fireflies glow. He paid children a penny per firefly to help gather enough material. In 1953, he married Hanna Machlup and accepted his first faculty position at Northwestern University. While there, he began studying the dinoflagellate Gonyaulax polyedra, a plankton that flashes at night when stimulated. With Beatrice M. Sweeney, a researcher at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, he showed that the dinoflagellates operate on an internal biological rhythm, their flashes based on a circadian, or 24-hour, cycle. It is now accepted that virtually every living creature operates on an internal circadian cycle. Dr. Hastings’s research also helped lay the foundation for treating some sleep disorders. Dr. Hastings accepted a position at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1957 and moved to Harvard in 1966. He also conducted research at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole for more than five decades and served as a trustee there from 1967 until 1974. He retired about five years ago. In 2003, he was inducted into the National Academy of Sciences. He and a colleague, Thèrése Wilson, wrote “Bioluminescence: Living Lights, Lights for Living” (2013). Dr. Hastings is survived by three daughters, Marissa Bingham, Jennifer Hastings and Laura Hastings; a son, David; his companion, Barbara Cheresh; a sister, Anne MacQueen; and five grandchildren. His wife died in 2009. Dr. Hastings was more interested in advancing scientific understanding than practical applications of his work. “Working on topics such as bioluminescence or circadian rhythms could only be motivated by a true interest in basic knowledge,” he said in “Fifty Years of Fun,” a lecture about his career. “It’s not leading directly to a solution for cancer.”
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Obituary;J. Woodland Hastings;Antibacterial;Biology and Biochemistry
|
ny0238921
|
[
"us"
] |
2010/12/02
|
In Afghan Shootings Case, Soldier Agrees to Plea Deal
|
JOINT BASE LEWIS-McCHORD, Wash. (AP) — An Army staff sergeant charged with shooting at unarmed Afghans has pleaded guilty in a deal that requires him to testify against other defendants. Staff Sgt. Robert Stevens of Portland, Ore., acknowledged his guilt to aggravated assault and other charges at his court-martial Tuesday. Prosecutors dropped a conspiracy count. Five soldiers are charged with killing three Afghan civilians. Sergeant Stevens is not one of them, but he said that in March he followed an order from Staff Sgt. Calvin Gibbs to shoot at two Afghans in a field who posed no threat. Those Afghans were not injured. Sergeant Gibbs is accused of leading a conspiracy to kill the civilians; he says the shootings were justified. The plea is subject to approval by a military judge.
|
United States Defense and Military Forces;Stevens Robert;Gibbs Calvin R;Afghanistan War (2001- );Suits and Litigation
|
ny0095004
|
[
"world",
"europe"
] |
2015/01/17
|
Turkey Threatens to Block Social Media Over Released Documents
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ANKARA, Turkey — Turkish officials threatened to shut down Twitter in the country unless the social-media company blocked the account of a left-wing newspaper that had circulated documents about a military police raid on Turkish Intelligence Agency trucks that were traveling to Syria last January. The demand came on Thursday, a day after a local court in Adana, a southern Turkish province, issued an order barring coverage of the investigation, hinting at the possibility of an overall ban on social media networks where documents on legal proceedings of the raid have been circulated. The court argued that publication of the information violated national security and interfered with a continuing inquiry. Turkish government officials strongly denied opposition claims that the intelligence agency’s trucks had carried weapons for extremists fighting the regime of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Instead, the trucks were trying to deliver humanitarian aid for the Turkmen minority in Syria, who had been stranded in the conflict since 2011, officials said. Networks like Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus complied with the court order on Wednesday, removing content from accounts to avert a shutdown, Turkish news outlets reported. But the BirGun newspaper, as well as other Twitter users, continued to challenge the ban by posting new messages. Twitter refused to block the newspaper’s account but did block specific messages that BirGun had posted showing images of leaked documents in which the military police were said to have confirmed that the trucks contained weapons and explosives. The documents also said the weapons were destined for Al Qaeda. “Out of the almost 60,000 tweets on the account, Twitter withheld access in Turkey to the small number of tweets that discussed the national security issue referenced in the order,” said Nu Wexler, a Twitter spokesman, who added, “We continue to work diligently to protect the rights of our users and preserve access for millions of Twitter users in Turkey.” Both Twitter and YouTube were blocked in Turkey in March after leaks of what were said to be government plans for a secret military operation in Syria. Twitter was reactivated after two weeks and YouTube after two months.
|
Turkey;Newspaper;Syria;Social Media;Censorship;Computers and the Internet;Tech Industry;Spying and Intelligence Agencies
|
ny0064652
|
[
"world",
"europe"
] |
2014/06/27
|
Militarism and Humiliation Cast Shadow on Germany
|
KIEL, Germany — On June 28, 1914, Kaiser Wilhelm II was preparing to indulge in a favorite pastime: racing his yacht Meteor at a regatta that is still held each year in this seafaring stronghold. When he learned of the assassination in Sarajevo of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Hapsburg Empire, he hastened to Berlin. But he quickly returned to this Baltic Sea port, on which he lavished so much money and time in his frantic race to match or outdo British naval superiority. In many ways, Kiel epitomized Germany’s rapid industrialization and militarization from 1870 to 1914, under Otto von Bismarck and then the kaiser. Numbers alone tell a story: In 1870, as Bismarck unified Germany, Kiel had around 30,000 inhabitants. By 1914, when Europe’s leaders stumbled into World War I, its population exceeded 227,000. Four years later, Kiel bore witness to the depths of German defeat. A sailors’ rebellion that started here spread nationwide and helped force the abdication of the kaiser in November 1918. The next year, rather than let the Imperial Fleet fall to the enemy, German commanders on Scapa Flow, off Scotland, scuttled 52 of the fleet’s 74 vessels. Under the Treaty of Versailles, signed five years to the day after the archduke’s assassination, the proud navy was limited to just a few ships and 15,000 men — far fewer than the 35,000 German sailors who had perished in World War I. Might, militarism and humiliation: These are the memories that make Germans today reluctant to project their clout as, once again, Europe’s economic powerhouse . One hundred years on from World War I, German leadership in Europe is both desired and resented, a historically rooted ambivalence that is keenly felt by the Germans and by their wary neighbors. Most Germans remain reluctant to see their country’s force deployed in any way commensurate with its economic heft. But this abstention from military action does not mean that Germany is not throwing its weight about. During the European debt crisis , Chancellor Angela Merkel demonstrated that no solution was possible without Germany’s helping hugely to pay for it. Always calm, she brooked little criticism and brushed aside anti-German sentiment as she pushed to impose austerity on supposedly profligate European neighbors. Today, with nationalism and populism on the rise in Europe, Ms. Merkel is central in trying to untangle a tussle over European leadership that may hasten a British exit from the European Union, and she faces demands from two other major partners, France and Italy, to relax stringent budgetary demands. In Germany, the enormity of Nazi crimes in World War II tends to overshadow World War I, which consumed more than 37 million lives, including those wounded and missing, and four empires. In some ways, the 100th anniversary has reminded Germans that Hitler and his supporters bore deep scars from the country’s catastrophic defeat in 1918. Germans are observing the occasion with some 80 exhibitions nationwide, and with countless discussions and seminars. “ The Sleepwalkers ,” Christopher Clark’s chunky history of how Europe went to war in 1914, is a best seller and its author a coveted guest for centenary discussions. In Kiel, the imperial stamp always lingered. A statue of Kaiser Wilhelm I on horseback adorns a central park. The Kiel Canal, to this day an important waterway linking the North and Baltic Seas, was named after Wilhelm II when it opened in 1895. Outsize paintings of the opening still stare down at the regal Kiel Yacht Club. Paradoxically, it was development on land that helped bolster the importance of this natural deep-sea port. By the time of Bismarck, the growth of railways had brought goods and people to Kiel from all over Germany and enabled the delivery of imports throughout the newly unified country. Later, shipyards that had produced Germany’s first submarine in 1851 were central to Wilhelm II’s naval race with Britain. Especially after 1900, Wilhelm poured torrents of money into the German Navy. In 1906, Britain’s Royal Navy took delivery of H.M.S. Dreadnought, with its groundbreaking armament of big guns. Wilhelm and top members of his navy and government responded with plans to build two dreadnoughts and one battle cruiser per year, as well as to dredge and widen the Kiel Canal so the large new vessels could use it. Four battle cruisers were produced in Kiel from 1907 to 1910, completed ahead of schedule. Naval spending rose steadily at least until 1912, when military commanders came to consider a land war more likely. Britain and France were alarmed by Wilhelm’s ambition. Britain’s determination to keep its navy supreme only heightened German anxieties, already running high because the kaiser felt beleaguered on two fronts. The huge Russian Army ensured that his perceived foes had more men under arms than Germany and its Austro-Hungarian allies could muster. In some sense, his naval expansion may have been a salve for this insecurity. At any rate, the Reichskriegshafen Kiel, the imperial war harbor here, profited. By the time war broke out in 1914, the navy had 22 pre-dreadnought ships, 14 dreadnoughts and four battle cruisers. Three more warships were completed by November 1914, and construction continued throughout the war, with a battle cruiser added in late 1914, 1916 and 1917. Naval historians, however, tend to accord more significance to Germany’s U-boats, which were responsible for the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915, for instance, eventually helping to draw the United States into Europe’s Great War. A similar shipbuilding boom erupted in the 1930s after Hitler took power and reached an agreement with Britain, ushering in a new wave of production of submarines and surface battle vessels. The shipbuilding made Kiel a prime target for Allied bombs, and by the end of the war in 1945, it was 80 percent destroyed. Image The Nazis ushered in a new period of shipbuilding in Kiel, Germany, in the mid-1930s to supply the Third Reich with battleships and submarines. Credit Times Wide World Photos Today, Kiel is still a seafaring town. Submarines are still built here. Sailors bob on Kiel Sound. Instead of dreadnoughts and battle cruisers, hulking cruise and cargo ships dominate the urban shoreline. But the city is a mosaic of ill-matched architecture and buildings that have changed purpose. Wilhelm’s proud Naval Academy, for instance, is now the parliamentary seat of Schleswig-Holstein, the state of which Kiel is the capital. The mishmash lends a defeated air to a place still pondering how to remember and interpret a dreadful 20th century. The histories of two concrete memorials illustrate the scars. One was originally intended to honor Germany’s naval dead in World War I. The other is the Flandernbunker, or Flanders bunker, built outside the main surviving military base here. Its name stems from a Nazi campaign to lionize the Germans killed in the World War I trenches, and it sheltered military commanders and select civilians in the global conflict that ignited two decades later. Today, a local art historian, Jens Rönnau, runs the bunker as an alternative arts and conference center with a goal of teaching peace and how to avoid future wars. Last month, about 150 people spent two days on what Uta Körby, a 69-year-old Kiel native working to draw attention to the Nazi past and memorialize its victims, calls “Battleground: History.” The location was the memorial built for the World War I sailors. It is a tower and flamelike structure of reinforced concrete with an outer layer of north German brick, soaring nearly 300 feet above the coast at Laboe, where Kiel Sound meets the open sea. It was designed in 1927, but finished and opened only in 1936, when Kiel hosted the sailing events in the Olympics. Hitler attended but did not speak. Instead, the Nazis left their mark in a subterranean memorial hall with a demand: “Bare your head and be silent!” Exiting up one staircase, today’s visitors — there are 200,000 a year — confront a 1936 glass tableau of sailors’ lives on ship and shore, in which a still-discernible swastika has replaced the sun. For Jann M. Witt — the amiable, bearded historian of the German Naval Association, which looks after this memorial and a U-boat dry-docked across the road — the meaning of the place is clear: It was designed to glorify the German Navy and its victims in World War I. When the British, whose bombs had left the memorial unscathed, returned it to the association in 1954, the Germans decided it would be for all their naval victims in the two world wars, “and our dead adversaries.” That was still too militaristic for many. So in 1996, it became a memorial for all those who have died at sea — a sweeping designation that has brought some notable international elements but results in a muddled exhibition that is still a tad nationalistic in tone. Mr. Witt and his associates believe that the memorial can carry a message of peace. Standing in a hall that shows every German ship lost in the two world wars, the 35,000 German sailors lost in World War I and the 120,000 said to have been lost in World War II, Mr. Witt recalled visiting with his grandfather, a member of the navy, when he was a boy. “This,” he said, “was the first place that I realized that war is not a game.”
|
World War I;Germany;Europe;Emperor of Germany Wilhelm II;Kiel
|
ny0161491
|
[
"technology"
] |
2006/04/06
|
Yet Another Way to Pass Along the Contents of Your Computer
|
What's the best way to share computer files with friends, family and associates? Many files today are too big for floppy disks, and many computers now lack drives for the disks anyway. Some files are too big to e-mail (especially to people with dial-up connections). Burning files to CD's is time-consuming, and most CD's can't be reused. And you hate to send out expensive U.S.B. flash drives. Memorex's answer is FlashDiscs, solid-state U.S.B. 1.1 flash drives that are cheap enough (three for $19.95) that you can hand out content on them the way you used to hand out floppies. Each FlashDisc holds 16 megabytes -- paltry compared with bigger flash drives, but equivalent to more than 10 floppies and big enough for the files most people share. The color-coded discs, now on sale at electronics and office supply stores, come with write-on labels to identify their contents and are rugged enough to be mailed in ordinary envelopes. Though the FlashDisc is small enough to be easily pocketed, its shape makes it hard to lose -- and easy to see when the cap is off the U.S.B. plug. FlashDiscs work with any PC or Mac that has a U.S.B. port, so you can use them to share files with people in both camps. IVAN BERGER
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APPLE COMPUTER INC;MEMOREX;PRICES (FARES FEES AND RATES);COMPUTERS AND THE INTERNET
|
ny0167574
|
[
"politics"
] |
2006/01/09
|
Spokesman Goes Out on a Limb: He's for Mom
|
WASHINGTON - Scott McClellan, the spill-no-secret White House press secretary, wandered into the Oval Office at 7 a.m. last Tuesday to check in with his boss about the overnight news and to schmooze about Texas football. And then, Mr. McClellan recalled, "I asked him for his guidance about what he wanted me to say about the Texas governor's race." For Mr. McClellan, it wasn't just a routine inquiry about how the White House should respond to a statewide political development. As everyone in Texas already knew, Mr. McClellan's mother, Carole Keeton Strayhorn, the state's comptroller, had announced the day before that she would run as an independent in 2006 against the Republican incumbent, Gov. Rick Perry. A few hours later at Mr. McClellan's early briefing, President Bush's directions to his press secretary became clear. "The president will support the Republican nominee, and I think it's pretty clear the Republican nominee will be his friend Rick Perry," Mr. McClellan said. As for the woman running against Mr. Perry, Mr. McClellan said, "My mother cares deeply about Texas, and she has my full support." "God, that's courageous," wisecracked Bill Plante of CBS, as Mr. McClellan chuckled and reddened. The political split between the president and his press secretary was just the latest chapter in Mr. McClellan's nearly four decades in politics with his mother, who is as voluble as her son is restrained. Still, Ms. Strayhorn's most recent endeavor is one of the more bizarre moments in Texas politics and also in the West Wing. One of Ms. Strayhorn's best-known supporters is none other than Ben Barnes, a former Texas lieutenant governor and an adviser to Senator John Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign. During that race, Mr. Barnes, a Democrat, said repeatedly that he had helped Mr. Bush win a coveted spot in the Texas Air National Guard to avoid combat in Vietnam. "Ben Barnes and I are lifelong friends," Ms. Strayhorn said by way of explanation in a telephone interview from Austin on Friday. "His brother roomed with my brother at the University of Texas." As for the president, "I love George Bush, and he's got to do his job and I've got to do mine." Mr. McClellan declined to comment on Mr. Barnes, but he did have some things to say about his mother. "I learned long ago just to stay out of her way," he said agreeably in an interview in his office on Friday afternoon, when Mr. Bush was in Chicago and the West Wing had settled into a pre-weekend snooze. "She's a very dynamic person, she's a very strong personality, and she charges ahead to get things done." Mr. McClellan, the youngest of Ms. Strayhorn's four sons, was 9 when his mother, then a Democrat, was first elected mayor of Austin, a nonpartisan position. Over the next six years, from 1977 to 1983, she served three terms. In most of that time she was a single mother who wove her children into her public life. "A lot of times she'd take me along to Council chambers," Mr. McClellan said. "Or she'd pick me up from school and I'd go hang out at City Hall." Ms. Strayhorn was divorced from her first husband, Barr McClellan, the father of her sons, shortly after she became mayor. In 2003 she married her third husband, Ed Strayhorn, a high school sweetheart. Mr. McClellan went on to graduate from the University of Texas and to run three more successful campaigns for his mother: her election and re-election as a Texas railroad commissioner and her election as comptroller. Ms. Strayhorn once said that when she would "bounce off the walls," Mr. McClellan could get her focused. "I used to joke that when I became her campaign manager, I finally got to tell her what to do," Mr. McClellan, 37, said. "Once in a while she would listen to me." This time around, Ms. Strayhorn's campaign manager is Mr. McClellan's brother Brad, 40, a former assistant Texas state attorney general. "People ask me, 'How do you control your candidate?' " Brad McClellan said by phone from Austin on Friday. "And I don't. She's been herself since I was a kid." Ms. Strayhorn's other sons are Mark B. McClellan, 42, the administrator of the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicare Services, and Dudley McClellan, 40, Brad's identical twin, the deputy general counsel for the State Bar of Texas. Ms. Strayhorn, a Republican, said she had decided to run as an independent not because she would lose to Mr. Perry in a Republican primary -- the predominant view in Texas political circles -- but because she was ushering in a new era of nonpartisan politics. "I could have blown the barn doors off the Republican primary," she insisted. Ms. Strayhorn first announced that she was a candidate for governor last summer. As for the White House press secretary, he said that "the president considers my mother a friend," but that he himself had no immediate plans to work in his mother's campaign or, for that matter, to leave his job anytime soon. "I've learned a lot from her," Mr. McClellan said. "And I don't think I would be where I am today without her."
|
TEXAS;MCCLELLAN SCOTT;GOVERNORS (US)
|
ny0017985
|
[
"sports"
] |
2013/07/05
|
Gay Takes 100 Meters
|
Tyson Gay ran the year’s second-fastest 100 meters, 9.79 seconds, to win at the Athletissima Diamond League meet in Lausanne, Switzerland. Gay’s time of 9.75 in winning the United States nationals title is the fastest time this season.
|
Track and field;Tyson Gay
|
ny0281493
|
[
"world",
"americas"
] |
2016/10/14
|
Colombia President Extends Truce in Hope of Reviving Peace Deal
|
BOGOTÁ, Colombia — President Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia on Thursday extended a cease-fire with the country’s largest rebel group through the end of the year as he seeks to revive a peace accord to end five decades of war after voters rejected the deal in a referendum. The original cease-fire, which was put in place in August, was nullified when the peace agreement was rejected this month. He had already extended it to Oct. 31. Mr. Santos and his team are considering proposals from representatives of those who opposed the accord — which was rejected by a margin of less than half a percentage point — as too lenient on the rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. He will take the proposals to the FARC’s leaders in Havana, who have said they are willing to discuss new ideas. Mr. Santos said he decided to extend the cease-fire after meeting with student leaders who had organized two huge marches through Bogotá, the capital, to show support for a peace deal. “One of the students reminded me, that in the army and in the guerrilla ranks, there are young people waiting to see what happens, hoping that they don’t need to fire another shot,” Mr. Santos said in a televised address. “For that reason, and at the request of the students, I have taken the decision to extend the cease-fire until Dec. 31,” he said The cease-fire can be extended further, but Mr. Santos said he hoped that a new deal would be approved before then. He was awarded the 2016 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for his efforts to end the war. Led by former President Álvaro Uribe, the side opposed to the peace deal wants rebels who have committed war crimes to be confined for five to eight years — possibly on farms — and barred from elected office. The opponents were outraged that the accord offered the rebels 10 congressional seats and nontraditional sentences like clearing land mines instead of serving prison terms in return for ending a conflict that has killed more than 220,000 people. Although the FARC’s leaders have said they are willing to hear new ideas, Mr. Uribe’s proposals may be difficult to accept, given that they have repeatedly refused to consider jail time and want to form a political party.
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Colombia;FARC;Juan Manuel Santos;Referendum
|
ny0225449
|
[
"world",
"middleeast"
] |
2010/10/29
|
Yitzhak Rabin’s Supporters See a Legacy Slip Away
|
TEL AVIV — In the 15 years since Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish militant after a peace rally here, blood seeping onto a song sheet in his breast pocket as he lost consciousness, his legacy in Israel has seemed clear — warrior turned peacemaker, symbol of a tough nation with an outstretched hand. Roads, schools and squares, including the one in central Tel Aviv where he was killed, now bear his name. Every year at this time thousands have gathered at Rabin Square here for candles, peace songs, speeches about coexistence and recollections of heartbreaking moments, like President Bill Clinton’s farewell — “Shalom, haver,” Goodbye, friend. This Saturday’s gathering, however, will be the last of its kind, organizers say. Attendance has been getting sparse and television stations are not lining up to broadcast the event. The shift has prompted intense debate in Israel as the Nov. 4 anniversary approaches. Has the public lost interest because it is disillusioned with peace and views Mr. Rabin’s involvement in the Oslo accords a mistake? Or has negotiating with the Palestinians simply gone mainstream, and Mr. Rabin is no longer its symbol? The left has no doubt. “Fifteen years later we can’t pretend any longer,” Yossi Sarid , a former member of Parliament from the left-wing Meretz party, wrote in Haaretz. “It was a perfect crime that paid off — a man was murdered and his legacy was covered with blood. Rabin’s way is deserted, in mourning.” Ben-Dror Yemini, a conservative columnist for Maariv, thinks otherwise. “The truth is the opposite,” he wrote. “Rabin’s assassination saved the Israeli left wing.” He added that before the killing, “There were terror attacks that gave rise to the phrase ‘the price of peace.’ The polls predicted a terrible fall for the Labor Party, and the strengthening of the right wing. The right wing not only ruled the violent and stormy street. The right wing also ruled in people’s hearts.” Mr. Rabin, a soldier-statesman who was gruffly shy, remains mostly honored as a man. The battle over his legacy, therefore, is about what he stood for. In the first years, his memory belonged to his colleagues on the left. Right-wing incitement against Mr. Rabin — in one infamous example he was portrayed at a rally in a Nazi uniform — was widely seen as contributing to the atmosphere that led to the assassination. But with the failure of the Oslo accords, the violence of the second Palestinian uprising in 2000, the withdrawal from Lebanon that increased Hezbollah’s power and the rise of Hamas in Gaza after Israel pulled out, land-for-peace is viewed with skepticism by a rising portion of the Israeli public. Moreover, while Mr. Rabin was an early advocate of mutual recognition with the Palestinians, he never advocated a Palestinian state or sharing Jerusalem. As a result, the right says it is not so much disowning Mr. Rabin as repossessing the real him. “Fifteen years ago, after the terrible stain of this assassination, it was politically impossible to say certain things against Rabin’s policies,” Boaz Bismuth, a senior editor at the conservative daily Israel Hayom, said by telephone. “Now, you are allowed to disagree with Oslo and not be seen as someone who favored his murder. What peace? After 15 years, you can come out of the closet and say, ‘This region is not about to become Benelux.’ ” For those who were close to Mr. Rabin and are trying to preserve his memory, this shift has created a challenge. Eitan Haber was the one who announced outside the Tel Aviv hospital that grim Saturday night that Mr. Rabin had died of his wounds, and the one who rescued the peace song sheet from his jacket pocket. Today, he is an opinion columnist for Yediot Aharonot. On Sunday Mr. Haber wrote that, of course, this was a political murder of a political man trying to bring peace. And, of course, the incitement from the right will always be an inseparable part of the story. But it is time to broaden the legacy. “Almost the only way to turn the memorial day for Yitzhak Rabin into a national day of mourning and remembrance is to turn him into what he was not during the last moments of his life — a person of consensus,” Mr. Haber wrote. “It has to be decided that the murder of the prime minister of Israel and the tremendous danger to democracy are central issues to be addressed by both left and right.” Shlomo Avineri, a political scientist at Hebrew University, said he always believed that the focus should be on democracy and respect for the office of prime minister rather than on Mr. Rabin’s politics. “The intermingling of civics and politics has weakened the legacy,” he said in a telephone interview. “Today, the public conversation has moved to the right, so there is an attempt to bring the legacy back to the civics issue.” One aspect of the debate focuses on Israel’s place in the world. “No longer are we necessarily ‘a people that dwells alone,’ ” Mr. Rabin said in presenting his new government to Parliament in 1992. “We must join the international movement toward peace, reconciliation and cooperation.” During his tenure, the Arab boycott against Israel essentially fell apart, greatly increasing trade and consumer options here, and many countries that had shunned Israel established ties with it. In the years since, Israel has gone from a being a relative backwater to acquiring a European style of wealth and high-tech innovation. The assumption, common in the Rabin era, that peace and prosperity were mutually reinforcing has been challenged. Meanwhile, international impatience toward Israeli treatment of Palestinians has been growing. Israelis may feel integrated into the global economy but they feel politically alone. Here, too, there is an internal debate. The left thinks Israel is partly if not largely responsible for the world’s hostility while the right argues that the antagonism is a result of anti-Semitism and opposition to Israel’s existence. The government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tends to favor the second argument. For those who were close to Mr. Rabin, this shift has been a source of gloom. Mr. Sarid, the former leftist lawmaker, said in his column that he introduced the Yitzhak Rabin Memorial Day Law 13 years ago and he now regrets it. “At the time I thought it was self-evident, indispensable,” he wrote. “Today, I admit my mistake: it’s an unnecessary and even harmful law. It’s not right to use legislation to impose a day of pain and anger and horror on those who don’t feel as I do. Why force those who scorn him all year long to honor him one day a year?”
|
Rabin Yitzhak;Israel;Assassinations and Attempted Assassinations;Palestinians
|
ny0033676
|
[
"us",
"politics"
] |
2013/12/07
|
Health Care Law Providing Relief and Frustration
|
CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Mike Horrigan is a lifelong Democrat with heart problems who supports President Obama’s health care law because he expects it will help many people obtain better insurance, including himself. But under the new law, the Affordable Care Act, Mr. Horrigan’s coverage by a state high-risk insurance program was eliminated, then replaced by a more expensive plan. His wife’s individual plan was canceled for being substandard, then suddenly renewed — also at a higher price. So while Mr. Horrigan, 59, believes the law will improve health care in the long run, its short-term effect has been chaotic and trying for him and his wife, Kay. “It’s more stressful than it needed to be,” he said. For a measure of the tumult that has accompanied the arrival of the federal health care overhaul, there may be no better place to look than in the politically mixed state of North Carolina, where both the anxiety and the promise of revamping the health insurance system has left hundreds of thousands of people struggling to sort out their options. Many will end up with better coverage than they had, and may get help paying for it. Others will see their costs rise and are wondering if the change is worth it. And some, like the Horrigans, may find themselves falling into both camps. The agitation has been building for months. This fall, insurers notified about 260,000 North Carolinians that their individual health plans no longer complied with the law’s more stringent requirements, and many learned that the plans they were being offered as replacements would cost hundreds of dollars more per month. Then, after Mr. Obama said on Nov. 14 that insurers would be allowed to renew their plans for one year, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina announced that 230,000 of its customers in the state could keep their own plans — but at prices that rose 16 percent to 24 percent. Kathleen LaFleur, a broker who works with people who have individual plans at Employee Benefit Advisors , an insurance agency here, said many of the callers to her office had two things in common: confusion and anger. “They are confused before they call,” she said. “After they call, they’re not confused anymore. They’re angry.” Image The Affordable Care Act has raised the Horrigans’ costs. Credit Travis Dove for The New York Times Adding to the confusion is the fact that many consumers have been unable to fully evaluate their options because the federal health care website, which serves residents of North Carolina and 35 other states, did not work very well until recently. Those who qualify for subsidies must sign up through the federal marketplace. Consumers have until Dec. 23 to sign up for coverage beginning in January. “It has obviously been extremely frustrating for individual policyholders who have received cancellation notices at a time when there’s such a short window for them to decide what their coverage options will be,” said Wayne Goodwin, North Carolina’s insurance commissioner, an elected Democrat. Still, for some, the new law is working well. Rachel Bryant, a small-business owner who lives just outside Winston-Salem, felt unlucky when she received a notice from Blue Cross saying that her plan was being canceled and that the replacement would raise her monthly bill to $675 from $408. But when Ms. Bryant, a single mother of two young children who earns about $30,000 through her legal services business, finally succeeded after many tries to log onto the online marketplace, HealthCare.gov , she learned she was eligible for subsidies that would bring down her premiums to just $150 a month. “I’m extremely happy,” said Ms. Bryant, 36. “I’m not going to go bankrupt because of medical bills. I’m looking forward to it, and I’ll put up with the frustration and the bother.” About half of those buying individual insurance in the existing market will be eligible for a subsidy, according to a national study by the Kaiser Family Foundation. That does not include an additional one million people who buy individual insurance now but, under the provisions of the health law, will be eligible for Medicaid beginning in 2014, according to the study. For others, like the Horrigans, the transition is proving uncomfortable. Ms. Horrigan, 61, is a former psychiatric social worker; Mr. Horrigan is a former corporate human resources expert who started a consulting business in Charlotte after atrial fibrillation required two heart surgeries. Because of his heart problem, he was denied insurance and found coverage through North Carolina’s high-risk insurance pool. So they understood, Mr. Horrigan said, why the Affordable Care Act was necessary. The new law was designed to fix flaws in the old market in which people with existing medical conditions, like Mr. Horrigan, could find themselves uninsurable and without limits on out-of-pocket costs — people for whom serious illness often meant financial ruin. Under the new law, such people cannot be turned away or be charged more by insurers, and subsidies are available to those whose incomes fall below a certain level. Image Kathleen LaFleur, an insurance broker, said callers are initially confused, then angry. With help, she said, they calm down. Credit Travis Dove for The New York Times “I was a poster child for why folks should have this opportunity,” Mr. Horrigan said. Then realities set in. Because of the law, the state eliminated the high-risk pool that provided his coverage, for which he paid about $400 a month. Then Ms. Horrigan learned that her insurer, Blue Cross, was discontinuing her plan — which was deemed substandard under the new law — and replacing it with one that would cost $620 a month, up from $325, with a higher deductible as well. Now, after Mr. Obama’s reversal, Blue Cross says it will extend her policy, though at a higher cost: She will get a one-year rate of $402, an increase of 23.6 percent, she said. After all the confusion, she will renew — and her husband has selected a midlevel plan through Blue Cross that will cost about $670 per month. Calling the increases “unreasonable,” Ms. Horrigan acknowledged that they may be necessary to make the new system work. “I appreciate the irony of complaining about my premiums being increased when it protects somebody like my husband,” she said. “I reluctantly say we will probably be better off even though it hits us hard in the pocket.” Prices are rising for several reasons, including the law’s higher standards for coverage, and fees and taxes associated with it, said Barbara Morales Burke, vice president for health policy at Blue Cross in North Carolina. But she said the sticker shock some are feeling also has another cause: For years, insurers could charge people different prices based on factors like their health or gender. Now that the law prohibits such practices, some who benefited from the old system will be asked to pay more, while those who had been at a disadvantage will see some relief. “This is a disruption to the marketplace,” she said, and estimated that about a third of Blue Cross’s individual insurance customers would see a significant increase in their rates. Dr. David Naftolowitz, a psychiatrist in Durham, is among them. He was offered a replacement plan that would raise his monthly cost to $410 from $199. His deductible would rise to $5,500 from $5,000. He plans to extend his existing policies for a year, but said the extension was “like a teaser” that “takes the heat” off the president for the moment. “You’re going to be hit a year from now,” he said. Ms. LaFleur, the broker, said that once her clients have been through the process and make their choices, they tend to calm down. “They can exert some control, and that makes them feel better,” she said. There is one silver lining in the tumult: Suzy K. Johnson, Ms. LaFleur’s boss, says she plans to expand. “I’m growing my team,” she said. “This is an opportunity — they need us more than ever.”
|
Health Insurance;Obamacare,Affordable Care Act;North Carolina;HealthCare.gov
|
ny0295479
|
[
"business",
"media"
] |
2016/12/16
|
Sumner Redstone to Leave Viacom Board in February
|
The ailing 93-year old media mogul Sumner M. Redstone will step down from the board of Viacom in February, the company announced Friday, after a yearlong debate over his mental competence. Even so, Mr. Redstone will continue to control his $40 billion media empire through his National Amusements holding company, where he remains chief executive. And there are no changes to his position on the board of CBS, where he is chairman emeritus. Mr. Redstone controls about 80 percent of the voting shares in Viacom and CBS through National Amusements, the private theater chain company started by his father. In the last several months, his daughter, Shari E. Redstone, has taken a leading role in steering the company. On Friday, Viacom disclosed in a regulatory filing that Mr. Redstone would cede his voting position on the board of Viacom yet continue to participate in meetings in a nonvoting role. Mr. Redstone will retain the title of chairman emeritus of Viacom. Image Sumner Redstone in 2012. Mr. Redstone, 93, controls about 80 percent of the voting shares in Viacom and CBS. Credit Robyn Beck/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Questions about Mr. Redstone’s mental capacity and related corporate governance issues burst into public view last year when a former girlfriend filed a salacious lawsuit that revealed embarrassing details about his feeble condition and sexual desires. Amid the drama, Mr. Redstone ceded his role as chairman at Viacom and CBS in February of this year but remained on the boards of both companies as chairman emeritus. Then in May, Philippe P. Dauman, his longtime confidant and the chief executive of Viacom at the time, filed a lawsuit claiming that Mr. Redstone lacked the ability to make decisions about his businesses and was being manipulated by his daughter. Mr. Redstone, who has suffered a series of small strokes, has a severe speech impediment. He cannot read, write or do simple arithmetic, according to assertions in various court filings. In videotaped testimony taken May 5, Mr. Redstone relied on an interpreter to answer basic questions. During all this, Viacom has struggled mightily across its television and film businesses. The company’s share price has plummeted about 50 percent in the last two years. In the fiscal year ended Sept. 30, Viacom’s revenue tumbled 6 percent and its profit plunged 25 percent. The company on Friday also disclosed the pay package for Robert M. Bakish, the longtime Viacom executive who was named chief executive this week. Mr. Bakish’s total pay could reach about $12 million a year, with his annual salary adding up to $5.25 million a year for his roles as president and chief executive, as well as chief executive of Viacom’s global entertainment group. He is entitled to other bonuses and compensation. That paycheck is considerably less than the remuneration for Mr. Dauman, who was removed as Viacom chief executive this year. In 2016, Mr. Dauman’s pay was $93 million, including salary, stock and option awards and other compensation. The previous year, Mr. Dauman’s pay was $54 million.
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Appointments and Executive Changes;Executive Compensation;Board of directors;Viacom;Sumner M Redstone;Robert M Bakish;Philippe P Dauman
|
ny0024452
|
[
"world",
"europe"
] |
2013/08/28
|
Russia: Security Official Killed on Highway in Ingushetia
|
Unidentified assailants killed a prominent security official on Tuesday in the troubled North Caucasus region, which has a simmering Islamic insurgency. Akhmed Kotiyev, the head of the regional Security Council for the Ingushetia Republic, and his driver were killed by automatic fire from a passing car on a highway near Nazran, the republic’s capital, Russian state television reported. Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, the leader of Ingushetia, said that Mr. Kotiyev was known for negotiating with rebel fighters to abandon the insurgency, and that he was probably killed for that reason.
|
Caucasus;Murders;Ingushetia;Yunus-Bek Yevkurov;Russia;Assassination
|
ny0039409
|
[
"nyregion"
] |
2014/04/10
|
Different Sort of Dog Run: Beside Train, Between Boroughs
|
The urban dog has long lived a singular life. Apartment hallways double as exercise hubs. Sidewalks teem with potential snacks, discarded from bodegas on high. Perhaps it is fitting, then, that a wayward collie mix, no more than about 30 pounds, would choose the New York City public transportation system as its playmate. Around 11 a.m. on Tuesday, the dog began what would become a more-than-mile-long race against a Metro-North Railroad train, toggling between the train’s path and a parallel track as the engineer, Joseph Delia, slowly followed. She began somewhere near 149th Street in the Bronx, where Mr. Delia first spotted her, wending her way toward the elevated tracks of Manhattan. At times, she appeared to stumble across the railroad ties, forcing the engineer to brake. She crossed the Harlem River — either bounding from tie to tie above the water, officials said, or maneuvering to a walkway on the lift bridge — and remained ahead of the train as it reached the station at 125th Street. By then, the operations control center had received word: Hudson Line Train No. 446 was captive to the whims of a little brown dog with black trim. Soon, scores of waiting passengers — many apparently traveling to a Yankees game — turned into spectators, tracking the dog as she hiked below. At 11:17 a.m., two Metropolitan Transportation Authority police officers, Luis Alvarez and Errold Borges, were summoned, joining Metro-North employees near a small staircase at the south end of the platform. The officers whistled, coaxing the dog up the half-dozen steps and into an indoor waiting area. The crowd cheered. “It was actually very happy to see somebody,” Officer Alvarez said. “Remember, it came from the Bronx.” The dog is called Tie now, after the materials she crossed along the rails. On Wednesday, she remained in the custody of a center in East Harlem run by Animal Care & Control of NYC . She had no tag, no microchip, no license of any kind, but appeared to have had an owner, said Risa Weinstock, executive director of the organization. Her coat was clean, and she seemed to know a number of tricks, including barking on command and lifting her right paw for a shake — skills she displayed dutifully at a news conference on Wednesday at the center. “That’s not something you just learn on the street,” Ms. Weinstock said. As of Wednesday afternoon, no one had come forward to claim the dog. If no one does, Officer Alvarez said, he would be interested in adopting her. Both officers said they had been involved in rescues before this case, which was first reported by The New York Post, though neither could recall an animal quite as brazen. More often, the transit system resembles a sort of bottom-feeding zoo, counting rats and pigeons among its regulars. Last August, there was the dead shark on the N train, a rancid curiosity that at least one rider photographed after adding a MetroCard, an energy drink and a cigarette as props. Three weeks later, a search for two kittens in Brooklyn halted service on parts of the B and Q lines for about two hours. The transportation authority said on Wednesday that despite the engineer’s deliberate crawl, the train arrived on schedule, according to rail standards — which is to say, only a few minutes late. There is a travel adage from Yogi Berra, the Yankees legend and virtuoso of semi-intentional wit, paraphrased just a hair: The dog was lost, perhaps. But she was making great time.
|
Bronx;Manhattan;Dog;Metro North;MTA;Police;Luis Alvarez;Errold Borges
|
ny0240929
|
[
"sports"
] |
2010/12/13
|
Navratilova Leaves Hospital After Kilimanjaro Attempt
|
Martina Navratilova was released from a Nairobi hospital Sunday, three days after being taken off Mount Kilimanjaro because she had developed high-altitude pulmonary edema, an accumulation of fluid in the lungs. From a friend’s home in a Nairobi suburb, Navratilova, 54, said in a telephone news conference that she was so disappointed when her condition worsened that she cried while making a diary entry before the doctor accompanying the 27-person team told her she would have to give up her quest to reach the summit. “I told her, ‘I know, I’m struggling to go 10 yards to the bathroom,’ ” said Navratilova, who was taken off the mountain on a wheeled stretcher by porters while accompanied by the doctor after the fourth day of the planned six-day ascent. “It was a peculiar thing for an athlete — I had to retire from my match when nothing was hurting. I just couldn’t walk.” Months after completing radiation treatment for breast cancer, Navratilova was ascending the 19,341-foot Kilimanjaro peak in Tanzania to raise awareness and money for philanthropic projects supported by the Laureus Sports Academy , an association of 46 sports stars. Through donations and sponsors, Navratilova raised about $80,000 by Sunday, with a goal of $130,000, a Laureus spokesman said. “Maybe the fact that I didn’t make it to the top was bigger news,” said Navratilova, who said she was feeling fine except for a lingering cough. “Kind of like the way it was when I lost a tennis match.” She did express annoyance at a CNN report she saw while in the hospital. “It was on the crawl — ‘Navratilova quits Kilimanjaro climbing attempt.’ Quitting would suggest I had a choice,” she said. “It was either going up to die or going down — and that’s not much of a choice.” When she left, Navratilova said she left her racket behind with the hope that one of the others in her group would strike a tennis ball or two at the top, as she had planned. Eighteen made it to the top Saturday. Navratilova said she would reunite with the team at the airport for the flight home. Before the trip, Navratilova was told that the group could expect two days of walking in shorts and T-shirts. “We got about two hours,” she said. Mist turned to torrential rain and then to snow and sleet. She never had a chance to use the binoculars she had packed because visibility was so poor. “Nobody had fun,” she said. “It was just survival, just pure survival. Trying to stay dry, trying to stay warm, trying to eat enough, drink enough, to survive the day.” Navratilova said she did not regret the experience, especially if it raised awareness for the causes she was championing and the money for the programs. “I always said the only failure is when you fail to try,” she said. “I guess the other failure is not giving your best effort. I did both. I tried and gave my best effort. But if I ever did it again, I would do it in a drier time of the year.”
