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ny0170384 | [
"us",
"politics"
] | 2007/05/22 | McCain Counters Romney With a Three-Way Riposte | It doesn’t look much like there is a McCain-Romney ticket in the offing. Senator John McCain of Arizona, whose support of a bipartisan immigration proposal has drawn criticism from Mitt Romney , the former governor of Massachusetts, answered yesterday with a pointed riposte. “In the case of Governor Romney, you know, maybe I should wait a couple of weeks and see if it changes because it’s changed in less than a year from his position before,” Mr. McCain said on a conference call. “And maybe his solution will be to get out his small-varmint gun and drive those Guatemalans off his lawn.” That was at least three political jabs packed into one. First, Mr. McCain was painting Mr. Romney as a flip-flopper, in a nod to the fact that he has expressed support for similar immigration proposals in the past and changed his position on abortion before running for president. Next, Mr. McCain took a dig at a memorable line Mr. Romney used this year after his attempt to portray himself as a lifelong hunter was challenged, and it surfaced that he had not taken out hunting licenses in the states where he lived. “I’ve always been a rodent and rabbit hunter,” Mr. Romney said. “Small varmints, if you will.” Finally, the Guatemalans. That was a reference to an article in The Boston Globe late last year that quoted several people from Guatemala who said they had worked on Mr. Romney’s lawn in suburban Boston while in the United States illegally, as employees of a lawn care company that Mr. Romney hired. It was an early taste of one Republican presidential candidate naming, and criticizing, another. The Romney campaign answered with a statement that only referred to Mr. McCain as “a certain candidate.” “Governor Romney has been very clear that he opposes this immigration agreement, which clearly falls short of the American public’s expectations,” said Kevin Madden, a spokesman for Mr. Romney. “It seems that a certain candidate who brokered this flawed plan is having a very difficult time coming to terms with the political fallout that has ensued and has abandoned any and all substantive arguments for it.” | McCain John;Romney Mitt;Illegal Immigrants;Hunting and Trapping;Abortion;Immigration and Refugees;Presidential Election of 2008;United States Politics and Government;Politics and Government |
ny0128484 | [
"world",
"americas"
] | 2012/06/11 | Priorities in Mexico’s Drug War | The following are excerpts from an interview with Enrique Peña Nieto, a former governor of Mexico State who is the front-running candidate in the July 1 presidential election in Mexico . The interview was conducted in Spanish last week and translated by The New York Times. On priorities in the drug war : “The adjustment in the strategy is to focus on decreasing violence. And that means that the whole Mexican state, jointly between the three levels of government — state, federal and municipal — should really focus its efforts on combating homicide and the impunity that is a given in many of the homicides committed, as with kidnapping and extortion.” On improving policing, including adding a gendarmerie and expanding the federal police force to supplement small, poorly equipped local police forces. “Many times it’s there, in these places with the lowest populations, where organized crime hides, as there is no police that can really fulfill its duty to the best because the institutions are too weakened. There are too few police, sometimes without equipment, without weapons, and organized crime, with the level of sophistication in which it operates, ends up easily getting there and taking over these places with small populations.” On building trustworthy justice institutions: “Today we know of a great number of detentions, but it is not equal to the number of convictions of people that we presume committed a crime. Consequently, we have to strengthen this whole chain — we have to attain complete rule of law — and that doesn’t happen by decree, nor by good will. It’s a constant for the Mexican state, the strengthening of institutions. That will really allow us to have better results.” On the need to push through stalled money-laundering laws in congress: “I think money laundering is giving oxygen to organized crime. And what we must do is ensure that with this tool that the state will have, in the new legislation to combat money laundering, allows the state to act more efficiently.” On going after Joaquín Guzmán, known as “El Chapo,” or “Shorty,” the most-wanted drug trafficker in Mexico: “The commitment is to give security to the people. The commitment is to reduce violence, and the commitment is also to combat effectively and to capture those who act outside of the law. El Chapo and any other criminal — the state is obviously there to go after them and subject them to the law.” On the Institutional Revolutionary Party’s reputation for corruption: “I can’t single out my party. In all parties there are regrettable cases that have tarnished the institutions represented by certain actors. Therefore, it’s necessary to strengthen the state through public entities like the one I’ve proposed, the National Anticorruption Commission, to combat corruption. The state is obliged to fight corruption within the government. Today there are different mechanisms that are dedicated to this objective, but without a doubt, they aren’t sufficient. I have been proposing a national auditing system for the three levels of government, strengthening the Institute for Information and Protection of Data precisely to give more powers within these entities and municipalities to really attain more transparency and a better accountability.” On whether he has smoked marijuana or consumed any other illicit drug: “Never ever. I say it categorically. And I would undergo any test if there were any I could. I am willing to undergo any test.” On not being able to name three books that have made a mark on his life, a question that caused a social-media sensation when he could not fully answer at a book fair in December: “I wouldn’t pick one in particular. Back then, when they asked me that same question. I said, thinking which books, I pointed out the Bible as one of the first texts I read, and I think reading various books undoubtedly leaves you knowledge, lessons. I wouldn’t point out, or wouldn’t let one book in particular mark me. Maybe, more focused on my childhood, the Bible. After that it has been the forming of broader knowledge by reading many books — the ones I read during my college years, the ones during my postgraduate time and the ones I read on a regular basis.” On the movies “J. Edgar,” about the megalomaniacal FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, and “The Departed,” about Boston mobsters. “Lately the one I’ve been seeing in bits and parts is “Edgar Hoover.” Very good, by the way. ... I was drawn to it, and the truth is, well, it’s interesting. I recommend it. I’m probably halfway through. ... I also like comedies. ... Ah, “The Departed” is really good.” | Mexico;Elections;Pena Nieto Enrique;Drug Abuse and Traffic;Police;Organized Crime |
ny0156824 | [
"nyregion"
] | 2008/06/01 | Course Requirements: Good Nose and a Taste for Wine | Stephanie Frederick’s lecture began with a toast to Robert Mondavi, the celebrated winemaker who recently died. “He was the true father of American wine, my hero,” Ms. Frederick said to her students, who sat before a map of Italy, each one peering over seven glasses of red and white wines in a room where the wafts of alcohol would give a wall-fly a contact high. Ms. Frederick lowered her glass and lifted her head. “Does anybody think they can recognize a corked wine if they were blindfolded?” she asked, taking her red wine from station to station, beneath the twitching noses of aspiring sommeliers. “I didn’t know if this wine was corked or oxidized, but that sherry nose tells me that somehow, oxygen got in that wine.” “Oxygen,” Ms. Frederick added, “is the enemy of wine.” As she spoke, all 45 students began scribbling furiously on their notepads. They had gathered for a Tuesday morning class at the Williams Club in Midtown, home of the Sommelier Society of America, which offers a 20-week course covering a variety of wines and the significant regions of the world where they are produced. Ms. Frederick had already covered southern France, Germany and Austria, and in the next weeks, two other instructors were to discuss Portugal and Spain. Edison Lopez of Sunnyside, Queens, was spending weeknights poring over his wine notes, and weekends sniffing and sipping merlots and cabernets, Burgundies and Bordeaux in preparation for the final exam on July 22. Like most of his classmates, he hopes that his graduation certificate will be a springboard for a better career in a wine-related industry, perhaps as a sommelier in a restaurant, a job that can pay from $65,000 to more than $100,00 a year, and “even more in the top restaurants in Las Vegas,” according to Ms. Frederick. Someone with an educated nose can also find work for a wine importer or distributor. “There’s so much to remember,” said Mr. Lopez, 32, a waiter at Fresco by Scotto, a Manhattan restaurant. “To tell you the truth, I’m a little bit worried about the final,” he said between sips from a glass of Barolo, from northern Italy. “This stuff is fascinating, but there’s a lot of it to learn.” On Tuesday, he learned even more. Ms. Frederick, who owns a wine consulting business in Manhattan but is better known among the Sommelier Society for her vintage lectures, gave the class a list of what she believed were the five best wine-making grapes in all of Italy: nebbiolo, sangiovese, sagrantino, aglianico and corvina. She then warned: “You should know about Chianti for the final. It’s a classic red wine from Tuscany. You will always get questions about Chianti.” “And now,” Ms. Frederick said, turning the pages of her handwritten notes, “I’d like to talk about fermentation.” Caitlin Makowski, 21, a server at the highly rated and expensive Per Se Restaurant in the Time Warner Center in Manhattan, has dreams of owning her own restaurant and called her sommelier studies “a starting point.” “If you want to own a restaurant, you need a great deal of wine knowledge,” said Ms. Makowski, who lives in Elmhurst, Queens. She was the youngest of the students, who ranged in age from the early 20s to late 50s and paid $945 for the course. “I’m used to tasting lots of wines at work, but classes like these educate me on the backgrounds of those wines.” With any luck, Ms. Makowski will find a better job in the industry, as so many of Ms. Frederick’s former students have, in jobs scattered through the city. “Sommeliers are definitely in demand,” Ms. Frederick said. “There is a serious shortage of wine-knowledgeable people in New York and around the country.” Eric Rosenfeld, 28, who took the sommelier course in the fall of 2006, is now the general manager at Gemma, a restaurant at the Bowery Hotel. Shortly after earning his certificate, he landed a job as the sommelier at the Waverly Inn in the West Village. “I got into the restaurant business through my knowledge of wines,” he said. So did Paula Maia, 36, who took the course in the winter of 2006, and in April 2007 opened the Oak Wine Bar and Café in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, with her partner, Kevin Megan. “Ms. Frederick was an awesome instructor,” Ms. Maia said. “Everybody who wants to work in this business should take that class.” And then there is Natalie Sanz, the 26-year-old owner of Las Ramblas, a tapas bar at 170 West Fourth Street, who took the sommelier course in the spring of 2006 so that she could expand the wine list in her restaurant. “I’m more likely to hire someone who has a great knowledge of wine over someone else who doesn’t,” said Ms. Sanz, whose staff includes Michael Hands, a wine server who is currently taking the sommelier course. Robert R. Moody, the chairman of the Sommelier Society, sat in on the class. The organization, he said, began in 1954 at the “21” “21”Club in New York, when a group of restaurant workers with noses for fine wines wanted to be labeled more than waiters. “The wine waiters felt they weren’t being fairly compensated, and so they wanted an organization that could guarantee them tips they felt they deserved for suggesting certain wines to the clientele,” Mr. Moody said. “The “21” Club was a hot place to go because it had an excellent wine cellar.” Juan Benítez, a past president of the Sommelier Society who once served wine at “21” to the likes of Richard M. Nixon, Elizabeth Taylor, Frank Sinatra and Muhammad Ali, now owns Vintage Wines, an importer and distributor of wines on Staten Island. “I recommended Le Montrachet, a white wine, to Mr. Sinatra, who loved it and became one of my best tippers,” said Mr. Benítez, 59. “The more you know about wines,” Mr. Benítez said, “the further you will get in this business.” And that is why Mr. Lopez — his cheeks a bit rosy midway through Tuesday’s lecture — has been at the midnight vino. “If I drink too much in class, or too much when I’m studying at home, I get a little tipsy,” he said. “It’s hard not to drink all this good stuff while I’m learning about it.” | Wines;Manhattan (NYC);Sommelier Society of America |
ny0211927 | [
"us"
] | 2017/01/09 | Women’s March on Washington Opens Contentious Dialogues About Race | Many thousands of women are expected to converge on the nation’s capital for the Women’s March on Washington the day after Donald J. Trump’s inauguration. Jennifer Willis no longer plans to be one of them. Ms. Willis, a 50-year-old wedding minister from South Carolina, had looked forward to taking her daughters to the march. Then she read a post on the Facebook page for the march that made her feel unwelcome because she is white. The post, written by a black activist from Brooklyn who is a march volunteer, advised “white allies” to listen more and talk less. It also chided those who, it said, were only now waking up to racism because of the election. “You don’t just get to join because now you’re scared, too,” read the post. “I was born scared.” Stung by the tone, Ms. Willis canceled her trip. “This is a women’s march,” she said. “We’re supposed to be allies in equal pay, marriage, adoption. Why is it now about, ‘White women don’t understand black women’?” If all goes as planned, the Jan. 21 march will be a momentous display of unity in protest of a president whose treatment of women came to dominate the campaign’s final weeks. But long before the first buses roll to Washington and sister demonstrations take place in other cities, contentious conversations about race have erupted nearly every day among marchers, exhilarating some and alienating others. In Tennessee, emotions ran high when organizers changed the name of the local march from “Women’s March on Washington-Nashville” to “Power Together Tennessee, in solidarity with Women’s March on Washington.” While many applauded the name change, which was meant to signal the start of a new social justice movement in Nashville, some complained that the event had turned from a march for all women into a march for black women. In Louisiana, the first state coordinator gave up her volunteer role in part because there were no minority women in leadership positions at that time. “I got a lot of flak locally when I stepped down, from white women who said that I’m alienating a lot of white women,” said Candice Huber, a bookstore owner in New Orleans, who is white. “They said, ‘Why do you have to be so divisive?’” In some ways, the discord is by design. Even as they are working to ensure a smooth and unified march next week, the national organizers said they made a deliberate decision to highlight the plight of minority and undocumented immigrant women and provoke uncomfortable discussions about race. “This was an opportunity to take the conversation to the deep places,” said Linda Sarsour, a Muslim who heads the Arab American Association of New York and is one of four co-chairwomen of the national march. “Sometimes you are going to upset people.” The post that offended Ms. Willis was part of that effort. So was the quotation posted on the march’s Facebook page from Bell Hooks, the black feminist, about forging a stronger sisterhood by “confronting the ways women — through sex, class and race — dominated and exploited other women.” In response, a New Jersey woman wrote: “I’m starting to feel not very welcome in this endeavor.” A debate then ensued about whether white women were just now experiencing what minority women experience daily, or were having a hard time yielding control. A young white woman from Baltimore wrote with bitterness that white women who might have been victims of rape and abuse were being “asked to check their privilege,” a catchphrase that refers to people acknowledging their advantages, but which even some liberal women find unduly confrontational. No one involved with the march fears that the rancor will dampen turnout; even many of those who expressed dismay at the tone of the discussion said they still intended to join what is sure to be the largest demonstration yet against the Trump presidency. “I will march,” one wrote on the march’s Facebook page, “Hoping that someday soon a sense of unity will occur before it’s too late.” But these debates over race also reflect deeper questions about the future of progressivism in the age of Trump. Should the march highlight what divides women, or what unites them? Is there room for women who have never heard of “white privilege”? And at a time when a presidential candidate ran against political correctness and won — with half of white female voters supporting him — is this the time to tone down talk about race or to double down? Women’s March on Washington: What You Need to Know Many thousands of people are expected to march in protest of the new president on Jan. 21, his first full day in office. “If your short-term goal is to get as many people as possible at the march, maybe you don’t want to alienate people,” said Anne Valk, the author of “Radical Sisters,” a book about racial and class differences in the women’s movement. “But if your longer-term goal is to use the march as a catalyst for progressive social and political change, then that has to include thinking about race and class privilege.” The discord also reflects the variety of women’s rights and liberal causes being represented at the march, as well as a generational divide. Many older white women spent their lives fighting for rights like workplace protections that younger women now take for granted. Many young activists have spent years protesting police tactics and criminal justice policies — issues they feel too many white liberals have ignored. “Yes, equal pay is an issue,” Ms. Sarsour said. “But look at the ratio of what white women get paid versus black women and Latina women.” For too long, the march organizers said, the women’s rights movement focused on issues that were important to well-off white women, such as the ability to work outside the home and attain the same high-powered positions that men do. But minority women, they said, have had different priorities. Black women who have worked their whole lives as maids might care more about the minimum wage or police brutality than about seeing a woman in the White House. Undocumented immigrant women might care about abortion rights, they said, but not nearly as much as they worry about being deported. This brand of feminism — frequently referred to as “intersectionality” — asks white women to acknowledge that they have had it easier. It speaks candidly about the history of racism, even within the feminist movement itself. The organizers of the 1913 suffrage march on Washington asked black women to march at the back of the parade. The issue of race has followed the march from its inception. The day after the election, Bob Bland, a fashion designer in New York, floated the idea of a march in Washington on Facebook. Within hours, 3,000 people said they would join. Then a friend called to tell Ms. Bland that a woman in Hawaii with a similar page had collected pledges from 12,000 people. “I thought, ‘Wow, let’s merge,’” Ms. Bland recalled. As the effort grew, a number of comments on Facebook implored Ms. Bland, who is white, to include minority women on the leadership team. Ms. Bland felt strongly that it was the right thing to do. Within three days of the election, Carmen Perez, a Hispanic activist working on juvenile justice, and Tamika D. Mallory, a gun control activist who is black, joined Ms. Bland. Gloria Steinem , honorary co-chairwoman of the march along with Harry Belafonte , lauded their approach. “Sexism is always made worse by racism — and vice versa,” she said in an email. Ms. Steinem, who plans to participate in a town hall meeting during the march with Alicia Garza, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter, said even contentious conversations about race were a “good thing.” “It’s about knowing each other,” she wrote. “Which is what movements and marches are for.” But the tone of the discussion, particularly online, can become so raw that some would-be marchers feel they are no longer welcome. Ms. Willis, the South Carolina wedding minister, had been looking forward to the salve of rallying with people who share her values, a rarity in her home state, where she said she had been insulted and shouted at for marrying gay couples. But then she read a post by ShiShi Rose, a 27-year-old blogger from Brooklyn. “Now is the time for you to be listening more, talking less,” Ms. Rose wrote. “You should be reading our books and understanding the roots of racism and white supremacy. Listening to our speeches. You should be drowning yourselves in our poetry.” It rubbed Ms. Willis the wrong way. “How do you know that I’m not reading black poetry?” she asked in an interview. Ms. Willis says that she understands being born white gives her advantages, and that she is always open to learning more about the struggles of others. But, she said, “The last thing that is going to make me endeared to you, to know you and love you more, is if you are sitting there wagging your finger at me.” Ms. Rose said in an interview that the intention of the post was not to weed people out but rather to make them understand that they had a lot of learning to do. “I needed them to understand that they don’t just get to join the march and not check their privilege constantly,” she said. That phrase — check your privilege — exasperates Ms. Willis. She asked a reporter: “Can you please tell me what that means?” | Women's rights,Feminism;Civil Unrest;Race and Ethnicity;Donald Trump;Washington DC;Women and Girls;Black People,African-Americans;White People;US Politics |
ny0008374 | [
"us"
] | 2013/05/23 | Okla. Town’s Residents Stay Put in Tornadoes’ Cross Hairs | MOORE, Okla. — Along a nearly 20-mile path of caved-in buildings, upside-down cars and muddy rubble, there was a different sort of stunning sight on Wednesday — a homeowner, broom in hand, sweeping the driveway, trying to make at least one patch of land here the way it used to be. For more than a century, this Oklahoma City suburb has taken a battering in Tornado Alley. At least 22 tornadoes have struck in or near Moore, killing more than 100 people, since the town was incorporated in 1893, according to the National Weather Service. The tornado that destroyed dozens of homes, businesses and schools on Monday carved a destructive path for 17 miles and killed at least 24 people, but the one that touched down May 3, 1999, left an even longer, deadlier trail, staying on the ground for 38 miles and killing 36. Despite the continual destruction, people have not fled Moore. They have stayed put and rebuilt, and others have moved to the town. Nearly 19,000 people lived here in 1970; by 2011, there were 56,000 residents. Moore is a working-class suburb at the southern edge of Oklahoma City where churches outnumber bars and Republicans outnumber Democrats. In the 1890s, a railroad employee named Al Moore who lived in a boxcar had trouble receiving his mail at a settlement here. He painted his name on a board and nailed it on the boxcar, and the town’s name was born, city officials say. Image The rubble of Plaza Towers Elementary School in Moore, Okla., on Wednesday. Credit Matthew Staver for The New York Times Most residents are white, and the town has a median household income of $56,601, higher than the $44,973 median in Oklahoma City. People park their R.V.’s in the driveway, next to their cars as well as their boats. They work in the oil and energy industry, run small businesses, cut hair, wait tables, tutor schoolchildren. The longtime mayor, Glenn Lewis, owns a jewelry store. The Republican lawmaker who represents the area in the state House of Representatives, Mark McBride, owns a roofing and home building company. “It is a blue-collar town,” he said. “We’re pretty plain. We pay cash for things down here.” Mr. McBride, 52, was born and raised in Moore and still lives here, and in his cowboy hat, boots and jeans he embodies the town’s unpretentious manner. At a news conference, he stood and announced on live television that if anyone needed a place to stay, he had room at his house. Then he gave out his cellphone number. “I wasn’t joking,” Mr. McBride said. “I’ve got extra beds and a couch.” Ken and Doris Saxon moved to a red-brick home a few blocks from City Hall in 1962 with their four young children. A few years later, a tornado damaged Moore High School, where Mrs. Saxon’s brother was band director. There were other close calls: The 1999 tornado struck about 10 blocks north, and on Monday, they crouched in their bathroom, holding pillows and comforters over their heads. Their home, and their neighbors’ houses, were spared any major damage. On Wednesday afternoon, the couple — their children are grown, and they are great-grandparents — was busy outside in the yard, picking up fallen tree limbs and branches. Mrs. Saxon, 78, a retired office manager, had her red gardening gloves on, while her husband, 80, a retired auto mechanic, rested in the shade. She recalled that when the tornado hit the high school decades ago, her brother had been leading the school band in a performance. The roof came off and the rain poured in. He told them to stay and keep playing. “In California you have earthquakes,” Mrs. Saxon said. “In New York, you have hurricanes. Everywhere you’ve got something. We just choose this over everything else. It’s a good place to live. It’s home.” In some of the damaged areas of the city, it is hard to tell what Moore used to be. In a residential area near the destroyed Moore Medical Center, the homes on Southwest Sixth Street were reduced to piles of wood, concrete and red brick. Marking the horizon were a few shells of homes, barkless trees and chimney stacks. The Return to Moore 13 Photos View Slide Show › Image Matthew Staver for The New York Times Late Tuesday evening, this flattened Moore was not the real Moore: there were no residents picking through their belongings, only reporters and news crews and TV trucks. Nearby, there were blockades run by National Guard members in the middle of what were once bustling intersections. On Wednesday, the real Moore was on display at the Madison Place subdivision, where homeowners backed trailers and pickup trucks into their driveways and began cleaning up. The neighborhood was heavily damaged, but still recognizable, though with surreal touches. A thick shard of wood punctured a blue slide at a playground like a dagger; a UPS driver made his rounds, delivering to homes that were barely standing. At a two-story brick house at the end of a cul-de-sac, you had to imagine the upstairs room where Crystal Sheppard’s children once slept. There was no more upstairs. There was just a window pane and open sky. Ms. Sheppard, 26, moved to Moore in April 2011 with her husband, her 4-year-old son and two girls who are foster children, drawn by the reputation of the local school district. She is a stay-at-home mother. Her husband, Daunte, 27, is a finance manager at a Chevrolet dealership. On Monday, Ms. Sheppard was at home with the two girls when the tornado approached. Her son was at his prekindergarten and her husband was at work. She grabbed the girls and, joined by a neighbor, sped away. “It was behind us and we just tried to keep ahead of it,” she said. “It was literally pedal to the metal.” On Wednesday, she and her husband removed some of their undamaged furniture and appliances. Underneath the rubble in the patio, she pulled her son’s pre-k graduation picture. They will stay in town. “We’re not moving from Moore,” she said. “We’ll just have a shelter built.” | Moore OK;Tornado |
ny0009572 | [
"business"
] | 2013/02/18 | Rem Vyakhirev, Former Chief of Gazprom, Dies at 78 | MOSCOW — Rem I. Vyakhirev, who as chief executive of the huge Russian energy company Gazprom during the 1990s resisted efforts by reformers to break up and privatize it, only to end his tenure a billionaire owning valuable pieces of the company himself, died on Feb. 11. He was 78. His death was confirmed by a Gazprom spokesman, who did not provide the cause or place of death. Early in the post-Soviet period, Mr. Vyakhirev seized on the possibilities of exploiting the sheer power and scale of the Russian natural gas industry — both for the government and for private enrichment. His career spanned the transformation of what had been the Soviet ministry of gas into the world’s largest natural gas company. By the time he left Gazprom, in 2001, forced out in a din of criticism over missing assets, Forbes magazine estimated his net worth at $1.5 billion. All along, though, Mr. Vyakhirev, reflecting a strange cognitive dissonance that characterized his career, espoused the benefits of state ownership of natural gas fields and pipelines. Gazprom, which is controlled by the Russian government but is 50 percent owned by private investors, remained whole while the Russian oil industry was split up and sold piecemeal. The company supplies about a quarter of all gas consumed in Europe today. “The gas industry should be in one pair of hands, in state hands,” Mr. Vyakhirev said in September in an interview with the Russian edition of Forbes. “There’s all this talk about gas being an addiction, how to get off the gas needle. That’s ridiculous. Gas is a wet nurse, not a needle.” Rem Ivanovich Vyakhirev was born on Aug. 23, 1934, in a village in the Samara region of southern Russia. His given name is an acronym evoking socialist progress: Revolution, Engels and Marx. By the late 1980s, he had risen to deputy minister of gas in the Soviet Union. He assumed control of Gazprom in 1992, when his patron, the former minister of gas, Viktor S. Chernomyrdon , was appointed prime minister under President Boris N. Yeltsin. Mr. Vyakhirev and a tight group of associates held sway over Gazprom’s assets, including whole towns in Siberia. The company became an island of the old Soviet system in the new Russia, known as the state within the state, a paternalistic monopoly with tens of thousands of coddled employees. The company’s staggering wealth and size made Mr. Vyakhirev one of Russia’s most powerful men. He was able to shrug off efforts by the tax ministry to collect billions in arrears from the company in the mid-1990s. He also aided the state by informally ladling out funds from the corporate budget. Yevgeny Yasin, the minister of economy at the time, recalled Mr. Vyakhirev’s eagerness to help the government on such projects as rebuilding a cathedral in Moscow. “He always helped,” Mr. Yasin said, as quoted by Public Post, a news Web site. “Gazprom was a second budget, in fact an ‘extra pocket’ for the government, to be used during especially difficult situations.” All the while, beginning with a quiet deal soon after the company’s founding that allowed company executives to buy up to 30 percent of Gazprom shares at auctions they controlled, pieces of Gazprom slipped away to nonstate entities. Public documents and financial records later showed that some assets went to Mr. Vyakhirev and members of his family, a sign of the rough and loose ways of early Russian capitalism. One deal, for example, transferred about $185 million worth of gas fields to Sibneftegaz, a subsidiary partly owned by Mr. Vyakhirev’s relatives. As pressure mounted to oust Mr. Vyakhirev, Boris Fyodorov, a former minister of finance, disclosed that tens of billions of dollars worth of gas sales from Russia to former Soviet countries like Ukraine went through Itera, a trading company based in Jacksonville, Fla., and partly owned by Gazprom managers. President Vladimir V. Putin, in consolidating political control over Russia early in his first term, ousted Mr. Vyakhirev in 2001 by having government appointees on the board cancel his contract. Mr. Vyakhirev stayed on as chairman for a year. The new director, Aleksey B. Miller, then set about unraveling the old management’s insider deals. Gazprom’s stock rallied for a time before the global recession, but has been in a swoon for years. The company is losing market share in Europe because of price pressure from the gas industry in the United States. Mr. Vyakhirev’s survivors include a son, Yuri, and a daughter, Tatyana Vyakhireva. In the Forbes interview last year, Mr. Vyakhirev said he had taken up hobby farming in retirement. “I never wanted to be the head of a company,” he said. “But why refuse if the entire business is in your hands? If you give it to somebody, they would either drink it away or lose it.” | Rem Vyakhirev;Gazprom;Obituary;Russia |
ny0012955 | [
"us"
] | 2013/11/19 | Louisiana: Political Newcomer Is Headed to Congress | Vance McAllister has never been to Washington, but he will make his first trip this week — as Louisiana’s newest congressman. The Republican political newcomer began to build his staff Monday after his 20-point victory on Saturday in the runoff election for the Fifth District seat. Mr. McAllister met with his predecessor, Rodney Alexander, and said he planned to hire many of Mr. Alexander’s former employees as long as they had not endorsed his competitor, Neil Riser, a Republican state senator. Mr. Alexander, a Republican, left the seat in September to take a job in Gov. Bobby Jindal’s administration. A businessman with the backing of the popular “Duck Dynasty” television family, Mr. McAllister largely funded his own campaign, running as a political outsider and a pragmatist who talked of the need for compromise rather than partisanship in Washington. | House of Representatives;Congress;Republicans;Louisiana;Rodney Alexander |
ny0182590 | [
"us"
] | 2007/12/28 | Military Paper Challenges Defense Dept. | WASHINGTON — Top editors at the military newspaper Stars and Stripes are asking for full disclosure of the paper’s relationship with a Department of Defense publicity program, called America Supports You, after disclosures that money for the program was funneled through the newspaper. The newspaper’s two top editors have asked that the acting publisher, Max D. Lederer Jr., and the Pentagon official who oversees the program, Allison Barber, release details of a relationship that involves employees of the newspaper’s business department overseeing contracts on behalf of America Supports You. The program was established three years ago to build public support for the troops. “This is not how an editorially independent newspaper should conduct itself,” the executive editor, Robb Grindstaff, and managing editor, Doug Clawson, said in a Dec. 8 letter to Mr. Lederer and Ms. Barber, and copied to the secretary of defense. The letter added that the refusal to release information was damaging morale on the editorial side of the paper. “The integrity and credibility of both Stars and Stripes and the D.O.D. public affairs department with our audience is negatively impacted by this continuing scenario,” Mr. Grindstaff and Mr. Clawson wrote. The newspaper, financed in part by the Pentagon, is part of the American Forces Information Service and reports ultimately to Ms. Barber, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for public liaison and internal communications. The editors’ letter follows an e-mail message sent in November by six midlevel editors of the newspaper requesting Mr. Lederer’s resignation after he failed to respond to their request that he release documents detailing the paper’s financial dealings with America Supports You. Thomas P. Skeen, the newspaper’s senior editor in the Pacific who signed the e-mail message, said the issue came down to the credibility of the newspaper. “To me personally it was just hypocrisy at its worst,” Mr. Skeen said of the refusal to release the details of the relationship between the newspaper and the program. In an interview, Ms. Barber said that there were no plans to release the details and that all money spent by Stars and Stripes had been reimbursed. America Supports You has been the subject of an inquiry by the Defense Department’s inspector general. The audit is one of four examining the office of the assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, according to the inspector general’s office. The inspector general inquiry is looking at the relationship between America Supports You and Stars and Stripes, which have different types of financing. Because Stars and Stripes relies partly on advertising revenue, it operates with fewer guidelines and restrictions than other Pentagon programs that rely solely on appropriated funds, including America Supports You. Ms. Barber said the choice to involve the Stars and Stripes business department was made out of expediency and had nothing to do with the looser financing regulations. An audit, announced in October, is examining whether the Joint Civilian Orientation Conference, a Pentagon outreach program that educates civilian leaders about the military, is in compliance with the law and Defense Department policies. After a Stars and Stripes reporter, Jeff Schogol, discovered that the inspector general’s office had widened the inquiry to include the newspaper, he investigated and wrote articles that the newspaper published. Documents have been posted on the paper’s Web site, www.stripes.com , that describe payments, including a $499,000 purchase agreement between Stars and Stripes and a contractor doing work for the America Supports You program. The documents stipulate that work be submitted to employees on the business side of the paper for an advertising program and a Web site for America Supports You. In November, Mr. Lederer sent an e-mail message to employees conceding that using the newspaper as a contracting agent for America Supports You might have been unwise and that more debate was necessary. Perception of objectivity has always been a thorny issue for the editorial staff because the paper is supposed to be free from government censorship — but is owned and partly financed by the government. By statute, the newspaper is guaranteed editorial independence. There are stipulations, including that the newspaper cannot knowingly publish classified information that has not been disclosed elsewhere. Ms. Barber said it was only recently that the news staff voiced concerns about the relationship with the publicity program. “What I would say is if we’ve had the America Supports You contract for maybe two years, and they didn’t even know about it, then clearly there is that established firewall that you have to have in an organization that is a First Amendment organization,” she said. | Stars and Stripes;Defense Department;America Supports You;Newspapers |
ny0043996 | [
"science"
] | 2014/05/13 | New Neurons Found to Overwrite Old Memories | The inability of adults to recall experiences from early childhood may be linked to the creation of new neurons in the brain. Throughout a person’s life, neurons are constantly made in the hippocampus, a region of the brain associated with memory. To see whether this process, known as neurogenesis, could drive the loss of childhood memories, researchers ran tests with animals trained to fear a particular environment through electric shock. Adult mice that were made to run on a wheel, an activity that encourages the birth of new neurons, quickly lost their fear of the troubling environment, while mice that didn’t run seemed to retain their memories. Infant mice treated with drugs to slow neurogenesis were also better at retaining memories of the shocks than those not given drugs. The researchers ran similar tests on guinea pigs and degus, which experience less infant neurogenesis than other animals. When left untreated, these rodents did not forget the shocks as quickly as infant mice did. But when treated with drugs that stimulate neurogenesis, they, too, were more likely to forget. “When new neurons are born and mature and integrate into these pre-existing neural circuits, they’re going to change the connections that existed before,” said Katherine Akers, now at Wayne State University and lead author of the study. “Changing these connections might degrade the integrity of the pre-existing memories.” The findings, published in the journal Science , could help lead to treatments for adults with memory or cognition problems, she said. DOUGLAS QUENQUA | Amnesia;Rodents;Brain;Memory;Science Journal |
ny0022165 | [
"sports",
"football"
] | 2013/09/21 | Giants Hope for U-Turn on Familiar Trip | EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. — The 0-2 Giants found a ray of hope this week in the knowledge that their last such start came in 2007, when they swept their next six games and went on to win Super Bowl XLII. The belief that they can repeat such a turnaround could hinge on how they fare Sunday against quarterback Cam Newton and the Carolina Panthers, an opponent they are meeting at a familiar time and place. The Giants traveled to Charlotte, N.C., with a 1-1 record in their third regular-season game last year. They used a 36-7 thumping of the Panthers to start a torrid stretch in which they won five of six games. That helped lead to a winning record (9-7) but not a playoff berth. “There has to be a sense of urgency,” defensive end Justin Tuck said of this year’s slow start, “because we are not getting those two games back.” Any sense of déjà vu surrounding Sunday’s kickoff in Charlotte ends for the Giants with the absence of running back Andre Brown. Against the Panthers on Sept. 20, 2012, Brown carried 20 times for 113 yards and 2 touchdowns. He and the rest of the Giants’ offense played the best possible defense against Newton by keeping him off the field; the Giants dominated the time of possession, keeping the ball for 36 minutes 10 seconds. This year, Brown is on injured reserve until mid-November with a broken left leg. The Giants have missed his hard-charging style. With their aging offensive line struggling to create running lanes, they have 33 rushing attempts for 73 yards, a meager 36.5 yards per game. It appears the defense will also be lacking a key figure: cornerback Corey Webster is listed as doubtful after missing Friday’s practice with a hip injury. Aaron Ross is expected to make his first start for the Giants since Super Bowl XLVI to close the 2011 season. He left as a free agent to sign with Jacksonville but played only one year with the Jaguars before he was released. Ross said that he had not been told he would start but that he would embrace the opportunity. “I love to play. I love to compete. I’m a fierce competitor,” he said. “Any time I have a chance to go out there, I’m excited.” Ross, drafted by the Giants in the first round in 2007, said he had always been ready to rejoin the lineup. He said of his study habits: “It’s the same as it is every week. I go in preparing like I’m a starter, because you never know what is going to happen.” Ross hurried into action in the season-opening 36-31 loss at the Dallas Cowboys when Prince Amukamara collided with safety Ryan Mundy and sustained a concussion. Ross held up well against Tony Romo, the Cowboys’ elusive passer. “We’re not looking for any kind of letdown,” safety Antrel Rolle said of the probable lineup change. “We’re looking for Ross to play ball as he did against Dallas.” No matter the circumstances, the Giants expressed confidence they could defeat the Panthers if they repeated the success they had last year against Newton, the first player taken in the 2011 draft and one of the game’s most dynamic players. The Giants held Newton to 16-of-30 passing for 242 yards and intercepted him three times. Although Newton is difficult to tackle at 6 feet 5 inches and 245 pounds, the Giants limited his effectiveness as a ball carrier by taking a double-digit lead. He rushed six times for 6 yards, including his team’s only touchdown. It came in the third quarter, after the visitors had built a 23-0 lead. It was a rare poor afternoon for Newton, who became the only player in N.F.L. history to pass for more than 8,000 yards (8,045) and 40 touchdowns (41) while running for more than 1,000 yards (1,045) and 20 touchdowns (22) in his first 33 games. He passed for 3,869 yards and rushed for 741 yards and 8 touchdowns last year, when he became the first quarterback to lead his team in rushing since Donovan McNabb paced the Philadelphia Eagles in 2000. “He is a special athlete,” Mundy said. “He can bring the ball down and get 5 yards or he can get 70 yards.” Although the Giants have only two sacks, defensive end Mathias Kiwanuka said he thought they could turn up the pressure against Newton. “Everybody knows about his feet and when he escapes the pocket, that he can still look down the field and he can make people miss,” Kiwanuka said. “So our job will be to push the pocket, get people up in his face and make sure we get him down on the ground.” EXTRA POINTS Hakeem Nicks was given an excused absence from practice so he could attend to personal matters. Nicks was expected back for Sunday’s game. ... Coach Tom Coughlin continued to keep focus on the game rather than on the death of his younger brother, John, who will be buried Tuesday. Asked how his players had rallied around him, Coughlin said: “Let’s not go there, please. Everybody’s working hard to get where we want to be.” | Football;Giants;Carolina Panthers;Cameron J Newton;Andre Brown;Corey Webster;Aaron Ross |
ny0015746 | [
"nyregion"
] | 2013/10/17 | Trial Opens for Imelda Marcos’s Ex-Aide | When the former personal secretary to Imelda Marcos contacted a London gallery three years ago about selling a Monet masterpiece that Mrs. Marcos, the former first lady of the Philippines, had bought in the 1970s, the gallery was understandably leery. The ex-secretary, Vilma Bautista, possessed only one thing to prove she was authorized to sell the painting: a single-page document from 1991 naming her as Mrs. Marcos’s agent. That document will be a key piece of evidence in Ms. Bautista’s conspiracy trial, which began in State Supreme Court in Manhattan on Wednesday. Ms. Bautista, a diminutive 74-year-old with a bamboo cane and oversize glasses, has been charged with illegally conspiring with two nephews to sell four paintings that Mrs. Marcos had acquired with state money at the height of her husband’s power. She is also charged with failing to pay taxes on millions she reaped from the sale of one painting. “It’s a simple story of greed, opportunism and fraud,” Garrett Lynch, an assistant district attorney, said to the jury. The London gallery, Marlborough Fine Art , eventually agreed to handle the sale, and a Swiss collector agreed to pay $32 million for the masterpiece, Claude Monet’s well-known water lily painting, “Le Bassin aux Nymphéas” (1899). That painting had disappeared from an Upper East Side town house in late 1985, along with another Monet work and valuable paintings by Alfred Sisley and Albert Marquet, just before President Ferdinand Marcos was removed from power. The house had been the Philippine Consulate, but Mrs. Marcos had treated it as her New York residence. Mr. Lynch said Ms. Bautista had taken the paintings and hidden them for two decades, even though she was aware the Philippine government wanted to recover some of them. Then she ran out of money. “She was broke, she was financially desperate, she had to find some income,” he said. “Beginning in 2009, she turned to the last thing she could to generate money: the missing paintings she had been sitting on for so many years.” Mr. Lynch said Ms. Bautista and her two nephews in Bangkok tried unsuccessfully to sell the paintings on the black market in Thailand. Then Ms. Bautista started peddling the Monet masterpiece to galleries in New York and London. Selling that work was less problematic, Mr. Lynch said, because it had never been placed on the Philippine government’s list of missing paintings. After the sale, Mr. Lynch said, Ms. Bautista paid off her debts, bought a $2.2 million condominium in Manhattan, sent $5 million to her nephews and banked about $15 million, never sending a dime to Mrs. Marcos. Ms. Bautista’s lawyer, Susan Hoffinger, argued that her client had been thrust into a political struggle between the Marcos family and the family of President Benigno Aquino in the Philippines. No court in the Philippines has ruled on whether the paintings belong to the state or to Mrs. Marcos, she said. “Vilma Bautista has been made a scapegoat in this political struggle, criminally charged with her future put at stake,” she said. Ms. Hoffinger also asserted that the 1991 document giving Ms. Bautista the right to sell the painting — known as a certificate of authority — was still valid. The prosecution had said it would be proved fraudulent. “That’s just speculation,” Ms. Hoffinger said. “The prosecution didn’t tell you in his opening that they will bring Imelda Marcos in to testify here. They will not. They aren’t bringing her. Without that testimony from Mrs. Marcos, there will be no evidence that that certificate of authority isn’t valid.” | Art;Fraud;Vilma Bautista;Imelda R Marcos;Philippines |
ny0057868 | [
"nyregion"
] | 2014/09/12 | Budget Cuts Reshape New York’s Public Housing | The crushing news came less than a year after Diane Robinson and her 24-year-old son moved into an airy two-bedroom apartment in the Bronx. The city, which helps pay her rent, wrote this summer to say she would have to downsize into a one-bedroom apartment or pay $240 more a month in rent. A public school aide, Ms. Robinson, 48, decided to stay in the apartment, in the Castle Hill neighborhood . But on an annual income of about $25,000, she is struggling, she said, and she does not know how long she can hang on. Moving to a one-bedroom apartment would mean that her son, a college student who works to help with food and utilities, would have to sleep in the living room. “My son works — he’s not entitled to have his own bedroom?” she said. “Next thing they’re going to tell me is that I’m not entitled to a roof over my head.” Thousands of New York City tenants are facing similar choices because of cuts to the federal Section 8 voucher program and the resulting belt-tightening by the city. The rental vouchers allow low- and moderate-income tenants to live in private buildings and to pay about 30 percent of their income in rent, with the voucher program making up the rest. The cost of the program is about $400 million a year. But federal budget cuts under sequestration last year have left the program $37 million short, the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development said. The agency, which administers the affected vouchers, stopped issuing new ones, rescinded dozens that had already been issued and declared more than 9,000 households “overhoused.” Such tenants were told to move to smaller, less expensive apartments or, if they chose to stay put, to be prepared to pay a higher rent in most cases because their subsidy will shrink. For the city, absent an infusion of funding, the alternative was ending subsidies outright for 3,000 Section 8 households, the housing and preservation agency said. Many of those households would then be at risk of homelessness at a time when the de Blasio administration is already working to reduce record numbers of homeless families. The downsizing, though, can be a painful process, robbing some longtime tenants of one of the things New Yorkers value the most in a crowded city — space. And it has outraged some elected officials and tenant leaders, who say the cuts are putting an undue burden on lower-income tenants. Like Ms. Robinson, many of them are trying to hold onto their current apartments even if it means paying substantially more in rent, city officials said. The current situation for her and her son, Malcolm Gibbs, is not sustainable, Ms. Robinson said, because the newly increased rent — she now pays $1,038 while the voucher pays $507 to her landlord — takes almost all of her paycheck. Under the new standards, two-person households living in two-bedroom apartments, like Ms. Robinson’s, must switch to a one-bedroom regardless of the tenants’ genders, relationship or ages. Only households with three to four people are eligible for two-bedroom apartments. This means that in some cases a child and a parent may have to share the bedroom or someone may have to sleep in the living room. Image “At my age, I don’t deserve a tiny place,” said Christina Sanchez, 67, a retired cafeteria helper who has been asked to move from a one-bedroom apartment at 40 Waterside Plaza into a studio. Credit Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times Residents who live alone in apartments with bedrooms must move to studio apartments. Many of these voucher holders are older tenants who raised families in the larger units and now have an apartment full of a lifetime of belongings and mementos. Relatives of some older tenants said the notices about the moves, which started going out last year, had caused confusion and anxiety. In interviews, some of the older tenants said they worried about not having enough room for family visits or future needs like a live-in home health aide or a wheelchair. Others fretted over the more immediate problem of disposing of furniture and adjusting to smaller surroundings. “I can’t pull a sofa bed,” said Cristina Sanchez, 67, a retired school cafeteria helper who sleeps on a full bed in her small one-bedroom apartment in the Manhattan high rise where she has lived for 19 years. “At my age, I don’t deserve a tiny place.” About 120,000 city households receive Section 8 vouchers, with the housing preservation and development agency administering about one-quarter of those. Of the 32,000 under the agency’s control, a little less than one-third are affected by the downsizing cuts. The vast majority of Section 8 vouchers are administered by the New York City Housing Authority , which has also had its federal money cut. But the authority already had a policy of placing single tenants in studios and two-person households in one-bedrooms, so to deal with the federal cuts, the officials say they are not issuing new vouchers and have tapped reserves and other streams of federal funding. Vicki Been, the housing preservation agency’s commissioner, told the City Council at a public hearing this year that the agency anticipated further cuts in 2016. The cuts also affect affordable housing special populations like older adults and the formerly homeless, and the landlords who provide that housing, Ms. Been said in an interview. “Vouchers are absolutely critical to help this lowest income band, but they also help landlords who are fairly low-income themselves,” she said. “They shore up critical building stock that’s often left untouched by city programs.” Some vouchers pay thousands of dollars a month for units in high-rise buildings in areas like TriBeCa and the East River waterfront, where rents have risen much faster than household incomes. The average voucher subsidy is lower, though, ranging from $916 to $1,409, agency officials said. Image Ms. Sanchez has been asked to move from her 8th floor one-bedroom apartment at 40 Waterside Plaza into a smaller studio. Credit Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times Council members, troubled by the impact on tenants, in July approved $250,000 to help cover some moving expenses. Members also negotiated with housing officials to give tenants up to a year to move, instead of just the 30-day deadline that had been imposed on most households. But some elected officials, including the Manhattan borough president, Gale A. Brewer, have called for a moratorium on the relocations while other solutions are explored. Some tenant groups are considering legal action. “When did a bedroom become a luxury in the United States?” asked Rita Popper, a leader of a tenants group fighting the moves, Housing Alliance Against Downsizing . Norman Siegel, the civil rights lawyer and the former head of the New York Civil Liberties Union, who represents the alliance, said the moves might be disproportionately affecting older and disabled tenants. City figures show that about 60 percent of those in notified households are elderly, disabled or both, slightly higher than their 54 percent proportion in the overall Section 8 population, according to the housing preservation and development agency. Housing officials are waiving their policy for tenants who have a disability or medical condition that requires a larger unit to accommodate a live-in aide or medical equipment. The city had granted 699 accommodations as of late August. Ms. Robinson, who is claiming financial hardship, was denied her request to stay but she has secured a hearing in October to appeal that decision. Ms. Robinson said she was forced to move last year to her current two-bedroom because her previous landlord was not making repairs. But to cover moving expenses like a deposit and broker’s fee, she took out a $5,000 loan. Even with her son’s help, she sometimes has to go to her church for food. Having once spent three months in a shelter for domestic abuse victims, Ms. Robinson says her greatest fear now is to end up back in a shelter. “The rents keep going up, up and now they decide to make this cut,” she said. “I may be faced with being homeless.” | Public Housing;NYC;Real Estate; Housing;Rent;Affordable housing;Department of Housing Preservation and Development NYC;Housing Authority NYC;Budget |