|
Mountains;Medicine and Health;Cancer;Navratilova Martina
|
ny0015356
|
[
"sports",
"basketball"
] |
2013/10/27
|
N.B.A. Preview: The Haves and the Have-Nots
|
The “shrinking middle class” has apparently become part of the N.B.A. conversation, as the league has had a recent and drastic transformation. In past decades, there were some upper-echelon teams (the haves), about the same number of bottom-tier teams (the have-nots), and a robust middle tier. Entering the 2013-14 season, the N.B.A.’s upper class — which, on its lower end, includes both New York teams — has grown to include about half the league. Much of the rest of the league has its nose pressed against the playoffs window, with little chance of playing meaningful games past Valentine’s Day. These are fundamentally flawed squads that will struggle to win 30 games. Some of the bottom teams can credibly forecast good days ahead to their fans, while the others will have to use other means, perhaps T-shirt launchers, to distract them from the hopelessness of their situation. But any assessment of the coming N.B.A. season must acknowledge hopelessness: after all, there is only one LeBron James, the one truly unstoppable force in today’s N.B.A., and 29 N.B.A. teams don’t have him. HAVE PLENTY TEAM MIAMI HEAT PROJECTED FINISH Three-peat. WORST CASE ... Or bust. ‘BIG 3’ PLAYERS G Dwyane Wade, F LeBron James, F Chris Bosh. ADJECTIVE TO DESCRIBE TEAM Wary. CAN THEY BEAT THEMSELVES? Sure. HOW, EXACTLY? Ego or injury, nothing short of an implosion or James’s deciding to retire and become an N.F.L. tight end. SUMMARY The Heat have improved their lot since last season. That is not to suggest that C Greg Oden, signed in the off-season, can be counted on — and, after so many years of injuries, he is a long shot to contribute — but Michael Beasley, another recent addition, could become a valuable player for a team loaded with talent. Three-peat is as powerful a word as exists in the N.B.A. lexicon and creates its own internal momentum. The 2013-14 season probably ends for the Heat at the same moment it does for the soon-to-be commissioner, Adam Silver: upon delivery of the Larry O’Brien Trophy. TEAM MEMPHIS GRIZZLIES PROJECTED FINISH An N.B.A. finals loss. WORST CASE The team discovers that holding the (O. J.) Mayo does ruin the entire meal and loses in the Western Conference semifinals, but not sooner. ‘BIG 3’ F Zach Randolph, C Marc Gasol, G Mike Conley. ADJECTIVE Persistent. COULD THEY BEAT THE HEAT? Yes. Put the tenacious defender G Tony Allen on LeBron James, occasionally spell him with the long-armed F Tayshaun Prince, and watch Gasol and Randolph take turns tormenting Chris Bosh. SUMMARY A tall, talented squad, with a new coach, Dave Joerger, promising to maintain the commitment to lockdown defense, the Grizzlies are a nightmare matchup for every team. The roster has two accomplished post-up players, unheard-of in today’s N.B.A. And the Grizzlies’ solid defense masks one another’s (read: Randolph’s) deficiencies. Memphis should have enough to make it to the N.B.A. finals and, with a few breaks, even win them. TEAM OKLAHOMA CITY THUNDER PROJECTED FINISH A Western Conference finals loss. WORST CASE Russell Westbrook hides Kevin Durant’s backpack until Durant agrees to allow him more isolation plays. ‘BIG 3’ F Kevin Durant, G Russell Westbrook, F Serge Ibaka. ADJECTIVE Uneasy. COULD THEY BEAT THE HEAT? Yes. It’s simple: Coach Scott Brooks provides his mercurial point guard with an organizational chart that has “Durant” listed alone atop it. SUMMARY Before last season, the team essentially traded James Harden for G Kevin Martin, who, in the off-season, bolted as a free agent for Minnesota, which is, in effect, banishing yourself from the postseason. The Thunder still have the rest of the pieces in place to win the title, but what happens in December, when most observers think Westbrook will return? That’s the key to their season. TEAM INDIANA PACERS PROJECTED FINISH An Eastern Conference finals loss. WORST CASE They believe the hype. ‘BIG 3’ F Paul George, C Roy Hibbert, G George Hill. ADJECTIVE Eager. COULD THEY BEAT THE HEAT? Yes. Outrebound, outdefend and outrun, and you will outlast Miami — that should be Indiana’s mantra. SUMMARY Indiana may not be the N.B.A.’s most talented team, but it has the most potential. The Pacers grew up fast last season but still have some growing to do. Hibbert and George are soon to be All-Star fixtures, and they are just scratching the surface. After nearly an entire season away, G Danny Granger is plotting his comeback despite a degenerative knee problem, but he comes back to a different hierarchy — this has become George’s team. If there must be a team chosen to dethrone the Heat before the N.B.A. finals, this would be it. TEAM CHICAGO BULLS PROJECTED FINISH An Eastern Conference semifinals loss. WORST CASE Derrick Rose plays too timidly, causing Joakim Noah to spontaneously combust. ‘BIG 3’ G Derrick Rose, F Joakim Noah, F Carlos Boozer. ADJECTIVE Hungry. COULD THEY BEAT THE HEAT? Yes. They nearly did it last season with three missing starters and a 5-foot-9 (or so his player card says) point guard, Nate Robinson. Replace him with a determined former most valuable player in Rose, along with a healthy Luol Deng and a healthier Noah, and it is possible to imagine Miami not surviving that series. SUMMARY Never before has an injured M.V.P. been under so much scrutiny for the rehabilitation of his injury. Late last season, the Bulls announced that Rose was cleared to play while he was still clearly uncomfortable about jumping into a playoff push. While the team has been taking it slowly with him in the preseason, Rose is exhibiting some of his trademark explosiveness. He has something to prove, but personal ambition often gets in the way of group achievement. TEAM LOS ANGELES CLIPPERS PROJECTED FINISH A Western Conference semifinals loss. WORST CASE The new coach, Doc Rivers, tries to insert Paul Pierce into the lineup to offer some fourth-quarter scoring punch and quickly realizes ... ‘BIG 3’ G Chris Paul, F Blake Griffin, C DeAndre Jordan. ADJECTIVE Confident. COULD THEY BEAT THE HEAT? Yes. LeBron James cannot effectively guard Paul, and Rivers’s influence inspires Griffin to develop post-up moves that will turn the Clippers’ long-range shooters into de facto Ray Allens. Image Dwight Howard and James Harden Credit Bob Levey/Associated Press SUMMARY The Clippers are the better team in Los Angeles, and it’s not even a question any longer. The missing piece may have been coaching stability, and Rivers will certainly provide that, as well as one other thing: his substitution patterns, which kept the Celtics’ veterans fresh for the playoffs. The Clippers are young and deep and have the game’s best point guard. If this were their season, it would not come as a complete shock. TEAM HOUSTON ROCKETS PROJECTED FINISH A Western Conference first-round loss. WORST CASE They get the bad Dwight Howard. ‘BIG 3’ G Jeremy Lin, G James Harden, F Dwight Howard. ADJECTIVE Excited. COULD THEY BEAT THE HEAT? Yes. They get the good Dwight Howard. SUMMARY Howard has moved again, after an unsuccessful season with the Lakers. He comes to a team with legitimate playmakers in Lin and Harden and little else. But the lack of a quality bench will hold even the best teams back and may just prove too great an Achilles’ heel for Houston to overcome. TEAM SAN ANTONIO SPURS PROJECTED FINISH A Western Conference semifinals loss. WORST CASE Tim Duncan drops the mic on the eve of the playoffs, tired of the question, “How much do you have left?” Coach Gregg Popovich follows suit. ‘BIG 3’ C Tim Duncan, G Tony Parker, F Kawhi Leonard. ADJECTIVE Creaky or cranky. COULD THEY BEAT THE HEAT? Yes. By doing what they do — play intelligently. Yet the window is closing rapidly. Everyone is a year older (which means a lot more to a 37-year-old than to a 27-year-old), and the team still has no answer for LeBron James. It all depends on the speed with which Leonard grows into a dependable 20-points-a-night scorer. SUMMARY Last season looked like the last roundup for this Spurs squad. Everyone is returning, but the younger players, while talented, are still not ready to assume command of the team. Among the older players, Manu Ginobili wore down so much in last year’s playoffs that twice he nearly fell asleep while he was flopping, so it will be interesting to see if he has anything left. The end of the Duncan-Parker-Ginobili-Coach Pop era is in sight. HAVE SOME TEAM DENVER NUGGETS PROJECTED FINISH A Western Conference first-round loss. WORST CASE Turns out the team’s former coach, George Karl, really did know how to coach, and the team’s chemistry disintegrates. ‘BIG 3’ G Ty Lawson, G Randy Foye, F Wilson Chandler. ADJECTIVE Hyper. COULD THEY BEAT THE HEAT? No. You need to play defense to become N.B.A. champion. Or Western Conference champion, for that matter. SUMMARY The Nuggets have never been known for team defense, and so the franchise has also never been known for winning basketball championships. Every year, the team says it will focus on stopping its opponents, but we will believe that when we see it. TEAM KNICKS PROJECTED FINISH An Eastern Conference first-round loss. WORST CASE Amar’e Stoudemire comes back four more times this season, trashing the team’s fragile focus, and Carmelo Anthony quietly begins packing his things. ‘BIG 3’ F Carmelo Anthony, C Tyson Chandler, G Iman Shumpert. ADJECTIVE Unsteady. COULD THEY BEAT THE HEAT? Yes. Stoudemire comes back healthy, Shumpert stays healthy and Anthony cancels out LeBron James on the scoring sheet. SUMMARY The Knicks are perilously close to becoming another of Isiah Thomas’s famous patchwork squads of the last decade: unwisely sinking so much money into a long-term Stoudemire contract has handcuffed the team into taking chances on J. R. Smith (which worked until last season’s playoffs) and Metta World Peace. This season is filled with pitfalls. TEAM NETS PROJECTED FINISH An Eastern Conference semifinals loss. WORST CASE We all know what happens when you buy things that are past warranty. ‘BIG 3’ G Deron Williams, C Brook Lopez, F Paul Pierce. ADJECTIVE Confident. COULD THEY BEAT THE HEAT? Yes. With the addition of, believe it or not, F Andrei Kirilenko, along with G Jason Terry and Pierce, the Nets can beat the Heat from the perimeter. SUMMARY The Nets are going for it — say that about them. They have not just mortgaged their future, they have defaulted, by trading multiple first-round draft picks and younger players to the Celtics for Pierce, Kevin Garnett and Jason Terry, whose combined age is older than the hills. (For you Nate Silver fans, the number is actually 109.) Here’s the odd thing: instead of also importing Doc Rivers, they handed the reins to a coaching novice, Jason Kidd. TEAM : GOLDEN STATE WARRIORS PROJECTED FINISH : A Western Conference first-round loss. WORST CASE The closest they come to tasting success is Stephen Curry’s 3-point shootout title at the 2014 All-Star Game. ‘BIG 3’ G Stephen Curry, F David Lee, F Andre Iguodala. ADJECTIVE Hopeful. COULD THEY BEAT THE HEAT? No. They have only the one transcendent player, Curry. SUMMARY A team that is fun to watch, the Warriors are Exhibit A for the benefits of NBA League Pass. But their bench was weakened in the off-season with the departure of useful role players like G Jarrett Jack and F Carl Landry. In addition, its lack of a consistently healthy frontcourt — C Andrew Bogut has played fewer than 50 percent of the team’s games in the last three seasons, and F David Lee is recovering from a hip injury — may haunt the team come April, or sooner. TEAM : LOS ANGELES LAKERS PROJECTED FINISH Will miss playoffs. WORST CASE Emboldened by all the magazine covers, Kobe Bryant attempts to recreate Willis Reed’s famous limping-to-the-court moment in the 1970 N.B.A. finals. Only he does it on opening night and reinjures himself. ‘BIG 3’ G Kobe Bryant, F Pau Gasol and G Steve Nash. ADJECTIVE Numb. COULD THEY BEAT THE HEAT? No. The loss of Metta World Peace, one of the few players who can muscle LeBron James, ends the conversation. SUMMARY With worse chemistry than Walter White and Jesse in the final season of “Breaking Bad,” the Lakers can never be overlooked entirely, not with Bryant, Gasol and Nash. But the operative word is “entirely.” Bryant’s comeback will take unwanted attention away from the newer players, and the addition of C Chris Kaman will keep Gasol from having to do too much — and by too much we mean rebounding or playing defense. Still, this has all the makings of a nightly ill-advised shotfest by Bryant, the man who calls himself the Black Mamba. Image LeBron James Credit John W. McDonough/Sports Illustrated — Getty Images TEAM DALLAS MAVERICKS PROJECTED FINISH Will miss playoffs. WORST CASE The team owner, Mark Cuban, decides to sit in front of the bench this season. ‘BIG 3’ F Dirk Nowitzki, G Devin Harris and G Monta Ellis. ADJECTIVE Resigned. COULD THEY BEAT THE HEAT? No. Other than Nowitzki, there is no one the Heat need to game plan against. SUMMARY Like several Western Conference teams, Dallas is ripe for a roster overhaul but is still rooted in the past as a way to appease its lone superstar. The window isn’t closing; it has disappeared. As a matter of fact, the house with the window has been demolished. Cuban would be wise to take stock of what is happening in San Antonio, as that team is simultaneously growing older and younger. TEAM UTAH JAZZ PROJECTED FINISH Will miss playoffs. WORST CASE The Hall of Famer John Stockton is forced out of retirement to handle the gaping hole at point guard. ‘BIG 3’ F Derrick Favors, C Enes Kanter, F Gordon Hayward. ADJECTIVE Realistic. COULD THEY BEAT THE HEAT? No. Beyond the obvious gulf in talent, there are five reasons: Spurs, Thunder, Grizzlies, Clippers, Rockets. SUMMARY The Jazz decided to commit to a youth movement and let veterans like F Al Jefferson, F Paul Millsap and G Mo Williams depart. And so Utah will not make the playoffs, but what the front office has is a plan, and that will sustain the team’s loyal fan base. TEAM ATLANTA HAWKS PROJECTED FINISH Eastern Conference first-round loss. WORST CASE The departure of F Josh Smith proves more damaging than imagined, and Atlanta becomes a have-not very quickly. ‘BIG 3’ C Al Horford, G Jeff Teague and F Paul Millsap. ADJECTIVE Numb. COULD THEY BEAT THE HEAT? No. Because their best, most versatile player, Smith, bolted via free agency, and Horford, for all of his skills, cannot do it alone — or with the contributions of Teague and Millsap. SUMMARY This is a team in rebuilding mode that does not seem to be rebuilding, other than at the coaching position. Adding one of San Antonio’s former coaches, Mike Budenholzer, is a smart move, but Atlanta has a lot to overcome. If the team played out West, it might not win 30 games. HAVE LITTLE MILWAUKEE BUCKS In the off-season, Milwaukee signed the free-agent G O. J. Mayo. It will be interesting to see how he reacts to being the focal point of the offense — something he is very likely to make himself, whether the coaches know it yet or not. CLEVELAND CAVALIERS With the dazzling point guard Kyrie Irving and the newcomers G Jarrett Jack and C Andrew Bynum, they are a few breaks away from being a have, but only one from being a have-none. PORTLAND TRAIL BLAZERS The team has the rookie of the year, G Damian Lillard, to play alongside F LaMarcus Aldridge, F Nicolas Batum and G Wesley Matthews. Still, the lack of a bench will hold Portland back. NEW ORLEANS PELICANS It’s an intriguing young squad — with three scoring guards (Jrue Holiday, Eric Gordon and Tyreke Evans), they are looking to create a modern-day Run TMC. Still, the team is two seasons away from the playoffs and about a decade away from living down that name. MINNESOTA TIMBERWOLVES They have two-thirds of a big three — in G Ricky Rubio and F Kevin Love — but little else. BOSTON CELTICS According to published reports, Rajon Rondo wanted more control of the team in past years. Not sure this is what he had in mind. WASHINGTON WIZARDS Changing the team’s name seems to have worked out just fine for this other Washington sports team. G John Wall has a max contract and max frustration. HAVE NONE TORONTO RAPTORS When the team’s mascot tore an A.C.L. in training camp, it was seen as a bad omen, which says a lot. DETROIT PISTONS The owners managed to persuade F Josh Smith to come to town. That’s about it. PHOENIX SUNS For years, the Suns were this basketball concoction that did not worry about the follies of playing defense, ergo winning. The fun stops here. PHILADELPHIA 76ERS The team’s off-season highlights: trading its lone young All-Star, G Jrue Holiday; trading for a player with a fear of flying, F Royce White, and then releasing him; and acquiring a rookie with one good knee, C Nerlens Noel. SACRAMENTO KINGS Good news: the team is staying in Sacramento. For whom, is the question still in debate. ORLANDO MAGIC When your best players continue to leave, eventually the well runs dry. Consider it dry. CHARLOTTE BOBCATS In many respects, Michael Jordan was better at baseball than running an N.B.A. team. O.K., in all respects.
|
NBA;Basketball;NBA Championship;Free agent
|
ny0008928
|
[
"world",
"europe"
] |
2013/05/22
|
Exorcist Says Pope Helped ‘Liberate’ Man
|
VATICAN CITY — A dispute over whether Pope Francis performed an exorcism intensified on Tuesday, with a well-known exorcist insisting that Francis helped “liberate” a Mexican man possessed by four different demons despite the Vatican’s insistence that no such papal exorcism took place. The case concerns a 43-year-old husband and father who traveled to Rome from Mexico to attend Francis’ Mass on Sunday in St. Peter’s Square. At the end of the Mass, Francis blessed several wheelchair-bound faithful as he always does, including a man described by the priest who brought him as being possessed by the devil. Francis laid his hands on the man’s head and recited a prayer. The man heaved deeply a half-dozen times, shook, then slumped in his wheelchair. The images, broadcast worldwide, prompted the television station of the Italian bishops’ conference to declare that according to several exorcists, there was “no doubt” that Francis either performed an exorcism or a simpler prayer to free the man from the devil. The Vatican was more cautious. In a statement Tuesday, it said Francis “didn’t intend to perform any exorcism. But as he often does for the sick or suffering, he simply intended to pray for someone who was suffering who was presented to him.” The Rev. Gabriele Amorth, a leading exorcist for the diocese of Rome, said he performed a lengthy exorcism of his own on the man Tuesday morning and ascertained that he was possessed by four separate demons. Rvenerand Amorth told RAI state radio that even a short prayer, without the full rite of exorcism being performed, is in itself a type of exorcism. “That was a true exorcism,” he said of Francis’ prayer. “Exorcisms aren’t just done according to the rules of the ritual.” The Rev. Juan Rivas, the priest who brought the man, took the Vatican line, saying it was no exorcism but that Francis merely said a prayer to free the man from the devil.
|
Vatican City;Pope Francis;Catholic Church;Prayer;Rome
|
ny0070487
|
[
"sports",
"ncaabasketball"
] |
2015/03/20
|
No. 14-Seeded U.A.B. Surges to Stun Iowa State
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LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Jerod Haase’s last game as a college player was in Birmingham, Ala., in 1997 in the N.C.A.A. tournament’s round of 16. His Kansas team was 34-1, with its only loss having come in double overtime against Missouri, but the Jayhawks were stunned by a nine-loss Arizona team in the tournament, 85-82. Haase knows all about the sting of defeat and the sudden, unexpected packing of bags in March. Here Thursday, coaching a team from Birmingham, Haase felt the euphoria that comes with being an N.C.A.A. tournament underdog that stuns a higher seed. His University of Alabama-Birmingham Blazers, a No. 14 seed, stunned third-seeded Iowa State, 60-59, as the U.A.B freshman William Lee outplayed Iowa State’s senior star Georges Niang in the crucial final moments of the game at the KFC Yum! Center. Haase, recalling his 1997 loss, said, “Arizona was really good, they won the championship that season, and it was a bitter loss for us.” He paused for a moment and added, “This is an unbelievable feeling.” U.A.B (20-15), a member of Conference USA, will play U.C.L.A., which defeated Southern Methodist, on Saturday here in the round of 32. Lee, a 6-foot-9 forward, turned down offers from larger schools to sign with U.A.B. and made the defining plays of this upset. He pulled up to hit a 15-foot shot over Niang with 23 seconds left to give the Blazers a 58-57 lead. At the other end, he blocked Niang’s shot off a spin move in the lane, then grabbed the rebound and was fouled. Lee sank both free throws for a 60-57 lead as the arena shook with anticipation of yet another N.C.A.A. tournament upset. Iowa State’s Naz Long missed an open 3-pointer from the right side on the Cyclones’ last possession. “He’s good, a really good player,” Niang said of Lee. Niang, an All-Big 12 forward, made 4 of 15 shots and finished with 11 points. The Cyclones led the Big 12 in scoring, averaging 78 points a game, but struggled with their offense on Thursday, shooting just 36.9 percent from the field. Lee finished with 14 points and 12 rebounds. Robert Brown, a 6-foot-5 junior, led U.A.B. with 21 points. The Blazers made just 3 of 18 3-point attempts, but they had numerous extra possessions because of 19 offensive rebounds. Image U.A.B.'s Chris Cokley late in his team's victory over Iowa State. Credit Andy Lyons/Getty Images “They really didn’t like boxing out and that’s what we did, we went to the glass and got offensive rebounds and second-chance points,” Lee said. Haase said he went to the team’s dry erase board in the locker room before the game and wrote “scared” on the bottom of the board and “cocky” on the top. He asked his team where they thought they were on that scale and he said they were much closer to the top — and confident, not cocky. It was not just a win for the basketball program, the players said, it was a win for the campus and the city of Birmingham. The school closed its football program after the 2014 season, and the mourning has continues in a state where football dominates. “We have to give U.A.B. something to cheer about, something to believe in,” Lee said. The Blazers noted the lack of belief in their chances against Iowa State, Big 12 tournament champion. It is hard to avoid the constant chatter of favorites vs. underdogs before the N.C.A.A. tournament, but U.A.B. played well the part of the righteous so-called mid-major. “They predicted us to lose 89 percent; we took that to heart,” Lee said. “Little bit of disrespect if you ask me.” Iowa State (25-9) had won five straight games after trailing by at least 10 points, but it had no remedy for the hustle of the underdog Blazers. “I think the difference was the glass,” said Iowa State Coach Fred Hoiberg. “They outrebounded us 52-37 and just kind of had their way on the offensive glass down there. “It’s just tough. It’s as tough a loss as I’ve ever been a part of. With what we had going, I thought the momentum we had coming into this tournament, and then just to go out there and not play very well.”
|
College basketball;University of Alabama at Birmingham;Iowa State;NCAA Men's Basketball,March Madness
|
ny0250513
|
[
"nyregion"
] |
2011/02/10
|
Costs Soaring, New Jersey Bond Rating Is Lowered
|
A top credit-rating firm lowered New Jersey’s bond rating on Wednesday, citing ballooning pension and other costs, and Gov. Chris Christie and Democrats in the Legislature wasted no time in blaming each other. The firm, Standard & Poor’s , downgraded New Jersey’s general-obligation rating to AA-, from AA, and dropped the ratings on some other state debts even lower. The changes will increase the interest rates that the state must pay when it borrows money. Standard & Poor’s has given lower ratings to just two states, California and Illinois; four others stand with New Jersey at AA-, which is the fourth-highest rating. The firm rates New York and Connecticut a notch higher, at AA. A Standard & Poor’s credit analyst, Jeffrey Panger, cited New Jersey’s underfinanced pension and employee benefit funds, and his firm’s shift to putting more emphasis on such obligations. The state reported last year that its pension system had $54 billion less than it needed to meet future obligations, one of the biggest such deficits in the country, and experts have said the state could run out of money within a decade. The fund for retiree health care is even further behind. Year after year, lawmakers have failed to contribute what actuarial rules said was required to make the systems whole, increasing the size of the payment that the rules required the following year. In 2010, Mr. Christie’s first year as governor, the state was supposed to put $3 billion into the pension system, but in grappling with a large budget deficit, it contributed nothing. The governor, a Republican, has said the state needs to curb government employee pensions and benefits to remain solvent, and at a public forum in Union City on Wednesday, he said the Democrats, who control the Legislature, had compared him to Chicken Little. “The sky started to fall in today,” he said, referring to the Standard & Poor’s action. Such talk brought the governor criticism last month, when he mused publicly about the prospect, however distant, of a state bankruptcy — at a time when the state was marketing a new bond issue. Some bankers said he had spooked the market and possibly raised the state’s cost of borrowing by saying what chief executives usually refused to acknowledge. Democrats said Wednesday that the governor was responsible for the downgrade, for failing to put money into pensions last year. They noted that last year they agreed to pension and benefit reductions for newly hired employees. “It’s time the governor took responsibility for his own actions and stopped trying to blame others,” said Assemblyman Louis D. Greenwald, chairman of the budget committee.
|
Credit and Debt;Pensions and Retirement Plans;Standard & Poor's Corp;Christie Christopher J;New Jersey
|
ny0039813
|
[
"world",
"asia"
] |
2014/04/07
|
Thomas Polgar, C.I.A. Officer, Dies at 91; Helped Lead U.S. Evacuation of Saigon
|
Saigon was falling and the United States was fleeing, desperately evacuating the last of its embassy staff and C.I.A. officers in the final, chaotic hours of April 1975. With the airport under siege by the North Vietnamese, helicopters landed on rooftops to ferry away Americans and some South Vietnamese. Thomas Polgar, the Saigon station chief for the C.I.A., helped lead the effort, lifting people over fences and destroying files. Just before Mr. Polgar destroyed the cable-sending machine the agency had used to communicate, just before he boarded a helicopter himself, he took a moment to type a last dispatch. “This will be final message from Saigon station,” Mr. Polgar wrote. “It has been a long and hard fight and we have lost. This experience, unique in the history of the United States, does not signal necessarily the demise of the United States as a world power. “The severity of the defeat and the circumstances of it, however, would seem to call for a reassessment of the policies of niggardly half-measures which have characterized much of our participation here despite the commitment of manpower and resources, which were certainly generous. Those who fail to learn from history are forced to repeat it. Let us hope that we will not have another Vietnam experience and that we have learned our lesson.” Image Thomas Polgar He concluded, “Saigon signing off.” The capital of South Vietnam was soon renamed Ho Chi Minh City, and Mr. Polgar, who was 91 when he died on March 22 in Winter Park, Fla., was reassigned to Mexico City. When he retired from the C.I.A. in 1981, his last few months in Vietnam continued to define a career in espionage that began during World War II. “He really is the last of the original C.I.A. officers who started with the agency in 1947 and lived through its heyday until the fall of Saigon in 1975,” Tim Weiner, the author of “Legacy of Ashes,” a history of the C.I.A. that recounts some of Mr. Polgar’s time in Vietnam, wrote in an email. Mr. Polgar, who was born in Hungary and became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1943, began working in intelligence soon after the Army drafted him late in World War II. He worked in the Office of Strategic Services before moving to the C.I.A. after it was formed in 1947. In the 1950s, he helped lead spying operations in Berlin. After spending the 1960s based in Vienna and Washington, he moved in 1970 to Buenos Aires, where the next year he helped end a hijacking by boarding the plane and talking with the hijacker. By the end of 1971, he was in Asia preparing to take over the post in Saigon. American troops withdrew from Vietnam in 1973 under the Paris Peace Accords. The United States hoped that, with a very small military presence, several hundred C.I.A. operatives and American financial support, South Vietnam could be preserved as an independent state. Image Evacuees were helped aboard an American helicopter atop an apartment building in Saigon. Before Thomas Polgar left, the C.I.A. station chief, he destroyed files and sent a last dispatch. Credit Hubert Van Es/United Press International But by early 1975, the financial support had been substantially reduced and the North Vietnamese had begun a major offensive in the south. Saigon, the last redoubt of the South Vietnamese government, was under direct siege on April 29, leading to the dramatic but incomplete evacuation. Thousands of South Vietnamese whom the United States had promised to evacuate were left behind. Mr. Polgar — along with the American ambassador at the time, Graham A. Martin, and Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger — were later accused of not recognizing the seriousness of the new threat from the North Vietnamese, of believing for too long that a negotiated settlement could be reached, and of waiting too long to evacuate. In his 1977 book “Decent Interval,” Frank Snepp, a top C.I.A. officer who had been based in Saigon, accused Mr. Polgar of withholding important information from Washington officials, such as intelligence that made clear the futility of negotiating with the North Vietnamese. Mr. Polgar said at the time that he held Mr. Snepp “in the highest regard,” but that “what he’s giving is the private’s view of the war.” Mr. Polgar was born on July 24, 1922, in Budapest. His parents were Jewish and moved the family to the United States in 1938 to escape Nazi oppression. He studied accounting at a business school in New York, graduating in 1942. He is survived by his wife, the former Anna Fain, whom he married in 1977; three children from a previous marriage, Thomas, Patricia Polgar-Bailey and Catherine Jordan; and four grandchildren. His wife confirmed his death. Mr. Polgar received numerous awards for his C.I.A. service. After he retired, he worked in a range of positions in Washington, including, in the late 1980s, as a top investigator on the Senate select committee looking into the Iran-contra affair.
|
Thomas Polgar;CIA;Vietnam War;Obituary;Ho Chi Minh City
|
ny0237520
|
[
"nyregion"
] |
2010/06/21
|
High School Diplomas Engraved in Old Tradition
|
The tens of thousands of engraved cream-colored diplomas that New York high school graduates will receive this week can trace their birth to an old-fashioned source: an ink-splattered, cluttered printing workshop in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Over the last six weeks, they have emerged from hulking gray steel machines amid a whir of pulleys and the clatter of copper plates striking metal. The method by which they were made has not changed for decades, nor has the design; and the same family-owned company has engraved them for at least the past 21 years (that was as far back as anyone in the workshop could remember). On Friday, Nerad Balwant, a veteran pressman at Royal Engraving, the printing company, started on the final batch of thousands of diplomas for June, aligning sheets of stiff card stock on a feeder under a mechanical arm. Hydraulic suction cups moved the sheets onto a roller, which then fed them over an engraved copper plate rolled in black ink. A press bore down on the paper, forcing black ink from the furrows of the engraving onto the page, creating the signature raised lettering and finely detailed New York City seal of the document. The diplomas were then flipped onto a conveyor belt and dried under a heater, finally falling into a small metal bin amid the din. The result was a formal six-by-eight-inch document with a 1950s aura, all capital letters in an authoritative serif font. Over the past 20 years, “nothing’s changed at all” about the process, Mr. Balwant said. The company opened its doors in 1924 as a small wholesale engraver on Fulton Street in Manhattan, then the city’s printing district. Called Tripi Engraving, it was run by Italian immigrants, who bought the current one-story brick shop on Meserole Avenue in Greenpoint in the 1980s. It later changed its name to Royal Engraving, and merged with a former competitor, Palographia, about seven years ago, said Larry Paladino, who now co-owns the firm. Across the 11,000-square-foot printing floor, past 17 ink-stained engraving presses dating as far back as the 1880s, is a modern five-color offset printer, a far cheaper, easier way to print. But offset printers are a “dime a dozen,” Mr. Paladino said, and they do not print from engravings. Still, engraving diplomas the traditional way is an expensive job; the Department of Education’s contract pays him just under $80,000 a year. “I’d hate to lose it, to be honest, but there probably is some other way it could be done,” he said. Using methods similar to those first developed in the 1400s, the design on the city’s diplomas is etched with acid on a copper plate — the shop sends out for that — which then forms the basis for the pressing. Because engraving allows for perfect replicas of signatures and precise details, it lends the documents a layer of security. Each diploma is run two or three times through the presses, first printed with the basic information (The New York City Department of Education Diploma ...) and the engraved signature of the current chancellor, Joel I. Klein. Separate plates bear the name of each high school and the signature of its principal. The line for the student’s name is left blank, as is the year, for each school to write or type in. Because of Mr. Klein’s push in recent years to create hundreds of new small high schools, there are more plates now — 366 this year — and many of the high schools have long-winded, new-fangled names, requiring smaller font sizes or two lines of text in a layout designed decades ago. (The Law Government and Community Service Magnet High School, for example, looked crammed in.) “In the old days, not so many kids graduated,” said Mr. Balwant, his loose plaid shirt and baseball cap ink-free as he checked a batch for smudging. He guessed at why. “Maybe because of the bad economy, they are staying in school to get a better job,” he said. Once printed, the diplomas are sliced into size in a large cutting machine. The pressmen use sandpaper to remove any ink stained along the edges. Then the action moves to the cramped shipping department. On Friday, Cynthia Sotelo sat among piles of diplomas, sorting them into mailers. With graduation days away, there was a rush to finish the final few schools, like Landmark High School (250 diplomas) and the High School of Computers and Technology. Francis Lewis High School was the largest job this year, placing an order for 2,500 regular diplomas and 500 special-education diplomas. The school has only about 1,100 graduates, but like other schools, it ordered extras. In all, the printer will send out 120,000 diplomas this year. The Department of Education would not provide an estimate for the number of graduates this year, but last year, there were 45,000 June graduates. (One possible reason: the orders may also be used for August and January graduations.) Though his work will adorn living rooms or offices — or sit in boxes — around the city, Mr. Balwant did not look upon graduation time with great sentiment, though he was glad the job was nearly done. “I’ve been doing it for many years,” he said.
|
diplomas;engraving;Education and Schools;Family Business;New York City
|
ny0056191
|
[
"world",
"middleeast"
] |
2014/09/11
|
Israeli Officer Charged in Assault
|
JERUSALEM — A border police officer has been charged with assault after he was filmed beating a Palestinian-American teenager on the edges of a violent riot in East Jerusalem in July, the Israeli Ministry of Justice said Wednesday in a statement. Tariq Abu Khdeir, 15, from Tampa, Fla., was spending the summer with relatives in Shuafat. He got caught up in violence that broke out after the grisly killing of his cousin Muhammad Abu Khdeir, 16, by Jewish extremists in revenge for the kidnapping and killing of three Israeli youths by Palestinian militants in the West Bank. The footage of Tariq’s beating spread worldwide, prompting international outrage and a call by the State Department for a speedy and credible inquiry. The officer, who was not named, chased Tariq, who was “masked, with a kaffiyeh wrapped around his head, and holding a wooden slingshot,” according to the statement. After the youth was on the ground, and was not resisting arrest, the officer kicked and punched him in the head, face and upper body, the statement added. Tariq, who was hospitalized and has since returned to the United States, said that he had only been watching the clashes. Several other members of the Abu Khdeir clan have since been detained by the Israeli authorities.
|
Israel;Tariq Abu Khdeir;Palestinians;Police Brutality,Police Misconduct,Police Shootings;Muhammad Abu Khdeir;Murders;Jerusalem;West Bank;Kidnapping and Hostages;Gaza Strip
|
ny0189406
|
[
"world",
"asia"
] |
2009/05/27
|
North Korea Is Said to Test-Fire 3 More Missiles
|
SEOUL, South Korea — One day after its nuclear test drew angry and widespread condemnation, North Korea further antagonized the international community on Tuesday by test-firing three short-range missiles. In addition, a South Korean newspaper reported on Wednesday that American spy satellites had detected plumes of steam and other signs of activity at a North Korean plant that reprocesses spent nuclear fuel to make weapons-grade plutonium. The report from the newspaper, Chosun Ilbo, appeared to support a claim by North Korea in late April that it had restarted its reprocessing plant at Yongbyon, 60 miles north of Pyongyang, the capital. The missile firings came just hours after South Korea said it would join an American-led initiative to stop the global trafficking in unconventional weapons. The North responded Wednesday by reiterating its position that it would consider it a declaration of war if South Korea actually stopped and searched any North Korean ships as part of that program. The developments sharpened the confrontation between North Korea and much of the world — especially the United States — as the United Nations Security Council vowed to fashion a resolution that could impose further sanctions on the increasingly belligerent North. The missiles launched Tuesday were surface-to-ship and surface-to-air projectiles, a South Korean official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to reporters. The South Korean news agency Yonhap said the missiles had a range of 80 miles. They were apparently launched from a base on the eastern coast into the sea opposite Japan, further rattling nerves in the region. There was no official comment on the missile firings by either the North Korean authorities or the South Korean Defense Ministry. After its nuclear test on Monday, its second in less than three years, the North test-fired three short-range missiles, also off its east coast. An intelligence official in Seoul said that move indicated that North Korea was “getting its back up” about the possibility that United States military aircraft would fly near North Korea in an effort to collect radiation data from the nuclear blast. At the Pentagon, officials said the military on Tuesday sent a specially designed surveillance plane into international airspace around North Korea to collect particles from the test. The airplane has high-technology “sniffers” on board to collect radioactive materials that might have seeped up from the underground test. The particles from the first surveillance flight were to be sent to laboratories in the United States, and a second flight was planned over the next day or two, officials said. South Korea’s long-delayed participation in the Proliferation Security Initiative , a program to curb trafficking in unconventional weapons, followed a statement on Monday by the Security Council that unanimously condemned the nuclear test and called it a “clear violation” of a previous resolution. At the United Nations, the five permanent Security Council members and Japan and South Korea met for 90 minutes Tuesday to discuss possible new sanctions as well as ways to strengthen provisions in a 2006 resolution that have never been put into effect, like halting and inspecting North Korean vessels at sea. Ambassadors were tight-lipped about potential new sanctions, and diplomats said no written proposals had begun to circulate. All seven nations were said to have agreed on the need to send a strong message to North Korea. “We are in agreement on the goals,” said Susan E. Rice, the American ambassador. But the Chinese ambassador, Zhang Yesui, deflected questions about how strong a resolution his country would support. In Japan, the lower house of Parliament unanimously adopted a resolution on Tuesday condemning the North’s nuclear test, and it threatened to step up sanctions against the North. “Japan, as the world’s only nation to ever suffer a nuclear attack, cannot condone” North Korea’s repeated nuclear tests, the resolution said. North Korea’s recent belligerence has also prompted Japan’s governing party to debate whether Tokyo should consider pre-emptive strikes against states considered hostile — actions that would probably require changes to Japan’s pacifist Constitution. North Korea appeared unfazed by the world’s condemnation, which included strong rebukes from allies like China and Russia. On Tuesday in Rodong Sinmun, the North’s main Communist Party newspaper, North Korea declared that it was “fully ready for battle” against the United States, accusing President Obama of “following in the footsteps of the previous Bush administration’s reckless policy of militarily stifling North Korea.” North Korean officials have said that South Korea’s full membership in the initiative would be seen as a “declaration of undisguised confrontation and a declaration of a war.” The international effort was begun in 2003 by the Bush administration in order to interdict shipments — especially at sea — that were suspected of containing unconventional weapons, their related materials and delivery systems. Russia, Britain, France and Israel are among the 95 signers of the initiative, which India, Pakistan and China did not sign. South Korea had wavered on joining the initiative for fear of provoking the North. But on Tuesday, President Lee Myung-bak, who came to power with a promise to take a tougher approach toward the North, spoke with Mr. Obama about the North Korean threat and the South’s decision to join the effort. On the phone, Mr. Lee emphasized to Mr. Obama that the United States and its allies “should not repeat the pattern” of “rewarding” North Korea’s provocations with dialogue and economic aid, as they did after the North’s first nuclear test in October 2006.
|
North Korea;Nuclear Tests;South Korea;Arms Control and Limitation and Disarmament
|
ny0244299
|
[
"sports",
"ncaabasketball"
] |
2011/04/03
|
When David Meets Goliath on the N.C.A.A. Hardwood
|
Houston The title game is set: UConn will face Butler on Monday for the national championship. But this is not your classic David-and-Goliath tale. Butler is making its second consecutive appearance in the national championship game. When was the last time David did that? And the Bulldogs have made a habit of pummeling some of the nation’s biggest, baddest programs. In fact, Butler has become such an effective knockout artist that, instead of looking at Monday’s matchup from David’s perspective, let’s look at it — and the entire tournament — from Goliath’s. Counted among the fans drawn to the men’s Final Four are a flock of disappointed coaches, athletic directors and presidents who wish they could have been here as participants, not spectators. Their programs spent millions of dollars on head coaches, resources to lure blue-chip athletes and support staff to keep them eligible. They did all of this, only to be upended by a so-called David who, despite spending far less, swooped in and snatched the prize. I’ve thought about this for quite some time and more intensely this year when two midmajors — Butler, an eighth seed, and Virginia Commonwealth , an 11th seed — reached the Final Four. Butler defeated V.C.U., 70-62, to advance to the national championship game for the second consecutive year. Goliath rarely gets sympathy, and he’s not getting any now. This is simply a suggestion to look at upsets through Goliath’s economic prism. Last year Butler, which spends roughly $10 million annually on its athletic program, including $1.7 million on basketball, defeated Michigan State to reach the national championship game. Michigan State spends more than $58 million to maintain its Big Ten program, with $6.3 million going toward its men’s basketball team. Is this really fair? “It’s an accepted way of life,” said Gene Smith, Ohio State’s athletic director. “There’s always a David, there’s always a Goliath. Nine times out of 10, Goliath is going to win, and that’s why you make the investment.” Ohio State’s athletic budget is a whopping $89,580,305. The men’s basketball budget is $4,051,972. “I would hope that our investment would position our program where we would never get beaten by David,” Smith said. “That’s why we make the investments we make, so we can be dominant.” But if the coach of the well-heeled favorite loses too many times to the underdog, “we’ve got a problem,” Smith said. “The pressure is greater for Goliath.” Last week V.C.U. extended its tournament ride at the expense of Florida State. Florida State spends more than $56 million, including $3.6 million on its basketball program, to play big-time intercollegiate athletics in the Atlantic Coast Conference. V.C.U.’s athletics budget is a little more than $8 million, with $1.3 million going to basketball. UConn’s athletic budget is $47,359,000, $5.5 million going to basketball. Its coach, Jim Calhoun, is Connecticut’s highest-paid state employee. He at least got UConn into the national championship game by winning Saturday’s other Final Four game over Kentucky, 56-55, which spends $52,462,483 on its athletic programs, including $6.3 million on basketball. Having a hot tournament run is one thing, but could Butler compete night in, night out in the Southeastern Conference or the A.C.C.? Barry Collier, Butler’s athletic director and its former basketball coach, said the real question is why teams from the power conferences won’t engage in home-and-home series with a college like Butler. Universities in the power conferences traditionally make teams like Butler travel, although the Bulldogs’ recent success has changed that arrangement to a degree. Louisville, for example, will play at Butler next season. “There are a few who will do that,” Collier said, “but not as many as we’d like.” Still, if you look at this from Goliath’s perspective, the Butlers of the world might find life tougher on a day-to-day basis in one of the power conferences. “That would be tough,” said Leonard Hamilton, the Florida State coach. “I’m not saying that they couldn’t. But more than likely they would have a difficult time.” Traditionally, we filter March Madness through David’s prism, not Goliath’s, and why not? Rooting for the underdog is a quaint sports ritual. But Goliath has feelings, too. And expenses. In the end, those are the programs that attract the television ratings and the sponsors that help the tournament, which in turn gives those programs the luster that attracts blue-chip talent. Fans like the idea of underdogs, but viewers like to see battles of the titans, although last year’s ratings for the two national semifinal games were the highest they had been in five years. You can make the argument that the presence of Duke helped. Bobby Fong, the president of Butler, which faced Duke in last season’s final, discounted the correlation between big-time programs spending huge sums of money and winning. “Trying to measure quality by money is a misdirected enterprise,” Fong said. “Just like the notion that because we have more missiles we’re safer is a fallacy, the idea that spending more money means more wins is misguided. You can invest in the best talent and lure them with great arenas, but that doesn’t mean they will beat the team that plays well together.” Of course, Fong made Butler Coach Brad Stevens the highest-paid coach in the Horizon League — but he said he did it as a reward, not as a deterrent. “I think the money has kind of subverted so many of the educational priorities at universities and made life hellish for the N.C.A.A.,” Fong said. “The entire model is kind of wrongheaded after a point.” Wrongheaded, perhaps, and continuing. Large programs like UConn will continue to invest heavily in intercollegiate athletics; medium-sized small ones like Butler will spend much less and hope to catch a giant sleeping. On Monday, there’s good chance that Goliath will have both eyes open. If it doesn’t seem right, put yourself in Goliath’s shoes.