ny0179874 | [
"science"
] | 2007/08/21 | Science of Magic | The reason he had picked me from the audience, Apollo Robbins insisted, was that I’d seemed so engaged, nodding my head and making eye contact as he and the other magicians explained the tricks of the trade. I believed him when he told me afterward, over dinner at the Venetian, that he hadn’t noticed the name tag identifying me as a science writer. But then everyone believes Apollo — as he expertly removes your wallet and car keys and unbuckles your watch. It was Sunday night on the Las Vegas Strip, where earlier this summer the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness was holding its annual meeting at the Imperial Palace Hotel. The organization’s last gathering had been in the staid environs of Oxford, but Las Vegas — the city of illusions, where the Statue of Liberty stares past Camelot at the Sphinx — turned out to be the perfect locale. After two days of presentations by scientists and philosophers speculating on how the mind construes, and misconstrues, reality, we were hearing from the pros: James (The Amazing) Randi, Johnny Thompson (The Great Tomsoni), Mac King and Teller — magicians who had intuitively mastered some of the lessons being learned in the laboratory about the limits of cognition and attention. “This wasn’t just a group of world-class performers,” said Susana Martinez-Conde, a scientist at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix who studies optical illusions and what they say about the brain. “They were hand-picked because of their specific interest in the cognitive principles underlying the magic.” She and Stephen Macknik, another Barrow researcher, organized the symposium, appropriately called the Magic of Consciousness. Apollo, with the pull of his eyes and the arc of his hand, swung around my attention like a gooseneck lamp, so that it always pointed in the wrong direction. When he appeared to be reaching for my left pocket he was swiping something from the right. At the end of the act the audience applauded as he handed me my pen, some crumpled receipts and dollar bills, and my digital audio recorder, which had been running all the while. I hadn’t noticed that my watch was gone until he unstrapped it from his own wrist. “He’s uncanny,” Teller said to me afterward as he rushed off for his nightly show with Penn at the Rio. A recurring theme in experimental psychology is the narrowness of perception: how very little of the sensory clamor makes its way into awareness. Earlier in the day, before the magic show, a neuroscientist had demonstrated a phenomenon called inattentional blindness with a video made at the Visual Cognition Laboratory at the University of Illinois. In the video, six men and women — half with white shirts and half with black — are tossing around a couple of basketballs. Viewers are asked to count how many times members of, say, the white team, manage to complete a pass, keeping the ball from the opposition. I dutifully followed the instructions and was surprised when some 15 seconds into the game, laughter began to ripple through the audience. Only when I watched a second time did I see the person in the gorilla suit walking on from stage left. (The video is online at viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/grafs/demos/15.html .) Secretive as they are about specifics, the magicians were as eager as the scientists when it came to discussing the cognitive illusions that masquerade as magic: disguising one action as another, implying data that isn’t there, taking advantage of how the brain fills in gaps — making assumptions, as The Amazing Randi put it, and mistaking them for facts. Sounding more like a professor than a comedian and magician, Teller described how a good conjuror exploits the human compulsion to find patterns, and to impose them when they aren’t really there. “In real life if you see something done again and again, you study it and you gradually pick up a pattern,” he said as he walked onstage holding a brass bucket in his left hand. “If you do that with a magician, it’s sometimes a big mistake.” Pulling one coin after another from the air, he dropped them, thunk, thunk, thunk, into the bucket. Just as the audience was beginning to catch on — somehow he was concealing the coins between his fingers — he flashed his empty palm and, thunk, dropped another coin, and then grabbed another from a gentlemen’s white hair. For the climax of the act, Teller deftly removed a spectator’s glasses, tipped them over the bucket and, thunk, thunk, two more coins fell. As he ran through the trick a second time, annotating each step, we saw how we had been led to mismatch cause and effect, to form one false hypothesis after another. Sometimes the coins were coming from his right hand, and sometimes from his left, hidden beneath the fingers holding the bucket. He left us with his definition of magic: “The theatrical linking of a cause with an effect that has no basis in physical reality, but that — in our hearts — ought to.” • • • In his opening address, Michael Gazzaniga, the president of the consciousness association, had described another form of prestidigitation — a virtual reality experiment in which he had put on a pair of electronic goggles that projected the illusion of a deep hole opening in what he knew to be a solid concrete floor. Jolted by the adrenaline rush, his heart beat faster and his muscles tensed, a reminder that even without goggles the brain cobbles together a world from whatever it can. “In a sense our reality is virtual,” Dr. Gazzaniga said. “Think about flying in an airplane. You’re up there in an aluminum tube, 30,000 feet up, going 600 miles an hour, and you think everything is all right.” Dr. Gazzaniga is famous for his work with split-brain patients, whose left and right hemispheres have been disconnected as a last-ditch treatment for severe epilepsy . These are the experiments that have led to the notion, oversimplified in popular culture, that the left brain is predominantly analytical while the right brain is intuitive and laid-back. The left brain, as Dr. Gazzaniga put it, is the confabulator, constantly concocting stories. But mine was momentarily dumbstruck when, after his talk, I passed through a doorway inside the Venetian Resort Hotel Casino and entered an air-conditioned simulation of the Grand Canal. My eyes were drawn upward to the stunning illusion of a trompe l’oeil sky and what I decided must be ravens flying high overhead. Looking closer, my brain discarded that theory, and I saw that the black curved wings were the edges of discs — giant thumbtacks holding up the sky. Later I was told they were automatic sprinklers, in case the clouds catch fire. “It’s ‘The Truman Show,’ ” said Robert Van Gulick, a philosopher at Syracuse University, as I joined him at a table overlooking a version of the Piazza San Marco. A sea breeze was wafting through the window, the clouds were glowing in the late afternoon sun (and they were still glowing, around 10:30 p.m., when I headed back toward my hotel). How could we be sure that the world outside the Venetian — outside Las Vegas itself — wasn’t also a simulation? Or that I wasn’t just a brain in a vat in some mad scientist’s laboratory. Dr. Van Gulick had come to the conference to talk about qualia, the raw, subjective sense we have of colors, sounds, tastes, touches and smells. The crunch of the crostini, the slitheriness of the penne alla vodka — a question preoccupying philosophers is where these personal experiences fit within a purely physical theory of the mind. Like physicists, philosophers play with such conundrums by engaging in thought experiments. In a recent paper, Michael P. Lynch, a philosopher at the University of Connecticut, entertained the idea of a “phenomenal pickpocket,” an imaginary creature, like Apollo the thief, who distracts your attention while he removes your qualia, turning you into what’s known in the trade as a philosophical zombie. You could catch a ball, hum a tune, stop at a red light — act exactly like a person but without any sense of what it is like to be alive. If zombies are logically possible, some philosophers insist, then conscious beings must be endowed with an ineffable essence that cannot be reduced to biological circuitry. Dr. Lynch’s fantasy was a ploy to undermine the zombie argument. But if zombies do exist, it is probably in Las Vegas. One evening as I walked across the floor of the Imperial Palace casino — a cacophony of clanging bells and electronic arpeggios — it was easy to imagine that the hominids parked in front of the one-armed bandits were simply extensions of the machines. “Intermittent conditioning,” suggested Irene Pepperberg, an adjunct associate professor at Brandeis University who studies animal intelligence. If you want to train a laboratory rat to pull a crank to get a food pellet, the reflex will be scratched in deeper if the creature is rewarded with some regularity but not all the time. Dr. Pepperberg has thrown a wild card into studies of consciousness with her controversial experiments with African gray parrots. With a brain “the size of a walnut,” as she puts it, the birds display what appears to be the cognitive potential of a young child. Her best-known parrot, Alex, can stare at a tray of objects and pick the one that has four corners and is blue. He has also coined his own word for almond — “cork nut.” With appearances on PBS and a cameo role in a Margaret Atwood novel, “Oryx and Crake,” Alex has entered the popular imagination, while Dr. Pepperberg struggles to find a secure academic position. Critics can’t resist comparing Alex to “Clever Hans,” the famous horse whose arithmetical abilities were exposed as learned responses to his trainer’s subtle cues. Dr. Pepperberg says she controls for that possibility in her experiments and believes her parrots are thinking and expressing themselves with words. • • • One evening out on the Strip, I spotted Daniel Dennett, the Tufts University philosopher, hurrying along the sidewalk across from the Mirage, which has its own tropical rain forest and volcano. The marquees were flashing and the air-conditioners roaring — Las Vegas stomping its carbon footprint with jackboots in the Nevada sand. I asked him if he was enjoying the qualia. “You really know how to hurt a guy,” he replied. For years Dr. Dennett has argued that qualia, in the airy way they have been defined in philosophy, are illusory. In his book “Consciousness Explained,” he posed a thought experiment involving a wine-tasting machine. Pour a sample into the funnel and an array of electronic sensors would analyze the chemical content, refer to a database and finally type out its conclusion: “a flamboyant and velvety Pinot, though lacking in stamina.” If the hardware and software could be made sophisticated enough, there would be no functional difference, Dr. Dennett suggested, between a human oenophile and the machine. So where inside the circuitry are the ineffable qualia? Retreating to a bar at the Imperial Palace, we talked about a different mystery he had been pondering: the role words play inside the brain. Learn a bit of wine speak — “ripe black plums with an accent of earthy leather” — and you are suddenly equipped with anchors to pin down your fleeting gustatory impressions. Words, he suggested, are “like sheepdogs herding ideas.” As he sipped his drink he tried out another metaphor, involving a gold panning technique he had learned about in New Zealand. Lead and gold are similar in density. If you salt the slurry with buck shot and swirl the pan around, the dark pellets will track the elusive flecks of gold. With a grab bag of devices accumulated over the eons, the brain pulls off the ultimate conjuring act: the subjective sense of I. “Stage magicians know that a collection of cheap tricks will often suffice to produce ‘magic,’ ” Dr. Dennett has written, “and so does Mother Nature, the ultimate gadgeteer.” At the end of the magic show where I was fleeced by Apollo, The Amazing Randi called on Dr. Dennett and another volunteer to help with the final act. As Mr. Randi sat on a chair, the two men tightly bound his arms to his thighs with a rope. “Daniel, would you take off your jacket for me for just a moment?” the conjuror asked. “Now drape it around the front of my hands.” “A little higher,” Mr. Randi said. Without missing a beat, he grabbed the collar and pulled it up toward his chin. The audience cheered. Either he had slipped the ropes in a matter of seconds or his hands had been free all along. “Allow people to make assumptions and they will come away absolutely convinced that assumption was correct and that it represents fact,” Mr. Randi said. “It’s not necessarily so.” | Brain;Magic and Magicians;Psychology and Psychologists;Science and Technology;Teller |
ny0292872 | [
"sports"
] | 2016/06/11 | A Stirring Farewell to Muhammad Ali, Just as He Scripted It | LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Muhammad Ali spent the better part of a decade planning his funeral, his friends and family said, and by late Friday afternoon it was evident what had taken him so long. In a spectacle that fanned across miles of his hometown, in memories that stretched over some of 20th-century America’s most turbulent years, and in prayers from the palette of faiths that he honored as paths to truth, he was laid to rest, one week after his death at age 74. Ali was eulogized in a grand sports arena by, among others, a priest and an imam, a rabbi and a monk, a former United States president and a famous comedian. Protégées and daughters and his wife remembered him. As they spoke, all stood beneath the flags of the United States and the Olympic Games, symbols of a man who saw himself as a citizen of America and of the world. Earlier in the day, his coffin traveled through nearly 20 miles of Louisville, cheered and saluted by tens of thousands of people who tossed flowers onto the hearse and chanted his name. On Thursday, a traditional Muslim ceremony was held here as a prelude to Friday’s embrace. Video Bill Clinton, Billy Crystal and Bryant Gumbel delivered eulogies for Muhammad Ali at a 15,000-seat sports arena in his hometown, Louisville today. Credit Credit Brendan Smialowski/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images It was all part of a leave-taking that Ali had seen as a chance to lead once more by including Christians, Jews, Buddhists and Native Americans as speakers in an emphatic, if not explicitly spoken, renunciation of sectarianism and embrace of ecumenism. “Muhammad indicated that when the end came for him, he wanted to use his life and his death as a teaching moment,” Ali’s widow, Lonnie, said. He was 12 years old when his bicycle was stolen, she noted, and a police officer encouraged him to learn boxing. Teachers believed in him. Friends backed his career. Named the athlete of the 20th century by Sports Illustrated, Ali never settled for sportsman as his sole identity. Among the first speakers at the memorial was the Rev. Kevin Cosby of St. Stephen Church in Louisville, who said Ali had taken his place in history by rejecting the narrative of a country that had, from its earliest days, refused to recognize African-Americans as fully human and full citizens. That mattered because of the times he lived in, Dr. Cosby said, the context that helped define him just as the American Revolution had for George Washington and the Great Depression for Franklin D. Roosevelt. “He dared to love black people at a time when black people had a problem loving themselves,” Dr. Cosby said. “He dared to affirm the beauty of blackness, he dared to affirm the power and the capacity of African-Americans. He dared to love America’s most unloved race.” Image Ali’s widow, Lonnie, speaking at the service. “Muhammad indicated that when the end came for him, he wanted to use his life and his death as a teaching moment,” she said. Credit Lucas Jackson/Reuters President Obama, in Washington for his daughter’s high school graduation, sent a letter that said Ali’s example had inspired him to think how far he might one day go himself. “Ali was a radical, even in the most radical of times,” Mr. Obama wrote, in a letter read by his senior adviser Valerie Jarrett. “A loud, and proud, and unabashedly black voice in a Jim Crow world. His jabs knocked some sense into us, pushing us to expand our imagination.” Billy Crystal, a young and struggling comedian when he became friends with Ali, said the boxer had invited him to go for a training run one morning at a country club. Mr. Crystal said he explained that the club excluded Jews. Ali, he said, was incensed to learn this, saying, “I’m a black Muslim, and they let me run.” Ali never ran at that club again, Mr. Crystal said. He remembered, as well, that the silver-tongued Ali had lost his speech to illness in recent years, but that he continued to be a powerful force on humanitarian missions. “Ultimately, he became a silent messenger for peace, who taught us that life is best when you build bridges between people, not walls,” Mr. Crystal said. Drafted to serve in the Vietnam War, Ali said his faith could not countenance a combat role, and Ms. Ali noted that he refused to leave the country even though his stance cost him his boxing title and put him in jeopardy of prison. Mr. Crystal said Ali had set an example. “There were millions of young men my age, eligible for the draft for a war we didn’t believe in,” Mr. Crystal said. “It was Ali who stood up for us by standing up for himself.” Viewed through the lens of history, Ali’s stance on the Vietnam War is now widely seen as principled; at the time, he was denounced. Dr. Cosby noted that at the Kentucky Derby, gamblers cannot bet on a horse once it has reached the winner’s circle. Image The comedian Billy Crystal, speaking at Ali’s memorial service, said, “Ultimately, he became a silent messenger for peace.” Credit Aaron P. Bernstein/Getty Images “There were a lot of people who would bet on Muhammad Ali when he was in the winner’s circle,” Dr. Crosby said. “But the masses bet on him while he was still in the mud.” Close to 20,000 people were in the KFC Yum Center arena for the memorial, which lasted more than three hours, with 13 speakers in addition to members of the clergy who prayed and chanted. If the spectacle in the arena was global, the scenes on the roughly 19-mile procession were strictly local, pulsing with pride for a native son. Ali’s ties to the compact, quirky city of his youth never frayed. All business halted as workers streamed to the sidewalk to stand vigil in gently chaotic decorum. “It’s almost like we’re extended cousins,” said Andrea Meriwether, 31, a native of Louisville, who was taught pool by Ali’s younger brother, Rahman Ali. “I can’t think of anyone from here who hasn’t met him or had some connection.” Video Lifelong fans of the boxing legend Muhammad Ali gathered to pay respects outside his childhood home in Louisville, Ky., as his funeral went on in the same city. Along Broadway in the heart of downtown, those extended cousins, and other branches of the human family, stood eight and 10 deep on both sides of the street for blocks. With no pens to corral them on the sidewalk, the crowds seeped onto the roadway. “Everyone has a story,” said Mark Collins, 54, who recalled working in a bank when Ali, then in his magic-trick phase, performed an illusion of levitation. An especially jammed point was the corner where Broadway meets South Fourth Street, a central shopping and dining street. Now featuring chiseled atriums, it was a street where the young Ali, then known as Cassius Clay, would not have been allowed into the cafeterias of the department stores. Among those near that spot on Friday was Carolyn Miller-Cooper, the executive director of the city’s Human Relations Commission. “In Louisville, it was always a polite racism,” Ms. Miller-Cooper said. “You couldn’t go in and try on clothes. Children had to trace their foot on a sheet of paper for parents to bring to the store and try to buy the right-sized shoes.” Video Fans, peers and family members of Muhammad Ali's reacted to his death and reflected on his contributions to sports and society over the past week. Credit Credit Mark Humphrey/Associated Press For many in the crowd, Ali’s stature as a boxer was something they had heard about, a piece of history they had not lived; the appreciation of the man was for the place he claimed in the world. “I wasn’t around for those titles,” said Rodrecruz Hines, 32, an autoworker who held a single red rose as he waited. “To me, he had this charismatic character, and he stood up for our rights, for the rights of young black men.” As the hearse approached, chants of “Ali! Ali! Ali!” rose. People swarmed forward to toss flowers onto the hearse. Riding with the windows down, people in the limousines, including members of the Ali family, the actor Will Smith, and the mayor, Greg Fischer, slapped hands with the spectators as they passed. Ali returned often to Louisville, and Ms. Miller-Cooper, who serves on the board of the city’s Muhammad Ali Center, saw him at a gala for the center last fall, with Ms. Ali tending to him. Ms. Miller-Cooper’s admiration for both of them grew as he continued a public life, even if physically diminished. “He was pretty frail, but he was still out there, shining a light on Parkinson’s,” she said. “I think that was what showed he was the greatest — that he continued to live, not hide.” | Muhammad Ali;Boxing;Funerals;Louisville KY |
ny0038026 | [
"us"
] | 2014/03/22 | Border Patrol Seeks to Add Digital Eyes to Its Ranks | PHOENIX — Among the federal officials who gathered here this week for a conclave on border security, there was little talk of building a fence along the 2,000-mile Mexican border. Instead, the chatter was all about technology: about concentrating Border Patrol agents, equipped with late-model surveillance tools, in areas of frequent illegal traffic, while using aerial drones to monitor remote, lightly trafficked spots. The chief of the Border Patrol, Michael J. Fisher, said the goal of the strategy, begun a year ago, was to “shrink the border,” allowing agents to focus on areas where criminal smugglers of migrants and drugs were most likely to travel. The plan is to cover 900 miles, or 45 percent of the border, by 2016 with a “dense” array of agents and technology, and to monitor 1,092 miles, the other 55 percent, with “persistent surveillance” informed by drones, Mr. Fisher said. The report from Mr. Fisher and other top Homeland Security officials was eagerly received by hundreds of merchants who brought their wares to the Border Security Expo , a technology bazaar in the convention center here filled with darting robots, winged drones, high-powered microwave radios and video cameras that can peer over fences and through walls, day or night. House Republican leaders issued immigration principles in January saying that the United States had a “fundamental duty” to secure the border but was “failing in this mission.” Republicans have since said they were unlikely to take up immigration in the House this year. Last year, the Senate passed a comprehensive bill with a $40 billion increase for border spending. Homeland Security officials said they were not waiting for new action from Congress, which has nearly doubled the size of the Border Patrol since 2006 to more than 18,500 agents. “Some would suggest that you have to seal the border 100 percent, in which case we’re going to need thousands and thousands more Border Patrol agents and thousands and thousands more pieces of equipment,” Mr. Fisher said. “Even if our budgets could sustain it, which I suspect they cannot, we had to come up with an alternative plan this year.” Mr. Fisher said he had asked field commanders to identify areas across the rugged mountains and variable riverbeds of the border that were “low risk” because terrain or other factors made them hostile for people crossing illegally. He said 115 areas were identified, and Predator drones began last March to monitor them systematically to confirm there was no human movement. Image A Border Patrol agent at the expo. Part of a strategy on patrolling the border involves using aerial drones to monitor remote, lightly trafficked spots. Credit Samantha Sais for The New York Times If drones detect changes on the ground in those areas, a reconnaissance team is sent within 24 hours to determine whether there was an incursion, Mr. Fisher said. So far, detailed aerial images have been made of 388 miles of so-called low-risk border so that changes there can be rapidly noticed. In areas with higher traffic, agents patrol more frequently, backed up by surveillance towers, mobile spy systems, remote video cameras, hidden ground sensors and a host of other devices, some of them already proven in fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Such technology has been in use for several years near Tucson, until last year the busiest sector for illegal crossings. Now officials are gradually spreading it to other areas, particularly South Texas, where crossings are surging. In 2013, the Border Patrol made about 330,000 apprehensions at the southwest border, a third year at a low number not seen since the early 1970s. But almost all crossers were smuggled by criminal organizations that are also moving drugs and other contraband, officials said. As the authorities made it harder to move on the ground, smugglers dug tunnels under the line and sent ultralight aircraft to fly over it. Vendors in the vast display hall insisted they had answers. Qinetiq North America was offering a small robot that could scuttle into a makeshift tunnel to deactivate traps. AAI Corporation , in Maryland, had a drone, about 14 feet long, mounted with daylight and infrared cameras, just the thing for the aerial mapping that Mr. Fisher mentioned, said Jon Borcik, a representative. “It’s very covert,” Mr. Borcik said. “You really can’t see it in the air, and it’s a very quiet vehicle also.” Competition was intense to provide cameras mounted on collapsible towers that agents could carry in their pickup trucks. John Moulton, from Tactical Micro, in Virginia, had built a tower that could rise to 35 feet with a camera that could see six miles and a laser spotter that could pinpoint a person at more than eight miles. Homeland Security officials are still smarting from a disastrous border technology program started under President George W. Bush that cost more than $1.1 billion and produced very limited results. After three years of deliberations, last month the agency invested $23 million to purchase tall, fixed towers for cameras and other devices, the first such effort after the tower system failed in the earlier program. At least one vendor, ITC Manufacturing of Phoenix, was actually trying to sell the Border Patrol a fence. But that fence was made of thin bars of high-carbon steel set less than an inch apart, said Wayne Lyall of ITC, resistant to the most powerful bolt cutter. It did not look at all like the high metal barriers that lawmakers in Washington often evoke when demanding more security at the border. | Illegal Immigration;US Border Patrol;Mexico;Drones;Fence;Homeland Security;Arizona;Michael J Fisher |
ny0217291 | [
"world",
"asia"
] | 2010/04/13 | Fugitive Kyrgyz President Warns of Bloodshed | BISHKEK, Kyrgyzstan — The provisional government that took power in Kyrgyzstan last week has drawn up plans to detain the country’s ousted president, a leader once close to the United States who fled a bloody riot in the capital to his ancestral homeland in the south of the country. The president, Kurmanbek Bakiyev , re-emerged in public from his compound in a southern village on Monday to hold a rally of about 500 people — and taunt the new leaders to try to arrest him. If they do, Mr. Bakiyev said, “there will be blood.” “Let them try to come and take me,” he told journalists after the rally. “Let them try to destroy me. There will be blood.” The announcement about the interim government’s arrest plan came in a news conference in the capital, Bishkek. Almazbek Atambayev, deputy head of the interim government, said that only concern for innocent bystanders was delaying security forces from swooping in and arresting Mr. Bakiyev. “These people are shielding themselves behind their countrymen, without conscience or honor,” Mr. Atambayev said. “We cannot allow innocent people to die again.” The fate of Mr. Bakiyev — openly defiant but apparently powerless — has been a source of tension around the country since he fled the capital last week after riot police officers opened fire on antigovernment demonstrators, provoking a violent backlash. In the last few days, he has been receiving journalists from his refuge at his compound in the southern mountains, in Teyit. “Of course we would like him to run someplace, anyplace,” Mr. Atambayev said, but no country has offered asylum. The new leaders had at first insisted the police would honor the president’s immunity from prosecution under the Kyrgyz Constitution, as he has not formally resigned his post. Roza Otunbayeva, the leader of the interim government, suggested Mr. Bakiyev should face an international tribunal, and raised the prospect in a meeting Saturday with a United Nations special envoy. On Monday, the United States Embassy in Bishkek issued a statement saying that it would play no role in resolving Mr. Bakiyev’s status. “The U.S. Embassy has no plans to shelter Mr. Bakiyev or help him leave Kyrgyzstan,” the embassy said. The embassy also said that the United States ambassador, Tatiana C. Gfoeller, met Monday with Ms. Otunbayeva, to express condolences over the loss of life last week. At the rally, Mr. Bakiyev repeated that he had no intention of surrendering. Still, he said he was open to negotiations with the interim government and renewed his call for an international commission to come to Kyrgyzstan to investigate last week’s violence. In a speech that evoked cheers and whistles from a crowd of mostly male supporters, Mr. Bakiyev continued to blame his opponents for the violence in Bishkek, which left more than 80 people dead, and recalled the largely peaceful coup in 2005 that ushered him into power. “That which happened in Bishkek was barbaric,” he told the crowd. “If I was guilty of this, I would have run away like the last president.” His supporters held blue and red signs saying “Keep your hands off the legitimate president” and “Youth for the legitimate president.” They accused the opposition of illegally usurping Mr. Bakiyev’s authority and vowed to defend him should any effort be made to arrest him. “We will never hand over the president,” said Pirimrul Sabirhanov, 40, a local businessman, calling the interim government “usurpers” and “criminals.” Like others, however, he said he was not prepared to turn to violence. “We won’t arm ourselves,” he said. “We won’t fight.” Mr. Bakiyev’s options are shrinking as more and more regional leaders voice support for the interim government or resign, as have some of the top officials in his own home region. Outside the capital, the American military resumed flying troops to and from Afghanistan through the Manas air base on Monday, after a brief halt because of the uprising, the United States Embassy said in a statement. Refueling flights had continued throughout the disturbance. | Kyrgyzstan;Demonstrations and Riots;Bakiyev Kurmanbek S |
ny0257400 | [
"sports",
"baseball"
] | 2011/01/20 | A’s Bolster Bullpen With Fuentes | The Oakland Athletics added another proven arm to their deep bullpen, completing a two-year, $10.5 million contract with the left-hander Brian Fuentes. He had 24 saves and a 2.81 earned run average last year with the Angels and the Twins. Closer Andrew Bailey returns, and the A’s also signed Grant Balfour and Brad Ziegler. | Fuentes Brian;Oakland Athletics;Baseball |
ny0267520 | [
"business"
] | 2016/03/24 | Joining Other Airlines, American Will Share Profits | Coming off record earnings, American Airlines says it will make profit-sharing payments to employees. Some American employees had complained that they did not participate in profit sharing, unlike their counterparts at other airlines. For instance, Delta shared $1.5 billion last year, and United paid out $698 million. On Wednesday, American said it would share 5 percent of its pretax 2016 earnings with all employees, except top management, in early 2017. Including its regional-flying subsidiaries, American has about 118,000 employees. | American Airlines;Airlines,airplanes |
ny0162438 | [
"politics"
] | 2006/02/02 | Senate Panel Rebuffed on Documents on U.S. Spying | WASHINGTON, Feb. 1 - The Bush administration is rebuffing requests from members of the Senate Judiciary Committee for its classified legal opinions on President Bush's domestic spying program, setting up a confrontation in advance of a hearing scheduled for next week, administration and Congressional officials said Wednesday. The Justice Department is balking at the request so far, administration officials said, arguing that the legal opinions would add little to the public debate because the administration has already laid out its legal defense at length in several public settings. But the legality of the program is known to have produced serious concerns within the Justice Department in 2004, at a time when one of the legal opinions was drafted. Democrats say they want to review the internal opinions to assess how legal thinking on the program evolved and whether lawyers in the department saw any concrete limits to the president's powers in fighting terrorism. With the committee scheduled to hold the first public hearing on the eavesdropping program on Monday, the Justice Department's stance could provoke another clash between Congress and the executive branch over access to classified internal documents. The administration has already drawn fire from Democrats in the last week for refusing to release internal documents on Hurricane Katrina as well as material related to the lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Several Democrats and at least one Republican have pressed the Justice Department in recent days to give them access, even in a closed setting, to the internal documents that formed the legal foundation of the surveillance program. But when asked whether the classified legal opinions would be made available to Congress, a senior Justice Department official said Wednesday, "I don't think they're coming out." The official said the administration's legal arguments had already been aired, most prominently in a 42-page "white paper" issued last month. "Everything that's in those memos was in the white paper," said the official, who, like other administration and Congressional officials, was granted anonymity because classified material was involved. While the administration has spent much of the last two weeks defending the legality and necessity of the surveillance program, the Judiciary Committee session will be the first Congressional hearing on it. Senator Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican who leads the panel, said Wednesday that he had "a lot of questions" the administration had not yet adequately answered about the program's legal rationale. Mr. Specter would not address the committee's request for the classified legal opinions, except to say, "that's not a closed matter -- we're still working on that." Several Democrats on the panel have made formal requests for the legal opinions, including Senator Dianne Feinstein of California. In the interview, Mr. Specter said that he wanted a fuller explanation as to how the Justice Department asserts that the eavesdropping operation does not conflict with the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which set strict and "exclusive" guidelines for intelligence wiretaps. The operation was approved by President Bush, to allow the National Security Agency to conduct wiretaps on Americans' international communications without a court warrant. Mr. Specter said his view was that the operation "violates FISA -- there's no doubt about that." He also questioned why the administration did not go to Congress or the intelligence court to seek changes in the process before moving ahead on its own with the classified program after the Sept. 11 attacks. Representative Jane Harman, the California Democrat who was one of the few members of the Congress briefed on the operation, echoed that same theme in a letter sent Wednesday to President Bush. She said in the letter that with changes made to the foreign intelligence law after the Sept. 11 attacks, the eavesdropping operations of the N.S.A. "can and should" be covered by court-approved warrants, "without circumventing" the process. Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales will be the lone witness at next week's hearing, and his aides said he was entering it with confidence about the program's legal footing, based on both the president's inherent constitutional authority and a Congressional authorization after the Sept. 11 attacks to use military force against terrorists. But both Republicans and Democrats said Wednesday that they planned to question Mr. Gonzales about those assertions. While the administration has laid out its legal defense repeatedly in the last two weeks, the formal legal opinions developed at the Justice Department to justify the program remain classified. The administration has refused even to publicly acknowledge the existence of the memorandums, but The New York Times has reported that two sets of legal opinions by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel asserted the president's broad power to order wiretaps without warrants in protecting national security. The first Justice Department opinion is thought to have been written in late 2001 or early 2002 by John Yoo, a strong proponent of expanded presidential powers in wartime. The second opinion, officials said, was drafted by Jack Goldsmith, another senior department official who later left to teach at Harvard. It came in 2004 at a time some senior officials at the Justice Department were voicing concerns about the program's legal foundation and refusing to sign off on its reauthorization. Those concerns led in part to the suspension of the surveillance program for several months and also appear to have led Mr. Goldsmith and other Justice Department lawyers to revisit the question of its legal underpinnings in order to satisfy those concerns. Members of the Judiciary Committee have sought access to the memorandums, officials said. Some Democrats speculate that the classified memos may contain far-reaching and potentially explosive legal theories similar to those advocated by Mr. Yoo and others, and later disavowed by the Justice Department, regarding policies on torture. In a letter sent Wednesday to Mr. Gonzales, Mrs. Feinstein said the legal opinions and other internal documents were needed for Congress to assess whether the president "has the inherent authority to authorize this surveillance." With two additional hearings scheduled on the program after Mr. Gonzales's appearance, Mr. Specter said he was also considering seeking testimony from former Justice Department officials, and perhaps even input from the FISA court itself. But Senator Charles E. Schumer, a New York Democrat who also serves on the Judiciary Committee, said the panel should consider issuing subpoenas if the administration is not more forthcoming in providing documents and witnesses. "Without the Justice Department memos and without more witnesses, it's hard to se how anything other than a rehashing of the administration line is going to happen," Mr. Schumer said Wednesday. "I am worried that these hearings could end up telling us very little when the American people are thirsty to find out what happened here." | NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY;BUSH GEORGE W |
ny0282654 | [
"nyregion"
] | 2016/07/10 | Familiar Pianist at Caramoor, and Beethoven’s Gravitational Pull | As an 18-year-old student at the Curtis Institute of Music , Jonathan Biss had little professional experience when he took part in the rising-star residency for instrumentalists at the Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts in Katonah in 1998. But those who recall the tall, dark pianist during his residency say he radiated self-assurance beyond his years. “I remember Jonathan as a very confident young man, almost cocky,” Paul Rosenblum, Caramoor’s longtime managing director, said as he sat in the center’s ornate Spanish courtyard on a sun-drenched day recently. “I asked him, ‘Do you intend to play a lot of chamber music?’ He said, ‘Sure, but I intend to have a concerto soloist career.’” And that is what Mr. Biss has done. Since his debut with the New York Philharmonic in 2001, he has played with nearly every major orchestra in the United States and Europe. He has also become a leading exponent of Beethoven, having begun a nine-year commitment to record all 32 of the composer’s sonatas and created a popular online course about them. All of that will inform Mr. Biss on his seventh trip to Caramoor, where he will be the artist in residence during the 71st summer festival. The residency will take place over three days, two of which will center on Beethoven — a decision that he said bordered on the inevitable, given his attraction to the composer and the freedom he enjoyed in programming the concerts. “I think of it more as a gravitational pull than a choice,” he said recently in his spartan Manhattan apartment. “There is something about Beethoven aside from the mastery of the music and the variety of expression. There is the force of his personality.” On July 10, he will play Beethoven’s Concerto No.2 with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s . The work, he said, is of particular interest because of its cadenza. Written about 20 years after the main work was completed, it proved to be the part of the piece that the composer Timo Andres focused on in “The Blind Banister,” a concerto written on Mr. Biss’s request as a kind of response to the Beethoven. “Banister,” which will have its New York premiere after the Beethoven concerto, is the first installment of Mr. Biss’s Beethoven/5 project, in which each of five composers produces a companion piece to one of the five Beethoven piano concertos. Caramoor commissioned “Banister” with St. Luke’s and the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, which debuted the piece last November. Mr. Andres said he concentrated on the cadenza because of its contrast with the main piece, which is less reflective of the mature Beethoven’s potent style. “It was the revving up of those slightly different aesthetics against each other which set me off,” Mr. Andres said. He has created a work with a cadenza that, like Beethoven’s, manipulates the basic elements of his main concerto. But while he adopts some of Beethoven’s compositional techniques, his frame of reference is strictly contemporary — a strategy that the conductor, Joshua Weilerstein, said the orchestra would respect when interpreting the piece. “We’re going to take the language Timo writes in,” he said. Mr. Weilerstein will be the first American to conduct the work, which has been performed in Belfast, Ireland, as well as Saint Paul, Minn. Mr. Biss, who will perform “Banister” with the New York Philharmonic in April, found the cultural affinity worth noting. “Even though Timo’s influences are all over the map, somewhere in there he’s really American,” Mr. Biss said. “And I think Josh is also a product of this country. It will be interesting to work with someone who comes out of not so different a tradition.” Like Mr. Biss, Mr. Weilerstein has a history with Caramoor. In 2011, when he was barely a week into a three-year tenure as assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic, Mr. Weilerstein successfully stepped in for the conductor, Alan Gilbert, who was late for a concert at the Venetian Theater. Mr. Weilerstein is also connected to Caramoor through his sister, the cellist Alisa Weilerstein, a onetime participant in the rising-star program and the 2013 artist in residence. She will perform Bach’s cello suites in the Rosen House Music Room on Oct. 15. Family ties will also play a part when, on Aug. 4, Mr. Biss performs with his mother, the violinist Miriam Fried, in Janacek’s Sonata for Violin and Piano and Brahms’s Piano Quartet in A major. While they have never performed the Brahms together, neither expected a conflict on interpretation. “I wouldn’t pretend that we never fought, as mother and son, but we never ever had a disagreement when we worked together,” she said, echoing Mr. Biss’s sentiment. “There’s a different layer to the relationship of playing together that you can’t really duplicate with a colleague no matter how great they are.” The day after their performance, Mr. Biss will take a solo turn on four Beethoven sonatas. Among them is the “ Appassionata ,” which he said helped stoke his passion for Beethoven when, as a child, he became fascinated with a recording of it by Rudolf Serkin . “I felt like I was connected to it by some electric charge,” he said. The charge has not diminished over the years; he said he had probably performed the famously demanding and stormy sonata 100 times. At Caramoor, it will close out his residency. “There’s nothing to say after you’ve gone to hell,” he said. The “Appassionata” also figures in his internet lecture series, “Exploring Beethoven’s Sonatas,” which he said has been viewed by nearly 100,000 people. The course is offered by Coursera, an online service, through Curtis, where Mr. Biss, like Mr. Serkin before him, now teaches. He said he expected it to increase attendance at the Caramoor concerts. “Everywhere I go there are people who have seen it,” Mr. Biss said. “Hopefully, that portion of the audience already feels that they have a deeper relationship with me.” | Classical music;Caramoor;Jonathan Biss;Ludwig van Beethoven;Music;Katonah NY;Caramoor |
ny0133800 | [
"sports",
"ncaabasketball"
] | 2008/03/09 | North Carolina Pulls Away From Duke | DURHAM , N.C. — Duke Coach Mike Krzyzewski and his North Carolina counterpart, Roy Williams, managed to add even more fuel to one of the most intense rivalries in college sports with a public dispute last month over the disclosure of injuries, of all things. With these men’s basketball programs, it’s always something. Not that either side needed added inspiration when they met Saturday night at Cameron Indoor Stadium. At stake was the Atlantic Coast Conference regular-season championship and the perks that come with it: the No. 1 seed in the upcoming A.C.C tournament and an expected local placing in the N.C.A.A. tournament. The spoils go to North Carolina, which beat Duke, 76-68, in a finish that will join the list of highlight-reel games that have marked this series. Tyler Hansbrough’s layup with 2 minutes 9 seconds to go broke a 68-68 tie and Ty Lawson added a pair of free throws and a crucial steal as No. 1 North Carolina (29-2) staved off a Duke comeback. Lawson missed a layup after his steal, but the ball was tipped in by Danny Green with 48 seconds to go for a decisive 6-point advantage. A dunk by Green sealed the victory as North Carolina scored 10 consecutive points to overcome a 2-point deficit in the final minutes, holding Duke scoreless over the final 5:41. Green, a reserve swingman, had 18 points and 7 blocked shots and Hansbrough added 16 points and 15 rebounds to pace North Carolina, which will be the top seed this week when the A.C.C. tournament opens in Charlotte , N.C. Although the seedings for the N.C.A.A. tournament will not be announced until next weekend, the winner of this game has the inside track on a No. 1 seed in that tournament, with first- and second-round games in nearby Raleigh , N.C., and the regional semifinals and finals in Charlotte. “I can’t really describe it,” Hansbrough said of Saturday night’s victory. “We’ve got a title, A.C.C. title we just won. Possibly No. 1 seed, really helped us. I think it showed that we’ve come a long way. “I think our team’s really coming together now.” Greg Paulus had 15 points for No. 6 Duke (26-4), which will have the No. 2 seed in the A.C.C. tournament. “Playing in a game like this and being in those situations, whether you hit or miss, is great experience for us,” Krzyzewski said. “We want to play in as many big games as we can.” The teams had come in with 13-2 records in the A.C.C., the fifth time in this series that the title had come down to the final game of the season. But that was not all that weighed on the Tar Heels. This had been an emotional week in Chapel Hill , 10 miles down the road from Duke. And for once, the teams set aside their rivalry long enough to stand on the court for a moment of silence to honor Eve Carson, the North Carolina student body president who was found shot to death near the campus early Wednesday morning. The Tar Heels, wearing an “EVE” patch on the shoulders of their jerseys, pulled to a 43-31 halftime lead as Green scored 14 points. Duke rallied in the second half and finally tied it on a 3-pointer by Jon Scheyer from the baseline with 9:45 to go. That set up a furious finish, with Scheyer’s layup finally giving Duke the lead, 68-66, with 5:42 to go. “We’ve been down plenty of times this year,” Green said. “We had to come back on a lot of teams. Nothing new to us. Just because they’re Duke doesn’t mean we can’t come back on them.” Duke had won the first game of the season series, 89-78, on Feb. 6 at the Dean Smith Center. But the Tar Heels were without Lawson, their starting point guard, who had a sprained ankle. Williams had openly discussed that injury and others on the team this season. So when Krzyzewski mentioned in a radio interview that he normally did not disclose injuries, Williams took that as a slight. On his own radio show, Williams declared that he did not care what others said and they should worry about their own teams. “I’ll coach my team,” he said. Lawson, back in the lineup although not 100 percent, had 10 points and 3 steals off the bench against Duke. NOTES Among the guests at Cameron were quarterbacks Eli and Peyton Manning. Both played college football under David Cutcliffe, the new coach at Duke. ... The former Duke basketball players Christian Laettner, Jay Williams and Chris Duhon also attended. | Basketball;UNC;Duke |
ny0205995 | [
"technology",
"personaltech"
] | 2009/01/15 | PoGo, for Instant Gratification in Snapshots | The Polaroid film cameras may be dead, but you can still have instant photos with the company’s new PoGo Instant Digital Camera, a compact snapshooter with a built-in printer that lets you capture and immediately print 2-by-3-inch images. The $200 PoGo camera is a follow-up to Polaroid’s PoGo Instant Mobile Printer, which appeared on store shelves in July. Like the printer, the combination device uses Zink printing technology, an inkless system that uses heat-activated dye crystals to produce an image in about 60 seconds. The photos have an adhesive backing, which enables them to double as stickers. The PoGo camera has a 3-inch LCD for reviewing images before you print. That is essential because the paper will set you back $12.99 for a pack of 30, or about 43 cents for each photo. The device looks a bit clunky but weighs only 10 ounces, which is pretty slight when you consider there is a printer inside. Don’t expect great images or outstanding prints from a device in this price category, though you will get the instant gratification that Polaroid made famous many decades ago. Look for it in stores in March . RIK FAIRLIE | Cameras;Photography;Polaroid Corp |
ny0105311 | [
"world",
"asia"
] | 2012/03/14 | Tibetan Monk Sets Himself on Fire to Protest Chinese Rule | An 18-year-old Tibetan monk, Gepey, died Saturday after setting himself on fire to protest Chinese rule in Tibetan areas, according to Free Tibet, an advocacy group based in London. Gepey was from Kirti Monastery in Sichuan Province, which is the epicenter of the wave of self-immolations that began in March 2011. Since then, at least 26 Tibetans have set fire to themselves across the Tibetan plateau, and at least 18 have died. Gepey committed self-immolation on the anniversary of an ill-fated Tibetan uprising against Chinese occupiers in 1959 that resulted in the Dalai Lama fleeing to India. Free Tibet said Gepey killed himself behind a military building in the town of Aba, known in Tibetan as Ngaba. He was the third Tibetan in a row to self-immolate by a building that symbolizes China ’s crackdown in Tibet , the group said. It added that security officers took away Gepey’s body, and the authorities did not allow traditional funeral rites to be performed for fear of the ceremony turning into a protest. | Immolation;Monasteries and Monks;Sichuan Province (China);Tibet;China;Deaths (Fatalities) |
ny0190619 | [
"world",
"asia"
] | 2009/05/06 | Afghans Say U.S. Raids Killed 30 Civilians | KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — At least 30 civilians have been killed in bombing raids by United States forces in western Afghanistan during heavy fighting between Afghan troops and Taliban fighters, Afghan officials said Tuesday. Enraged villagers brought an estimated 30 bodies, including those of women and children, from their district to the capital of Farah Province to show officials, news agencies reported, quoting local officials. Villagers’ accounts put the death toll at 70 to 100, they said. If confirmed, the bombardment would be the largest case of civilian casualties since an attack on the village of Azizabad in western Afghanistan last year, in which United Nations officials said there was convincing evidence that 90 civilians were killed. The United States military only ever acknowledged that 30 civilians had died . The case led to stricter rules for calling in bombing raids on Afghan houses. The provincial governor for Farah Province, Rohul Amin, confirmed there had been heavy fighting and aerial bombardment in Bala Baluk, a district to the north of the province where Taliban and drug smugglers are active. He said that 25 to 30 Taliban had been killed and that there had also been civilian casualties. He said he was sending a government delegation to the area to investigate. The top United States spokesman in Afghanistan, Col. Greg Julian, confirmed that coalition forces had participated in the battle, The Associated Press reported. Colonel Julian said that several wounded Afghans had sought medical treatment at a military base in Farah, but that officials were still investigating the reports of civilian deaths. The Taliban had gathered in several villages named Shewan Kalai, Ganjabad, and Durani Kalai, in the Bala Baluk district, the governor said when contacted by phone. They attacked police checkpoints in the villages around midnight on Monday and the fighting steadily escalated. Three policemen were killed and three others wounded. Two police cars were set on fire and one was stolen. An Afghan Army unit was sent to the area, but found a heavy contingent of Taliban and later called in airstrikes. The Afghan Army has American trainers embedded with them who are able to call in air support. The fighting lasted about 12 hours through the night, the governor said. “We don’t know the exact numbers of the civilians’ casualties; it is a densely populated area where the fighting broke out,” the governor said. “The Taliban are using civilians’ houses for their own protection and as a shield,” he said. He said he would ask tribal elders to go to the region to investigate the villagers’ claims, because the area was too full of the Taliban for government officials to go there. Villagers told Afghan officials that they had put children, women, and elderly men in several housing compounds away from the fighting to keep them safe. But the villagers said fighter aircraft later attacked those compounds in the village of Gerani, killing a majority of those inside, The A.P. reported. Abdul Basir Khan, a member of Farah’s provincial council, said villagers had brought bodies, including women and children, to Farah city to show the province’s governor, The A.P. report said. Mr. Khan said it was difficult to count the bodies because they had been badly mutilated, but he estimated that the villagers brought around 30. Mohammad Nieem Qadderdan, the former top official in the district of Bala Baluk, said he had seen dozens of bodies when he visited the village of Gerani. “These houses that were full of children and women and elders were bombed by planes. It is very difficult to say how many were killed because nobody can count the number, it is too early,” Mr. Qadderdan, who no longer holds a government position, told The A.P. by telephone. “People are digging through rubble with shovels and hands.” | Afghanistan War (2001- );Civilian Casualties;United States Defense and Military Forces |
ny0231102 | [
"sports",
"baseball"
] | 2010/09/30 | Twins Miss Morneau, Still Out with a Concussion | MINNEAPOLIS — Nearly three months after sustaining a concussion in a game in Toronto, Justin Morneau often seems like a phantom. Minnesota Twins General Manager Bill Smith says he occasionally sees Morneau, the Twins’ four-time All-Star first baseman, running along the warning track at Target Field, foul pole to foul pole. And just about every day, Manager Ron Gardenhire says, Morneau takes batting practice in the indoor cages. But to almost everyone, except his teammates, Morneau sightings have been very limited. He sits in the dugout during home games. He appeared on the field briefly last Tuesday night to celebrate after the Twins clinched the American League Central division title. Lately, that has been about it. In managing Morneau’s recovery, the Twins stopped giving daily medical updates, Smith said, to discourage speculation about his progress or setbacks. They also shield him from members of the news media. Morneau last spoke to reporters on Sept. 8, when the Twins nominated him for Major League Baseball’s Roberto Clemente Award for community service. That day, a glassy-eyed Morneau said he was still symptomatic but remained hopeful he might return before the end of the season. Doctors treating Morneau are confident he will resume his career, Smith said. But no one knows exactly when that will be. The Twins appear to be proceeding as if Morneau will not be available when the playoffs begin next week, perhaps against the Yankees. “If he was ready, he would be out on the field hitting with us,” Gardenhire said last week. However, on Wednesday, before the Twins beat the Royals, 4-2, in Kansas City, Gardenhire offered a glimmer of hope, telling reporters that Morneau would work out with the Twins on Thursday, when they return to Target Field for a season-ending series with Toronto. But Gardenhire would not speculate whether Morneau could play at some point in the postseason. Smith and Gardenhire both say they no longer ask Morneau how he’s feeling. Both seem intent on not pressuring him into coming back too soon. Still, if Morneau does work out with the team Thursday, the question of how he feels will be front and center. The importance of being cautious will undoubtedly have to be re-emphasized. “Every one of us would love to have Justin Morneau in the lineup tonight,” Smith said last week. “But we’re not going to jeopardize Justin Morneau’s long-term health or his long-term career. If we have to wait two days or two weeks, we wait two days or two weeks. If we have to wait six months, we wait six months.” Among the major leaguers who sustained concussions this season — a list that includes St. Louis Cardinals catcher Jason LaRue, who has decided to retire, and Jason Bay of the Mets — Morneau is the biggest name. The 2006 A.L. most valuable player, Morneau was in the midst of another successful season (.345, 18 homers, 56 runs batted in) when he was accidentally kneed in the head by Toronto’s John McDonald on a takeout slide into second base on July 7. The Twins pulled Morneau out of the game immediately. He did not play the next day and accompanied the Twins to Detroit to be examined by Dr. Kenneth Podell, a neuropsychology consultant for the Detroit Lions and Red Wings. Podell sent him back to Minneapolis to rest. Smith said the Twins’ medical and training staffs took a greater interest in concussions after the plight of Corey Koskie, a longtime Twin who missed two and a half seasons with post-concussion syndrome, for an injury sustained with the Milwaukee Brewers, before retiring in March 2009. Koskie called Smith shortly after Morneau was examined and later talked to Morneau. The Twins already knew to be careful with Morneau, who had previously told the medical staff he sustained four head injuries playing basketball and hockey as a youngster. As a Twin, he missed 10 days with a concussion after a 2005 beaning. At first, Morneau said his symptoms were not as severe as in 2005. But they did not subside as quickly. He took batting practice on the field on Aug. 7, and there was talk he might soon begin a rehabilitation assignment. That did not happen. In late August, Morneau was told to cease baseball activities and concentrate on cardiovascular work at home. He quietly resumed hitting several weeks ago. Dr. Christopher Giza, an associate professor of pediatric neurology and neurosurgery at U.C.L.A., said the Twins had followed established guidelines in their treatment of Morneau. He said some patients with a history of head injuries did not recover quickly from another incident even if the initial symptoms, as in Morneau’s case, did not seem that severe. In an interview on Sept. 8, Morneau expressed frustration over sitting out for a second consecutive season. Last year, Morneau did not play after Sept. 12 because of a cracked bone in his lower back. The Twins won the A.L. Central but were swept by the Yankees in the playoffs. This season the Morneau-less Twins have compiled a 47-23 record in the second half. Among the keys to the surge have been a career season from left fielder Delmon Young (110 R.B.I.), unexpected production from the 40-year-old designated hitter Jim Thome (25 homers and a .280 average) and a .383 second half from Joe Mauer . “It seems like they play pretty good without him,” White Sox pitcher Mark Buehrle said of Morneau. “That’s the type of team they have. When one of their superstars goes down, even a great hitter like he is and defensive guy at first base, it seems like they have somebody to step right on in.” In the September interview, Morneau lamented his ongoing absence, saying, “You never know how many chances you’re going to get to win.” Michael Cuddyer, who missed more than two and a half months in 2008 with finger and foot injuries, said he understood Morneau’s frustration but could not offer him much comfort. “Automatically, if you’re not on the field, you’re going to feel like that,” said Cuddyer, who replaced Morneau at first base. “So you have to do stuff to make yourself feel like a part of it.” Morneau tries. On Sept. 17, when center fielder Denard Span reported a jammed shoulder, Morneau gave the minor league callup Ben Revere advance notice that he would be making his first major league start. Last Tuesday night, Morneau sprayed Champagne with teammates after the Twins clinched and carefully hugged the much smaller Span on the field. But he turned his head to avoid an accidental bump. Meanwhile, Gardenhire said he could not help but think how much more formidable the Twins would be with his phantom in the lineup. “I just wish I had my first baseman,” he said. | Morneau Justin;Baseball;Concussions;Minnesota Twins;Gardenhire Ron;Smith Bill |
ny0015371 | [
"nyregion"
] | 2013/10/11 | Former Liu Associates Are Sentenced | Two former associates of John C. Liu, the New York City comptroller, managed to avoid lengthy prison sentences on Thursday for their roles in attempting to funnel money to Mr. Liu’s mayoral campaign through an illegal fund-raising scheme. Although Jia Hou, a former Liu campaign treasurer, and Xing Wu Pan, a fund-raiser, faced maximum sentences of 20 years on each of various counts, it was widely expected that the actual sentence would be far less severe. Both defendants’ lawyers had asked that their clients avoid prison, and prosecutors recommended a sentence of as much as 30 months for Ms. Hou, and half that for Mr. Pan. But in a Manhattan courtroom filled with the defendants’ supporters, the judge, Richard J. Sullivan of Federal District Court, sentenced Ms. Hou to 10 months and Mr. Pan to four. Afterward, Mr. Liu, who was not charged in the federal investigation into his campaign finances, which dated to 2009, sharply criticized the office of Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan, for prosecuting Ms. Hou, 27, who goes by the name Jenny, and Mr. Pan, who is known as Oliver and is in his 40s. “For reasons I may never fully understand,” Mr. Liu said, “the U.S. attorney’s office set out to destroy me with what has been described as an extraordinarily intrusive and exhaustive investigation.” He added: “Failing to find that I had done anything wrong, they proceeded to set up a weak man and a wonderful young woman. Jenny Hou does not deserve this ordeal and injustice she has been put through.” Mr. Bharara’s office declined to comment on Mr. Liu’s statement. Prosecutors had charged that Ms. Hou and Mr. Pan relied on so-called straw donors — people whose contributions are reimbursed by others — to raise money with the goal of obtaining city matching funds. Ms. Hou was acquitted of conspiracy but was convicted for her role in the straw-donor scheme. She was also found guilty of lying to federal agents and of obstruction of justice. Mr. Pan was found guilty of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and of attempted wire fraud in relation to a straw-donor scheme. On Thursday, before they were sentenced, each defendant addressed Judge Sullivan. Mr. Pan, before he spoke, bowed deeply toward the judge, prosecutors and spectators. Ms. Hou also bowed, after she spoke, toward the judge, then toward her family and supporters in the gallery. Mr. Pan told the judge he now realized that “creating straw donors was totally wrong” and that he had learned “a valuable lesson.” Image Jia Hou, who worked for John C. Liu during his run for mayor of New York, was sentenced to 10 months in prison over a fund-raising scheme. Another defendant received four months. Credit John Marshall Mantel for The New York Times Ms. Hou wept at times as she read a statement. Throughout the case, she said, she had maintained her innocence. “I am not changing that position,” she continued. But she said that she had not been focused on seeking matching funds, and should have been more attentive than she was. “What I lacked was experience in life,” Ms. Hou said, adding that she had not had the judgment required to ask what was really going on. Judge Sullivan made it clear in court that he believed the defendants’ actions had subverted the electoral process and added to public cynicism. “What makes it a serious crime,” he said before sentencing Ms. Hou, “is the fact that it compromises and undermines the institution of free elections,” which he said was essential “to our system of government.” He also cited Ms. Hou’s obstruction and lying convictions, saying the justice system depended on people providing truthful information. Judge Sullivan said that he did not doubt Ms. Hou had been thrust into a difficult situation. “It’s not a crime to be overwhelmed,” he said. “It’s not a crime to be naïve and lack life experience.” But that was “not what the jury convicted you of,” he said. “They convicted you of fraud.” Ms. Hou’s lawyer, Gerald B. Lefcourt, and Mr. Pan’s lawyer, Irwin Rochman, both said their clients, who are to surrender later this year, would appeal. Throughout the trial, the prosecutors, Brian A. Jacobs and Justin Anderson, sought to portray the Liu campaign as condoning, if not orchestrating outright, questionable practices intended to maximize fund-raising, and suggested that the defendants’ actions fit into a larger pattern. Mr. Anderson said in a closing argument that Mr. Liu must have known about the scheme, an assertion his lawyer, Paul Shechtman, has steadfastly rejected. Mr. Liu, who finished fourth in the Democratic primary for mayor, was not in court on Thursday. After the trial ended on May 2, he said that he was “deeply saddened” by the verdict and was proud of how his campaign had been conducted. He expressed a similar sentiment on Thursday. “I am very sad but even more angry at what has occurred,” he said. “The U.S. attorney’s office was wrong and should not be proud of its conduct.” | Jia Hou;Xing Wu Pan;John C Liu;Fraud;Campaign finance;Criminal Sentence;Richard J Sullivan;NYC |
ny0275745 | [
"sports",
"football"
] | 2016/02/07 | After Revelation He Had C.T.E., Ken Stabler Is a Poignant Hall of Fame Addition | While generally a cause for celebration, Saturday’s announcement of the class of 2016 for the Pro Football Hall of Fame carried a somber tone as Ken Stabler, a Super Bowl-winning quarterback for the Oakland Raiders, was elected days after it was publicly revealed that he had had Stage 3 chronic traumatic encephalopathy , or C.T.E., a degenerative brain disease, before his death in July. Stabler, known as the Snake, who won a Most Valuable Player Award for the 1974 season and led the Raiders to the team’s first Super Bowl victory after the 1976 season, was previously a finalist for election three times, but this year, as a senior candidate, he was elected alongside Dick Stanfel, a star offensive lineman in the 1950s. The modern-era electees were Brett Favre, Marvin Harrison, Kevin Greene, Orlando Pace and Tony Dungy, as well as Edward J. DeBartolo Jr., who owned the San Francisco 49ers for all five of their Super Bowl wins and was elected as a contributor. Video The family of Ken Stabler, the former Raiders quarterback who died in July at age 69, speaks about his life and the effects of C.T.E., which was diagnosed posthumously. Credit Credit Al Messerschmidt/Associated Press Stabler was represented at the announcement by his grandsons, Justin and Jack Moyes. “He was just special,” Justin Moyes said of Stabler. “He loved football, and that was life for him.” Stabler’s election came a year after Junior Seau, a star linebacker for the San Diego Chargers and the New England Patriots, was elected. Seau committed suicide in 2012, and it was subsequently revealed that he, too, had had C.T.E. While Stabler’s career totals may appear modest by today’s standards, he enjoyed a dominant prime with the Raiders and the Houston Oilers, and his antics off the field were immortalized in his autobiography, “Snake,” a vivid portrayal of the N.F.L. in the 1970s. Although Stabler threw more interceptions than touchdown passes during the course of his career, at the time of his death, John Madden, his longtime coach in Oakland, paid him perhaps the ultimate tribute. “I’ve often said, if I had one drive to win a game to this day, I would pick Kenny,” Madden told reporters. “Snake was a lot cooler than I was. He was a perfect quarterback and a perfect Raider. When you think about Kenny, you think about the Raiders.” The players will be formally enshrined in the Hall of Fame on Aug. 6 at Tom Benson Hall of Fame Stadium in Canton, Ohio. | Football;Pro Football Hall of Fame;Ken Stabler;Chronic traumatic encephalopathy;Super Bowl;Raiders |
ny0038325 | [
"nyregion"
] | 2014/04/04 | Brooklyn Boxer Rises, but Her Feet Stay on the Ground | Heather Hardy tugged at her skirt as she explained what happened to it. “The day after Sandy, we found this skirt floating around the living room,” said Ms. Hardy, 32, who was living on her mother’s couch at the time of the hurricane. The skirt had blood on it, she said, because “I’d fought in it three days before and gotten a head butt that needed stitches.” Months before the storm, she and her daughter, Annie, 9, had lost most of their belongings in an apartment fire. The flood, which destroyed her parents’ house — along with others in their working-class neighborhood — took almost everything else. But not the skirt. “I couldn’t get rid of it,” she said. “It was my debut skirt from my first professional fight.” After years of struggle, Ms. Hardy is a rising force in professional boxing and has become a source of pride in Gerritsen Beach, the tightknit Brooklyn neighborhood where her family’s roots stretch back six generations. She did not walk into a boxing gym until 2010, but has won all nine of her pro fights, the Universal Boxing Federation international super bantamweight title, a 2011 national championship and a 2012 Golden Gloves award. She is the first woman to sign a long-term promotional deal with Lou DiBella, a high-profile boxing promoter with a roster of top-ranked male boxers. In the ring, the petite, 5-foot-5 boxer is a formidable brawler, wearing the colors of Ireland and two blond braids. “I’m not a pretty fighter,” she said. “I fight like a boy.” She is intent on putting on a good show: People may come to see the male headliner, “but I have to make them remember the girl,” she said. Her fans, especially those from Gerritsen Beach, are passionate at her fights. Celebrities — including 50 Cent, Rosie Perez and Susan Sarandon — have been in the audience. Ms. Hardy is among a growing number of female boxers carving out space in a male-dominated sport. But it is not easy. “They don’t get equal pay,” said Bruce Silverglade, 67, the owner of Gleason’s Gym in Brooklyn, who has encouraged Ms. Hardy and other female fighters. Even at the top, women make only about $1,000 a round. And “women have a much harder time getting fights,” Mr. Silverglade said. “In the general population, there’s still a feeling — women shouldn’t be boxing.” Despite her success, much remains the same for Ms. Hardy. She still starts working out at Gleason’s Gym at 6 a.m., with her trainer and mentor, Devon Cormack, 55, a soft-spoken former kickboxing champion. She still hustles to sell tickets to her fights. She still trains clients so that she can pay her rent. Until a few months ago, she got up before dawn to take a bus and two subway trains to Gleason’s. She hated being away from Annie, sometimes 15 hours a day. In their new apartment in Dumbo, near the gym, she sleeps on the couch. Annie has the bedroom. Ms. Hardy was driven even as a girl. Her family has lived in a series of bungalows in Gerritsen Beach, the predominantly Irish enclave between Sheepshead Bay and Marine Park, since her great-great-grandmother emigrated from Scotland in 1929. She got top grades in school. “If there was something she wanted,” said her aunt, Karen Bianco, 47, “she wouldn’t ask, ‘Can I have, can I have?’ She’d work for it.” Ms. Hardy is proud of where she came from. “We’re all family,” she said. “Gerritsen Beach’s motto is: ‘You help the ones you love, and then you help the ones you hate.’ ” That explains why the devastated community mobilized so quickly after the hurricane. And why the local church, where her father is a longtime volunteer, has given her parents a place to live as their house is being rebuilt. Yet the seaside blocks, where families have known one another for generations, can feel insular. Early on, “I wanted to get out,” Ms. Hardy said, having been determined to avoid a well-worn neighborhood path. “You get out of high school, you have a kid, you get married,” she said. “Then you get a job and wait for your parents to die so you can move into their home.” College seemed a way out, and she attended the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan. “I felt really fortunate,” she said. “I had a vision of a bigger picture.” But after graduating at 22, with a major in forensic psychology, she got pregnant and married her childhood sweetheart, who worked for the Sanitation Department. “I felt like a guy in a dress,” she said about her years as a wife and a mother at home in Gerritsen Beach. During a painful divorce, she worked multiple jobs to support herself and Annie. She did some kickboxing as a creative outlet, then stopped for lack of money. “For about a year, I did nothing,” she said. “I found myself completely lost.” She decided to try Gleason’s. Sparring in the legendary old gym, she felt an immediate jolt. “Boxing was the only thing that felt completely mine,” she said. “When you find something you love, you don’t want to do it just a little bit.” Mr. Cormack took notice. “I saw something in her,” he said. “She was making mistakes, but giving 150 percent, just nonstop effort.” Ms. Hardy initially trained with Mr. Cormack’s younger sister, Alicia Ashley, a World Boxing Council world champion he had trained. “But I kept losing,” Ms. Hardy said. The night of her second amateur loss, Mr. Cormack ended up working her corner. “I said, ‘Dev, I don’t want to lose anymore.’ He said ‘O.K.’ and took me as his project.” He and Ms. Hardy are tied at the hip. “We’re together in everything,” Ms. Hardy said, explaining that even their money is pooled. Mr. Cormack helps her out with living expenses. “I know other fighters, married to their trainers. We’re not, but we might as well be.” Her ties to Gerritsen Beach remain tight, but “it’s a relief to be out,” Ms. Hardy said. “I get to be around Annie all the time.” After she picks her daughter up at school, they walk to Gleason’s, where Annie does homework and plays with a hula hoop. “I make my mom bring me groceries from our neighborhood,” Ms. Hardy added, smiling. “Everything is so expensive here.” In Gerritsen Beach, Ms. Hardy had worried, what if Annie doesn’t get to see a bigger picture? “I didn’t want to be another generation passing along my parents’ house,” she said. At her new school, “Annie’s learning ‘good morning’ in 30, 40 languages.” | Boxing;Heather Hardy;Gleason's Gym;Gerritsen Beach Brooklyn;Brooklyn |
ny0008467 | [
"nyregion"
] | 2013/05/15 | Complaints Rise as Bike Share Program Nears | Bike share was easy for New York City to love in the abstract. It was not about adding bike lanes at the expense of something else; it was about sharing something that did not yet exist. But with the program two weeks away, many New Yorkers have turned against bike share, and for one simple reason: They did not expect it to look like this. In recent weeks, hundreds of stations have sprouted in Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn — empty husks sprawled 30 or 50 spaces long on city sidewalks and streets, anticipating rows of bicycles that will soon protrude from the kiosk slots. The critics say the kiosks are a blight. They clash with the character of residential areas of the West Village or Fort Greene, Brooklyn. They are already magnets for pigeons, garbage bags and dogs in need of relief. Lawsuits have been prepared. Kiosks have been defaced. At one community meeting, an inelegant analogy was drawn between the Bloomberg administration and the Taliban. “None of us are against bikes — most of us have bikes that we stow in our building,” said Lynn Ellsworth, 54, from TriBeCa. “But why they put these giant racks in these little streets is crazy to me.” Many opponents knew that the rental bikes were coming — thousands of them, made available for public use — and they understood that the city would need somewhere to put them . But there was initially little uproar, nothing to match what greeted the expansion of bike lanes, a flash point of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s transportation legacy. Image Some neighbors want to get rid of a kiosk near Petrosino Square in Manhattan; bicycling advocates are encouraging residents to attend a community meeting. Credit Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times Indeed, a poll by The New York Times last year found broad support for cycling, with 66 percent of respondents calling bike lanes a good idea. Eleven percent of those polled said they were very likely to use bike share; 19 percent said they were somewhat likely. Now, even some avid cyclists have found occasion to complain. At a recent community meeting on bike share in the West Village, Jane Browne, 42, who initially supported the program, said she had recently seen mice scurrying in the “corridors of trash and water” that formed between a nearby bike station and the curb. Shelly Mossey, 58, from Battery Park City, has protested the planned removal of a widely used rack for private bikes near South End Avenue, calling it a pillar of the neighborhood. His son’s bike is on there, he said, and so are his peers’. Families mingle at the rack before retrieving their bikes and escorting their children to school. “Why do we have to lose that,” Mr. Mossey asked, “and give it up for the bigger picture?” Other residents have rebelled against the program’s sponsor , Citibank, whose logo on bike kiosks prompted vandals in Fort Greene to post fliers at the stations. They read, in all capital letters, “Residential landmark blocks are not for advertising or commercial activity!” The city’s Transportation Department said it had been warned of possible problems ahead by aides of Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, where a bike share program began in 2010. “They said you’ll be hated for six months,” Jon Orcutt, the department’s policy director, recalled, “and then you’ll be loved.” Image A bike share kiosk at the edge of a park on Lafayette Street in Manhattan. Credit Todd Heisler/The New York Times Still, the Bloomberg administration had hoped to pre-empt some of the discontent. In a report timed weeks before the first Brooklyn stations were installed, the city said that community participation in the program’s planning had outstripped “any other public project undertaken anywhere.” The city said it had discussed the bike share program at 159 public meetings, and conducted 230 more with elected officials, property owners and other stakeholders. Planners received more than 10,000 suggestions for station locations online. But city officials, advocates and adversaries alike now concede that no amount of forewarning could have prepared residents for the sight of the stations. “People are attached to their streets,” said Paul Steely White, the executive director of Transportation Alternatives, an advocacy group that has been among the program’s greatest cheerleaders. “When someone changes it, it’s like someone rearranging the furniture in our living room.” Some neighborhood grievances have been predictable : complaints of lost parking and reckless riding, often from those who opposed cycling’s expansion in the city long before bike share. Resident groups that have threatened legal action against the city over station locations in Manhattan — including groups from an apartment building at 99 Bank Street in the West Village and from a luxury condominium on East 55th Street — are seen as unlikely to affect the program’s introduction. Despite that, Mitchell Moss, the director of the Rudin Center for Transportation at New York University, said the station debate provided a more vexing test for the city than the debate over bike lanes, in part because “a car is not as sympathetic as a resident.” Image The bike kiosk and docks at Liberty and Broadway in Manhattan. Credit Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times “You don’t know where a bike stand is until you see it,” he said. “The problem is not that people weren’t informed. It’s the critical mass of the bike stands that has the impact.” The bike share program, which is to begin Memorial Day, will initially include roughly 330 stations and 6,000 bikes. For a $95 annual membership, before tax, New Yorkers can rent bikes for as long as 45 minutes without an additional charge. Mr. Orcutt said most of the more than 200 stations installed had so far been constructed without incident. “Washington had at least one fistfight at a community meeting,” he said. “We haven’t had that.” (An official with Washington’s Transportation Department said she did not recall any contentious community meetings or significant opposition to the program.) Mr. Orcutt added that some neighborhood concerns — worries of restricted access to transit system stairwells, or of impediments to firefighters or sanitation workers trying to reach buildings efficiently — were largely unfounded. Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the Sanitation Department officials said they had not flagged any troublesome station locations. But Jim Long, a Fire Department spokesman, said that transportation officials had not “consulted with the Fire Department” as stations were installed, though he added that in many cases, there had been probably no need for the agencies to communicate because a location posed no risk to fire operations. (The Transportation Department said it had solicited input from the Fire Department before stations were placed, though it was unclear if or how that feedback had been used.) But bike share advocates say the new additions will soon blend in with the scenery, appearing as native to the sidewalks as bus shelters or subway entrances. On Lafayette Street recently, where a 55-bike station has been assembled near Astor Place, a couple leaned on the kiosk as if it were a well-worn city bench, plotting their next move with their daughter waiting in her stroller. Nearby, on University Place, Alfred Haffenden, 71, sat between a bike station and his table of available consumer items — two Al Franken books, a baby-care advice book and VHS copies of “The Shawshank Redemption” and “Wuthering Heights.” The stations would be a change, he said, but who would want to live in a New York that refused to try something new? “There’s not much you can do about that type, my friend,” he said, leaning toward the kiosk. “Some people can’t see. Some people just don’t want to see.” | Biking;NYC |
ny0240027 | [
"technology"
] | 2010/12/09 | Hackers Defend WikiLeaks, Testing Online Speech | A hacking free-for-all has exploded on the Web, and Facebook and Twitter are stuck in the middle. On Wednesday, anonymous hackers took aim at companies perceived to have harmed WikiLeaks after its release of a flood of confidential diplomatic documents. MasterCard , Visa and PayPal, which had cut off people’s ability to donate money to WikiLeaks, were hit by attacks that tried to block access to the companies’ Web sites and services. To organize their efforts, the hackers have turned to sites like Facebook and Twitter. That has drawn these Web giants into the fray and created a precarious situation for them. Both Facebook and Twitter — but particularly Twitter — have received praise in recent years as outlets for free speech. Governments trying to control the flow of information have found it difficult to block people from voicing their concerns or setting up meetings through the sites. At the same time, both Facebook and Twitter have corporate aspirations that hinge on their ability to serve as ad platforms for other companies. This leaves them with tough public relations and business decisions around how they should handle situations as politically charged as the WikiLeaks developments. Some internet experts say the situation highlights the complexities of free speech issues on the Internet, as grassroots Web companies evolve and take central control over what their users can make public. Clay Shirky, who studies the Internet and teaches at New York University , said that although the Web is the new public sphere, it is actually “a corporate sphere that tolerates public speech.” Marcia Hofmann, a lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said, “Any Internet user who cares about free speech or has a controversial or unpopular message should be concerned about the fact that intermediaries might not let them express it.” She added, “Your free speech rights are only as strong as the weakest intermediary.” The problem came into relief on Wednesday, through an effort called Operation Payback, organized by a group calling itself Anonymous. The group spent much of the day posting notes on Facebook and Twitter that told followers which companies to single out and that documented hacking successes. But Facebook banned one of the group’s pages, saying that using the site to organize hacking attacks like that violated its terms of use. The group went on Twitter to complain. A Facebook spokesman issued a statement saying that the company was “sensitive to content that includes pornography, bullying, hate speech, and threats of violence” and would “take action on content that we find or that’s reported to us that promotes unlawful activity.” In an interview Wednesday morning, Joe Sullivan, Facebook’s chief security officer, addressed WikiLeaks’s own presence on the site. He said the company had not received any official requests to disable pages or accounts associated with the WikiLeaks organization. Facebook generally resists requests by governments or advocacy groups to take down material if that content is not illegal or does not violate Facebook’s terms of service, which prohibit attacks on individuals or incitements to violence. “Facebook is a place where people come to talk about all sorts of things, including controversial topics,” Mr. Sullivan said. It was not clear whether anyone had asked Facebook to take down the Operation Payback page. Twitter allowed the Operation Payback account to stay active most of Wednesday. But the group’s account was disabled late in the day, after it posted a link to a file that provided thousands of consumer credit card numbers, according to a person with direct knowledge of the situation. A Twitter spokesman declined to discuss the details of the situation. “We don’t comment about the specific actions we take around user accounts,” he said. The company is not overly concerned about hackers’ attacking Twitter’s site, he said, explaining that it faces security issues all the time and has technology to deal with the situation. Twitter is in a particularly delicate situation because its founders have celebrated their service’s role in political protest and free speech. They have not been shy about trying to capitalize on the good will engendered by playing that role. WikiLeaks’s own Twitter account remains active, and it is the group’s main channel for reaching supporters and the media. Last week, Amazon.com fell into a similar position when it decided to stop storing files for WikiLeaks. Advocates of WikiLeaks complained that Amazon.com was bowing to political pressure to cut the organization from its Web services. An Amazon.com spokesman said the company was simply banning an organization that had violated its terms of service by trying to distribute documents it did not own. The last week has given rise to a hacking war in which groups have blocked access to WikiLeaks’s Web sites by bombarding them with requests. And now the WikiLeaks supporters have responded in kind, flying the freedom of speech banner as the motivation for their actions. | null;Cyberwarfare;Freedom of speech;PayPal;Amazon |
ny0105946 | [
"us"
] | 2012/04/18 | Supreme Court Weighs Revisions in Cocaine-Case Sentences | WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court heard arguments on Tuesday about an aspect of one of the greatest controversies in American criminal law: the differing treatment of crack and powder cocaine. “I’ve been a judge for nearly 20 years,” said Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the only member of the current court who has served as a trial judge, “and I don’t know that there’s one law that has created more controversy or more discussion about its racial impact than this one.” Crack and powder cocaine are two forms of the same drug. But, until recently, a drug dealer selling crack cocaine was subject to the same sentence as one selling 100 times as much powder. In 2010, Congress enacted the Fair Sentencing Act , which reduced the disparity to 18 to 1, at least for people who committed their crimes after the law became effective that Aug. 3 . That means many defendants caught with small amounts of crack are no longer subject to mandatory 5- or 10-year prison sentences. The question on Tuesday was whether the new, lesser punishments also applied to people who committed crimes before the law became effective but were not sentenced until afterward. The usual rule, set out in an 1871 law, is that new laws do not apply retroactively unless Congress expressly says so. Here Congress said nothing, or at least nothing in so many words. It did instruct the United States Sentencing Commission to act quickly to revise its discretionary sentencing guidelines to reflect the new ratios. Early in the argument, several justices suggested that the 1871 law might pose an insurmountable barrier to defendants who sold cocaine before August 2010. Congress must have known, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said, that the 1871 law “required an express statement if they wanted to apply the change retroactively.” “So why shouldn’t we hold them to that standard?” he asked. As the argument went on, the justices’ attention seemed to turn to a question posed by a lawyer for the two men whose cases were before them. “Why would Congress want district courts to continue to impose sentences that were universally viewed as unfair and racially discriminatory?” the lawyer, Stephen E. Eberhardt, asked. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy seemed sympathetic to trial judges called on to sentence defendants under the old law. Many such judges have expressed anger over the issue. “One of the hardest things is sentencing,” Justice Kennedy said. “And you’re saying that a sentencing judge who knows the law has been changed, who knows the law has been criticized, is nevertheless bound and determined that it’s fair for this person to be sentenced to the longer term.” The Justice Department had initially supported a strict reading of the 1871 law. It revised its position last July, and a lawyer for the federal government, Michael R. Dreeben, argued in support of leniency on Tuesday. Under the stricter rule, he said, “there will probably be thousands of crack defendants who will be sentenced under the old mandatory minimums that Congress repealed because they were perceived as being racially disparate and unfair.” He added: “I think everyone in Congress understood that these guidelines had undermined the credibility of the criminal justice system for years.” Since both the government and the defendants agreed that the recent law may be applied retroactively to those sentenced after 2010, the Supreme Court appointed Miguel A. Estrada, a prominent Washington lawyer, to argue the other side. “I think this is a difficult case for public policy,” he told the justices, “but is not a difficult case for legal doctrine.” He added that if Congress had truly meant to undo a racially discriminatory policy it would not have stopped with defendants not yet sentenced. Many prisoners are serving long sentences under the old law, he said, and yet neither the defendants nor the government have argued for altering those punishments. Justice Antonin Scalia picked up on the point. “I would find that extraordinary, that they say it’s racist but we are going to leave in effect all of the sentences that have previously been imposed,” he said. The cases heard Tuesday were Dorsey v. United States, No. 11-5683, and Hill v. United States, No. 11-5721. | Supreme Court;Sentences (Criminal);Law and Legislation;Cocaine and Crack Cocaine;Discrimination;Mandatory Sentencing;Justice Department;Drug Abuse and Traffic |
ny0236469 | [
"us"
] | 2010/06/05 | Immigration Debate Defines G.O.P. Race in California | IRVINE, Calif. — Meg Whitman was almost at the end of a 30-minute town hall-style meeting here, responding to questions about taxes and spending, schools and unemployment. But one topic had not come up, so Ms. Whitman, a Republican candidate for governor, raised it herself, serving up a stern attack against illegal immigration and a promise that she would protect California’s borders. “I am 100 percent against amnesty,” Ms. Whitman proclaimed. “My Republican opponent says I’m for amnesty. That is absolutely not true.” For almost a year, Ms. Whitman, the former chief executive of eBay, has campaigned on three issues: jobs, education and government spending. But as her contest for the Republican nomination for governor against Steve Poizner , the state insurance commissioner, enters its final days, she has found herself drawn into a loud and caustic argument over immigration policy. “It is the only issue,” said Stuart Stevens, Mr. Poizner’s chief campaign consultant. The primary here on Tuesday will be the highest-stakes electoral contest since Arizona approved a tough immigration law, and that has allowed Mr. Poizner to reshape the campaign, focusing a series of stark attacks on Ms. Whitman. The extent to which immigration has, in the view of many Republicans, hijacked this contest has stirred worry that the nominee chosen next week will be weakened in the general election against Jerry Brown, a Democrat and former governor. “There’s a difference between talking about a problem and trying to exploit the problem as a wedge issue to try to get scared white voters,” said Allan Hoffenblum , a Republican analyst here. “I’m not speaking as a lone wolf on this in the Republican Party. It’s concerning a lot of us.” Hispanics are becoming increasingly influential in California politics. One in six voters this November is expected to be Hispanic — a proportion that is likely to grow in coming years — and Southern California has been at the forefront of efforts to boycott Arizona for enacting tough anti-immigrant legislation in late April. In many ways, California’s primary race offers a worrisome preview of what many Republicans say are the political perils for the party nationally in being identified with tough immigration policies. Mr. Poizner has enthusiastically endorsed such policies in his campaign. His series of stark television advertisements portraying Ms. Whitman as an advocate of permissive immigration began three weeks ago. The emphasis on immigration is striking in a state that is reeling from the economic downturn and saddled with what officials in both parties view as a dysfunctional government. At 12.5 percent, the unemployment rate here is far above the national average. The state has been hit hard by the foreclosure crisis, its public education system is a shambles, and disapproval of the Legislature and of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican barred by term limits from seeking re-election, are at near-record highs. The election is playing out against the backdrop of the latest battle in Sacramento over proposed cuts in spending to balance the budget. One strain on the state’s finances is providing social services to a large population of illegal immigrants, which is one reason the issue has political resonance. Still, it is hardly clear that the tough-on-immigrants stance has universal appeal among Republican voters; in the Central Valley, for instance, many farmers use undocumented farm workers. A Los Angeles Times/U.S.C. poll published on Sunday showed Ms. Whitman leading Mr. Poizner by 53 percent to 29 percent; other polls taken last month, after Mr. Poizner began his advertising assault against Ms. Whitman, showed that he had significantly tightened the race, until she started pushing back. In an interview, Ms. Whitman — who has been running advertisements promising to be “tough as nails” on illegal immigration — said that she thought voters were concerned about other things besides immigration, and that she was raising the issue only in response to what she asserted were Mr. Poizner’s distortions of her record. She said Mr. Poizner had hurt himself as a general election candidate because of the tenor of his attacks. “I think he’s damaged in the general because he’s only talked about one issue,” Ms. Whitman said. “And I think that’s a big mistake.” Mr. Poizner said that illegal immigration was “part and parcel of our message from the get-go” and that he always viewed it as the No. 1 issue for Republican primary voters, and a point of contrast with Ms. Whitman. “It’s huge: everywhere I go, people burst out into applause when I start talking about it,” Mr. Poizner said after appearing at a town hall-style meeting in El Segundo flanked by bright red screens with white lettering proclaiming, “No Amnesty: Stop Illegal Immigration.” “Our positions are just different,” he continued. “Meg Whitman opposes Arizona. I fully support it. In fact, I don’t see how you can be a Republican running for high office in the United States and be taken seriously if you oppose what’s going on in Arizona.” Both candidates are independently wealthy and together have spent more than $100 million — about $80 million for Ms. Whitman, and $25 million for Mr. Poizner — which has guaranteed a wide audience for the back-and-forth volley of television advertisements, radio spots and mailers. The demonstrated willingness of Ms. Whitman and Mr. Poizner to tap their own political fortunes to win the governorship is one of the key reasons Republicans are hopeful about defeating Mr. Brown. Even without immigration, candidates this primary season face a politically daunting task in trying to navigate an increasingly conservative Republican base and emerge as a viable candidate in the general election. Mark Baldassare , president and chief executive of the Public Policy Institute of California , a policy study and polling group, said that 75 percent of Republicans statewide disapproved of President Obama in a poll earlier last month, compared with 39 percent of all registered voters in California. “The Republican primary voters are not representative of the overall mood of Californians,” Mr. Baldassare said. “This is really a unique slice of the electorate.” One sign of this is the extent to which both Ms. Whitman and Mr. Poizner are critical of Mr. Schwarzenegger. Mr. Poizner said he would not want the governor to campaign with him should he win the nomination. “I think it would be better if he just stays out of the primary and the general election,” he said. Ron Nehring , the chairman of the state Republican Party, said the severity of the economic problems facing California would overshadow the immigration stances taken by the Republican candidate during the primaries. “The Democrats are always trying to paint Republicans as anti-immigrant,” he said. “But the first, second, third and fourth issue in the race for governor is jobs and the economy.” Ms. Whitman’s advisers said that if she won the nomination, she would move away from immigration to broaden her appeal. But Mr. Poizner said he would not change his campaign a bit. “This is important for everyone to know: What you see is what you get,” he said. “The campaign I’m waging now in the primary is exactly the same campaign I’ll be waging in the general against Jerry Brown. I think it’s a myth that independents, Democrats, these groups that supposedly would object to my strong positions on illegal immigration — uh-uh.” | Whitman Margaret C;Poizner Steve;California;Immigration and Emigration;Elections;Republican Party;Primaries and Caucuses;Governors (US);Politics and Government |
ny0000768 | [
"business",
"global"
] | 2013/03/29 | Hong Kong Plan to Limit Public Data on Directors Put on Hold | HONG KONG — The Hong Kong government said late Thursday, just before the start of a four-day Easter public holiday, that it had put on hold its plans to block public access to residential address information and the identity card numbers or passport numbers of company directors. The decision by the Financial Services and Treasury Bureau represents a sharp reversal of what had been portrayed by the government as an attempt to protect privacy. But the proposed policy drew criticism from bankers, corporate lawyers, accountants and journalists. They assailed the plan as a retreat from corporate transparency that would damage Hong Kong’s position as a financial center and could facilitate money laundering and other criminal activity. Hong Kong makes it extremely easy to set up companies, so many individuals create them, even simply to own their residences. Extensive data are available only from the Companies Registry, which has long been open to the public, including online, although fees are charged for documents. Many wealthy mainland Chinese, including from prominent Communist Party families, own companies in Hong Kong and have provided personal information to the Companies Registry. Banks, law firms and accounting firms routinely check the registry and gather data on mainland Chinese citizens to verify identities and detect fraud in initial public offerings and other transactions. The Financial Services and Treasury Bureau said it would proceed this year with a long-planned rewrite of the city’s Companies Ordinance, but the rewrite would not include the contested provision to limit public access. “Given the complexity of the issues involved and very diverse views of different stakeholders, we believe that the community should be given more time to build consensus on the issue” of public access, the bureau said in a statement sent to the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Hong Kong, which was one of the groups that had protested the proposed curbs on public access. | Hong Kong;Regulation and Deregulation;Banking and Finance;Privacy |
ny0082694 | [
"us",
"politics"
] | 2015/10/29 | Republicans Nominate Paul Ryan as House Speaker | WASHINGTON — House Republicans on Wednesday nominated Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin to be the 62nd speaker of the House, turning to the young chairman of the Ways and Means Committee to replace John A. Boehner of Ohio, who was driven into retirement by an angry uprising of conservative hard-liners. Mr. Ryan, an architect of sweeping budget and tax reform proposals who gained national prominence as the Republican Party’s 2012 vice-presidential nominee, won the overwhelming support of his colleagues in the nominating contest and is now set to be installed as speaker in a formal vote on the House floor on Thursday. Republicans said the vote was 200 to 43 over Representative Daniel Webster of Florida, Mr. Ryan’s closest rival. Although Mr. Ryan was short of the 218 votes needed to win Thursday’s floor vote, supporters said he would pick up backers now that he is the nominee. “Anything over 218 wins, I think we’ll be well above that,” said Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma. In reluctantly accepting the gavel, the lanky Mr. Ryan, 45, will be tasked with healing the bitter divisions that have bedeviled House Republicans from virtually the moment they reclaimed the majority in the midterm elections of 2010. Seven Notable Speakers and Their Legacies Often called the second most powerful job in Washington, the position of speaker of the House comes with a vast array of responsibilities and daily duties. As Representative Paul D. Ryan prepares to take the helm, here is a look back at how some speakers fulfilled their charge as dictated by House rules, years of tradition and changing political realities. “This begins a new day in the House of Representatives,” Mr. Ryan told reporters on Wednesday after the vote. “We are not going to have a House that looked like it did the last few years. We are going to unify. We are going to respect the people by representing the people.” Rank-and-file conservatives, including the rebellious hard-liners of the House Freedom Caucus, had long complained that Mr. Boehner was too conciliatory in negotiations with President Obama and congressional Democrats. They also complained that Mr. Boehner did not give them enough say in the running of the House, and demanded changes. On Wednesday afternoon, the House was scheduled to vote on a bipartisan budget agreement, negotiated by Mr. Boehner, that Mr. Ryan has criticized but that would nonetheless allow him to take the speaker’s chair with a clean slate. The bill sets spending limits for the next two years, and raises the federal borrowing limit through March 2017 — essentially eliminating the risk of a government shutdown or a debt default through the end of Mr. Obama’s second term. Still, other challenges loom. Most immediately, some crucial highway programs are due to expire next month. And the budget agreement must now go through the appropriations process, where contentious issues are almost certain to arise. After Mr. Boehner unexpectedly announced his retirement on Sept. 25, Mr. Ryan repeatedly denied any interest in the speaker’s post. But party leaders pleaded with him to step up after the majority leader, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, abandoned his own bid for the position in the face of sharp criticism from the same conservatives who had hounded Mr. Boehner. Mr. Ryan ultimately said he would accept the nomination but only if his colleagues rallied behind him, which they did last week. Although the Freedom Caucus did not formally endorse him, a majority of its members said they would vote for him. Mr. Ryan, whose wife and three young children live in Janesville, Wis., has said he will not give up his weekend family time as speaker, and that other Republican leaders will have to assist with fund-raising trips and other responsibilities. | US Politics;Federal Budget;Paul D Ryan Jr;House of Representatives;Congress;Republicans |
ny0085024 | [
"world",
"europe"
] | 2015/10/22 | Marine Pilot Dies in Jet Crash in Britain | LONDON — An American Marine was killed on Wednesday when the combat jet he was piloting crashed shortly after taking off from a Royal Air Force base in Lakenheath, England, about 80 miles northeast of London, the authorities said. The jet, an F/A-18 Hornet, crashed in farmland between 10:30 and 11 a.m. The Marine Corps said the crash had occurred near Littleport, while the police said it had occurred slightly to the east, around Redmere. The two villages are about six miles apart; Redmere is about eight miles west of the base in Lakenheath. “We can confirm one fatality and believe there was just one person on board the aircraft,” the Cambridgeshire Constabulary, the police agency responsible for the area, said in a statement . The corps confirmed the crash but did not have additional details. A Marine Corps spokesman at the United States European Command headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany, said the pilot was part of Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 232, in the Third Marine Aircraft Wing, and was based at the Marine Corps Air Station in Miramar, a section of San Diego. While the Lakenheath base is owned by the Royal Air Force, it has been under the operational control of the United States military for decades. “The loss in Cambridgeshire today is terrible news, my thoughts & prayers are with all involved,” the United States ambassador to Britain, Matthew Barzun, wrote on Twitter. | Plane Crash;Great Britain;Fatalities,casualties;US Military;US Marines;Military aircraft;Royal Air Force |
ny0122346 | [
"world",
"middleeast"