|
College Athletics;NCAA Basketball Tournament (Men);Basketball;Butler University;Virginia Commonwealth University;University of Kentucky;University of Connecticut;NCAA Basketball Championships (Men);Basketball (College)
|
ny0161342
|
[
"sports"
] |
2006/04/07
|
Bonds Plight Foreshadowed
|
San Francisco - A FEW hours before the Giants opened their 49th season here, Barry Bonds walked through the clubhouse, bat and, it seemed, time in hand. As Bonds passed, I said that I had a question to ask -- about boxing, not baseball. Bonds is this generation's Jack Johnson, and I wondered if he was familiar with the man who became a champion, then a legend. Both hold valuable real estate in our sports landscape. Johnson became the first black heavyweight champion, in 1908, at a time when the heavyweight championship defined manhood and for many was a metaphor for white male supremacy. Bonds is on the verge of supplanting Babe Ruth as the second most prolific home-run hitter in baseball history. More important, I wondered if Bonds was familiar with Johnson's rise and fall. Bonds said he was. He said he had watched "Unforgivable Blackness," Ken Burns's documentary on Johnson. Bold and bodacious, Johnson enraged segments of the black and the white communities. He flaunted his power and independence. He openly traveled with, went out with and married white women -- the ultimate taboo of his era. He taunted, bragged and belittled his opponents. Bonds simply plays by his own set of rules. "He had to throw a fight, right?" Bonds asked, referring to Johnson's controversial loss to Jess Willard on April 5, 1915. Historians are split. Most say Johnson was beaten fair and square. Others say he threw the fight. Randy Roberts, a professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh and a biographer of Johnson ("Papa Jack: Jack Johnson and the Era of White Hopes"), said he didn't know a lot about Bonds, but that from what he knows, the two have many similarities. "Jack Johnson and Barry Bonds are proponents of the chaos theory," he said yesterday in a phone interview from Pittsburgh. "Johnson lived his life in perpetual chaos. If he didn't want it that way, it wouldn't have been that way. The only thing he did not want was to be forgotten." Like Bonds, Johnson was media savvy. Roberts said: "His greatest challenge was to stay in the news once he was no longer champion. Joe Louis was a godsend for Jack. He always talked about Louis's flaws, he always predicted that he would lose fights. He knew that would enrage black reporters. Johnson did it to be in the media." I'm convinced that Jack Johnson would have had a reality show. "His life was a reality show -- a running reality show," Roberts said. "He felt any publicity was good publicity," Roberts added. "Good, bad -- if people are talking about you, it's good." The most important thing for Bonds to know about Johnson is how his career was compromised and short-circuited when powerful forces within the federal government decided he had become too big for his britches and had to be brought down. If a succession of "white hopes" couldn't beat him, the government would. When Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig caved in to pressure and deputized a posse to pursue Bonds and past steroid use in baseball, I thought this could be to Bonds what the Mann Act was to Jack Johnson. "When Jack Johnson said, 'They're out to get me,' he was right," Roberts said. "Not only were they out to get him, they did." In 1910, Congress passed the White Slave Traffic Act, which came to be known as the Mann Act. The legislation was designed to stop the proliferation of immigrant prostitution. (Section 6 of the Mann Act empowered the commissioner general of immigration "to receive and centralize information concerning the procuration of alien women and girls with a view to their debauchery, and to exercise supervision over such alien women and girls, receive their declarations, establish their identity, and ascertain from them who induced them to leave their native countries.") Roberts said that Johnson was targeted because he was a threat to the racial order of the day. "The great fear of the day was miscegenation -- black men and white women," he said. The federal agent faced with applying the Mann Act to Johnson said that the application was misapplied. "But the government said that the only way to nail Johnson was through the Mann Act," Roberts said. Johnson was among the first men to be prosecuted under the act. He married a prostitute and had actually persuaded her to stop in order to devote her attentions to him. Before they were married, however, they had violated the Mann Act by crossing a state border. Johnson was a so-called Mann Act offender. Selig can't go after Bonds for gambling on baseball, and in good conscience he can't go after Bonds for violating any rules within the baseball fraternity. Selig can let the newly formed commission report and the federal government punish. With a bad knee, how long can Bonds stay ahead of Selig's posse? Bonds received a warm, extended ovation when he was introduced yesterday, though there was a smattering of boos. He walked twice, struck out and scored a run in the Giants' 6-4 victory over the Atlanta Braves. But if the Giants' season-opening series at San Diego was any hint of things to come, the next few months will see baseball fans at their crudest. The posse Selig unleashed last week is raring to go, ready to shadowbox with a latter-day Jack Johnson. Sports of The Times E-mail: [email protected]
|
SAN FRANCISCO GIANTS;JOHNSON JACK;BONDS BARRY;BASEBALL;BOXING;SPORTS OF THE TIMES (TIMES COLUMN);NEWS AND NEWS MEDIA
|
ny0129123
|
[
"us"
] |
2012/06/26
|
Massachusetts: Bulger Trial Delayed
|
Lawyers for James (Whitey) Bulger on Monday won a four-month delay in his trial and told a judge that a deal between their client and the government renders him immune from prosecution, and that they will seek to have charges against Mr. Bulger dropped. Mr. Bulger, who prosecutors said acted as an F.B.I. informer while playing a leading role in Boston’s crime underworld, faces charges including 19 murders at a trial now scheduled to begin March 4, 2013. His lawyers said they need more time to prepare his defense. Mr. Bulger was captured last summer in Santa Monica, Calif., after spending 16 years in hiding with his girlfriend, Catherine Greig, who was recently sentenced to eight years in prison on charges of harboring a fugitive.
|
Bulger James J;Fugitives;Federal Bureau of Investigation;Massachusetts;Greig Catherine Elizabeth;Boston (Mass);Organized Crime
|
ny0046943
|
[
"sports",
"ncaabasketball"
] |
2014/11/20
|
Creighton Rallies From 18-Point Deficit to Beat No. 18 Oklahoma
|
Zach Hanson caught Devin Brooks’s air ball along the baseline and put it in the basket for the go-ahead points in the last minute, and host Creighton came back from an 18-point deficit to upset No. 18 Oklahoma, 65-63. ■ In women’s play, Jewell Loyd had 28 points and 11 rebounds to lead No. 3 Notre Dame to a 71-63 road victory over No. 15 Michigan State on Wednesday. Brianna Turner added 17 points, and Lindsay Allen had 14 for the Fighting Irish. Aerial Powers scored 27 points for the Spartans. Elsewhere, Kaili Lukan scored 20 points, including two free throws with nine seconds left in the second overtime, to help Green Bay upset No. 24 Purdue, 81-78. Purdue, now 38-2 in home openers, had not lost one since 1995.
|
College basketball;Creighton University;University of Oklahoma;University of Notre Dame;Michigan State
|
ny0030108
|
[
"us"
] |
2013/06/16
|
After Profits, Defense Contractor Faces the Pitfalls of Cybersecurity
|
WASHINGTON — When the United Arab Emirates wanted to create its own version of the National Security Agency, it turned to Booz Allen Hamilton to replicate the world’s largest and most powerful spy agency in the sands of Abu Dhabi. It was a natural choice: The chief architect of Booz Allen’s cyberstrategy is Mike McConnell, who once led the N.S.A. and pushed the United States into a new era of big data espionage. It was Mr. McConnell who won the blessing of the American intelligence agencies to bolster the Persian Gulf sheikdom, which helps track the Iranians. “They are teaching everything,” one Arab official familiar with the effort said. “Data mining, Web surveillance, all sorts of digital intelligence collection.” Yet as Booz Allen profits handsomely from its worldwide expansion, Mr. McConnell and other executives of the government contractor — which sells itself as the gold standard in protecting classified computer systems and boasts that half its 25,000 employees have Top Secret clearances — have a lot of questions to answer. Among the questions: Why did Booz Allen assign a 29-year-old with scant experience to a sensitive N.S.A. site in Hawaii, where he was left loosely supervised as he downloaded highly classified documents about the government’s monitoring of Internet and telephone communications, apparently loading them onto a portable memory stick barred by the agency? The results could be disastrous for a company that until a week ago had one of the best business plans in Washington, with more than half its $5.8 billion in annual revenue coming from the military and the intelligence agencies. Last week, the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Dianne Feinstein, whom Mr. McConnell regularly briefed when he was in government, suggested for the first time that companies like Booz Allen should lose their broad access to the most sensitive intelligence secrets. “We will certainly have legislation which will limit or prevent contractors from handling highly classified and technical data,” said Ms. Feinstein, a California Democrat. Senior White House officials said they agreed. Yet cutting contractors out of classified work is a lot harder in practice than in theory. Booz Allen is one of many companies that make up the digital spine of the intelligence world, designing the software and hardware systems on which the N.S.A. and other military and intelligence agencies depend. Mr. McConnell speaks often about the need for the private sector to jolt the government out of its attachment to existing systems, noting, for example, that the Air Force fought the concept of drones for years. Removing contractors from the classified world would be a wrenching change: Of the 1.4 million people with Top Secret clearances, more than a third are private contractors. (The background checks for those clearances are usually done by other contractors.) Mr. McConnell himself has been among the most vocal in warning about the risks to contractors. “The defense industrial base needs to address security,” he said in an interview with The New York Times last year, months before Booz Allen hired Edward J. Snowden, its young systems administrator who has admitted to leaking documents describing secret N.S.A. programs. “It should be a condition for contracts. You cannot be competitive in the cyber era if you don’t have a higher level of security.” Booz Allen is saying little about Mr. Snowden’s actions or the questions they have raised about its practices. Mr. McConnell, once among the most accessible intelligence officials in Washington, declined to be interviewed for this article. “This has to hurt Mike’s relationship with the N.S.A.,” said a business associate of Mr. McConnell’s who requested anonymity. “He helped set up those contracts and is heavily engaged there.” Indeed, few top officials in the intelligence world have become greater authorities on cyberconflict than the 69-year-old Mr. McConnell, who walks with a stoop from a bad back and speaks with the soft accent of his upbringing in Greenville, S.C. He began his career as a Navy intelligence officer on a small boat in the backwaters of the Mekong Delta during the Vietnam War. Years later he helped the American intelligence apparatus make the leap from an analog world of electronic eavesdropping to the new age of cyberweaponry. President Bill Clinton relied on Mr. McConnell as director of the N.S.A., a post he held from 1992 to 1996. He then moved to Booz Allen as a senior vice president, building its first cyberunits. But with the intelligence community in disarray after its failure to prevent the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the fiasco of nonexistent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the toll of constant reorganization, President George W. Bush asked him to be the second director of national intelligence from 2007 to 2009. That was when he made his biggest mark, forcing a reluctant bureaucracy to invest heavily in cybercapability and overseeing “Olympic Games,” the development of America’s first truly sophisticated cyberweapon, which was used against Iran’s nuclear enrichment program. When Mr. Bush needed someone to bring President-elect Barack Obama up to speed on every major intelligence program he was about to inherit, including drones and defenses against electronic intrusions from China, he handed the task to Mr. McConnell. Video Edward J. Snowden’s disclosure that the United States government is collecting phone and Internet records kick-started a wave of creative commentary on government surveillance. But Mr. Obama was not interested in keeping the previous team, and Mr. McConnell returned to Booz Allen in 2009. He earned more than $4.1 million his first year back, and $2.3 million last year. He is now vice chairman, and the company describes him as the leader of its “rapidly expanding cyberbusiness.” In Washington he is often Booz Allen’s public face, because of his ties to the intelligence agencies and his extensive and loyal network of federal intelligence officials who once worked with him. Two months ago, the company announced the creation of a Strategic Innovation Group, staffed by 1,500 employees who are pursuing, among other projects, one of Mr. McConnell’s favorites: the development of “predictive” intelligence tools that its clients can use to scour the Web for anomalies in behavior and warn of terror or cyberattacks. He has also hired a senior counterterrorism official to market products in the Middle East. This year, the company began working on a $5.6 billion, five-year intelligence analysis program for the Defense Intelligence Agency. The company’s profits are up almost eightfold since it went public in late 2010. Its majority shareholder is the Carlyle Group, which matches private equity with a lot of Washington power, and its executives, chief among them Mr. McConnell, drum up business by warning clients about the potential effects of cyberweapons. “The digital capabilities are a little bit like W.M.D.’s,” Mr. McConnell said in the interview last year. The good news, he said, is that countries like China and Russia recognize limits in using those weapons, and terror groups have been slow to master the technology. “The people that would do us harm aren’t yet in possession of them,” he said. As director of national intelligence, Mr. McConnell kept a giant world map propped up in front of his desk. Countries were sized by Internet traffic, and the United States ballooned bigger than all others — a fact that he told a visitor was at once “a huge intelligence advantage and a huge vulnerability.” The advantage was that the United States’ role as the world’s biggest Internet switching center gave it an opportunity to sort through the vast troves of metadata — including phone records, Internet activity and banking transactions — enabling analysts to search for anomalies and look for attacks in the making. But he chafed at the legislative restrictions that slowed the process. So in 2007, as the intelligence chief, he lobbied Congress for revisions to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to eliminate some of the most burdensome rules on the N.S.A., including that it obtain a warrant when spying on two foreigners abroad simply because they were using a wired connection that flowed through a computer server or switch inside the United States. It made no sense in the modern age, he argued. “Now if it were wireless, we would not be required to get a warrant,” he told The El Paso Times in August of that year. The resulting changes in both law and legal interpretations led to many of the steps — including the government’s collection of logs of telephone calls made in and out of the country — that have been debated since Mr. Snowden began revealing the extent of such programs. Then Mr. McConnell put them into effect. In 2007, “Mike came back into government with a 100-day plan and a 500-day plan for the intelligence community,” said Stephen J. Hadley, Mr. Bush’s national security adviser. “He brought a real sense of the private sector to the intelligence world, and it needed it.” The new technologies created a flood of new work for the intelligence agencies — and huge opportunities for companies like Booz Allen. It hired thousands of young analysts like Mr. Snowden. The intelligence agencies snapped them up, assigning them to sensitive, understaffed locales, including the Hawaii listening station where Mr. Snowden downloaded his materials. Only last month, the Navy awarded Booz Allen, among others, the first contracts in a billion-dollar project to help with “a new generation of intelligence, surveillance and combat operations.” The new push is to take those skills to American allies, especially at a time of reduced spending in Washington. So while the contract with the United Arab Emirates is small, it may be a model for other countries that see cyberdefense — and perhaps offense — as their future. The company reported net income of $219 million in the fiscal year that ended on March 31. That was up from net income of $25 million in 2010, shortly after Mr. McConnell returned to the company. But the legal warnings at the end of its financial report offered a caution that the company could be hurt by “any issue that compromises our relationships with the U.S. government or damages our professional reputation.” By Friday, shares of Booz Allen had slid nearly 6 percent since the revelations. And a new job posting appeared on its Web site for a systems administrator in Hawaii, “secret clearance required.”
|
John Michael McConnell;Booz Allen Hamilton Holding;NSA;Defense contractor;Classified Information;Government Surveillance;Edward Snowden
|
ny0055690
|
[
"world",
"africa"
] |
2014/09/05
|
As Islamist Militants Advance, Residents Flee a Nigerian City
|
DAKAR, Senegal — Amid fears that Islamist militants were closing in on the major city in Nigeria’s northeast, hundreds of residents were said to be fleeing Maiduguri on Thursday in the face of doubts that the army could repel an attack on the metropolis of more than one million people. The militant group Boko Haram has captured towns to the north , south and east of Maiduguri in recent months in a series of bloody assaults, and appears also to have taken control of the last major town on the road southeast of the city, Bama, 45 miles away, according to reports on Thursday in Nigerian news media and accounts of witnesses. The militants have already announced in video messages their intention to carve out an Islamist territory in Nigeria’s north. A successful attack on Maiduguri, the birthplace of Boko Haram, a major commercial and government hub and the capital of Borno State, would represent a significant advance. “It’s very tense,” said Maikaramba Saddiq, a human rights activist in Maiduguri and the local head of Nigeria’s Civil Liberties Organization. “The Boko Haram have taken over Bama town. That’s why many of them are running away. They think the next target is Maiduguri.” The State Department’s top diplomat for Africa delivered a stark warning about what she said was the “worsening” security situation in the country, in remarks in the Nigerian capital, Abuja, on Thursday. “We are very troubled by the apparent capture of Bama and the prospects for an attack on and in Maiduguri, which would impose a tremendous toll on the civilian population,” Assistant Secretary of State Linda Thomas-Greenfield said in prepared remarks at a conference in Abuja. “This is a sober reality check for all of us. We are past time for denial and pride. Despite our collective efforts, the situation on the ground is worsening.” The city is already crowded with perhaps a half-million people displaced by recent Boko Haram advances in the region. Given the ruthlessness of the group’s assaults, an attack on Maiduguri could result in widespread bloodshed. In town after town, Nigeria’s military has so far proved unable to repel assaults by Boko Haram, fleeing and leaving behind weapons and equipment. Several residents said Thursday that they feared soldiers would abandon Maiduguri. “From all the various happenings in other locations, they were not able to contain the insurgents,” said Abba Mohammed Bashir Shuwa, until recently a top adviser to the governor of Borno. “It is feared that they might not withstand the capabilities of the insurgents.” He said that the governor had dissolved his cabinet and had returned to Maiduguri in haste from an overseas trip to “stay with his people.” Maiduguri is home to a major military installation, the Seventh Infantry Division of the Nigerian Army, and “the military have evacuated most of their families,” Mr. Shuwa said. “They advised me to leave the town if possible before Sunday,” he said. “They are expecting that there might be an attack before Sunday.” Mentioning the unresolved capture of hundreds of schoolgirls by Boko Haram in April, the group’s recent attacks across the border in Cameroon , and its leader’s proclamation of an ISIS-style “caliphate,” Ms. Thomas-Greenfield added: “All of these developments are deeply disturbing, and increasingly dangerous with each passing day.” She said that the United States was “close to announcing the launch of a major border security program,” to include Nigeria and its neighbors Cameroon, Chad and Niger, but offered no details, and the State Department was unable to provide any Thursday night. The United States already trains, in a limited fashion, given Nigerian security forces’ tarnished human rights record, some army and police units, and has provided aerial reconnaissance in the so-far unsuccessful hunt for the captured schoolgirls. But it was unclear Thursday night whether military assistance would be stepped up, given the apparently intensifying threat from the Islamist militants.
|
Nigeria;Maiduguri Nigeria;Boko Haram;Islam
|
ny0237816
|
[
"us",
"politics"
] |
2010/06/08
|
Other Issues Sideline Same-Sex Marriage as No. 1 Issue in Iowa
|
DES MOINES — When Iowa became the first Midwestern state to legalize same-sex marriage a year ago, opponents said the issue would drive future political races, and some even pledged to work to remove the State Supreme Court justices behind the decision. With Iowans going to polls on Tuesday, same-sex marriage has been a matter of debate among the Republican candidates for governor, but the issue appears to have been overtaken by voters’ worries about jobs, the economy and the state’s budget misery. “Too many other things are upsetting people,” said David A. Yepsen, director of the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute at Southern Illinois University and a former political reporter for The Des Moines Register. Mr. Yepsen said the race for governor had essentially been transformed into a referendum on the performance of Gov. Chet Culver, a Democrat seeking his second term. At least 2,020 same-sex couples have married in Iowa since the State Supreme Court unanimously ruled in April 2009 that a state law barring such unions was unconstitutional. The ruling set off a flurry of efforts to take the matter to voters, but any such referendum on a constitutional amendment requires the approval of two consecutive General Assemblies, and the Democratic-led legislature has resisted the notion. Mr. Culver is unopposed in Tuesday’s Democratic primary, but three Republicans — including former Gov. Terry Branstad — want to replace him. All three say they favor allowing a vote on a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage, but one of the candidates, Bob Vander Plaats, has gone further, calling for an effort to remove the three justices on the State Supreme Court, who are all on the ballot this November. Mr. Branstad, who departed a dozen years ago after four terms and who, as governor, signed the state law banning same-sex marriage that was struck down last year, holds a 28-point lead in the latest poll by The Des Moines Register . Some of the strongest opponents of same-sex marriage, including the Iowa Family Policy Center, say the issue remains crucial here (The Register’s poll found that 77 percent of Republican voters said the issue should be brought to the voters). The policy center’s political action committee has endorsed Mr. Vander Plaats and taken the unusual step of announcing that it will not support anyone in November if Mr. Branstad is the Republican nominee. Bryan English, a spokesman for the center, acknowledged that efforts to remove Iowa’s justices had gained little steam, but said that his group intended to single out state legislative races in the fall in an effort shift the partisan balance there. Supporters of same-sex marriage say Iowans are mostly tired of the issue. “They want to move on,” said Justin Uebelhor, a spokesman for One Iowa , a gay advocacy group. “They want elected officials to focus on jobs, the economy, improving schools.”
|
Primaries and Caucuses;Iowa;Same-Sex Marriage Civil Unions and Domestic Partnerships;Homosexuality;Endorsements;Governors (US);Culver Chet
|
ny0099198
|
[
"us"
] |
2015/06/23
|
California Farmers and Others Lag in Reporting Conservation
|
SACRAMENTO — A majority of farmers and others holding some of California’s strongest claims to water have missed a deadline to confirm they stopped pumping from rivers and streams during the drought, state officials said Monday. Fewer than a third of the farmers, water districts and communities responded to the State Water Resources Control Board’s broadest conservation order ever for those with water rights. The order this month affected 277 century-old rights to water from the Sacramento, San Joaquin and delta watersheds in the agriculture-rich Central Valley. State officials expect to demand that even more senior water rights holders stop diverting water as California confronts its fourth year of drought. Deep cuts have already been made to deliveries from government reservoirs and to farmers with more recent, and less secure, claims to water. Cities and towns are also under order to cut water use as much as 36 percent from 2013 levels. Some senior water rights holders are challenging the state’s order in court. Those who did not respond to the water board within seven days were expected to take about 200,000 acre-feet of water over the summer, a sliver of the state’s total water use. Kathy Mrowka, the water rights enforcement manager, said she was reviewing the data and did not have an immediate explanation for why it lagged. Board officials have said those ignoring the orders would be the first to face inspections and enforcement. The punishment for taking water is $1,000 a day and $2,500 per acre-foot. Some people who have not responded may not be illegally taking water because the streams and creeks to which they hold rights have dried out. Others may have missed the state’s curtailment notices or are waiting for a court decision before responding.
|
California;Agriculture;Drought;Conservation of Resources;Water;Rationing
|
ny0085403
|
[
"sports",
"golf"
] |
2015/07/05
|
Tiger Woods Sees How the Other Half Plays, if Not How It Lives
|
WHITE SULPHUR SPRINGS, W.Va. — The 220th-ranked player in the world arrived here on his private jet, refreshed after a vacation on his yacht in a luxury resort community in the Bahamas. That player, Tiger Woods, the 14-time major winner and former world No. 1 whose career earnings total over $109 million, returned to work the other day at the Greenbrier Classic at the Greenbrier Resort , an opulent oasis in the middle of West Virginia hill country. For Jim Herman , the 224th-ranked player, the tournament was a working vacation. Herman took his wife, their two young children, his mother, his brother and his in-laws to stay with him and rented a three-bedroom cottage on the grounds. Even at the discounted rate offered to players, the resort, replete with $4 doughnuts, $43 pan-seared chicken breasts and $195 personal meditative sessions, was a little rich for Herman, whose career earnings since he turned professional in 2000 are $1.9 million. To enjoy such amenities on a weekly basis on the PGA Tour, Herman said, “you’d have to be finishing in the top 10 every week.” The chasm between Herman’s lifestyle as a professional golfer and Woods’s is wider than the one carved through West Virginia’s limestone mountains by the New River . It is much greater than the four-spot gap between Woods and Herman in the world rankings. Woods traveled here from West Palm Beach, Fla., on his Gulfstream G550 and landed at Greenbrier Valley Airport after a commute of roughly 890 miles that took less than two hours. Herman, who tied for 68th at the Travelers Championship last weekend outside Hartford, traveled here in the family minivan, a Honda Odyssey, with his wife and their 5-year-old daughter and 22-month-old son. He drove roughly 200 miles to Philadelphia on Sunday night and covered the last 400 miles of the journey on Monday morning. Image Jim Herman, 37, has received support from Donald Trump. Credit Jim Rogash/Getty Images “We drive a lot,” said Herman, a veteran of the minitours. “We’re used to it.” Herman, a nonwinner on the Tour, has two top-10 finishes in 20 starts in the wraparound season, his best in four nonconsecutive PGA Tour campaigns. With $905,506 in earnings for the season, he felt he could justify splurging on this week’s Fourth of July family junket. “You just bite the bullet and pay whatever it costs,” Herman said, adding, “It’s a little motivation to play well, make sure you make it to the weekend so you can pay for it.” At 39, Woods is two years older than Herman, who has bounced around between the PGA Tour and the Web.com circuit. Woods has not had a top-10 finish in 23 months, since his tie for second at the 2013 Barclays Championship. His appearance in this event, which is off the beaten path for most of the world’s best players (only four of the top 20 were in this year’s field), is a byproduct of his struggles. He needs tournament starts to improve his world ranking, which has plunged so low that he is ineligible for World Golf Championships events, like next month’s Bridgestone Invitational, which he has won eight times. Before his second round on Friday, Woods, the owner of 79 PGA Tour titles, was introduced as “a man who has dominated every phase of golf he has ever competed in.” After the round, he was tied for 26th at 135, four strokes behind the leaders, Jhonattan Vegas and Scott Langley. On May 11, 2014, Woods woke up as the world No. 1. Herman was ranked 385th and operating on the Tour’s fringes. Injuries and another swing change have contributed to Woods’s nightmarish reversal of fortunes. A happy life away from the golf course, a burgeoning self-belief and a new putter have been key to Herman’s progress. Herman raves about his Bettinardi putter and the support, financial and otherwise, of Donald Trump, whom he met while working as an assistant pro at Trump Bedminster, a golf club in New Jersey. Herman wears a Trump patch on his chest and one on his golf bag. “I’ll always be thankful for the support he showed me at that time and to this day,” Herman said. Speaking after his first-round 67, Herman was wearing a TaylorMade cap and a purple shirt, which was unadorned except for the Trump patch. Poking at his sleeves, he joked, “I’ve got a lot of space available.” After a 72 on Friday, Herman had a lot of extra time; he missed the cut by one stroke. As usual, Woods was dressed from head to toe in Nike apparel. He has been a brand ambassador for Nike since signing his first deal with the company, for five years and a reported $40 million, in 1996. Image Blayne Barber, 25, Barber has not cashed a paycheck in more than two months. Credit Andrew Redington/Getty Images For as long as Blayne Barber can remember, Woods has been the king of golf. Barber, a 25-year-old PGA Tour rookie, was 6 when Woods turned pro. At the start of the year, Barber hoped to be in the field for this event, but as he explained, “Being a rookie, you don’t really know what your schedule’s going to be.” Barber turned professional in 2012. That year, he also took himself out of the running for a PGA Tour card because he could not say with certainty that his sand wedge had not touched a leaf before a shot during a qualifying round. A few days later, he phoned in the penalty and was disqualified for signing an incorrect scorecard. The last week that Woods spent at No. 1, Barber was No. 288. With three top-10 finishes in 20 starts, Barber has moved three places ahead of Woods in the world rankings. “He’s got a lot more tournament victories than I do,” said Barber, a nonwinner on the Tour who has earned $674,871 in this wraparound season. “So I don’t think it really matters.” Barber has not cashed a paycheck since the end of April, when he finished tied for eighth at the Zurich Classic of New Orleans. To save on expenses, Barber could have stayed off-site this week. He opted to pay extra in the hope that the convenience and comfort would pay off in a lower score. “Lots of weeks I pay more than I would pay if I was staying somewhere on my own,” he said, adding, “You do it because you just try to be as comfortable as you can because if you’re comfortable, you’ll play well.” With rounds of 70 and 69 on the Old White T.P.C. Course, Barber missed his fifth consecutive cut by a stroke. Every week that he fails to make a dime, he loses at least a couple of thousand dollars in expenses. This weekend, that included a one-way flight from Hartford to Roanoke, Va., through Washington, five nights’ lodging and the stipend owed to his caddie. No private jet was waiting at Greenbrier Valley Airport in Lewisburg to whisk him home to Auburn, Ala. After signing his scorecard, Barber called the airlines to see if he could get from here to there before the first rocket’s flare on the Fourth.
|
Golf;Tiger Woods
|
ny0007073
|
[
"world",
"asia"
] |
2013/05/17
|
China: Refinery Proposal Draws Protests
|
More than 2,000 people in the southwestern city of Kunming unfurled banners and shouted, “Protest! Protest!” in a demonstration on Thursday against plans for a petroleum refinery. The demonstration — the second in the city this month — was largely peaceful, though there were minor scuffles with the police. Witnesses said at least two people were briefly detained. Kunming officials said this week that the refinery planned by the powerful state company PetroChina would meet environmental standards and that it was crucial for the local economy, but residents are worried about the air and water pollution it would produce. The police allowed the protest to proceed, but censors scrubbed posts in China’s social media that were critical of the project, and employees of state companies were asked to promise not to participate in any rally or talk about the project in public or online.
|
China;Refinery;Oil and Gasoline;PetroChina;Air pollution;Water pollution
|
ny0083933
|
[
"sports",
"baseball"
] |
2015/10/30
|
Royals Bring Their Edge in Confidence to Queens
|
With his team leading the World Series by two games to none, Royals Manager Ned Yost looked relaxed Thursday afternoon during a session with members of the news media at Citi Field. Yost had his hair combed back in a style similar to that of the former N.B.A. coach Pat Riley, whose teams won five titles. Of the 18 questions Yost was asked, only one — about benching designated hitter Kendrys Morales — touched upon the strategic changes his team would have to make against the Mets as the series shifted to a National League ballpark. Instead, the questions ranged from Yordano Ventura’s postseason (Ventura will start Game 3 for the Royals) to the Gold Glove finalists announced Thursday (four Royals were named). An hour later, Mets Manager Terry Collins had to regularly reinforce the idea that his team had not lost its confidence after playing 23 innings of mostly futile baseball in Kansas City, leaving with no victories and tired bodies that did not get home and into bed until 5 a.m. Thursday. Preparing for Game 3 of the World Series at Citi Field on Friday night, the Royals brimmed with cool confidence, while the Mets looked to make adjustments against a team that stroked a number of timely hits against the Mets’ vaunted pitching staff. “I’m very, very impressed by it, how they do it and how they handle it,” Collins said. He added: “We’ve got to make better pitches. You can’t keep throwing the ball — there’s seven inches on each side of the plate, you’ve got to get it to the edges or they’re going to get good hits.” Noah Syndergaard, the Mets’ starter in Game 3, has devised a game plan based on how the Royals aggressively attacked Matt Harvey and Jacob deGrom, the Mets’ starters in the first two games. Syndergaard, a rookie who is 1-1 with a 2.77 E.R.A. this postseason, said he would continue to pitch to his strengths, whereas Harvey threw a lower percentage of fastballs than usual in Game 1. Syndergaard also hinted that he would not necessarily open the game with a first-pitch strike to Alcides Escobar, the leadoff hitter who surprised the Mets with an inside-the-park home run in the Royals’ first at-bat in Game 1. “I have a few tricks up my sleeve that I’ll be able to break out tomorrow night,” Syndergaard said. Shortly after Syndergaard’s news conference, he threw long tosses in right field before heading to the bullpen. The snapping of his high-velocity fastballs hitting the catcher’s mitt was the only ambient sound at Citi Field. Collins decided against holding a formal workout, citing his team’s need for rest and their familiarity with Citi Field, with the exception of two temporary commissioner’s boxes set up near the dugouts behind home plate. “To bring them out just so you guys can all go in and get a quote from them doesn’t make much sense to me,” Collins said. “So we’re going to give them a blow and get them ready for tomorrow.” The Royals, too, did not do much Thursday, but they did open their clubhouse for 30 minutes. They spoke with the assurance of players who have a two-game lead. “I think our team really matches up well in an N.L. game,” said first baseman Eric Hosmer, referring to the designated-hitter rules that are out of play for Games 3 through 5 (if Game 5 is needed). Although the Mets kept their operations close to the vest, making only Syndergaard and Michael Cuddyer available in addition to Collins, they tried to emphasize the longtime franchise slogan, “Ya Gotta Believe.” The 1986 Mets were one of the 11 teams that have overcome a 2-0 deficit in the Series. “There’s a lot of confidence in that clubhouse,” Collins said. “I talked to them when we got back off the field last night. It was a similar refrain from the night before. That is: We’re down, but we’re not out.”
|
Baseball;Ned Yost;Noah Syndergaard;Mets;Terry L Collins;Kansas City Royals;World Series
|
ny0178518
|
[
"world",
"middleeast"
] |
2007/08/03
|
Rice Backs Appointed Palestinian Premier and Mideast Democracy
|
RAMALLAH, West Bank, Aug. 2 — Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, embracing an appointed Palestinian prime minister here in the West Bank, said Thursday that the United States still supported democracy in the Middle East. But she defended the American refusal to recognize the earlier, elected, Hamas-led government. Standing next to Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, during a news conference here, Ms. Rice said, “We believe strongly in the right of people to express themselves and their desires, in elections.” But, she added, once elected, “ you have the obligation to govern responsibly.” She said that the United States and other Western nations had been right to boycott Hamas and the elected Palestinian government. “You can’t have one foot in the path of terror and one foot in the path of politics,” she added. Ms. Rice met with Salam Fayyad, the prime minister selected by Mr. Abbas after he ousted the Hamas-led government. Mr. Abbas of Fatah has been seeking to consolidate his power since a June coup left the rival Hamas movement in power in the Gaza Strip. He has held out the prospect of new elections soon. He appointed Mr. Fayyad after firing the Hamas-led government of Ismail Haniya. Hamas won a legislative majority in January 2006, but Fatah never agreed to accept it, and the United States and Israel refused to deal with Hamas, which they classify as a terrorist organization, unless it accepted Israel’s right to exist and agreed to give up violence. Ms. Rice said it was up to the Palestinians to decide when to hold a new vote, but the Americans, like the Israelis, have told Mr. Abbas they will not accept a renewal of a unity government with Hamas. Mr. Abbas said Thursday that he would not try to reconcile with Hamas unless they “reverse everything they did” and “apologize to the Palestinian people — then we might reconsider.” It would be nearly impossible for Mr. Abbas to hold an early vote unless Hamas agreed to one. Mr. Abbas told Ms. Rice that he was ready to work with Israel on a “declaration of principles” as an interim step toward a full peace agreement, an idea floated last week by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel. Such a declaration, as envisioned by Israel, would outline the contours of a future Palestinian state, without immediately tackling the most explosive issues, like final borders and the fate of Palestinian refugees. Mr. Abbas said Thursday that once such a declaration had been negotiated, “what is important is that we arrive at a result and that we know what that result is, what is the roof that we need to reach, but the stages of implementation can be agreed on later.” Separately on Wednesday and Thursday, Ms. Rice met with Mr. Olmert and other senior Israeli officials to discuss plans for Mr. Bush’s fall conference on Palestinian-Israeli peace. Her meetings in the West Bank ended a three-day swing through the region that included stops in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, where she pressed for Arab support for the conference. Ms. Rice’s trip was the first high-level American visit to Israel and the West Bank since the Gaza takeover. Since then, Mr. Abbas — and the world — have largely left Gaza to itself to be governed by Hamas, focusing aid and diplomatic efforts on the West Bank, where Mr. Abbas’s Fatah forces remain in control. The United States, Israel and the European Union have all welcomed the dissolution of the Palestinian government. Mr. Bush quickly unfroze $86 million in aid, which was put into the deep freeze after Hamas won the 2006 elections. On Thursday, Ms. Rice signed a so-called framework agreement with Mr. Fayyad, which ostensibly released the first $10 million in aid. The money is intended to strengthen Mr. Abbas’s security forces. A spokesman for Hamas in Gaza, Sami Abu Zuhri, criticized the Rice visit and the release of the aid. “She came to incite one Palestinian side against another,” he said. “She came to provide $80 million to stamp out resistance forces. Rice did not come to the region to establish a Palestinian state, as she and her master Bush claimed, but instead she came to support one Palestinian party against another, and to support the Zionist occupation.” In a statement, Mr. Olmert praised the Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, who said Wednesday that his country was leaning toward attending the Middle East meeting, but wanted it to be substantive. Mr. Olmert “shares the same approach, that the international meeting will be serious and meaningful, and he welcomes the participation of leaders of Arab countries in the meeting,” his office said. But Israeli officials also emphasized that, unlike the Saudis, the Israelis believe that the core issues of the conflict should be discussed in a bilateral format with the Palestinians, rather than in an international framework that might make them more difficult to solve. Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said the most delicate issues should not be addressed immediately. In Gaza City on Wednesday night, at least one Palestinian was killed when Hamas tried to arrest a member of Islamic Jihad after he fired into the air at a wedding. Medical officials said that in subsequent clashes between Islamic Jihad and Hamas’s Executive Force, acting as the police, one Executive Force member was killed.
|
Palestinians;Politics and Government;United States International Relations;Boycotts
|
ny0296730
|
[
"business",
"dealbook"
] |
2016/12/13
|
Big Banks Fight to Block Crisis-Era Lawsuits From Continuing
|
Big banks are fighting tens of billions of dollars of potential legal costs linked to at least a dozen pending lawsuits arising from the financial crisis. Now they want the Supreme Court to weigh in, arguing that regulators took too long to file their claims. A handful of banks, including Wells Fargo, Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank, have asked the Supreme Court to review a lower court decision that said the regulators filed their claims on time despite a Depression-era securities law that gave them only a three-year window. The Justice Department is pushing back. In a brief submitted last week, it says the banks’ argument lacks merit and asked the court not to take up the case. Damages related to some $37.5 billion in securities are at stake in the pending lawsuits, the banks say, in addition to billions of dollars in disputed prejudgment interest. That sum includes nearly $32 billion for cases in the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which most commonly decides securities cases. The banks say these lawsuits should have been barred under the strict three-year window and extensions should not have been allowed. The Second Circuit voted 2-to-1 against the banks last May. “In terms of financial crisis litigation, the stakes are enormous,” said Robert Giuffra, a partner at Sullivan & Cromwell and lead attorney for the banks. “If there’s a future downturn and the federal banking agencies want to start bringing lawsuits, they would get the benefit of this favorable decision.” The case involves the August 2009 failure of the Colonial Bank of Montgomery, Ala. The bank had $25 billion in assets and its collapse was among the largest in American history. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation later sued the institutions that issued or underwrote the roughly $300 million in mortgage-backed securities purchased by Colonial that led to its ruin, arguing that the disclosures on those securities contained false information or misrepresentations about the health of the underlying mortgages. The government argues that the lawsuits were timely under the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery and Enforcement Act, a 1980s law coming out of the savings and loan crisis that provides the F.D.I.C., when acting as a receiver, additional time to bring claims to court by overriding other statutes of limitations. Nearly identical provisions exist for regulators overseeing credit unions and mortgages. More broadly, Firrea has proved to be a key tool for the government after the mortgage meltdown. Other provisions of the law were used to help secure billion-dollar settlements from JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and others. The banks say the F.D.I.C., along with the Federal Housing Finance Agency and the National Credit Union Administration, has incorrectly relied on so-called extender provisions to bring cases to court years after certain troubled securities were sold. They point to the Securities Act of 1933, which imposes the stricter three-year deadline, called a statute of repose. They argue that the extender provision does not explicitly override such statutes. The intent of the deadline is to provide greater certainty to financial institutions about when they are exposed to costly litigation. Regulators filed their lawsuit over Colonial in August 2012, which the banks contend was about five years after Colonial purchased the securities. A lower federal court judge sided with the industry in 2014 before the Second Circuit panel split, 2 to 1, in favor of the government last May. The appeals court found that Firrea does supersede all applicable time limits, including statutes of repose. The appellate court correctly held that the Firrea extender provision “establishes the sole time limit applicable to suits brought by the F.D.I.C. as receiver,” the government’s brief filed last week says. “That holding does not conflict with any decision of this court or of another court of appeals.” “To the contrary,” the brief adds, “it is consistent with the unanimous view of all of the other appellate courts, including the Fifth, Ninth and Tenth Circuits, that have considered the issue” under the extender provision “or under virtually identical provisions governing suits by other federal entities.” A F.D.I.C. spokesman, David Barr, declined to comment on the case. The financial industry has previously petitioned the Supreme Court twice to hear related cases, and has been denied both times. The court receives thousands of petitions every year, and the odds of being granted a hearing are generally very low. In their latest attempt, the banks pointed to a 2014 decision in an environmental case over contaminated drinking water, CTS Corp. v. Waldburge r, in which the justices voted, 7 to 2, that an extender provision did not displace a statute of repose. The banks argued that lower courts are misapplying the law by not following the reasoning laid out in that case. “There is nothing about the CTS decision that suggested that it would apply only to that particular statute and that the principles that were announced there shouldn’t be of general application,” said Michael Dell, a partner at the law firm Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel, who is representing several trade groups in the case. The Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, the American Bankers Association and the Clearing House Association together filed a brief in support of the banks’ petition in November. The earlier petitions to the high court, the banks say, included key differences: One was filed shortly after the CTS decision, before there was a record of how lower courts would respond, and the another dealt with a state statute of repose, not the federal securities law at issue in the current lawsuit. The government argues that no new issues have come to light that require further examination. “This court has twice denied petitions for writs of certiorari that raised essentially the same arguments as this one,” the Justice Department says in its brief. “Petitioners identify no changed circumstance that would warrant a different result here.” Critics who would like to see the banks pay for their actions urge the court to focus on the broader policy considerations stemming from the crash. “Those who were most guilty of causing the financial crash in 2008 have fought tooth and nail to avoid being held responsible — and they have been wildly successful at doing that,” said Dennis Kelleher, president and chief executive of Better Markets, an advocacy group focused on financial markets. “One of the reasons we’re seeing political earthquakes in the U.S. is the lack of accountability on Wall Street.”
|
Banking and Finance;Regulation and Deregulation;Lawsuits;Wells Fargo &;Bank of America;Credit Suisse Group;Deutsche Bank;Colonial Bank;Justice Department;Supreme Court,SCOTUS
|
ny0267141
|
[
"sports",
"football"
] |
2016/03/30
|
Giants Linebacker Jasper Brinkley Returning
|
Linebacker Jasper Brinkley, the Giants’ third-leading tackler last season, re-signed with the team.
|
Football;Jasper Brinkley;Giants
|
ny0061942
|
[
"technology",
"personaltech"
] |
2014/01/16
|
Review: Typo Keyboard Case for iPhone 5
|
Despite the popularity of touch-screen smartphones, some BlackBerry users have clung to their phones equipped with tactile keyboards. For those reluctant to let go of their BlackBerry, Typo Keyboard is here to help with the transition to a touch screen. Typo is actually a cellphone case, currently available for the iPhone 5 and 5s, with a wireless keyboard on the bottom. The entrepreneurs behind the concept are hoping to make life easier for those who desire the functions and apps on the iPhone but also like hammering out an email on a keyboard. The case, which can be ordered from the company’s website for $99 for shipping in February, is surprisingly slim yet sturdy, adding little bulk to the iPhone. Inside is a tiny lithium-ion battery, only 1 millimeter thick. The keyboard covers the bottom of the phone, but the ports are still accessible. And setup, via Bluetooth, was easy. The keys are laid out in typical Qwerty fashion, with alternate keys for capitalization, numbers and symbols. The iPhone’s home button is covered, but Typo includes a button that returns your phone to its home screen, as well as one that lights up the keyboard. The buttons are relatively easy to push, especially for people who are familiar with BlackBerry devices. I gave up my BlackBerry for an iPhone years ago, so going back to a physical keyboard presented a bit of a challenge. After a few texts, though, my thumbs became more agile. But Typo has no trackpad, so I still had to use the touch screen. And there is no autocorrect, or even a send button, which didn’t make texting any faster for me. Typo Keyboard has garnered a lot of interest since its inception, mostly because it is backed by the celebrity host Ryan Seacrest and the company is facing a lawsuit from BlackBerry . But the unfortunately named device, which suggests a typographical error, needs some refinement before it deserves the attention it’s drawing.