] | 2012/09/16 | An American Ambassador Who Plunged Into Arab Life | J. Christopher Stevens , the American ambassador to Libya who was killed in an assault on a diplomatic mission there last week, was happy to gossip, but was revered for listening. A northern Californian with a toothy grin, he had a passion for the Arab world and its language, and he went out of his way to use it, whether with officials or shopkeepers, in an effort to show respect. In his willingness to allow others to be heard, even when he had an important message to impart, Mr. Stevens was an unusual American diplomat, friends and colleagues say. He allowed himself to be governed by the habits, proprieties and slower pace of the Arab world. With the State Department on high alert for security threats, especially since the Sept. 11 attacks, and many American diplomats consigned to embassies that resemble fortresses and armored motorcades that do not make unscheduled stops, Mr. Stevens plunged into Arab social life. He traded personal risk for personal contact. His comfort with his environment and his distaste for displays of security, some quietly suggest, may have led to a touch of overconfidence that cost him his life. His lonely death in Benghazi, a city he knew well, along with those of three other Americans, came during a Libyan militia attack on the American diplomatic mission there, where his presence had not been advertised. What the United States lost was not only one of its foremost Arabists, a man who built a bridge to the tribes and militias that toppled the Libyan dictator Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi . It also may be losing, in the unrest sweeping a conflict-prone crescent of Muslim countries from Pakistan to Sudan, a style of diplomacy already on the decline: the street-smart, low-key negotiator who gets things done by building personal relationships. Mr. Stevens, 52, was known as Chris, but he often signed letters and e-mails to friends as Krees, the way many Arabs pronounced his name. His affection for Arab culture and street life, whether in Syria, Libya or the Palestinian territories, made him many friends and impressive networks of contacts. Precisely what happened the night he was killed is unclear. But for an American ambassador to have so little security on the anniversary of Sept. 11, especially in a part of Libya known for its radicalism, is bound to raise questions, and in some sense, only adds to the irony of his death in a country he loved, and that for the most part, loved him back as an ally and a friend. John Bell, an Arabic-speaking former Canadian diplomat, knew Mr. Stevens when they were young political officers together in Egypt, and later in Jerusalem. “He was a consummate professional, calm and deliberative, with a real sensitivity to the Arab world,” Mr. Bell said. “He was good on the ground, and he had a way about him that endeared him to a lot of people; he listened to a lot of people and was not highly opinionated. And that made him a good and unusual American diplomat.” Diana Buttu knew Mr. Stevens in Ramallah and Jerusalem for several years from the autumn of 2002, when he was the political officer dealing with the Palestinians and she was the legal adviser to the Palestinian negotiators. “He was a different kind of American diplomat, he really was,” she said. “First, he was interested in being here. He brought a lot of energy and he spoke Arabic, and reached out to people and tried to build relationships for the U.S. In my experience, many U.S. diplomats don’t speak Arabic, or if they do, they don’t try.” American diplomats, given a presentation on the Israeli settlements by the Palestinians, often responded with exasperation, Ms. Buttu said, complaining that the Palestinians “didn’t understand how much we do for you behind the scenes with the Israelis.” But Mr. Stevens was different, she said. “He would say, ‘Tell me more. Tell me more of what America can do to help and why.’ ” Harvey Morris, as a correspondent for The Financial Times, also knew Mr. Stevens then. For him, Mr. Stevens was both of a new generation and yet “very much in the tradition of old-school Americans who went to the region, that missionary generation that founded the American University of Beirut, long before any suggestion of U.S. neocolonialism.” Mr. Stevens was not above diplomatic gossip, said Mr. Morris, who now blogs for The International Herald Tribune. Recounting the private meeting of Cécilia Sarkozy, then the wife of the French president, with Colonel Qaddafi in 2007 to try to secure the release of some jailed Bulgarian nurses, Mr. Stevens noted that the Libyan leader had opened his robes and was naked underneath. (The former Mrs. Sarkozy says that is not true.) Another friend in Jerusalem, Noga Tarnopolsky, a journalist, remembers Mr. Stevens as “the ideal of what you want when you meet a diplomat; he was a complete anomaly,” she said. “Wherever he was living, he was able to let go of everything else and live that place completely.” But she said he was deeply frustrated with security regulations that confined his activities. “He wanted that human contact, he wanted to be able to speak to Palestinians on the street, and he couldn’t because security regulations made him always travel in armored vehicles,” she said. “He used to talk about how he felt this was an obstacle to his ability to really be who he wanted to be.” At the same time, she said, “those security measures might have saved his life in a very different context,” and now there creeps in a thought, she said, that perhaps he was too trusting. As a diplomat, Mr. Stevens also got very high marks from his superiors. “We were in Damascus together, and I remember running into him Friday in the souk, sipping tea, talking to merchants,” said his boss, Elizabeth Dibble, the principal deputy assistant secretary for the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs. “He went out and explored Syria. Many of us in a tough place stick together, but he had Syrian friends and international friends wherever he went.” Mr. Stevens, having served already in Colonel Qaddafi’s Libya, was the perfect choice as the first ambassador to a new Libya, she said, especially after having spent six months in Benghazi during the war working to help the rebel National Transitional Council. He had gone to Benghazi by boat, with one other diplomat, two security officers and a couple of armored cars. “For him it wasn’t just the sense of adventure,” Ms. Dibble said. “It was not something every Foreign Service officer would be willing to do.” He also had the diplomat’s requisite patience. “It takes a lot of tea,” Ms. Dibble said. “You don’t rush into talking points, you develop a relationship and a personal connection, and a series of connections becomes a network. Many Americans, we start at A and work down the list to F. But A to B is not a straight line, and Chris had an instinctive feel for this, how to get things done.” The French writer and activist Bernard-Henri Lévy, who made early contact with the rebels in Benghazi and helped persuade the French to intervene, knew Mr. Stevens then, and related a meeting Mr. Stevens had in April 2011 with Mustafa Abdul Jalil, the chairman of the council. “I was struck by the mix of human warmth and professional diplomacy,” Mr. Lévy said, and “by his great capacity to listen and his strategy to speak last.” David Welch, a retired senior State Department official, knew Mr. Stevens from a first posting in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in 1992 and helped promote him. “He was one of the best of his generation,” Mr. Welch said. Helena Kane Finn, who was a senior diplomat at the American Embassy in Israel, remembers her encounters with Mr. Stevens with fondness and respect. “He was able to keep his balance and remain open-minded,” she said. “And he had sheer courage. It takes a lot of guts to go into Libya and do what he did. It’s not just dinners and cocktail parties. It’s people like him who really count.” Martin Indyk was Mr. Stevens’s boss in Washington in the late 1990s, when Mr. Stevens was running the Iran desk in an earlier effort to re-engage with Tehran. “He wanted to learn Farsi on the side,” Mr. Indyk remembered. “He wanted to be our first diplomat on the ground there, which was a stretch to me, but it was no surprise that he was first on the ground in Libya. Some people enjoy bureaucratic fighting in Washington, but he wanted to be out on the front lines where the fires burn. There aren’t a lot of people like that.” Roya Hakakian, an Iranian-born writer who met him then, said that “he displayed the quintessential sunny innocence of Americans.” Late last year, as Mr. Stevens waited for his confirmation hearings, they met in Washington, she wrote in thedailybeast.com . They spoke about the radicalization of the Libyan opposition and her concern that there would inevitably be a lashing out at the United States. She cited the takeover of the American Embassy in Tehran in 1979 as inevitable, given the revolutionary narrative. “Chris’s face was unusually flushed as he listened,” Ms. Hakakian wrote. “He was far more hopeful about the future.” He seemed hurt, she said. “Chris had fallen in love with Libya’s revolution. At the end, those very forces whose influence he thought would be curbed had claimed his life.” | Stevens J Christopher;Diplomatic Service Embassies and Consulates;United States International Relations;Middle East and North Africa Unrest (2010- );State Department;Libya |
ny0009944 | [
"world",
"middleeast"
] | 2013/02/28 | Construction of Disputed Turkish Dam Continues | ILISU, TURKEY — Mahmut Dundar raised a remote control toward a flat-screen monitor suspended from the ceiling of his office beside the Tigris River in southeast Turkey. “These are live,” he said, as he toggled between images of men and machines swarming over a dozen different building sites of the Ilisu Dam project. The feed goes to the prime minister’s office in Ankara, Mr. Dundar, general manager of the project, said last week. “The prime minister can watch every point of construction 24 hours a day, minute by minute, so he is informed of our progress at all times. He has set the target for completion for 2014, and we mean to make that date.” About 1,450 workers are laboring around the clock to complete the Ilisu Dam, one of the most controversial public works projects in recent history, by the middle of next year. That would be exactly five years after European lenders pulled out of the €1.1 billion, or $1.5 billion, project in July 2009, citing concerns about environmental impact, resettlement policies and the destruction of cultural treasures. Undeterred, Ankara quickly raised domestic financing and resumed work in 2010. “We have now completed 53 percent of the project, and we will complete the rest on time,” said Mr. Dundar, who is also regional director of the state hydraulic works. “We have no funding problems whatsoever, we work day and night, and all relevant agencies are in constant coordination.” On the construction site, about 40 kilometers, or 25 miles, from the Syrian border and 70 kilometers from Iraq, the roar of machinery drowned out the rushing waters of the Tigris, which has been diverted from its natural bed to flow through three diversion tunnels and emerge roiling and foaming into a new concrete basin. The surrounding mountain ridges bristled with military sentry posts and surveillance equipment guarding the construction site against the Kurdish rebels roaming the area. Trucks and earth movers hauled loads of limestone, basalt and clay onto the rising body of the dam, which is to attain a height of 141 meters, or 460 feet, when complete. The crest of the dam will be 2.3 kilometers long, with a volume of 24 million cubic meters of earth and rock. One-third of that is done, Mr. Dundar said, with the rest scheduled to be finished within the year. “Meanwhile, construction of the spillway and the power plant are going ahead according to plan,” he added. If the project stays on track, the Ilisu Dam will begin to impound water next year. Filling the reservoir could take anywhere from 5 to 11 months, Mr. Dundar said, depending on the season in which it is begun. “We think the reservoir will be filled in 2015,” he added. The project appeared to hit a snag last month when Turkey’s highest administrative court ruled that a decree issued by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan last year to accelerate work on the dam was in part null and void. The court declared invalid that part of the decree that declared all infrastructure projects connected to the dam to be exempt from environmental impact assessment requirements on the grounds that plans for the dam were drawn up before the relevant law came into effect in 1993. Opponents of the project were jubilant and staged a rally in Ankara, calling for the Ilisu construction site to be shut down. Emre Baturay Altinok, the lawyer who lodged the complaint on behalf of environmentalists, said by telephone from Ankara this month: “It is unlawful to continue work on the project without environmental impact assessments. The construction site must be closed and sealed.” Mr. Dundar disagreed with that interpretation of the ruling, which he said would not impede work on the dam. “The ruling does not even remotely have anything to do with stopping the project,” he said. “It is merely about applying the environmental impact assessment regulations, which we are now doing anyway.” The state hydraulic works authority has lodged an objection to the ruling, asking for clarification of certain terms, he said. “But in any case,” he added, “the final judgment will definitely not stop the project.” Mr. Altinok, the lawyer, said he was not surprised that construction was continuing six weeks after the court ruling. “That is the way of justice in Turkey,” he said. “We are accustomed to court rulings against large projects not being implemented.” The Ilisu project has long inflamed passions in Turkey and beyond. Concerns about its environmental, cultural and social impact forced companies and financial backers from Germany, Austria and Switzerland to pull out of the project under pressure from public campaigns in 2009. With a capacity of 11 billion cubic meters of water, the Ilisu reservoir will flood more than 30,000 hectares of land, or 74,000 acres, submerging parts of the historical town of Hasankeyf upstream, as well as uncharted archaeological sites along the Tigris. The waters will displace 199 settlements, affecting 55,000 people, according to a report drawn up in 2008 by international experts acting on behalf of European export-credit agencies. Scientists are at work in Hasankeyf to prepare for the removal of cultural monuments to a safe location across the Tigris and to fortify higher parts of the ancient town that will not be submerged, Mr. Dundar said. A new town on a mountainside across the river from Hasankeyf is nearing completion and should be ready for resettlement of the town’s population before the water begins to rise. Resettlement has been completed in the village of Ilisu near the dam site, where villagers were moved to a new settlement at the end of 2010. Villagers interviewed in Ilisu this month were unenthusiastic about their new homes, despite the running water in modern kitchens and bathrooms and communal amenities such as a playground and a meeting room. “It was better in our old village,” a woman who gave her name as Zekine said. “Our fields and orchards were there. They are all gone now.” Many villagers complained about the loss of their farmland. “Most people here work on the dam construction site now, but once that wraps up, there will be no place to work,” said Mehmet, a young man who did not give his family name. “I preferred our old village, because we had our orchards and our vines and could always make a living if we worked hard.” “We were farmers, now we are workers,” said Osman Demir, from the neighboring village of Karabayir, whose agricultural land was nationalized to build the new village of Ilisu. Like most settlements affected by the dam, his village has not applied for resettlement by the state. Besides Ilisu and Hasankeyf, only one other village has signed up for resettlement, Mr. Dundar confirmed. “It is up to the free will and democratic wishes of the villagers,” he said. “We want to build modern settlements for them. But we can only do it for those who want it.” This is what opponents of the dam have feared all along, said Arif Arslan, president of the Friends of Hasankeyf Association in Batman, who has been monitoring the Ilisu project for 20 years. “It will be just like when the Batman dam was built and 20,000 villagers were displaced” in the 1990s, Mr. Arslan said in a recent interview. “Villagers will move to the city with their cash compensations, the money will run out, and they will end up leading miserable lives in the slums.” Mr. Arslan is skeptical that the Ilisu project will contribute to the welfare and development of the region, among the poorest in Turkey. “We have seen 18 dams built in this region already,” he said. “Do you see a rise in the standard of living anywhere around here?” In Ilisu, Mr. Dundar said that “every project has unwanted side effects.” Yet the Ilisu Dam is essential to the development of the country and the welfare of its people, he argued. “Our country needs energy, and we are trying to meet that need,” he said. Ilisu’s 1,200-megawatt hydroelectric power plant is designed to produce nearly 4 billion kilowatt hours of energy per year, worth an annual $400 million, according to project managers. “Our country’s weakest spot is its dependency on energy imports,” Finance Minister Mehmet Simsek said at the opening of Ilisu’s diversion tunnels last year. To partly overcome that dependency, he added, “This jumbo project is of the utmost strategic and economic importance to our country.” | Turkey;Levees and Dams;Environment;Hydroelectric Power;Historic preservation;Recep Tayyip Erdogan |
ny0044895 | [
"nyregion"
] | 2014/02/16 | A Review of ‘Art at the Core’ at the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art in Peekskill | “Art at the Core: The Intersection of Visual Art, Performance and Technology” at the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art in Peekskill feels more like an arbitrary collection of artworks than a specially curated show. Nonetheless, there is some attempt at binding the exhibition together with a common theme. According to a gallery release, the few dozen works by 23 artists “lend themselves to narrative interpretation” and look toward art to address “the very core of our everyday lives, our ‘Weltanschauung,’ ” or worldview. This is a vague and general order. Doesn’t art always reflect the worldview of the artist and try to cut through the distractions cluttering our daily lives to address our “core” existence? Still, a few works here seem to fit the bill. One is by Chen Zhen, an artist who was born in Shanghai in 1955 and was diagnosed with a rare condition, autoimmune hemolytic anemia, at age 25. (He died in 2005.) The work here, “Traitment Musical/Vibratoire” (1997) is a big armature made with bed frames over which the artist stretched yak skins to create makeshift drums audiences could play. Diagrams drawn on the skins identify parts of the body, but also link traditional Chinese medicine with other cultures’ traditions and religion with everyday life. Image Jon Pylypchuk’s “I Thought They Were My Children” (2000). Credit Howard Goodman Another work that has an interesting story and uses enigmatic materials is Jeffrey Schrier’s “Unfinished Flight,” from the series “Wings of Witness.” Mr. Schrier, who lives in nearby Croton-on-Hudson, took more than 11 million drink-can tabs collected from around the world by junior high students in Illinois; the number of tabs is meant to commemorate the number of lives lost in the Holocaust. Mr. Schrier uses the tabs to create sculptures that look somewhat feathery. The one here refers to the poem “The Butterfly,” written by Pavel Friedmann while he was imprisoned in the Theresienstadt concentration camp, near Prague. It also recalls the work of El Anatsui, the African artist who uses metal retrieved from recycling stations to create tapestry-like sculptures. Several painters and photographers here make work that is highly narrative. David Drebin’s photograph “Girl in Orange Dress” (2009) captures a woman gazing out a picture window at a metropolis below and is reminiscent of Gregory Crewdson’s film-noir inspired photographs (but also Andrew Wyeth’s famous 1948 painting “ Christina’s World ”). The master of this genre, Jeff Wall, is represented here by “Rear, 304 E 25th Ave., May 20, 1997, 1:14 & 1:17 p.m.” (1997). A montage of two silver gelatin prints — one giant and one much smaller — the work depicts a drug transaction taking place outside a dilapidated house, presumably in Vancouver where Mr. Wall was born and still lives. There is more of a breakdown with the painting on view here: much of the better work seems to have nothing to do with the exhibition’s purported themes, while lesser works illustrate the idea of narrative and the everyday worldview quite nicely. In the former category are works by veteran abstractionists like Suzan Frecon, represented here by a dark red canvas titled “Soforouge” (2009), and Dan Christensen’s “Sagaponto” (1973), a moody, vaguely minimalist painting in which you can see different colors peeking out from under the acrylic white paint. A great work here is Charles Hinman’s “Castor and Pollux” (1968), which could just as easily be described as a sculpture; part of the shaped canvas tradition of the late ’60s and ’70s, Mr. Hinman’s work is more like a geometric wall relief than a two-dimensional painting. Image Jeffrey Schrier’s “Unfinished Flight” (2013). Credit Howard Goodman Paintings by Stephan Balleux, Jonas Burgert, Bryan El Castillo and Robert Fekete rely on a kind of post-post-Surrealist sense of drama and the uncanny — the same thing that much of the ’80s and ’90s photography like Mr. Crewdson’s and Mr. Wall’s was based on. Here it feels like a well-worn trope. Yigal Ozeri’s portrait of “Priscilla in Vines” (2009) at least comes with an interesting back story: While searching on Craigslist for models for his paintings, Mr. Ozeri met a man who suggested his girlfriend as a suitable muse. And that is how he met the subject of the painting, who stares out from behind a mass of hanging branches; a woman who lived in the forest in Maine and got all her food from nature. (You can’t tell any of this from the painting.) Some other notable works here that don’t seem to fit into any cogent exhibition narrative are by Phyllida Barlow, Matt Keegan, Haroon Mirza, Adam Pendleton, Jon Pylypchuk, Florian Schmidt and Ben Schumacher. If “Art at the Core” feels more like a gallery experience than a museum one, part of that has to do with the nature of the organization that is hosting the show. Founded by the art collectors Marc and Livia Straus, the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art is not too different from places — prevalent, for instance, in Miami — where private collections are open for public view. (Or, on a much larger scale, the Rubin Museum of Art or the Neue Galerie in Manhattan.) The center has always seemed to split the difference between being a small public museum and one devoted to collectors’ interests. The latter feels more pronounced here, however — and now more than ever since Mr. Straus has opened a gallery in Lower Manhattan (he had an exhibition of Mr. Hinman’s works in 2012). At the same time, the day I visited the center there was a table filled with art supplies, occupied by locals making scruffy sculptures. While “Art at the Core” didn’t impress me much as an exhibition, the sight of this creativity happening just yards away from a few accomplished artworks did. | Art;Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art;Peekskill NY |
ny0067580 | [
"us"
] | 2014/12/18 | Montana: Man Convicted of Murder for Shooting of Garage Intruder | A man who killed a German exchange student trespassing in his garage was convicted of deliberate homicide Wednesday despite arguing that a “castle doctrine” law allowed him to use deadly force. The man, Markus Kaarma, 30, faces a minimum penalty of 10 years in prison for killing Diren Dede, 17. Mr. Kaarma fired four shotgun blasts at Mr. Dede, who was unarmed, early April 27 after being alerted by motion sensors. Mr. Kaarma’s lawyers said that he feared for his life and did not know if the intruder was armed, and that his garage was burglarized at least once previously. Prosecutors said Mr. Kaarma, who left a purse inside the garage and left the door partly open that night, wanted to lure an intruder into his garage and then harm that person. | Murders and Homicides;Diren Dede;Markus Kaarma;Montana |
ny0229319 | [
"nyregion"
] | 2010/07/13 | Greenwich Village Fire Shows Hazards of Wood Decks | Flames licked over the parapet of a Greenwich Village building on Monday morning and black smoke billowed into the air after a wooden roof deck ignited. It was the second time in less than a week that a wood roof deck in Lower Manhattan had caught fire, underscoring the fact that such decking can be transformed into dangerous tinder if not properly cared for, said Salvatore J. Cassano, the fire commissioner. “Wood that is exposed to the air, exposed to the sun and the cold, it dries out and becomes fire prone,” Mr. Cassano said. “It may be nice to have a roof deck, but make sure it’s done according to the law, according to the codes.” The fire shortly before noon on Monday, on the top of the six-story, cast-iron Mercantile Exchange building on Broadway, resulted in just a few minor injuries, but people were evacuated from at least two buildings and traffic on Broadway was halted for about 90 minutes as firefighters put out the flames. On Thursday, there was a fire involving a wood deck on the roof of 240 East Houston Street, a five-story brick condominium building at the corner of Avenue A. The fire displaced residents and filled nearby streets with a gray haze. And in June, a wood roof deck on top of a residential building on West 72nd Street caught fire; it was extinguished without serious injuries, although parts of the building sustained water damage. Deputy Chief Bob Carroll of the Fire Department’s Division 1, said that on Monday more than a dozen trucks and about 70 firefighters responded to the two-alarm fire on Broadway, between Bleecker and Houston Streets, and found flames rising from the wood decking. Chief Carroll said the firefighters extinguished the flames then cut through the roof to put out the fire that had penetrated the rooftop and charred support beams. Four firefighters and another person had minor injuries, he said. Sarah Spratt, a hair stylist, said that when the fire in the Mercantile building started on Monday morning, she was involved in a photography shoot in a studio on the sixth floor. The blaze filled the halls with smoke and sent workers rushing downstairs, she said. Darrin Navarro, who was also working in the studio, said a smell like burning rubber prompted him to go up to the roof, where he found the deck ablaze. “The flames were over six feet tall,” he said. On Monday afternoon, Mr. Cassano said the two recent deck fires were being investigated. | Fires and Firefighters;Wood and Wood Products;Decks (Outdoor);Greenwich Village (NYC) |
ny0141093 | [
"world",
"europe"
] | 2008/02/25 | Born Irish, but With Illegal Parents | DUBLIN — Cork-born and proud of it, George-Jordan Dimbo is top to toe the Irish lad. He studies Gaelic, eats rashers, plays hurling, prays to the saints, papers his walls with parochial school awards, and spends Saturdays at the telly watching Dustin the Turkey, a wisecracking puppet, mock the powerful. If the Irish government has its way, he may soon be living in Africa. George, 11, is an Irish citizen and has been since his birth when Ireland , alone in Europe, still gave citizenship to anyone born on its soil. His mother and father, Ifedinma and Ethelbert Dimbo, are illegal immigrants from Nigeria, who brought him back to Ireland three years ago, judging it the best place to raise him. Since then, the unusual trio — the Irish schoolboy and his African parents — have shared a single room in a worn Dublin hostel while facing a prospect dreaded by children on both sides of the Atlantic, a parent’s deportation. “Dear justice minister,” George wrote when he was 9. “I heard my Mommy and Daddy whispering about deportation. Please do not deport us.” “Remember,” he added, “I am also an Irish child.” Thousands of Irish children face similar risks, living in a country where one or both parents do not legally reside. Their stories find abundant parallels in the United States, where an estimated five million children — including three million American citizens — have parents who are illegal immigrants. New efforts to catch them make fear of deportation a growing factor in American life, the flip side of generous laws that make infants instant citizens. The battle over the “I.B.C.’s” — Irish-born children — stems from a decade of head-turning change that has brought this island of red-haired Marys and blue-eyed Seans the demographic version of an extreme makeover. For centuries, Ireland was a racially homogenous land of emigrants. Now it is a multicultural nation of immigrants, whose share of the population, 11 percent, is nearly as high as that in the United States. Years of Irish prosperity have drawn Polish plumbers, Lithuanian nannies, Latvian farm workers, Filipino nurses, Chinese traders, and sub-Saharan asylum seekers. The town of Portlaoise, about 40 miles southwest of Dublin, has the country’s first African-born mayor. The Synge Street School, where George Dimbo says his Hail Marys beneath a plaster Virgin, is walking distance from the city’s first mosque and rents classroom space to two Chinese academies. “I went to bed in one country and woke up in a different one,” writes the Irish novelist, Roddy Doyle, in a collection of short stories called “The Deportees” (Viking, 2007). They depict characters as diverse as an African war survivor on his first day of class, and Fat Gandhi, a gay tandoori vendor who “quickly realized that his loud embrace of Christianity was very good for business.” The Dimbos are the kind of memorable figures who might have tumbled from Mr. Doyle’s pages. A former graduate student in Cork, Ms. Dimbo, 42, wore a Yoruba headdress to a recent parent-student event, and has just written a feminist novel about a migrant prostitute. Mr. Dimbo, 43, releases his frustrations with a daily run through the Dublin streets, and George is so unusually courteous that his sixth-grade teacher thought he was “taking the mickey”—Irish for pulling his leg. “He’s the most mannerly child I’ve taught in years,” said the teacher, Brendan O’Boyle. “He’s very, very good, very upright, very honest.” “He’s one of the best guys we’ve ever had,” said last year’s teacher, Gerard Mooney. Not long after George arrived, a classmate told him that he disliked black people. “But I’m black,” George recalls answering. “No,” the boy said. “You’re Irish.” So Far, Little Conflict Ireland’s dash to diversity has so far provoked little of the conflict found elsewhere in Europe or the United States. There are no major anti-immigrant political parties and little anti-immigrant violence. When a Dublin high school student, Olukunle Elukanlo, was deported to Nigeria in 2005, his protesting classmates won his return. Government officials here often credit Irish history for the tolerance. “There’s an emotional sense of understanding about what immigrants are going through because of our experience as immigrants,” said Conor Lenihan, the minister of integration. But others see undercurrents of racial unease that could boil into conflict, especially if hard times return. “In Irish literature there’s a big fear of the returned immigrant who brings all sorts of chaos with him,” said Mary Gilmartin, a geographer at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. “Many people here feel threatened.” As recently as the 1980s, young Irish were fleeing unemployment in droves, many to work illegally in the United States. By the late 1990s, an economic boom called the Celtic Tiger was luring them home, along with droves of foreign construction workers, farm hands, waitresses and nannies. A wave of asylum seekers joined them, many from Africa. Some had escaped harrowing wars or genital mutilation. But officials grew skeptical of their claims as their numbers surged to about 12,000 in 2002 from a trickle a decade before. Ireland not only offered citizenship to children born upon arrival; until 2003 it also allowed their illegal-immigrant parents to stay, a shortcut many asylum seekers used to win residency. Word got out: with a visa to Britain, a pregnant woman could reach Northern Ireland, take a cab across the border, and gain residency by giving birth. Ms. Gilmartin argues that reports of abuse were exaggerated. But a 2004 referendum changed the rules, reserving citizenship for the children of longtime legal residents. It passed with nearly 80 percent of the vote. By then, Ireland had about 18,000 mixed families of Irish children and illegal-immigrant parents. Wary of the costs of large-scale deportation, the government ran a one-time legalization program that gave residency to about 95 percent of those parents. The Dimbos were among the 1,000 or so families whose cases were rejected, and they have appealed to the Supreme Court. Their situation, like that of millions in the United States, pits competing interests: those of children (to live in their country with their parents) against those of states (to enforce borders for the perceived common good). Odyssey to Ireland Ms. Dimbo first came to Ireland legally, to get a master’s degree in sociology in 1995. She was recently married, two months pregnant, and unaware, she said, that Irish law would make George a citizen. She gained legal residency through his citizenship, but they returned to Nigeria when George was 2 to join his father, who ran an import business. With Ms. Dimbo working as a bank manager in Lagos, the family lived comfortably, but came back to Ireland twice, believing each time that George’s citizenship and their past residence gave them the right to stay. The most recent time was in 2005, to apply for the legalization program, not realizing, they said, that it only covered families who had remained in Ireland, which disqualified them. With their savings gone, they have spent nearly three years in a government “accommodation center” — a dormitory where they share one room, line up for meals, and are barred from working. “You feel like you’re a prisoner,” said Mr. Dimbo, a proud man dismayed by his forced dependency. “If we had known our lives would be like this, we never would have come.” George said if his parents left, he would go with them — “every child needs his parents” — and wrote the justice minister to convey his fears. “I am very worried,” he wrote. Gathered at another accommodation center, an hour outside Dublin in Mosney, many parents said their fears of deportation had begun to affect their children. “My daughter knows I’m depressed,” said a single mother from Nigeria, who declined to be identified for fear of harming her case. “She goes, ‘Did I do anything wrong?’ ” Another single mother said, “I’m afraid I’m going to hurt my child.” Other complaints come from men sneaking into Ireland, to join their children and wives who got residency through the legalization program. To avoid new waves of migration, the program gave no right to family reunification. “Unless we control the flows of people, public attitudes will turn against the whole process of immigration ,” said Mr. Lenihan, the government minister. But in denying children their fathers, the men say, the government may create the kind of immigrant underclass that plagues other parts of Europe. “Our children are going to be growing up angry,” said one of four illegal-immigrant fathers from Nigeria who met with a reporter in Balbriggan, a Dublin suburb. Another father blamed race. “If our kids were really Irish to them, they would not say, ‘Take the fathers away,’ ” he said. At the same time, many of those facing deportation marvel at Ireland’s virtues, including the freedom to protest without getting shot and ambulances that come when summoned. When Lynda Onuoha joined Mosney mothers to demonstrate outside Parliament, they waved Irish flags. “We wanted people passing by to see that even though our kids are black, they are Irish by nationality, and we want to make a home here,” she said. Even after tightening its rules, Ireland remains more generous than most of its European peers. The United States is the rare country that gives immediate citizenship to the children born inside its borders, whether their immigrant parents are legal residents or not. A 2007 bill to end the practice, which stems from the 14th Amendment, drew nearly 100 Congressional co-sponsors, though legal scholars have traditionally argued that a change would require a constitutional amendment. Fear for U.S. Children Deportations in the United States have been rare, but with enforcement on the rise, migrant groups warn of a new generation of American children haunted by fear. Border control advocates respond that the parents have only themselves to blame, for migrating illegally. At times, Ms. Dimbo says the same. “To come here without papers, we are wrong,” she said. “We are cap in hand, saying for George’s sake, let us forgive and forget.” Adding her own note of Irish chauvinism, she said it was only when she got to Donegal that she appreciated the phrase “deep, blue sea.” Mr. Dimbo added, “I love this country.” George has spent 6 of his 11 years in Ireland, including most of his school years. What he recalls of Nigeria is mostly the heat and the corporal punishment in school. Asked if he feels more Irish or Nigerian, he answered politely in a Dublin lilt. “I think I feel more Irish,” he said. “For one, because I am Irish.” | Immigration and Refugees;Ireland;Illegal Immigrants;Families and Family Life;Asylum (Political);European Union;Citizenship |
ny0165666 | [
"business"
] | 2006/09/19 | Revlon Replaces Chief Executive | Revlon, the cosmetics maker controlled by the financier Ronald O. Perelman, has ousted its chief executive, Jack L. Stahl, after four years of losses, and replaced him with the finance chief, David L. Kennedy. Mr. Stahl, hired in 2002, will stay on as an adviser for 30 days, Revlon, which is based in New York, said yesterday. Mr. Kennedy, 59, also joined Revlon in 2002, as president of Revlon International. He became chief financial officer in March. Revlon, which makes cosmetics sold under its own name and the Almay brand, has posted losses for eight consecutive years, and Mr. Kennedy will be the third chief executive since 1999. Revlon is saddled with almost $1.7 billion in debt and faces competition from larger rivals, such as L’Oréal and Procter & Gamble’s Cover Girl brand. Shares of Revlon fell 2 cents yesterday, or 1.4 percent, to $1.41. Revlon said on Aug. 3 that its second-quarter loss more than doubled as sales of two lines, Vital Radiance and Almay, did not meet expectations. | Revlon Incorporated;Stahl Jack L |
ny0061618 | [
"technology"
] | 2014/01/18 | A Muted Beginning to Sales of Apple’s iPhone Through China Mobile | Apple is counting on a long-awaited agreement with China Mobile, the world’s largest cellular operator, to make major headway in China. But before Apple declares any major degree of success, the technology giant may need to overcome some significant hurdles. A hint of the challenges was apparent on Friday, when customers were finally able to buy iPhones from China Mobile. At a store in Beijing, only about a dozen customers showed up to buy iPhones, despite the appearance of Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive. It was a far cry from the long lines that usually accompany a big introduction in the United States Apple and Mr. Cook have made improved sales in China a high priority — and that has meant getting on China Mobile, which has more than 750 million customers. Mr. Cook’s presence in China this week signaled the importance that Apple has attached to the market. Sales will not necessarily come easy. As the country’s economy boomed, some other Western brands in China gained a loyal following. From Gillette razors to Walmart stores, American products and companies were generally seen as superior to domestic alternatives, even though many of the products, like iPhones, were assembled in China. But recently, foreign brands have been subjected to intense scrutiny by the Chinese news media, especially the state-run CCTV, prompting consumers to reconsider domestic alternatives. In one recent example, Walmart recalled donkey meat that it was selling at several outlets in China after it was found to have been tainted with fox meat. When iPhones were introduced in China five years ago by the country’s second-largest mobile operator, China Unicom, they found a ready market among trend-conscious consumers. Since then, despite adding the country’s third-biggest carrier, China Telecom, to its lineup, Apple has lost ground to the market leader in smartphones, Samsung Electronics, and lower-end domestic rivals. Apple’s market share in China has fallen into the single digits. “Apple used to be the must-have, aspirational brand for all wealthy and middle-class Chinese consumers,” said Shaun Rein, managing director of the China Market Research Group and the author of “The End of Cheap China.” “But over the last year, there has been a real deterioration of the Apple brand.” Some American tech giants continue to thrive in China. Microsoft remains the overwhelmingly dominant provider of PC operating systems. Others, like Facebook and Twitter, have been blocked from entering China, and still others have faded. Google was once a leading search engine in China, but then lost ground to a local rival, Baidu, and scaled back its presence in the country rather than submit to censorship demands. Motorola was once a power in mobile phones in China, but it was supplanted by companies like Nokia of Finland — which, in turn, yielded leadership to Apple and Samsung. More recently, Cisco Systems, the maker of telecommunications network equipment, said sales in China had been hurt by disclosures of surveillance by the National Security Agency. Apple still has fans, including Xia Bingyi, a 26-year-old customer from the eastern Chinese city of Jinan. She was one of 10 people who won a trip to Beijing to buy an iPhone on the opening day of China Mobile’s offering. Ms. Xia already owned an iPhone 4 she bought two years ago, but said she did not hesitate to sign up for a new iPhone 5S once China Mobile began offering it. “This is like manna from heaven!” she said. Among consumers who have to pay their own way, however, price has been a big barrier to bringing the iPhone to a broader audience in China. The list price of 5,288 renminbi (about $870) an iPhone in China is more than many people’s monthly salary, especially outside the major cities. China Mobile has been less aggressive on pricing and subsidies than some analysts had expected. To get the iPhone 5S free of charge, subscribers must commit to a two-year contract at 588 renminbi a month. China Unicom and China Telecom, which together have about 450 million customers, have cut the price of their competing iPhone packages only modestly since China Mobile announced its Apple agreement in December. “There won’t be a subsidy war among the three operators because they have already learned that they need to control this,” said Jun Zhang, an analyst at Wedge Partners, an equity research firm. On Sina Weibo, a microblogging service, some users complained about the pricing of the iPhone 5S by China Mobile, saying they could get smuggled versions from Hong Kong for less money. “The model is the same,” one contributor wrote on Weibo. “I want the cheaper one.” Before the deal with Apple, China Mobile said 45 million people were using iPhones on its network, most of them acquired from Hong Kong or via other unofficial channels. This accounts for more than 60 percent of the iPhones in use in China, according to Craig Yu, research director at Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, a research firm. China Mobile, which has 3,000 stores, has one big advantage over its two rivals — the fast network it is building, using so-called 4G technology. China Unicom and China Telecom are still relying on the slower, previous generation technology. But this could bring muddled results for Apple, because analysts say some China Mobile iPhone sales will come from customers already using iPhones and just switching carriers. As a result, estimates of iPhone sales by China Mobile, which have ranged from fewer than 10 million annually to more than 30 million, might not budge its market share as much as the unit sales might suggest. An Apple spokeswoman, Carolyn Wu, declined to comment on the first-day sales figures. Previously, China Mobile had reported more than one million preorders for the phone via its website since the deal was announced in December. Mr. Zhang at Wedge Partners said such online registrations generally resulted in firm orders in only about a third of the cases, meaning Apple could expect to sell about 400,000 iPhones. Over all, including the effect of customers switching from rival networks, Mr. Zhang said he expected Apple to sell about one million more phones a month in China as a result of the deal, on top of the roughly three million it has been selling. In a market of more than one billion mobile phone customers, those are somewhat modest figures. That may help explain why even Mr. Cook seemed to be looking as much to the future as to the present as he traveled to Beijing for the China Mobile introduction. “Today is just the beginning of China Mobile and Apple coming together to deliver the best experience in the world,” Mr. Cook said at an appearance on Friday. Analysts say Apple could probably broaden its potential market in China by making phones with features that appeal more to Chinese consumers, like bigger screens. Handsets like the Samsung Note 3, which has a 5.7-inch screen, compared with the 4-inch screen of the Apple 5S and 5C, have been selling well in China. “We never talk about future things,” Mr. Cook said. “We have great things we are working on but we want to keep them secret. That way you will be so much happier when you see it.” | Apple;China;Smartphone;China Mobile;iPhone |
ny0135883 | [
"sports",
"hockey"
] | 2008/04/06 | Sharks’ Streak Raises Concern About Peaking | The San Jose Sharks have come streaking into the playoffs, winning 18 of 21 games since Feb. 20. Only in the N.H.L. could this be perceived as a problem. “Any hesitancy that you’re going to peak too soon?” Coach Ron Wilson was asked during a conference call last week. “Don’t you want to lose a couple of games before you get to the playoffs?” There is a persistent belief among commentators and fans that winning too much in the regular season is bad, as if it somehow detracts from a team’s playoff abilities. “We try and prepare to win every game,” Wilson said unapologetically. “You don’t plan on a streak like this. We want to keep playing our kind of hockey right now, playoff hockey.” Mike Babcock, coach of the only team to finish ahead of the Sharks, the Presidents’ Trophy-winning Detroit Red Wings, heard a similar question during another conference call last week. “Are you worried about just cruising into the playoffs?” he was asked. “I’ve been on both ends of it in the Stanley Cup playoffs,” Babcock said. “When you’re the higher seed, the other teams have usually been battling like crazy and sometimes you’ve been drifting along. The great thing for us this year is our games down the stretch here have been against teams that are good teams that have played us real difficult.” It seems strange to have to explain why it is good to finish far in front of everyone else as the Wings and the Sharks have this season. One reason, certainly, is the comfortable margin of error it offers a team. That has given San Jose the luxury of resting banged-up players like Jonathan Cheechoo and cutting back on the lengthy ice time of key players like defenseman Brian Campbell and center Joe Thornton. The puck-moving Campbell, acquired from Buffalo at the trade deadline, has been to the Sharks what Ringo Starr was to his new bandmates, the Beatles. The Wings, after a series of injuries that began in February and nearly derailed their season — the latest was the loss of forward Tomas Kopecky to torn knee ligaments Thursday — have fought through their tribulations and are playing well on the eve of the playoffs. “We are on a great roll, and we’ve got to continue it,” Babcock said. “We’re playing the kind of hockey you need to to be successful in the playoffs.” No Guarantee for No. 1 The perception that winning in the regular season is bad preparation for the playoffs may arise from the disappointingly early playoff exits of a number of top teams — notably the Red Wings — in recent years. Although the team that finished first over all has won 36 of 80 Stanley Cups since the N.H.L. took sole possession of the trophy in 1926 — about once every 2.2 seasons — the No. 1 team has not done nearly so well recently. Only 4 of the last 17 Cups have been won by the regular-season champion. Alan Reifman, a professor of human development at Texas Tech University who has a specialty in statistical correlation and causality, found that over the past five postseasons there was only a modest correlation between the performance of N.H.L. teams in the regular season and their performance in the playoffs. In his calculation comparing teams’ point totals in the regular season with how far they advanced in the playoffs, a correlation coefficient of zero would represent no relationship between the two competitions. A one would represent an exact relationship wherein the Presidents’ Trophy winner also wins the Stanley Cup, the second-place teams gets to the Cup finals, and so on. Last season, that figure was .50, a “moderately strong correlation,” Reifman said. In 2005-6, it was .33, a moderate-to-weak correlation. The season before that, it was .31, preceded by a very weak .04 and a moderately strong .50. In the N.B.A., Reifman said, the correlation in recent years between regular-season and playoff performance has been much stronger, averaging more than .50. In other words, an N.B.A. team that finishes high in the standings can expect to do very well in the playoffs. Not so for an N.H.L. team. But any Red Wings fan could have told you that. Returning With Vengeance The Boston College Eagles are back in the Frozen Four, and they would prefer not to watch for a third consecutive time as another team celebrates a national championship at the other end of the rink. The Eagles join Michigan, North Dakota and Notre Dame in the tournament, which will be played Thursday and Saturday at the Pepsi Center in Denver. “We want to win it this time,” Boston College Coach Jerry York told College Hockey News after the Eagles beat No. 2 Miami of Ohio in overtime to win the Northeast Regional. “We’ve given ourselves a chance to win it, and hopefully we get some puck luck this time.” To reach the final for a third straight year, the Eagles will have to get past North Dakota. The Fighting Sioux are making their fourth consecutive Frozen Four appearance. They have a powerful offense, led by T. J. Oshie and Ryan Duncan, last season’s Hobey Baker Award winner, and a stingy goaltender in Jean-Philippe Lamoureux. He faced almost 90 shots in defeating Princeton and Wisconsin in Midwest Regional games. The other semifinal features Michigan, ranked No. 1, against Notre Dame, which barely gained a postseason invitation and is making its first Frozen Four appearance. The Wolverines, making their first appearance since 2003, rely on the high-scoring senior forwards Kevin Porter and Chad Kolarik. Porter, after scoring four goals in a regional victory over Niagara, is considered the favorite to win this year’s Hobey. The other finalists for the award are the junior forward Nathan Gerbe, the 5-foot-5 scoring dynamo for Boston College, and the senior forward Ryan Jones of Miami. Yashin Rolls On The former Senator and Islander Alexei Yashin, reviled by most N.H.L. fans as the prototypical overpaid, petulant European player who disappears in the postseason, continues to excel in his return to the Russian Superliga. He is the top playoff scorer with 14 points in 13 games and has led Lokomotiv Yaroslavl to the final against the runaway regular-season champion, Salavat Yulaev Ufa. The best-of-five series is tied, 1-1, and resumes Monday in Yaroslavl. | San Jose Sharks;Hockey Ice;National Hockey League |
ny0129802 | [
"nyregion"
] | 2012/06/06 | Justice Thomas D. Raffaele Says Police Officer Struck Him | Thomas D. Raffaele, a 69-year-old justice of the New York State Supreme Court, encountered a chaotic scene while walking down a Queens street with a friend: Two uniformed police officers stood over a shirtless man lying facedown on the pavement. The man’s hands were cuffed behind his back and he was screaming. A crowd jeered at the officers. The judge, concerned the crowd was becoming unruly, called 911 and reported that the officers needed help. But within minutes, he said, one of the two officers became enraged — and the judge became his target. The officer screamed and cursed at the onlookers, some of whom were complaining about what they said was his violent treatment of the suspect, and then he focused on Justice Raffaele, who was wearing a T-shirt and jeans. The judge said the officer rushed forward and, using the upper edge of his hand, delivered a sharp blow to the judge’s throat that was like what he learned when he was trained in hand-to-hand combat in the Army. The episode, Friday morning just after midnight — in which the judge says his initial complaint about the officer was dismissed by a sergeant, the ranking supervisor at the scene — is now the focus of investigations by the police Internal Affairs Bureau and the Civilian Complaint Review Board . The judge said he believed the officer also hit one or two other people during the encounter on 74th Street near 37th Road, a busy commercial strip in Jackson Heights. But he said he could not be sure, because the blow to his throat sent him reeling back and he then doubled over in pain. “I’ve always had profound respect for what they do,” Justice Raffaele said of the police, noting that he was “always very supportive” of the department during the more than 20 years he served on Community Board 3 in Jackson Heights before becoming a judge. At one point in the early 1990s, he added, he helped organize a civilian patrol in conjunction with the police. “And this I thought was very destructive.” The justice, who sits in the Matrimonial part in State Supreme Court in Jamaica, Queens, was elected to the Civil Court in 2005 and the State Supreme Court in 2009. Justice Raffaele was among the judges around New York State who volunteered to perform weddings on the Sunday last summer when New York’s same-sex marriage law went into effect. The judge’s description of the confrontation and its aftermath, which he provided in a series of interviews, was corroborated by two people he knows who described the encounter in separate interviews. Justice Raffaele and one of the men, Muhammad Rashid, who runs a tutoring center near where the encounter occurred, said they were on the street at that hour because the judge had spent most of that day and night cleaning out his parents’ house and Mr. Rashid had just helped him move two tables; he donated them to the tutoring center. The judge said his parents had just moved to Houston; he had taken them to the airport that morning and the house’s new owner was to take possession the next day. The judge said he was in “a lot of pain” and went with Mr. Rashid to the emergency room at Elmhurst Hospital Center, where a doctor examined his throat by snaking a tube with a camera on the end through his nose and down his throat to determine whether his trachea had been damaged. The doctor, he said, found no damage; Justice Raffaele was released and told to see his personal doctor for follow-up care. When they first came upon the crowd, the judge said, he was immediately concerned for the officers and called 911. After he made the call, he said, he saw that one of the officers — the one who he said later attacked him — was repeatedly dropping his knee into the handcuffed man’s back. His actions, the judge said, were inflaming the crowd, some of whom had been drinking. But among others who loudly expressed their concern, he said, was a woman who identified herself as a registered nurse; she was calling to the officer, warning that he could seriously hurt the unidentified man, who an official later said was not charged. Justice Raffaele said that after the officer struck him and he regained his composure, he asked another officer who was in charge and was directed to a sergeant, who, like the officer who hit him, was from the 115th Precinct. He told the sergeant that he wanted to make a complaint. The sergeant, he said, stepped away and spoke briefly with some other officers — several of whom the judge said had witnessed their colleague strike him — and returned to tell the judge that none of them knew whom he was talking about. As the sergeant spoke to the other officers, the judge said, the officer who hit him was walking away. At the hospital, he said, he saw another sergeant from the 115th Precinct, who took his complaint. He also telephoned the Police Department’s Internal Affairs Bureau. He said he was interviewed on Friday by a lieutenant and a sergeant from a special unit in the bureau called Group 54, which investigates complaints of excessive force. Deputy Commissioner Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman, said in an e-mail that all force complaints, whether they involve serious injuries or not, are referred to the Civilian Complaint Review Board, an independent agency that investigates allegations of police misconduct that does not rise to the level of a crime. The department’s Internal Affairs Bureau investigates complaints of excessive force that involve serious injuries. “In this instance,” he said, Internal Affairs “is reviewing the complaint because it was brought to its attention by the judge, not because of the level of injury.” He did not respond to an e-mail with other questions about the episode. Police investigators, apparently from Internal Affairs, visited a number of shops along 74th Street on Sunday, seeking to determine whether any had security cameras that might have recorded a fight Thursday night involving a police officer and two men, said Sunil Patel, the owner of Alankar Jewelers. He said that he had security cameras, but that they did not capture any images of the confrontation because the store’s security gate blocks their view when the shop is closed. The office of the Queens district attorney, Richard A. Brown, is working with the Internal Affairs Bureau on the investigation, an official there said. The administrative judge for civil matters for the State Supreme Court in Queens, Jeremy S. Weinstein, who oversees the court where Justice Raffaele sits, said he was surprised to learn of the encounter because of what he said was the judge’s personality. “I think, universally felt, that he is one of the most soft-spoken, thoughtful, decent human beings around,” Justice Weinstein said. “I think his temperament is admired by certainly his colleagues in the bar and I believe the community that he served.” Asked whether he intended to sue, Justice Raffaele said, “At this point, no, I don’t.” He added: “I do feel that it’s important for this person to be disciplined. I don’t know if he should be an officer or not — what he was doing was so violent.” | Raffaele Thomas D;Jackson Heights (NYC);Police Department (NYC);Police Brutality and Misconduct;Civilian Complaint Review Board;New York City |
ny0281929 | [
"world",
"asia"
] | 2016/07/02 | Mosha, Thai Elephant Wounded by Land Mine, Gets New Prosthetic Limb | BANGKOK — Mosha was 7 months old when she stepped on a land mine near Thailand’s border with Myanmar and lost a front leg. That was a decade ago. This week, she received her ninth artificial leg, thanks to the Friends of the Asian Elephant Foundation hospital in northern Thailand. Mosha is one of more than a dozen elephants who have been wounded by land mines in the border region, where rebels have been fighting the Myanmar government for decades. She was the first elephant to be fitted with a prosthetic limb at the hospital near Lampang. Mosha weighed about 1,300 pounds when she was wounded. Today, she weighs more than 4,000 pounds, and her growth has necessitated frequent upgrades of her artificial leg. Motala, another resident of the hospital, lost a front leg to a land mine in the same border area in 1999. She is now more than 50 years old. “ The Eyes of Thailand ,” a 2012 documentary, featured her being fitted with an artificial limb. Dr. Therdchai Jivacate, a Thai orthopedist who helped design prosthetic limbs for the elephants, said they could not survive without them. “When she cannot walk, she is going to die,” he told The Daily Telegraph in Britain in 2009, when Mosha was fitted with a new prosthesis. When Mosha received her newest artificial limb last week, he told Reuters: “The way she walked was unbalanced, and her spine was going to bend. That means she would have hurt her cartilages badly and eventually stopped walking. And she would have died because of that.” The Thai Elephant Conservation Center estimates that there are 2,000 to 3,000 elephants living in the wild in Thailand and about 2,700 domesticated ones. In the past, many elephants in Thailand worked in the logging industry, where their agility and strength made them a valuable asset. But the Thai government banned logging in the nation’s forests in 1989, putting them out of work. | Elephant;Prosthesis;Explosive mine;Thailand;Friends of the Asian Elephant Foundation |
ny0115284 | [
"us"