|
Smartphone;iPhone;BlackBerry
|
ny0060791
|
[
"sports",
"autoracing"
] |
2014/08/12
|
Accidents Cloud Future for Tony Stewart in Sprint Cars
|
This Saturday night was going to be a big deal at the Plymouth Speedway dirt track in Indiana. The Bob Newton Classic is scheduled to be run on the track, a three-eighths-of-a-mile banked oval, and Tony Stewart, the Indiana native and three-time Nascar champion, was planning to compete. “We draw anywhere between 700 and 900,” Plymouth’s general manager, Mike Zielinski, said, “but on a night when he comes, there could be 2,500.” There is no telling what the crowd will be now. On Monday, the track announced that Stewart had pulled out of the event two days after an on-track accident in which the driver Kevin Ward Jr. was struck by Stewart and killed during a sprint car race at Canandaigua Motorsports Park in upstate New York. A note was posted on the Plymouth website that read: “We at Plymouth Speedway extend our deepest condolences and prayers to the family of Kevin Ward Jr., and thoughts and prayers to Tony Stewart and family. Tony Stewart will NOT be racing at Plymouth Speedway this Saturday. More information on the weekend’s racing will be announced this week.” It was the second straight race that Stewart had withdrawn from, after the decision Sunday not to compete in a Nascar Sprint Cup race at Watkins Glen International in New York. There is no word yet whether he plans to return next Sunday for a Nascar race at Michigan International Speedway. And there is at least some question whether Stewart, who started his career on dirt-track ovals on his way to Nascar’s big leagues, will continue to return to his racing roots from time to time. Or if he will cut back on his extracurricular racing in the aftermath of the accident, a move that could affect a sport that has been both helped and hurt at times by his presence. That decision will depend in part on the results of the investigation into Saturday’s accident . In an interview in his office Monday morning, Sheriff Philip C. Povero of Ontario County said that investigators were interviewing witnesses and dirt-track racing experts, and studying a reconstruction of the accident scene as they considered whether there was “probable cause that a violation of law occurred.” The possibility that Stewart hit the throttle in the moments before his car struck Ward has become a focus of the inquiry. “That’s part of the whole desire to collect people with an expert knowledge of this type of racing to review and analyze the video,” Povero said, “and to review and see whether that did or did not occur.” Stewart, whom Povero described as distraught in the aftermath of the crash, was cooperating with the investigation, Povero said. No criminal charges have been filed. Povero said that in his 43 years of work in the sheriff’s office, he could not recall anyone having been arrested after a crash at the dirt track. Image Sheriff Philip C. Povero of Ontario County described Tony Stewart, above, as distraught in the aftermath of the crash. Credit Jared C. Tilton/Getty Images The accident Saturday night was the third serious sprint car crash for Stewart in about a year. He blamed himself for a 15-car crash at Canandaigua Motorsports Park in July 2013 in which two drivers were hurt. A few weeks later, he sustained a broken leg in a race at Oskaloosa, Iowa, forcing him out of the Sprint Cup series for the rest of the season. Now this. “When you’ve been snakebit three times, you may have to think about what your hobby is going to be from now on,” said Humpy Wheeler, a racing promoter who began his career in dirt tracks. Stewart’s driving future also affects his Stewart-Haas Racing team, which had to sign other drivers to compete in the No. 14 Chevrolet in Stewart’s absence. Regan Smith ran Sunday’s race in place of Stewart. Although the three sprint car accidents were very different, they raise the question of whether Stewart should be racing in that series, if his presence affects other drivers who may become more aggressive to try to beat the Nascar star in their midst. “When I’ve been at many a track he has come to, I’ve heard promoters say ‘Hey, Tony’s here, we’re going to have a heck of a race’ — it’s better than a full moon, ’cause their own drivers are going to rise to the occasion,” Wheeler said. Some think the gap in experience between Stewart and local drivers may have created additional danger. “They’re used to a little more talent than what we’ve got around here,” said Scott Caton, a race fan and bartender who works near the Canandaigua track. But Dain Naida, a sprint car racer from Tecumseh, Mich., who has driven against Stewart several times in his career, said he did not think that drivers became too aggressive in Stewart’s presence. Nor does he believe that Stewart’s own aggressiveness on the track was a problem for less experienced drivers. “He by no means comes in and dominates any of those races,” said Naida, who watched the video of the crash and defended Stewart’s actions. “He’s won a few, but he hasn’t won an absolute ton of them in a winged sprint car, and I think that’s part of the challenge to Tony when he comes to races.” The problem, Naida said, is that although Stewart brings fans back to races, his accidents have also drawn negative media attention. “It’s wonderful that he brings so much publicity to the sport, and the areas where it’s bad is when something bad happens like when he broke his leg last year,” Nadia said. “All you see all over the newscasts are: Sprint cars are way too unsafe; he shouldn’t be racing these kinds of cars.” Will Stewart return? After Saturday night, it would not be surprising if he stepped away, at least for a while, and reassessed his involvement. “When it ceases to be fun, you’ve got to think about doing something else,” Wheeler said. “Certainly, today is no fun for Tony Stewart.”
|
Car Racing;Tony Stewart;Kevin Ward Jr.;Accidents and Safety
|
ny0074634
|
[
"nyregion"
] |
2015/04/08
|
4 Workers Injured at Midtown Manhattan Construction Site
|
Four construction workers were injured on Tuesday in Manhattan when they fell while doing interior demolition work and were struck by debris, the authorities said. The workers, whose names were not immediately released, were taken to Bellevue Hospital Center after the episode, which a Fire Department spokesman said occurred just after 10 a.m. at 331 Madison Avenue, near 43rd Street. They were working near an open stairway on the mezzanine level of the building, which is undergoing a gut renovation, when the accident occurred, Battalion Chief Tom Meara said. As the workers fell from a height of about two stories, the Fire Department said, a chandelier collapsed, as did part of a heavy marble banister. Chief Meara said that all construction would be halted at the site but that the building was considered structurally sound. A spokeswoman for the building’s owner, SL Green Realty Corporation, said it was monitoring the workers’ conditions. By late Tuesday afternoon, the spokeswoman, Nicole Kolinsky, said that three of the workers were expected to be released from the hospital by day’s end and that the fourth was admitted in stable condition. The interior demolition work was being done by Waldorf Demolition, with Tishman Construction as the construction manager, Ms. Kolinsky said. “There was a licensed site safety manager present,” she added. “Safety is our top priority.” She said the owners were coordinating with the contractors and the New York City Department of Buildings to resume work at the site.
|
Accidents and Safety;Construction;Midtown Area Manhattan;Waldorf Demolition;SL Green Realty
|
ny0030801
|
[
"us"
] |
2013/06/07
|
Federal Stewardship of Wild Horses Criticized in Report
|
DENVER — A new report catalogs a range of problems with the way the federal government is managing thousands of wild horses and burros that roam the American West, supporting the position of animal rights advocates who have long argued that the program is ineffective and needlessly cruel. The report , conducted by the National Academy of Sciences at the behest of the Bureau of Land Management and released Wednesday, concluded that the bureau’s methods of counting the thousands of wild horses and burros that wander rural stretches of the United States were inconsistent and most likely inaccurate. It also said that the bureau’s policy of removing the animals from the range and taking them to holding facilities as a means of population control, an approach that has drawn sharp criticism from wild horse proponents, did not work. “Continuing ‘business as usual’ will be expensive and unproductive for B.L.M. and the public it serves,” the report said. “Compelling evidence exists that there are more horses and burros on public rangelands than reported at the national level and that population growth rates are high.” An icon of frontier mythology, wild horses , which trace their lineage to United States Cavalry horses, workhorses and horses brought by Spanish settlers, have been at the center of an increasingly bitter dispute over the past several years. The bureau contends that their numbers have become unmanageable. And it says it has little choice but to bring them to enclosed pastures so that other animals can share the land. Horse advocates counter that the horses should be allowed to live freely. The bureau estimates that about 37,300 wild horses and burros roam on federally managed rangeland in 10 Western states and that nearly 50,000 additional animals are being cared for at short-term corrals and long-term pastures. With essentially no natural predators, herds typically double every four years. The National Academy of Sciences report found that the bureau had most likely undercounted the horses by 10 to 50 percent. It also said that the bureau’s horse removals might inadvertently allow the animal population to swell by reducing competition for forage. The report recommended that more fertility control drugs be used as an alternative, a departure from the bureau’s current approach. “It needs to be used in a consistent, widespread manner, which has not been done today,” said Dr. Guy Palmer, a veterinarian at Washington State University and the chairman of the committee that conducted the study. “In theory, you could continue the status quo if the American public is willing to continue to pay for long-term holding pastures,” Dr. Palmer said. “However, there are growing concerns that this is economically unsustainable. And that’s not what the public expects.” According to the bureau, the program’s budget ballooned to $75 million in 2012 from about $20.4 million in 2000, driven primarily by the rising cost of holding horses and burros. In its research, the National Academy of Sciences did not specifically address the issue of roundups, which involve helicopters corralling wild horses into traps and have become a rallying cry for critics who say they are dangerous and inhumane. Nonetheless, horse advocates said the findings affirmed their concerns by calling for changes in the program. “The report is a powerful validation of what wild horse advocates have been saying for years,” said Suzanne Roy, director of the American Wild Horse Preservation Campaign . “The report delivers a strong case for an immediate halt to the roundup and removal of wild horses from the range, an increase in wild horse and burro population levels and implementation of in-the-wild management using available fertility control options.” A bureau spokesman, Tom Gorey, said the bureau needed and wanted to do a better job managing the animals, but was well aware the program was in a “crisis” because it was running out of holding space. Mr. Gorey also pointed out that because fertility control treatments lasted only one to two years, some horse removals would have to continue. Leaving the population control to nature, he said, “would subject horses and burros to mass starvation and dehydration,” he said. “We don’t think that laissez-faire style is something the American public or Congress would support.” Mr. Gorey noted that the conclusion that wild horses had been undercounted undermined assertions from animal rights advocates that the program was deliberately overstating the problem “to disguise an alleged agenda of ‘managing for extinction.’ ” In a statement, Neil Kornze, the bureau’s principal deputy director, said the bureau was open to more options to better control the wild horse population and help the program become more cost effective. “Our agency is committed to protecting and managing these iconic animals for current and future generations,” he said.
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Horse;Animal Cruelty;BLM;National Academy of Sciences;Western States
|
ny0053977
|
[
"business"
] |
2014/07/07
|
Reno Rolls the Dice on High-Tech
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RENO, Nev. — A street newly nicknamed Startup Row intersects this city’s old strip of casinos touting Money Maker Jackpots and Crazy Cash Slot Tournaments. While old-fashioned slot machines are whirring nearby, this stretch of road has become a home for smartphone app makers, cloud computing developers and companies like one that set up shop here recently to build tiny sensors that allow devices to connect to the Internet. For most of America, Reno stirs images of worn-out casinos, strip clubs and quick divorces. But it is trying to change that reputation and reduce its reliance on gambling by taking advantage of its location and low taxes to gain a solid footing in the new economy. Instead of poker payouts, Reno now boasts of e-commerce ventures, an Apple data center and a testing ground for drones. It also hopes to attract a large factory to build batteries for Tesla’s electric vehicles. “People believe in this town, and they’re tired of being presented as this joke,” said Abbi Whitaker, a local business owner who helped create a marketing campaign to reshape Reno’s image. “When you’re at rock bottom there’s a good chance to reinvent how you go up.” Reno exemplifies how cities not far from California, including Boise, Idaho, and Tucson, are trying to poach the state’s technology culture to help diversify their economies, marketing themselves as places where taxes are lower and environmental regulations are less onerous. They hope that when the next recession strikes, they will not sink to the same depths as they did in the last one. Reno is among the best situated, less than a four-hour drive from San Francisco and in a state with no corporate or inventory taxes. It gained appeal as an outpost of Silicon Valley nearly a decade ago after a Microsoft licensing unit and an Amazon distribution warehouse moved in. California refugees were buying homes, lured by the relatively low cost of living and the 30-minute drive to Lake Tahoe. Then came the Great Recession, walloping Reno’s gambling industry, and its housing and job markets. At the end of the recession in 2009, homes had lost nearly half the value they had in the beginning of 2006, and median prices continued to fall. At its depths in September 2010, Reno’s unemployment rate was 13.4 percent compared with the national average, 9.5 percent, according to Moody’s Analytics. But now, after several years scraping along the bottom in almost every measure of economic health, Reno appears poised to turn the corner, according to economists who study the region. Housing prices are slowly starting to rise. The unemployment rate has declined to 7.1 percent. New technology companies are arriving, and older ones are expanding, including Zulily, an e-commerce company for women and children’s clothing and home décor, which announced plans in May to double its warehouse and hire 600 people. Most of all, civic boosters are on edge waiting for Tesla, Elon Musk’s electric vehicle company, to announce the location of its new battery factory that is expected to employ more than 6,000 people. Tesla has said it is considering Nevada, Texas, California, Arizona and New Mexico. Reno is not far from one of the few lithium deposits in the country, it is relatively close to Fremont, Calif., where the vehicles will be assembled, and its industrial park has tens of thousands of acres of land for the auto company’s new expansive factory. Tesla officials did not respond to requests for comment. “There are solid reasons to be optimistic about Reno,” said Greg Bird, an economist at Moody’s Analytics. “We’re starting to really see the data turn for them.” Reno competes for new businesses with Salt Lake City and major cities in Arizona, all of which are convenient for online retailers to set up shipping locations for customers in California and the rest of the West. In Tucson, Duralar Technologies, a global nanotechnology company, announced in March that it planned to set up its United States headquarters there. Boise has increased its marketing to lure new technology companies and has drawn several start-ups in recent years, said Clark Krause, executive director of the Boise Valley Economic Partnership. The organization emphasizes its outdoor lifestyle on its website. It is not a simple climb back from the depths of the recession for these cities. Nearly all are constrained by a shortage of skilled workers to fill the jobs created by companies their economic development offices are trying to attract. “We have the same challenges everyone else does when it comes to finding enough talent to grow as much as we could,” Mr. Krause said. In Reno, where many workers traditionally have been employed in some aspect of the gambling industry, the work force is less educated than in more populous cities, economists said. Tesla, for instance, might have to recruit from elsewhere to find enough trained workers for its battery plant, should it decide to build here. “We’re not going to wait for the gaming industry to come back,” said Mike Kazmierski, president of the Economic Development Authority of Western Nevada. “It’s not going to. So what are our strengths, and how do we capitalize on them?” Mr. Kazmierski is encouraging Reno to prepare for the new kinds of companies his team is wooing. A major part of his strategy is just up the hill from Reno’s casino strip: the University of Nevada, Reno. The campus of 18,000 students has traditionally not played a major role in the city’s economy and is physically separated from the rest of town by Interstate 80. Students often earn their degrees and leave. But now, the university is starting to work with Mr. Kazmierski’s team to make sure students are trained in specific skills or even the languages needed by companies looking to settle in Reno. The university created an on-campus office space this spring for an Australian drone company that decided to open a research outlet in Reno, one of a handful of locations the federal government has selected for testing unoccupied aerial vehicles. Image Abbi Whitaker, owner of the Abbi Agency, who helped create a campaign to reshape Reno’s image, and Mark Estee, a chef, at Campo, his restaurant along the Truckee River downtown. Credit David Calvert for The New York Times Separately, the university just announced plans to take over an empty downtown building that will house a center for drone research, a student welcome center and a coffee shop. Mr. Kazmierski outlined his vision on a recent morning driving down Reno’s casino strip, past the Showboat Inn, the pay-by-the-week motels and signs advertising $5.99 prime rib and fries. Towering old casino buildings could be turned into student dormitories or condos. Storefronts could house technology companies. The new drone research building could host an incubator space for businesses. For companies, the region’s chief draw is its lack of taxes. But the location has other advantages. Reno is less than a two-day drive to anywhere in the West, an advantage for shipping companies. And there is no shortage of land ready for development. Outside town, along miles of scrubby desert, large manufacturing centers, distribution centers and office parks already have moved in, and more are on the way. The area is so expansive that wild horses roam among the warehouses. Surveyor stakes mark new developments, and fire hydrants sprout seemingly in the middle of nowhere. Three years ago Reno and the neighboring town Sparks averaged four tours a month for prospective companies. Mr. Kazmierski said that had increased to 10, with scouts from 14 companies visiting in May. “The most challenging obstacle to get over is our image,” he said. “That image of a second-tier kind of Vegas is embedded in their heads.” Visiting executives are surprised to learn that the Truckee River cuts through downtown, where a restaurant scene is emerging. Bike paths wind through the city and beyond, and urban gardeners raise chickens in their backyards. A new downtown boutique hotel has no casino. Instead, its main feature is its 164-foot climbing wall. The Reno Collective, along Startup Row, offers a shared work space to foster entrepreneurialism. On a recent day the office was filled by young people tapping on laptops, some sitting on exercise balls, and one with a dog curled around her feet. In the same building, Eric Jennings set up his company, Pinoccio, two years ago, making tiny radio sensors for enabling Internet connectivity. “There’s such a low barrier to entry here,” Mr. Jennings said. “If you’re passionate about something you can just take it on.”
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Reno;Startup;Casino;Relocation;Corporate tax;Recession and Depression;Silicon Valley;University of Nevada; Reno;Science and Technology
|
ny0240800
|
[
"nyregion"
] |
2010/12/12
|
Eli Zabar, a Dining King, Dines Well on Sundays
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If an award existed for ensuring that New Yorkers ate well on Sunday (and every other day), Eli Zabar , whose gastronomic empire includes E.A.T. on Madison Avenue, the Vinegar Factory, Eli’s Manhattan and Eli’s Bread, would be a serious contender. He has been growing vegetables on the Vinegar Factory rooftop for 15 years, and he took over the farmers’ market in Amagansett, N.Y., in 2008. Mr. Zabar, 67, lives on the Upper East Side with his wife, Devon Fredericks, 60, who works for the company, and their 19-year-old twin boys, Sasha and Oliver. DONNA PAUL NO ALARM NEEDED I have an internal clock that seems to know when the sun will rise, and that’s when I am up. Now, around 5:30 a.m. I check e-mails and make coffee. I set everything up the night before so the beans are ready to grind fresh. Then I’ll walk our two Wheaten terriers, Toby and Mini. I like to drink my coffee from a thick-rimmed, white porcelain mug. Before leaving for my jog, I’ll bring a tray with coffee up to Devon. CENTRAL PARK JOG I’ve been meeting the same friend, Michael Donovan, every Sunday for 15 years. It’s kind of a therapeutic run. We discuss business and personal issues, our kids, whatever comes up. We take a different route each week, depending on our mood. Our ritual is to end at Eli’s Manhattan on Third Avenue for the 8 a.m. opening, where we meet up with another friend, Robi Blumenstein, for breakfast. FORAGE FOR FRUIT We always sit at the same table. I’ll start by going downstairs to the produce department in search of fresh fruit. I’ll stuff apples, pears, grapefruit, whatever I see that appeals to me that day into the pockets of my vest jacket. I’ll bring it all upstairs and cut slices right on our table and order seven-grain bread, toasted dark. We spend about an hour eating and talking about a wide range of subjects; they are both very interesting and smart. BREAKFAST, PART TWO I’ll head home to shower, and then between 11 and noon, Devon and I head back to Eli’s, and this time sit at the bar and order huevos rancheros. If our kids are home from college, we’ll go to E.A.T. and order the tower of bagels. If we are with friends who have young children, then we’ll go to the upstairs brunch at the Vinegar Factory. WORK ON WINE After brunch, I’ll head back to Eli’s to do a little work. That usually involves having a meeting with my wine manager and cellar master. We taste wines that have recently arrived and write descriptions of it for the menu. We discuss which bottles are going to be placed in the cellar. My passion is rare wines from Europe, especially Burgundy and the Piedmont region of Italy. FLY OR WALK Depending on the weather and the season, I might go fly my plane. It’s a Piper 2009 J3 Cub. If not, Devon and I might go for a walk along the High Line or go to a museum. Sometimes I’ll watch a football game on television at home. EARLY DINNER We eat around 5:30 or 6 o’clock. A special treat is going to Brooklyn to Franny’s for pizza. I love the appetizers there; everything they serve is great. Often we eat home and have friends over. Devon is a fantastic cook. She makes a salad with kale and roasted pine nuts that I adore. This time of year we’ve been eating white truffles on pasta or scrambled eggs. We are enjoying them now because in January they’ll be gone. MOVIE OR BOOKS We finish reading the Sunday Times after dinner, and either watch a movie or read books. I have to be in bed by 10:30. I can’t stand nighttime.
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Zabar Eli;Restaurants;Vinegar Factory
|
ny0019913
|
[
"us"
] |
2013/07/24
|
After Filibuster, a Star Rises in Texas
|
NEW YORK — She comes from a key district in North Texas, has a slow twang, battle scars and ferocity of spirit, and after one drama-filled day in the bitter abortion fight in the Texas Legislature, Wendy Davis has become a national political star and charismatic new face of women’s rights. For 11 hours, in a midday-to-midnight filibuster, Ms. Davis, a Fort Worth Democrat, held forth on the floor of the State Senate last month against a Republican bill severely limiting abortion. Cheered on by a packed gallery and hundreds of other supporters in the halls of the Capitol in Austin (and thousands watching a live stream of the proceedings), the telegenic 50-year-old single mother of two was able to stop the bill — if only, as it turned out, for three weeks. She was an overnight sensation. In short order, she pumped life into the moribund Texas Democratic Party, recharged the state’s women’s movement, raised nearly $1 million in two weeks for her re-election campaign and, not least, was beseeched by supporters and some in her party to run for governor in 2014, which might be a quixotic quest in a state that has not elected a Democrat to that office in 20 years. Now, while she thinks about all that, Ms. Davis is going to Washington. She will be the host of two fund-raisers on Thursday. One, a $500-a-head breakfast at Johnny’s Half Shell, a restaurant on Capitol Hill, will feature House and Senate Democrats including Senators Kirsten E. Gillibrand of New York and Barbara Boxer of California. Later, she will be the host of a happy-hour fund-raiser, at $25 to $250 a person, at Local 16 in the hip U Street neighborhood. Ms. Davis already has the support of major players in the capital. Emily’s List, the two-million-member organization focused on electing pro-choice Democratic women, included the senator on a recent list of potential female presidential candidates and has declared a stake in her success, saying, “Emily’s List helped elect Wendy Davis to the Texas State Legislature in 2008, and supported her competitive re-election campaign in 2012.” Behind her ascent in the political arena is this network of powerful women, organizations and advocates, principally Annie’s List, a 10-year-old, Austin-based organization that, with about 6,000 donors and 26,000 supporters, recruits, trains and finances female Democratic candidates in Texas. “Senator Davis has a stellar record,” Annie’s List’s executive director, Grace Garcia, a 58-year-old native of San Antonio, Texas, said by phone from Austin. “We have been standing strong behind her since 2008, when we recruited her to run for the Texas Senate in a swing district seat held by a 20-year incumbent.” At that time, Ms. Davis, who had put herself through junior college, Texas Christian University and Harvard Law School, was serving in the Fort Worth City Council and practicing law. She won an uphill battle then and won another tough fight for re-election last year. This month, Annie’s List handed the senator $50,000 to help kick off her campaign for re-election next year. “It won’t be a cakewalk,” said Ms. Garcia, a former deputy in the Clinton White House and a senior adviser in the State Department under former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. As to all the talk about Ms. Davis’s possible candidacy for governor, Ms. Garcia seemed cautious. “I believe that Texas will be a better state if she were our governor,” she said. “But the important question is, is Texas ready?” Texas political experts suggest that Ms. Davis has little chance of winning the governor’s race, pointing to the Republicans’ strong record in the Lone Star State, their millionaire contributors and the fund-raising ability of the front-running Republican candidate, Attorney General Greg Abbott. The Texas Tribune said “that 2014 is looking like yet another blowout for the Republicans, which means more dashed Democratic hopes of turning Texas blue, or even gaining a toehold.” The Tribune was alluding to Battleground Texas, a spinoff of the Obama 2012 campaign aimed at turning Texas, the second-largest state in the country, with a big haul of electoral votes, from Republican red to Democratic blue. Over the past few weeks, Ms. Davis has said that it was an honor to be mentioned as a possible candidate for governor but that she would be disappointed if Democrats did not field a serious candidate for that office, prompting some people to believe she might run despite the odds. “She will be very strategic about looking at the landscape,” Ms. Garcia told me. “It may not be 2014.” Ms. Davis’s most powerful political benefactor, Amber Anderson Mostyn, a 42-year-old trial lawyer who is the board chair of Annie’s List, said in an e-mail last week: “When she was recruited by Annie’s List in 2008 to challenge a 20-year incumbent senator, I knew that Wendy had the strength and tenacity to win with Annie’s List’s support.” Notably, she did not mention a possible Davis candidacy for governor. This is relevant because Ms. Mostyn and Annie’s List have been Ms. Davis’s biggest contributors. “I have always wanted Wendy to be my governor,” Ms. Mostyn said in an article in The New Republic magazine this month. “But I don’t want everyone to get carried away with the events of the day without the mathematics having changed.” Ms. Mostyn and her husband, Steve Mostyn, run a lucrative law practice in Houston. They have made millions on insurance litigation and rank among the biggest Democratic financial backers. They contributed $5.2 million in the 2012 cycle to super PACs, the independent political action committees, ranking 17 among top donors nationally , according to the Center for Public Integrity. Their contribution to super PACs is modest compared with donations from fellow Texans like Harold Simmons ($30.9 million) and the late Bob Perry ($23.5 million), both Republican patrons. The Mostyns also seeded Battleground Texas with a $250,000 check, according to Texas Monthly. Battleground Texas got its footing early this year and is said to be searching for viable Democratic candidates to run for statewide office. Ms. Davis seems a likely candidate for a statewide run. But without the full-throated political and financial support of Ms. Mostyn, she could hardly make it. Whatever Ms. Davis decides to do next, her rise nationally could not have happened at a better time for women’s rights groups, which are facing hard-line conservatives in Congress and in state legislatures, a legacy of the 2010 midterm elections, which swept Tea Party candidates into office. “The 2010 election really changed the composition of many of the state legislatures, creating an environment where anti-choice restrictions are getting more traction,” said Julie Rikelman, the litigation director of the U.S. program of the New York-based Center for Reproductive Rights. Her organization, along with Planned Parenthood and the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, is considering a court challenge of the Texas abortion law, which bans abortions after 20 weeks and imposes strict health regulations on state abortion clinics. For Annie’s List, Wendy Davis has been a boon to its campaign to elect more women like Annise Parker, the mayor of Houston, and Mary Gonzalez of El Paso, the second openly gay State House representative. “We’ve been ruled by Tea Party Republicans,” Ms. Garcia said. “We’ve been battling in red Texas for 10 years. For us, it’s a battle, district by district. I’m very hopeful we have reached a turning point.”
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Texas;Democrats;Abortion;Women's rights,Feminism;Politics;Campaign finance
|
ny0245926
|
[
"world",
"asia"
] |
2011/04/01
|
New to Work, the Young Inherit Japan’s Crises
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TOKYO — As hundreds of thousands of young people begin their working lives on Friday, they face a transformed Japan that will test a generation reared in affluence yet dismissed by its elders as selfish materialists. April 1 is the traditional entrance day for incoming classes of new employees, who assume adult responsibilities and values along with the new suits and crisp white shirts that are the uniforms of corporate Japan. But they face a landscape as uncertain as any in their lives, with Japan’s economy hobbled and its national pride bruised by the triple disasters of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear crisis. Yo Miura had expected to enter a bank in the Sendai area, counting on a steady income and a modest amount of prestige. But his start date at the bank has been put off while northeastern Japan struggles to rebuild. “My life has completely changed,” he said while sitting in the job office at Tohoku University in Sendai, his alma mater. “Before, my life was peaceful and predictable. Now, I’m not sure what the future holds.” While he awaits word from his employer, Mr. Miura plans to follow his friends’ example and volunteer to help people rebuild their homes. Mr. Miura hopes that by fixing broken walls and retiling roofs, he can repair people’s lives and bring deeper meaning to his own. “So many houses are shattered, I will feel good helping out,” he said. While many of their elders wrote them off as too coddled to live up to traditional Japanese values of self-sacrifice and hard work, many young people are finding meaning in the crisis. Even before the earthquake, this generation was struggling with a sense of thwarted opportunities in a stagnant economy. With the erosion of the postwar compact that traded a slavish devotion to work for stable wages and benefits, many young people felt alienated. Legions of college graduates, unable to land full-time jobs and eager to express their individuality, have drifted in and out of part-time work, a limbo-like existence that older generations find unfathomable. Now some graduates, destined for corporate life, have found purpose volunteering to work at nonprofit groups shuttling aid to the newly destitute in the prefectures north of here. Students have taken to the streets to collect donations for those in need. Blogs and social networking sites are flooded with comments from young people asking what they can do to help. “Before the earthquake, I thought about myself and what I can do for my new company,” said Miki Kamiyama, who just graduated from Meiji University and will start working at a small cable company in Yokohama on Friday. “But now I think what I can do for all of society.” Among the hardest-hit are the new hires at Tokyo Electric Power Company, which owns the disabled nuclear power plants in Fukushima. Once one of Japan’s most prestigious companies, Tokyo Electric has become the target of anger and contempt, and some observers question whether it will need government aid. Tokyo Electric, known as Tepco, is so consumed with shutting down its reactors in Fukushima that it is unlikely to have many free workers to train the 1,100 or so new hires that start work this week, and many new construction projects have been put off. Still, some new hires sense an opportunity to fix a broken company. “In a way, I feel fortunate that I will be on the front line to help the people and Japan’s society,” said one new entrant who asked that his name not be used so as not to alienate his employer. “I feel that people who work for companies like Tepco want to help in some way.” The personal transformations are more subtle outside Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima, the three prefectures that have suffered the most. Without obvious damage to fix, young people are instead grappling with a silent threat from radioactive particles, as well as rolling blackouts that have forced Japanese to do without many of the electronic gadgets that were their constant companions. The larger question is whether these young adults will remain as committed and concerned as they appear to be now. Life in many Japanese companies, especially for new hires, can be all-consuming, leaving little time for sleep, let alone volunteer activities. Partners, spouses and children will have their own gravitational pull. And because people’s identities are so closely tied to the groups they are part of, social pressure may naturally lead them to narrow their circles to family, associates from work and friends from school. “It’s premature to say what the impact of the earthquake and tsunami will be,” said Hiroshi Sakurai, who teaches sociology at the School of International Liberal Studies at Waseda University. “Japanese have gotten used to these things.” But a minority of young adults may continue to find meaning not just in the suffering they are seeing daily, but the outpouring of support for Japan from other countries. That sense of interconnectedness has motivated Keiko Eda, a volunteer at Peace Winds Japan, a humanitarian relief organization in Tokyo. “Because of the earthquake, I think a lot of young people are clearly changing, including me,” she said. “We don’t recognize this as our normal lives anymore.” For now, companies in Tokyo and elsewhere in Japan are adapting to the less-than-normal start of the fiscal year. Many of them have canceled the yearly ceremonies where executives greet new workers on their first day on the job. Moments of silence are now the norm. Late-night drinking sessions with superiors that mix bonding and hazing are being shunned. For now, people are continuing to search for ways they can help, large and small. Shota Kitanishi, a student at Kwansei Gakuin University in Nishinomiya, near Kobe, was 4 years old when the earthquake of 1995 destroyed parts of the city. He grew up watching the city being rebuilt. In solidarity, he is asking other students to pledge about $12 a month for 12 months and send the money to aid groups helping victims in northeastern Japan. “You just can’t think of the disaster as someone else’s disaster,” he said. “We’re all Japanese. When you get together, you feel like you can do anything.”
|
Japan Earthquake and Tsunami (2011);Economic Conditions and Trends;Labor and Jobs;Politics and Government
|
ny0137678
|
[
"us"
] |
2008/05/07
|
A City Committed to Recycling Is Ready for More
|
SAN FRANCISCO — Mayor Gavin Newsom is competitive about many things, garbage included. When the city found out a few weeks ago that it was keeping 70 percent of its disposable waste out of local landfills, he embraced the statistic the way other mayors embrace winning sports teams, improved test scores or declining crime rates. But the city wants more. So Mr. Newsom will soon be sending the city’s Board of Supervisors a proposal that would make the recycling of cans, bottles, paper, yard waste and food scraps mandatory instead of voluntary, on the pain of having garbage pickups suspended. “Without that, we don’t think we can get to 75 percent,” the mayor said of the proposal. His aides said it stood a good chance of passing. How does he describe his fixation with recycling dominance? “It’s purposefulness that could otherwise be construed as ego,” Mr. Newsom said. “You want to be the greatest city. You want to be the leading city. You want to be on the cutting edge. I’m very intense about it.” In a more businesslike tone, Jared Blumenfeld, the director of the city’s environmental programs, addressed one of the main reasons the city keeps up the pressure to recycle. “The No. 1 export for the West Coast of the United States is scrap paper,” Mr. Blumenfeld said, explaining that the paper is sent to China and returns as packaging that holds the sneakers, electronics and toys sold in big-box stores. Not that Mr. Blumenfeld does not have a competitive streak of his own. San Francisco can charge more for its scrap paper, he said, because of its low levels of glass contamination. That is because about 15 percent of the city’s 1,200 garbage trucks have two compartments, one for recyclables. That side has a compactor that can compress mixed loads of paper, cans and bottles without breaking the bottles. (These specially designed trucks, which run on biodiesel, cost about $300,000 apiece, at least $25,000 more than a standard truck, said Benny Anselmo, who manages the fleet for Norcal.) Another major innovation in the past decade was the development of infrastructure for turning food wastes — a major part of the waste stream in a city with thousands of restaurants — into baggable compost that is used in California’s vineyards and the vast farms of the Central Valley. The garbage from San Francisco’s 750,000 residents is picked up on the pay-as-you-throw principle — the more garbage bins you need, the higher your monthly fee. (The average customer pays $23.58 a month.) Also, in the past couple of years, it has banned plastic grocery bags and permitted the recycling of hard plastic toys. The city has 12 recycling streams, or programs, devoted to different materials, including regular garbage, construction debris, furniture and paint. “When we look at garbage, we don’t see garbage, O.K.?” said Robert Reed, a spokesman for Norcal Waste Systems, the parent company of Sunset Scavenger and Golden Gate Disposal and Recycling Company, the main garbage collectors in the city. “We see food, we see paper, we see metal, we see glass.” The recycling rate for this curbside collection from homes, hotels and the city’s 5,000 restaurants is considerably lower than the overall rate, Mr. Reed said, in part because the rates on other waste streams — construction debris or material, like batteries and compact fluorescent bulbs, that the public brings in to special centers — is much higher. Much of the concrete from demolished buildings, for instance, is recycled in new sidewalks. Another recycling stream is born of the community’s design sensitivities. “People are doing very well here,” Mr. Reed said. “They remodel, and they paint. On Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays, people line up to bring us paint” at a facility built for the purpose. “We separate it into flat and latex, screen it to take out the chunks, and blend it in 55-gallon drums,” he said. The three resulting colors — off-white, beige and green — are packed in five-gallon tins and sent to local nonprofit organizations, schools or charitable institutions in Mexico. Norcal’s subsidiaries handle 3,545 tons of waste a day in San Francisco, out of about 7,800 generated citywide, Mr. Reed said. About 55 percent of Norcal’s total goes to the landfill; the rest is recycled. These figures become part of the calculation of the city’s overall diversion rate of 70 percent, which is the figure it just reported for 2006. As John Sitts, of the state’s integrated waste management board, said, “the diversion rate includes recycling, composting and source reduction” — the last term representing “everything businesses and residents do to reuse things rather than throwing them out.” The Los Angeles region most recently reported a 59 percent diversion rate, a number still being audited by state regulators. San Jose, at 62 percent, claims the best-in-class crown for cities of 900,000 or more. Statewide, the figure for 2006 was 54 percent. With the exception of Chicago, which boasted a 55 percent rate in 2006 — the most recent year for which national comparisons are available — Eastern and Midwestern cities lagged well behind their California counterparts. According to the most recent annual survey of the trade magazine Waste News, in 2006 New York City was at 30.6 percent, Milwaukee at 24 percent, Boston at 16 percent and Houston at 2.5 percent. San Francisco’s system is being noticed overseas. Mr. Blumenfeld’s calendar is full of meetings with officials from Germany and China, most of whom visit Norcal’s facilities, including the food-waste composting centers. His visitors are learning, Mr. Blumenfeld said, that “you can recycle almost anything.”
|
Recycling of Waste Materials;San Francisco (Calif);Newsom Gavin
|
ny0260930
|
[
"sports"
] |
2011/06/10
|
40th New York Mini 10K to Celebrate Waitz
|
Joan Benoit Samuelson recalls lining up for the 1980 L’Eggs Mini Marathon in New York, a women-only 10-kilometer race then in its early years in Central Park, and being too intimidated to speak with Grete Waitz. “She had such a presence; she was all business,” Samuelson said this week. “Back then, I sort of paid homage to Grete.” Waitz, then 26, had already won two New York City Marathons and one New York Mini when she broke the tape in 30 minutes 59.8 seconds, later rounded up to 31 minutes. “It was always an honor just to be in that race with her,” said Samuelson, who finished third that year at the age of 23. Just as Waitz’s fame soared when she won the New York City Marathon nine times, she crystallized her legend with five victories in the New York Mini , a pioneering event that spawned other women-only races and will be run for the 40th time Saturday. “I haven’t run a single race as powerful as the New York Mini,” said Deena Kastor, the American record holder in the marathon who won the race in 2004 and is back competing after giving birth in February. “It just has so much energy and buzz.” This year, the buzz will be a bit subdued. The New York Road Runners is dedicating the race to Waitz, who died April 19 at age 57 after a six-year battle with cancer. “The Mini is so perfect to celebrate Grete,” said Mary Wittenberg, the president of Road Runners. “She inspired not only a generation of great professional athletes and great track runners but so many other women who grew up watching Grete in the marathon and the 10K.” This 10K had humble beginnings but fierce aspirations. Seventy-eight women entered in 1972, the inaugural year, when the race was 6 miles, not 6.2. Each woman wore a white T-shirt bearing the name of the shaving cream sponsor, Crazylegs, and an iron-on number. Fred Lebow, also the founder of the New York City Marathon, brought Playboy bunnies to pose for prerace photos. Such publicity drew a modest crowd but with much fanfare, featuring balloons and loudspeakers on the course, recalled Kathrine Switzer, then Kathy Miller, who finished sixth. “At the time, the miniskirt was in fashion,” Switzer said. “We loved the name Mini. We didn’t think it was disparaging. People still thought six miles was a distance.” Lebow appointed Switzer the race spokeswoman, along with Nina Kuscsik, a 33-year-old mother of three from Huntington, N.Y. Kuscsik had won the first sanctioned Boston Marathon for women two months earlier. “If we had enough distance races for the women, we wouldn’t need the men,” Kuscsik said in 1972 after finishing third. In retrospect, the first Mini was run during a formative time for female athletes: two months after that important Boston Marathon and 20 days before passage of Title IX, the federal amendment banning gender discrimination in education, which increased opportunities for girls and women in the United States. The Mini was exuberant in welcoming women to the sport, Switzer said, but it was always competitive. She added, “Women had to learn to take the responsibility for pace.” The Mini was the model for women-only races in the United States, and Switzer formed her Avon running series after the event. Now there are more than 200 women-only runs, out of more than 18,000 road races in the United States. Last year, 52 percent of participants in 10K road races were women. In the half-marathon, women represented 59 percent, according to Running USA , an organization that promotes road racing. A total of 7,115 runners are registered for this year’s race, including Linet Masai, 21, of Kenya, the defending champion, and Liliya Shobukhova, the 2010 Chicago and London Marathon champion. Kenya’s Lornah Kiplagat, a four-time winner of the Mini, will participate mostly in celebration of the event. Kastor, too, has low expectations, since she has not raced since the 2010 London Marathon and could not train during her pregnancy. For the first and only time this year, in honor of Waitz, men will be entered as well, with Waitz’s husband and coach, Jack, leading a group called Friends of Grete. Corinna Cortes, 50, grew up in Denmark, where she said women were discouraged from running. She began running 10 years ago after giving birth to twins, and competed with a women-only team, Athena, in New York. At races in Central Park, she said she was always inspired by Waitz. “I only see her as this fantastic woman who would be there to send us off, say a few words,” Cortes said, adding that the memorial this year would be bittersweet but important. “We tend to forget the people who paved the road for us,” she said. On Central Park’s roads, the memory of Waitz stands; she is tied with the retired Kenyan marathon runner Tegla Loroupe for most victories in the Mini. “Grete was always appreciative of the support in New York,” said Samuelson, who beat Waitz at the inaugural women’s Olympic marathon in 1984. The two became close friends, and Waitz was the godmother of Samuelson’s son, Anders. Even after Waitz retired in 1990, Samuelson said she encouraged other professionals, found time to advise recreational runners and promoted the sport in New York City schools. “She truly was a pioneer and, even maybe more importantly, a mentor,” Samuelson said.
|
New York Road Runners Club;Waitz Grete;Running;New York City Marathon;Marathon Running
|
ny0013160
|
[
"us"
] |
2013/11/21
|
White Supremacist Convicted of Several Murders Is Put to Death in Missouri
|
Joseph P. Franklin , a white supremacist who killed at least eight people in a shooting spree from 1977 to 1980 and confessed to being the sniper who wounded the Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt and the lawyer and civil rights activist Vernon E. Jordan Jr., was executed on Wednesday, the Missouri Department of Public Safety said. His death, by lethal injection, came after his scheduled execution had been delayed twice by last-minute stays because of concerns about the state’s new drug protocol and Mr. Franklin’s mental competency. He was injected at 6:07 a.m. and declared dead 10 minutes later, officials said. Mr. Franklin, 63, was convicted of nine murders but considered a suspect in a dozen more. He received the death sentence in 1997 for the murder of Gerald Gordon, one of three people hit by long-range rifle fire on Oct. 8, 1977, outside a suburban St. Louis synagogue. Mr. Franklin confessed to the crime 17 years later from a prison cell, where he was serving four life sentences in connection with six other killings, all described as hate crimes. He told investigators that he had picked the synagogue at random, intending to kill only Jews. Mr. Franklin was one of a dozen death row inmates who have challenged the constitutionality of Missouri’s method of lethal injection. The state changed its drug formula protocols in October after several pharmaceutical companies in the United States and Europe began refusing to provide drugs used in executions. The state turned to an unnamed compounding pharmacy for help in producing a new solution. The practice is controversial because drugs mixed in compounding pharmacies are not approved by the Food and Drug Administration, and critics say their use could cause needless suffering and botched executions. Federal prosecutors had charged Mr. Franklin in the attempted murder of Mr. Jordan in 1980 but failed to win a conviction. In a 1996 interview with a TV reporter, Mr. Franklin admitted to having shot him.