] | 2012/11/15 | Colorado: Interior Secretary Apologizes to Reporter | Interior Secretary Ken Salazar apologized Wednesday for threatening to punch a reporter who asked him about problems with the government’s wild horse program at a campaign event. Mr. Salazar called Dave Philipps, a reporter with The Gazette of Colorado Springs, to apologize and offer him an interview. The apology came a day after the newspaper posted an audio recording of Mr. Salazar’s Election Day comments, in which he accuses Mr. Philipps of setting him up by asking about a horse slaughter proponent who has bought hundreds of wild horses. Mr. Salazar tells the reporter, “If you do that to me again, I’ll punch you out.” Mr. Salazar at first simply said that he regretted the exchange. But the newspaper called on him to apologize. | Salazar Ken;Apologies;Newspapers;Horses;Philipps Dave;Colorado Springs (Colo);Interior Department |
ny0233565 | [
"world",
"europe"
] | 2010/08/23 | Sweden Defends Reversal of Warrant for Founder of WikiLeaks | STOCKHOLM — The Swedish prosecutor’s office on Sunday defended its handling of allegations made by two Swedish women against Julian Assange, founder of the WikiLeaks Web site, saying that a senior prosecutor withdrew the arrest warrant that had been issued for Mr. Assange on a rape charge after reviewing a judgment made by a more junior official before additional information became available. The abrupt reversal of the prosecutor’s office had added a new and bizarre turn to events involving Mr. Assange, a 39-year-old Australian. He has been locked in a dispute with the Pentagon over WikiLeaks’ posting last month of 77,000 classified Afghan war documents on the Internet, and its announcement of plans within weeks to post 15,000 additional secret documents that he has described as even “more explosive.” Mr. Assange and others working for WikiLeaks said that “dirty tricks” by those seeking to destroy WikiLeaks were responsible for the developments here on Saturday, when prosecutors first announced that they had issued an arrest warrant for Mr. Assange, then reversed course within hours. The warrant was canceled after the chief prosecutor, Eva Finne, reviewed the case and found that “there is no longer reason to believe that Mr. Assange has committed rape,” in the words of a spokeswoman for the national prosecutor’s office, Karin Rosander. “Another prosecutor was responsible for the matter on Friday,” Mrs. Rosander said Sunday in a telephone interview. “During Saturday, a new prosecutor took over, and new information came to light. When she looked into the matter, she found there was no reason to suspect” Mr. Assange of rape, and therefore no need for the arrest warrant. Mrs. Rosander said a separate allegation against Mr. Assange that was cited in the prosecutor’s original statement on Saturday, involving molestation, remained under investigation. “The prosecutor will begin looking into the matter tomorrow, and she estimates that she will make a decision in the coming week,” she said. The prosecutor’s office did not feel that an accusation of molestation — a term that covers a wide range of offenses under Swedish law, including inappropriate physical contact with another adult — was enough to justify an arrest warrant, Mrs. Rosander said. A molestation conviction carries a possible fine, or up to a year in prison. Pending further investigation into the molestation claim, Mrs. Rosander said, the police have been trying, so far unsuccessfully, to “find” Mr. Assange, who has remained elusive since arriving in Sweden 10 days ago from Britain. He had said he hoped to establish a secure base for himself and WikiLeaks in Sweden because its press laws provide broad protections for news organizations that publish secret information. The Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet has agreed to take on Mr. Assange as a columnist in an arrangement that would qualify him for such protections. Mr. Assange has told reporters in recent weeks that he believes he and other WikiLeaks activists are at risk of being arrested, or being singled out in other ways, in the wake of WikiLeaks’ release of the Pentagon documents. Early Sunday, Mr. Assange responded to efforts by The New York Times to contact him with a brief e-mail to a reporter in which he described the sexual abuse accusations as “completely baseless, as I always said.” Previously, he had responded to the Swedish accusations in Twitter feeds, a form of communication he has favored in recent weeks in his effort to disguise his whereabouts. On Twitter, he implied that the accusations were payback for WikiLeaks’ disclosures. “We were warned to expect ‘dirty tricks,’ ” he said. “Now, we have the first one.” In its Sunday editions, Aftonbladet quoted Mr. Assange as saying that the rape claims had caused damage even though they had been dropped because WikiLeaks’ “enemies” could use them to discredit the organization. “I do not know what lies behind this. But we have been warned that, for example, the Pentagon plans to use dirty tricks to undermine us,” Mr. Assange was quoted as saying in a phone interview from Sweden. “And I have also been warned about sex traps.” The Pentagon press secretary, Geoff Morrell, said Sunday that any suggestion that the Pentagon was involved in the allegations was “absurd.” Aftonbladet also quoted a woman who it said made the accusation of molestation as saying: “The accusations against Assange are, of course, not orchestrated by the Pentagon or anybody else. Responsibility for what happened to myself and the other girl lies with a man who has a skewed attitude to women and a problem taking no for an answer.” The newspaper did not identify the woman. | Assange Julian;Wikileaks;Sex Crimes;Sweden |
ny0262986 | [
"world",
"middleeast"
] | 2011/12/18 | Egyptian Soldiers Chase and Beat Unarmed Civilians in Cairo | CAIRO — Egypt ’s military rulers escalated a bloody crackdown on street protesters on Saturday, chasing down and beating unarmed civilians, even while the prime minister was denying in a televised news conference that security forces were using any force. In one of the most incendiary developments, video cameras captured soldiers stripping the clothes off women they were beating on the pavement of Tahrir Square. The contradiction in the military-led government’s statements and actions appeared to represent a shift in strategy by the military council. After trying for months to preserve some credibility and collaboration with the Egyptian political elite, the ruling generals on Saturday scarcely acknowledged the demands made by their newly appointed civilian advisory council the night before that the military cease its violence and apologize to demonstrators. Instead, as the crackdown entered its second day, the military council appeared to be playing to those Egyptians impatient with the continuing protests and eager for a return to stability. Crowds of supporters turned out downtown on Saturday morning to cheer on the military police, hand them drinks of water and help them close off Tahrir Square from demonstrators massing to get in. Protesters, for their part, charged that the military rulers were provoking the clashes to derail or discredit the continuing election of a new Parliament that could challenge their power. “The military council is responsible for everything that happens,” Ziad el-Elaimy, a newly elected member of Parliament who was beaten Friday by the military police, said in a television interview. The prime minister, Kamal Ganzouri, issued his denial that the military had or would use force in a news conference on Saturday morning after more than 24 hours of street fighting in front of the military-occupied Parliament building that left 10 dead from gunshots and hundreds wounded. For most of the previous day and night, men in plain clothes, accompanied by a few in uniform, stood on top of the “people’s assembly” and hurled chunks of concrete and stone taken from inside the building down at the crowd of demonstrators several stories below. A few men in uniform were seen with them. On Saturday morning, a parliamentary building on Tahrir Square that houses a historical archive burst into flames. It was unclear who started the blaze; the military-led government blamed the protesters, while they blamed the military. Around the same time, several witnesses said, hundreds of military police officers in riot gear finally chased the demonstrators from in front of the Parliament building into Tahrir Square and then out into the side streets. They burned down a small tent city, leaving the square in flames for hours and sending a thick plume of black smoke curling over downtown. As they charged, soldiers used clubs to beat anyone they could catch. A video shown on a private Egyptian television network in the morning showed several military police officers using batons to beat civilians as they lay on the ground of Tahrir Square, and one appeared to be unconscious. Several videos on the Internet and Egyptian television showed soldiers tearing the clothes off women as they beat them in Tahrir Square. At least one of the women was wearing the traditional hijab veil and covering before she was stripped; she lay unmoving while a soldier lifted his boot to kick her bare midriff. Mohamed ElBaradei, a leading liberal and former United Nations atomic energy chief, addressed a public message to the military council over the Internet: “Did you see the pictures of the military police dragging girls and stripping them of their clothes? Aren’t you ashamed? Let me remind you: justice is above power.” Passers-by were caught up as well. A young woman getting off a bus and trying to catch a taxi to work was grabbed by soldiers and thrown to the ground, before a group of people rescued her and tucked her into a passing vehicle. As the military police were charging the square, Mr. Ganzouri, the military-appointed prime minister and a former prime minister under the ousted president, Hosni Mubarak, was declaring at his televised news conference that the only acts of violence were arson and vandalism committed by the protesters. Contradicting the accounts of civilian witnesses, he said that soldiers had come out on Friday only to protect the Parliament and cabinet buildings. He acknowledged several deaths from bullet wounds, but in an echo of the Mubarak government’s public relations, blamed unnamed third parties and said no one in the military had fired a weapon. “The events taking place in the streets aren’t a revolution,” he said. “They’re an attack on the revolution.” When a journalist asked about the widespread reports of indiscriminate beatings by military police, Mr. Ganzouri upbraided him: “Don’t repeat what you saw in media. Don’t say violence, there was no violence. What does your conscience tell you?” In a separate statement, the military council said that the soldiers had charged into Tahrir Square in self-defense after “thugs” had shot at military officers. “We have never and we will never target the revolutionaries of Egypt,” the statement said, adding that the protests “were not met with anything except self-control until the last escalation, which compelled stopping those outlaws.” In another statement late in the afternoon, the military rulers responded to the demands of their civilian advisory council by expressing “sorrow” over the bloody events of the previous day. The statement said the military was taking “all necessary measures” to stop the violence by building a concrete barrier dividing the protesters from the security guards protecting the Parliament and cabinet buildings. It pledged that an investigation would reveal “the reality of the situation.” The statement, however, fell short of the apology the council had demanded. And it suggested that the military-led government had been a powerless neutral bystander during the deadly clashes of the night before, even though much of the violence directed at the demonstrators, including the rain of rocks from atop the Parliament building, had come from areas under the military’s control. Many civilian critics of the military rulers argue that the government should be able to disperse an unruly crowd without killing people. Elsewhere in the city, thousands turned out to mourn a religious scholar from Al Azhar, the premier center of Sunni Muslim scholarship, who was killed the day before. “Yes, we are chanting inside Al Azhar, down with military rule,” mourners intoned during a funeral procession. The procession had swelled to several thousand by the time it reached Tahrir Square in the early evening, and its arrival swelled the crowd. “Every bullet makes us stronger,” they chanted. The military police by then had retreated from the square to behind a newly erected barricade between the square and Parliament, but they continued to exchange volleys of rocks with protesters on the other side. After nightfall, the military police began discharging what appeared to be fireworks at the protesters as well. There were reports that new protests against military rule had also broken out in Alexandria, Egypt’s second-largest city. There were signs, however, that at least some Egyptians were ready to side with the military against the disruption of more protests. A call-in show on a private television station interviewed a woman with a heavily bandaged head who told the story of her beating by the military police on Friday morning. But most of the viewers who called in criticized her instead of the military, urging her to go home and stop ruining the country. In the chaos on the downtown streets on Saturday, it was easy to overhear similar arguments. “Why are you here?” one man asked another near the burning archive. “I feel bad for the people who were killed, I feel bad for the sheik from Al Azhar,” came the answer. “But I can’t cross the square when I am going to work,” the first man implored. “You are delaying life.” | Egypt;Middle East and North Africa Unrest (2010- );Defense and Military Forces;Elections;Demonstrations Protests and Riots;Ganzouri Kamal el- |
ny0220698 | [
"world",
"middleeast"
] | 2010/02/28 | Iran’s Leader of Opposition Assails ‘Cult’ of Rulers | One of Iran ’s opposition leaders, Mir Hussein Moussavi , said Saturday that a dictatorial “cult” was ruling Iran — one of his most critical statements against the country’s rulers since disputed elections last summer. “This is the rule of a cult that has hijacked the concept of Iranianism and nationalism,” Mr. Moussavi said in the interview posted on his Web site, Kalameh. “Our people cannot tolerate such behavior under the name of religion.” The statements appear to be part of a renewed campaign by the opposition’s leadership to prove that they are still vital, despite a brutal crackdown by the government and their inability to bring masses of people to the streets in a recent planned protest. Last week, another opposition leader, Mehdi Karroubi, called for a national referendum to gauge the popularity of the government. The supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, followed with a statement dismissing the possibility of any compromise with the opposition, saying those who refused to accept the results of the June 12 election had no right to participate in politics. Both Mr. Moussavi and Mr. Karroubi ran in the election, which the government says was won by the incumbent, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad . The authorities claimed recently that the poor showing by the opposition at its planned rally on Feb. 11 showed that the government had managed to end the mass protests that had continued sporadically since the summer. The opposition had difficulty mobilizing in good part because the government had undertaken a widespread clampdown starting weeks before, and bused in tens of thousands of government forces. But the relatively small showing by antigovernment protesters also led to some soul- searching among the opposition, which has been re-examining its tactics and struggling to find a new catalyst for its movement. | Iran;Ahmadinejad Mahmoud;Moussavi Mir Hussein;Politics and Government;Demonstrations and Riots;Political Prisoners |
ny0209356 | [
"business"
] | 2009/12/10 | CIT Leaves Bankruptcy With Less Debt but Many Questions | The CIT Group, which started out in 1908, financing horse-drawn carriages, survived for a century before sinking into bankruptcy. But it took just 38 days for the company, one of the biggest lenders to small and midsize companies, to pull itself out of bankruptcy, a feat that, only months ago, seemed almost impossible. CIT went bust despite a $2.3 billion lifeline from Washington — money that was vaporized in its bankruptcy. On Thursday, it will enter its post-bankruptcy era with less debt but some big questions about its future. CIT’s leaders have pledged to refashion the company and reduce its reliance on short-term debt, which proved disastrous when the credit markets froze over last year. Although the company’s stock will not officially begin trading until Thursday morning, people close to the company said that premarket trading has priced the shares at about $27 each, valuing CIT at $5.4 billion. The company has shed $10.5 billion worth of debt. Its old shares, currently trading under the ticker symbol CITGQ, are expected to become worthless. CIT’s emergence from bankruptcy underscores the recovery in the financial markets and the broader financial industry. Its reorganization plan, a months-long affair orchestrated during many late nights and hours of conference calls, relies on money from private investors, with virtually no aid from regulators. It also proved that a financial firm could survive the challenges of bankruptcy court, which many financial analysts thought unlikely. “It’s an enormous achievement to have gotten the vote that you’ve gotten,” Allan L. Gropper, the federal bankruptcy judge overseeing CIT’s case, said this week in approving the reorganization plan. Still, taxpayers’ investment in CIT was wiped out by the bankruptcy, in the first realized loss in the government’s $700 billion financial rescue plan. Banking analysts say other losses may follow. And Jeffrey M. Peek, CIT’s chief executive and the architect of its ill-fated expansion, intends to step down at year-end, as the company cedes control to its creditors. CIT has hired executive search firms to find his successor and new board members. Over the last five months, Mr. Peek and his management team, together with their advisers, sweated through negotiations with creditors and lenders to come up with a survival plan. More than a half-dozen executives involved in those negotiations, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the confidential nature of the talks, retraced how the company nearly died before scraping together a rescue. Since becoming a bank holding company last December, CIT believed that it could reform itself through access to government programs available to other financial firms, including the issuing of debt backed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. But a brief phone call to Mr. Peek on July 14 from William L. Rutledge of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, denying federal assistance, took company executives by surprise — and sent them scrambling. Senior executives, who had assured clients that CIT would receive government aid, had to go back to companies like Dunkin’ Donuts, asking them how much money they needed today versus waiting a day, a week or more. In CIT’s boardroom in Midtown Manhattan, advisers kept a daily tally of the company’s dwindling cash levels on a whiteboard. With $1 billion in bonds maturing in August, CIT and its advisers approached several banks about receiving a $3 billion loan, and by late Thursday, July 16, believed they had secured financing from a group led by JPMorgan Chase. But the next day, JPMorgan informed the company that it did not have enough time to conduct proper due diligence and would not risk making a loan so close to an imminent bankruptcy filing. Jeffrey Aronson, a co-founder of Centerbridge Partners, an investment firm with a big position in CIT’s debt, later met with Mr. Peek and suggested that a group of about six large bondholders would be willing to supply an emergency loan. As CIT’s troubles grew, its major bondholders warmed to the idea of a prepackaged bankruptcy, a specific type of Chapter 11 filing that usually takes no more than two months in court and would give the company breathing room on its debt load and bond maturities. If enough bondholders supported the so-called prepack, company officials reasoned, CIT’s troubles could be solved much more quickly and elegantly. Treasury officials had expressed concern about what would happen to the government’s investment in CIT, since the preferred stock it held would almost certainly be wiped out in a bankruptcy filing. But the officials decided to stand down from a fight, opting instead to act like a normal investor. The result was a large debt-for-equity exchange offer, coupled with a solicitation of votes for a prepackaged bankrtupcy. Yet CIT officials and advisers were still consumed by a dozen other issues, including negotiating with Goldman Sachs over preserving a $2.13 billion loan made in 2008, which carried a more attractive interest rate than the company could get at that time. Only the intercession of the CIT bondholder committee helped Goldman and the company to reach a deal. By Oct. 26, CIT had appeased the concerns of major bondholders and rebuffed a challenge by Carl C. Icahn, who had acquired about $2 billion of CIT bonds. | Bankruptcies;CIT Group Inc;Obama Financial Stability Plan;Peek Jeffrey M;Treasury Department |
ny0186498 | [
"sports",
"ncaabasketball"
] | 2009/03/14 | Though Hobbled, North Carolina Gets by Virginia Tech | ATLANTA — On the grease board in the North Carolina locker room, written in blue, of course, was a simple message for the Tar Heels from Coach Roy Williams: “Find a way.” It could have easily said, “Find a different way.” The No. 1 Tar Heels (28-3) played their quarterfinal game of the Atlantic Coast Conference tournament Friday without point guard Ty Lawson, the A.C.C. player of the year, the engine of the best fast break in college basketball, who is sidelined with an injured right toe. So Carolina found another, slower gear and held off desperate Virginia Tech (18-14) for a 79-76 victory before 26,352 in the Georgia Dome. Instead of racing the floor for points, the Tar Heels were merciless in pounding the Hokies inside. Tyler Hansbrough, the 6-foot-9 senior forward, scored 28 points and collected 8 rebounds. Deon Thompson, a 6-8 junior forward, and Ed Davis, a 6-10 freshman forward, combined for 22 points on 9-of-16 shooting. The senior guard Bobby Frasor, who started in place of Lawson, played a career-high 37 minutes and had one turnover. He did not try to be like Lawson; he just moved the ball around the perimeter until it found its way inside. “It’s nice to have other guys step up and not rely on him, so when he’s out we can score without him, get the ball inside and still win,” Frasor said. In the Carolina locker room after the game, Lawson did not sound anxious to get back on the floor, especially with the Tar Heels focused on the N.C.A.A tournament and winning the national championship that eluded them last season, when they lost in the semifinals. Lawson said he was not sure if he would play in the A.C.C. semifinals Saturday against Florida State, which held off Georgia Tech, 64-62, in another quarterfinal. “It’s tough to walk on it, that’s why I have this big boot,” Lawson said. “This tournament matters, too. We have a streak going of two A.C.C. tournaments in a row, but the N.C.A.A. tournament is the bigger goal.” Teams that are not making the N.C.A.A. tournament will lament losing games after not making vital plays — a shot, a defensive stop, a free throw — in the last minute. But North Carolina has Hansbrough, who influenced the outcome against the Hokies with three plays in the final seconds. Virginia Tech trailed, 77-76, when it got the ball in the lane with less than six seconds to play. Hansbrough reached in and put a big hand on top of the ball, which tied up the Hokies’ J. T. Thompson and forced a jump ball. The possession arrow went to Carolina. The ball was inbounded to Hansbrough, who was fouled. He made two free throws with 4.6 seconds to play, making the score 79-76. Tech’s A. D. Vassallo tossed up a desperation 3-point attempt, with Hansbrough jumping at him, but it was an air ball. The Hokies probably needed a victory to get into the N.C.A.A. tournament, but may have to settle for the National Invitation Tournament. Apparently dismayed, Virginia Tech Coach Seth Greenberg walked out of the Georgia Dome resigned that his team will not be in the N.C.A.A. tournament despite eight victories in a tough conference. Greenberg knew the difference was not winning a close game down the stretch of the season, so he will go watch his daughter’s volleyball game, he said, then maybe the announcement of the tournament pairings. “It’s one stop, it’s one rebound, it’s one 50-50 ball,” Greenberg said. “It’s not just for us, it’s for other teams, too.” Carolina, meanwhile, will be a No. 1 seed for the N.C.A.A. tournament, regardless of whether it wins the A.C.C. tournament. “Tyler told me a couple of weeks ago he wished the N.C.A.A. tournament was here,” Frasor said. | University of North Carolina;Basketball;Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University;College Athletics |
ny0148179 | [
"sports",
"tennis"
] | 2008/09/03 | Two Top Men Are Pushed to the Limit at U.S. Open | By the end of the day, it seemed that all was as it should be. In the three marquee matches played during the day session at Arthur Ashe Stadium, the favorites defeated lesser-ranked opponents and advanced in the United States Open. But that did not mean that victory came easily. Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic, the second and third seeds, battled through five sets apiece to squeak by their opponents and into the quarterfinals. Only Elena Dementieva, the No. 5 seed and the women’s singles gold medalist at the Beijing Olympics, easily dispatched her challenger, defeating Patty Schnyder in two sets to advance to the semifinals. In a match that lasted 3 hours 32 minutes, Federer defeated Igor Andreev, the No. 23 seed, 6-7 (5), 7-6 (5), 6-3, 3-6, 6-3. Federer, who has won the past four Opens, dropped the first set for the first time in the Open this year. “He broke me so easily in the first game that he just made it harder,” Federer said in a courtside interview after the match. “I was just trying to stay in the match. It was really close in the second set. That was key for me to get back into the match.” Andreev, a Russian, also identified the second set as crucial. “It was, I think, a very important moment, beginning of second set where I have few break points on his serve,” he said. “It was, like, problem for him to return to make points on my serve.” The match eventually went to a fifth set, and a turning point came when Federer broke Andreev’s serve to take a 2-0 lead. With Federer seemingly in control, the drama returned at 4-2, when Andreev failed to convert on four break points in a game that went to deuce six times. Federer attacked the net, winning 58 of 84 net approaches, including 15 of 19 in the fifth set. Andreev won 12 of his 28 net approaches. Federer attributed his net play to his gold medal victory in doubles at the Olympics. “We don’t have that many guys at the net anymore,” Federer said, adding that after winning last month in Beijing, “I’m a little more confident in that.” But Federer also led in unforced errors, committing 60 to Andreev’s 42. Despite Federer’s record at the Open, skeptics had wondered if he was up to the challenge this year after losing to Rafael Nadal in the finals at Wimbledon and the French Open and after surrendering his No. 1 ranking to Nadal last month. Federer insisted that a five-set match, even given his performance this season, was more fun than stressful. “Being part of these dogfights is fun for me,” he said. Federer will face Gilles Muller of Luxembourg, a qualifier who upset the No. 5 seed, Nikolay Davydenko, in the quarterfinals. Federer laughed when he was asked if he was concerned about Muller because Muller had nothing to lose. “It’s been that way for four and a half years,” Federer said. “This is just a guy who’s got even less to lose.” Djokovic’s victory was also hard-won. After struggling against the 15th-seeded Tommy Robredo in five sets and nearly four hours of play, the third-seeded Djokovic laughed about being unsteady on his feet in a brief courtside interview. “I need to stand next to the net, otherwise I will fall down,” Djokovic said. He prevailed, 4-6, 6-2, 6-3, 5-7, 6-3, but only after calling a trainer to examine him for an injured right hip and a turned right ankle. Robredo did not escape unscathed, either, tumbling in the fifth set with the score tied at 2-2. Djokovic advanced to the quarterfinals; he will meet the winner of the Andy Roddick-Fernando González match, which was played Tuesday night. Djokovic said did not feel well when he woke up Tuesday morning, blaming a late-night match Sunday against Marin Cilic. He said adrenaline from the match with Cilic kept him up until 4:30 a.m. on Monday. “I didn’t feel well,” Djokovic said. “The moment I stepped on the court, I felt already, as you said, less energy in the tank.” His claim of multiple ailments drew skepticism from Robredo, who said after the match that he was hurting, too. “I have pain, as well,” Robredo said. “I was running like hell and my feet were burning, but I say nothing, no? I think that if you’re not fit enough, then don’t play.” Robredo seemed to come into his own in the fourth set, breaking serve to tie it at 3-3. The crowd was behind him, cheering his clever shots and booing Djokovic when he threw down his racket in disgust. In the fourth set, Djokovic said he began to doubt himself. “I didn’t know if I was able to continue going on that high level, and he was just getting into the game more and more,” he said. But he somehow found that level and moved into the quarterfinals. If the Djokovic and Federer victories came after long brawls, the Dementieva match ended more predictably. She continued her Olympic bounce by beating Schnyder, 6-2, 6-3. Dementieva won 80 percent of her serves. Schnyder squandered her only chance to take the lead in the second set. After breaking serve to tie the set at 3-3, she failed to hold hers in the next game and Dementieva took the lead. “It was a very, very important moment for me to break her again,” said Dementieva, who will play the No. 2 seed, Jelena Jankovic, in the semifinals. “I’m very happy that I was able to do this.” | United States Open (Tennis);Federer Roger;Djokovic Novak;Tennis |
ny0169225 | [
"technology"
] | 2007/03/26 | Fuzzy Critters With High Prices Offer Lesson in New Concepts | IF the face of e-commerce 1.0 was the Pets.com sock puppet, will the new face of e-commerce be a Webkinz? The cuddly stuffed animals, which are in exceedingly high demand among the elementary school set, have also gained notice among Internet executives for their ability to bridge the online and offline worlds. And although no one expects others to replicate the breakaway success of Webkinz in, say, the automotive industry, analysts said there are many lessons to be learned from these plush toys. “There’s an opportunity here to change the way retailers, manufacturers and media companies think about new concepts,” said Kenneth Cassar, an analyst with Nielsen//NetRatings, an Internet consulting group. “They need to challenge themselves to pursue new products and offerings without the burden of thinking as either an offline product or online product first.” Webkinz, which are manufactured by the privately held Ganz Corporation in Woodbridge, Ontario, break that mold by existing simultaneously in the child’s room and on Webkinz World ( Webkinz.com ). Each of the roughly 45 Webkinz animals, which sell for about $11 at retail (if you can find them), comes with its own avatar that lives on the site. Webkinz World is a cross between an online gaming site, an educational site and the virtual world of Second Life, but with animals instead of people. Youngsters may also use the site for text chats with friends with whom they have shared their online identity. The idea for Webkinz, she said, came from Howard Ganz, the company’s chief executive. “He wanted to pay attention to what kids are doing these days, and what they’re doing is going online,” said Susan McVeigh, a Ganz spokeswoman. (Mr. Ganz declined an interview request.) Ganz, which introduced Webkinz in April 2005, stopped publicly commenting on sales last year as the toys approached the 1 million mark. Since then, their popularity has spiked, with stores across the nation struggling to maintain inventory and eBay sellers demanding a steep premium for certain animals, like Sherbet the rabbit, which sold last week for about $40. Some discontinued Webkinz have been sold on eBay for well over $100, and an eBay auction for a dog and cat set that closed yesterday attracted a winning bid of $1,525. Patrick Yap, manager of B Chemist, a department store and pharmacy in Manhattan that sells toys, said he has more than 700 back orders for Webkinz. “I’m taking orders for July shipments right now,” he said. “This is bigger than Beanie Babies. With those you’re playing all by yourself. With these, you can do that, too, but you can also go on the site and chit-chat with your friends.” That is precisely the point, Ms. McVeigh said. “They get to choose how they play,” she said. “This takes everything a child loves about a plush toy — the nurturing of it, the fantasy of raising your pet — and brings it to the next level, where in the interactive world you really do look after it.” Since last April, the site has risen from 325,000 unique visitors to 2.8 million last month, according to Nielsen//NetRatings. Time spent per user has dropped off dramatically since April, when the average user logged nearly three hours per month on the site. Now the average is 11 minutes. Ms. McVeigh, of Ganz, speculates that the average may have dropped because parents may be limiting the time their children spend on the site. Mr. Cassar, of Nielsen//NetRatings said the Webkinz craze underscores the fact that the nation’s roughly 160 million Internet users spend just 26.5 hours per month online, or 5 percent of their non-sleeping hours. “But Internet-based and Internet-enabled technologies are beginning to transform the way we live the other 95 percent of our lives,” he said. “That’s a trend that may ultimately be far more important than what we do within the narrow slice of our days that we actually spend on the Web.” Online companies like Craigslist, Match.com, Meetup and Monster.com facilitate offline activity. Offline companies like Wal-Mart, Target and Gap have extended their sales online. Video game companies like Xbox now allow players to compete against others online. These companies have effectively built bridges between the offline and online worlds, Mr. Cassar said, but Webkinz is unusual in that it began as a product that “existed equally prominently in the real world and the virtual world. Other companies need to challenge themselves to pursue new products and offerings without the burden of thinking as either an offline product or an online product first.” Judging by Meetup’s recent growth, adult Internet users, too, are more actively integrating the Web with their offline lives. The company, which provides an online service that helps groups organize and meet offline, has seen a sharp upturn in business this quarter. Users are on pace to conduct more than three times the number of meetings they did in the first quarter of 2006, according to Scott Heiferman, Meetup’s chief executive, and company revenues have spiked by about 40 percent in the last three months alone. Meetup, which is privately held and based in Manhattan, does not disclose actual revenue figures, but Mr. Heiferman said it is on pace to organize roughly 75,000 meetings this quarter. The business recently began exploring an advertising model to help capitalize on the fact that marketers are increasingly interested in small communities that are passionate about a particular subject or activity. Mr. Heiferman said Webkinz is “a brilliant idea,” in that it melds the online and offline worlds. His own company’s approach, though, is different in that it appeals to people who may have had enough of exclusively online connections. “We’re living our lives more and more in front of a screen,” Mr. Heiferman said. “You can easily go through a good part of life just looking at your iPod , your cellphone, the computer, the TV, and I think there’s a feeling of, ‘O.K., I need the real world and real people and real teddy bears and real community.’ ” | Toys;Computers and the Internet;Webkinz;Children and Youth;Computer and Video Games |
ny0046845 | [
"nyregion"
] | 2014/11/20 | Mayor Bill de Blasio Takes a Day to Pursue a National Profile | WASHINGTON — For Mayor Bill de Blasio , it was a day when New York City seemed very far away. He shared a morning flight to Washington with Loretta E. Lynch, the nominee for attorney general, before heading to the White House for a meeting with Valerie Jarrett, who is President Obama’s closest adviser. At a breakfast, the mayor warned fellow Democrats to worry about the “authenticity” of Senator Rand Paul, a potential 2016 presidential candidate, and he urged Hillary Rodham Clinton, his former boss, to shift her policies leftward, adding that he would be “honored” to advise her in a presidential run. After 11 months in office, Mr. de Blasio has no dearth of headaches at home: bumpy poll numbers, the departure of a key aide under a cloud of personal problems, and a tendency toward tardiness that led him to miss the most important moment of a memorial service last week for victims of a plane crash. But on Wednesday, touring the nation’s capital for the second time in just over a month, the mayor looked undeterred in his efforts to promote himself in a loftier role: as a leader of the American left. “I think most voters now see themselves as stuck or falling backward economically,” Mr. de Blasio told Mike Allen of Politico in a breakfast interview here. “I don’t want to be hackneyed, but I think the American dream has ceased to function for a lot of families.” A sojourn to Washington is not unusual for New York mayors, and it can be a helpful way to burnish one’s profile while distracting from local vexations. In the Politico interview, Mr. de Blasio laughed off mocking New York Post headlines while offering himself as a guru for the Democratic Party , instructing its potential presidential candidates in 2016 to embrace the fight against income inequality that propelled his own ascent to City Hall. Those who might question the mayor’s certitude received a bracing riposte. Asked about a poll that showed a yawning racial divide in his approval rating, Mr. de Blasio suggested the survey, by Quinnipiac University, was based on a skewed sample. “I question whether they are getting the totality of the citizens of our city,” the mayor said. And Mr. de Blasio opined that coverage of Rachel Noerdlinger, who took a leave of absence this week as chief of staff to the first lady, Chirlane McCray, after revelations about ethical lapses and a boyfriend with a serious criminal past, was motivated by news outlets looking to “promote a worldview.” Image Mr. de Blasio sat down with Mike Allen of Politico for an interview. Credit Gabriella Demczuk for The New York Times “The essence is what matters, not the tabloid headlines,” the mayor said, adding that New Yorkers would ignore stories he deemed “counterproductive.” Mr. de Blasio ended his day among friends, at a Center for American Progress event, where he was a featured speaker along with liberal A-listers like Julián Castro, the federal housing secretary, and Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts. Prominent Democrats said there was curiosity in Washington to hear from the liberal who wrested City Hall back 20 years after the last Democratic mayor. “His campaign was masterful,” said Edward G. Rendell, a former Philadelphia mayor and Democratic national chairman. “He talked about progressive values and he won an overwhelming victory.” Mr. Rendell added, “The governmental struggles that he’s had don’t eliminate the fact that his campaign message was a very effective one.” The mayor’s visit, although carefully choreographed by his aides, was not without some surprises. Asked by Mr. Allen about his marijuana habits, Mr. de Blasio said he had not used the drug since college. He also said that living in Gracie Mansion could be isolating and that he returned to his gym in Park Slope, Brooklyn, on weekends. At one point, Mr. de Blasio, who warned against Wall Street’s excesses in his mayoral campaign, praised Lloyd C. Blankfein, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, for calling attention to income inequality. (Mr. Blankfein is on a committee for New York’s bid to host the 2016 Democratic National Convention in Brooklyn; Mr. de Blasio said on Wednesday that $10 million in commitments had already been secured.) Mr. de Blasio cautioned that Senator Paul, Republican of Kentucky, should not be underestimated as a presidential contender, saying he “evinces a certain authenticity that any good Democrat should worry about.” And asked by Mr. Allen about the best perks of his job, Mr. de Blasio, a passionate fan of Italian dining, cited a culinary benefit. “You can get into restaurants really easily,” the mayor said to laughter, adding, “I thought, oh my God, I can probably get into Rao’s now.” | Bill de Blasio;NYC;US Politics;Washington DC;Democrats;Loretta E Lynch;Valerie Jarrett;Politics |
ny0289867 | [
"business",
"dealbook"
] | 2016/01/29 | Corporate Lawyers Say They Are Spending More In-House | Chief legal officers at corporations in 41 countries say they are spending more — and hiring more staff members — in-house, according to a new study by the Association of Corporate Counsel, a legal professionals membership group, that asked 1,300 corporate lawyers and chief legal officers. The rise is being driven by more government regulatory scrutiny as corporate dealings become increasingly multinational, according to the group’s report . One-third of those responding said their companies had been the target of regulators in the last two years. One in three corporate lawyers said their companies had been targeted by regulators in the last two years, “reflecting the additional risk companies are exposed to as they increase their cross-border work and face a wider range of government scrutiny,” said Veta T. Richardson, the association’s president and chief executive. While multinationals are still outsourcing complex litigation, “corporate law departments are spending more on internal budgets than on law firms or other external legal service providers,” the association’s 2016 study found. Currently, 53 percent of the legal budget is being spent internally and 47 percent is being spent on outside legal help, the study found. Corporate legal departments are focusing on ethics and compliance issues along with regulatory concerns and data breaches, which were experienced by some 22 percent of companies in the study. That means that legal staffing has more than doubled at nearly half of the corporations, said the association, which has more than 40,000 in-house lawyers in 85 countries as members. The association said the explosive rise in its membership reflected the growing number of legal professionals at corporations. Nonetheless, 61 percent of the chief legal officers predicted that the total amount of work going to outside legal providers would remain the same in the coming year. Corporations are continuing to take a harder look at what they spend for outside law firms, and the respondents who expected to reduce outsourcing said they would increase the number of in-house lawyers in their departments in the coming year. | Legislation;Outsourcing;Companies;Lawyers;Association of Corporate Counsel |
ny0191528 | [
"us"
] | 2009/02/20 | Geronimo’s Heirs Sue Secret Yale Society Over His Skull | HOUSTON — The descendants of Geronimo have sued Skull and Bones, a secret society at Yale University with ties to the Bush family, charging that its members robbed his grave in 1918 and have kept his skull in a glass case ever since. The claim is part of a lawsuit filed in federal court in Washington on Tuesday, the 100th anniversary of Geronimo’s death. The Apache warrior’s heirs are seeking to recover all his remains, wherever they may be, and have them transferred to a new grave at the headwaters of the Gila River in New Mexico, where Geronimo was born and wished to be interred. “I believe strongly from my heart that his spirit was never released,” Geronimo’s great-grandson Harlyn Geronimo, 61, told reporters Tuesday at the National Press Club. Geronimo died a prisoner of war at Fort Sill, Okla., in 1909. A longstanding tradition among members of Skull and Bones holds that Prescott S. Bush — father of President George Bush and grandfather of President George W. Bush — broke into the grave with some classmates during World War I and made off with the skull, two bones, a bridle and some stirrups, all of which were put on display at the group’s clubhouse in New Haven, known as the Tomb. The story gained some validity in 2005, when a historian discovered a letter written in 1918 from one Skull and Bones member to another saying the skull had been taken from a grave at Fort Sill along with several pieces of tack for a horse. Ramsey Clark, a former United States attorney general who is representing Geronimo’s family, acknowledged he had no hard proof that the story was true. Yet he said he hoped the court would clear up the matter. Tom Conroy, a spokesman for Yale, declined to comment on the lawsuit but was quick to note that the Tomb was not on university property. Members of the Skull and Bones, who guard their organization’s secrecy, could not be reached for comment. Though the society is not officially affiliated with the university, many of Yale’s most powerful alumni are members, among them both Bush presidents and Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts. “Of all the items rumored to be in the Skull and Bones’s possession, Geronimo’s skull is one of the more plausible ones,” said Alexandra Robbins, the author of “Secrets of the Tomb” (Little Brown 2002), a book about the society. “There is a skull encased in a glass display when you walk in the door of the Tomb, and they call it Geronimo.” Some local historians and anthropologists in Oklahoma have cast doubt on the tale, noting that no independent evidence has been found to suggest that Geronimo’s grave was disturbed in 1918. Ten years later, the army covered the grave with concrete and replaced a simple wooden headstone with a stone monument, making it nearly impregnable. Geronimo, whose given name was Goyathlay, put up fierce resistance to white settlers, fighting the Mexican and United States armies for nearly three decades. He finally surrendered, with only 35 men left, to Gen. Nelson A. Miles on the New Mexico-Arizona border in 1886 and spent the rest of his life in prison, dying of pneumonia. Not all Apaches want to move his remains to New Mexico. The branch of the tribe that settled at Fort Sill after Geronimo died is fighting to keep the grave where it is. “There is nothing to be gained by digging up the dead,” said Jeff Houser, the chairman of the Fort Sill Apache Tribe. “It will not repair the damage to the tribe caused by its removal and imprisonment.” | Indians American;Geronimo;Suits and Litigation;Organizations Societies and Clubs;Tombs and Tombstones;Skull and Bones;Yale University |
ny0030614 | [
"business",
"media"
] | 2013/06/26 | Commercials With a Gay Emphasis Are Moving to Mainstream Media | WHEN Expedia decided to begin running on television this month a commercial it had introduced online in October, about a father’s trip to attend his daughter’s wedding to another woman, the media plan was drawn up to include Logo , the cable channel aimed at gay and lesbian viewers. But the commercial is also running on networks watched by general audiences, like CNN, History, MSNBC and the National Geographic Channel. “As we were making our Web site more personal, we wanted to get back to the idea that travel is really personal,” said Sarah Gavin, director for public relations and social media at Expedia in Seattle, and “equality is a core part of who we are.” The Expedia decision is indicative of a significant change in how marketers are disseminating ads with so-called L.G.B.T. themes, for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender. For the last two or three decades, such ads were usually aimed at L.G.B.T. consumers, placed in media those consumers watch and read, and then supplemented with tactics that included event marketing like floats in Pride Month parades. Recently, however, L.G.B.T. ads have been getting broader exposure. While targeted media and events remain part of the game plan, they are also running in mainstream media that, in addition to general cable channels, include magazines like Family Circle, newspapers like The New York Times and social media like Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter and YouTube. One goal is to reach families, friends and straight allies of L.G.B.T. consumers. “I have friends who are gay who said, ‘I sent this to my mother,’ ‘I sent this to my father,’ ” Ms. Gavin said of the Expedia commercial, which was created by the Los Angeles office of 180, part of the Omnicom Group. “We wanted to start a conversation.” Another goal is to signal support for L.G.B.T. consumers as they seek civil rights in areas like immigration and marriage. Although “niche media remain an important part of the mix,” said Billy Kolber, publisher and creative director of Man About World , a gay travel magazine for the iPad, “it’s more impactful when you see an ad in mainstream media because it says these companies are willing to offer public support.” The list of marketers that are casting a wider net with their L.G.B.T. ads reads like a Who’s Who of Madison Avenue. In addition to Expedia, they include Amazon, American Airlines, Anheuser-Busch InBev, Bloomingdale’s, Crate & Barrel, Gap, General Mills, Google, Hyatt, JetBlue Airways , Kraft Foods, Johnson & Johnson, MasterCard, Microsoft, J. C. Penney and Redhook Ale Brewery. “As society becomes more diverse, there’s more inclusive messaging, which reflects what society actually looks like,” said Michael Wilke, executive director of the AdRespect Advertising Educational Program, which works with marketers on L.G.B.T. representation in campaigns. Image The Lucky Charms mascot at the Twin Cities Pride Family Picnic in St. Paul. Credit Andy Berndt/Street Factory Media “It’s not about being inclusive to stand out,” he added. “It’s about being inclusive to blend in.” And “it’s particularly a no-brainer when you look at younger consumers,” Mr. Wilke said, who, according to polls, are far more accepting of diversity than their elders to the point where they expect to see ads that celebrate acceptance. A play on words centered on “acceptance” is the focus of a campaign under way from MasterCard Worldwide, which offers a hashtag, #AcceptanceMatters, and includes material on Facebook along with Twitter. “We think it will resonate with a lot of different people,” said JR Badian, vice president and senior business leader for U.S. digital marketing and social media at MasterCard Worldwide in Purchase, N.Y. “This gives us the opportunity to be targeted as well as bring the message to a larger audience.” The MasterCard campaign, which is being handled by R/GA in New York, part of the Interpublic Group of Companies, is composed of social media and event marketing. “We’ll see how the conversation is liked and shared,” Mr. Badian said, “and if we could extend it out to traditional media.” Like MasterCard’s effort, an L.G.B.T. campaign for Lucky Charms cereal, sold by General Mills, is composed of social media and event marketing. The agencies in the Lucky Charms campaign, which carries the theme and hashtag “Lucky to be,” are McCann Always On, part of the McCann Erickson New York unit of Interpublic, and Street Factory Media in Minneapolis. “We feel Lucky Charms is a brand of ‘magical possibilities’ for everyone and anyone,” said Greg Pearson, marketing manager for Lucky Charms at General Mills in Golden Valley, Minn., partly because each box contains three kinds of pieces shaped like rainbows, “one of the universal symbols of acceptance.” So far, almost all comments about “Lucky to be” have been “really positive,” Mr. Pearson said, without the kind of reaction suffered by a commercial with an interracial cast for another General Mills cereal, Cheerios. That drew so many vituperative remarks on YouTube that the commenting function was disabled. There are many complaints, along with more than 15,500 “likes,” on the Facebook fan page for Grey Poupon mustard, sold by Kraft Foods, regarding an L.G.B.T. ad posted on Monday depicting two men from a revived version of the brand’s signature car commercial holding hands. The negative remarks include “gross,” “sick” and “you just lost another buyer.” The ad was created by Crispin Porter & Bogusky, part of MDC Partners. For Expedia’s commercial, the response has been “mixed,” Ms. Gavin said. “There are a lot of folks who applaud us and a lot of folks who aren’t happy.” That will not deter Expedia, she added, because she believes that time is on the company’s side. “In 10 years,” she asked, “is this even a conversation we’ll have any more?” Mr. Wilke echoed Ms. Gavin. Marketers “are increasingly feeling comfortable about being inclusive,” he said. “This will continue to gather steam.” | advertising,marketing;Homosexuality;Expedia;General Mills |
ny0020242 | [
"sports",
"baseball"
] | 2013/07/12 | Final All-Star Votes Are In, and Dodgers’ Puig Is Not | Atlanta first baseman Freddie Freeman won the fan voting for the last spot on the National League All-Star roster, meaning the Los Angeles Dodgers sensation Yasiel Puig will not get to play in the July 16 game at Citi Field unless he is added as an injury replacement. Puig is off to a terrific start in the majors (hitting .394 with eight homers in 35 games heading into Thursday), but he has only been up for five weeks, leading some to question whether he belonged on the National League team. Freeman, who is batting .313 with nine homers, set a record with 19.7 million votes, and Puig was second. The league did not release the vote total for Puig. “I don’t have my head down at all,” Puig said through an interpreter. “I want to congratulate Freddie Freeman for winning the vote. I’m happy for everyone who voted. I have to keep playing. Hopefully, the best things come out for this team for the future.” In the American League, Toronto reliever Steve Delabar won with 9.6 million votes. He is 5-1 with a 1.74 earned run average in 37 appearances for the Blue Jays. BRAVES 6, REDS 5 Freddie Freeman celebrated his newly won All-Star berth by driving in four runs with three hits as host Atlanta beat Mat Latos and Cincinnati. Freeman drove in two runs with a first-inning double and added run-scoring singles in the second and fourth innings. Latos (8-3) lasted only four innings in his shortest start of the season. PHILLIES 3, NATIONALS 1 Kyle Kendrick outpitched the All-Star Jordan Zimmermann, and pinch-hitter Kevin Frandsen hit a tiebreaking double in the seventh for host Philadelphia. Image Yasiel Puig was hitting .394 with eight homers in 35 games heading into Thursday, but he was second in the fan voting for the last spot on the National League All-Star roster. Credit Christian Petersen/Getty Images Jonathan Papelbon finished for his 20th save in 24 tries. Papelbon blew two saves against the Nationals last month and allowed two runs in a 3-2 win Monday night. CUBS 3, CARDINALS 0 Edwin Jackson earned his third straight win, combining with four relievers on a four-hitter, and Anthony Rizzo drove in all the runs to lead host Chicago. St. Louis had the tying run at the plate in the ninth inning after, but Alfonso Soriano made a shoestring catch on Jon Jay’s liner to end the game. RAYS 4, TWINS 3 Matt Moore, a recent addition to the A.L. All-Star team, won his 13th game this season, Luke Scott and Evan Longoria hit back-to-back homers and the surging Rays completed a four-game sweep by beating visiting Minnesota. Moore (13-3) gave up three runs, three hits and two walks and had 10 strikeouts over seven and a third innings. Moore is taking the spot of the Texas right-hander Yu Darvish, who went on the disabled list this week because of a strained trapezius muscle. RED SOX 8, MARINERS 7 Daniel Nava hit a two-out single in the top of the 10th to score pinch-runner Jackie Bradley Jr., and visiting Boston rallied from a 5-1 deficit. ORIOLES 3, RANGERS 1 Chris Davis hit his major-league-leading 34th homer to back a strong pitching performance by Miguel Gonzalez as host Baltimore earned a split in its four-game series with Texas. Davis’s 34 home runs are the most in the majors before the All-Star break since 2001. WHITE SOX 6, TIGERS 3 A sixth-inning grand slam by Joshua Phegley gave Chris Sale some long-awaited offensive support, and visiting Chicago went on to beat Detroit in a game that included a bench-clearing altercation shortly after the White Sox took the lead. INDIANS 4, BLUE JAYS 2 Toronto was held to two hits by the rookie Danny Salazar, who was making his big-league debut for host Cleveland. Salazar pitched six superb innings — he held Toronto without a hit for the first five — and overpowered the Blue Jays, who struggled to catch up to a fastball that registered 99 miles per hour on the stadium radar gun. | Baseball;All-star game;Yasiel Puig;Braves;Dodgers;Freddie Freeman |
ny0039517 | [
"nyregion"
] | 2014/04/19 | Health Officials to Propose Tighter Monitoring of Water Tanks | In a reversal, New York City health officials are proposing stronger oversight of rooftop water tanks, which supply drinking water to millions of residents and workers each day but are often neglected by their owners. The city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene is proposing to change the health code to require building owners to submit records of annual tank inspections to the city. Currently, the owners, who are responsible for cleaning, inspecting and testing water tanks once a year, are required only to keep their records for five years and make them available upon request. The inspection records are the primary indication health officials have of the cleanliness of a water tank and the drinking water inside. The move follows an investigation by The New York Times that found that regulations governing water tanks were rarely enforced and that some tanks contained E. coli, a bacterium, found in feces, that is used to predict the presence of viruses, bacteria and parasites that can cause disease. The presence of E. coli suggested that animals had gotten into the tanks, experts said. Building superintendents interviewed by The Times reported finding dead birds and mice in their tanks, and one said a person had been sleeping in the space between the tank cover and the roof. “This is a civilized city in a first-world country,” Corey Johnson , a City Council member of Manhattan, said. “People should not be drinking water that has feces or bones or anything else in the water. It’s unacceptable.” Recent surveys by the health department showed that nearly 60 percent of landlords did not comply with existing rules. Health officials, who previously insisted that they were satisfied with their current oversight, indicate in their proposal that the changes will “promote building owner compliance with the inspection mandate and facilitate the department’s ability to monitor compliance.” The health department will hold a public hearing on the proposed changes on Monday and the Board of Health is expected to vote on the proposal on June 9. New York City’s water flows from upstate reservoirs through hundreds of miles of tunnels into city mains and arrives with only enough pressure to supply water up to the sixth floor of most buildings. Since the late 1800s, owners of taller buildings have employed pumps in the basement to carry water up to a wooden tank on the roof. Water enters the tank through a spout at the top, and when drinkers or bathers open their taps below, water exits the tank through a pipe midway down. Gravity does the rest. Image Rooftop water tanks in Manhattan. Owners are required to inspect them once a year, but the city is considering stricter rules. Credit Kirsten Luce for The New York Times From 12,000 to 17,000 water tanks crown city structures today as part of a delivery system that has barely changed in a century. Even today, new water tanks are usually built from yellow cedar. City health officials reject the idea that the tanks pose any health hazard. “Though there is no evidence that drinking water tanks pose a meaningful risk to public health, we are proposing these additional actions to help reassure New Yorker’s that the city’s drinking water is safe and encourage greater compliance with the Health Code,” the health department said in a statement. Daniel Kass, a deputy health commissioner who is in charge of water tank oversight, wrote a letter to the editor criticizing The Times’s investigation the day after it was published. He characterized the city’s water testing program as “vigorous” and said that of “the 534 samples the Health Department has collected at buildings over seven stories high since 1985, not a single one tested positive for E. coli.” But Daniel R. Garodnick , a City Council member from Manhattan, said: “Five hundred and thirty-four samples in 30 years? That’s a drop in the bucket. A few hundred inspections in over three decades probably won’t calm many nerves.” Approval of the proposal by the Board of Health is not assured. At a board meeting in March, some members expressed hesitation about even publishing the proposed regulation and soliciting public comment, given that the department had no data showing that drinking water was unsafe. One member, Bruce C. Vladeck, suggested that rather than strengthening the reporting requirement, the department should consider cutting back inspections from once a year to once every five years. Mr. Vladeck said the regulations added to the cost of housing. In his building, he said, that could save up to “$20,000 every year for the plumber.” In contrast, Mr. Garodnick’s office is working on legislation that would go even further than the health department’s proposal, requiring the health department to report landlord compliance rates to the Council annually and to create a searchable online database for water tank inspection reports. The public advocate’s office is drafting a bill to require more thorough reports from landlords, random water tank field inspections by health officials, and detailed notices of inspection results posted for residents. “We’re trying to keep it clean and safe for New Yorkers,” the public advocate, Letitia James , said. “The only way to ensure that is to shed some light on the system.” Both the Building Owners and Managers Association of New York and the Real Estate Board of New York said they supported the city health officials’ proposed changes to the code, noting the importance of keeping tenants safe and the ease of satisfying the new requirement. “Buildings are required to conduct the inspections, so submitting the paperwork will not be difficult,” a board representative said. But another landlord advocacy group, the Rent Stabilization Association, is concerned that the health department’s proposal could leave landlords vulnerable to lawsuits. “At first blush, it sounds like something to give ammunition to sue an owner,” said Frank Ricci, the group’s government affairs director. “A tenant can get sick in a building and it may or may not be from the water supply. But now, when you have this thing on file with the health department saying that you should have filed in January, but you waited until June? Someone’s going to use that for litigation purposes.” | Water;NYC;Health and Mental Hygiene Department NYC;E Coli;Water pollution;HazMat;Buildings |
ny0239943 | [
"science"
] | 2010/12/07 | Teller Ponders an Enigma: Making the Mind Jump Through Hoops | I had just put another spoonful of succulent sweet potatoes, slow-simmered with apples and pecans, onto my plate. “I’ve been invited,” I said to the guests at the holiday dinner, “to write about puzzles.” (My memory of this dialogue may be blurred by carbohydrates .) “But I’ve never found puzzles attractive,” I went on. “Why would you deliberately expose yourself to stress and frustration? You put in effort that you could have used to write a novel or cure cancer , and you come out with nothing but the solution to a previously solved problem. What’s the point? Why torment yourself?” At one end of the table sat our historian. “I love being overwhelmed,” he said, his deep-set eyes burning over his high cheekbones. “When I was a boy, I used to take seven or eight jigsaw puzzles, pour all the pieces together on a table and mix them up. Then I’d sort them by color into their respective boxes and solve them all individually. If I hadn’t done that, and learned that you can solve overwhelming problems by breaking them down, organizing them, I don’t think I could write history.” I thought for a moment. “So it’s like lifting weights in the gym? You’re not actually doing useful work, but you’re strengthening particular muscles.” At the other end of the table sat a square-jawed personal trainer from Iowa. “When I’m taking people through a workout,” he said, “I make them break down the lifting movements in their heads, like his puzzle. If you identify which muscles need to fire” — he illustrated with a turkey leg — “your workouts are efficient, and you get stronger faster.” Across the table my pretty blond stage manager seemed lost in thought. I asked her, “Do you do puzzles?” “I do,” she said. “I like the crosswords because I can call Mom up and we can work them together over the phone. She’ll ask, ‘What’s a four-letter word for knife?’ And I’ll answer, ‘Snee,’ and she’ll be so happy.” “It builds your vocabulary,” said the historian. “You learn words like ‘ort.’ ” “When my father was in his 80s,” I recalled, “every day year-round, he’d walk two blocks to the newspaper box, bring home the paper, make a cup of instant coffee and do the Jumble at the kitchen table. One January he got snowed in. I faxed him his puzzle. He liked that. But later when I sent him a book of Jumbles, he put it away with distaste. ‘I don’t want a bunch of them. I do my one puzzle a day — and then it’s out of the way.’ ” “Just lately,” said my stage manager, “I’ve been trying those English cryptic crosswords online, but I don’t get them yet. They’ll say, ‘Arrange lease for the artist,’ and somehow you’re supposed to figure out ‘arrange’ means that ‘lease’ is an anagram of something and it’s ‘for the artist,’ so it’s an easel.” “Oooof!” grunted the aspiring 29-year-old horror filmmaker, looking as though he’d been smacked in the face. “Sorry. I wasn’t reacting to what she said,” he said. He pointed to his plate. “In this cranberry sauce there was one cranberry that hadn’t burst.” He winced. “It was the sourest thing I ever ate in my life,” he said with masochistic glee. “You love anything painful,” I said. “So do you. You invent magic tricks that drive people crazy and scare them to death. You frustrate the hell out of them. But they buy tickets, don’t they? That’s just as nuts as doing puzzles.” “Pain,” our historian said softly, “when it comes by choice — whether in a jigsaw, a workout, a crossword, a magic trick or a too-tart fruit — can be pleasure.” I took that as my cue to serve the pie. At Halloween the pumpkin had been cut, stewed, mashed and frozen. Earlier today, the pale squash had been thawed and sweetened and beaten into the eggs, then cradled in flaky dough, baked to the most delicate of custards and cooled. Then at table, each slice was topped with fresh, unsweetened whipped cream. The guests went silent at the first bite. There were deep, slow sighs such as I imagine would be heard in an opium den. It was the perfect balm to the pain of the cranberry. | Crossword Puzzles;Puzzles;Writing and Writers;Magic and Magicians;Science and Technology |
ny0070616 | [
"sports",
"ncaabasketball"
] | 2015/03/18 | Personal Triumph for Thad Matta, but a Trying Year for Ohio State | COLUMBUS, Ohio — Thad Matta, who had just secured the most victories in Ohio State men’s basketball history, was celebrated at halfcourt inside Chicago’s United Center after a flawed but gutsy victory against Minnesota in the Big Ten tournament Thursday. Matta was handed a pristine white No. 298 jersey. It was an appropriate token for his 298th win, which has forever sewn him into program lore. He beamed and posed for pictures with his team, his wife, Barbara, and their daughters, Ali and Emily. Yet in the preceding two weeks, Matta had deflected questions from the news media about the inevitably of the feat with jokes and a brand of sarcastic stoicism that has become familiar in his 11 seasons in Columbus. Highs and lows are often met with humor and self-deprecation. “Honestly, I haven’t thought about it,” Matta said with a thin smile. “I think if it happens, then I may take a deep breath and say, ‘Hey, let me think about what it really means to me.’ ” At a place like Ohio State, where coaches and athletes are lionized, Matta has been careful in what he is willing to reveal to strangers. “He’s perfectly fine with coming to the gym, getting work done, going home and nothing in between,” said Aaron Craft, a former Ohio State star point guard. “When he has to, he can turn it on. But he’s never a guy that’s going to go out and seek that kind of attention and seek that kind of glory for himself.” Archie Miller, who studied under Matta for two seasons in Columbus before taking the helm at Dayton in 2011, agreed. “He wants to go about his business,” Miller said. “He wants do it in a way where he doesn’t have to be the center of attention.” An N.C.A.A. Bracket for Risk-Takers For this bracket, the more unusual that your picks are, the more points you’ll receive — so long as those picks are correct. On the night of a milestone, though — one achieved by overcoming back problems that have rendered him unable to easily walk, sit or dress himself — Matta was grateful and introspective. “The people it probably means the most for me is my wife and my two daughters,” he told reporters at a postgame news conference. “Because I’ve gone probably — well, going on eight years — with a disability. And they’re the ones that have suffered the things that I can’t do as a father — I can’t do as a husband.” In 2007, Matta, who has had back problems most of his life, was left partially disabled after emergency surgery to alleviate extreme pain. His right foot no longer works properly, and he wears a brace to prevent him from falling. His back still hurts, and it has seemed to grow worse this season. He sits on a high stool during news conferences, and he is increasingly tethered to a high chair next to the team’s bench. “I have some really, really bad days in terms of coming home after games, and they’ve got to help me get my shoes and socks off,” Matta said. “And for them to stay the course with me, it means a heck of a lot more to me for them than it does for myself.” Matta has won five Big Ten championships and four conference tournament titles and has taken his club to the N.C.A.A. tournament in eight of the last nine seasons. He led Ohio State to its first title-game appearance since the 1960s in 2007, the Final Four in 2012, the round of 8 a year later, and the round of 16 in 2010 and 2011. This season has been trying, however. One day after the team honored Matta, the Buckeyes fell to Michigan State in the Big Ten quarterfinals; it was the program’s worst showing since 2008. Ohio State (23-10) — which earned a No. 10 seed in the N.C.A.A. tournament and will play Virginia Commonwealth on Thursday — trailed by as many as 17 points less than a week after a 24-point loss to Wisconsin at home that could be considered the nadir of the team’s inconsistent season. Because of this, Matta’s personal triumph is mixed with unrest from corners of the team’s rabid fan base. “The first two comments on my game story the other night were from people that, the first one said that Matta needs to be fired and the second one agreed with him,” said Bob Baptist, who has covered Ohio State basketball for The Columbus Dispatch since 1997. “This is the night after he set the record for wins, which I thought was pretty interesting. It’s sort of illustrative of the short-attention-span fan right now.” Baptist said the program was at a crossroads with a group of underwhelming veteran players and an influx of new talent like D’Angelo Russell, the star freshman guard who is expected to be a top pick in the N.B.A. draft if he chooses to leave Ohio State. “It’s either this is one bad senior class that he’s had or the other argument is that the current staff that he has and Thad himself are not developing players well enough,” he said. “I don’t think right now there’s an answer for it. But if this continues, I think he could be in trouble.” Baptist said Matta was firmly backed by Ohio State Athletic Director Gene Smith and the administration “not only for as many games as he’s won, but for the type of person he is.” Alan Major, the former coach at Charlotte, who teamed with Matta for eight seasons as an assistant at Xavier and Ohio State from 2001 to 2010, knows Matta’s personality well. “He’s just got this kind of next-door-neighbor, blue-collar, guy-you’d-love-to-sit-on-the-front-porch-with-and-have-an-iced-tea mentality,” Major said. Even so, a disgruntled minority of fans has grown louder in recent months. Expectations are soaring here, especially after the football team won the inaugural College Football Playoff. An early exit in last year’s N.C.A.A. tournament did not help. Earlier this month in a teleconference, Michigan State Coach Tom Izzo compared Matta to Lloyd Carr, the former Michigan football coach, saying, “I think he does an incredible job, and I’ve gained so much respect for him over the years, and yet he doesn’t seem to please enough people sometimes in Columbus.” But those who know Matta best paint him as an optimist whose back struggles have led to relentless hope on the court. It is a notion apparent in interviews with his players, who maintain their goal of returning to the Final Four despite their struggles. Such outlooks might begin with how Matta embraces his pain. “You would never be able to tell unless he told you about it,” said Brad Stevens, the Boston Celtics’ coach, who began his foray into basketball under Matta at Butler in 2000. “Or excuse me, unless you asked him about it, because he’s not going to say anything.” Matta and the Buckeyes remain dreamers in a season in which they have been doubted — even by those within their passionate fan base. “The beauty of Thad is he does it and coaches for the right people and for the right reasons,” Major said. “I know he doesn’t let those things get to him. He knows who matters, and that’s the best part about him.” | College basketball;Thad Matta;Ohio State |
ny0233184 | [
"sports",
"global"
] | 2010/08/31 | Luis Scola Helps Argentina Remain Unbeaten | Luis Scola scored 32 points to help Argentina beat Angola, 91-70, in a Group A game Monday in Kayseri, Turkey, essentially securing the Argentines a place in the second round of the world basketball championships. Scola, a Houston Rockets forward, scored 17 of Argentina’s 23 points in the first quarter as the South Americans built a 3-point lead against Angola (1-2). He finished the half with 21 points as Argentina (3-0) led by 45-32 at the break. Argentina led by only 5 points after three quarters, but Carlos Delfino and Scola then took over to secure the victory. Delfino, who plays for the Milwaukee Bucks, finished with 22 points. COLD SHOOTING FELLS GERMANY Patty Mills scored 16 points as Australia cruised past cold-shooting Germany, 78-43, in a Group A game in Kayseri. A day after upsetting Serbia in two overtimes, Germany fell behind by 12-2. The lead reached 22 before Australia (2-1) took a 38-20 lead into halftime. Germany shot 26 percent from the field. Jan Jagla, who had 22 points against Serbia and hit a decisive off-balance 3-pointer, scored 2 points and did not play in the second half. SERBS BOUNCE BACK Dusko Savanovic and Marko Keselj scored 21 points each as Serbia rebounded from its loss to Germany by beating Jordan, 112-69, in Group A play in Kayseri. Serbia (2-1) used its height to dominate Jordan (0-3) inside. Center Nenad Krstic sat out the last of his three-game suspension for a pretournament brawl, but his backup, Kosta Perovic, scored 20 points. SLOVENIA HOLDS OFF CROATIA Uros Slokar and Jaka Lakovic scored 15 points each, and Slovenia beat Croatia, 91-84, in a Group B game in Istanbul. Slovenia (2-1) took the lead for good on Miha Zupan’s 3-pointer with 6 minutes 33 seconds left. Samo Udrih followed with a layup and Lakovic sank a 3-pointer, making it 77-71, and the Slovenians never let Croatia (1-2) get closer than 4 points from there. Croatia made only 15 of 26 free throws. FIRST WIN FOR IRAN Iran earned its first victory at its first world championships, blowing most of a 24-point lead before defeating Tunisia, 71-58, in a Group B game in Istanbul. Hamed Haddadi of the Memphis Grizzlies had 23 points and 13 rebounds for Iran (1-2), whose lead was down to 3 in the final minutes before it pulled away from Tunisia (0-3). EXPANDED DRUG TESTING FIBA, basketball’s governing body, said that more than 100 random drug tests would be conducted at the world championships, its largest program since beginning random drug testing in 1990. Patrick Baumann, FIBA’s secretary general, said that 48 players, two from each team, had been tested and that there would be at least 60 more tests. He said he hoped this could “banish the myth that some teams are not tested.” | Basketball;International Basketball Federation |
ny0225908 | [
"business",
"global"
] | 2010/10/19 | E.U. Finance Chiefs Near a Deal on Budget Sanctions | BRUSSELS — European Union finance chiefs appeared close to a deal on Monday to sanction countries that spend beyond their means — and, in so doing, threaten the stability of the euro — but it remained unclear how long governments would have to adjust their budgets before the measures would be imposed. Germany and the European Commission have called for nearly automatic penalties against countries that breached debt and deficit limits. Ministers still were discussing late Monday whether to compromise on that point at a time when governments across Europe were struggling to push through austerity budgets, or to maintain a commitment to a rapid system. With several countries facing strong public resistance to efforts to reduce deficits and trim debt, “a lot of member states are getting cold feet now” about making sanctions automatic, the Dutch finance minister, Jan Kees de Jager, said. Late Monday, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France said after a meeting with the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, that there should be sanctions on member states that failed to take measures to reduce their budget deficits within six months, Reuters reported from the French town of Deauville. Under a possible compromise, European governments still would have a last chance to repair their budgets before any sanctions kicked in, according to a copy of the draft conclusions obtained by Bloomberg News. But Reuters reported late on Monday that governments were nearing agreement on almost automatic sanctions, even as they discussed how soon they should kick in. The recommendations by the so-called E.U. task force on economic governance are expected to be presented at a meeting of national leaders on Oct. 28 and 29 in Brussels. The task force is chaired by the European Union president, Herman Van Rompuy. Olli Rehn, the E.U. commissioner for monetary affairs, said the meeting Monday, which was held in Luxembourg, was “the moment of truth for E.U. member states, whether they are genuinely for reinforced economic governance or not.” But it is still unclear whether investors, whose skepticism about the solidity of some countries’ finances has driven up borrowing costs, will be satisfied. Some financial analysts sounded the alarm Monday at earlier reports of the compromise. Easing the timing of sanctions “would represent a remarkable concession at this juncture” by Germany that was “attributable to a lack of support on the part of euro-area member states” for tougher measures, Thorsten Polleit of Barclays Capital wrote in a research note. In reality, doubts about the ability of the European Union to enforce budget limits may well have persisted anyway. An existing budget treaty called the Stability and Growth Pact already requires E.U. members to keep their public deficits under 3 percent of gross domestic product and public debt at no more than 60 percent of G.D.P. Many European countries have deficits that exceed those limits. But the sanctions in that pact — like stiff fines — have never been imposed because of a lack of political will. France insisted Monday that the compromise represented progress. “Look at the whole picture: it’s a massive strengthening of the pact,” the French finance minister, Christine Lagarde, said, according to Bloomberg News, apparently referring to the earlier pact. France is facing protests, demonstrations and possible shortages as it tries to push through fiscal changes, including raising the retirement age. Strikes linked to austerity programs also have rattled Spain and Greece, which triggered the euro crisis this past spring when the true scale of its debt became known. The story is different for Germany, the biggest contributor to financial support for Greece and to a stabilization fund for the euro worth €750 billion. The German public has sought assurances that the Greek situation can never happen again. The European Commission, supported by Germany, has been calling for measures to increase the likelihood that the European Union would impose sanctions. These would include a so-called reverse voting mechanism, whereby governments would have had to vote to stop the imposition of sanctions, rather than vote in favor of sanctions. | European Union;Budgets and Budgeting;Credit and Debt;Embargoes and Economic Sanctions |
ny0163412 | [
"politics"
] | 2006/02/01 | Mine Safety Nominee Fields Tough Questions From Senators | WASHINGTON, Jan. 31 - The Bush administration's nominee to be the nation's top mine safety regulator faced tough questioning on Tuesday at a Senate confirmation hearing that reflected competing visions of a proper oversight role. Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the ranking Democrat on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, suggested that the nominee, Richard M. Stickler, might be too cozy with the mine industry to move the Mine Safety and Health Administration, which he would head, toward stiffer enforcement. "Mr. Stickler's history is long on coal production experience but short on ensuring worker safety," said Mr. Kennedy, referring to the nominee's three decades of management experience in the industry. The senator added that an aggressive leader was needed to prevent tragedies like the two accidents that killed 14 miners in West Virginia in January, and said, "I'm concerned that Mr. Stickler may not be that person." But Mr. Stickler, who worked for BethEnergy Mines of Amity, Pa., for 30 years before heading the Pennsylvania Bureau of Deep Mine Safety from 1997 to 2003, said, "I believe I have the background and experience to do this job." "I have been an underground miner," he said, adding, "I know what it feels like to lose men in tragic mine accidents." The committee chairman, Senator Michael B. Enzi, Republican of Wyoming, endorsed the administration's preference that oversight agencies work in partnership with industry rather than act as taskmaster. "We need to realize that workplace safety is a team effort," Mr. Enzi said. "There are no adversaries in the effort to promote workplace safety." But Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, pressed Mr. Stickler on whether he would be willing to push the agency, which has been criticized as lax in enforcing its own regulations, to play a tougher role. "Are you going to move forward in an aggressive direction," Ms. Murray asked, "or are we going to hear more of the voluntary philosophy of they will do the right thing if we just sit back and let them?" Mr. Stickler said he planned to study the regulations and make whatever changes he could. "But generally I think the current laws are adequate," he added. Mr. Enzi disagreed with the view that the mine safety agency was headed in the wrong direction. "Last year the total number of mine fatalities was the lowest ever recorded," he said. "The injury rate in the mining industry was also the lowest on record. That tells me that the industry has made strides improving and promoting workplace safety." Indeed, another Republican, Senator Johnny Isakson of Georgia, said that since 2001, the annual number of coal mine fatalities per 1,000 mines had been cut nearly in half, to 11.1 from 19.6. Mr. Isakson also voiced confidence in Mr. Stickler's commitment to worker safety, citing his experience as an underground manager, superintendent and shift foreman. "He is a man who, for most of his adult life, has wiped the coal dust off his boots every night," Mr. Isakson said. The committee has not yet set a date for a vote on Mr. Stickler's nomination. If confirmed by the full Senate, he will succeed David G. Dye, acting administrator of the mine safety agency, which has been without a permanent chief for a year. | SENATE;KENNEDY EDWARD M;BUSH GEORGE W;STICKLER RICHARD M;ACCIDENTS AND SAFETY;LABOR;MINES AND MINING;COAL;BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION;REGULATION AND DEREGULATION OF INDUSTRY |
ny0197966 | [
"world",
"europe"
] | 2009/07/02 | School Built on Cemetery Provides Lesson in History | TOLEDO, Spain — As this medieval hilltop city baked in the afternoon heat, a group of Jewish leaders gathered beside a freshly dug grave and lowered into it small bundles of flaking, ancient bones. With prayers and a plea for forgiveness for disturbing the peace of more than 100 medieval souls, they laid them to rest in the cool, reddish earth. The quiet ceremony in late June concluded months of delicate negotiations between Jewish groups and Spanish authorities over the fate of the remains of 103 Spanish Jews whose graves were excavated last year during the construction of a school building in a suburb of this historic city. The exhumation drew international condemnation from Jewish representatives and became an important battleground in the quest to preserve Jewish cemeteries all around Spain, remnants of a thriving community that made Toledo its capital before being expelled by Spain’s Roman Catholic monarchs in 1492. The dispute pitted the exigencies of modern society against the rights of a scattered people for whom a permanent tomb is a crucial religious requirement. It stirred friction between Jewish groups eager to protect their heritage but divided over how to deal with a secular government. “Toledo is central to Jewish history,” said David Stoleru, a co-founder of the Center of Studies Zakhor in Barcelona, a research group dedicated to preserving Jewish heritage. “The state has a duty to protect that legacy.” “This issue has international repercussions,” Mr. Stoleru said. “It’s not just affecting the Jewish community in Spain but the sensibility of an entire people.” The controversy began in September, when builders digging a new foundation at the Azarquiel High School discovered dozens of graves, believed to be part of a Jewish cemetery dating from around the 13th century. The cemetery may extend well beyond the grounds of the school; Mr. Stoleru said he recently saw bones in the ground at another nearby construction site. The government of Castilla-La Mancha, the parched region of which Toledo is the tourist-mobbed capital, halted the digging and stored the remains at a museum pending discussions with the Federation of Jewish Communities of Spain, which represents Spain’s 40,000 Jews. Jewish representatives suggested building a raised foundation to sit above the graves but were told this would be difficult and expensive, according to rabbis and government officials involved in the talks. María Soledad Herrero, who runs the regional government’s culture department, said the authorities had to balance the needs of history with those of students. “Nobody knows the importance of Spain’s Jewish heritage better than we in Toledo,” she said by telephone. “But we can’t put 1,000 pupils on the street.” As talks dragged on, the economic pressure grew, and in February the authorities ordered construction to restart. The facts on the ground built their own momentum: by mid-June, a foundation had been laid and the skeleton of a two-story building stood above the grave site. Meanwhile, international protests spread to New York , Israel and Canada. Rabbi David Niederman, president of the United Jewish Organizations of Williamsburg , visited Spain to protest the exhumation, which he said was tantamount to a second expulsion. Thousands of black-clad Orthodox Jews gathered in a Brooklyn hotel in May to mourn the desecration. Finally, on June 18, the parties agreed to bury the remains close to the original graves but clear of the construction site. Dalia Levinsohn, secretary general of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Spain, hailed the agreement as the best solution available and dismissed criticism from groups that advocated a harder line. “We did what we could,” she said by telephone. “If you kick up a big fuss, the next time someone finds remains they won’t say a word to us.” However, Toledo’s symbolism made it an important, and distressing, precedent, preservationists and religious leaders said. “This is not an example we want to repeat,” said Rabbi Moshe Bendahan, Spain’s chief rabbi, who helped to broker the agreement. “The model would be to not excavate the remains in the first place.” Religious representatives in Toledo said the city should seize on a revival in interest in Spain’s Jewish past to promote understanding. The city, which is home to two of Spain’s last three medieval synagogues, but has virtually no practicing Jewish population, flaunts its history: its cobblestone streets are lined with shops selling swords, pottery and medieval figurines, and a small tram packed with tourists curls past its monuments. The regional government has shown a willingness to sacrifice modern construction for the sake of preserving historic sites: three years ago it stopped plans by a private developer to build 1,300 apartments in Toledo after diggers uncovered a Visigothic town. The 210-acre site is now protected and is set to be transformed into a museum and research center. Toledo is by no means the first city to face controversy over a Jewish burial site in Europe, where preservationists have battled exhumations from Prague to Vilnius, Lithuania. The remains of more than 150 people were exhumed from a medieval cemetery in Tarrega, in the Catalonia region, two years ago and reburied in a cemetery in Barcelona. Nor is the news all negative: in May, Catalonia’s regional government declared the Jewish cemetery on Mont Juic, in Barcelona, a cultural heritage site. Ms. Levinsohn said the federation would seek to sign protocols with Spain’s 17 regional governments to better safeguard Jewish cemeteries. Under Spanish law, when ancient human remains are found they are exhumed and stored for archaeological study. Jewish preservationists said Spain should also identify and map what Jewish leaders say they believe could be hundreds of unmarked cemeteries. For Mr. Stoleru, the issue of Jewish graves raises questions about how modern, secular Spain reconciles itself with dark chapters of its history, like the expulsion and forced conversion of thousands of Jews and Muslims during the Inquisition. “We need to reflect much more deeply about the expulsion and use history to inform our daily actions,” he said. “Jewish heritage in Spain should not be a museum piece. It should be a tool for teaching tolerance and diversity.” | Toledo (Spain);Jews and Judaism;Cemeteries;History |
ny0281063 | [
"sports",
"hockey"
] | 2016/10/06 | To Enhance Scoring, N.H.L. Looks to Shrink the Goalie | BUFFALO — At 6 feet 5 inches and 235 pounds, Buffalo Sabres goaltender Robin Lehner is big even by N.H.L. standards, able to block much of the net by using his bulk. Yet he has noticed during the past several seasons that his counterparts tend to eclipse the net, too. “I know what all the goalies around the league look like with their pads on,” Lehner said. “Some of the small guys look the biggest.” The reason: supersize and layered equipment. “A guy that’s 175 shouldn’t have a chest protector where he looks like he’s a 350-pound guy,” Lehner said. “I don’t think anyone should have pants underneath their pants. There’s goalies that have pants underneath their pants. That’s a fact. People in the league know it.” Last year, the N.F.L. endured scandal with accusations that the New England Patriots had deflated footballs to gain an advantage. In the N.H.L., complaints center on goalies’ inflating their profiles to better stop pucks. The N.H.L. and the players’ union are in the process of overhauling standards governing the size and design of goaltenders’ equipment. They plan to roll out slimmer-fitting pants and chest protectors and beefed-up enforcement during the coming season, which begins next Wednesday. “It’s basically, we want to have fairness that your gear shouldn’t make you a better player, giving you an advantage over your athleticism,” said Mathieu Schneider, special assistant to the executive director of the players’ union. “The idea is that it creates more goal scoring as well.” Image The Islanders’ Jaroslav Halak, at 5-11, is expected to be the only No. 1 goaltender on an N.H.L. team this season who is shorter than 6 feet. Credit Seth Wenig/Associated Press Despite an increased emphasis on calling obstruction penalties to open up the game, scoring has remained flat, and the league and the players’ union continue to tinker with rules. In the meantime, goaltenders continue to get bigger and better at stopping the puck. Ben Bishop of the Tampa Bay Lightning is 6 feet 7. The only expected No. 1 goaltender on an N.H.L. club who is shorter than 6 feet is Jaroslav Halak of the Islanders, who is 5-11. During the past 10 seasons, only one goalie under 6 feet — 5-11 Tim Thomas, with the Boston Bruins in 2008-9 and 2010-11 — has won the Vezina Trophy, awarded to the N.H.L.’s top goaltender. “If he’s not 6-foot-1, 6-foot-2, in the draft, you don’t even look at him unless he’s really special,” said Martin Brodeur, assistant general manager for the St. Louis Blues. Brodeur, who is 6-2, retired in 2015 as the N.H.L.’s career leader in wins (691) and shutouts (125). During his career, he was involved with the players’ union’s effort to reduce the width of pads to a maximum of 11 inches, from 12. “I’m sure goalies are tired of getting targeted all the time,” he said. “I couldn’t care less what guys wore. I felt more comfortable with smaller equipment, so everyone was always asking me questions about it. If I felt I could play with bigger equipment, trust me, I would have done it.” Three years ago, in the most recent changes to goalies’ gear, the coverage of the pads from the knee to the pelvis was reduced by 10 percent. But scoring did not rise. The average of goals per game has hovered just below 2.8 per team during the past six seasons, according to Hockey-Reference.com . In the meantime, save percentage increased to .915 over the past two seasons, from .914 in the 2013-14 season. Like Brodeur, some other goaltenders said they felt more agile and effective with diminished pads. “There’s a chance that happens with this,” Schneider said about slimmed-down gear. “When you look at the size and athleticism of guys today, at all positions but particularly in goal, these guys are incredible athletes. Gone are the days of the doughnut-eating, cigarette-smoking goalie.” The new pants will be more rounded and conform to a goalie’s body, Schneider said, in an attempt to reflect body proportions. Manufacturers have made prototypes, but only select goalies have seen them, including Halak, who helped Team Europe to a runner-up finish at the World Cup of Hockey in Toronto last week. “I tried them on, but I haven’t had a chance to try them in a practice yet,” he said. “Once we get back to our teams, there will be pants waiting for each of us over here, and we have to get used to them quickly. It’s not that big of a difference.” Schneider said the rollout for the new pants was still undetermined, but he was confident they could be implemented during the coming season. The design for a new chest protector has proved more challenging, with some goaltenders citing concerns that safety will be compromised by a streamlined design. Schneider said the first set of prototypes went out to select players in July, but it is unlikely they will be introduced this season. The pants and the chest protector were originally set to be ready by the start of the season. But Schneider said continuing feedback from goaltenders and delays with manufacturers had pushed back the timeline. Once the new equipment arrives, enforcement will be robust. “The first goalie that gets a suspension or a fine won’t be happy about it,” Schneider said, “but the idea is that we’re doing this and we’re not going to do it halfway.” Oversight will be handled at multiple levels, said Bill Daly, the N.H.L.’s deputy commissioner. “There’s a clearinghouse,” he said. “All of the pads and pants will be approved in advance by hockey operations. The only thing shipped to the clubs should be compliant equipment. Then there are spot checks by hockey operations during the course of the season. And the officials have the ability to police during games.” Lehner, who has not seen any of the new prototypes, said he looked forward to equipment that was more properly sized. “If I could go the same size ratio to my body as some of the smaller guys doing it, I would look huge,” he said. Whatever their personal dimensions or preference for equipment, goaltenders have agreed on one thing. When asked if they would prefer to alter their equipment or make the nets bigger, the response was unanimous, Schneider said with a chuckle: No one wanted to make the nets bigger. | Ice hockey;NHL;Jaroslav Halak;Robin Lehner |
ny0237295 | [
"technology",
"personaltech"
] | 2010/06/10 | A Custom Wardrobe Is Available Online | A few weeks ago, FedEx dropped off an enormous box of clothes picked out for me by Carrie Harrison, my personal style consultant. Though we’ve never met in person, Ms. Harrison, a former clothing retailer who recently became a personal shopper, had somehow chosen several items perfectly suited to my tastes. There were many lovely shirts, an amazing pair of designer jeans and brown leather zip-up boots that will garner several compliments for my dazzling sense of fashion. I don’t deserve those compliments. As a writer who works at home, I prefer get-ups involving pajama pants, a sweatshirt and Crocs. I rarely go shopping for clothes, and when I do, I’m quick and robotic: if I find a pair of comfortable pants, I like to buy several in different colors to make them last for years. In other words, I’m a regular guy — if you don’t know someone like me, you probably are someone like me. That makes me the perfect customer for Trunk Club, an ingenious new online personal-shopping service that aims to turn schlubby fellows like me — or, say, your dad or your husband — into the sort of refined gentleman George Clooney might play in a movie. When you give Trunk Club as a gift, your style-challenged recipient is assigned a personal consultant. Using a webcam and Skype, he and the consultant will chat about his life and sense of style. Ms. Harrison asked me about my work, how often I have formal meetings, how often I go out for fun and whether my wife likes what I wear. (Usually, I think.) She also asked about my favorite colors, the weather where I live and how adventurous I tend to be in my fashion (I decided it was best not to tell her about my tuxedo T-shirt). Based on a meeting like this, Trunk Club sends your man a big box of clothes. He tries on everything while the consultant watches over Skype, offering advice on what works and what doesn’t. Trunk Club charges only for the clothes you keep; you send back the items that don’t suit you. There are no monthly membership fees, and the consultant’s time is gratis. Just as with Netflix, shipping both ways is free. The service can be close to revolutionary for men who aren’t fond of shopping for themselves, but who need nice clothes anyway — which Trunk Club is betting constitutes a large audience. “I should be careful not to make too broad a generalization, but I think most people would accept that women are more prone to enjoy shopping than men,” said Brian Spaly, the chief executive of Trunk Club. “Men are more likely to abhor shopping. They still want to look good, but they don’t enjoy the process.” You might also consider giving Trunk Club to a young man who’s just finished college and is looking for a new wardrobe. This gets to the magic of Trunk Club’s personalized service — it works for anyone, for virtually any situation. You tell the consultant what you need clothes for (a first job, a round of interviews on Wall Street, speed-dating night), and she’ll happily pick out a range of options. The service isn’t cheap. Trunk Club deals in upscale designer brands, and gift certificates come in denominations of $250 and above. The labels in my box included Jack Spade, AG, Perry Ellis, and Bed|Stu. (Don’t worry, I hadn’t heard of many of them, either). Shirts go for around $100, jeans for more than $150, and those shoes that I loved were $190. The prices are comparable to what you’d pay in a high-end department store, but I found the process much more enjoyable than going to the mall. For one thing, it’s luxurious to have someone else shop for you — there’s a sense of being pampered that is itself worth the cost of the gift. What’s more, if your recipient doesn’t have a very good eye for fashion, the clothes he’ll get through Trunk Club will probably trump the outfits he’d find if he braved the mall. Both my wife and my dinner companions praised a Trunk Club-provided shirt I wore out one night; I was candid about getting a consultant’s help, but other men can keep it a secret. The truly lazy man might find even Trunk Club too demanding. For him, there’s Manpacks.com , a sock and underwear subscription service. The company will send men a new pack of undergarments every three months; prices start at $11 a pack (including shipping) and can go up to more than $40, depending on the number and brands of socks, undershirts and underwear selected. Another service, Blacksocks.com , dismisses even that small bit of decision-making. Its “sockscription” will send you pairs of identical black socks every few months — the theory being that black socks go with everything, and they can never get mismatched. The price of a year’s subscription starts at $89 including shipping, for which you’ll get three deliveries of three pairs of socks. Both Manpacks and Blacksocks offer gift certificates. Then there’s ShirtsMyWay.com , which tries a different tack in getting men to dress better: total customizability. The site offers a sophisticated design tool that allows you to choose every aspect of your shirt, down to the color of the thread around the buttonholes. (There are more than seven trillion different fabric and style configurations, the company says.) Once you hit submit, your designs are whizzed off to ShirtsMyWay’s production center in China, where a tailor and team produce a shirt to exact specifications. Designing your own shirt sounds more difficult than picking one out at the store, but I found it to be much easier. That’s because you don’t have to hunt for your exact size — everything is tailored to your fit — and you can order several different colors in the same general style. The service also makes a perfect gift for fellows in hard-to-find sizes; for a big-and-tall or small-and-short guy who has trouble finding well-fitted shirts elsewhere, ShirtsMyWay may be a savior. Prices vary depending on the fabric, but I made a wonderful shirt for $125. And I didn’t have to leave the house to do it, either. | Computers and the Internet;Shopping and Retail;Fashion and Apparel |
ny0039475 | [
"world",
"europe"
] | 2014/04/10 | Berlin’s Over-Budget, Behind-Schedule Airport Becomes an Attraction | BERLIN — In the early days of aviation, it was common for people to visit airports simply to stand on observation decks and watch the planes come and go. This city’s new airport is attracting tourists for the opposite reason: a conspicuous lack of passengers and planes after a series of delays and bungles that have driven its cost billions of dollars over budget and pushed its opening back indefinitely. Part of the appeal seems to be the chance to gawk at evidence that Germany — practically synonymous with precision and efficiency — could fail in such a spectacular fashion. Scheduled to open in November 2011, Berlin Brandenburg Willy Brandt Airport began offering public tours of the construction site after ground was broken in 2006. Since then, about one million people have signed up, said Ralf Kunkel, an airport spokesman. And business seems to have picked up even more as the problems have mounted. One budget travel agency began offering vacation packages last spring — two nights in a nearby hotel and a trip to the beleaguered airport in a double-decker tour bus. One recent Sunday afternoon, 16 sightseers and their guide, Elisa Naundorf, a lively young woman in tall black boots and a red-and-white parka, made their way to the airport’s Infotower, a 105-foot-tall triangular structure with an observation deck above and a museum and gift shop below. Before ascending the tower’s 171 steps, tourgoers could buy beach balls and baseball caps, umbrellas and USB sticks, all emblazoned with the airport logo. From one shelf, a plush blue ant wearing a miniature hard hat and overalls seemed to look on as visitors handed over $13.50 for the tour. History is an intrinsic part of Berlin’s backdrop, and more than a few sights here reflect its turbulent past. For some, the airport tour offered a refreshing change of scenery from the more weighty tributes to victims of Nazi persecution or monuments to the Red Army in the city’s central quarters. “I had seen enough memorials,” said Marlis Lippold, 48, of Osnabrück, in western Germany, who was spending the weekend in Berlin with friends. “I wanted to see why they’re still not finished out here.” From the lofty observation deck, one could see large tarps in the shape of X’s unfurled over an inactive runway, empty parking lots and four decommissioned jets, their engines wrapped in protective yellow covers, parked in front of a hangar. Amid the lack of progress, tourgoers learn, the airport’s builders and planners have sought ways to prevent the infrastructure from atrophying. Every weekday at 10:26 a.m., for instance, the railway company Deutsche Bahn sends empty subway trains through a tunnel leading out to the airport. The lonely journeys keep air in the tunnel moving so the tracks do not rust. It is anecdotes like this, often lampooned in the German news media, that have roused the curiosity of the many people eager to see how things are coming along, or how they are not. Germans are also curious to see how their tax money is being spent, after reports that the empty airport consumes more electricity each day than the city’s still-functional Tegel Airport , with its 400-plus flights a day, and that cleaning costs for the empty main terminal are $200,000 a month. “I was here a year ago, and I wanted to see if anything had changed,” said Felix Ritter, 20, a law student from Berlin. “It has been so mismanaged. What a waste of money.” The project may wind up costing upward of $5.8 billion — $1.6 billion more than originally planned — according to Mr. Kunkel, the airport spokesman. The joint ownership between the states of Berlin and Brandenburg and the federal government means that German taxpayers will foot the bill for any cost overruns. In a damage-control effort, Hartmut Mehdorn, the head of the company charged with building the airport, last year ordered that the construction site be tidied up. Fences were dismantled, and piles of building equipment were removed. Since then, at least superficially, the airport has given an impression of being ready for business. On the recent tour, participants wanted to know why the hundreds of problems delaying the opening — not the least of which is a defective fire safety system that courses through the entire building — had not been recognized sooner, and who was ultimately responsible for the mismanagement. The most pressing question, however, was about when the airport would finally open. While the airport is the largest construction project languishing in Germany, it is not the only major one. The Elbe Philharmonic Hall in Hamburg will be finished six years later than expected and cost about $700 million more, while the underground expansion of Stuttgart’s main train station is expected to be finished in 2021, 11 years late, and cost up to $2 billion extra. As the bus approached the main terminal along Melli-Beese-Ring, named after the first German woman to receive a pilot’s license, passengers whipped out their cellphones to snap pictures of the towering steel, glass and concrete structure. At 10,000 tons, the structure’s roof weighs about the same as the Eiffel Tower, according to Ms. Naundorf, the tour guide. Through the building’s glass facade, visitors could see check-in counters of polished nutwood and computer screens wrapped in plastic. Clusters of stanchions stood near orange construction cones. Bored-looking security guards in bright yellow vests watched the main entrance. The bus crept past the Steigenberger Hotel , opposite the airport’s main terminal, another victim of the delays. For months, cleaning crews have gone from room to room, turning on faucets and opening windows to keep the hotel fresh for when the first guest finally arrives. But when that will be remains unclear. The original 2011 target has been pushed back four times — the last time indefinitely — because of a number of budgetary and technical problems. Last year, the airport’s managers compiled a to-do list of hundreds of items that must be checked off before the airport can open. Mr. Mehdorn, the head of the building company, has said that although an official opening date remains uncertain, he hopes to be done with construction and any additional repairs by the end of this year. But tourgoers had their doubts. “I’m generally an optimistic person,” said Mr. Ritter, the law student, “just not when it comes to this airport.” | Berlin;Airport;Construction;Travel,Tourism;Willy Brandt;Germany |
ny0226576 | [
"business"
] | 2010/10/08 | Stock Prices Slip Ahead of September Jobs Report | Stocks edged lower Thursday, backing away from early gains, as uncertainty built up ahead of a crucial report on the labor market. The Dow Jones industrial average came within two points of 11,000 before turning lower for most of the day. The Dow hasn’t traded above that level since May 4, about a week after reaching its highest point of the year. Slightly better news on claims for unemployment insurance gave stocks an early lift, but the gains faded quickly as traders opted for caution ahead of Friday’s employment report from the Labor Department, the most crucial piece of news on this week’s economic calendar. Stocks are coming off a historically strong performance in September, and analysts say the market will need significant doses of positive news on the economy, corporate earnings or, preferably, both before heading decisively higher again. The Dow Jones industrial average gained 10.4 percent in September, but is still 2.1 percent below its 2010 high reached on April 26. In economic news, first-time claims for unemployment insurance fell last week, a better result than analysts were expecting. Retailers including Macy’s, Abercrombie & Fitch and Limited Brands reported better-than-expected monthly sales, which initially provided a lift to the market. The retail sales news was positive, but “there’s not enough to move the needle given that we’ve got the big jobs report” Friday, said Hank Smith, chief investment officer at Haverford Investments. The Dow Jones industrial average fell 19.07 points, or 0.17 percent, to close at 10,948.58. The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index fell 1.91 points, or 0.16 percent, to 1,158.06, while the Nasdaq composite rose 3.01 points, or 0.13 percent, to 2,383.67. There is a wide range of expectations for how Friday’s jobs report might turn out, said Edward P. Crotty, chief investment officer at Davidson Investment Advisors. Even upbeat results might not be enough to drive stocks significantly higher. “If the number is good, there will be skepticism it’s not sustainable,” Mr. Crotty said. Claims for unemployment insurance have been falling steadily in recent weeks, but still indicate that employers are not ramping up hiring. The payroll company ADP said Wednesday that private employers trimmed jobs in September for the first time in seven months. Earnings reporting season got under way after the market closed Thursday when the aluminum maker Alcoa became the first company in the Dow Jones industrial average to report quarterly results. Alcoa’s net income fell 21 percent because of lower metals prices, but the results still beat analysts’ expectations. PepsiCo reported mixed results earlier in the day. The beverage and snack maker said its third-quarter profit jumped in part on revenue gains after its acquisition of its two largest bottlers earlier this year. Earnings matched expectations, but the company narrowed its earnings outlook to a level below analysts’ forecasts. PepsiCo fell $2.01, or 3 percent, to $66.10. Limited Brands shares rose $1.05, or 3.8 percent, to $28.64, while Abercrombie & Fitch jumped $3.44, or 8.9 percent, to $42.03. Macy’s rose 15 cents, to $23.85. Bond yields remained near their lowest levels since January 2009 as traders expected the Federal Reserve to step up its purchases of Treasury issues to lower interest rates and encourage borrowing. Cliff Draughn, president and chief investment officer at Excelsia Investment Advisors, said the Fed could act as early as its next meeting, which wraps up Nov. 3. The timing of the Fed re-entering the Treasury market hinges on how the investors react to election results on Nov 2. The Treasury’s benchmark 10-year note rose 4/32, to 102 3/32, and the yield slipped to 2.38 percent from 2.40 percent late Wednesday. The mortgage buyer Freddie Mac said rates on traditional 30-year fixed-rate mortgages reached their lowest level on records dating back to 1971. The dollar continued to fall against other major currencies as traders expected interest rates in the United States to fall further. Currencies with higher interest rates become more attractive to foreign exchange traders when United States rates fall. Gold, which is considered a safe alternative to the dollar, hit another record of $1,366 an ounce early Thursday before pulling back to $1,333.55 an ounce. | Stocks and Bonds;Currency |
ny0239170 | [
"nyregion"