|
Capital punishment;Joseph Paul Franklin;Murders;Larry Flynt;Gerald Gordon;Vernon E Jordan Jr;Missouri
|
ny0080667
|
[
"technology",
"personaltech"
] |
2015/02/12
|
Backpacks That Pack Power for Mobile Devices
|
WITH people juggling multiple digital devices that constantly need charging, backpack manufacturers have sensed a market opportunity. Some new backpacks are specifically designed not only to protect our smartphones, tablets, laptops, headphones and game players, but also to recharge them and track their whereabouts. For those who need power as well as protection, Tylt’s $170 Energi Plus Backpack includes a 10,400 mAh battery, which can charge three devices simultaneously. Though it can hold up to a 15.5-inch laptop, it can’t charge one. The battery is intended for smartphones and tablets only. The battery takes about seven hours to charge; once it’s 50 percent done it can begin to charge devices. There’s enough power to fully charge an iPhone 6 more than five times. If not used, the battery will retain its charge for around one year. Pass-throughs embedded in the bag allow charging cables to be secured and then routed through to most pockets. Image Tylt’s Energi Plus Backpack includes a battery that can charge three devices simultaneously. The bag is attractively designed, constructed of heavy artificial material, including an exterior pocket for a water bottle, a hardened one for glasses, and others for small business items. Numerous USB cables are included, as well as an older-style Apple 30-pin connector. The company says it’s working through its inventory before it will switch to a Lightning connector, like those used for the newest Apple mobile devices. Ampl Labs’ $299 SmartBackpack , expected to arrive this year, has even more charging ports. And any of the bag’s six ports can be routed to any pocket. The included 5,000 mAh battery can charge a smartphone three times, or three smartphones simultaneously one time. Fast-charging technology allows the bag’s batteries to be charged to 80 percent capacity in one hour. The bag can be reserved on the crowdfunding site Indiegogo for $250. With an additional specialized battery, the SmartBackpack can also charge laptops and tablets. The tablet battery is $59; the laptop battery costs $139, or $179 for an Apple version. Ampl Labs also has a smartphone app to work with the SmartBackpack; the app monitors battery charge and remaining battery capacity, and allows the user to prioritize charging order when powering multiple devices. Image Ampl Labs’ SmartBackpack is expected to arrive this year. The app also aims to prevent bag theft. Walk too far away from the backpack, and the app will alert you. With the app, power profiles can be created for different users, learning what and how an individual likes to charge devices. The app can also be programmed not to alert the owner if the phone is separated from the bag if, for example, the owner is not working. A backpack that offers even more flexibility is the $649 Phorce Pro . It can transform from a backpack to a briefcase or messenger bag. It can also be expanded to twice its original size and is capable of holding a jacket. The 26,000 mAh battery can charge an iPhone 5 14 times. The battery can charge a laptop (there’s space in the bag for a 15-inch one), a smartphone, headphones — almost any modern electronic device. Constructed of canvas and leather, the Phorce Pro contains padded pockets for a tablet and laptop. The three USB plugs can be used to power three devices and a laptop simultaneously. Devices charge as fast as if one used the original charging cables. The Phorce Pro also has a smartphone app with features similar to those offered by Ampl Labs. Phorce said it would like to eventually expand the app’s functionality to include such capabilities as changing the bag’s shape and fabric color, once that becomes feasible. Image The Phorce Pro has USB plugs that can be used to power three devices and a laptop simultaneously. Credit Phorce Even with a charging-capable backpack as expensive as the Phorce Pro, though, once the battery runs out, you’re stuck if you’re nowhere near an electrical outlet. Voltaic Systems makes a line of solar-powered backpacks to help keep you connected when you’re climbing a mountain or hiking and still need power to call a friend. Its signature model, the $389 Array , includes a ruggedized solar panel that stretches across the frame, and a 20,000 mAh battery, enough to charge a laptop. The panel needs 90 minutes of sun exposure to sufficiently load its battery enough to charge a smartphone; two hours to charge a seven-inch tablet; and 11 hours to charge a laptop. The Array comes with a selection of charging tips for smartphones and laptops; an Apple laptop charging adapter costs extra. Its solar panel can be detached and used with other bags, and its battery can be charged either via the sun, a car battery or a standard electrical outlet. Whichever product might be of interest, one thing that they have in common: Their use gives us one more excuse to never disconnect from our digital devices.
|
Luggage;Batteries;Tablet computer;Smartphone;Mobile Apps;Laptop
|
ny0158270
|
[
"business",
"worldbusiness"
] |
2008/12/16
|
Global Layoffs at Electrolux
|
STOCKHOLM (AP) — The Swedish appliance maker Electrolux said on Monday that it would lay off more than 3,000 staff globally because of a slump in the market. An Electrolux spokesman, Anders Edholm, said the layoffs represent about 5 percent of the company’s total work force of 57,000. Mr. Edholm said demand in Europe and North America has been declining for some time and fell sharply in the second half of November and in December. As a result, Electrolux will not reach its previous forecast of an operating profit for the year of 3.3 billion kronor to 3.9 billion kronor ($411 million to $486 million). The layoffs will come in the fourth quarter of this year and in 2009.
|
Electrolux AB;Layoffs and Job Reductions
|
ny0285783
|
[
"technology"
] |
2016/09/30
|
Daily Report: When Artificial Intelligence Goes to the Dark Side
|
Computers really are becoming like people: Just because they are smart doesn’t mean they won’t do awful things. As John Markoff writes , the kind of artificial intelligence that is capable of winning at the game of Go or figuring out your fastest route home is also starting to show up in criminal schemes. One program, known as Blackshades, was sold in the online criminal underground known as the dark web and used for purposes like video and audio eavesdropping. The man who developed Blackshades was sentenced in June 2015 to 57 months in prison. As with most other crimes, though, the threat of hard time isn’t going to stop everyone — particularly as the costs keep coming down and the number of applications is exploding. Image The way A.I. can now recognize text and images, even imitate voices, lends itself to malicious uses in defeating online security, spotting victims, even eventually fooling people into thinking that a machine they’re talking to is a person. It happened to me yesterday. Working from home, I received a robocall to see if I wanted to buy solar panels (a common enough scam ). A voice that called itself Amanda started the pitch with a chatty informality that was far superior to a standard recording, though it was still halting and tentative. When I asked if this was a computer, there was a pause, then a stilted “Yes, I’m a real person,” followed by a too-fast pitch that didn’t stop when it was interrupted. Then Amanda hung up on me. I have a feeling she’ll be back, with a faster processor and a better grasp of informal speech. They say one of the best ways to check, for now, is to ask the suspected bot to recite a limerick or sing “Happy Birthday.” It may not be dignified, but it beats being ripped off.
|
Artificial intelligence;Computers and the Internet;Tech Industry
|
ny0104069
|
[
"world",
"middleeast"
] |
2012/03/19
|
American Teacher Shot Dead in Yemen
|
An American teacher affiliated with a missionary organization was shot and killed by two men on a motorcycle in the central Yemeni city of Taiz on Sunday, according to Yemeni officials. The teacher was on his way to work when the gunmen approached his car and opened fire, according to Hamoud al-Sofi, the governor of Taiz, who was reached by phone. He said that an investigation was under way and that the information the authorities had so far pointed to possible involvement by Al Qaeda in Yemen . “We are all sad in Taiz and we consider this a disaster,” he added. The teacher had been living in Taiz along with his wife and two children for at least two years, Mr. Sofi said. According to another Yemeni official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is continuing, the teacher worked for a vocational institute for people with disabilities that was established by the International Trade and Development Center, a charitable organization largely financed by churches. Other reports on the shooting noted that he was an English teacher at the institute. Taiz has historically been a more peaceful city than the rest of Yemen, with a generally tolerant populace. Nevertheless, over the past year, conflict broke out there between armed tribesmen who supported antigovernment protesters and government forces controlled by the relatives of former President Ali Abdullah Saleh . A Qaeda-affiliated group gained control of large swaths of territory in southern Yemen over the past year as the central government was preoccupied by political crisis in the northern capital city of Sana. The group has become bolder in its attacks in recent months, but Taiz is not known for being a city where Al Qaeda has a presence. Whether or not the extremist group was behind the slaying of the American remained unclear on Sunday.
|
Taiz (Yemen);Murders and Attempted Murders;Middle East and North Africa Unrest (2010- );United States International Relations;Al Qaeda;Yemen
|
ny0096963
|
[
"sports",
"baseball"
] |
2015/06/03
|
Clay Buchholz Pitches Red Sox Past Twins
|
Clay Buchholz pitched eight scoreless innings as the Boston Red Sox ended a three-game slide with a 1-0 victory over the Minnesota Twins at Fenway Park on Tuesday night. Buchholz got all the run support he needed on Rusney Castillo’s run-scoring single in the seventh. Buchholz struck out eight and allowed three hits before Koji Uehara took over in the ninth and picked up his 11th save to preserve the shutout. Mike Pelfrey had a solid start as he and Buchholz carried shutouts into the seventh inning, when the Red Sox broke the tie. Xander Bogaerts hit a two-out double off the wall in center and scored easily on Castillo’s single up the middle. Buchholz got his first win since Boston beat Toronto, 6-3, on May 10. Pelfrey allowed one run and six hits, walking two and striking out one. RANGERS 15, WHITE SOX 2 Joey Gallo hit an upper-deck homer, doubled off the top of the wall and set a Rangers franchise record for a major league debut with four R.B.I. as host Texas pummeled Chicago. Gallo, the top prospect in the Rangers organization, made the jump from Class AA Frisco for what is supposed to be a short stint while the four-time All-Star third baseman Adrian Beltre is on the 15-day disabled list with a sprained left thumb. ASTROS 6, ORIOLES 4 Evan Gattis hit a three-run homer and Luis Valbuena added a go-ahead solo shot in a five-run third inning as host Houston beat Baltimore. The Astros were in a big hole early after a four-run second inning by the Orioles, but they bounced back an inning later for their major-league-leading 17th comeback victory this year. ATHLETICS 5, TIGERS 3 Ben Zobrist’s grand slam highlighted a five-run seventh inning for Oakland as it rallied in Detroit. Alfredo Simon held the A’s to one hit during the first six innings, but the Tigers scuffled defensively in the seventh, and Oakland had the bases loaded with one run already in when Simon was pulled. Angel Nesbitt came on in relief, and Zobrist greeted him with a line drive over the wall in right field for his sixth career grand slam. INDIANS 2, ROYALS 1 Michael Brantley drove in the go-ahead run with two outs in the eighth inning, backing a strong performance by Carlos Carrasco and sending visiting Cleveland past Kansas City. CARDINALS 1, BREWERS 0 Lance Lynn allowed five hits while pitching into the eighth inning, Mark Reynolds had a run-scoring single in the second, and St. Louis edged visiting Milwaukee. Lynn struck out five and walked one in seven and two-thirds innings. MARLINS 5, CUBS 2 Brad Hand pitched six innings to earn his fifth victory in 33 career starts, and host Miami topped Chicago. Hand improved his career record as a starter to 5-18. PHILLIES 5, REDS 4 Darin Ruf hit a game-ending single with one out in the ninth inning after Maikel Franco tied it in the eighth with a two-run homer, and host Philadelphia earned a rare late-inning comeback victory by edging Cincinnati. NATIONALS AND BLUE JAYS SPLIT Jordan Zimmermann allowed six hits in eight innings, Bryce Harper singled home the go-ahead run off R. A. Dickey, and host Washington defeated Toronto, 2-0, in the opener of a day-night doubleheader. A day after rain postponed the first meeting of the teams since 2012, Zimmermann struck out four and walked one to win for the third time in four starts. After Toronto loaded the bases with one out in the seventh, Zimmermann got Russell Martin to ground into a double play. In the second game, Kevin Pillar hit two home runs off Max Scherzer, and the Blue Jays ended a four-game skid with a 7-3 win. Pillar hit a solo shot in the second and a three-run homer down the left-field line in the sixth. ROCKIES 6, DODGERS 3 Jorge De La Rosa threw six innings with a healing cut on his middle finger, Michael McKenry homered, and host Colorado knocked off Los Angeles, 6-3, in the first game of a doubleheader. The game was the makeup of a rainout on May 9.
|
Baseball;Clay Buchholz;Red Sox;Minnesota Twins
|
ny0143235
|
[
"world",
"europe"
] |
2008/11/14
|
Gates Criticizes Russian President’s Post-Election Speech
|
TALLINN, Estonia — Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates used a visit to this former Soviet republic on Thursday to scold the Russian president as “misguided” for delivering a speech brimming with caustic warnings to the United States the day after America elected a new president. President Dmitri Medvedev, in a national televised appearance before parliament last week, delivered a series of rebukes and threats widely interpreted as taunting President-elect Barack Obama. For one, Mr. Medvedev said Russia would place surface-to-surface Iskander missiles in Kaliningrad, along its border with Europe, if the United States proceeded with plans to build a base for 10 anti-missile interceptors in Poland. “Within hours of the conclusion of the American election, Russian President Medvedev responded by threatening to place missiles in Kaliningrad, hardly the welcome a new American administration deserves,” Mr. Gates said here after a meeting of NATO defense ministers. “Such provocative remarks are unnecessary and misguided.” Mr. Gates repeated the American position that Russia had nothing to fear from American efforts to build missile defenses in Europe, describing them as protection against a potential attack from Iran. And he reiterated that Kremlin leaders likewise did not need to worry about discussions about joining NATO among democratic nations along Russia’s borders, including Ukraine. “Quite frankly, I’m not clear what the missiles would be for in Kaliningrad,” Mr. Gates said. “After all, the only real emerging threat on Russia’s periphery is in Iran. And I don’t think the Iskander missile has the range to get there from Kaliningrad. Why they would threaten to point missiles at European nations seems quite puzzling to me.” The planned integration of Ukraine’s possible ascension topped the agenda here, and alliance defense ministers sought ways to push Ukraine further toward military modernization as part of its progress toward membership. During an April summit meeting of NATO presidents and prime ministers in Bucharest, Romania, the alliance agreed that both Georgia and Ukraine would become NATO members. But a group of larger NATO nations, including Germany and France, successfully postponed the formal offer of a Membership Action Plan, or MAP, that sets out the exact details of joining the alliance. Alliance foreign ministers are to meet in Brussels next month to again debate the question of Ukraine’s ascension to the MAP process. But officials in Berlin and Paris have said they would continue to oppose a formal action plan offer to Ukraine, thus killing its chances since the alliance requires unanimous action. The NATO secretary general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, was joined by Mr. Gates in stressing that Ukraine had not yet reached the required levels of military — and political — reform required for alliance membership. Even so, the alliance risks appearing weak and indecisive to Russia if it does not move forward with Ukraine’s membership, and NATO diplomats already are discussing how to move the entry process forward while acknowledging the veto power of nations that can block offering a Membership Action Plan to Ukraine. Foreshadowing a possible alliance compromise, senior NATO-nation officials began de-emphasizing the importance of the MAP process as the only way for Ukraine to enter the alliance. The Estonian president, Toomas Hendrik Ilves, said the importance of the process was being overestimated.. “The political fetishization of MAP, as if this process were tantamount to instant membership instead of its opposite, was unfortunate,” he said. “I think we should not over-mystify an acronym, and instead deal with realities in our continent.” Other senior officials rushed to agree that nations aspiring to join the alliance need not even go through the formal Membership Action Plan system. “There are various pathways to membership,” Mr. de Hoop Scheffer said. He said Russia would be mistaken if it saw a political victory if NATO foreign ministers failed to offer a formal membership plan to Ukraine in December, because membership for both Georgia and Ukraine remains alliance policy. “That is our beacon,” he said. “That is our course. Now it is a matter of how do we move that process forward.” Ukraine’s defense minister, Yuriy Yekhanurov, warned Russia against any belief it controlled a sphere of influence in the region and could dictate foreign policy to its neighbors. “European democracies have their own rights to choose their own ways of security,” he said. But he agreed that political in-fighting among Ukraine’s political leadership might slow his nation’s decision to enter NATO, as the republic’s president and prime minister remained locked in a bitter power struggle. “There has been an overdose of democracy in Ukraine,” Mr. Yekhanurov said.
|
Russia;Estonia;Gates Robert M;Medvedev Dmitri A;North Atlantic Treaty Organization;International Relations;Missiles and Missile Defense Systems
|
ny0076009
|
[
"us"
] |
2015/05/27
|
Diary’s Pages May Help Jurors Decide if Colorado Gunman Was Methodical or Mad
|
DENVER — The brown spiral notebook that James E. Holmes mailed to his psychiatrist shortly before he opened fire in a sold-out movie theater has been one of the most important, and closely guarded, pieces of evidence in the murder case against him. It has been stored under seal, and the murderous fantasies and rambling writings inside have been shielded from public view. On Tuesday, prosecutors entered that notebook into evidence and passed out copies in the courtroom, giving jurors one of the darkest, most direct glimpses yet into the mind of Mr. Holmes, the former neuroscience student who killed 12 people and wounded 70 others in that Aurora, Colo., theater in July 2012. “What is the meaning of life?” he wrote. “What is the meaning of death?” The notebook’s pages offered a prism for Mr. Holmes’s mental state, and each side in the case tried to nudge jurors toward sections that underscored its view of his mind-set. Prosecutors emphasized pages in which he pondered the most ruthless way to kill people and sketched out which theater to attack. Defense lawyers — they do not dispute that he is the killer, but argue that he is not guilty by reason of insanity — highlighted pages of runic symbols; nonsensical equations about life and death, infinity and “negative infinity”; and pages covered with the word “Why?” In one passage, Mr. Holmes debated whether to attack an airport, but decided against it, saying that security would be too tight and that his actions might be misconstrued as terrorism. “Terrorism isn’t the message,” he wrote. “The message is there is no message.” Prosecutors, who are seeking the death penalty, have called Mr. Holmes a meticulous and calculating killer who went on a rampage to shore up his self-worth after he dropped out of his graduate program and his girlfriend broke up with him. Defense lawyers say he suffers from schizophrenia and was in the throes of a psychotic episode on the night of the shooting. “The notebook is going to prove extremely important to both sides,” David M. Beller, president of the Colorado Criminal Defense Bar, said in an email. “Both the prosecution and the defense will spend much of the trial isolating particular words and phrases that support their own respective positions. The prosecution highlights the intricate planning and detail, where the defense focuses on the incoherent ramblings of a sick man.” Colorado, unlike many states, puts the burden on prosecutors to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a defendant was not insane at the time of the killings. A litany of mental health experts who have examined Mr. Holmes and his writings are expected to testify over the course of the trial. James Holmes’s Notebook Used in the Aurora Shooting Trial Prosecutors hope the journal will show jurors how Mr. Holmes plotted to kill; defense lawyers hope it reveals the depth of his mental illness. Ultimately, jurors will have to decide whether Mr. Holmes was so mentally ill that he could not distinguish between right and wrong at the time of the shootings. The notebook could provide a road map toward that decision. “Rarely is there a case, as we have here, where a defendant is giving the jury a journal of what is going on in his head in the months, weeks, and days before,” Mr. Beller said. The notebook was discovered on July 23, 2012, in the frantic first days after the shooting. It was found unopened in a mailroom at the University of Colorado campus where Mr. Holmes had been a graduate student, addressed to Dr. Lynne Fenton, a psychiatrist there who had seen him. Mr. Holmes had booby-trapped his apartment with explosives, so the bomb squad was called in to make sure that the package was not another rigged to explode. The envelope to Dr. Fenton bore 16 Forever stamps featuring various scientists — among them a notable botanist, biochemist, chemist and physicist — in an apparent nod to Mr. Holmes’s interests. The package held $400 worth of burned $20 bills, and a sticky note bearing an infinitylike symbol similar to one on a calendar in his apartment marking the date of the shooting. Sgt. Matthew Fyles of the Aurora police testified about the notebook, its packaging and its contents on Tuesday, holding it up for jurors at one point. The name on the cover: James Holmes. The academic course: “Of life.” Guided by questions from Karen Pearson, the chief deputy district attorney, Sergeant Fyles described drawings and read from passages in which Mr. Holmes talked about his yearslong “obsession to kill.” Mr. Holmes debated whether to carry out a bombing, a biological attack or serial killings in a national forest, but rejected those in favor of attacking a movie theater. He debated which theaters in the Century 16 cinema complex to attack, and discussed opportune times to strike. He wrote a to-do list, telling himself to buy a stun gun, a folding knife and body armor; research mental illness; and practice shooting at a range far from his home in Aurora. “The cruel twists of fate are unkind to the misfortunate,” he wrote at one point. But he also appears to have written about struggling with mental illness. One heading refers to the “mind of madness,” and in another passage, he described flashes and shadows in his peripheral vision, and talked about brief feelings of invincibility followed by catatonic stretches. He wrote that he “fought and fought,” but ultimately “embraced the hatred.” “That is my mind,” he wrote. “It is broken. I tried to fix it.”
|
James Eagan Holmes;Aurora Shooting;Mental Health;Murders and Homicides;Aurora Colorado;Lynne Fenton
|
ny0234705
|
[
"us",
"politics"
] |
2010/01/28
|
Trying to Prove He’s the Same Old Obama
|
He took office a year ago promising to change Washington. On Wednesday, President Obama tried to convince viewers that Washington hasn’t changed him. Mr. Obama’s State of the Union address was as much about his state of mind as the nation’s: the president repeatedly asserted that he feels as strongly about the impasse in the capital as ordinary Americans do. “From the day I took office, I have been told that addressing our larger challenges is too ambitious, that such efforts would be too contentious, that our political system is too gridlocked, and that we should just put things on hold for awhile,” Mr. Obama said. “For those who make these claims, I have one simple question: How long should we wait?” In the age of instant communication, a State of the Union address is less a speech than a chance to reboot. Presidents use the solemnity of the setting to reset expectations. It’s an hour (or more) of deference in a clattering, noisy world, a moment when the president holds forth on all the news networks, and can readjust his message. And Mr. Obama did just that, at times using an informal, interlocutive style that made the speech seem as much like a town meeting as a joint session of Congress. He is known for giving eloquent speeches, and also for a professorial coolness when explaining policy details. Wednesday night, Mr. Obama used a mix of humor and stern exhortation to remind voters why they elected him — even as he promised that he would not let electoral politics derail economic reform. It was a populist message delivered with patrician restraint, a presidential performance tinged with a little of the anti-establishment zeal of the Tea Party movement — a Green Tea movement. “And if there’s one thing that has unified Democrats and Republicans, it’s that we all hated the bank bailout,” Mr. Obama said. “I hated it. You hated it. It was about as popular as a root canal.” The Republican response was almost as carefully choreographed as the president’s address — mindful of last year’s much-ridiculed performance by Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana. This time, Gov. Robert F. McDonnell of Virginia spoke from the State House surrounded by a winsome, multicultural selection of colleagues and supporters who clapped throughout, as if at a State of the Union of their own. Mr. McDonnell was respectful of the president, even pointing out where he and his party agreed with Mr. Obama, but cast his objections as a populist protest against big government. “What government should not do is pile on more taxation, regulation and litigation that kill jobs and hurt the middle class,” Mr. McDonnell said. Mr. Obama reminded his audience that he inherited a recession , a deficit and two wars. The camera can be a weapon on these occasions, and Mr. Obama used it well, teasing the Republicans in the chamber for sitting stonily and refusing to clap even when he spoke of lowering taxes. As the camera panned the silent, seated half of the room — a snapshot of sullen resistance — Mr. Obama joked, “I thought I’d get some applause on that one.” A few Republicans jeered when Mr. Obama explained that his deficit-reduction proposals would only go into effect next year, when, he said, the economy would be stronger. And the president took exception to that rebuke, and added one of his own, “That’s how budgeting works.” Mr. Obama cast the administration’s mistakes as a communications lapse, not flawed decision-making. He managed to suggest that partisan posturing clouded his message about health care and the economy. “Still, this is a complex issue, and the longer it was debated, the more skeptical people became,” he said. “I take my share of the blame for not explaining it more clearly to the American people. And I know that with all the lobbying and horse-trading, this process left most Americans wondering what’s in it for them.” Complaining that “we face a deficit of trust,” Mr. Obama said the change he sought in his first year was sabotaged by politicians, lobbyists, bankers and television pundits. (Mostly, TV commentators were positive, though Chris Matthews of MSNBC gave Mr. Obama a back-handed compliment, saying the speech was so postracial and so far-reaching that “I forgot he was black.”) And some of his most passionate phrases were directed at “the numbing weight of our politics.” He appealed to legislators’ conscience: “We cannot wage a perpetual campaign where the only goal is to see who can get the most embarrassing headlines about their opponent — a belief that if you lose, I win.” The adage says that in a democracy, people get the government they deserve. Mr. Obama used his time before Congress to posit that, actually, the American people deserve a better legislative branch.
|
Obama Barack;State of the Union Message (US);United States Politics and Government;Speeches and Statements
|
ny0167493
|
[
"business"
] |
2006/01/07
|
For Best Buy and Circuit City, It Was a Good December
|
Best Buy and Circuit City Stores, two of the nation's largest consumer electronics retailers, posted strong December sales gains as consumers bought flat-panel televisions and portable digital music players. Sales at stores open at least a year rose 5.8 percent at Best Buy and 11 percent at Circuit City, beating analysts' estimates and year-earlier results. Circuit City also raised its sales forecast for the year. Sales of consumer electronics outpaced the 3.5 percent gain reported by department stores and apparel retailers this holiday season. Consumer electronics sales rose 10 percent from Nov. 20 to Dec. 24, according to the NPD Group, a research firm. "It was a good Christmas for electronics," said David Keuler of Mason Street Advisors. Stock in Best Buy, which is based in Richfield, Minn., rose $3.55, or 8 percent, to $47.05. Circuit City, which is based in Richmond, Va., rose 15 cents, to $22.94 a share. Both companies reported a 12 percent revenue increase for the month. Best Buy said sales rose to $5.7 billion, helped by the addition of 104 stores. Sales of flat-panel televisions and MP3 players helped increase average purchase prices. Web site orders increased 40 percent and gift card sales rose 20 percent. Revenue from gift cards is not recorded until they are redeemed. Circuit City's revenue increased to $2 billion in December. The company raised its sales forecast for the fiscal year to as much as 12 percent from as much as 10 percent. The company also recorded a gain in sales from its Web site. Orders increased 49 percent from a year earlier, aided by a guarantee that orders made online could be picked up at a store within 24 minutes.
|
BEST BUY CO INC;CIRCUIT CITY STORES INC;COMPANY REPORTS;RETAIL STORES AND TRADE
|
ny0045391
|
[
"nyregion"
] |
2014/02/21
|
Judge Finds Surveillance of Mosques Was Allowed
|
The New York Police Department’s intelligence unit did not discriminate against Muslims in carrying out far-reaching surveillance meant to identify “budding terrorist conspiracies” at mosques in Newark and other locations in New Jersey, a federal judge ruled on Thursday. In a written decision filed in United States District Court in Newark, Judge William J. Martini dismissed a civil rights lawsuit brought in 2012 by eight Muslims who said the New York Police Department’s surveillance programs were unconstitutional because they focused on religion, national origin and race. The suit accused the department of spying on ordinary people at several mosques, restaurants and grade schools in New Jersey since 2002. The plaintiffs, including the former principal of a grade school for Muslim girls, “have not alleged facts from which it can be plausibly inferred that they were targeted solely because of their religion,” Judge Martini wrote. “The more likely explanation for the surveillance was to locate budding terrorist conspiracies.” The judge added, “The police could not have monitored New Jersey for Muslim terrorist activities without monitoring the Muslim community itself.” “The motive for the program,” he added, “was not solely to discriminate against Muslims, but to find Muslim terrorists hiding among the ordinary law-abiding Muslims.” The ruling also singled out The Associated Press, which helped the suit with a series of articles based on confidential police documents that showed how the Police Department sought to infiltrate dozens of mosques and Muslim student groups and investigated hundreds of people in New York and elsewhere. “Nowhere in the complaint do the plaintiffs allege that they suffered harm prior to the unauthorized release of documents by The Associated Press,” the judge wrote. “This confirms that plaintiffs’ alleged injuries flow from The Associated Press’s unauthorized disclosure of the documents.” He added: “Thus the injury, if any existed, is not fairly traceable to the city.” The Center for Constitutional Rights, which represented the plaintiffs, called the decision troubling. “In addition to willfully ignoring the harm that our innocent clients suffered from the N.Y.P.D.’s illegal spying program, by upholding the N.Y.P.D.’s blunderbuss Muslim surveillance practices, the court’s decision gives legal sanction to the targeted discrimination of Muslims anywhere and everywhere in this country, without limitation, for no other reason than their religion,” said Baher Azmy, the center’s legal director. New York City’s Law Department had no immediate comment on Thursday. Former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Raymond W. Kelly, the former police commissioner, had been staunch supporters of the surveillance programs, saying they were needed to protect the city. A similar lawsuit filed in federal court in Brooklyn is pending.
|
Government Surveillance;Muslim Americans;Lawsuits;Mosque;NYPD;New Jersey
|
ny0104523
|
[
"business"
] |
2012/03/30
|
Retro Remakes as Hollywood Looks Back to the 1980s
|
LOS ANGELES — “21 Jump Street” is a hit. “RoboCop” and “Dirty Dancing” are on the way. Arnold Schwarzenegger is juggling a bunch of action flicks. 1987? No. Weirdly, 2012. Digital entertainment options and social media might be changing the movies. But Hollywood is sloshing in its Hot Tub Time Machine with a cluster of projects that recall an era when hair was big, heroes had biceps and the stars who are returning to the limelight were a lot younger. Billy Crystal ’s return as the Oscars host, it turns out, was just a warm-up act. For the first time in a decade, Mr. Crystal, 64, is a leading man. He plays opposite Bette Midler, 66, as Artie Decker, a grandpa who takes charge of his daughter’s three children in “Parental Guidance,” set for release by 20th Century Fox in November. It’s all part of a retro mood that has revved up the careers of baby-boom performers while providing comfort food for the audience. At a time of plunging DVD sales and an up-and-down box office, Hollywood is doubling back on past hits in search of profits. Often the remakes feature familiar stars playing iconic roles, like Bruce Willis, 57, who is preparing for yet another “Die Hard” film, his fifth. These favorites and their stars are making a comeback not just because they are — or were — proven winners with an aging audience, but also because they mean something to a new generation of filmmakers. “The people who decide what movies get made are now, like me, in their early 40s, and they’re turning back to what they grew up with,” said Jonathan M. Goldstein. Mr. Goldstein is co-writing and codirecting an updated version of “Vacation” (1983) and is hoping to land Chevy Chase , now 68, in a reprise of his classic role as the bumbling traveler Clark Griswold. “There’s nothing new under the sun,” said Thomas Pollack, a film producer who was the chairman of Universal Pictures in 1987. Mr. Pollock said the main change in the film industry’s penchant for the past was its love affair with the “reboot,” a reimagining of an old film, like “Vacation,” that might open the door to a new string of sequels. Mr. Crystal’s new movie is the kind of heartwarming, wisecracking comedy that used to be written by Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel, the funny guys who turned out “Parenthood” back in the 1989. In fact, the script, based on a story by Mr. Crystal, was rewritten by Mr. Ganz, who is 63, and Mr. Mandel, 62. “This was, in a sense, a throwback sort of thing,” Mr. Ganz said of the polish he and Mr. Mandel did on a screenplay written by Lisa Addario and Joe Syracuse. The mission, he explained, was to add depth and stronger relationships among characters — qualities that these days might seem old-fashioned but that were hallmarks of their work on Mr. Crystal’s “City Slickers” and “Mr. Saturday Night.” It was probably inevitable that an array of film and television projects from 1987, on their silver anniversary, should be in development and working their way toward the screen again. A new version of “Dirty Dancing,” which made hot August nights even hotter when it was released in the summer of 1987, is in active development at Lionsgate, according to Julie Fontaine, a spokeswoman for the studio. And a retooled “RoboCop,” another of that summer’s hits, is in preproduction at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which plans to release it in August 2013. The cyborg RoboCop is still trying to clean up Detroit, though details are scarce. “We are not able to reveal anything else at this time,” said Jayne S. Zelman, a spokeswoman for MGM. None of the current throwbacks are likely to match the appeal of fresher, youth-driven movies like “The Hunger Games,” which took in $155 million for Lionsgate last weekend, or the “Twilight” series, whose worldwide ticket sales have exceeded $2.5 billion. A remake of “Arthur,” a fondly remembered romantic comedy from 1981, found few takers when it was released with Russell Brand in the title role last year. “21 Jump Street,” based on a television show whose pilot dates to 1987, has done better, with over $70 million in ticket sales during its first 10 days. But those of an age to recall Mr. Crystal when he was still a goofy heartthrob, Harry, to Meg Ryan’s painfully cute Sally — in 1989s “When Harry Met Sally” — do not visit theaters much now. According to statistics released by the Motion Picture Association of America last week, viewers over 60 make up 19 percent of the United States population, but account for only 13 percent of ticket sales. And those between the ages of 50 and 59 are 14 percent of the populace, yet buy only 10 percent of the tickets. Still, some of the stars from the 1980s are determined to show their continued vitality — and none more so than Mr. Schwarzenegger, who put his film career aside to serve as governor of California from 2003 through 2011. Mr. Schwarzenegger’s comeback hit a snag last May, when his marriage to Maria Shriver broke up amid revelations about a long-running affair with a housekeeper. Movie plans were suspended in the uproar. But not for long. Mr. Schwarzenegger, 64, is now set for a cameo appearance with Sylvester Stallone in “The Expendables 2,” expected in theaters in August, and has more substantial roles in “The Last Stand,” “Unknown Soldier” and (again with Mr. Stallone) “The Tomb,” which are all intended for release in 2013. “He’s on every page, or we’re making the wrong film,” said Albert S. Ruddy, a producer of “Unknown Soldier,” in which Mr. Schwarzenegger’s character harks back to his muscular roles in “Predator” and “The Running Man,” both from 1987. “He’s going to be a killer. Get out of the way,” said Mr. Ruddy. Mr. Chase, meanwhile, made an appearance in “Hot Tub Time Machine,” a 2010 comedy about a time trip back to 1986. Now he is being pursued by Mr. Goldstein and his filmmaking partner John Francis Daley, who hope to wrangle him into their new “Vacation” movie, in which Clark Griswold’s grown son, Rusty, takes his own family on the rocky road to Walley World. But that assumes Mr. Chase can spare the time from a new collaboration he just announced — with Dan Aykroyd.
|
Movies;Nineteen Hundred Eighties;Crystal Billy;Schwarzenegger Arnold;Chase Chevy;Parental Guidance (Movie)
|
ny0150246
|
[
"sports",
"tennis"
] |
2008/09/13
|
Inquiry Into Betting Clears Davydenko
|
The Association of Tennis Professionals on Friday cleared the Russian tennis star Nikolay Davydenko of fixing a match last summer in Poland. But the association acknowledged that its investigators were unable to review phone records that were first withheld and then destroyed. The ATP, the governing body of men’s tennis, said it found no evidence of wrongdoing by Davydenko, his opponent, Martín Vassallo Arguello of Argentina, or anyone else associated with their match in Sopot, Poland, on Aug. 2, 2007. “The ATP has now exhausted all avenues of inquiry open to it, and the investigation is now concluded,” the association said in a statement. Davydenko’s wife and brother refused to turn over their cellphone records and appealed the ATP’s request for them to an independent hearing officer. They lost the appeal, but by then the records had been destroyed by the phone company in Germany, which was following local data protection laws. The Davydenko incident touched off a gambling scandal within tennis in which at least a dozen ranked players came forward and said they had been asked to throw matches or had heard of similar approaches to others. In May, a report commissioned by the major tennis governing bodies recommended that 45 matches played in the last five years be investigated because betting patterns gave a “strong indication” that gamblers were profiting from inside information. Those matches, the report said, might be only an indication of the depth of the problem. Earlier this month, Jeff Rees, a London police officer who has worked on anticorruption programs in other sports, was named to the newly formed Tennis Integrity Unit. It will work to help police the Sony Ericsson WTA Tour, the ATP, the International Tennis Federation and the Grand Slam tournaments. “We have taken landmark action by creating an anticorruption code, and we intend to move forward,” Kris Dent, an ATP spokesman, said. Dent acknowledged that ATP officials were frustrated by a series of appeals by Davydenko that extended the inquiry. That prevented investigators from examining the complete phone records of Davydenko’s wife and brother, who were at the match in Sopot. During that match, Davydenko, then the world’s fourth-ranked player, went from being a heavy favorite against the 87th-ranked Vassallo Arguello to being a significant underdog. Davydenko’s odds got longer, and more money came in for Vassallo Arguello, even after Davydenko won the first set. Davydenko retired because of an injury with Vassallo Arguello ahead, 2-6, 6-3, 2-1. During the match, Betfair, an online betting exchange, notified the ATP that its security team had recognized irregular betting patterns. After the match, Betfair voided $7 million in bets, the first time it had taken such a measure. It turned over its data to the ATP. Betfair has become a focal point for the growing list of match-fixing scandals. Over the last seven years, it has alerted dozens of sports about suspicious betting activity, leading to investigations in horse racing, soccer and tennis. Davydenko’s manager, Ronnie Leitgeb, has said that ATP investigators told Davydenko’s camp that nine Betfair accounts traced to Russia stood to make $1.5 million if he lost and that two other unknown account holders were to make nearly $6 million. “It was an unprecedented decision by Betfair to void all bets on the Davydenko-Arguello match last year,” a statement released by the company said. “This led us to share betting data with the ATP under the rules of the Memorandum of Understanding we have with them. The ATP were left to investigate and establish whether concerns we had about the betting patterns breached any of ATP’s rules. “The response from the ATP was very encouraging,” the statement continued, “and to subsequently establish a joint investigative body with the ITF and WTA to deal with issues of this kind should act as a blueprint for all other sports.” Davydenko has always maintained that he did nothing wrong. Neither Leitgeb nor Davydenko could be reached for comment. Davydenko’s lawyer, Frank Immenga, did not return e-mail messages. Speaking at Wimbledon this year, Davydenko speculated that Russian spectators might have overheard him talking to his wife and entourage in their native language in the stands at the Sopot tournament. “Everything was going on — I spoke in the center court with my wife,” he said. “Maybe it’s possible, if I can say something, ‘I don’t want to play or I can retire’ — some people can understand.”
|
Davydenko Nikolay;Tennis
|
ny0132063
|
[
"sports",
"autoracing"
] |
2012/12/07
|
Loeb to Enter Four Rallies Next Year
|
The world rally driving champion Sebastien Loeb will compete in only 4 of the 13 events on the calendar next season.
|
Automobile Racing;Loeb Sebastien
|
ny0167634
|
[
"politics"
] |
2006/01/31
|
Democrats Try to Tie Upstate Congressman to Washington G.O.P. Scandals
|
WASHINGTON, Jan. 30 - New York Democrats, hoping to oust an influential Republican congressman from upstate New York, are questioning his ties to lobbyists in the wake of the lobbying corruption scandal hanging over Capitol Hill. The Democrats are seizing on reports that the congressman, John E. Sweeney of the Albany area, recently organized a $2,000-a-person "Skiing with Sweeney" weekend getaway attended by lobbyists at a ski resort in Park City, Utah, as well as a dinner at the home of Jeffrey Kimbell, a pharmaceutical industry lobbyist. The Democrats who have attacked Mr. Sweeney in newspaper interviews, news releases and a satirical Internet advertisement are arguing that his actions reflect a larger culture of corruption that has enveloped Washington under Republican rule. The attacks notwithstanding, he has not been implicated in any troubles that have touched other Republicans. "A scandal is brewing in Washington, D.C.," the narrator in the Internet ad declares. "So it is worth asking: What is our congressman doing to fix this mess? He's going skiing. In Utah. With lobbyists." The attacks, which have escalated in recent days, have provoked the Sweeney camp into striking back, suggesting that the congressman and his advisers are slightly unsettled. Specifically, the Sweeney camp has taken aim at Kirsten Gillibrand, a Democrat who is seeking to unseat him and whose campaign has helped orchestrate many of the attacks. Melissa Carlson, a Sweeney spokeswoman, suggested hypocrisy on Ms. Gillibrand's part, pointing out that she is the daughter of Douglas Rutnik, an Albany lobbyist who is close to Gov. George E. Pataki. Ms. Carlson also defended the trip to Utah, noting that Mr. Kimbell, the pharmaceutical lobbyist, represents two companies that employ more than 2,000 people in the congressman's district and that Mr. Sweeney was discussing economic development efforts with him. Ms. Carlson also noted that Mr. Sweeney had used his influence and seniority in Congress to secure aid for his district and for the rest of the state, and that he played a crucial role in fighting for $20 billion in reconstruction aid for New York City after the 9/11 attack. "We don't have to attack her," Ms. Carlson said of Ms. Gillibrand. "My boss has a record of achievement to run on." The attacks on Mr. Sweeney come as New York Democrats say they plan to use the fallout over the lobbying scandal in Washington as an issue to mount vigorous challenges against Mr. Sweeney and other Republicans they consider too close to Republican leaders on the Hill. Interestingly, Mr. Sweeney has taken part in an effort to force new elections on Capitol Hill to replace most of the Republican leaders in the aftermath of the lobbying scandal. In calling for House elections, Mr. Sweeney and his allies believe that leadership changes in the House should go beyond Representative Tom DeLay of Texas, who recently abandoned his effort to remain majority leader amid pressure from Republican colleagues jittery about an election-year lobbying scandal. Mr. DeLay, who had temporarily stepped aside after being indicted on state charges in Texas, made his decision after the lobbyist Jack Abramoff, a former DeLay ally, pleaded guilty to corruption charges in a case that could also involve other former senior DeLay aides. In a letter being circulated to Republican House members, Mr. Sweeney and a colleague, Representative Dan Lundgren of California, argued that Republicans "must seize this opportunity to regain the trust the American public placed in us." But Democrats say that Mr. Sweeney's fund-raising event in Utah suggests that he is not genuinely committed to reform. In an interview, Ms. Gillibrand accused Mr. Sweeney of being "part of the problem in Washington." "My concern is that he is on a junket with representatives of the pharmaceutical industry listening to their concerns when he should be back in the district listening to our concerns," she said. But even Democrats agree that Ms. Gillibrand has an uphill battle in the heavily Republican district.