] | 2010/12/27 | Christie, Cuomo and Malloy Have Much in Common | They’re not exactly a matched set, but when life as we know it resumes after the New Year, the governors of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut will have a lot in common. All will have backgrounds as prosecutors — Gov. Chris Christie as a federal prosecutor in New Jersey, and the incoming governors of New York and Connecticut, Andrew M. Cuomo and Dannel P. Malloy , as a New York attorney general and an assistant district attorney in Brooklyn, respectively. These days, a prosecutor’s ability to make a point clearly and sell it hard is no small skill. All three are considered high-energy, hard-charging types rather than amiable dealmakers or Clintonesque charmers. All three will encounter horrific fiscal challenges in high-tax states. All operate in largely Democratic states that have seen a governor forced to resign within the last seven years. All three follow predecessors who didn’t set the world on fire. All could be asked: Why would you want this job? The roads diverge from there, but how each fares could be an illuminating case study for governing in hard times. Mr. Christie, the only Republican among the three, is the best-known quantity, having actually had to serve as governor over the past year. So far, he’s enthusiastically embraced a model of governing as armed combat. That persona has made him a hot property in national Republican politics. The jury’s still out on how well it is working in New Jersey. The latest Quinnipiac University poll showed him with a 46 percent approval rating among New Jersey voters, compared with 44 percent disapproving. That’s down from 51-to-38 percent in November. Almost two-thirds said they would not vote for him as president. The most recent Rutgers-Eagleton poll showed him as perhaps the most polarizing governor in recent New Jersey history, with the second-highest “poor” rating for a first-year governor in the poll’s history and one of the highest ratings of “excellent.” Mr. Christie is facing a Democratic Legislature, but his relative success in driving against traffic offers lessons. The upside, said Prof. David P. Redlawsk, a Rutgers political scientist and director of its poll , is that Mr. Christie personifies the appeal of politicians with clear positions and beliefs, even if they’re not always popular. “People respect tough leadership in tough times,” he said, adding, “You’ve got to be able to say, ‘This is who I am and what I believe.’ ” The downside is that the politician as Terminator goes only so far. “Wielding a meat ax is something best done with finesse rather than bravado,” said Prof. Ross K. Baker, another Rutgers political scientist, adding, “There’s a point in which this kind of aggressive, chesty approach becomes bullying, and people don’t like that.” Finding the right balance might be a particular challenge for Mr. Cuomo, who has ruled out tax increases and campaigned on a Christie-esque assault on state government. He faces not just a nightmarish budget deficit, but also legislative dysfunction that makes New Jersey look like Switzerland. UNLIKE Mr. Christie, who occupies an extraordinarily strong governor’s office, Mr. Cuomo faces a divided Legislature and an Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, who arguably is as powerful as he is. Like Mr. Malloy, Mr. Cuomo faces more complications than Mr. Christie does, in dealing with public employees’ unions that typically support Democrats. The good news: if Mr. Cuomo succeeds as a fiscal hawk, he will be a force nationally. The bad news: good luck on succeeding. By some measures, Connecticut’s budget deficit is the worst of the three. But given Door 1, 2 or 3, you might want Mr. Malloy’s. He has strong Democratic majorities in both houses and early praise for enterprising appointments, particularly persuading Justice Joette Katz to leave the Connecticut Supreme Court to head the troubled Department of Children and Families. As Barack Obama has learned, having the executive branch and the legislature run by the same party means that you own every failure. Still, after being elected despite some risky stances on subjects like tax increases (he says they’re on the table) and the death penalty (he’s against it), Mr. Malloy comes in with some straight-shooter credibility and without the bully label. And when being a governor is borderline impossible, a prudent person might try Connecticut over its neighbors. “I don’t think anyone would apply the slogan ‘Land of Steady Habits’ to either New Jersey or New York,” Professor Baker said. | Governors (US);Democratic Party;Christie Christopher J;Cuomo Andrew M;Malloy Dannel P;New Jersey;New York State;Connecticut;Politics and Government |
ny0154651 | [
"world",
"asia"
] | 2008/01/08 | North Korea Given Time to Send Data | TOKYO (Reuters) — North Korea ’s failure to meet a deadline to declare its nuclear activities should be confronted with patience and perseverance, a senior American envoy said here on Monday. North Korea said Friday that it had already accounted for its nuclear arms program as required under a multilateral disarmament deal, but the assertion was rejected by the United States. “They were prepared to give a declaration which wasn’t going to be complete and correct,” said Washington’s top envoy to nuclear talks with North Korea, Christopher R. Hill, “and we felt that it was better for them to give us a complete one even if it’s going to be a late one. “So I think we have to have a little sense of patience and perseverance,” he told reporters in Tokyo after arriving for talks with Japanese officials. The United States and several allies have said North Korea missed a Dec. 31 deadline to submit a full inventory of its nuclear arms programs, as promised in six-party negotiations last year, and to disable its main nuclear complex at Yongbyon. At the talks — involving the two Koreas, the United States, China, Japan and Russia — the North agreed to abandon its nuclear program for aid and a better international standing. “No one likes being late, but being late is probably preferable than being wrong or giving us something that we can’t work with,” said Mr. Hill, who will go to Seoul on Tuesday. “Some of the programs are ones that they would rather not discuss publicly,” Mr. Hill said when asked why, according to the United States, the North had not made a full declaration. “And I must say this is a society and a government whose first instinct is not to be transparent.” | Atomic Weapons;North Korea;Hill Christopher R;United States;Tokyo (Japan) |
ny0050157 | [
"world",
"asia"
] | 2014/10/11 | Political Rally in Pakistan Ends in Deadly Stampede | ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — At least seven people were killed and 43 injured in a stampede after a political rally for an opposition politician, Imran Khan , on Friday evening in central Pakistan , according to rescue workers and officials. The victims were suffocated as people pushed their way out of a gate at Qasim Bagh Stadium, where the rally was held, officials said. Hundreds of thousands of people had gathered in Multan, the biggest city in the southern part of Punjab Province, to listen to the speech of Mr. Khan, a charismatic former cricket player turned politician, who has been demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif . Mr. Khan has led sit-ins in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, since mid-August, and has now embarked on political rallies across the country to further expand his opposition movement. His political rallies are usually disciplined and organized, and attended by large numbers of young men and women. Friday’s event drew an estimated 80,000, according to local news reports. Image One of the dozens of people injured after the rally. At least seven people died as crowds pushed their way out of the stadium. Credit Asim Tanveer/Associated Press The disaster unfolded as people began to leave the stadium, witnesses said. “People tried to leave the venue at once,” one witness, who was not identified, told Geo TV, a private news network, “and 30 to 40 people fell down near Hussain Agahi Gate and were crushed by the incoming wave of people.” Television images showed people holding unconscious young men as they were rushed to a nearby hospital. Mr. Khan and his party leaders blamed the local government for the deaths, accusing it of mismanagement. “I hold the district administration of Multan responsible,” said Shah Mehmood Qureshi, a senior leader of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, the political party led by Mr. Khan. Mr. Qureshi claimed that district officials did not open all exits in the stadium and turned off electricity as people prepared to leave, setting off panic and confusion. But the government denied the allegations and laid the blame on the political party, claiming that it was responsible for the security of the event within the stadium. “Nobody from P.T.I. guided people about how to leave the venue,” said Zahid Saleem Gondal, the top government official of Multan, using the party’s initials. “This is an issue of internal security.” | Pakistan;Imran Khan;Stampede;Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf;Nawaz Sharif |
ny0289778 | [
"sports",
"golf"
] | 2016/01/11 | Spieth Wins at 30 Under | Jordan Spieth cruised to victory at the Hyundai Tournament of Champions on Sunday, closing with a six-under-par 67 for an eight-shot victory over Patrick Reed in Kapalua, Hawaii. Spieth, who led by five entering the final round, finished at 30-under 262. He and Ernie Els, who won at Kapalua in 2003 with a score of 31 under, are the only players in PGA Tour history to finish a 72-hole event at 30 under or lower. ■ Brandon Stone won the South African Open in Johannesburg for his first European Tour title, becoming the youngest player to capture the title since the event joined the tour schedule in 1997. Stone, a 22-year-old South African, finished with a roller-coaster round of one-under 71 and a total of 14-under 274, defeating his countryman Christiaan Bezuidenhout (67) by two shots. The Englishman Daniel Brooks (72) finished in third, three strokes behind. | Golf;Jordan Spieth |
ny0077991 | [
"nyregion"
] | 2015/05/12 | Mayor de Blasio’s Days on the Road Fuel Criticism at Home | A rally by the steps of the United States Capitol. Fire-up-the-base speeches in Iowa and Wisconsin. Cross-country political trips, paid for with private money, and a Silicon Valley fund-raiser hosted by tech moguls, with tickets going for up to $10,000 apiece. Clinton? Rubio? Bush? No. De Blasio. After 16 months as mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio seems determined to escape the confines of his day job and to prompt a national liberal movement — even as he leaves himself open to criticism that he is not making problems at home a priority. This week, Mayor de Blasio, a Democrat, is off to Washington to spend two days pressing federal lawmakers to shift their policies leftward. He flies from there to California, where he will speak about economic inequality and raise money for his national effort at a private reception in San Francisco, with the former president of Facebook, Sean Parker, as a co-host. By the time Mr. de Blasio returns, he will have been traveling outside New York on political trips for at least a portion of 10 of the last 31 days. (Throw in a vacation to Puerto Rico and college visits with his son, and the mayor has spent about a third of April and May on the road.) The mayor, who has steadfastly defended his trips, argued on Monday that his federal and municipal efforts were intertwined, and pointed to his efforts on housing, immigration and education as signs that he remains focused on the city. “Mayors before me have understood it the same way: They’ve had to speak to national issues, while making sure things work here every day,” Mr. de Blasio said at a news conference in Queens. “My job is to do both.” Still, Mr. de Blasio is pursuing his extracurricular activities at a notably early stage of his mayoralty. And at times, he has risked sounding like an outsider, evaluating his constituents from afar. “A lot of people outside New York City understand what happened in the first year of New York City better than people in New York City,” Mr. de Blasio said in a profile in Rolling Stone, referring to the first year of his administration. “But I’m convinced something very special happened here.” The remark prompted a cartoon in The Daily News that depicted the mayor with a giant balloon for a head, floating away from a puny body. “Caution,” the caption read. “Do not overinflate.” Advisers to Mr. de Blasio said his comment had been misinterpreted, saying the mayor wanted to draw a distinction between the preoccupations of New York City tabloids and what he viewed as his broader achievements, like starting a free prekindergarten program for 53,000 students, as well as a municipal identification card program. “He’s using every tool as mayor of New York City to combat the central issue of our times, which is income inequality,” said John Del Cecato, a political consultant who is helping to oversee Mr. de Blasio’s travels. “But he knows there is only so much that a mayor can do on his own,” Mr. Del Cecato added. “He really feels it’s an obligation to his constituents, to 8.4 million people, to help push the federal government to do its part.” When it comes to municipal matters, though, Mr. de Blasio has shown varying degrees of enthusiasm. In Queens on Monday, he announced a more stringent inspection regimen for the city’s troubled homeless shelters, denouncing an “unacceptable” status quo and adding, “I’m very proud of what is being done here.” Image Mr. de Blasio at a shelter in Queens on Monday, when he argued that his federal and municipal efforts were intertwined. Credit Ruth Fremson/The New York Times But at a required lengthy city budget presentation last week, the mayor seemed less excited. After joking with reporters that driving to Las Vegas was “an appealing prospect as this press conference wears on,” he ended the event on an ironic note. “Thank you for sitting through this long and fascinating presentation,” the mayor said, dryly. Wanderlust among mayors is hardly new. Michael R. Bloomberg , a political independent, eagerly pursued a national profile while mayor, urging other cities to adopt his ban on smoking and leading a coalition to end gun trafficking; he also mulled a run for president, although those activities took place well after his first term. Mr. Bloomberg also traveled frequently to Bermuda . Rudolph W. Giuliani , a Republican, ran for the United States Senate toward the end of his tenure as mayor. John V. Lindsay , a Republican who later switched parties, campaigned for the Democratic presidential nomination late in his second term. “You have to strap them to the mast, like Odysseus,” said Gordon J. Davis, a senior aide to Mr. Lindsay and former city parks commissioner. New York mayors, he added, can find the lure of fame “intoxicating.” But Mr. Davis, who was a speechwriter during Mr. Lindsay’s presidential bid, said he also believed the job required shining a spotlight on urban issues. “Is it the obligation of the mayor of the city of New York to be a spokesman on national issues? Absolutely, it is part of the job,” Mr. Davis said. “There may be some style issues on when you do it, and how you do it, but I think it’s perfectly appropriate.” Mr. de Blasio has denied any presidential ambitions — at least before his re-election fight in 2017 — but he is embracing the national spokesman role. Besides Rolling Stone, he gave an interview on MSNBC and wrote an op-ed article in The Washington Post with Senator Elizabeth Warren , Democrat of Massachusetts. Chirlane McCray , the mayor’s wife, is also courting a national audience, speaking with National Public Radio and publishing a Mother’s Day essay in Time magazine. Mr. de Blasio has been less forthcoming recently with his local press corps. Until the event on Monday, the mayor had allowed City Hall reporters to question him, without restrictions on the topic, three times in the last three weeks, including once after he bumped into reporters on the City Hall plaza. (Aides to the mayor said the shooting death of a police officer and the budget presentation last week took precedent.) In Washington this week, the mayor is scheduled to attend an event with Ms. Warren, before joining allies to unveil a list of federal policy demands, which he describes as the liberal equivalent of Newt Gingrich ’s “Contract With America.” In California, the mayor is speaking at his daughter’s university and appearing with Robert Reich, the former labor secretary. On Thursday in San Francisco, Mr. de Blasio is also set to attend a fund-raiser for the Campaign for One New York , a political nonprofit group established to advance his agenda. The group, which can accept large contributions outside New York City’s campaign finance limits, is paying for the mayor’s California trip. George Arzt, a longtime aide to former Mayor Edward I. Koch , a Democrat, recalled that Mr. Lindsay’s presidential ambitions were harmed when a Brooklyn Democrat urged the mayor to end his travels with the much-publicized comment, “Little Sheba better come home.” “It is extremely difficult being out of the city a significant number of days while telling city residents you are in charge,” Mr. Arzt said. He recalled that Mr. Koch, who ran for governor in his second term, rarely spent a night away from the mayoral residence, Gracie Mansion, for fear that something might go awry. Mr. Koch had a saying, Mr. Arzt recalled: “If a sparrow dies somewhere in the city of a heart attack, it is my fault.” | Bill de Blasio;NYC;Democrats;Mayor;Income Inequality;Liberalism US |
ny0220756 | [
"business",
"economy"
] | 2010/02/17 | Federal Reserve Officials Openly Voice Deficit Concerns | WASHINGTON — Wading deeply into fiscal policy is not normally the domain of the Federal Reserve , but several central bank officials have begun speaking out in forceful terms about the dangers of the expanding deficit. Though only a minority so far, the officials are warning that a failure to bring the budget under control could lead to a dangerous spiral of inflation. Worries about the possible long-term effects of the deficit have galvanized political debate in recent days, culminating in President Obama’s decision to create a bipartisan commission to tame the nation’s debt. The comments by Fed officials reflect, in part, a concern about the central bank’s ability to maintain its political independence over the long term, a concern shared by the Fed chairman, Ben S. Bernanke. Next week, Mr. Bernanke is set to deliver the Fed’s semiannual monetary report to Congress, and economists will be watching closely to see if he too says anything about the debt and the deficit. Thomas M. Hoenig, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City since 1991 and the longest-serving of the 12 Fed bank presidents, warned on Tuesday that in the worst case, the Fed could face pressure to inflate the nation’s way out of its indebtedness. “It seems inevitable that a government turns to its central bank to bridge budget shortfalls, with the result being too-rapid money creation and eventually, not immediately, high inflation,” he said at a policy forum here, sponsored by the Peterson-Pew Commission on Budget Reform. “Such outcomes require either a cooperative central bank or an infringement on its independence.” Last Wednesday, the Dallas Fed president, Richard W. Fisher, said that interest rates on Treasury securities had been kept unnaturally low by the willingness of the Chinese to buy American debt and by shaky European economies, like Greece’s. “We cannot count forever on the largess or the misfortune of others to mask our own imbalances here at home — for fiscal profligacy in Washington today hinders our ability to address fiscal challenges tomorrow,” Mr. Fisher told the World Affairs Council of Dallas-Fort Worth. The Fed has just two main responsibilities — keeping inflation low and promoting maximum employment — but balancing them is perhaps its greatest challenge. With unemployment at 9.7 percent, few expect the Fed to start raising interest rates for at least several months. For now, Mr. Bernanke, who was granted a second four-year term last month after a contentious Senate debate, has shown little appetite for applying brakes on the economy, though he has outlined a strategy for the Fed to gradually reduce the size of its balance sheet, in part to reassure the markets that he is mindful of the threat of inflation. Mr. Hoenig was the sole dissenter last month when the Fed’s key policy-making body, the Federal Open Market Committee, voted to keep short-term interest rates near zero, where they have been since December 2008. Specifically, Mr. Hoenig objected to the panel’s statement that “exceptionally low levels of the federal funds rate for an extended period” were still warranted. Mr. Hoenig is known for his wariness of inflation, so his dissent was not entirely a surprise. But other members of the committee, while using more cautious language, appear to share at least some of his concerns. In a speech last month in Arlington, Va., the Fed’s vice chairman, Donald L. Kohn, said “the deficit is on track to remain quite large even as the economy recovers, pushing up the ratio of federal debt to gross domestic product substantially.” Mr. Kohn added: “Unless the trajectory is changed, the competition for savings between the government, on the one hand, and households and businesses, on the other, could be significant as households and businesses begin to borrow and spend in the recovery, putting upward pressure on interest rates.” And James Bullard, president of the St. Louis Fed, said in an interview last week that it made sense for the Fed to think about withdrawing from what he called its “unprecedented monetary policy” since 2008: the combination of near-zero interest rates and huge purchases of mortgage-backed securities and Treasury securities. The expansion of the balance sheet helped drive down long-term interest rates and support economic recovery. But Mr. Bullard said the idea that “the worst part of the crisis is over, so maybe it’s time to start adjusting” was sensible, adding, “I’m sympathetic to that argument.” Not all of the Fed’s leaders are preoccupied about the prospect of inflation; some consider it remote and are more focused on the weak job market. “I do think the news is mostly good on the inflation front, although the need for careful policy choices is even more critical than usual,” Narayana R. Kocherlakota said Tuesday in his first speech as president of the Minneapolis Fed. Mr. Kocherlakota told the Minnesota Bankers Association, in St. Paul, that the decline in gross domestic product during any recession was not felt evenly across the population. “Some workers — those who lose their jobs — suffer much bigger falls in income,” he said. “For this reason, many macroeconomists now believe that the true cost of a recession is not the fall in G.D.P. per se, but the associated increase in the risk of people becoming, and staying, unemployed.” Mr. Kocherlakota noted that employment was slow to recover after the last two recessions, in 1990-91 and in 2001, and that unemployment — still at its highest level since the early 1980s — has leveled off only because fewer employees are getting laid off or quitting. “To get a true expansion in employment and in the economy, the hiring rate has to pick up — and we have yet to see evidence that it will do so in the immediate future,” he said. | National Debt (US);United States Economy;Federal Reserve System;Interest Rates;Inflation (Economics) |
ny0147948 | [
"nyregion"
] | 2008/07/22 | M.T.A. to Seek Higher Fares to Help Close Budget Gap | The Metropolitan Transportation Authority will propose a substantial increase in transit fares and bridge and tunnel tolls next year to help close a widening budget gap of nearly $900 million, according to an official at the authority. Though the precise amount of the fare and toll increase has yet to be determined, the authority will seek to increase the revenue it gets from those sources by 8 percent. If approved by the authority’s board, the increase would take effect next July and would follow a toll and fare increase in March of this year. In the more than 100-year history of the subway, the fare has gone up in consecutive years only once before, in 1980 and 1981. On Wednesday, the authority will unveil a preliminary budget plan for 2009 that calls for the fare and toll increases and outlines other measures to balance its budget, including more than $300 million in additional financing that the authority hopes to get from the city and state. Coming at a time when the state and city budgets face extreme financial pressure as well, those requests are likely to be resisted by elected officials. The authority faces steadily rising costs, particularly for fuel, as well as sharply declining tax revenues due to a slowdown in the real estate market. Just six months ago, the authority predicted that its shortfall for 2009 would be slightly more than $200 million, less than a quarter of its latest projection. The budget plan, which the authority is required to produce in July, puts new focus on a state commission created by Gov. David A. Paterson to recommend long-term solutions for the authority’s chronic financial difficulties. The panel, which is headed by Richard Ravitch, a former authority chairman, is to make a report by November. The authority must pass a new budget for next year in December. Even traditional opponents of fare increases said they thought higher fares were inevitable because the authority’s financial problems are so deep, but they said riders should not have to bear the cost alone. “We’re not fans of fare hikes,” said Gene Russianoff, staff lawyer for the Straphangers Campaign, a rider advocacy group, “but my view about the hikes will turn largely on how much the city and the state will pony up to pay their fair share.” Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s chief spokesman, Stu Loeser, said in a statement that while the city recognized the authority’s financial problems, “City taxpayers aren’t in a position to increase our subsidy over the billion-dollars-plus we already provide each year.” He added, “That’s why we are looking forward to hearing the Ravitch commission’s findings about how the M.T.A. can find new revenue sources on both the expense and capital sides.” The authority official, who discussed the budget proposal on the condition of anonymity because it had not been made public, said the authority had not worked out details but expected the higher fare to bring in about $200 million. The authority is required by law to operate with a balanced budget. To achieve that, the new budget plan envisions an infusion of more than $300 million from the city and the state. Even with that additional aid, the authority will still need to raise fares and tolls and impose a variety of belt-tightening measures to close its budget gap. When the authority raised fares in March, it kept the base subway and bus fare unchanged, at $2, after having proposed to raise it to $2.25. It was not clear whether the base fare would rise next year, but the authority has said in the past that it prefers to make such increases in 25 cent increments, because its MetroCard vending machines are not set up to dispense coins smaller than quarters. Still, only a minority of subway and bus riders pay the base fare. Most use either unlimited-ride MetroCards or the pay-per-ride MetroCards that provide a 15 percent bonus on purchases of $7 or more. There are many ways the authority could increase overall subway and bus fare revenue by 8 percent — for example, through a combination of raising the base fare, lowering the pay-per-ride bonus and raising the cost of the unlimited-ride MetroCards, and the various fare types would not necessarily increase by the same percentage amount. The attempt to increase revenue by 8 percent would also apply to commuter rail tickets on the Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North Railroad and tolls on the authority’s bridges and tunnels, which include the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and the Queens-Midtown Tunnel. There, too, different types of tickets and tolls, including E-ZPass and cash tolls, could have varying increases, as long as the overall revenues rise by 8 percent. The only other time that the subway fare has gone up two years in a row was in 1980 and 1981, when Mr. Ravitch was the authority’s chairman. He raised the fare in June 1980 to 60 cents from 50 cents. He raised it again in July 1981, to 75 cents. In a plan released a year ago, the authority proposed regular, modest fare and toll increases every two years. That pattern was supposed to begin with the fare that took effect in March, with the next increase scheduled for 2010. (The March increase was originally proposed at 6.5 percent, but it was reduced after Gov. Eliot Spitzer intervened.) Now, in calling for a fare increase next year, the authority is accelerating that schedule. The official who discussed the budget proposal said the authority had no choice, given its financial straits. Still, if the increase does take effect next July, the official pointed out, it would be ahead of schedule by only six months. The authority has run large surpluses in recent years, thanks to the region’s real estate boom, which provided soaring revenues from taxes on real estate transactions. The authority had expected those revenues to drop this year, but they have plummeted much further than anticipated. The surpluses were supposed to continue through this year, which the authority had predicted would end with $300 million in excess cash (largely because of real estate tax receipts left over from previous years). It now expects most or all of that surplus to be eaten up by higher than expected costs and lower than expected real estate tax revenues. Fuel costs are projected to be $88 million higher than anticipated this year, while real estate tax revenue is expected to be $201 million below the budgeted amount. The loss of the surplus is a major factor in the gloomy outlook for next year. As recently as February, the authority had predicted a 2009 budget deficit of slightly more than $200 million. But that figure has grown as the surplus dwindled. In addition, the authority expects that real estate tax receipts next year will be $242 million below previous forecasts, and it projects $123 million in added fuel costs for next year. The authority’s executive director, Elliot G. Sander, said in recent weeks that the authority faced a deficit as high as $700 million next year. The official who discussed the new budget proposal said the $700 million figure was in addition to the previously projected deficit of more than $200 million. Assemblyman Richard L. Brodsky, a Westchester Democrat who is chairman of the Assembly Committee on Corporations, Authorities and Commissions, said he had not taken a position yet on the agency’s proposal. But, he said, the agency will need “more city money, more state money and, unfortunately, more money from the users.” The budget calls for the city to greatly increase its subsidy of the Access-a-Ride program, which provides transportation to the disabled at an annual cost of more than $320 million. The city pays about $100 million a year now to subsidize the program. The authority’s new budget asks the city to contribute an additional $110 million. The authority will also seek to have the city and state pay for the total cost of giving city students free MetroCards. The city and state contribute $45 million each now for student MetroCards, but that covers only about half the cost. The authority wants the two entities to pay the entire cost, which would mean an addition of $90 million. The authority is also seeking to increase its revenues by ending a policy of giving free E-ZPass tags to city and state agencies for use in official vehicles. | Prices (Fares Fees and Rates);Metropolitan Transportation Authority;Transit Systems |
ny0077196 | [
"us"
] | 2015/05/31 | U.S. Paid Residents Linked to Nazi Crimes $20 Million in Benefits, Report Says | WASHINGTON — The American government paid $20.2 million in Social Security benefits to more than 130 United States residents linked to Nazi atrocities over the course of more than a half-century, with some of the payments made as recently as this year, according to a federal investigation. The millions of dollars paid out, a total far higher than officials had previously believed, indicate the ease with which thousands of former Nazis managed to settle into new lives in the United States with little scrutiny after the end of World War II . A report due to be released this week by the Social Security Administration ’s inspector general concludes that virtually all of the payments were proper under policies in place at the time, and that federal officials did not have the legal authority to prohibit benefits until a Nazi suspect was deported, according to officials briefed on the report. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because the report has not yet been made public. In the 1960s and 1970s, as dozens of aging former Nazis in the United States were beginning to collect Social Security benefits, there was little investigation by federal authorities into possible links of immigrants to atrocities committed in wartime Germany. It was not until the early 1980s, under pressure from Congress, that the Justice Department began investigating hundreds of suspects in the United States and started deportation proceedings against former Nazi officers, concentration camp guards, execution-squad leaders and others. The report found that more than three dozen former Nazis received a total of $5.7 million in Social Security benefits before they were ultimately deported, the officials said. Another 95 suspected former Nazis who received a total of $14.5 million in Social Security benefits were never deported and continued receiving benefits. Some died before they could be deported, others fled the country and still others settled their investigations and were allowed to remain in the country. “It is outrageous that any Nazis were able to receive benefits, but this report also makes clear that the Social Security Administration lacked the legal right to terminate benefits in far too many of these cases,” said Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, the New York Democrat who requested the investigation after new evidence emerged last year of Nazis receiving benefits. Reports first began surfacing in the 1980s that large numbers of suspected Nazis were receiving Social Security benefits after they had spent decades working in cities around the country, often in blue-collar jobs. An investigation by The Associated Press last fall drew renewed concern to the phenomenon, prompting Congress to pass legislation called the No Social Security for Nazis Act. That led to the termination of benefits to four Nazis who had left the United States to return to Europe. The most recent benefit payment came this January, investigators found. No other current or former United States residents linked to Nazi crimes are known to be receiving Social Security benefits today. | Holocaust and Nazis;Social Security;Social Security Administration;Justice Department;Carolyn B Maloney;US |
ny0086275 | [
"nyregion"
] | 2015/07/10 | Three Men Charged in Fatal Shooting of Manhattan Shopkeeper | Three men were charged on Thursday in connection with the murder of a shopkeeper, who was fatally shot last month and found by a customer behind the register of his family’s odd-and-ends store on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The men, Michael Adams, 29, of the Bronx; his brother Stephen Adams, 27; and Zubearu Bettis, 44; entered the shop, BNC General Merchandise, on Amsterdam Avenue between 104th and 105th Streets, on June 18, with the intention of robbing the store, the police said. At the register, they encountered Bubacarr Camara, 26, a recent immigrant from Gambia, in West Africa, and one of them shot him in the head, investigators said. Mr. Camara was initially believed to have been bludgeoned to death. Stephen Adams and Mr. Bettis were arrested on June 26 in a separate robbery case in Manhattan and charged while in custody with Mr. Camara’s murder in Federal District Court. Michael Adams was arrested on Thursday after a tip, investigators said. All three men have been charged with second-degree murder and robbery. Mr. Bettis has a criminal record dating to 1991. Criminal records for Stephen and Michael Adams were not available. Mr. Camara, known as Buba, was a soccer star in his hometown, Numuyel, and spent time in the United States working to support his son, a toddler who remained with his mother in West Africa. In the store, which sells an array of items like iPhone cases and undershirts, he was known for frequently letting customers off the hook when they did not have the money for a fresh pair of socks, and for his devotion to Islam. The shop was closed a few minutes several times a day for Mr. Camara and his family to pray. Since the attack it has remained shut, its metal roll-down gate a memorial. Bangally Camara, Mr. Camara’s father, cannot bring himself to go back to the store, he said on Thursday. He plans to keep paying the rent until his lease is up, then close it for good. “If I could speak to them, I want to see why they killed my son, what is the reason they killed him,” the father said, his voice breaking. “You go rob somebody, you get what you got, so why did you kill him?” | Murders and Homicides;Robbery;Bubacarr Camara;Upper West Side Manhattan;Michael Adams;Stephen Adams;Zubearu Bettis |
ny0222560 | [
"us",
"politics"
] | 2010/11/27 | Obama Gets 12 Stitches After Basketball Game | WASHINGTON — President Obama had to get 12 stitches in his lip after getting a blow from an opponent’s elbow during a basketball game Friday morning, White House officials said. “After being inadvertently hit with an opposing player’s elbow in the lip while playing basketball with friends and family, the president received 12 stitches today administered by the White House medical unit,” the press secretary, Robert Gibbs, said in a statement. “They were done in the doctor’s office located on the ground floor of the White House.” A second White House statement, a couple of hours later, said that Mr. Obama was injured when another player turned into the president, “who was playing defense, to take a shot when the elbow hit the president in the mouth.” That statement did not name the player responsible for the elbow, but it listed several players who were not: Mr. Obama’s nephew Avery Robinson; Reggie Love, an Obama aide who played basketball for Duke University; and Education Secretary Arne Duncan. Shortly after 5 p.m., the identity of the elbower emerged: Rey Decerega, the director of programs for the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute. Mr. Decerega said in a statement that the game was all in good fun — and did not apologize. “I learned today the president is both a tough competitor and a good sport,” he said. “I enjoyed playing basketball with him this morning. I’m sure he’ll be back out on the court again soon.” The White House said Mr. Obama was given a local anesthetic while receiving the stitches. The stitches were made with a smaller filament than is typically used, which increases the number of stitches but makes a tighter stitch and results in a smaller scar. | Obama Barack;Basketball;Sports Injuries |
ny0051500 | [
"us"
] | 2014/10/08 | Delaware: Toddler Takes Heroin to Day Care | A 4-year-old girl mistakenly took hundreds of packets of heroin to her day care center and began passing them out to classmates, thinking it was candy, the state police said Tuesday. Several children who received the packets Monday went to the hospital as a precaution, the police said. But no packets were opened, and all of the children were released. The police said the child unknowingly brought the heroin when her mother gave her a different backpack because a pet ruined the regular backpack. The police say the backpack contained nearly 250 packets of heroin. The girl’s mother, Ashley Tull, 30, of Selbyville, was charged with child endangerment and maintaining a drug property. In a phone interview Tuesday, a woman who identified herself as Ms. Tull’s sister, Alicia Tull, said Ashley Tull would not comment. But Alicia Tull said that her sister had no idea that heroin was in the backpack and did not use or deal drugs. She said her sister was taken advantage of by an individual who stored the drugs in her home without her knowledge. | Delaware;Heroin;Drug Abuse;Children;Day Care |
ny0045246 | [
"world",
"europe"
] | 2014/02/19 | German Village Resists Plans to Strip It Away for the Coal Underneath | ATTERWASCH, Germany — A grove of apple saplings grows on the lee side of Ulrich Schulz’s barn. He did not plant them for the fruit, he said, but as an act of rebellion against a nearby mining company that wants to raze his farm, which his family has owned since 1560, to get at the coal beneath his land. “A nod to Martin Luther,” said Mr. Schulz, 53, gesturing at the two rows of spindly trees. “He said that if he knew the world was coming to an end, he would plant an apple tree.” It may not be the end of the world, but it could be the end of Atterwasch, population 241. While Chancellor Angela Merkel has promised her country a future virtually free of fossil fuels, it may seem strange that this village in eastern Germany, and two neighboring ones, are still fighting plans to wipe them, quite literally, off the map. But Germany’s sudden hunger for coal has emerged as the dirty side of Ms. Merkel’s ambitions to shut down the country’s nuclear power plants by 2022 and eventually move Germans mostly to renewable energy. In fact, last year Germany burned more brown coal than at any time since its Communist-era factories began closing in 1990, according to AG Energiebilanzen, an association that tracks energy consumption. The problem is that there are days when the wind does not blow and clouds fill the sky. With eight nuclear reactors shut since 2011 and the push for renewable energy still in its infancy, the country needs to bridge the power gaps. That has only increased Germans’ craving for coal, even though their energy diet is supposed to be shifting. For Mr. Schulz and his neighbors, the battle to save Atterwasch is akin to not wanting to be the final casualty of a lost war, in a region where about 25,000 people have already been uprooted by mines over the years. “Nobody wants to be the last one,” Mr. Schulz said, contemplating the bright green of a young crop of rye on a balmy winter day. Eckhard Schulz, Ulrich’s brother, said he was struck by that fact recently, while touring the nearby open-pit mine at Jänschwalde with his future son-in-law, a landscaper employed for reclamation projects by Vattenfall , the Swedish company that runs the mine. They encountered a small sign on the spot where a church in the village of Horno had stood for centuries. Until 2003. That was when Horno became the most recent of 136 villages swallowed by open-pit mines in the region of Lusatia since 1924, according to the Archive of Lost Places , a local documentation center about the relocated villages. Video Germany is in the midst of an unprecedented shift to renewable energy, but is still dependent on brown coal. The village of Atterwasch may become a victim of Germany’s hunger for brown coal. “I stopped and I realized in the future, that could be our church,” said Eckhard Schulz, who helps care for the three bells in the tower of Atterwasch’s medieval church. The oldest bell, he notes, was cast in 1460, before Columbus reached America. “Suddenly, I wanted to turn back. I didn’t want to see anything more.” For Vattenfall, the coal miner, Germany’s shift to green energy has, paradoxically, been an unexpected boon. “We have certainly felt the impact of the energy transformation in the last three years,” said Thoralf Schirmer, a spokesman for Vattenfall, which owns five open-pit mines in eastern Germany that extract lignite, or brown coal. The company is petitioning the government to expand three of those mines. “We have seen an increase of the demand for lignite since Germany decided to scale down its nuclear energy, because you need another source of energy to fill in this gap, and this source is lignite,” Mr. Schirmer said. “It is cheap, abundant and easy to get at.” Easy enough, but not if the people of Atterwasch have a say. Vattenfall says it takes relocation very seriously and has sought to begin speaking with the residents about the process. “A house for a house, a school for a school, a church for a church,” Mr. Schirmer said. “Neighbors should be kept together; the structure of the new village should resemble the old.” Image Ulrich Schulz, left, and his father on the farm their family has owned since 1560. Vattenfall wants to raze the farm. Credit Gordon Welters for The New York Times But the villagers are not interested, said Christian Huschga, 43, a scriptwriter who moved to Atterwasch as a child and is now raising two sons here. “We aren’t interested in talking, because the minute we open the dialogue, it makes it look like we are interested in relocating, and we aren’t.” “We want to stay here because we don’t think that it will be necessary, that we will need to dig brown coal from the earth in 20 to 40 years, when we already want to have stopped using fossil fuels. We find that schizophrenic.” The prospect of relocating is an emotional one. A banner declaring “Atterwasch stays!” hangs over the firehouse, and a bright yellow X, a local symbol of resistance, decorates the village church, a rallying point for candlelight vigils and marches. For now, the survival of the village has become a question of endurance, of what will last longer, the determination of residents like the Schulzes to stay or Germans’ appetite for coal. Germany has poured billions into expanding green energy, and the government predicts that the transition could cost up to 550 billion euros ($757 billion) before it is over. So far renewable energy sources have expanded to 23 percent of the country’s supply. But the goal — 80 percent renewables by 2050 — is still a long way off. In addition to providing enough electricity to power millions of households and industry in the region and beyond, the mining industry provides about 10,000 jobs, directly or indirectly, according to local officials. Vattenfall sponsors the local soccer and ice hockey teams, as well as an annual film festival in the main city, Cottbus, and it supports several other cultural and educational institutions. Image The main road and the 14th-century church in Atterwasch. Credit Gordon Welters for The New York Times Image The Overburden Conveyor Bridge F60 is the largest movable technical industrial machines in the world. Credit Gordon Welters for The New York Times “Coal is the foundation of prosperity in the region,” said Lothar Nicht, a deputy mayor in Cottbus, the largest city in Lusatia. Before the first mines opened in the late 1800s, he said, the region was one of Germany’s poorest. After the textile industry’s decline at the end of the last century, mine closings could be fatal. “What is the Plan B? There isn’t one,” Mr. Nicht said. “Nobody knows what will happen in the next 20 to 50 years. The question is what will happen to us? We will once again become the poorhouse of the nation.” For now, the Schulz brothers will not even discuss relocating, choosing instead to focus on fighting to preserve their village. “We are still convinced that we will be able to grow old here, to continue to live and work here,” Ulrich Schulz said. “But no one can say that with certainty.” | Germany;Coal;Mining;Angela Merkel;Renewable energy;Nuclear energy;Atterwasch Germany;Janschwalde Germany |
ny0065091 | [
"business",
"media"
] | 2014/06/17 | Dean Baquet, Top Times Editor, Has Tumor Removed | Dean Baquet, the executive editor of The New York Times, had a malignant tumor removed from his kidney on Saturday and will spend about a week away from the office while recovering, he said in an email to the newspaper’s staff on Monday morning. Doctors discovered the tumor on Thursday, Mr. Baquet said, and felt that it required “immediate attention.” He had “minimally invasive, completely successful surgery,” he said, “and my doctors have given me an excellent prognosis.” Mr. Baquet, 57, took The Times’s top newsroom job last month after the abrupt dismissal of Jill Abramson, its first female executive editor. On Thursday, Harvard announced that Ms. Abramson planned to teach there this fall. Mr. Baquet previously served as managing editor, the No. 2 newsroom job. He has not appointed a successor to that role, saying that he plans to take his time with new appointments as he rethinks the newspaper’s management structure while it continues to adapt to the digital age. The Times has unveiled several new digital initiatives and mobile products. In his email, Mr. Baquet said that he would remain “in touch with the newsroom leadership” as he recovered and that the new initiatives would continue. “I know this comes as we are all trying to move forward in the newsroom,” Mr. Baquet said. “I assure you,” he said, “that I will be back there as soon as possible.” | Dean Baquet;The New York Times;Cancer |
ny0069131 | [
"sports",
"football"
] | 2014/12/01 | Giants Blow 21-Point Lead and Lose to Jaguars for Seventh Straight Defeat | JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — The Giants’ season may already have been lost, but grim realities remain in the shocking and absurd ways they can pivot so quickly from bad to worse. Sunday, they were forced to endure yet another indignity, this time squandering a three-touchdown lead and falling to the Jacksonville Jaguars, 25-24 , on a 43-yard field goal by Josh Scobee with 28 seconds to play. Fittingly, the Giants’ loss — their seventh straight — was sealed by a sack of Eli Manning, who fumbled and allowed the Jaguars to celebrate their second win of the season. Bewildered and beaten again, the Giants trudged off EverBank Field and struggled to explain how the Jaguars had scored two defensive touchdowns and the rookie quarterback Blake Bortles had driven them into field-goal range to win the game. The Giants had reclaimed the lead at 24-22, saved momentarily by a 33-yard Josh Brown field goal with 3 minutes 26 seconds to play. But Bortles led the Jaguars into field-goal range with a 21-yard scramble to the Giants’ 25-yard line, and Scobee delivered the winning kick. Image Giants Coach Tom Coughlin said, “We could have kneeled on the ball in the second half and had a better chance to win.” Credit Phelan M. Ebenhack/Associated Press “We could have kneeled on the ball in the second half and had a better chance to win,” Coach Tom Coughlin said. The Giants (3-9) clearly had cured most of their ailments in the first half. They controlled the ball for nearly 21 minutes and scored on three consecutive possessions for a 21-0 lead, and needed only to coast the rest of the way, as haplessly as the Jaguars had played to that point. “I’m not saying we gave up,” left tackle Will Beatty said. “We’ve just got to find ways to finish these close games. You would have thought it was the second team that came out there in the second half.” Coughlin was especially exasperated by the collapse. The team, he said, talked at halftime about not letting the Jaguars back into the game. “We talked about finishing,” he said. “Everyone used the same word and knew what I was talking about. We came out, and you couldn’t script it any better for the other side of the ball.” The Jaguars recovered in astonishing fashion. They rallied to take a 22-21 lead with 12 minutes 56 seconds remaining. On the Giants’ second offensive play of the third quarter, Manning was drilled at the 8-yard line by linebacker Geno Hayes, and the ball bounced backward toward the goal line. J. T. Thomas outmaneuvered two Giants to recover the fumble in the end zone and cut the Jaguars’ deficit to 21-10. Bortles provided more hope with a 30-yard scoring pass to Marqise Lee, whose route involved simply sprinting past cornerback Zack Bowman. The Jaguars seized the lead early in the fourth, when Aaron Colvin returned tight end Larry Donnell’s fumble 41 yards for the score. Donnell was upended and lost the ball as he flipped, landing on his head and giving Jacksonville an opportunity to score a second defensive touchdown in a game for the first time in franchise history. What had started as a Giants landslide turned into a meltdown. “I don’t know an English word to explain the way we feel,” said Rashad Jennings, who rushed for 91 yards and scored two touchdowns. “We have too much talent on this team, so we should be held to a higher standard.” Manning was 24 of 34 for 247 yards and one touchdown. After not being sacked in the first half, he was brought down four times by the Jaguars in the second half. Image Manning was sacked by Sen’Derrick Marks (99) on the Giants’ final possession and fumbled, ensuring their defeat. Credit Phelan M. Ebenhack/Associated Press “We just don’t quite have it figured out yet how to win the game,” Manning said. “I don’t know how you teach that.” The Giants sacked Bortles seven times, but he suddenly morphed into a veteran in the second half. He finished the game 21 of 35 for 194 yards, but did not throw an interception and ran for 68 yards, mostly on key scrambles down the stretch. “A rookie quarterback moves it the length of the field at the end of the game to what amounted to a two-minute drive,” Coughlin said. “We get no turnovers, nothing, on our side of the ball. Quite frankly, I was counting on that.” For three straight possessions, the Giants played as well as they had all season. The first of those drives was the team’s longest of the season, a 19-play, 91-yard masterpiece that took 9:51 and ended on the first play of the second quarter as Jennings scored on a 2-yard run. The Giants converted on third down on four occasions on that possession and were so confident in running the ball that Jennings carried 12 times, including the last five plays. Image The Jaguars got to celebrate for just the second time this season, while the Giants left the field dejected for the seventh straight game. Credit John Raoux/Associated Press Manning spurred the next drive with a 32-yard pass to Donnell that put the Giants at the 2-yard line. A false-start penalty pushed them back, but Manning connected with Preston Parker for a 3-yard touchdown and a 14-0 lead. Jennings scored again, ripping off a 17-yard run after Manning turned and casually flipped the ball back to him. Defensively, things looked just as effortless. The Jaguars had only one possession and ran three offensive plays, for 9 yards, in the first quarter. They did not record a first down until there was 5:37 left in the second, and the crowd let out a loud, sarcastic cheer to celebrate the moment. Manning was rarely under duress, completing 15 of 19 passes for 177 yards and compiling a passer rating of 123 in the first half. Jennings had 65 yards on 19 carries, and an offensive line plagued by injuries held together even after right tackle Geoff Schwartz was lost early to an ankle injury. But this has been a tough season for the Giants, and the Jaguars apparently believed they could win no matter how badly the game, and their season, had turned against them. They were right. | Football;Josh Brown;Eli Manning;Rashad Jennings;Geoff Schwartz;Jacksonville Jaguars;Giants |
ny0085215 | [
"business",
"media"
] | 2015/07/03 | BBC to Cut 1,000 Jobs as License Revenue Falls Short | LONDON — The BBC said Thursday that it was cutting 1,000 jobs to help plug a budget gap of 150 million pounds caused by a larger decline than expected in the number of households owning televisions, as viewers increasingly choose to watch content free online. The BBC is financed in part by a license fee system in which every British household with a television pays £145.50, or about $230, a year to the BBC. That helps generate about £3.7 billion for the corporation. Television owners 75 or older are exempt. The BBC said viewers were increasingly using their hand-held devices or going online to catch up on missed programs, suggesting that the BBC needed to update its business model for the digital age by extending the license fee to include digital services. The BBC director general, Tony Hall, was quoted by the BBC News website as saying that more than one million fewer people had a television set than had been forecast by the corporation in 2011, creating the shortfall. He said the organization faced a “difficult choice” because of the challenging economic environment, the BBC reported. “We’ve already significantly cut the costs of running the BBC, but in times of very tough choices we need to focus on what really matters — delivering outstanding programs and content for all our audiences,” he said in a statement. The reduction, which amounts to about 5 percent of BBC’s work force, comes as media companies across the globe, including The New York Times Company, are grappling with how to increase revenue and compel viewers or readers to pay for content. At the BBC, Lord Hall said the cost-cutting drive would include the elimination of senior management roles and the streamlining of staff in marketing, communication and human resources. The cuts should generate savings of £50 million, he said. The BBC has faced several challenges in recent years that have dented public confidence, including criticism over its handling of the allegations of sexual abuse against the television personality Jimmy Savile; attacks by conservative politicians against a perceived left-wing bias; and a debate about the future viability of the license fee system, whose revenues some critics have argued should be shared with other broadcasters. | BBC;TV;Great Britain;Layoffs;News media,journalism |