|
NEW YORK STATE;HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES;SWEENEY JOHN E;GILLIBRAND KIRSTEN;ELECTION ISSUES;ETHICS;LOBBYING AND LOBBYISTS;ELECTIONS
|
ny0001891
|
[
"sports",
"ncaabasketball"
] |
2013/03/30
|
Michael Carter-Williams Is the Point Man of Syracuse’s Run
|
WASHINGTON — Gerry McNamara still participates in an occasional practice at Syracuse. Not far removed from his playing career, McNamara is the youngest assistant on Coach Jim Boeheim’s staff, so the onus often falls on him to get out there and compete. McNamara enjoys himself for the most part. There are exceptions. For example, he does not particularly relish being guarded by Michael Carter-Williams, a 6-foot-6 guard with the wingspan of a pterodactyl. So after Carter-Williams dismantled Indiana’s backcourt on Thursday in the Round of 16, McNamara could empathize. “I know what it feels like trying to beat him off the dribble,” he said. “I know what it feels like trying to get a shot off against him.” In igniting Syracuse’s run to the region final, Carter-Williams has showcased more than defense. He might own one of the more comprehensive toolboxes in college basketball: defending, scoring, rebounding, passing. “Not a lot of players can impact the game in every aspect,” McNamara said. “And he can.” Ahead of Saturday’s East Region final against Marquette, Carter-Williams ranked third in the country in assists (7.5 a game) and fifth in steals (2.74). He scored a game-high 24 points as fourth-seeded Syracuse (29-9) eliminated No. 1 seeded Indiana with startling proficiency. Carter-Williams has managed to deliver his finest work of the season in the wake of personal adversity. Last week, his family’s home in Hamilton, Mass., was destroyed in a fire. Carter-Williams said he lost nearly everything, but he was able to recover a handful of items, including the ring he received as a McDonald’s all-American in 2011. It has not been easy, he said. He tries to compartmentalize his emotions. Image Michael Carter-Williams after a 3-pointer against Indiana. Known for his passing, he scored 24 points in the Round of 16 victory. Credit Jonathan Ernst/Reuters “When it comes time for basketball,” he said, “everything else is kind of irrelevant.” His two seasons at Syracuse have been anything but bland. As a freshman, he played sparingly behind Brandon Triche, Scoop Jardine and Dion Waiters, who was the fourth pick in last year’s N.B.A. draft. In hindsight, Carter-Williams said, the experience probably helped him. He added 12 pounds. He watched and learned. He stifled his frustration. “As a competitor, I wanted to be out there playing,” he said. He has gotten that opportunity this season, though he has not been immune to growing pains. His perimeter shooting has been an adventure; he has shot 29.3 percent from 3-point range. Errant passes, too, have been an issue. He had eight turnovers against Louisville in January. But if some of his plays are high risk (no-look lobs to teammates), then they also are high reward. “He understands the game, he sees the game, and he’s got a great feel for the game,” Boeheim said. As a high school player at St. Andrew’s School in Barrington, R.I., Carter-Williams was a potent scorer, finishing with 2,260 points. He split time at both guard positions, but his coach, Michael Hart, said he projected Carter-Williams as a point guard in college, figuring that Carter-Williams’s unusual combination of savvy, skill and size had the potential to make him unguardable: too big for small guards, too quick for big forwards. “A lot of people see this skinny kid with the baby face,” Hart said in a telephone interview. “It’s deceptive.” Carter-Williams has a knack for the game’s subtleties — passing angles, defensive positioning — that he credits to growing up in a basketball family. His mother, Mandy Zegarowski, coaches high school basketball in Massachusetts. His stepfather, Zach Zegarowski, was an assistant coach at Charlestown High School, a powerhouse program just north of downtown Boston. His father, Earl Williams, played college basketball. Carter-Williams said he got regular assessments of his play from all three. “Pretty much after every game,” he said. His recent play has further piqued the interest of N.B.A. scouts. While leaving college early for the draft seems like an increasingly viable option, Carter-Williams said he had not decided his future. He cited more pressing business. In anticipation of Saturday’s game, Carter-Williams used the word “toughness” three, four, five times. On Feb. 25, Marquette defeated Syracuse, 74-71, in their only meeting of the season. “Things couldn’t have gone much worse for us,” he said, adding, “We’ve learned from those mistakes.”
|
College basketball;NCAA Men's Basketball,March Madness;Syracuse University;Marquette University;Michael Carter-Williams
|
ny0141943
|
[
"business",
"media"
] |
2008/11/17
|
Politically Charged Radio Interview Goes Viral
|
Internet rule of thumb: When something goes online, it spreads fast and keeps spreading, whether you like it or not. A striking example came last week, when Clear Channel Communications tried to force a Web site in Connecticut to take down an audio recording, only to have the recording pop up on dozens — if not hundreds — of other sites within days. On Oct. 28, Tom Scott, a talk radio host at a Clear Channel station, WELI-AM in New Haven, recorded a heated interview with Senator Christopher J. Dodd , Democrat of Connecticut. Mr. Scott, a former Republican state senator, accused Mr. Dodd of misconduct in getting a mortgage, which Mr. Dodd vehemently denied. The station did not broadcast the interview as scheduled. Mr. Scott said the station had withheld the recording because of repeated clashes between him and a producer. He does not accuse the station of censorship, but does say that the producer wanted to be easier on Mr. Dodd. Clear Channel confirms the dispute with the producer, and says WELI did not broadcast the interview because Mr. Scott quit. Mr. Scott said he left by mutual agreement, but after the station held up the broadcast. Last Tuesday, the recording turned up on a local Internet news site, The New Haven Independent, along with an article about the episode at WELI. The site received a letter from a lawyer for Clear Channel, stating that the recording belonged to the company and demanding that it be removed from the site, but that went about as well as the music industry’s early attempts to stop file sharing. Political Web sites, bloggers and other radio stations quickly picked up on the story, including at least one Clear Channel station, and some charged censorship. (That would have meant Clear Channel, known for mostly conservative talk radio, protecting a liberal Democrat.) They downloaded the recording from The Independent and posted it online or played it on the air, or simply posted links to The Independent’s site. “It crashed our server,” said Paul Bass, managing editor of The Independent. “It’s by the far the heaviest traffic we’ve had.” Mr. Scott said, “I got calls from all over the country from people wanting to interview me about what happened.” On Thursday, WELI broadcast the Dodd interview after all — to put to rest talk of censorship, a Clear Channel spokeswoman said. “This was just an attempt to protect intellectual property,” she said. “But it speaks to how incredibly hard it is to do that on the Internet.”
|
Radio;Computers and the Internet;Clear Channel Outdoor Holdings Incorporated;Dodd Christopher J;Scott Tom;Presidential Election of 2008;Freedom of the Press;New Haven (Conn)
|
ny0279440
|
[
"world",
"europe"
] |
2016/10/05
|
John Kerry Criticizes Russia, Saying It ‘Turned a Blind Eye’ on Syria
|
BRUSSELS — Secretary of State John Kerry criticized Russia on Tuesday for pointedly ignoring the Syrian government’s use of chlorine gas and barrel bombs against its own citizens, and he left little hope for an early resumption of talks with Russia about a cease-fire. Speaking here before the opening of a conference on Afghanistan organized by the European Union, Mr. Kerry said that the United States would continue efforts to end the fighting in Syria through the United Nations, but that Washington had little hope of persuading Russia to give up its unqualified support of the government of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria. The Obama administration announced on Monday that it was suspending bilateral talks with Russia on a cease-fire. Audio Reveals What John Kerry Told Syrians Behind Closed Doors In a private meeting with Syrians, the secretary of state expressed frustration with Russia, the Obama administration’s failure to back diplomacy with force, and the shrinking prospects for a cease-fire. Listen to his conversation. “We acknowledge in sorrow — and, I have to tell you, outrage — that Russia has turned a blind eye to Assad’s deplorable use of chlorine gas and barrel bombs against his people,” Mr. Kerry said. “Together, the Syrian regime and Russia have rejected diplomacy and seem to have chosen instead to continue their pursuit of a military victory over the broken bodies, bombed-out hospitals and traumatized children of a long-suffering land.” Mr. Kerry’s speech, at an event hosted by the German Marshall Fund of the United States, focused mainly on trans-Atlantic cooperation between the United States and the European Union. Noting concerns about Britain’s vote to leave the bloc , Mr. Kerry said the United States would remain a strong ally of Britain and the European Union. “As much as some of us may wish the U.K. vote had gone the other way, the lesson we must take from this democratic choice is not that we need less Europe or less U.K.” Mr. Kerry said. “Rather, we all need more of both.” He added: “The United States will support its friends and allies on both sides of the channel as you work through the tough issues ahead. But we will not be shy about where our interests lie: We need the strongest possible E.U., the strongest possible U.K., and a highly integrated, collaborative relationship between them.”
|
US Foreign Policy;EU;John Kerry;Syria;Brexit
|
ny0130801
|
[
"sports"
] |
2012/12/04
|
Utah Announces Bid for 2026 Winter Olympics
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Utah officials announced plans for a long-shot bid for another Winter Olympics, saying they already have the venues in place and have left behind the taint of scandal from the 2002 Games. The bid, for 2026, is contingent on the United States Olympic Committee’s deciding it will endorse a city for those games. Utah announced the bid far in advance to scare off any competitors, Reno-Tahoe among them.
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Olympic Games;Utah
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ny0189615
|
[
"world",
"europe"
] |
2009/05/16
|
Arrest of 2 ‘Pink Panthers’ May Shed Light on Jewel Heists
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PARIS — The wanted posters for Zoran Kostic offer clashing images of a fugitive who investigators believe may hold the key to cracking a network of globe-hopping jewel thieves with a taste for chunky diamonds and Patek Philippe Swiss watches. His Interpol poster lists his eye color as black — or green. And Mr. Kostic’s photos veer from the dark, brooding looks of a Heathcliff with tousled hair to the grim visage of a newly shorn truck driver. A German reward poster, offering 5,000 euros, or $6,800, shows a softer side: a man who might be a prosperous banker in suit and tie, peering intently through a window of a luxury jewelry store, Wempe. That man in the window had managed to outwit and elude the authorities since early 2003, until the international hunt finally led to the two-star Hotel Utrillo, a short walk from the Moulin Rouge in Paris, where this week the French police arrested Mr. Kostic, 39, and Nikola Ivanovic, 36, with their Swiss watches. It was a moment for investigators to savor; many had gathered for an unusual two-day conference in Monaco in March to share information about the group, which they called the Pink Panthers, with representatives from 16 countries, including the United States, Japan and the United Arab Emirates. They pored over information about a shifting collection of about 200 men from Montenegro and Serbia, most with military or athletic backgrounds, who carried out reconnaissance missions by methodically looking for “soft targets.” The authorities say they believe that the Pink Panthers have snatched jewels worth more than $130 million in swift attacks that extend from Dubai to Geneva, Tokyo, Paris and Monaco. Their nickname was invented by British investigators when one suspect there hid a $657,000 blue diamond in a jar of cream, a tactic lifted from one of the “Pink Panther” films starring Peter Sellers. But when thieves struck on May 5 in Switzerland at L’Émeraude, a jewelry store in Lausanne, police investigators were able to raise a rapid alarm, passing on warnings to French authorities with a hunch that the robbers might run toward France . Stéphane Volper, an inspector with the judicial police in Lausanne, said a bold approach had become the signature of Pink Panther thieves, who operated with impunity because they were accustomed to staging robberies and then heading back to Serbia undetected, using counterfeit passports. In 2007, for instance, thieves struck the Ciribelli shop in Monte Carlo, a robbery in which Mr. Kostic is a suspect. To this day, investigators remain baffled by the choice of getaway car. “They escaped in a yellow Fiat,” said Olivier Jude, inspector commander at the Monaco Police Department. “Now that was unusual. Then they abandoned the car and left inside their fingerprints.” For all their detective work across borders, the police know little about Mr. Kostic, who was born in the south of Montenegro in Cetinje, a city of about 18,000 people. But they consider him a “big fish” because, they say, he has figured in more than 20 high-profile robberies and may ultimately provide information about the methods of the Pink Panthers. So far, according to the French police, Mr. Kostic and his accomplice, Mr. Ivanovic, are not saying much. But they have admitted to the recent robbery in Lausanne, said Hélène Dupif, the commissioner of the organized-crime police unit in Paris. Ms. Dupif said she considered the members of the Pink Panthers extremely violent. “These are men who are really strong, who come in with handguns and order people to the ground and scream at them in a language they don’t understand,” she said. “They terrorize people, and some victims have been seeing therapists for a long time because of them.” Almost 40 men tied to the network have been arrested on theft charges in several countries, including Japan, where well-dressed robbers tear-gassed employees in a jewelry store. Within three minutes they had vanished with a sack of diamonds and the Comtesse de Vendôme, a 125-carat necklace of 116 diamonds. Soon after the Pink Panther police meeting in Monaco, one of the suspects in the Japanese case, Rifat Hadziahmetovic, was arrested on March 18 in Cyprus by the local police, who discovered that he was also wanted by Interpol. In February, the authorities arrested two Serbs, according to Ms. Dupif. So when the Swiss authorities called after the heist in Lausanne, French investigators used information from the earlier arrests to monitor areas where Mr. Kostic and Mr. Ivanovic might turn up. The hunch proved true; they were spotted in the rather unluxurious Pigalle neighborhood of Paris, notorious for its sex shops and red-light district. When they found them, according to Ms. Dupif, they still had two Patek Philippe watches from the Lausanne robbery. She noted that lately the Panthers had been shifting from diamonds to watches, which may be easier to resell. So far investigators have not been able to determine what happened to all the stolen diamonds. But officials are not certain whether the network was responsible for the most highly publicized robbery in recent months. In early December, the Pink Panthers fell under suspicion when four men — three disguised as women with long tresses, sunglasses and winter scarves — struck the fabled Harry Winston jewelry store on Avenue Montaigne in Paris. In less than 15 minutes they were gone, carrying sacks of diamonds. But the Panthers are known for even greater speed — their robberies usually take less than three minutes — leading some investigators to question whether they were responsible for the holdup. Initially, the police counted up the plunder at more than $80 million. Since then Harry Winston has started collecting insurance payments, but it has lowered the value of the cost of the diamonds to $32 million, revealing in its annual report that it will receive about $20 million as an insurance settlement. Today its Paris store has become even more exclusive. Now the store is open only for private appointments with customers. On a street corner facing the door stands a “watcher” in a suit, a communications cord dangling from his ear to relay information to employees inside.
|
Robberies and Thefts;Jewels and Jewelry;Diamonds;Crime and Criminals;Interpol;France
|
ny0160215
|
[
"nyregion"
] |
2006/03/10
|
As 'Sopranos' Returns, Art Irritates Life
|
UNLESS you've been hibernating all winter, you probably know that they are back on Sunday, Tony and the gang, that fun- and gun-loving brigade of sociopaths, the kinds who know how to put the Freud in schadenfreude. After a long break, a new round of "The Sopranos" is about to begin on HBO, to the delight of devotees dying to see who gets whacked next. But there are others. Some Italian-Americans roll their eyes. Here we go again, they say in resignation -- another season of those on-screen gavones, those lowlifes, those embarrassments to themselves and others. Emanuele Alfano will not be watching. He is director of a group called the Italian-American One Voice Coalition, which would like to be sort of an Anti-Defamation League for Italian-Americans, a flashing light warning of bigotry and harmful stereotyping. Seven years after "The Sopranos" first went on the air, his dismay over it has not waned. "The attitude toward Italian-Americans, especially those from New Jersey, is that you have to be connected in some way," said Mr. Alfano, who lives in Bloomfield, N.J. " 'The Sopranos' reinforced that attitude a hundredfold." Worse for him is that the creative forces behind so many Mafia-themed films and television shows are Italian-Americans, people with names like Scorsese, Coppola and De Niro. In the case of "The Sopranos," it is David Chase, original family name De Cesare. There is nothing really new here. The pros and cons of "The Sopranos" have been argued since its beginning. And for every Mr. Alfano, there is someone who says, Get over it. Mafia movies are today's equivalent of the old westerns, a harmless form of entertainment. One prominent "Sopranos" fan, former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, advises some of his fellow Italian-Americans "to be less sensitive." "You could spend your whole life wanting to be insulted," Mr. Giuliani said a few years ago. "Why?" Part of the why may be the relentless grip that the Mafia has on popular culture and the news media. Witness the enormous, often inexplicable, attention paid to all things Gotti. That includes the current New York trial of John A. Gotti, whose mob-boss father, even in death, is treated by some newspapers as if he were a cross between Garibaldi and St. Francis of Assisi. What troubles the writer Helen Barolini is the incomplete picture of Italian-American life that emerges. "I don't mind that it exists," she said of the "Sopranos" series. "Let it exist. But where's all the rest of us?" Dr. A. Kenneth Ciongoli, board chairman of the National Italian American Foundation, says he enjoys watching "The Sopranos." But he also feels that it has taken "what I as a doctor would call the urban sclerosis of America and superimposed it on Italian-Americans and made it ours." Urban sclerosis? "Dysfunctional families, impolite people, materialism, hedonism et cetera," he explained. "All of the things that represent the excess of America. They have made it Italian-American, unfairly." ONE wonders what Tony Soprano himself might think about this debate. In fact, we have an inkling. No question, he takes his Italian heritage seriously. But he is prepared to go only so far down the group-pride road. In an episode about Columbus Day a couple of years ago, Tony reminds his consigliere, Silvio Dante, of all that he has achieved. Leaving out the expletives -- no easy task with a "Sopranos" script -- he tells Silvio: "Did you get all this because you're Italian? No. You got it because you're you, because you're smart, because whatever. Where is our self-esteem? I mean, that doesn't come from Columbus or 'The Godfather' or Chef Boyardee." That's the thing about "The Sopranos." Like it or not, it is often insightful. Robert Viscusi, a professor of English at Brooklyn College, makes that point in a new book, "Buried Caesars" (State University of New York Press). It is fair to say, Professor Viscusi writes, that "discrimination inevitably accompanies and draws nourishment" from "The Godfather" and "The Sopranos." But make no mistake about those works, he says. They are, "for good or ill, works of art." Mr. Alfano, for one, doesn't buy it. Asked if "The Sopranos" was not indeed well made, he replied with a trace of scorn: "Well made. 'Birth of a Nation' was also well made." NYC E-mail: [email protected]
|
ITALIAN-AMERICANS;ORGANIZED CRIME;TELEVISION;DISCRIMINATION;CRIME AND CRIMINALS;NEWS AND NEWS MEDIA;SOPRANOS THE (TV PROGRAM)
|
ny0086075
|
[
"us",
"politics"
] |
2015/07/28
|
As the G.O.P. Base Clamors for Confrontation, Candidates Oblige
|
WASHINGTON — For Senator Ted Cruz to call his party’s leader, Senator Mitch McConnell, a liar as he did Friday and again Sunday in the Senate was an extraordinary personal attack, but given how much the conservative base of the Republican Party has come to loathe its leaders, it was also good politics for the struggling presidential candidate. While tensions between the ideological purists of the base and the pragmatists of the party establishment have simmered for decades, the breach has widened in recent years to nearly unbridgeable. Many Republicans now lament that the divide goes a long way to explain why their party lately has had so much trouble governing in Congress and picking a presidential nominee. “We are struggling to prove that we can be a governing party,” said Vin Weber, a Republican strategist and former congressman. Mr. Weber was saying much the same during the prolonged fight in Congress last winter, when conservatives threatened to shut down the Homeland Security Department unless President Obama reversed immigration orders shielding many illegal residents from deportation. Then, too, Mr. McConnell provoked conservatives’ wrath by engineering Republicans’ retreat to prevent a shutdown. This time the issue that incited Mr. Cruz was Mr. McConnell’s green light for a vote to reauthorize the long bipartisan Export-Import Bank, which conservatives want to eliminate as “corporate welfare.” But these intraparty battles could look trifling, Mr. Weber and other party leaders fear, compared to what the Republican-controlled Congress could face this fall: An escalation of infighting over essential bills to finance the government in the fiscal year starting Oct. 1 and to increase the nation’s debt limit. An impasse would risk a governmentwide shutdown or default, which based on past episodes could damage Republicans with the public. But not with the conservative base, or with conservative news media and the conservative advocacy groups like those backed by the billionaire Koch brothers, who all demand confrontation. That is the audience that Mr. Cruz and other Republican senators running for president are playing to. Increasingly, so are rank-and-file Republican lawmakers without White House ambitions. Who Is Running for President? Donald J. Trump officially accepted the Republican party's nomination on July 22. Hillary Clinton was officially nominated on July 26 at the Democratic Convention. Therein lies the governance problem for Mr. McConnell, the Senate majority leader from Kentucky, and House Speaker John A. Boehner, Republican of Ohio. For congressional Republicans, following the leader down a pragmatic path of compromise can get the followers in trouble back home, or worse, attract a more conservative opponent in the next primary election. Conversely, attacking the leader wins points with the conservative base, as Mr. Cruz is counting on to catch up with Donald J. Trump, who has taken a lead in some polls by positioning himself as the most antiestablishment contender of all. Soon after attacking Mr. McConnell on Friday, Mr. Cruz dialed into the radio shows of the conservative celebrities Rush Limbaugh and Mark R. Levin. Mr. Limbaugh called the Cruz attack “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington-type stuff.” Mr. Levin posted on Twitter, “Let’s see how many others in the Senate have a backbone & call out McConnell.” The roots of the current base-versus-establishment dynamic go back two decades, after Republicans broke Democrats’ 40-year lock on a House majority in 1994. The party’s base had shifted to the more conservative and populist South from the Northeast and Midwest. Also, conservative media was popular and expanding: Its initial alliance with the Republican establishment was evident when party leaders, including Mr. Boehner, made Mr. Limbaugh an honorary House Republican for his role in helping make them a majority. Like Mr. Boehner, many in today’s party establishment once were proud troublemakers for conservatism themselves — Mr. Weber was, along with Newt Gingrich, a leader among right-wing rebels in the House through the Ronald Reagan and George Bush administrations — and they remain conservative still by any nonpartisan measure. But governing often means compromising. By the early 2000s, conservative voters grew increasingly antagonistic toward party leaders, and so did the conservative media that both reflects and drives opinion among its hard-line audience. With Republicans in control of both the White House and Congress for six years, many conservatives were disillusioned and angered by the George W. Bush era’s legacy of deficits, mismanagement in Iraq and during Hurricane Katrina, recession, financial collapse and federal bailouts. The election of Mr. Obama and a Democratic-controlled Congress for a time caused Republicans to unite in opposition, and Mr. Obama’s policies, like the Affordable Care Act, gave rise to the Tea Party. Republicans won a House majority again in the 2010 midterm elections with an influx of Tea Party supporters. But the rapprochement between party leaders and the base soon was strained by the realities of governance. Republican leaders were unable to fulfill their promises to stop Mr. Obama on health care, immigration and federal spending. By last January, despite another successful midterm election in November that gave Republicans a Senate majority too, pent-up frustration led House hard-liners to try to oust Mr. Boehner — egged on by conservative voters, news media and activist groups. Even allies acknowledge that Republican leaders’ repeated promises since 2010 on matters like Obamacare or immigration, while intended to reassure the base in the moment, only end up stoking its anger when the promises cannot be kept. The president, after all, has a veto. Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a Republican leadership adviser and former director of the Congressional Budget Office, said, “I always felt that the major goal the day after the election last November should have been to lower expectations.” Among conservatives, he said, “There was this sort of notion that somehow they were running Washington, which is nuts.” But spreading that notion is the conservative media, which has expanded in recent years, on air and online, to become many conservatives’ sole source of news, according to the Pew Research Center . Mr. Levin, for example, drew sustained cheers at a conservative conference in February for a rant lambasting Republican leaders more than Mr. Obama. “The Republicans said that if we gave them the Senate along with the House, they’ll do great things,” he shouted. “They’ve done nothing!” Steve Deace, an Iowa-based syndicated radio host and columnist popular with conservatives, has his own lexicon for the Republican establishment: “the surrender caucus,” “girly men” or “lords of the realm.” “This is by any measure the most conservative Republican caucus in my lifetime,” said Representative Tom Cole, a member of the Republican leadership from Oklahoma. But for the conservative media and the conservative base, he said, “The idea of getting half of a loaf and moving down the road is just anathema to them.” He added, “They’re looking for fights to pick with, quote, establishment Republicans, unquote.” With 2016 approaching, so are a number of Republican presidential candidates beyond Mr. Cruz. Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin recently tweeted this: “On the campaign trail for 28 hours with head not hitting the pillow, blasting GOP leadership for false promises.” The conservative radio host Laura Ingraham approvingly retweeted that, to her own 546,000 followers.
|
US Politics;2016 Presidential Election;Ted Cruz;Mitch McConnell;Republicans
|
ny0201575
|
[
"us"
] |
2009/09/24
|
A Detainee Freed, but Not Released
|
NEW YORK — Anybody who thinks it’s going to be easy for the Obama administration to meet its goal of closing the Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, detention center by Jan. 22 needs to take a look at the case of Saber Lahmar, who has been imprisoned there since January 2002. Mr. Lahmar is an Algerian who in 2001 was living and working as a permanent resident of Bosnia. After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States, he was suspected by the U.S. authorities of involvement in a plot to attack the American Embassy in Sarajevo, which led to his arrest by the Bosnian police, his transfer to the U.S. authorities and his incarceration, along with five other suspects from Bosnia, at Guantánamo. In November 2008, Mr. Lahmar became the first Guantánamo detainee to successfully challenge his detention, bringing a habeas corpus petition to federal court in Washington. According to his lawyer, Robert Kirsch, the U.S. government abandoned its claim that there ever was a plot to attack the embassy in Sarajevo, though it maintained that Mr. Lahmar and the other Bosnians were planning to travel to Afghanistan to fight against U.S. forces there. But Judge Richard Leon, a Bush appointee and no crusader against Guantánamo, ruled that there was no evidence to support the government’s claim, and he ordered the United States to use pursue all efforts to get Mr. Lahmar released from custody. But despite that ruling, nearly a year after his detention was found to be unjustified, Mr. Lahmar is right where he has been for almost eight years: locked up in Guantánamo. He has not seen his wife for that entire time, nor has he ever seen the child that she gave birth to not long after his arrest. “Relatively speaking,” Mr. Kirsch, his lawyer, said, “his conditions are better than those he had before the court decision, but he’s still suffering horribly emotionally and psychologically.” Ever since Judge Leon’s decision, Mr. Lahmar’s detention has been technically illegal, and one way to deal with it would be to allow him to settle in the United States. But Congress has forbidden any Guantánamo detainees from being settled in the United States. Moreover, Mr. Lahmar himself, Mr. Kirsch said, isn’t eager to settle in the country that incarcerated him for so long. Instead, the matter has been turned over to the State Department, specifically to Daniel Fried, the special envoy whose job is to facilitate the closing of Guantánamo by persuading other countries to take the detainees who have been ordered released by the courts or determined to pose no danger. Mr. Fried has had some modest success lately — but not in the case of Mr. Lahmar or of a majority of the others ordered released by the courts. In all, since the Supreme Court decision last year, some 37 habeas petitions have been heard. Thirty have been decided in favor of the detainees, seven against them. Of the 30 ordered released, 20 are still in custody. Lawyers involved in the detainees’ cases say that about 226 men remained locked up in Guantánamo in all, of whom 80 have been approved for resettlement while about 40 have been referred for prosecution. But what sort of prosecution — before civilian or military courts? This basic question has still not been decided, despite the Obama administration’s early and outspoken opposition to the Guantánamo way of doing things. President Barack Obama suspended ongoing military tribunals when he came into office, but since then his administration has postponed a decision on whether to proceed with some military tribunals or to shift those trials to the civilian courts. According to lawyers involved in some of these cases, the administration’s dilemma is this: If it proceeds with military tribunals, it keeps in place the system of the previous administration, which, during the presidential campaign, Mr. Obama called “an enormous failure.” If it moves to civilian trials, it risks having crucial evidence thrown out because it was obtained by waterboarding and other means of “enhanced interrogation.” And so, can Guantánamo be emptied and closed in the next four months? “I think it’s likely that most of the men held prisoner there will be gone by then,” Mr. Kirsch said. “It will take tremendous diplomatic effort, but the level of creativity that comes from a deadline should not be underestimated.” Nearly half of the detainees who qualify for release are Yemenis. If Mr. Fried can strike a deal with either Yemen or Saudi Arabia to take them, a large part of the problem could be eliminated at a single stroke. But not all are Yemenis. Take, for example, the 22 Uighurs, members of the Muslim minority of Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region in western China. The men were at one time imprisoned in Guantánamo, and all have since been determined by the courts to pose no danger to the United States. Nine of them have gone to Albania and Bermuda, and four more have agreed to go to the tiny Pacific island nation of Palau — but the nine others are reluctant to go there, said the lawyer for two of the Uighurs, Susan Baker Manning. “What happens to those who don’t accept the offer to go to Palau — and there could be many reasons for not accepting it — I don’t know,” Ms. Manning said. “I’d only be guessing at this point.” And then what of those who will be prosecuted? And what of those deemed too dangerous to be released but too difficult to prosecute — a category that isn’t much publicly acknowledged, but that lawyers who are involved in the Guantánamo cases believe to exist? One worry of human rights lawyers is that their clients could be taken away from a closed-down Guantánamo and put someplace else outside the jurisdiction of the law. “The last thing we want to see is the opening of a similar facility elsewhere in the world, “ Jameel Jaffer, director of the American Civil Liberties Union National Security Project, said, “or even in the United States.”
|
Guantanamo Bay Naval Base (Cuba);Detainees;Shutdowns (Institutional)
|
ny0063567
|
[
"sports",
"hockey"
] |
2014/01/12
|
Setting a Hockey Team’s Direction Left and Right
|
Kurt Kehl has an unusual memory. Name just about any N.H.L. player in the last 40 years or so, and Kehl knows whether he shot from the left side or the right side. Kehl, a senior vice president for the Washington Capitals and the other teams owned by Ted Leonsis, was asked last week about players past and present, famous and obscure. Anton Volchenkov? Lefty. Brian Rafalski? Righty. Ray Bourque? Lefty. Bill Houlder? Lefty. Ron Stackhouse? Righty. Al MacInnis? Righty. Lee Norwood? Lefty. Kehl was right every time. Although baseball fans usually know from which sides players bat and pitchers throw — the hitter-pitcher matchup being the fulcrum of the sport — the importance of right and left shots in hockey is far more subtle. The game’s complexities can cloud right- and left-handedness for fans, but players, coaches and general managers recognize how crucial it can be. A coach may assign a righty or lefty center to take a face-off, depending on which side of the ice the draw takes place. Some right-shooting wings prefer to play their natural side — right shooters on the right, left shooters on the left — because they can carry the puck along the boards, away from the defenders to the inside. But others like to skate on what is known as the off wing, because it provides a better angle for shooting. Situations can dictate how a player’s shooting preference is used. Capitals Coach Adam Oates rejuvenated Alex Ovechkin’s career last season when he switched him from left to right wing at even strength. Ovechkin, with a right-handed shot, could accept passes on his forehand and use his body to shield the puck from checkers. Yet on the power play, Ovechkin went back to his off wing so he could more quickly one-time his powerful shot directly off a pass. For defensemen, the consequences of shooting right or left can be even greater — and can more easily escape public notice. Although N.H.L. rosters list whether wings play the left or the right side, they do not do the same for defensemen. Perhaps that is one reason commentators rarely pay attention to the handedness of defensemen. This season, however, defensemen’s shooting sides informed the narrative of the selection process for Canada’s Olympic team, beginning with the furor over P. K. Subban . As it turned out, Subban made the roster that was announced Wednesday, but Brent Seabrook’s right-handedness helped cost him a place on the squad. Canada Coach Mike Babcock wanted an equal number of left-handed and right-handed shots among his eight defensemen. Seabrook won a gold medal with Canada’s 2010 Olympic team, and he is a top-pair defenseman for Chicago who was vital to the Blackhawks’ two recent Stanley Cup championships. But he would have been a fifth right-hander on Team Canada’s blue line for the Sochi Games in Russia. Babcock likes his defensemen playing on their natural side because of the advantage they have making basic plays. They can theoretically execute better when passing on the forehand to escape an opposition forecheck, or when attempting a cross-ice pass while skating through the neutral zone, or when dashing to the boards to keep a puck in the offensive zone. Making all those plays swiftly and cleanly becomes magnified on the larger Olympic ice surface , which is about 15 feet wider than N.H.L. rinks and more roomy behind the net. But many defensemen thrive while playing on their “wrong” side. Philadelphia’s Mark Streit, a left-handed shot who usually plays right defense, logged many minutes for Switzerland at the 2010 Olympics and will play in Sochi. “Eventually, you get used to picking up pucks on your backhand and moving them to your forehand,” Streit said. “But it’s a different story when you go back and forth a lot from side to side.” That preference can have ramifications. The Rangers may be weighing whether to trade their top-pair defenseman Dan Girardi, who can become an unrestricted free agent in July. General Manager Glen Sather will have to take into account that if they deal him for a prospect, they will have only one right-shooting defenseman, Anton Stralman.
|
Ice hockey;Kurt Kehl
|
ny0005428
|
[
"nyregion"
] |
2013/04/15
|
Weiner, Perhaps Exploring Mayoral Bid, Issues Policy Guide
|
As he seeks to extend the discussion about a possible candidacy for mayor — and shift attention away from the online sex-messaging scandal that cost him his Congressional seat — Anthony D. Weiner released a 21-page policy booklet on Sunday that he described as a blueprint for keeping New York City “the capital of the middle class.” The document, named “Keys to the City,” was largely drawn from a booklet of the same title , theme, and format that he distributed five years ago, in anticipation of a mayoral bid in 2009 that he later abandoned. Mr. Weiner, who said the report was intended merely to “generate some discussion,” did expand on his old ideas and added a few new ones, including a city-run single-payer health care program; a requirement that sex offenders wear GPS tags for easy tracking; and a British House of Commons-style “question time” for New York City’s mayor. But many sentences and, in some cases, complete paragraphs, are repeated verbatim from the earlier document, and the updated booklet does not address many high-profile issues in this year’s mayoral contest, including the police tactic of stop, question and frisk. The release of the report — paid for by Mr. Weiner’s campaign funds and posted to a Web site that he first registered in 2008 — underscores the widespread puzzlement over his recent actions, as New York’s political world wonders if he is pursuing some sort of trial balloon or laying the foundation for a serious campaign for mayor. Image Anthony D. Weiner Credit Seth Wenig/Associated Press Less than two years after resigning his Congressional seat , Mr. Weiner, a Democrat, is in the midst of a step-by-step re-entry into public life. He broke his silence about the scandal in an 8,000-word profile published on Sunday in The New York Times Magazine, and he has signaled that he plans to sit for a series of news interviews in the coming days. In a telephone interview on Sunday, Mr. Weiner tried to restrict the conversation to the ideas in the policy document, repeatedly declining to answer inquiries about how seriously he was considering a candidacy. “I would take it on face value,” he said of the report. “I want these issues to be discussed and debated irrespective of who’s in the race.” He acknowledged that the report was an “amalgam” of his ideas over the years, but he became exasperated when pressed on the similarities between the document and its 2008 predecessor. “To some degree, this is the problem with reporting on politics these days,” he said, trailing off before exhaling loudly. Mr. Weiner was asked if the timing of the release, coming shortly after the Times Magazine article, could be viewed as a signal that he would soon enter the race. “I’ll leave it to the reader to try to derive motivation,” he replied. Mr. Weiner’s exploration of a mayoral bid, including his commissioning of a series of telephone polls of New York City voters, has attracted national headlines and provoked a variety of reactions from leading politicians. Image Anthony D. Weiner's policy booklet from 2008. Eliot Spitzer, the former New York governor who resigned after his own sex scandal, said in a radio interview on Saturday that Mr. Weiner “will make it as a serious candidate if he plunges in, as I think he will.” Mr. Spitzer added, “He will have to persuade the public. He can do it.” Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, Mr. Weiner’s former mentor, would not comment on the matter when asked about it on a Sunday talk show. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, on his Friday radio show, urged the news media to focus on Mr. Weiner’s policies, saying, “One joke is fine; after that, let’s get serious.” In the policy booklet, heavy on statistics, Mr. Weiner lays out a case for dozens of proposals. He calls for so-called instant runoff elections, in which voters would rank their preferred candidates, to avoid the cost of holding a citywide runoff two weeks after the primary. He says the city should offer tax breaks to employers that encourage their workers to commute by bicycle. Mr. Weiner also declares any congestion pricing proposal as “dead,” and suggests the city focus instead on reducing truck traffic and installing parking meters that can adjust prices based on demand. A section on health care proposes that the city create its own health care program for “uninsured and underinsured” New Yorkers. Mr. Weiner also suggests that city workers be required to pay a portion of their health care premium costs. The earlier report was released in July 2008, with the same skyline logo and same description of New York as “the capital of the middle class” as the report Mr. Weiner released on Sunday. Image Anthony D. Weiner’s policy guide from 2013. Vast chunks of the text from the 2008 report have been transferred, verbatim in many cases, to the 2013 version. In other instances, phrases and sentences have been repeated, but rearranged or slightly reworded. Some adjustments appeared to have been made for the purpose of timeliness. In 2008, Mr. Weiner wrote: “For every investor who has a made a killing during an I.P.O., there’s a neighborhood pharmacist who has been put out of business by a big chain.” In the new document, there is a version of that sentence more in line with today’s post-crash Wall Street: “For every private equity firm that made a fortune, there’s a neighborhood pharmacist who has been put out of business by a big chain.” The word “impotent,” which appeared in the earlier version in a description of the city’s relationship with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, has been removed from the 2013 version. The cover of the 2008 report featured a neighborhood tableau of elevated train tracks and a corner-store pharmacy; that image has been replaced with glossy snapshots of New York landmarks from each of the five boroughs. And a photograph of Mr. Weiner no longer appears on the cover. His former title, Representative, has also been excised.
|
Anthony Weiner;Mayoral races;NYC;Politics
|
ny0215921
|
[
"nyregion"
] |
2010/04/28
|
Attendance Court for New York City Truants
|
Trayvon Johnson stepped into one of New York’s newest courts the other day in East Harlem, nervously squeezing a balled-up tissue. So far, it was a familiar court scene. Judge Eileen Koretz, who has put some people away in her time, sized him up through narrowed eyes. Uh-oh, here it comes. But then, the judge asked sweetly: “Will you do me a huge favor, and take the gum out of your mouth?” Embarrassed smile. Trayvon was no hardened criminal, but a 13-year-old with a serious school attendance problem, traceable, he said, to a habit of sleeping late and a strong interest in daytime cooking shows on television. The gum came out. This is Attendance Court, an experimental two-year-old program that is applying relatively new judicial “problem-solving” ideas to the problem that tens of thousands of New York public-school students miss weeks of school every year. “Most of the time, I don’t feel like going to school,” Trayvon said. He is out about one of every four school days. Chronic truants get into the program after their parents get a letter from their child’s principal moderately threatening legal consequences and offering Attendance Court’s services. The program has no power to punish, but provides coordinated access to services like counseling and tutoring, as well as occasional tough talk by retired judges in hearings every two weeks. One of the national court trends for adults in recent years has been the creation of more than 3,000 new problem-solving courts across the country. In general, they connect defendants with social services and treatment for problems likes drugs and domestic violence. Hoping that similar help, mixed with an aura of judicial authority, may reduce school absences, the city has been trying out Attendance Courts in three schools, one in Brooklyn and two in East Harlem. Such courts are intended to “take aim at chronic truancy, so often a precursor to serious delinquency,” Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said in his State of the City address in 2007. Truancy courts, he said, would help by “holding children and their families accountable for school attendance.” There have been similar truancy courts in Buffalo and St. Louis and in Kentucky. Kim Nauer, who has written about truancy at the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School, said “it’s an interesting experiment” that may offer new strategies for dealing with chronic absenteeism. A 2008 report by the center said that nearly 40 percent of New York public school students — about 140,000 teenagers — were missing a month or more of classes each year by the time they reached high school. It is too early for definitive results, and the Attendance Court program is small, with some 45 chronically truant middle and elementary school participants a year. But early results show that attendance increases sharply, an average of four weeks a year, according to the Center for Court Innovation, a group in New York that runs the program. In a yellow room the size of a closet, truancy court got going at the Isaac Newton Middle School on Pleasant Avenue in East Harlem before school one Friday morning this month. Judge Koretz, who used to sit in Manhattan Criminal Court, was in a black pantsuit instead of a judge’s robe. She was squeezed into a plastic chair. To her left, in another plastic chair, was Susanna Osorno-Crandall, the program coordinator, who is the all-around cheerful arranger of after-school programs, homework helper and frequent buyer of alarm clocks to foster better wake-up habits. The students and their parents took their turns in plastic chairs hard against a turquoise filing cabinet that had seen better days. Judge Koretz said she and Ms. Osorno-Crandall have a kind of “good guy, bad guy” routine. Omayra Gomez, who was there with her sixth grader, Savannah (almost one month of absences out of the last five), said the sternness seemed more real than a routine. Judge Koretz can be nice, she said, but do not let that fool you. “She has a very strict face,” Ms. Gomez said. “The face says it all.” Savannah had an easy hearing, though. “Ms. Schoenfeld says you are doing much better, much more focused,” the judge said. Next case. Sabrina Skye Mirjah, age 11, who is failing many of her classes, was in no mood. There were hearts and other scrawlings in felt-tip marker on both arms. Why had she been out again? “Home. Sleeping.” The judge: “Are you motivated to get it done?” Sabrina: “ No.” Her mother, Maria M. Sanchez, was looking stressed. Ms. Osorno-Crandall had gotten Sabrina into the after-school program she asked for, and now she was complaining about that, too. “We agreed to her conditions,” the mother said, “and she still didn’t follow through. She blew it.” Ms. Osorno-Crandall would have her work cut out for her with Sabrina the next week. “I can help you with your homework,” she said brightly. No answer. East Harlem is no easy place to go to school, Dennis Ortiz, Newton’s guidance counselor, said later. The neighborhood has high poverty, diabetes and asthma rates that contribute to absenteeism, along with overcrowded apartments and a host of other challenges. “There is always some sort of crisis,” Mr. Ortiz said, adding that the teachers and he are often too busy to provide the intensive services that are available through the Attendance Court program. “I am overwhelmed,” he said. That morning, the fourth hearing in the yellow room was for Maegan Millan, an eighth grader with a pink flower bobbing on her headband. She missed about two months of school last year. At school, Maegan explained, there were issues. Fighting, for example, and gossip. Some classmates, she said, tell others “that they’re ugly or fat.” Ms. Osorno-Crandall and she have been talking about how to cope, she said. She has a 13-year-old sister who suffers from depression, her mother, Maria Martinez, added, and the whole family has sometimes been distracted. “I kind of forgot a little about Maegan,” Ms. Martinez said. Maegan, who has at times struggled academically, said that her sister’s difficulties did have a spillover effect. “If she doesn’t go to school,” she said matter-of-factly, “I don’t go to school.” Things are much better now, though, Ms. Martinez said. Maegan’s sister is in a special school and seems to be thriving. In the little yellow room, everything seemed possible for a minute. “I want to challenge you to get above a 70 this quarter,” Ms. Osorno-Crandall said to Maegan. The pink flower on the headband bobbed. The hearings were over for the day. The school hallways buzzed to morning life. But in the yellow room there were some hints of how challenging chronic truancy can be. Of the six students who had been scheduled to see Judge Koretz, two did not make it. They were absent from truancy court.
|
Education and Schools;Absenteeism;Courts;New York City;Truancy Court;Koretz Judge Eileen
|
ny0079787
|
[
"business",
"dealbook"
] |
2015/02/26
|
HSBC Executives, With a Lot to Explain, Give It a Shot
|
LONDON — HSBC’s mea culpa tour continued on Wednesday as the company’s chairman and its chief executive testified before the Treasury Select Committee in Parliament about the activities of its Swiss private bank. Stuart Gulliver, chief executive of HSBC since 2011, apologized for the bank’s conduct, which included helping clients evade taxes as recently as 2007. “It clearly was unacceptable, we very much regret this, and it has damaged HSBC’s reputation,” he said. He said the activities took place at a different time under different standards. “The practices that we’ve seen taking place at the Swiss private bank, which we absolutely do not support in any way, shape, or form, were in the period in the mid-2000s.” Members of Parliament grilled the executives on whether they accepted personal responsibility for the shortcomings at the Swiss bank. Douglas Flint, HSBC’s chairman, said he placed primary responsibility on managers in Switzerland. Asked multiple times whether he should be held accountable, he said, “I don’t have that line of sight,” adding, “I am ashamed of what happened and I have a shared responsibility, which I accept.” Mr. Gulliver was asked to defend a statement he made earlier this week in which he said that banks were being held to a higher standard than the church or armed services. “That didn’t land very well,” he conceded. He said he was trying to explain that it is hard to know what 257,000 people in 70 countries are doing and that companies need to have sufficient controls in place, which HSBC has worked to do. Both executives said HSBC’s compliance controls were significantly better than they have been in the past. Mr. Gulliver was asked about his own tax matters after it was disclosed earlier this week that while he was living Hong Kong, he had his bonuses paid into a Swiss bank account through a Panamanian company he had set up. “I can understand how people find these arrangements quite unusual,” he acknowledged, emphasizing that he set up the account to protect his privacy because bonus amounts could be viewed by colleagues on the company’s computer system at the time. He said the maneuver gave him no tax advantages. He was also questioned about his status as a so-called non-domiciled resident, meaning he pays taxes on his British income and any money he brings from abroad, but he is exempt — for a fee of £30,000 every year — from any capital gains, income or inheritance tax on foreign assets, including whatever is in his Swiss account. He said that he and his Australian wife had established Hong Kong as their permanent home and that he intends to return there. One lawmaker said, “So you could have worked for a U.K. bank for 50 years, lived in this city for 20 years and still be registered as a non-dom for tax purposes?” Mr. Gulliver said that he had paid British tax on all his HSBC earnings since 2003, when he returned to Britain, “so the amount of tax I have paid is the fair and appropriate amount.” When Andrew Tyrie, chairman of the committee, enumerated the regulatory investigations HSBC faces, including rigging foreign exchange markets and manipulating interest rate derivatives, among many others, Mr. Flint called it a “terrible list.” “We are suffering through horrible reputational damage,” he said.
|
Stuart T Gulliver;Tax Evasion;Banking and Finance;Switzerland;London;Legislature
|
ny0149164
|
[
"business"
] |
2008/09/19
|
A Bid to Curb Profit Gambit as Banks Fall
|
Traders who have sought to profit from the financial crisis by betting against bank stocks were attacked on two continents on Thursday. The Securities and Exchange Commission is considering a temporary ban on short sales of some or all shares and an announcement could be made as early as Friday morning. Earlier Thursday, the S.E.C. scrambled to put together an emergency rule to force major investors to disclose their short sales daily. In Britain, regulators announced new rules to bar short selling. Short selling — a bet that a stock price will decline — is the practice of selling stock without owning it, hoping to buy it later at a lower price, and thus make a profit. It has often been blamed for forcing prices down in times of market stress, but the level of anger has intensified as the American government has been forced to bail out major financial institutions and the leaders of some investment banks have asked for action to protect their shares. Both the S.E.C. and the New York State attorney general promised to intensify investigations into short selling abuses. “They are like looters after a hurricane,” said Andrew M. Cuomo , the attorney general. “If you pass a rumor in a normal marketplace, people are calm, they check it out, they do their due diligence. When you get the market in this frenzied state and they are on pins and needles, any false information is much more impactful.” Short sellers say that the criticism directed at them, and any restrictions on their activity, are wrong-headed, because they were among the first to raise the alarm about the risky mortgage lending practices that led to the current financial crisis. Senator John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate, said the S.E.C. had “kept in place trading rules that let speculators and hedge funds turn our markets into a casino” and said that the S.E.C.’s chairman, Christopher Cox, had “betrayed the public’s trust.” Speaking at a rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Mr. McCain said, “If I were president today, I would fire him.” The White House immediately said it supported Mr. Cox, who has said he will resign at the end of the Bush administration. Mr. Cox said he had moved against short sellers and was doing all he could to stem the financial crisis. “Now is not the time for those of us in the trenches to be distracted by the ebb and flow of the current election campaign,” Mr. Cox said in a statement released by the commission. “It is precisely the wrong moment for a change in leadership that inevitably would disrupt the work of the S.E.C. at just the wrong time.” Mr. Cox is a former White House aide to President Ronald Reagan and a former Republican congressman from California. Some conservative columnists and commentators, including Robert Novak, supported him as a running mate for Mr. McCain. Writing in the American Spectator earlier this year, Quin Hillyer said that conservatives would rally to a Cox selection and called him “the best choice, bar none.” In recent weeks, Mr. Cox has also stepped up his criticism of short sellers, particularly those who engage in “naked” short selling. While short sellers are supposed to borrow shares before selling them, naked shorts do not borrow. That saves the cost of borrowing, though the trader is still vulnerable to losses if the share price rises. Opponents of short selling believe that it can force share prices down and destroy confidence in a company that might otherwise survive. Regulators have long thought that the practice was crucial for efficient markets to function, but earlier this year the S.E.C. imposed temporary limits on short selling of some financial stocks. Financial share prices rallied when those limits were announced but fell during the period in which the rule was in effect. Share prices for many financial companies shot up Thursday afternoon after plunging the day before in the wake of the government decision to take control of the American International Group , a large insurance company, to prevent it from collapsing. Financial shares were especially hard hit Wednesday, with Morgan Stanley plunging 24 percent, to $21.75, and its chief executive, John J. Mack, blaming false rumors spread by short sellers. On Thursday, Morgan Stanley regained part of that loss, rising 3.7 percent to close at $22.55. The latest moves against short sellers began Wednesday. In the morning, Mr. Cox announced new rules to prevent brokerage firms from selling a stock short if they previously had sold the stock short without having borrowed it. That night, he said that he would propose more rules, to force large short sellers to disclose their positions. The rules were needed, he said, “to ensure that hidden manipulation, illegal naked short selling or illegitimate trading tactics do not drive market behavior and undermine confidence.” Details of the possible new disclosure rule were not released, and it is not clear how much authority the S.E.C. has over hedge funds, which have successfully sued to prevent the commission from forcing them to even register with it. Institutional investors, including some hedge funds, provide details of stocks they own every three months but do not disclose short positions. Mr. Cox said he wanted daily disclosure of short positions, which he said would be made public, though he did not say how quickly. By late Thursday, the S.E.C. was considering a temporary ban of some or all short selling. Mr. Cox told reporters in Washington late Thursday that he had discussed the ban with other senior administration officials but no decision had been made yet. Richard Baker, the president of the Managed Funds Association, a hedge fund trade group, said the funds would comply with any rules but said that disclosure of their trading positions should not be made so quickly that it would harm them in the market. Mr. Cox also said the S.E.C. would intensify its investigations of short selling by hedge funds and would demand their records on trading in certain securities. In Britain, the Financial Services Authority said that beginning Friday it would bar traders from taking new short positions in listed stocks of financial companies, and that starting next week, investors would have to disclose their short positions if they were at least 0.25 percent of a company’s outstanding shares. This week, the British bank Lloyds TSB took over HBOS, a mortgage lender, after HBOS’s stock tumbled. That fall was widely blamed on short sellers, and Prime Minister Gordon Brown vowed to clean up the financial system. To obtain shares to sell short, traders often borrow them from institutional investors, who receive small fees for the loans. But public pension funds in New York and California said Thursday that they would stop lending shares of some financial companies. New York State’s comptroller said the state’s Common Retirement Fund would temporarily stop lending the shares of 19 banks and brokerage firms to short sellers. “This speculative selling has put downward pressure on the entire stock market and threatens to drive our national economy deeper into decline,” Thomas P. DiNapoli, the comptroller, said in a statement. The suspension removes 105 million shares from the fund’s securities lending program. It will last until market conditions stabilize, a spokesman said. New York City’s comptroller announced the same move, as did officials in California. “We’re pulling them back because of the unfortunate predators that are out there right now, trying to be greedy,” said Patricia K. Macht, an official of the California Public Employees’ Retirement System.
|
Short Selling;Stocks and Bonds;Securities and Commodities Violations;Goldman Sachs Group Incorporated;Morgan Stanley;Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc;American International Group;Securities and Exchange Commission;Cuomo Andrew M
|
ny0059428
|
[
"us",
"politics"
] |
2014/08/10
|
2 Hawaii Democrats Face Tough Primary Challenges
|
HONOLULU — With two hurricanes bearing down toward his state, Gov. Neil Abercrombie refused to discuss this weekend’s Democratic primary election in which he is fighting to preserve his political life. “I took off my campaign hat some time ago,” he said at a news conference on Friday. Although Mr. Abercrombie may have suspended his campaigning, the primary election proceeded as scheduled on Saturday. And while the dual hurricane threats were downgraded to tropical storms — the first of which, Iselle, brought only minor damage to the Hawaiian islands — Mr. Abercrombie may not escape unscathed. In this heavily Democratic state, two of the party’s marquee officeholders, Mr. Abercrombie and Senator Brian Schatz, are facing tough challenges in their bids to advance to the general election. And though polling here is notoriously fickle, just about every political pundit in Hawaii agrees on one thing: Mr. Abercrombie is in trouble. On first glance, Mr. Abercrombie should be in good shape. The Hawaiian economy is growing, Unemployment here is low and dropping. And he has enjoyed enormous advantages in fund-raising and name recognition over his rival, David Ige, a state senator. But Mr. Abercrombie, who has held elected office in Hawaii for nearly four decades, has trailed in almost every recent poll. “He’s really lost his mojo,” said Neal Milner , a professor of political science at the University of Hawaii. A brash, tell-it-like-it-is style had served Mr. Abercrombie well for decades, including 20 years in Washington as a member of the House of Representatives, Mr. Milner said. But he said that during Mr. Abercrombie’s four years as governor, that style “has somehow turned against him.” Image Gov. Neil Abercrombie, left, and David Ige, a state senator, with moderator Mahealani Richardson during a Democratic primary debate in July. Credit PBS Hawaii, via Associated Press “People used to complain that he had a big mouth, but they’d vote for him for Congress,” he said. Mr. Ige, by his own account, has focused his campaign on building his name recognition. Some of the distinctions he has drawn between himself and the governor are based as much on style as on policy. “We have heard loud and clear that voters felt disconnected from government and that government had stopped listening,” he said in an interview Friday. “I’m an engineer by profession, so I listen more than I speak.” Mr. Abercrombie is bolstered by strong support from the Democratic Party establishment, including President Obama, who recorded an automated call for the governor that went out to voters. (“I’m asking you to support my friend, Gov. Neil Abercrombie,” the president said in the recording. “He’s taken action to turn Hawaii around.”) “All of us in the campaign, from the governor to our volunteers in the field, are confident we’ll advance through the primary,” Shane Peters, a spokesman for the governor’s campaign, said in an email. “Like nearly every other re-election bid by previous Hawaii governors, we expect it will be close.” Josh Green, a Democratic state senator who has not endorsed either candidate, said that Mr. Abercrombie may also benefit slightly from the storms. The second storm, Hurricane Julio, was approaching the island on Saturday, but it is not expected to hit Hawaii directly, and its effects may not come until Sunday. “With the number of traditional endorsements he got, which helps get out the vote, I think more of the early voters favored him,” Mr. Green said. “Some people could have trouble getting to the polls.” Early and mail-in voting accounted for almost half of the primary turnout in 2012. The first storm, Iselle, also gave Mr. Abercrombie the chance to perform as a leader responding to a crisis. “But I don’t think it will be enough for him,” Mr. Green said. At the very least, the storm has interrupted the usual get-out-the-vote activities — except for the television ads, which played nonstop during the storm. Mr. Abercrombie was hardly the only candidate to curtail campaign activities as Iselle closed in. Mr. Ige canceled phone banks and rallies. Mr. Schatz did the same. Colleen Hanabusa, a congresswoman challenging Mr. Schatz in the Senate race, went so far as to email her supporters, asking them to take down yard signs, lest a flying Hanabusa sign injure someone. “We didn’t want anything to become a projectile,” Ms. Hanabusa said. The race between Mr. Schatz and Ms. Hanabusa is seen as so close that almost any fluctuation in turnout — whether caused by the storm or anything else — could prove decisive. Democrats are almost certain to retain the seat, irrespective of who wins. Mr. Schatz was appointed to fill the seat held for more than half a century by Daniel K. Inouye, a beloved figure in Hawaii who in the final days before his death in 2012 asked Mr. Abercrombie to appoint Ms. Hanabusa to succeed him. Mr. Abercrombie’s disregard of that request has hung over both these races . Like Mr. Abercrombie, Mr. Schatz, as the incumbent, has enjoyed a financial advantage and support from powerful Democrats in Washington, including President Obama. He has built a progressive record for himself during his 18 months in Congress, and has worked to present himself as the better long-term option for the state, irrespective of how he initially got the job. “He tries to come off as being the most progressive candidate,” Mr. Milner said, including going after Ms. Hanabusa on Social Security, an issue important to the large block of senior voters here. “What he’s been able to do is build up a semi-incumbency, whereas normally candidates who have been appointed get no bump in their first election.” Ms. Hanabusa, meanwhile, enjoys great support from Japanese-Americans, in part because of Mr. Inouye’s endorsement. She has emphasized her long experience in Congress, and her Hawaiian roots (though Mr. Schatz also grew up in Hawaii). Her ads describe her childhood in rural Oahu, where her parents ran a gas station, and they are dotted with Hawaiian words. “They have been able to outraise and outspend us, though a lot of the money comes from the mainland,” she said of Mr. Schatz in an interview Friday. “I think tomorrow is going to be a statement about who really votes in Hawaii.”
|
Gubernatorial races;Senate races;Hawaii;Neil Abercrombie;Brian Schatz;David Ige
|
ny0052567
|
[
"sports",
"baseball"
] |
2014/10/25
|
Joe Maddon Leaves Job as Manager of Tampa Bay Rays
|
SAN FRANCISCO — Joe Maddon was driving west in his R.V. early Friday evening, almost ready to camp down near Pensacola, Fla., for a cookout while watching the World Series. Maddon is bound for his home in California, he said, with a planned stop to see family in Arizona along the way. “We’re not skipping town,” he said, kiddingly, over the phone. But Maddon has left his job as manager of the Tampa Bay Rays, the team he guided from underfunded doormat to overachieving contender. He opted out of his contract Friday, exercising a clause that triggered Oct. 14 with the departure of General Manager Andrew Friedman to the Los Angeles Dodgers. The opt-out clause, Maddon said, was something of a fine-print treasure revealed to him in a call from Matt Silverman, the Rays’ president of baseball operations, just after Friedman left. “I had totally forgotten about it,” Maddon said. “Andrew leaves, and I get a phone call that I have an opt-out clause. Otherwise I would not have known, I swear to you.” Maddon joined the Rays before the 2006 season, when the team went 61-101. Two years later the Rays were in the World Series, sparking a run of six winning seasons, five with at least 90 victories. Maddon was the ideal fit, open to ideas from the analytics-minded front office and popular with players for cultivating a loose clubhouse atmosphere while thriving on competing with the payroll behemoths in the American League East. He instantly becomes a highly coveted commodity. Maddon said his agent, Alan Nero, would look for opportunities on his behalf. There should be plenty, likely for more than the Rays could have paid him, despite what the team termed a diligent and aggressive effort to extend his contract. “I’m surprised by it and disappointed,” Silverman said, adding later, “I can only tell you what I know and what Joe and I spoke about, which was his desire to be a long-term Ray. I shared that desire and worked hard to make it a reality, and it didn’t happen.” Maddon, to his credit, acknowledged that money was a factor in his decision to leave. He pointed out that he turns 61 in February and had family and grandchildren and charities to consider. A chance at free agency, essentially, was too enticing to resist for a baseball lifer who took his first minor league managing job in 1981. “I’ve never had that moment, and I’ve been doing it for a while,” Maddon said. “I’ve had moments where I’ve asked for a couple of extra thousand bucks and been told no, and what did I do? I signed. But this is different. It’s interesting and exhilarating and scary, all at the same time.” Image Despite its modest payroll, Tampa Bay won at least 90 games in five of six seasons from 2008 to 2013 under Maddon. Credit Chris O'Meara/Associated Press Maddon praised the Rays’ ownership and front office and said it had been wonderful to work for them, noting that he had always been happy to go along with the company line. Silverman called the Rays’ contract offer “very generous,” but Maddon had a different perspective. “Fair is always in the eye of the beholder,” he said. “A subject with the Rays has always been limitations, and I’ve always settled for those limitations. I told my wife I really didn’t think I could settle the next time. “I have a very unique opportunity to exercise my right to opt out, and I think if you take anybody with the same choices, the same everything, I think about a hundred percent would do exactly the same thing.” The losses of Maddon, Friedman and the ace left-hander David Price, who was traded to Detroit on July 31, pose a challenge to a team that slumped to 77 victories this season while continuing to draw sparse crowds. The Rays have pledged to cut a payroll that was already less than $80 million this season and ranked 28th among the 30 teams. The Dodgers have the highest payroll, and Maddon, of course, worked closely with Friedman. But Friedman took the unusual step Friday of issuing a statement in support of Manager Don Mattingly, who is signed through 2016. “I wish him nothing but the best wherever his next stop will be,” Friedman said of Maddon. “However, nothing has changed on our end, and Don Mattingly will be our manager next season and hopefully for a long time to come.” After such a strong statement, it would undercut Friedman’s credibility if he reversed course and hired Maddon this off-season. The Minnesota Twins are the only team besides the Rays without a manager, but a more likely spot for Maddon could be the Chicago Cubs. Maddon interviewed with Theo Epstein, the Cubs’ president of baseball operations, when Epstein was Boston’s general manager in 2003. The Red Sox hired Terry Francona instead, but Maddon was said to have made a strong impression, and his years in Tampa Bay have only added to his appeal. The Cubs finished 73-89 last season, their first under Rick Renteria, who had never managed before in the majors and is signed through 2016. With several top prospects on the verge of making a major impact, room for the payroll to grow and a ballpark under renovation, the Cubs appear poised for a breakthrough. Maddon seems to shares Epstein’s sensibilities as an engaging personality with an appreciation for both scouts and statistics. If they hired Maddon, the Cubs, with their losing history, would be happy if he could forge the same kind of legacy in Chicago that he described for himself from his time in Tampa Bay. “That I did my job and was successful,” Maddon said, “and that we created a culture that didn’t exist before.”
|
Baseball;Joe Maddon;Free agent;Tampa Bay Rays
|
ny0101014
|
[
"world",
"middleeast"
] |
2015/12/17
|
Yemeni Sides Agree to Prisoner Swap, as Peace Talks Begin in Switzerland
|
AL MUKALLA, Yemen — Warring parties in Yemen agreed on Wednesday to release hundreds of prisoners as the Yemeni government and Houthi rebels sat down for peace talks in Switzerland aimed at ending the country’s nine-month conflict. The prisoner swap had been discussed for months, and was not part of the negotiations in Switzerland between the Houthi rebels and the government of President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, according to Nasser Houthar, a southern Yemeni official allied with Mr. Hadi. Even so, it was a rare gesture of good will by the sides, whose fighting has engulfed much of Yemen and left about 6,000 people dead since the conflict started in March. A Saudi-led military coalition, which supports Mr. Hadi, and the Houthis agreed to a cease-fire that began on Tuesday and was intended to facilitate the peace talks mediated by a United Nations special envoy . The truce was broadly holding on Wednesday, though there were multiple reports of violations, including fighting in the southern city of Taiz and airstrikes in Marib Province, east of the capital, Sana, according to residents. Past cease-fires have faltered, but there is mounting pressure on the combatants to reach an agreement now because of the increasingly dire humanitarian crisis in Yemen. Human rights groups have also stepped up their condemnations of the Houthis and the Saudi coalition, accusing them of carrying out indiscriminate attacks and other violations that may amount to war crimes. Mr. Houthar, reached by telephone on Wednesday afternoon, said that 340 Houthi prisoners were being transported to the southern Lahj Province, where they were expected to be exchanged for 270 fighters allied with Mr. Hadi and held by the Houthis. Also on Wednesday, an American prisoner held in Sana who had been facing the death penalty was convicted on murder charges and sentenced to 10 years in prison, according to his lawyers. Sharif Mobley, from New Jersey, was detained in 2010 in a sweep by the Yemeni authorities of militants suspected of ties to Al Qaeda. He was later accused of killing a security guard at a hospital from which Mr. Mobley attempted to escape. His lawyers at Reprieve, an international human rights group, said that Mr. Mobley had been held incommunicado for long periods and abused in custody, and that they had been unable to mount an effective defense. Mr. Mobley’s local lawyer, Saleh el-Moraisi, said that Mr. Mobley had also been ordered to pay compensation of about $23,000 to the family of Abdul Malik al-Bouhim, the security guard. Mr. Mobley’s lawyer said they were exploring a possible appeal.
|
Yemen;Houthis;Prisoner of war;Human Rights;International relations;Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi;Sharif Mobley
|
ny0214050
|
[
"business"
] |
2010/03/26
|
Best Buy Beats Estimates
|
The Best Buy Company , the electronics retailer, beat Wall Street’s forecast for profit and sales in its holiday quarter and forecast stronger-than-expected earnings in the current year as demand for electronics picks up. Best Buy, which gained market share in the first holiday season after the bankruptcy of rival Circuit City, also said on Thursday that it would resume share repurchases and open stores in domestic and international markets. “We are starting a slow, steady climb back toward where we once were,” the chief executive, Brian J. Dunn, said in an interview. Best Buy’s quarter was helped by demand for notebook computers, mobile phones and flat-screen televisions and more appetite for such gadgets is expected this year, the company said. Best Buy said its profit rose to $779 million, or $1.82 a share, from $570 million, or $1.35 a share, in the period a year earlier. Revenue in the period, which ended Feb. 27 and was the fourth quarter of Best Buy’s fiscal year, rose 12 percent, to $16.55 billion, from $14.72 billion. Sales at stores operating for at least 14 months increased 7 percent. Analysts on average were expecting a profit of $1.79 a share on revenue of $16.08 billion. Shares of Best Buy, which is based in Richfield, Minn., rose $1.48, to $42.66. Best Buy said it expected operating margins to rise this year, especially in the second half, allaying concerns over its aggressive promotional strategy as it tries to fend off Wal-Mart Stores and Amazon.com . Best Buy’s domestic business increased its market share by about 2.6 percentage points in the three months ended Jan. 31, compared with a year earlier. In the fourth quarter, gross profit margin fell 0.6 percentage point, to 24 percent of revenue, helped by sales of lower-margin notebook computers and flat-panel TVs. Best Buy plans to open 50 to 55 large-format stores and 75 to 100 small-format stores, mainly mobile phone shops, in the United States this year. It also plans to open 10 to 15 stores in China.
|
Company Reports;Best Buy Company Incorporated
|
ny0282025
|
[
"world",
"asia"
] |
2016/07/20
|
3 Men in India Accused of Raping Woman a Second Time
|
ROHTAK, India — Police officers in northern India on Tuesday arrested three men suspected of kidnapping and raping a 20-year-old college student last week, allegedly targeting her a second time as punishment for accusing them of raping her before. The men were among a group of five accused of assaulting the woman three years ago. Two of the three men arrested on Tuesday had been the only ones charged in the 2013 rape case and were out on bail when the second assault is said to have occurred, according to K.P. Singh, the director general of police in the northern Indian state of Haryana. The shocking nature of the allegations drew politicians and activists to the local police station and the hospital where the woman was being treated. Some excoriated the police for waiting six days to make an arrest. Investigators said they were waiting for forensic evidence to determine whether the woman had been raped a second time. There were conflicting accounts of what happened last Wednesday, when the police said they found the woman on a roadside in an intoxicated state. Praveen Kumar, a cousin of the victim, said she had been abducted and forced to drink alcohol or a drug, then taken to an unknown place and gang-raped. He said she was found with torn clothing and bruises on her neck and too traumatized to speak. “She only nods her head yes and no,” he said. “ She keeps saying, ‘They will kill us all.’ ” Mr. Kumar said the men who had been charged with raping his cousin had been intimidating the family to pressure the victim to drop the charges. “These are the same five men who gang-raped her in 2013,” he said. The victim is a member of India’s Dalit community, once known as untouchables. Her younger brother, Prince, 18, said she had identified her assailants. “All I know is she said, ‘Brother, they were the same five,’ ” he said. But the police were cautious, saying all the facts were not yet in. The chief investigator and deputy superintendent of the police, Pushpa, who uses only one name, said the officers found the woman on a roadside “in an inebriated state,” and that she showed “no injuries at all, internal or external.” “The doctors have examined her and the possibility of rape was not ruled out,” Pushpa said. Kamlesh Panchal, the chairwoman of the Haryana State Women’s Commission, said there were “no injury marks on her, and doctors say she is fit to talk.” “She told us she was raped, but we will wait for the forensic reports,” Ms. Panchal said. Relatives of the defendants said the woman’s claims could be disproved, in part by consulting telephone records during the time of the alleged attack, but they said the police were under public pressure to make an arrest. “Hang me if they find an iota of truth in the girl’s case,” said Ajit Singh, whose son, Amit, was one of the men arrested on Tuesday after he had been released on bail in the previous case. Few crimes generate as much outrage in India as rape. After the death of a 23-year-old woman who was brutalized and gang-raped on a moving bus in New Delhi in 2012, tens of thousands flooded the streets to demand tougher policing and prosecution of sex crimes. After that crime, reports of rape shot up. The government created a fast-track court for rape cases and introduced new laws, criminalizing acts like voyeurism and stalking and making especially brutal rapes a capital crime.
|
India;Rape;Women and Girls
|
ny0259002
|
[
"nyregion"
] |
2011/01/24
|
Unlikely Coalition Opposes Cuomo’s Tax Cap
|
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has vowed to rein in New York’s taxes, declaring them a burden to residents and businesses, and proposing help in the form of a state-imposed cap on property taxes. But many among the very constituencies he has been aiming to satisfy, homeowners and tax protest organizations, say they are deeply dissatisfied with his proposal. And in recent weeks many have joined educators, school district officials and unions in mobilizing against the tax cap, trying to cut off the proposal even before the governor has officially submitted it. These opponents are arguing that a tax cap would not lower anyone’s tax bill, and could instead end up costing people more in fees for programs and services as schools and municipalities seek other ways to cover costs. Many said they would prefer having property tax bills based partly on the income of the property owner, rather than just on the fluctuating real estate market. “Most property tax reform groups that have been studying the issue for a long time understand that a tax cap is smoke and mirrors,” said Susan Zimet, 56, an Ulster County legislator and a former New Paltz town supervisor. “It’s making people believe their taxes will go down. It’s setting them up to be incredibly disappointed when they get their tax bill.” The governor’s proposal would cap the growth of the overall property tax levy at 2 percent a year or the rate of inflation, whichever was less. A poll conducted this month by Siena College found that 83 percent of New York State voters supported a 2 percent tax cap. Nevertheless, New York has dozens of citizens groups, from Long Island to the Canadian border, with many claiming to represent hundreds, if not thousands, of like-minded taxpayers. By most accounts, some of these groups started banding together a few years ago when property taxes were rising steeply, and they have now stepped up their efforts with Governor Cuomo’s push for a tax cap. In recent weeks, groups have been trying to galvanize opposition to the proposal. In December, for example, representatives from the groups held a news conference in Albany and met with the editorial board of The Times-Union of Albany. They have appeared on radio shows in the Albany area and are blogging on taxnightmare.org . In January they attended Mr. Cuomo’s State of the State address to lobby legislators. They have also sent e-mails to the office of the Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, asking him to reject a tax cap, and plan to bombard Mr. Cuomo’s office with mail. The state’s powerful teachers union, New York State United Teachers , has also opposed the tax cap, saying it could devastate local schools, especially as mandated costs can rise by more than 2 percent annually. But union officials said last week that they were not providing money or working closely with the taxpayer groups — some of which would be happy to see school budgets restrained. Josh Vlasto, a spokesman for Mr. Cuomo, said in a statement that “property taxes are suffocating New Yorkers” and that “passing a property tax cap is the best way to deliver relief and Governor Cuomo will move swiftly to see that one is passed." Indeed, the governor has the support of many business and community leaders, who have formed their own group, the Committee to Save New York , to promote the tax cap, along with other fiscal measures. The group is spending at least $10 million in television and radio ads, direct mailings, and other communications. The Business Council of New York State has also broadcast radio commercials in the Albany area. “A property tax cap is crucial to take the pressure off homeowners and businesses in those areas of the state that have seen taxes constantly rising and jobs and people constantly leaving,” said William T. Cunningham, a spokesman for the Committee to Save New York. While other states have adopted tax caps, experts in fiscal policy are divided over their effectiveness. Supporters contend that tax caps, while they do not actually cut taxes, nevertheless slow the rate of increase and make them more affordable. Opponents say tax caps fail to reduce the tax burden on middle-class families, who are already overburdened. An analysis of census data by the Fiscal Policy Institute, a nonprofit research group in Albany, showed that in 2008 an estimated one in five New York households with incomes of $250,000 or less paid more than 10 percent of their income in property taxes; among households with incomes of $100,000 or under, that rose to more than one in four. “The problem with the property tax is that there is no limit to how much you can pay,” said Robert McKeon, 47, a cattle farmer and co-founder of the Tax Reform Effort of Northern Dutchess. He pays $10,000 a year in property taxes, more than 10 percent of his income, Mr. McKeon said. Many tax protest groups have instead lobbied for a “circuit breaker” program, which would provide a tax credit for people based on their income and ability to pay. In the long term, they say, they want the state to take over direct financing of schools and Medicaid , easing the pressure to increase property taxes. But these proposals would require significant state funds and face formidable hurdles, particularly during a state budget crisis. In addition, the circuit breaker would benefit only homeowners, while businesses have also demanded tax relief. A co-founder of taxnightmare.org, Gioia Shebar, 78, says the state’s property tax system is fundamentally unfair because it is based on home values, which fluctuate with the real estate market and reassessments, without regard to a homeowner’s income. Ms. Shebar, a retired New York City teacher, said school taxes on her three-bedroom home in Gardiner, N.Y., had nearly tripled, to $9,592, since 1997. Some of her neighbors, unable to afford such increases, have been forced to move or sell part of their land, she said. “It’s like having a sewer that’s really overflowing and putting a cap on it and saying ‘It’s fixed,’ ” Ms. Shebar said. “It’s still going to stink to high heaven.” John Whiteley, a retired Foreign Service officer who helped found the New York State Property Tax Reform Coalition , said his group was trying to educate people about the tax cap. “It’s popular because somebody comes up to you and says, ‘Hey, we’re going to put a cap on your property taxes,’ ” Mr. Whiteley said. “Who’s going to say no? They don’t bother to explain really what it is because it’s a sound bite, it’s not sound policy.”
|
Taxation;Cuomo Andrew M;New York State;Property Taxes;Housing and Real Estate;Budgets and Budgeting;Politics and Government
|
ny0117754
|
[
"sports",
"basketball"
] |
2012/10/30
|
N.B.A.’s Biggest Stars Concentrated in Miami and Los Angeles
|
Can mere mortals compete with superheroes? That is the question that will be asked repeatedly throughout the 2012-13 N.B.A. season. It all starts with LeBron James . A change occurred at some point last season, when James became more than just a star. He dominated for the Heat in the playoffs, winning his first league championship, and looked even better while leading the United States to a gold medal in the Olympics. In London, he was the unquestioned leader of a big-name group, overshadowing everyone else, including Kobe Bryant . The Lakers, unwilling to let James be untested in his prime, imported Dwight Howard and Steve Nash to play alongside Bryant and Pau Gasol. With Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh as James’s partners in Miami, seven of the league’s biggest stars are now concentrated on two teams. But before the Lakers or the Heat can be crowned the champions for 2012-13, they will have to get through a number of teams more than capable of challenging their dominance. Grown more organically than the mercenary rosters in Los Angeles and Miami, about which plenty has been written, teams from more modest cities like Oklahoma City, Indianapolis and Denver will try to grab the crown themselves. If things break right for these teams, they could.
|
National Basketball Assn;Nash Steve;Howard Dwight;James LeBron;Gasol Pau;Bryant Kobe;Basketball;Los Angeles Lakers;Miami Heat
|
ny0050139
|
[
"business",
"international"
] |
2014/10/11
|
E.C.B. Sets Release of Banks’ Asset Quality Review for Oct. 26
|
FRANKFURT — The European Central Bank said Friday that it would disclose the results of a yearlong review of the financial health of eurozone banks on Oct. 26, a Sunday, ending suspense about the timing of an event seen as crucial to the European economic recovery. The comprehensive assessment has preoccupied the European banking industry, both because of the huge volume of information that banks have been required to provide and because of fears by some that they might not pass scrutiny. By revealing the results on a Sunday, when financial markets are closed, central bank officials hope to minimize market turmoil should the so-called asset quality review produce any shocks — for example, by revealing that a major bank is severely undercapitalized. The aim of the project, considered long overdue by many economists, is to scour banks’ books for hidden problems, test their ability to withstand crises, and force the weak ones to either raise more money or close. The United States subjected banks to a similar acid test in 2009, which enabled lending to recover much more quickly than has been the case in Europe. Ultimately, the central bank hopes the review will clear up lingering doubts about the health of eurozone banks, so that the institutions can raise funds more easily from investors and increase lending to businesses and individuals. Lack of credit, especially in troubled countries like Greece and Italy, has been a severe impediment to growth in the eurozone, where unemployment remains at 11.5 percent. Mario Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank, said Thursday during an appearance in Washington that the review would “bolster confidence in the euro area banking sector.” He predicted that lending in the eurozone, which has been in steady decline, would recover next year. Mr. Draghi has insisted that the central bank will not hesitate to impose harsh conditions on banks found to be deficient, or close down those exposed as insolvent. Previous stress tests in the eurozone failed to restore confidence because some banks that passed them later collapsed. Dexia, a bank now owned by the governments of Belgium and France, required a taxpayer-financed bailout in 2011 only months after passing a stress test administered by the European Banking Authority , based on information supplied by national regulators. Dexia is in the process of being closed down. Some economists are skeptical about whether the current project will remove the stigma carried by eurozone banks since the beginning of the financial crisis. “My worry is that the asset quality review will not reassure markets very much,” said Marcel Fratzscher, president of the German Institute for Economic Research in Berlin. “It will certainly not be a game changer.” The review has two parts, overseen by the central bank but also involving the European Banking Authority, national regulators and thousands of private consultants and auditors hired to help. The banking authority’s review this time is supposed to be more credible because the agency will not be as dependent as in the past on information provided only by national officials. The current review is taking place in conjunction with the central bank’s adoption of a new role as supreme overseer of eurozone banks, part of a banking union intended in part to prevent national regulators from going easy on their own banks. The European Central Bank will formally become the primary bank supervisor on Nov. 4. In the first phase of the comprehensive assessment, which has been completed but not disclosed, teams of examiners pored over the books of the 130 most important banks in the eurozone and in Lithuania, which will join the currency union at the beginning of next year. The aim of the review was to uncover hidden problems, such as bad loans that banks had not disclosed. In a second phase, the banks are being subjected to stress tests intended to measure their ability to withstand a crisis, such as a severe recession or turmoil in global financial markets. The results of the stress tests will be announced by the European Banking Authority, based in London, on Oct. 26 as well. Banks that are found to be vulnerable in either the stress tests or the asset quality review will be required to raise more capital, effectively reducing their dependence on borrowed money and increasing their ability to absorb losses. The mere threat of the central bank’s scrutiny has already provoked a pre-emptive scramble by banks to raise capital. Mr. Draghi said Thursday that banks in the eurozone had raised almost 203 billion euros, or about $258 billion, since last summer.
|
Banking and Finance;European Central Bank;Regulation and Deregulation;European Monetary Union;Europe;Mario Draghi;European Banking Authority;Marcel Fratzscher
|
ny0016181
|
[
"sports",
"soccer"
] |
2013/10/21
|
Record Goal for Red Bulls
|
Tim Cahill scored the fastest goal in Major League Soccer history as the Red Bulls beat the Dynamo, 3-0, in Houston to extend their unbeaten streak to seven games. The Red Bulls (16-9-8) took over first place in the Eastern Conference and have the best record in the league, with one game remaining. Cahill put the Red Bulls ahead eight seconds into the game, getting a pass from Dax McCarty, heading it forward and sending a blast from outside the upper right box inside the near post. ■ Lauren Holiday and Carli Lloyd scored in the first half as the United States women’s national team overpowered Australia, 4-0, in San Antonio, giving Coach Tom Sermanni a victory in his first match against his former team.
|
Soccer;New York Red Bulls Soccer Team;Tim Cahill;Houston Dynamo Soccer Team
|
ny0274397
|
[
"business",
"dealbook"
] |
2016/02/02
|
Online Lender Ezubao Took $7.6 Billion in Ponzi Scheme, China Says
|
HONG KONG — A Chinese online finance company bilked investors out of more than $7.6 billion, spent lavishly on gifts and salaries and buried the evidence, according to local authorities who described the operation as an enormous Ponzi scheme . The accusations throw a shadow over China’s online finance industry, a lucrative area for many global leaders in the sector, but one that the authorities say has also drawn a growing number of cases of fraud and flameouts. Chinese officials say that the online company, Ezubao, once a dynamo of the industry, offered mostly fake investment products to its nearly one million investors, according to the state-run Xinhua news agency. The authorities arrested 21 people in Anhui, the eastern Chinese province where Ezubao is based, and closed some of the platform’s operations, the agency reported on Sunday. “Ezubao is a Ponzi scheme,” Xinhua quoted Zhang Min, a former executive at the company, as saying. Officials at the company could not be reached for comment. Video The state broadcaster aired footage on Monday of suitcases full of cash and excavators unearthing evidence in a fraud case involving an online finance company. Credit Credit Agence France-Presse — Getty Images A new category of Chinese companies has emerged in recent years to do for customers what the country’s state-owned banks will not. Chinese customers widely use their smartphones to buy groceries or transfer money, and new types of finance companies are offering loans to small businesses, students and others that state banks traditionally ignore. Ezubao claims to be a peer-to-peer lender, matching investors with potential borrowers over the Internet. China’s growth in peer-to-peer lending has been strong, and Morgan Stanley estimated total volume in the country last year at $33.2 billion, surpassing the United States. The Chinese market is fragmented, Morgan Stanley says, with more than 1,500 such lending platforms. But cases of illegal fund-raising related to peer-to-peer lending have grown quickly in the past two years, according to the local authorities, and officials pledged in December to tighten regulation of the industry. Because of the enormous sums involved and the large investor base, the collapse of a major online-financing platform could raise concerns over confidence in the security of such investments. Ezubao has been under official scrutiny for weeks. In December, Xinhua said the company was under investigation for suspected illegal business activities. Xinhua said an investigation by local authorities had found that most of the investment products the company marketed were fake. Some offered investors annual interest payments of as much as 15 percent. Why China Rattles the World China’s economy is faltering, prompting concerns that are now shaking global stock markets. In reality, the platform, which was set up by the Yucheng Group in July 2014, was used to enrich top executives, Xinhua said. That included more than 1 billion renminbi, or around $150 million, that Ding Ning, the chairman of Yucheng, is reported to have spent on items and gifts including real estate, cars and luxury goods, according to the news agency. The report added that the salary paid to Mr. Ding’s brother, Ding Dian, was increased to 1 million renminbi a month from 18,000 renminbi. The company spent as much as 800 million renminbi on payroll in the month of November. Another executive, who was in charge of risk management at a company affiliated with the Yucheng Group, said that more than 95 percent of the investment products Ezubao marketed on the platform were fake, according to the report, and those responsible went to considerable lengths to conceal their ruse. The Xinhua report said that suspects had placed about 1,200 documents and other pieces of evidence related to the scheme in 80 bags and had buried them six meters, or nearly 20 feet, underground at a site on the outskirts of Hefei, the capital of Anhui Province. It took the police 20 hours with two excavators to unearth the evidence, Xinhua said, and the police described the case as “extremely difficult.”
|
Ponzi and Pyramid Schemes;Ezubao;China
|
ny0205194
|
[
"world",
"americas"
] |
2009/01/19
|
Brazil Church Roof Falls
|
SÃO PAULO, Brazil (AP) — The roof of an evangelical church caved in shortly after a religious service on Sunday evening, killing seven people and injuring 57 others, the governor of São Paulo State, José Serra, said. About 60 people were inside the Reborn in Christ Church when the roof fell to the floor, a church spokeswoman, Marli Goncalves, said. The cause was not immediately clear. The church, which can hold 2,000 worshipers, was relatively empty at the time because the collapse happened between services, Ms. Goncalves said. As many as 1,000 people would likely have been inside just minutes earlier or later, she said.
|
Brazil;Accidents and Safety;Religion and Churches;Roofs;Jose Serra
|
ny0074434
|
[
"world",
"africa"
] |
2015/04/07
|
Body of a Rebel Leader Is Identified in Uganda
|
The bullet-scarred remains of the No. 2 commander in the Lord’s Resistance Army, the guerrilla group that once terrorized central Africa, have been positively identified after having been exhumed last month in a Uganda-led military expedition, a person involved in the recovery operation said Monday. The person, who spoke on condition of anonymity ahead of an official announcement from Uganda, said forensics experts were still completing DNA confirmation on the remains of the commander, Okot Odhiambo, one of five Lord’s Resistance Army soldiers, including its leader, Joseph Kony, wanted for the past decade by the International Criminal Court on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The person said there was no doubt, based on other evidence, that the remains were those of Mr. Odhiambo. Rumors of his death have circulated for years and last came up in October 2013, when he was thought to have been critically wounded in an ambush by Ugandan soldiers patrolling the Central African Republic. With the substantiation of Mr. Odhiambo’s death — plus the already confirmed deaths of two other L.R.A. defendants and the surrender of a fourth in January — only Mr. Kony, a warlord and self-described prophet, remains at large. Ugandan military officials were not available to comment on Mr. Odhiambo’s death. A spokesman for the International Criminal Court, based in The Hague, did not immediately return telephone and email messages. Tipped off about Mr. Odhiambo’s possible remains, a team from the Uganda People’s Defense Forces went to a grave site in January in the Central African Republic’s southeast, near the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo, a longtime domain of the L.R.A. The Ugandan military team was assisted by advisers from the American military and the Bridgeway Foundation, a Houston-based charity that has contributed to the hunt for Mr. Kony and his disciples. They found a decomposing body with a bullet wound to the stomach, people involved in the recovery operation said. The body was transported to Kampala, Uganda’s capital, where it has remained pending the official release of the DNA confirmation. Mr. Odhiambo, a Ugandan thought to have been born in 1970, was known for his absolute fealty to Mr. Kony. For that loyalty Mr. Odhiambo was rewarded with senior positions, including the rank of lieutenant general, according to a biography by the L.R.A. Crisis Tracker, a website created by human rights organizations that have sought to publicize the group’s history of atrocities. A warrant for his arrest was issued by the International Criminal Court in July 2005 on two counts of crimes against humanity and eight counts of war crimes including murder, pillaging and the forced conscription of children. News of his death came three months after Dominic Ongwen, a senior L.R.A. commander and co-defendant under indictment by the court, surrendered to a joint military task force of the United States and the African Union. Mr. Ongwen, believed to be about 35, got his start as a child soldier abducted when he was 10. Mr. Ongwen was transferred to International Criminal Court custody, and the first hearing in his case has been scheduled for next January . The Lord’s Resistance Army originated as a Ugandan rebel force nearly three decades ago. It evolved into an organization of marauding fighters who pillaged parts of Uganda, southern Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Central African Republic. Disciples swore obedience to Mr. Kony, who ordered village massacres and mutilations, kidnapped children for soldiering and kept a harem of prepubescent brides. The United Nations has estimated that from 1987 to 2012, the L.R.A. killed more than 100,000 people, abducted up to 100,000 children and displaced more than 2.5 million civilians. In 2011 the United States military began collaborating with the African Union to hunt down Mr. Kony, whose whereabouts remains unknown. Some rights activists believe he and followers have taken refuge in Sudan, lying low but still dangerous. “Given Joseph Kony’s incredible capacity to survive, one always has to remain concerned for the civilians in proximity to the L.R.A.,” said Maria Burnett, senior researcher in the Africa Division of Human Rights Watch.
|
Uganda;Lord's Resistance Army;Okot Odhiambo;War Crimes,Genocide,Crimes Against Humanity;Joseph Kony;Human Rights;International Criminal Court;Central African Republic
|
ny0061462
|
[
"world",
"middleeast"
] |
2014/01/02
|
2 Conservatives Join Iran Nuclear Panel
|
TEHRAN — Two members of Iran’s hard-line-dominated Parliament were added to a supervisory council responsible for monitoring the country’s nuclear negotiating team, Iranian news media reported Wednesday. The additions appeared to strengthen the influence of critics of the talks between Iran and world powers. The two members of Parliament were not identified by name, but they were described as “legal and technical experts who will be able to prevent misunderstandings by the Americans.” The supervisory council’s precise monitoring role has never been made clear. But it now includes one representative from President Hassan Rouhani’s government, one from the judiciary, one from the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran and three members of Parliament, the semiofficial Mehr News Agency reported. Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, who is also Iran’s leading negotiator in the nuclear dispute, has always emphasized that his negotiation team is fully authorized by the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to make a deal with its counterparts: the United States, China, Russia, France, Britain and Germany. But the addition of two conservative lawmakers, known for their suspicions toward the West, has injected some uncertainty into Mr. Zarif’s assertion. Supporters of Mr. Rouhani were displeased with the announcement, saying the nuclear talks are taking place under the authority of Ayatollah Khamenei and do not need monitoring. “These parliamentarians are just trying to feel important,” said Saeed Laylaz, an economist and political analyst with close ties to Mr. Rouhani’s administration. “The supreme leader is monitoring the talks and Parliament has no say or monitoring power at all.” The news came a day after Iranian negotiators said they had neared an understanding with their counterparts over carrying out a temporary nuclear deal signed with world powers in November. Abbas Araghchi, the deputy foreign minister, told the semiofficial Tasnim News Agency on Tuesday that he expected both sides to start carrying out their parts of the deal in the final 10 days of January. Iran will commit to a partial freeze of its nuclear activities, including the suspension of some uranium enrichment, while the West will provide some sanctions relief. Some analysts say the addition of two members of Parliament to the council overseeing the negotiations is a possible sign that the talks are entering a more serious phase. According to Iran’s Constitution, Parliament must ratify all international treaties. While Parliament cannot veto any temporary deals, like the one signed in November, it can veto a permanent agreement to resolve the nuclear dispute, the underlying objective of the talks. Iran contends its nuclear activities are for civilian purposes. Western nations and Israel say the Iranians aspire to make nuclear weapons. In 2007, Parliament refused to sign an amendment to the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons , which would have opened up Iranian nuclear sites to more inspections. The same amendment, called the Additional Protocol, is part of the current negotiations. Several members of Parliament have expressed dissatisfaction in recent months over what they call the Foreign Ministry’s failure to inform them about the details of the negotiations. Their complaints may help explain why the two members of Parliament were added to the supervisory council. “The parliamentarians are added to make sure that the final agreement is good enough to be approved by Parliament with a majority of votes,” said Hamid Reza Tarraghi, a conservative analyst with close relations to Iran’s leaders. “We have to make sure that the government does not sign something which Parliament will shoot down later.”
|
Iran;Nuclear weapon;US Foreign Policy;Legislature;UN
|
ny0098850
|
[
"business",
"dealbook"
] |
2015/06/08
|
Protections for Late Investors Can Inflate Start-Up Valuations
|
Warning: Some unicorns may be smaller than they appear. The recent proliferation of so-called unicorns — start-up technology companies valued at more than $1 billion — has been greeted variously as a sign of healthy innovation or an indication that valuations have become dangerously overheated. Led by the likes of the car-hailing service Uber at $41 billion and the home-rental website Airbnb at $10 billion, the global ranks of unicorns have more than doubled, to 102, over the last 15 months, according to PitchBook Data, which tracks private financial markets. Less noticed is that the reported valuations of many unicorns have been inflated by the terms of the private investments that set those valuations before any initial public offerings of stock — often with little or no disclosure of those terms. Increasingly, venture investors say, late-stage financing terms include extra protections, like a discount to the price of any eventual initial offering, a minimum return on investment or extra shares if the company later raises money at a lower valuation. For example, the cloud software provider Box Inc. raised $150 million in July 2014 from two investors, Coatue Management and TPG Capital, at $20 a share — a reported valuation of $2.4 billion. Under terms of their investment, Coatue and TPG were entitled to receive additional shares if Box later went public at a lower price, and a 10 percent discount to the I.P.O. price to boot. When Box priced its initial offering at $14 a share in January, the lower price dropped the Coatue-TPG purchase price to $12.60 a share and increased the number of shares they received by 58 percent. Box’s current stock market value is about $2.1 billion. Such protections, which Box disclosed because it had already filed plans to go public, are controversial among start-up investors. Early-stage investors warn they can jeopardize a company’s financial stability, diluting the value of their original stakes and worsening a company’s prospects in a downturn. But the protections appeal to company founders because they provide new cash at the highest nominal valuation, reducing dilution if all goes well. And later-stage investors argue that they provide valuable insurance. The protections, known among investors as structuring or ratcheting, can inflate a unicorn’s indicated valuation 10 percent to 25 percent, according to Rick Kline, a lawyer at Goodwin Procter whose firm does legal work on start-up and initial offering financings. He said the phenomenon has been part of a general “frothiness” in late-stage valuations. The cost of the extra insurance against a downturn — borne by the company and its other investors — effectively counts against the sale price and thus should reduce the valuation. But companies generally do not count such implied costs in reporting the valuations, venture investors say. The Silicon Valley law firm Fenwick & West recently analyzed 37 United States unicorns that raised money in the year ended March 31. It found that five of them promised to pay additional shares to late-stage investors if the companies’ initial offerings were priced below their pre-I.P.O. investment valuations, and six others allowed the investors to block an offering below the price of their investment. Fenwick did not identify the companies. As a result, the firm said, about 30 percent of unicorn investors “had significant protection against a down round I.P.O.” The same report noted that one-third of the companies had valuations at or just above $1 billion, “indicating that the companies may have negotiated specifically to attain the unicorn level.” In an interview, the report’s co-author, Barry Kramer, noted that unicorns could also increase their reported valuation by increasing the number of shares in the option pool set aside for employees, even if those options have not been issued, much less exercised. Samuel Schwerin, managing partner of Millennium Technology Value Partners, which invests in mid- to late-stage technology start-ups, noted that some late-stage investors had sought such protections partly because many start-ups have gone public or subsequently traded at prices below those paid by late-stage investors. The Rise of the ‘Unicorns’ Venture capitalists invest in companies in search of breakout hits. These rarities, called unicorns, have grown in size and number as investors chasing returns have bid up their value. Since the start of 2014, Mr. Schwerin noted, 11 technology companies have priced their initial offerings below the investment price of the last financing rounds before the offerings. In addition to Box, they include the software providers Apigee and Globant and the big-data manager Hortonworks. Mr. Schwerin also estimated that more than two-fifths of venture-backed technology companies had fallen below their initial offering price in the same period. Like Box, Globant also gave late-stage investors price protection, although it expired before Globant’s initial offering, and its stock price has since doubled from its offering price. The developments in late-stage financing have taken on greater importance as more companies stay private longer, allowing their valuations to blossom before public investors have a chance to get in on the action. During the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s, companies often went public within a few years of being founded, and their stock prices doubled or tripled soon after their initial public offerings. Now, a greater share of such gains is being reaped by investors before the offering. As a result, the amount of money flowing into late-stage investing has swollen, and the value of such investments has sometimes ballooned as unicorn valuations have shot up. Wellington Management, for one, is raising a fund devoted to late-stage investments. But recent losses have made some investors more cautious. One investing partner at a big venture capital firm, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of discussions on the matter, said there was a “sea change” in requests for protection by late-stage investors after some suffered temporary paper losses at several companies like Hortonworks, which went public in December, and the home-goods shopping website Wayfair, which had an I.P.O. in October. Mr. Schwerin, whose firm decided two years ago to proceed more cautiously in making new investments because of prevailing high valuations, said, “Only time will tell whether providing companies with such monster valuations in exchange for such sophisticated structures” is a good idea. Companies are also considered more likely to grant such protection if their path to profitability or a successful initial offering is less assured. That was the case with Box, which was burning through cash at the time of its $150 million fund-raising in mid-2014. Investors are reluctant to discuss their arrangements, and those that did spoke on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to jeopardize their relationships with the companies. Among current pre-I.P.O. start-ups, Uber has offered to sell stock at a discount of 20 percent to 30 percent of an eventual offering price to investors that participated in a $1.6 billion debt financing led by Goldman Sachs in January, according to Bloomberg News. And it gave minimum-return protection to at least one investor, TPG, in mid-2013, two investors said. Lynda.com, an online learning company, also gave protection to investors led by TPG in raising $186 million in January at a valuation of nearly $1 billion, one investor said. LinkedIn agreed to acquire Lynda.com in April for $1.5 billion. A LinkedIn spokesman declined to comment. And one fantasy sports site, FanDuel, is negotiating a late-stage round that may also include investor protections, two investors said. A FanDuel spokeswoman said she could not discuss any funding details. “I think entrepreneurs get starry-eyed about the high valuations and don’t realize they come with all sorts of caveats if everything doesn’t work perfectly,” said Daniel Ciporin, a venture capital investor at Canaan Partners. Neeraj Agrawal, a general partner at Battery Ventures, said such structures work for companies when, “like ‘The Lego Movie’ theme song, everything is awesome.” But, he added, “things won’t always be awesome, and when they aren’t, a company can blow up over this issue.”
|
Venture capital;IPO;Stocks,Bonds;Startup;Property Appraisals
|
ny0272981
|
[
"us",
"politics"
] |
2016/05/30
|
Secret Service Dreams of a New (14-Foot) White House Picket Fence
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WASHINGTON — Michael Jordan, the basketball star, was famous for being able to jump 48 inches into the air, putting the top of his head 10 and a half feet off the ground, well above the basket’s rim. If the Secret Service has its way, the new security fence around the White House will be about three and a half feet higher than that. Nearly two years after an armed man climbed over the existing seven-foot fence around 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and ran through the front door of the White House, the Secret Service is moving aggressively to design and build a taller, stronger security perimeter. Visitors to Washington could soon see a 14-foot barrier ringing the president’s home. Pressure to move quickly is intense; fence jumping at the White House has become a regular occurrence. Two people jumped the barrier last month, including one who had stolen a woman’s purse and was hoping for a clean getaway. There was a jumper the day after Thanksgiving last year. And in 2014, officers tackled a man who had scaled the fence and run onto the North Lawn. But before a new fence can go up, the Secret Service needs to obtain approval from two federal boards in a process that is filled with sensitivities surrounding historical preservation, aesthetics and security. In a city used to delicate politicking, the question of what the new White House fence should look like is expected to be difficult. Image Left, remains of the barriers Thomas Jefferson had erected around the White House, seen in 1861. Decades after his construction, an iron fence, seen at right in 1912, went up along the north front of the building. Credit via National Archives “We’re trying to find that balance of security, but also keep the historic nature of the White House and keep it open for the public,” Joseph P. Clancy, the director of the Secret Service, said in an interview. “The public doesn’t want to come to the White House and see a wall where you can’t actually see it.” In recent weeks, officials at the Secret Service have presented their thinking: a fence that looks similar to the existing one, with spear-tip finials atop vertical black iron pickets that are twice as thick, closer together and nearly twice as tall as the current ones. During appearances before the United States Commission of Fine Arts and the National Capital Planning Commission, officials at the Secret Service and the National Park Service, which is also working on the fence project, said they had to find a way to keep people from penetrating the barriers to the 18-acre White House complex, where the president works and the first family lives. “This is an immediate need,” Thomas Dougherty, the chief strategy officer for the Secret Service, told members of the planning commission at an informational meeting last month. “The current fence is currently deficient. It is not, now, a modern alternative to security. We want to move on to a stronger, higher fence.” Mr. Dougherty told commission members that the new fence should have anticlimb and antiblast features as well as “early detection” abilities. Sketches provided to the commission by the Secret Service show security sensors at 30-foot intervals atop the fence. But the images presented by the Secret Service raise questions: Will visitors still be able to see the White House clearly? Will the new fence make taking pictures difficult? Will the “people’s house” look like a stronghold, set apart from those that it serves? Image A mock-up of the proposed White House fence, used for training simulations at the Secret Service’s training center in Beltsville, Md. Credit Eric Thayer for The New York Times L. Preston Bryant Jr., the chairman of the planning commission, said he supported the idea of a 14-foot fence as a necessary security measure. But he also expressed hope that the final design for the fence would remain elegant and simple, like the building it protects. “I don’t want our federal facilities to be fortresses,” Mr. Bryant said in an interview. “We have tens of millions of people from around the world who visit Washington, D.C., every year. We want them to see that our federal facilities and our government are open, transparent. We want to impress upon them the theme of freedom.” Eric Shaw, the director of the office of planning for the District of Columbia, said during the planning commission meeting that the proposed fence “looked a little heavy,” and he questioned comparisons made by the Secret Service to similar fences, like the one around Buckingham Palace, the London home for the British monarchy. “It looked like the White House was kind of behind bars,” Mr. Shaw said of the renderings of the new fence. “It felt like we were sort of almost encasing the White House, in a way.” He added: “In the seat of democracy, it’s always weird to look at Buckingham Palace. The whole idea, in the end, is it’s actually a house; it’s not a palace.” Members of the fine arts commission, which is charged with protecting the aesthetics around federal property in Washington, expressed similar concerns. Image A rendering of the proposed fence. Credit National Park Service Alex Krieger, one of the commission’s members, noted that the thicker pickets in the proposed fence could “result in an overall visual impact that is more extreme than what was presented in the photographic simulations,” according to minutes of the meeting provided by the organization. He also noted the “historical progression of increasing fence heights around the White House” and suggested that the trend had been toward less attractive fences. Thomas Jefferson had a small post-and-rail fence erected around the White House in 1801, according to the White House Historical Association, and a “low and heavy wrought-iron fence” went up along the north front of the building 30 years later. But it was not until the early 1920s that a taller fence circled the building. Mr. Clancy said the Secret Service was committed to building something new that maintained the look of past fences. He said that was why it had largely rejected putting in glass or plexiglass panels, like those that might be found at a zoo or a sports arena. “You also have to think of the aesthetics — how would that look in front of the White House?” he said. “The fence is traditional. It’s what they have had for 100 years, and whatever we put in place here is going to be here another 100 years, so I think most are settled on the fence as the best way.” Because the project is in its preliminary design stage, no final cost has been determined, a spokeswoman for the Secret Service said. The Secret Service will appear again before the two commissions this summer, and final approval for the fence could come this fall. The current schedule calls for construction of the fence to begin in 2018.
|
White House;Secret Service;Security;Historic preservation;Fences and Property Barriers
|
ny0220485
|
[
"sports",
"baseball"
] |
2010/02/27
|
Mets’ Wright Is a Blue-Collar Star With a Matching Sandwich
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PORT ST. LUCIE, Fla. — Last month the Mets held a media event in the clubhouse at Citi Field, and David Wright made the trip to speak about the coming season. When it was over, he pulled out a zippered, soft-sided blue lunch box that he had brought with him from his Manhattan apartment, unzipped it and retrieved a peanut butter, honey and jelly sandwich that he had made a few hours earlier. By his own estimate, Wright eats these sandwiches 75 to 80 percent of the 365 days on the calendar, and he makes almost all of them himself. “He eats them nonstop, sometimes even for dinner,” Jeff Francoeur said. Wright is not as obsessive about this classic American delicacy as Wade Boggs was about chicken, which he ate every day, or as Ichiro Suzuki is about his curry before every home game. Wright just likes those sandwiches a lot. And if any Met fits the so-called lunch pail (or lunch box) designation, it is Wright, their third baseman, whose diligence for his craft is well known. Over the winter, Wright worked hard — and ate properly — and the Mets are delighted that he came into camp in excellent shape. But he said he had not really done anything this off-season different from what he normally does. He just works hard all the time and tries to fold it all into a comfortable daily routine, peanut butter included. “I wouldn’t just call him blue collar, though,” Mets General Manager Omar Minaya cautioned. “He has too much talent for that. I would say he’s a very talented player with a blue-collar approach.” Wright said his affinity for peanut butter sandwiches began in the minor leagues, where the food spread was not all that tempting. Sometimes the best available option was the vat of peanut butter and the loaf of bread in the clubhouse. Often enough, it still is. “It’s just something that’s quick, it’s easy to make and I like it a lot,” he said. “There’s really nothing more to it. I love ’em.” Wright likes his routines. During the season he gets up, has breakfast, watches a movie or plays some video games, and then heads into the park around 2 p.m. Once there, he may fashion himself a sandwich in the food room, or just begin his baseball routines, which include watching video, hitting and weight lifting. Wright likes following the same patterns if possible, but he is not a fanatic about them. The Mets are asking their players to limit their lifting during this season to prevent injuries, and Wright said he would comply. “If they feel that’s the best way to do it, who am I to object?” he said. “The trainers don’t come tell me how to hit, and I don’t tell them how to do their jobs.” More important than the weight lifting, though, is the work he did with the hitting instructor Howard Johnson over the winter. Wright hit .307 last season. But he mysteriously lost a lot of his power, falling from a career-high 33 home runs to a career-low 10. One obvious theory for the sudden drop-off is the expanse of Citi Field. On Friday at the spring complex, Wright might have found one easy remedy. While retrieving balls in the outfield of Field 7, the one with the same dimensions as Citi Field, he stood about 40 feet from the wall, picked up a bat and hit a fungo soaring off into the trees. On a more practical level, Johnson said he thought Wright might have overcompensated last year and tried to hit too much to right field. It wasn’t necessarily because of the intimidating distances in left, but because hitting to the opposite field was emphasized in spring training. So during the winter, Johnson worked with Wright to stay back on the ball a little longer, and then get aggressive when the ball gets deeper in the strike zone. It is not just a formula for Wright, either. The Mets want everyone to use the whole field. “I’d always like to pull the ball a little more,” Wright said. “But I can’t get away from my strength, which is going to the other gap. If the result is that I don’t hit as many home runs, so be it. Maybe it’s stubbornness or ignorance, but I’m not going to try to revamp the swing that I’ve had my whole life just to fit the ballpark. I’ll try to grind it out.” It is the way Wright approaches many things. Just grind it out. There’s nothing fancy there. He’s not a prosciutto panino with buffalo mozzarella and basil-infused olive oil. He’s simpler than that. He’s just peanut butter and jelly, and that works.
|
Wright David;New York Mets;Baseball;Sandwiches
|
ny0229537
|
[
"nyregion"
] |
2010/07/25
|
She’s Doin’ Fine, Alone With Her Wigs
|
To borrow Wendy Williams ’s trademark greeting: “Wendy, how you doin?’ ” If it’s a Sunday, the answer is: fantastic. Ms. Williams, 46, treats her day of rest from “The Wendy Williams Show” as just that, preferably ensconced in her she-cave in the suburbs of Essex County, N.J. Her husband, Kevin Hunter, 38, and son, Kevin Hunter Jr., 9, know better than to attempt to pry the gossip and advice queen away from a day of bad television and great wigs. MICHAEL WILSON UP ALONE I wake up around 8 o’clock in the morning. I am an early riser. I have a good couple hours by myself. I make my own coffee. I like it strong. BREAKFAST LIGHT We’re all trying to watch our weight. Now that I’m on TV, it’s more important that I look reasonably well. Sunday breakfast consists of juicing. My husband is the king of the juicer. We pull out the carrots and kale and all that. I’m doing turkey bacon and a little fruit. RETREAT WITH TV Then I go into what I call my room. My room is full of my crafting stuff. I’ve got my paints in shoeboxes. I’ve got wigs that need repairing. I make it a general rule never to leave the house on Sundays. For me, oh my gosh, there’s nothing like being in my room with the TV on. I go between Bravo and Lifetime and Lifetime movie channel and Hallmark Channel. And not really paying attention to it, but I have got to see the “Bridezilla” marathon. We got married at City Hall 12 years ago in Jersey City. I think weddings are ridiculous. PAINT, CANVAS, MAYBE FOIL I keep a steady supply of paintbrushes and canvases. I like to paint. I’m not some great artist. I’ve Twittered them. I tried a foil technique one time. You take a blank canvas and put aluminum foil up on it in the shape that you want. I chose hearts and circles. DONE UP JUST ENOUGH I think of myself as the queen of lounging. No lounge queen is complete without lounge clothes and house wigs. They’re not too done; they’re just done enough that when you pass your own reflection you don’t go, “Oh God, what a slob.” My robe’s, like, a peignoir. If somebody were to come over, I still have my robe on. It’s not lacy. They’re filmy. And extra long. They’re dragging on the ground. I love a presentation. HAPPY RECLUSE My thing is that it’s one thing to stay in the house, but I don’t stay in the house like a depressed person. I am celebrating life. My guys came in my room and luxuriated with me maybe three times ever. My husband thinks it’s the weirdest thing. THE WIGS I just gave away about 50 of them to help clog the BP hole disaster. I have about 15 left now. Here’s the thing: A lot of the ones I gave away were when my hair was almost bleached blond, it was so light. I didn’t see this as being a throwaway. I have a whole ’nother collection here at the show. WIG REPAIR You have to have the proper needle. It’s the same needle I use to sew a pair of jeans. You need black thread. It has to be thick. And you need time and you need patience. Through wear and tear and rough brushing and stuff, a track of hair will lift up. I will sew that track back down. Sometimes the wig clips need to be put in tighter. ONE LAST THING Sex, of course. I’m a sexy woman. My husband is sexy. We have dinner at 7 or 8 at night. After that, you know, I prepare myself.
|
Williams Wendy;New Jersey;Cable Television
|
ny0289287
|
[
"business"
] |
2016/01/05
|
G.M. Chief Mary Barra Is Named Chairwoman, Affirming Her Leadership
|
DETROIT — In a move that consolidates power at the top of the nation’s largest automaker, General Motors said on Monday that its chief executive, Mary Barra, had also been named chairwoman of its board. The change underscores the company’s revival under the helm of Ms. Barra, who took over as its chief executive in early 2014 and almost immediately was faced with the gravest safety crisis in G.M.’s history. A former plant manager who ascended the corporate ladder to become the auto industry’s first female chief executive, Ms. Barra is credited with stabilizing G.M. after the company admitted to selling millions of small cars with defective ignition switches that were later tied to at least 124 deaths. The revelation prompted the recall of 2.6 million vehicles and led to congressional hearings, federal and state investigations, and the creation of a compensation fund that awarded $595 million to nearly 400 injury victims and family members of people killed in the defective models. For more than a year, Ms. Barra was front and center as G.M.’s crisis manager, whether it was facing tough questions on Capitol Hill, apologizing repeatedly for putting lives at risk in the company’s cars, or firing employees responsible for the decade-long delay in fixing the problem. On Monday, Ms. Barra assumed the new position after a unanimous vote of the company’s board. She replaces Theodore Solso, the retired chief of the Cummins engine manufacturer, who will continue to serve as lead independent director of G.M. “The board concluded it is in the best interests of the company to combine the roles of chair and C.E.O. in order to drive the most efficient execution of our plan and vision for the future,” Mr. Solso said in a statement. G.M. had historically given its chief executive the chairman’s job as well, and was often criticized for concentrating too much authority in one leader. The two jobs were separated after the company tumbled into bankruptcy in 2009, and survived because of a $49 billion bailout by the federal government. Mr. Solso did not elaborate on whether the board had considered other candidates to lead it. “This is the right time for Mary to assume this role,” he said. Ms. Barra said she was honored to become chairwoman, and vowed to continue improving G.M.’s operating results and new technology. One analyst said the change made sense for G.M. given how the company responded to Ms. Barra’s initiatives to overhaul its culture after the ignition scandal. “This is not a surprise,” said David Cole, chairman emeritus of the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Mich. “Mary has demonstrated that she is a very good coach and leader, and is getting the most out of her team.” Mr. Cole noted that G.M. had trouble in the past when the same person served as chairman and chief executive, and dissenting voices were rarely heard on its board. “They had some bad experiences, like when Roger Smith wore both hats in the 1980s,” he said. “But Mary has proven herself.” In addition to running G.M.’s operations for the last two years, Ms. Barra became the public face of the company as it tried to rectify its safety problems. After G.M. agreed in September to pay a $900 million penalty to settle a Justice Department investigation of its ignition switches, Ms. Barra warned employees in a town hall meeting that the company still had work to do to restore its reputation for quality and safety. “Apologies and accountability don’t amount to much if you don’t change your behavior,” she said.
|
Mary Barra;GM;Appointments and Executive Changes;Automobile safety
|
ny0044561
|
[
"technology"
] |
2014/02/20
|
Scrutiny in California for Software in Schools
|
A leading California lawmaker plans to introduce state legislation on Thursday that would shore up privacy and security protections for the personal information of students in elementary through high school, a move that could alter business practices across the nearly $8 billion education technology software industry. The bill would prohibit education-related websites, online services and mobile apps for kindergartners through 12th graders from compiling, using or sharing the personal information of those students in California for any reason other than what the school intended or for product maintenance. The bill would also prohibit the operators of those services from using or disclosing the information of students in the state for commercial purposes like marketing. It would oblige the firms to encrypt students’ data in transit and at rest, and it would require them to delete a student’s record when it is no longer needed for the purpose the school intended. “We don’t want to limit the legitimate use of students’ data by schools or teachers,” Senator Darrell Steinberg, a Democrat who is the sponsor of the bill and the president pro tempore of the California Senate, said in a phone interview. “We just think the public policy of California should be that the information you gather from students should be used for their educational benefit and for nothing else.” Lawmakers like Mr. Steinberg are part of a growing cohort of children’s advocates who say they believe that regulation has failed to keep pace with the rapid adoption of education software and services by schools across the country. A federal law , called the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, limits the disclosure of students’ educational records by schools that receive federal funding. But some student advocates contend that an exception in the law, allowing the outsourcing of public school functions to private companies, may reveal personal information, hypothetically making children vulnerable to predatory practices. The prekindergarten to 12th grade education software market in the United States reached $7.97 billion in the 2011-12 school year, compared with $7.5 billion two years earlier, according to estimates from the Software and Information Industry Association, a trade group. One reason for the growth is the enthusiasm of many educators for online services and apps that can analyze student performance in real time, offering the promise of personalized learning tailored to the individual child. But a recent study by researchers at Fordham Law School reported that American schools seemed ill-equipped to vet the data-handling practices of the services they used. Some schools, for instance, signed contracts that did not specify the kinds of student details that companies could collect or did not prohibit firms from selling students’ personal information, the researchers reported. By aiming to regulate industry practices rather than school procedures, Mr. Steinberg’s bill is intended to prevent businesses from exploiting information like students’ names, ages, locations, family financial situations, medical information, or even their lunch preferences, said James P. Steyer, the chief executive of Common Sense Media, a children’s advocacy group based in San Francisco. California has been a national leader in data protection. It was the first state to enact a law requiring companies to report data breaches. And last fall, Mr. Steinberg, with the backing of Mr. Steyer’s group, spearheaded the passage of the first “eraser button” law for children. It requires websites to allow users under 18 to delete their own posts. “This isn’t going to prevent ed tech companies from doing business. It’s a very good market,” Mr. Steyer said of the new student protection bill. “But it is going to prevent companies from using software as a Trojan horse to gain access to student data for marketing purposes.” The California effort comes at a time when federal and school officials have been talking up data-driven learning as a way to make education more engaging for students, improve their graduation rates and expand their career prospects. This month, President Obama announced industry pledges of more than $750 million to strengthen student access to high-speed Internet in their classrooms as well as to devices and software. Under the federal education privacy law, schools that receive federal funding must generally obtain written permission from parents before sharing their children’s educational records. But an exception allows school districts to share those records — which might include academic, disciplinary or disability information — with services like online homework assignment systems, reading apps or school bus companies. The exception requires schools to maintain control over contractors’ use of students’ educational records. But some student privacy experts caution that federal rules may not be explicit enough to cover some of the latest technologies like those used by lunch account services that, for example, can scan the veins in a child’s palm and use that unique biometric pattern to identify a student. Officials at the Education Department have said that the agency is developing best practices for schools to use in contracting out for web services and for transparency with parents. Many online school services already have privacy policies in which they pledge not to sell, rent or trade personal information to third parties. Take ZippSlip , a start-up that allows schools to electronically send permission slips to parents. The company collects and houses information for schools, like which students have peanut allergies or are on the soccer team. But neither the company nor its school district clients are using the information to, say, market soccer equipment to parents, said David Leslie, the chief executive of ZippSlip. “ZippSlip creates a data-mining opportunity that has literally never been created before,” like allowing schools to analyze parent-teacher communication patterns, Mr. Leslie said. But, he emphasized, “we are not selling data to Walmart about who might be a better candidate to buy crayons.” Still, Mr. Steyer of Common Sense Media is urging more formal protections for student data. “We messed up the privacy of kids, and probably adults too, in the online commercial, consumer space because we weren’t prepared for the extraordinary pace of technology,” Mr. Steyer said. “Now we have the opportunity to get it right in the school space.”
|
K-12 Education;Legislation;Privacy;California;State legislature;Data Mining,Big Data;Darrell Steinberg
|
ny0021645
|
[
"sports",
"soccer"
] |
2013/09/28
|
Premier League Coverage Pays Off for NBC
|
STAMFORD, Conn. — It was teatime here in NBC’s Studio 3 as Liverpool began playing Southampton in England’s Premier League on Sept. 21. “How stereotypical,” said Rebecca Lowe, the host of “Premier League Live,” referring to drinking tea as she held a full Royal Wentworth cup. Lowe is part of the pervasive British flavor of the NBC Sports Group ’s coverage of Premier League soccer, which began last month under a three-year contract. Her tea-drinking co-analysts that day, Robbie Earle and Robbie Mustoe, former players, are also British. All the games are produced in England by Sky Sports, BT Sport or the league, and are called by British announcers. Only the analyst Kyle Martino, a former Major League Soccer player who joins Lowe, Earle and Mustoe in the studio, is American. In addition to the analysts’ expertise, NBC might be banking on the authenticity and familiarity that British voices and productions bring to the Premier League as the soundtrack for its coverage. But the network has taken an American approach to promoting the group, with billboards in Times Square and a humorous video starring the actor Jason Sudeikis as an American coach in England who does not know the rules of the game. The video promotion has been viewed online by more than 5.7 million visitors. Lowe was tickled that she has delivered Premier League reports Sundays on NBC’s “Football Night in America” pregame show, bringing Wayne Rooney to an audience far more familiar with Dan Rooney. “I’ve never been with a company that has invested so much on marketing,” said Lowe, who previously worked for ESPN U.K. and the BBC. So far, the formula is working. NBCSN’s 22 telecasts have been seen by an average of 391,000 viewers, 70 percent better than the average game last season on Fox Soccer, which carried most of the games, and ESPN and ESPN2, which broadcast about one game a week in a licensing deal. NBCSN, however, has about twice as many subscribers as Fox Soccer. More important, at least to NBC, is that NBCSN’s daily viewership from Aug. 17 to Sept. 22 swelled 67 percent, to 77,000 viewers. Image The control room at NBC Sports studios in Stamford, Conn. Credit Tim Clayton for The New York Times That is still a fraction of ESPN’s 1.2 million in that period and fewer than the month-old Fox Sports 1’s 121,000. But the highs are getting higher. Last Sunday afternoon, 852,000 viewers watched Manchester City trounce Manchester United, 4-1, in one of the Premier League’s marquee early-season matches. That was the biggest audience so far on NBCSN. John Guppy, a veteran soccer executive who founded Gilt Edge Soccer Marketing, said, “What they’ve done — and it’s not that Fox didn’t do it, but maybe it comes across more directly to consumers — is they’ve made the Premier League feel special and important.” NBCSN has become the NBC Sports Group’s Premier League centerpiece, filling as many as 40 hours a week on the cable network. Mark Lazarus, chairman of the NBC Sports Group, said the kickoff times of Premier League games, as early as 7:45 a.m. on Saturdays on the East Coast, had helped. Even the day’s latest matches start before American football games begin to dominate the channel lineup. “They’re largely in windows without live sports,” Lazarus said. “It’s not totally unencumbered, with college football Saturday afternoon and the N.F.L. on Sunday. But the beauty of this league is that it goes from August to May.” The Premier League’s success has helped Major League Soccer, which also has games on NBCSN. Viewership of the eight M.L.S. games on the network since coverage of the Premier League began on NBCSN has jumped 60 percent, and the number of unique visitors to M.L.S. games streamed by NBC has soared 322 percent. All of that should help M.L.S. in talks to extend its contract beyond next season. For the NBC suite of networks, the Premier League was a property to covet. NBC wanted to capitalize on the league’s popularity and to breathe oxygen into NBCSN, which will show 154 of the 196 games that the NBC family of networks is televising; NBC is showing 21 games this season, with others on CNBC, USA, Telemundo and Mun2. Another 184 games, which are not being televised, are available free at Premier League Extra Time, a service available to cable, satellite and telephone subscribers. The entire season of 380 games is being streamed on NBC Sports Live Extra. Lazarus is politic enough not to declare that NBCSN’s identity has quickly become tied inextricably to the Premier League. That would irk other leagues it carries or longtime properties, like the Tour de France. NBCSN also carries the Olympics every two years. Still, during an interview here at NBC Sports international broadcast center, Lazarus said: “It’s part of our definition, but you have to put it up with the N.H.L. This adds another pillar product to go with the N.H.L., and I think Nascar will be the third.” Image Richard Scudamore, left, the Premier League’s chief executive, with Mark Lazarus, the NBC Sports Group chairman. Both have seen success with the network’s coverage. Credit Tim Clayton for The New York Times NBC is paying the Premier League $250 million over three years, still triple what Fox Soccer was paying annually. NBC’s winning bid defeated one made jointly by Fox Soccer and ESPN. Fox Soccer folded and became FXX, an entertainment channel, but plans were in place during the bidding process to show Premier League games on Fox Sports 1. Richard Scudamore, the Premier League’s chief executive, said in an interview last week that some American club owners were nervous about shifting the United States rights to NBC. “But now they’re saying it’s the best thing we’ve ever done,” he said. Still, John Henry, the owner of Liverpool, one of the Premier League’s cornerstone clubs, said he had no skittishness about selling the league’s rights to NBC. “I thought Fox and ESPN did a great job,” he said in an e-mail message, “but I knew NBC was serious about their commitment, and they have done everything right thus far.” For any network that shows soccer, one large financial oddity exists: there are no commercial breaks during the games — except for advertisers’ names and logos that poke out of the corner score boxes during play. That is why NBCSN is awash in Premier League programming: pregame, halftime, postgame studio shows; game replays, previews, reviews and news shows; and the weekly “Manchester Mondays.” Some of it is seen in the wee hours, especially before games on Saturdays, Sundays and Mondays. Seth Winter, the executive vice president of sales for NBC Sports, said improved viewership and the Premier League’s increasing appeal to young, affluent viewers 18 to 49 has helped advertisement sales. The network’s expenses are relatively modest: it does not produce the games it televises — paying only satellite access fees — and sends announcers to only two of the six games it shows each week. Mark Noonan, a former executive at the United States Soccer Federation and Major League Soccer, said that NBC stepped into the Premier League at an appropriate moment, with a young, multicultural audience enamored with world sport. “I don’t even think it’s reached a tipping point,” he said. “NBC’s timing couldn’t be better.”
|
NBC Sports;Premier League;Soccer;TV;advertising,marketing;Cable television
|
ny0206018
|
[
"business",
"media"
] |
2009/01/15
|
Gannett Plans to Furlough Employees for a Week
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The Gannett Company , the nation’s largest newspaper publisher, said on Wednesday that it would force thousands of its employees to take a week off without pay in an effort to avoid layoffs. Gannett, which owns 85 daily newspapers across the United States including its flagship USA Today, said it could not say exactly how many people would be required to take time off, or how much money the company would save. But it said it would require unpaid leave for most of its 31,000 employees in this country. Also on Wednesday, USA Today notified its staff of a one-year pay freeze for all employees. “Most of our U.S. employees — including myself and all other top executives — will be furloughed for the equivalent of one week in the first quarter,” Craig A. Dubow, the chairman, president and chief executive, wrote in a memorandum to employees. “We sincerely hope this minimizes the need for any layoffs going forward,” he added. The company cannot impose the measure unilaterally on employees covered by a union contract, but Mr. Dubow said Gannett was asking unions to participate voluntarily. Tara Connell, a company spokeswoman, said about 12 percent of Gannett’s domestic employees were unionized. With the newspaper industry in increasingly dire financial straits, Gannett’s mandatory week off takes its place in a growing list of grave moves. Layoffs have been widespread, the newspapers in Detroit halted home delivery four days of the week, the Tribune Company filed for bankruptcy protection and owners of The Rocky Mountain News and The Seattle Post-Intelligencer warned that those papers could shut down. A second memo to Gannett employees says that some categories of “essential employees” will be exempted from the enforced time off, as will newly hired employees, but it adds, “there will be no individual hardship exceptions.” It also says that to comply with federal and state labor laws, a furloughed employee must strictly observe a no-work rule, not even “reading or responding to e-mails, calling or responding to calls from colleagues.” Gannett eliminated 3,500 jobs throughout the company in 2007, and a similar number last year, though it has not provided a final 2008 figure. The deepest round of cuts came last fall, when it laid off some 2,000 or more newspaper employees in little more than a month. Most of Gannett’s newspapers are small, but they include some major papers, including USA Today, The Detroit Free Press and The Arizona Republic. In this country, it also has hundreds of smaller, nondaily papers and 23 television stations. In Britain, the company publishes 17 daily newspapers and hundreds of smaller publications.
|
Gannett Co;Newspapers;Layoffs and Job Reductions
|
ny0014540
|
[
"technology",
"personaltech"
] |
2013/11/22
|
Restricting Content on Netflix, and Leaving a Flickr Group
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Q. How can I block my children from watching age-inappropriate movies on my Netflix account on the Wii game console? A. Netflix includes a set of parental controls you can turn on for your account. Once you adjust the settings on the web, the devices using the account — including the Nintendo Wii console — will restrict the available video content based on the age level you choose. To set up your preferred parental controls, log into your Netflix account on the web. Click on your name in the top-right corner and select Your Account from the menu. On the Your Account page, in the Your Profile area, click the “Parental control setting” link. On the next screen, you can limit the Netflix viewing options at three levels based on the standard maturity ratings used by the movie and television industry. These levels include Little Kids (material suitable for all ages), Older Kids (includes G- and PG-rated videos) and Teens (shows and movies with PG-13 and TV-14 ratings). Once you adjust the settings, it may take eight hours or so for the changes to kick in. Restarting the Netflix app on your devices may help sync the new settings more quickly. Netflix also works with other consoles like Microsoft’s recent Xbox line, the Sony PlayStation 3 and later, Apple’s iOS devices, a variety of TV set-top boxes, as well as some “Smart TV’s” and some Blu-ray players — so any of these hooked into the same Netflix account would also be affected. However, you can create separate user profiles within the main account and set parental controls on the one you have assigned to the children. You can also set up a specific profile that limits the viewing area to the children’s section of the Netflix library. Leaving a Flickr Group Q. I signed up for a bunch of Flickr photo groups years ago, but I’ve lost interest in a few of them, even though they show up on my Flickr home page. How do I quit the groups I don’t care about anymore? A. Log into your Flickr account and go to the Communities menu at the top of the page. Select Groups List to see a page listing all the groups you have joined over the years. Click the thumbnail icon of the group you want to leave. When you land on the group page, scroll down and click the red Leave Group button on the left side. For those who have not tried them out, Flickr groups are pages on the site where members can share and post their own pictures on specific topics like classic cars or London street photography . Since you can see the whole pool of images contributed by the group’s members in once place, these pages on Flickr can also be a great place to learn about composition or see samples of technology like high dynamic range photography. You can search for groups devoted to different subjects by going to the Communities menu on your Flickr page and choosing the Search Groups option. Click on a group’s name in the results list to see samples. If the group is open to new members, click the Join Group button next to its name to add it to your personal list.
|
Netflix;Flickr;Parental Guidelines
|
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