ny0191881 | [
"business"
] | 2009/02/28 | Desperately Protecting A.I.G.’s House of Cards | Next week, perhaps as early as Monday, the American International Group is going to report the largest quarterly loss in history. Rumors suggest it will be around $60 billion, which will affirm, yet again, A.I.G.’s sorry status as the most crippled of all the nation’s wounded financial institutions. The recent quarterly losses suffered by Merrill Lynch and Citigroup — “only” $15.4 billion and $8.3 billion, respectively — pale by comparison. At the same time A.I.G. reveals its loss, the federal government is also likely to announce — yet again! — a new plan to save A.I.G., the third since September. So far the government has thrown $150 billion at the company, in loans, investments and equity injections, to keep it afloat. It has softened the terms it set for the original $85 billion loan it made back in September. To ease the pressure even more, the Federal Reserve actually runs a facility that buys toxic assets that A.I.G. had insured. A.I.G. effectively has been nationalized, with the government owning a hair under 80 percent of the stock. Not that it’s worth very much; A.I.G. shares closed Friday at 42 cents. Donn Vickrey, who runs the independent research firm Gradient Analytics, predicts that A.I.G. is going to cost taxpayers at least $100 billion more before it finally stabilizes, by which time the company will almost surely have been broken into pieces, with the government owning large chunks of it. A quarter of a trillion dollars, if it comes to that, is an astounding amount of money to hand over to one company to prevent it from going bust. Yet the government feels it has no choice: because of A.I.G.’s dubious business practices during the housing bubble it pretty much has the world’s financial system by the throat. If we let A.I.G. fail, said Seamus P. McMahon, a banking expert at Booz & Company, other institutions, including pension funds and American and European banks “will face their own capital and liquidity crisis, and we could have a domino effect.” A bailout of A.I.G. is really a bailout of its trading partners — which essentially constitutes the entire Western banking system. I don’t doubt this bit of conventional wisdom; after the calamity that followed the fall of Lehman Brothers, which was far less enmeshed in the global financial system than A.I.G., who would dare allow the world’s biggest insurer to fail? Who would want to take that risk? But that doesn’t mean we should feel resigned about what is happening at A.I.G. In fact, we should be furious. More than even Citi or Merrill, A.I.G. is ground zero for the practices that led the financial system to ruin. “They were the worst of them all,” said Frank Partnoy, a law professor at the University of San Diego and a derivatives expert. Mr. Vickrey of Gradient Analytics said, “It was extreme hubris, fueled by greed.” Other firms used many of the same shady techniques as A.I.G., but none did them on such a broad scale and with such utter recklessness. And yet — and this is the part that should make your blood boil — the company is being kept alive precisely because it behaved so badly. When you start asking around about how A.I.G. made money during the housing bubble, you hear the same two phrases again and again: “regulatory arbitrage” and “ratings arbitrage.” The word “arbitrage” usually means taking advantage of a price differential between two securities — a bond and stock of the same company, for instance — that are related in some way. When the word is used to describe A.I.G.’s actions, however, it means something entirely different. It means taking advantage of a loophole in the rules. A less polite but perhaps more accurate term would be “scam.” As a huge multinational insurance company, with a storied history and a reputation for being extremely well run, A.I.G. had one of the most precious prizes in all of business: an AAA rating, held by no more than a dozen or so companies in the United States. That meant ratings agencies believed its chance of defaulting was just about zero. It also meant it could borrow more cheaply than other companies with lower ratings. To be sure, most of A.I.G. operated the way it always had, like a normal, regulated insurance company. (Its insurance divisions remain profitable today.) But one division, its “financial practices” unit in London, was filled with go-go financial wizards who devised new and clever ways of taking advantage of Wall Street’s insatiable appetite for mortgage-backed securities. Unlike many of the Wall Street investment banks, A.I.G. didn’t specialize in pooling subprime mortgages into securities. Instead, it sold credit-default swaps . These exotic instruments acted as a form of insurance for the securities. In effect, A.I.G. was saying if, by some remote chance (ha!) those mortgage-backed securities suffered losses, the company would be on the hook for the losses. And because A.I.G. had that AAA rating, when it sprinkled its holy water over those mortgage-backed securities, suddenly they had AAA ratings too. That was the ratings arbitrage. “It was a way to exploit the triple A rating,” said Robert J. Arvanitis, a former A.I.G. executive who has since become a leading A.I.G. critic. Why would Wall Street and the banks go for this? Because it shifted the risk of default from themselves to A.I.G., and the AAA rating made the securities much easier to market. What was in it for A.I.G.? Lucrative fees, naturally. But it also saw the fees as risk-free money; surely it would never have to actually pay up. Like everyone else on Wall Street, A.I.G. operated on the belief that the underlying assets — housing — could only go up in price. That foolhardy belief, in turn, led A.I.G. to commit several other stupid mistakes. When a company insures against, say, floods or earthquakes, it has to put money in reserve in case a flood happens. That’s why, as a rule, insurance companies are usually overcapitalized, with low debt ratios. But because credit-default swaps were not regulated, and were not even categorized as a traditional insurance product, A.I.G. didn’t have to put anything aside for losses. And it didn’t. Its leverage was more akin to an investment bank than an insurance company. So when housing prices started falling, and losses started piling up, it had no way to pay them off. Not understanding the real risk, the company grievously mispriced it. Second, in many of its derivative contracts, A.I.G. included a provision that has since come back to haunt it. It agreed to something called “collateral triggers,” meaning that if certain events took place, like a ratings downgrade for either A.I.G. or the securities it was insuring, it would have to put up collateral against those securities. Again, the reasons it agreed to the collateral triggers was pure greed: it could get higher fees by including them. And again, it assumed that the triggers would never actually kick in and the provisions were therefore meaningless. Those collateral triggers have since cost A.I.G. many, many billions of dollars. Or, rather, they’ve cost American taxpayers billions. The regulatory arbitrage was even seamier. A huge part of the company’s credit-default swap business was devised, quite simply, to allow banks to make their balance sheets look safer than they really were. Under a misguided set of international rules that took hold toward the end of the 1990s, banks were allowed use their own internal risk measurements to set their capital requirements. The less risky the assets, obviously, the lower the regulatory capital requirement. How did banks get their risk measures low? It certainly wasn’t by owning less risky assets. Instead, they simply bought A.I.G.’s credit-default swaps. The swaps meant that the risk of loss was transferred to A.I.G., and the collateral triggers made the bank portfolios look absolutely risk-free. Which meant minimal capital requirements, which the banks all wanted so they could increase their leverage and buy yet more “risk-free” assets. This practice became especially rampant in Europe. That lack of capital is one of the reasons the European banks have been in such trouble since the crisis began. At its peak, the A.I.G. credit-default business had a “notional value” of $450 billion, and as recently as September, it was still over $300 billion. (Notional value is the amount A.I.G. would owe if every one of its bets went to zero.) And unlike most Wall Street firms, it didn’t hedge its credit-default swaps; it bore the risk, which is what insurance companies do. It’s not as if this was some Enron-esque secret, either. Everybody knew the capital requirements were being gamed, including the regulators. Indeed, A.I.G. openly labeled that part of the business as “regulatory capital.” That is how they, and their customers, thought of it. There’s more, believe it or not. A.I.G. sold something called 2a-7 puts, which allowed money market funds to invest in risky bonds even though they are supposed to be holding only the safest commercial paper . How could they do this? A.I.G. agreed to buy back the bonds if they went bad. (Incredibly, the Securities and Exchange Commission went along with this.) A.I.G. had a securities lending program, in which it would lend securities to investors, like short-sellers, in return for cash collateral. What did it do with the money it received? Incredibly, it bought mortgage-backed securities. When the firms wanted their collateral back, it had sunk in value, thanks to A.I.G.’s foolish investment strategy. The practice has cost A.I.G. — oops, I mean American taxpayers — billions. Here’s what is most infuriating: Here we are now, fully aware of how these scams worked. Yet for all practical purposes, the government has to keep them going. Indeed, that may be the single most important reason it can’t let A.I.G. fail. If the company defaulted, hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of credit-default swaps would “blow up,” and all those European banks whose toxic assets are supposedly insured by A.I.G. would suddenly be sitting on immense losses. Their already shaky capital structures would be destroyed. A.I.G. helped create the illusion of regulatory capital with its swaps, and now the government has to actually back up those contracts with taxpayer money to keep the banks from collapsing. It would be funny if it weren’t so awful. I asked Mr. Arvanitis, the former A.I.G. executive, if the company viewed what it had done during the bubble as a form of gaming the system. “Oh no,” he said, “they never thought of it as abuse. They thought of themselves as satisfying their customers.” That’s either a remarkable example of the power of rationalization, or they were lying to themselves, figuring that when the house of cards finally fell, somebody else would have to clean it up. That would be us, the taxpayers. | Subprime Mortgage Crisis;American International Group;Emergency Economic Stabilization Act (2008) |
ny0247566 | [
"sports",
"golf"
] | 2011/05/29 | Ryan Palmer Leads the Byron Nelson After ‘Hard Day of Golf’ | Ryan Palmer sat down after finishing his third round Saturday and put his head down on the table. He was exhausted — and still leading — after a three-over 73 on a gusty day at the Byron Nelson Championship in Irving, Tex. Palmer, a Texas native who had made the cut only once in his first seven appearances at the tournament, has a one-stroke lead over Sergio García after a sun-soaked but brutal day for scoring at T.P.C. Four Seasons. “We chalked it up as a hard day of golf,” Palmer said. “If you had told me Thursday I was going to have a one-shot lead, I would have called you a liar and said, Whatever. But my bad round is out of the way, I think, and I still lead by one.” García shot a 74 while also making bogeys at the 16th and 18th holes, where he missed makable putts. “I could not shoot one shot higher than I did,” García said. “So if you look at it that way, and I’m only one shot behind Ryan, and I have tomorrow, I think it’s pretty positive.” The last three holes played into the wind, which was about 25 miles per hour with gusts near 40. Only 8 of 74 players shot under par Saturday, and there were no bogey-free rounds. “Obviously, the scores show how hard it was,” Palmer said. “Bad, hard day, that is for sure.” The best score was a 67 by Argon Atwal, who is tied with Ryuji Imada (70) for third place at three under. “You catch the wrong gust and you could be in serious trouble,” Atwal said. Gary Woodland and Matt Kuchar shot 68s and were tied with Joe Ogilvie (72) for fifth at two under. TWO TIED FOR LEAD IN ENGLAND The Italian teenager Matteo Manassero and second-ranked Luke Donald shared the lead in the BMW PGA Championship after three rounds in Virginia Water, England. They each shot a one-over 72, leaving them at five-under 208. Manassero had two birdies and three bogeys in an erratic front nine before making nine straight pars. Donald dropped five strokes heading into the turn but regained four on a flawless back nine. Top-ranked Lee Westwood and Fabrizio Zanotti of Paraguay shot 69s and are two strokes back. IRWIN SHARES LEAD Hale Irwin overcame a four-shot deficit to grab the lead, then frittered it away with a double bogey on the last hole to drop into a tie with Kiyoshi Murota at the Senior P.G.A. Championship in Louisville, Ky. A victory would make Irwin, who will be 66 on Friday, the senior tour’s oldest winner. Irwin, who shot a two-under 70, and Murota, who battled back pain to shoot a 74, were at nine-under 207 at Valhalla Golf Club. The Hall of Famer Tom Watson, the 2007 Senior P.G.A. champion, shot a 68 and was one shot back. YOUNG MAKES EIGHT BIRDIES Heather Bowie Young made eight birdies in a six-under-par 66 that gave her a two-shot lead at the L.P.G.A. Tour’s Brazil Cup at Itanhanga Golf Club in Rio de Janeiro. Young seized the lead by making five birdies on the front nine in the 30-player exhibition. Suzann Pettersen, who won last week’s match play event in Gladstone, N.J., was tied for second with Lindsey Wright at two strokes behind. | Palmer Ryan;Garcia Sergio;Golf |
ny0002530 | [
"us",
"politics"
] | 2013/03/12 | Florida Senate Committee Rejects Medicaid Expansion | MIAMI — Rebuffing Gov. Rick Scott’s support of Medicaid expansion, a Florida Senate committee on Monday rejected the idea, all but ending the possibility that the state would add more poor people to Medicaid rolls. But the Senate panel debating the expansion proposed a compromise: to accept the federal money but use it to put low-income people into private insurance plans. Accepting the money would please the governor and a number of Floridians, while steering people away from Medicaid, which many lawmakers and residents view as troubled. The committee vote to reject a Medicaid expansion under President Obama’s health care overhaul was 7 to 4, with Democrats voting for the expansion. Last week, a Florida House committee voted to reject Medicaid expansion altogether, saying that the system was broken and that adding people to the rolls would cost taxpayers too much money in the long run. The House speaker, Will Weatherford, a Republican, said it was the wrong approach, calling it a “dangerous path.” From the start, Mr. Scott knew it would be difficult for the Florida Legislature to embrace Medicaid expansion, even for only three years, which is what he proposed. The governor had staked his political career on derailing what he calls “Obamacare,” and his abrupt reversal did not endear him to conservatives in Florida or in the Legislature. Last week, he made it clear he was not going to lobby the Legislature on Medicaid, preferring to use his influence to push through raises for teachers and eliminate a manufacturing sales tax. “I am confident that the Legislature will do the right thing and find a way to protect taxpayers and the uninsured in our state while the new health care law provides 100 percent funding,” Mr. Scott said in a statement Monday after the vote. A Senate committee will convene to develop a plan that would use federal dollars under the law to expand Florida Healthy Kids , a well-established, well-liked health care exchange for low-income children. The proposal would allow the one million uninsured adults who qualify under the health care law to join and choose among various insurance plans. They would pay on a sliding scale, depending on income. “I think it’s important for us to say no to having Washington tell us to expand our Medicaid program,” said Senator Joe Negron, the Republican chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, who made the Healthy Kids proposal. But, he said, the committee still hopes to address the larger problem. “We want to try to find a creative way to help people, empower people to have their own private health insurance but not put them into the Medicaid program,” he said. Democrats said they were pleased that the Senate panel chose to accept the money, even if it meant taking a different approach. “A rose, by any other name, is still a rose,” said Senator Audrey Gibson, a Democrat on the panel. “This move is long overdue and one the House would be wise to emulate.” It is unclear whether the Obama administration would accept such a proposal. Several states, including Arkansas, Indiana and Ohio, are exploring using private insurers to enroll uninsured patients. The administration recently agreed to a proposal by the Democratic governor of Arkansas, Mike Beebe, who sought to reject Medicaid expansion and use federal money to buy private health insurance for its uninsured residents who qualify. The Senate proposal would also have to clear the House, which is working on its own proposal and has taken a more conservative line. | Obamacare,Affordable Care Act;Medicaid;Rick Scott;Florida;Health Insurance;State legislature |
ny0014446 | [
"business",
"media"
] | 2013/11/14 | HSN Joins With Univision to Reach the Hispanic Market | HSN, the home shopping network, is turning its sights toward Hispanic consumers with the announcement of a new e-commerce partnership with Univision Communications that will begin on Thursday. The three-year partnership will take the form of a shopping portal on Univision.com called Boutique Univision that will feature a variety of products from HSN targeted at Hispanics. “This is the fastest-growing consumer group and they will be driving the U.S. economy over the next few decades,” said Bill Brand, the chief marketing and business development officer at HSN Inc. “We are able to reach this Hispanic consumer through the most trusted brand in their community, and that’s Univision. That’s an unprecedented opportunity for us.” The effort is not the first time HSN has tried to reach a Spanish-speaking audience. In 1998, the company created a Spanish language television show called “Home Shopping en Español” that ran through 2002 and aired in Mexico and Puerto Rico, as well as on Galavision, a Univision-owned network. In addition to increasing product sales, the goal is to expand the company’s reach with Hispanic consumers, which Mr. Brand said represent 10 percent of HSN’s customer base. According to data from comScore, Hispanics in the United States are slightly less active on e-commerce and retail websites than all consumers. While 84 percent of all American consumers visited a retail website in October, just 80 percent of Hispanics did. The product categories on the Boutique Univision will include electronics, fashion beauty, home décor and cookware from brands like Vince Camuto, Samsung, Apple, Curtis Stone and Lancôme. Each day the site will feature one product to be offered at a promotional discount. Tonia O’Connor, the president for content distribution and corporate business development at Univision, said the portal was not “just a pure translation for what exists for general market shoppers,” but instead was a “customized shopping experience” with products selected specifically for Hispanic customers. Image Boutique Univision, a shopping portal on Univision.com that will start Thursday, will feature a variety of products from HSN directed at Hispanics. “We’re trying to create a beautiful storefront that’s inviting and that welcomes the shoppers in,” Ms. O’Connor said. Promotion for the online boutique will begin on Thursday and feature Lesley Ann Machado, a host from HSN, on the popular Univision morning show “ Despierta América .” Ms. Machado and Maggie Jiménez from “Despierta America” will announce the new portal. HSN will then feature a live feed of the announcement during a segment on its network featuring the chef Lorena Garcia. On Thursday, Ms. Jiménez will be a guest on the HSN show “Beauty Report” where she will discuss the boutique and other beauty tips and products. The hosts will also use social media to promote the initiative throughout the day. Additional promotions include digital and radio ads and emails that Univision will send to its viewers. Univision has used its morning show to promote brands before. In 2012, the show featured a fall fashion segment sponsored by Target to promote the retailer’s collection by the designer Phillip Lim. Ms. O’Connor said the promotions for the products featured in the new boutique would be tasteful. “It’s not going to be an overt sales pitch in the middle of our morning show,” she said. “It will be a subtle approach done in a way that is informative and showcasing the product itself.” As brands and media companies find more ways to move beyond traditional forms of advertising and into product placement and integrations, the line between content and marketing are increasingly blurry. “We don’t intend for any of our shows to become a block of home shopping,” Ms. O’Connor said. “We are sensitive to the right level of integration into the show.” Silvia Galfo, the senior vice president for marketing at Lancôme, said reaching the Hispanic market was a “key priority” for the brand. “It’s our No. 1 diverse customer,” Ms. Galfo said. “These women are beauty savvy across all categories.” The company has done both qualitative and quantitative research on Hispanic women customers and found that the product categories they are most interested in are skin care products with an emphasis on correcting dark spots on the skin, eye makeup for creating dramatic eye looks and fragrances, Ms. Galfo said. The products featured in the new boutique will reflect those choices, including the perfume Tresor, eye shadows and mascara to help women create a “cat eye” look that Ms. Galfo said was popular among Hispanic women. “We really see the potential of this fastest-growing customer group,” she said. “We have to make sure that we talk to them in the right language.” | Univision;advertising,marketing;Hispanic Americans;E Commerce |
ny0220558 | [
"sports",
"olympics"
] | 2010/02/11 | Plushenko, the Quad King, Is Back for More | TALLINN, Estonia — Yet another gold medal was in his possession, and with a sly smile, Yevgeny Plushenko extended his right arm and let his hand tremble. The hand represented his rivals at the Winter Olympics in Vancouver. “I’m going to take any result, but I think I did something already for figure skating, to come back and skate not bad and win,” he said after winning the European figure skating championship last month. “I know the other athletes, they understand right now they need something, and they start to shake right now, to shake a little bit.” After retiring from elite competition in 2006, Plushenko restricted his skating to television programs, his exhibition tour and the 2008 Eurovision song contest, which he helped his friend Dima Bilan win for Russia. Plushenko said that during those three years, he did not once attempt a quadruple jump, the element that had made him his sport’s dominant figure. But when Plushenko took to the ice here at the European championships, it was as if he had never been away as he opened with a clean quadruple toe loop-triple toe combination in the short program and in the free program. The quad was back in earnest, and so was Plushenko, just in time to try to defend the Olympic title he won in Turin, Italy, in 2006. “I respected him before, but I respect him even more now,” said Robin Wagner, the American coach who helped Sarah Hughes win the women’s Olympic title in 2002. “I don’t think people realize how difficult it is to come back at that level. It was already hard enough before the rule changes.” For singles skaters, there are ample reminders, both distant and recent, of the challenge: from the men’s stars Brian Boitano, Kurt Browning and Viktor Petrenko, who all failed to win an Olympic medal in 1994, to Sasha Cohen, who failed to qualify for the United States Olympic team this year. Even after multiple knee operations, Plushenko, 27, believes he is still in his physical prime, although he did not feel that way when he resumed serious training in June with his longtime coach, Aleksei Mishin, in St. Petersburg, Russia. For the first three months, Plushenko said, it was unbelievable. “It was too hard,” he said. “Wake up in the morning at 7, going to first practice, then off ice, then gym, then two hours’ break and then again practice on the ice and then again off ice, because I needed to lose 10 kilos.” (Ten kilograms is about 22 pounds.) “My muscles felt like stones all the time, because everything was in pain,” he said. “When I wake up in the morning, I needed 30 minutes to be able to walk.” He is trim and fit now, but there have been setbacks. He said he had twice had to have fluid drained from a cyst near his right Achilles’ tendon. He said he also had had painkilling injections in his left knee and planned to have minor meniscus surgery after the season. After practicing and landing some unprecedented jumps in training last year — including a quadruple toe-quadruple toe combination — he has scaled back his jumping in training. “I had problems, so now I do maximum three quadruples in practice,” he said. “Land or not land, no more.” But he says he is energized and content, and his wife of six months, Yana Rudkovskaya, agrees. “I understood that he really missed the life of a competitor,” Rudkovskaya said through an interpreter. “When he started competing again, there was a fire in his life. He is much happier.” Plushenko’s first marriage, to Maria Ermak, ended in divorce after less than three years in 2008. He and Ermak have a 3-year-old son together. Plushenko met Rudkovskaya, a 35-year-old fashion entrepreneur and mother of two sons, through the music business. Rudkovskaya runs a chain of beauty salons in Russia, but she is also the producer for Bilan, one of the most popular singers in Russia. Rudkovskaya, who was in Tallinn to watch Plushenko, was one of the forces behind his comeback. “My wife brought me back to this sport,” Plushenko said. “She told me, ‘Yevgeny, before we were married, I know you have all titles and were Olympic champion and a silver medalist in the Olympics, but you know, now you can be two times Olympic champion.’ “And I was like: ‘Yana! Come on! It’s not possible, because I didn’t skate for three and a half years, and I had a lot of surgeries, and I’m 27 years old.’ ” Plushenko made it clear that his comeback was not just for his new bride. After watching Jeffrey Buttle and Evan Lysacek win the last two world championships without completing a quad, Plushenko was aware there was an opportunity, as well as a financial opportunity. But his comeback was also about returning to what he does best after several years of driving fast cars and testing alternate professions, which included becoming a member of St. Petersburg’s parliament. “I’m in the government, still in the government actually, but it’s something that’s not mine, you know?” he said. “I need some more adrenaline, need this great atmosphere like we have in competition. You come to the ice and you are alone, and everybody is watching you, and you need to perform. It’s hard, but it’s great.” And to hear Plushenko tell it, anything beats politics. “Dirty, dirty thing,” he said. “Show business is dirty, but politics is unbelievable. You can talk like this with the people, and they are going to turn and say behind your back: ‘Bam. Bam. Bam.’ Not good things. I saw this, and, of course, I hated it. We have in figure skating this situation, too, but in politics, it’s — wow.” That last word also applied to his poised performance in Tallinn. “I think in some areas of skating, he’s even better than in Turin,” said Mishin, Plushenko’s coach. “In Turin, he was more a boy. Now he’s more a man.” Plushenko underscored his jumping prowess in the skate-and-giggle exhibition program here by completing two triple axels, a jump that the silver medalist, Stéphane Lambiel of Switzerland, could not do in the regular competition. Some analysts consider Plushenko a solid favorite for a gold medal in a deep men’s field that includes Lysacek, the reigning world champion; Daisuke Takahashi of Japan; and Patrick Chan of Canada. Plushenko has not done two quads in a program yet, but he insists that is part of his plan for Vancouver. “I thought that Plushenko was strong, really strong, right here,” said the former French skating star Philippe Candeloro, pointing to his head. But there is an alternative view to his gold medal prospects, one that says Plushenko’s artistic limitations could trip him up along with his relative weaknesses in some of the skills that are observed and scored more thoroughly in the contemporary scoring system. Lambiel, despite a free program with two major errors, received higher scores for program components than Plushenko, who still seems hardwired to get manic when the time comes to get artistic, gesticulating as if less were definitely not more. “There are better skaters than him, and they can have choreography that is better than him,” said the young Czech skater Michal Brezina, who finished fourth in Tallinn. “But when he’s on the ice and he does every jump like this,” Brezina said, snapping his fingers metronomically, “then what can you say? Nobody can beat him, because if he’s doing two quads, one with the combination with the triple and then two triple axels, he has more points than anybody.” | Olympic Games (2010);Figure Skating;Plushenko Yevgeny |
ny0116952 | [
"world",
"africa"
] | 2012/10/17 | Nigeria: 24 Killed in Fighting | Fighting between Nigeria’s military and the radical Islamist sect Boko Haram killed at least 24 people in the northeastern city of Maiduguri, officials said Tuesday. | Nigeria;Boko Haram |
ny0002383 | [
"sports",
"ncaabasketball"
] | 2013/03/23 | Gonzaga Hears Cheers That Used to Be Theirs | SALT LAKE CITY — The N.C.A.A. tournament unfolded here as if in some sort of parallel universe: the conversation dominated by Gonzaga, the spotlight stolen by Harvard. The Zags, long darlings of college basketball’s postseason, entered this year ranked among the favorites, stumbled against a No. 16 seed in Southern and withstood a neutral crowd turned obviously — and loudly — in favor of their overmatched opponent. That used to happen for the Zags, not to them. Harvard, meanwhile, captured its first-ever win in the tournament, a victory that slid the Crimson into the darling role once occupied by Gonzaga and others. Harvard, its team, its athletic department and its campus filled with future rulers of the world, had become an underdog — this, specifically, was in basketball, if in little else. Image Siyani Chambers, left, and Laurent Rivard after Harvard’s victory Thursday at Salt Lake City. Credit Harry How/Getty Images For Matt Santangelo, the Gonzaga guard for the beginning of its run, the radio analyst who watched both teams play on Thursday, it was an odd juxtaposition. As he watched the Zags cling for their tournament life against the Jaguars, then watched the Crimson dismantle New Mexico, he identified more with Harvard, less with his alma mater. “The Harvards, all the upsets, that’s exactly who we were,” Santangelo said. “I mean, that was the first time I’ve ever been at a G.U. game where the neutral fan rooted against G.U. Like the building blew up a couple times, and it was not in our favor.” So, he is asked, you felt a lot like Duke? “Basically,” Santangelo responded. Santangelo played on the 1998-99 team that shined a national spotlight on Gonzaga basketball, that made an N.C.A.A. regional final and started the run of consecutive tournament appearances, a run with no end in sight. He points to two demarcation lines: everything that happened before and after 1999, and everything that happened before and after forward Adam Morrison arrived in 2003. For those post-1999 teams, “everything was new and fresh,” Santangelo said. “After Adam, that expectation was set. Now you’re the big dog, the big fish.” Image Kelly Olynyk, a 7-footer for top-seeded and top-ranked Gonzaga. Credit Streeter Lecka/Getty Images This season, then, was a natural extension, the next step in Gonzaga’s basketball evolution. The first No. 1 ranking in program history. The first No. 1 seed in program history. The first time the Zags were forced to defend whether they deserved a top seed in the first place, the vitriol higher in volume, more intense. Gonzaga, once lovable, once the buster of brackets, now felt, as Santangelo admitted, a little bit the way those Duke teams always felt. That was especially acute on Thursday, when Southern kept the game close, withstood the expected Gonzaga knockout blow and made another run. The crowd, save for the Zags loyalists, screamed for the historic upset, screamed against the Zags. “It’s not a position we’ve been in a lot,” guard Mike Hart said. “It was weird.” In the locker room afterward, Coach Mark Few reminded his players that nothing in this tournament would come easy, that “the longer this thing goes, you’re going to see pretty much everybody in the whole arena slide over to the other side.” He told his players it did not matter whether they missed an easy shot, or blew an assignment — they needed to move on. Santangelo hoped Gonzaga would embrace this newfound role, to play like a tournament favorite. The Zags struggled in the first half of the first game after they obtained their first No. 1 ranking, same as in their first game as a No. 1 seed. Image Wesley Saunders, left, and New Mexico’s Alex Kirk during 14th-seeded Harvard’s win on Thursday. Credit George Frey/Associated Press “There are two ways to go about it,” he said. “Either ‘We’re going to play at our level, and if you don’t come to our level, we’re going to blow you out of the gym.’ Or ‘We’re angry. Yes, we got the votes, but there’s a lot of scrutiny. We’re going to show you guys.’ ” Life was much easier as an underdog. Just ask Harvard. The Crimson took a victory lap on Friday, even as their next game loomed. The players answered questions about why they went to Harvard in the first place, their hardest classes, whether they considered themselves nerds. One reporter asked guard Christian Webster what he thought of the story line elicited from Harvard’s upset: that the cute, smart kids had prevailed, revenge of the brainiest. “I don’t know about us being that cute,” he deadpanned. “But it has been overwhelming.” The Harvard players all said they went there because they believed in the vision of Tommy Amaker, the coach. They clinched the Ivy League title on the final weekend of the regular season, with wins over Columbia and Cornell. They overcame the loss of two star players snared in a widespread academic scandal, one that Amaker called “very unfortunate” but labeled a “universitywide situation” and “not a basketball or athletics deal.” Anyway, as this parallel universe played out, the bracket in the West Region opened up with upset after upset after upset. Harvard had taken out the third seed in New Mexico, but then on Friday, fourth-seeded Kansas State lost, and so did fifth-seeded Wisconsin. That left No. 6 Arizona, Harvard’s opponent Saturday, as the highest remaining seed other than the top two, Gonzaga and Ohio State. Image Earlier, Jameel Grace of Southern drove against Elias Harris and David Stockton (11) of Gonzaga. Credit Streeter Lecka/Getty Images Santangelo said the Zags’ victories in the 1999 run did produce a carry-over effect. They gave Gonzaga more confidence as it moved forward. He did not believe the current Bulldogs would be as susceptible to any carry-over, though. Too much talent. Too much size. “Fourteen years I’ve been in the N.C.A.A. tournament,” the assistant Tommy Lloyd said. “I don’t know how many times we’ve played unbelievable in the first game. Thursday and Friday everybody is like, oh, the Zags, they’re for real, they’re going to go to the Final Four. And then we lose on Saturday.” Lloyd chose to focus on the way Gonzaga’s first game ended, with a surge back ahead, more proof of a team he called “the best in the country in the last four minutes this season.” Gonzaga, he said, “did not limp out of there.” It made the plays it needed to. Same as Harvard. Perhaps Gonzaga needed to shake off the rust from its long break after the West Coast Conference tournament. Perhaps it needed to acclimate to its new status among the favorites. “This is where you want to be,” Lloyd said. “I don’t think you say, ‘I don’t want to be 30-2. I’d rather be 24-8 with a chip on our shoulder.’ If the crowd comes with the territory, if we’re big, bad Gonzaga, that’s fine by me. You want to survive. You want to advance.” In this parallel universe, with Gonzaga as the powerhouse and Harvard in the Gonzaga role, that was enough. For both of them. | NCAA Men's Basketball,March Madness;College basketball;Gonzaga;Harvard |
ny0048992 | [
"world",
"americas"
] | 2014/11/12 | Brazil: Police Killed 11,000 People Over Five-Year Period, Report Says | The Brazilian police killed more than 11,000 people from 2009 to 2013, for an average of six killings a day, a public safety organization said Tuesday in a report. The study by the Brazilian Forum on Public Safety , which is based in São Paulo, said police officers nationwide had killed 11,197 people over the past five years, while law enforcement agents in the United States had killed 11,090 people over the past 30 years. “The empirical evidence shows that Brazilian police make abusive use of lethal force to respond to crime and violence,” the report said. | Brazil;Police Brutality,Police Misconduct,Police Shootings;Murders;Brazilian Forum on Public Safety |
ny0189659 | [
"business"
] | 2009/05/28 | A ‘Safe Haven’ Looks Less Secure | With a flight to quality last year pushing up Treasury bond prices and risky loans looking like losses waiting to happen, banks plowed money into government bonds. And until about mid-May, when prices of 10-year securities topped 100 cents on the dollar, that looked like a good bet. Now, however, this safe haven does not look so secure. A rebound in risk appetite and worries about America’s credit rating have drained some air from the Treasury market bubble. A 10-year bond now fetches only a little over 95 cents on the dollar. That may not seem like much of a drop, but if you think of banks leveraging up their positions, it could result in some nasty losses. How much so? American depository institutions hold some $581 billion in various types of government obligations on reserve with the central bank, according to Federal Reserve statistics. Of course, the cost of financing these positions has also plummeted. The London interbank offered rate for three-month dollar borrowings is now a mere two-thirds of a percentage point. And a steeper yield curve is a boon for banks looking to earn their way out of trouble through fat net interest margins. But one could argue that Libor is being artificially depressed as a result of intervention by the United States government to prop up bank credit. If the government were to withdraw those measures — say, by pulling its borrowing guarantees, its liberal discount window collateral requirements or other programs — Libor could easily rise to a level appropriate for the industry’s average single-A to double-A credit. That was over 5 percent in 2006, for example. Should that happen, and if longer rates were also to struggle higher, banks would run the risk of losing money on their hordes of Treasuries, just when their plummeting prices make them hardest to unload. If so, this port in the storm could turn out to be quite choppy. Seeking Simple Rules The government’s plan to get bad assets off bank balance sheets always carried the risk that banks could game it. But the Public Private Investment Program won’t work if Treasury and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation set overly complicated rules, whether on avoiding bank conflicts or in any other part of the plan. So they need to settle for simplicity — which means imperfection. The Treasury’s plan involves the government subsidizing buyers of banks’ bad assets by offering cheap nonrecourse leverage. The idea is to give investors a chance to make money and to get illiquid markets moving and help increase asset prices toward the levels that banks are holding them, thereby minimizing further losses if they offload them. It is clear banks should not be buyers and sellers of the same assets. That would make it too easy to artificially inflate asset values and transfer remaining losses to American taxpayers. But industry groups are lobbying for banks to be allowed to participate, in a general sense, as buyers under the program as well as sellers. Yet having banks buy each other’s bad assets runs the risk of a similar artificial result. After all, a “you buy mine and I’ll buy yours” attitude among banks helped sustain the structuring and sale of questionable securitized products for longer than might otherwise have occurred. But banning banks that could be sellers from participating as buyers sounds both impractical and potentially damaging to the program. That is because banks are significant participants in all kinds of markets through their in-house investment desks and asset management affiliates, and excluding all their tentacles would reduce investor interest as well as being a logistical nightmare. The answer could be some simple rules, bearing in mind that most investors in the Public Private Investment Program are expected to be pooled together in funds run by asset managers. Banks could (and should) be banned from having any material interest in any pool buying their own assets. They could be restricted to a modest (say 10 percent) interest in any pool buying assets from other banks. There may be other options. But whatever solution the Treasury and the F.D.I.C. devises needs to be straightforward. Some gaming of the system could still occur, and taxpayer-supported banks could make money out of program, too. That might be galling to some, but it could be the price of the program’s success. After all, as the American Bankers Association, led by Edward L. Yingling, noted in a comment letter to the F.D.I.C., it would be somewhat odd “to hamper a program designed to benefit banks because of a concern that banks would benefit.” | Government Bonds;Treasury Department;Banks and Banking;Federal Reserve System |
ny0014178 | [
"sports",
"hockey"
] | 2013/11/15 | Kings’ 3-Goal Rally Sinks Isles | Tyler Toffoli scored the winning goal on a deflection with 1 minute 27 seconds left to cap the Kings’ three-goal rally in the third period as Los Angeles defeated the host Islanders, 3-2, on Thursday night. Toffoli tipped Jake Muzzin’s drive past goalie Kevin Poulin. Aaron Ness gave the Islanders a 2-0 lead in the second period with his first N.H.L. goal after Casey Cizikas put them in front with his first goal of the season. “That was a big, physical team,” Islanders Coach Jack Capuano said of the Kings. “I thought we played decently and well enough to win. “You’re always frustrated when 2 points slip away. The big thing is how we respond. We have to find a way.” BRUINS 3, BLUE JACKETS 2 After tracking down a shot he blocked, Milan Lucic scored on a breakaway with 48.6 seconds left in overtime as host Boston defeated Columbus. Chad Johnson made 32 saves for Boston. Blake Comeau and Nick Foligno scored for Columbus. LIGHTNING 5, DUCKS 1 Valtteri Filppula had two goals and an assist, goalie Ben Bishop won his 13th game this season, and host Tampa Bay beat Anaheim in a matchup of conference leaders. BLUES 7, AVALANCHE 3 Alexander Steen scored his league-leading 15th and 16th goals, and St. Louis’s slumping power play erupted for three goals in a win over visiting Colorado. BLACKHAWKS 5, COYOTES 4 Jonathan Toews and the rookie Brandon Pirri scored in a four-round shootout, and host Chicago beat Phoenix for its fourth straight win. AROUND THE LEAGUE Toronto center Nazem Kadri was suspended for three games without pay and fined $44,615 by the N.H.L. for a hit to Minnesota goalie Niklas Backstrom’s head in a loss Wednesday night. ... The Anaheim captain Ryan Getzlaf is nearing a return from an upper-body injury. Getzlaf missed his third straight game Thursday night at Tampa Bay but took part in the morning skate. | Ice hockey;Los Angeles Kings;Islanders |
ny0103404 | [
"world",
"africa"
] | 2012/03/18 | Ex-Libya Intelligence Chief Captured in Mauritania | TRIPOLI, Libya — Abdullah el-Senussi, the former intelligence chief and brother-in-law of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, was arrested Saturday at an airport in Mauritania, the authorities there said, in the most significant capture of a former official of the Qaddafi government since the apprehension of the dictator’s son Seif al-Islam by Libyan fighters in November. The International Criminal Court has indicted Mr. Senussi, Seif al-Islam and Colonel Qaddafi on accusations of crimes against humanity committed during the government’s attempts to crush the rebellion last year that ultimately ousted the Libyan leader. Colonel Qaddafi was killed by Libyan fighters shortly after his capture in October. During his years as intelligence chief, Mr. Senussi presided over the surveillance, detention, torture and assassination of probably thousands of Libyans. Aside from Colonel Qaddafi himself, Mr. Senussi was the most reviled figure in the former government. After the fall of Tripoli, journalists were able to walk through his headquarters, including his own grand corner office, the fitness facility used by his men, the tiny cells scrawled with the desperate prayers of the inmates who had been housed there, and larger rooms used for torture and beatings. Besides being wanted by the international court, Mr. Senussi was also sought for arrest by France, where he and five other Libyans were sentenced in absentia to life in prison for the 1989 bombing of a passenger airplane over Niger that killed all 170 people, many of them French. Libyans also believe he was responsible for the brutal 1996 crackdown on a riot at Abu Salim prison in Tripoli that left 1,200 dead. A demonstration last year by the families of the dead became the spark that ignited the Libyan uprising. It was unclear on Saturday what Mauritania planned to do with Mr. Senussi. France — which announced that it helped in the arrest, according to news reports — Libya and the International Criminal Court had all either asked to take custody of him or said they planned to. Libya’s interim government said in a statement that it was prepared to receive Mr. Senussi and guarantee him a free trial. But the Libyan justice system was always plagued with corruption and favoritism under Colonel Qaddafi, and the interim authorities have acknowledged that they are still working to rebuild it on a firmer foundation. The fate of Seif al-Islam remains unclear. Libyan fighters from the Western town of Zintan continue to hold him captive, and have refused to turn him over to Libya’s interim Justice Ministry. It is unclear whether Libyan authorities would hand him over for trial at the International Criminal Court if they took him into custody. Since the fall of Tripoli last August, Libyan fighters have repeatedly claimed, without proof, that they had captured Mr. Senussi. But officials of Libya’s interim government had never confirmed his capture. Instead, rumors of his whereabouts swirled around Tripoli, with one militia-leader-turned politician even boasting that he personally held Mr. Senussi in his custody. Former Qaddafi government figures, speaking on the condition of anonymity for their own safety, have said that Mr. Senussi was in fact alive and well, living in Africa. Officials of Mauritania said Saturday that they had arrested Mr. Senussi debarking from a flight from Casablanca, Morocco, according to news reports. They said he was carrying a fake Malian passport. Many senior figures from the former Qaddafi government fled or attempted to flee over Libya’s porous southern border into other African nations. Colonel Qaddafi had cultivated close ties to the tribal groups that live on both sides of those borders. Three other members of the Qaddafi family who played less important roles in the government than Seif also escaped into neighboring countries. Colonel Qaddafi’s son Mohammed and daughter Aisha escaped into Algeria and are believed to remain there. His son Saadi is in Niger, effectively under house arrest. | Libya;War Crimes Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity;Qaddafi Seif al-Islam el-;Qaddafi Mohammed el-;Senussi Abudullah el- |
ny0131275 | [
"nyregion"
] | 2012/12/11 | A Boy Full of Quirks Learns to Curb His Aggression | When Jaren Aponte, 4, wants to show someone affection, he seeks out an ear. “He has a specific tic,” his mother, Mary Viera, said. “He’ll grab somebody’s ear, rub it, and also rub his own ear. That’s him telling you ‘I like you.’ ” Jaren’s method of demonstrating fondness is not always understood, or reciprocated, by his classmates. If his grip is too tight or he tugs too hard, it causes physical irritation and reminds his mother of Jaren’s aggressive behavior, which has been curbed. At age 2, Jaren had yet to start speaking, showed weak motor skills and threw frequent tantrums. Ms. Viera, 41, who was armed with the knowledge she gained from rearing two other children — her daughter, Deileen Simmons, 24, and her son Jaden Arroyo, 9 — knew that something was wrong with him developmentally. Specialists concluded that Jaren had a sensory disorder, though no specific condition has been diagnosed. Ms. Viera started reading books about children with conditions similar to Jaren’s, and the more she learned, the more sense she was able to make of so many of her son’s quirky behaviors. “He gets overloaded,” she said. “The way he processes things is affected. It could be auditory, it could be visual, it could be smell. There are certain noises that he doesn’t like. He doesn’t like crowds.” Her son also has adverse reactions to touching certain things, like finger-paint and glue, and his sensitive taste buds have made him a picky eater. The biggest revelation from her research had been the connection between Jaren’s disorder and his aversion to public transportation. “My worst nightmare was getting on the bus or the train,” Ms. Viera said. “He would throw a tantrum from the moment we got on to the moment we got off.” She said that on numerous occasions, after she and her family had returned home from such a trip, she retreated to the bathroom to cry, in private, before composing herself. “When you have a child like this, you can do one thing to calm him down, or you can do 100 things that won’t calm him down,” she said. Since September 2011, Jaren has been enrolled in the Head Start Program at Public School 15, near his home in the Bronx. The program is financed by the Educational Alliance , a beneficiary agency of UJA-Federation of New York, one of the organizations supported by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund. “His speech has gotten better,” Ms. Viera said. “Socially, he’s better. If he wanted a toy or if he had a toy and somebody wanted to take it, he’d threaten them with fists.” Now, she said, Jaren is learning how to interact better with others, and he takes his boxer’s stance less frequently. His special needs, including complications caused by his asthma, meant Ms. Viera, who used to work full time at the Children’s Place, a clothing store in Manhattan, had to reduce her schedule to 10 hours a week. Her monthly income is $355. She receives $600 a month in food stamps and about $750 a month from Jaren’s father, who lives with her and the children. In February 2012, after three years on the waiting list of the New York City Housing Authority, the family received housing, with a monthly rent of $752. Unable to afford a dresser and bed for Jaren, Ms. Viera contacted the Ed Alliance, which used $800 in Neediest Cases money to help her buy furniture. For herself, college is now on Ms. Viera’s radar; it is something she has often contemplated. Over the summer, she took college preparatory courses at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, and she hopes to attend the City University of New York. Her goal is to study early childhood education, inspired by the research she did to help her understand her son’s challenges. “I just got interested in going to school to help other kids,” she said. “There’s a lot of kids who have problems.” The pursuit of higher education might also prove to be a motivating distraction. “You have to be in my shoes to see what I go through every day,” she said. “It’s not easy. The only thing that gets me out of bed is saying: ‘If I’m not going to do it, who’s going to do it?’ ” | Philanthropy;New York Times Neediest Cases Fund;UJA-Federation of New York;Educational Alliance;Viera Mary |
ny0100445 | [
"sports",
"rugby"
] | 2015/12/18 | Uncertainty Clouds New Super Rugby Franchises | WELLINGTON, New Zealand — Super Rugby’s bold new era is due to kick off in less than three months, but there is a growing concern that at least two of the new teams could be more of a liability than an asset to the new-look Southern Hemisphere competition. Next year the number of teams will increase to 18 from 15, with new teams in Argentina, Japan and South Africa joining the existing ones in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Argentina’s Los Jaguares have made steady progress in their efforts to be ready when the season starts Feb. 26. They have a stadium deal in place in Buenos Aires, and they unveiled their coaching staff Wednesday, with Raúl Pérez as head coach. Of the 30 players signed so far, 22 played for Argentina at the Rugby World Cup, including their inspirational captain, Agustín Creevy, who will have the same role for Los Jaguares. But while the Argentines are on track for a February start, the same cannot be said for Japan’s Sunwolves or the Southern Kings in South Africa. The Sunwolves, who will play home games in both Tokyo and Singapore, have stadiums lined up in both cities. And while the Sunwolves have the business side nailed down, they have not announced a single player signing with only 10 weeks to go. At least five of Japan’s World Cup stars — Fumiaki Tanaka (Highlanders), Michael Leitch (Chiefs), Male Sa’u (Blues), Hendrik Tui and Ayumu Goromaru (both Queensland Reds) — have chosen to play at other Super Rugby teams in New Zealand and Australia. The Sunwolves also have no coach. Japan’s former coach, Eddie Jones, walked away from the franchise to join the Stormers before taking the England job, while the former Australia coach Robbie Deans and ex-Canterbury and New Zealand Under-20s coach Rob Penney — both currently coaching in Japan’s Top League — have ruled themselves out of contention. Former Hurricanes coach Mark Hammett is the latest to be linked to the position . The delay of such a critical appointment as coach is causing consternation at Sanzar, the governing body that oversees Super Rugby. “The biggest worry is that they have yet to appoint a coach,” Steve Tew, the chief executive of the New Zealand Rugby Union, said this week. “We are told that will be resolved before Christmas, and clearly that’s already too late.” The Southern Kings, who played in Super Rugby in 2013 before they were replaced by the Lions franchise for 2014, are also drawing concerns. The South African Rugby Union took over the management of the cash-strapped franchise from the Eastern Province Rugby Union last month after players and staff were owed up to four months’ salary. Several players have walked out, with hooker Michael van Vuuren threatening court action over the unpaid wages, while the assistant coach Carlos Spencer also left. Coach Brent Janse van Rensburg quit two weeks after being appointed and was replaced by Deon Davids, who has no Super Rugby experience. An initial roster of 20 players was only announced last Sunday and contains just a few players who have played Super Rugby, including lock Steven Sykes, flyhalf Elgar Watts and prop Schalk Ferreira. Despite all that, Jurie Roux, the chief executive of S.A.R.U., is bullish about the progress made. “There has been a lot of overheated speculation about all manner of things, but we have not lost sight of our responsibility,” Roux said in a statement on Sunday. “Our only desire has been to rescue the Southern Kings from the parlous state in which they found themselves and put together a competitive squad to represent the people of the Eastern Cape with pride in Super Rugby.” But whatever progress Roux declares the Southern Kings have made, they and the Sunwolves are well behind the other teams, who have already begun work for the coming season, including strength and conditioning and strategy. Aside from the team problems, there are also fears that the complicated nature of the revamped competition will turn off fans. The new structure moves from a three-conference system of five teams per country to four conferences split into two unevenly sized groups. In the Australasian group, the Australian and New Zealand conferences will stay as they are, with five teams each. In the South Africa group, there will be two conferences of four teams each. In the first conference are the South African teams the Bulls, Stormers and Cheetahs, along with the Sunwolves. In the second, South African teams the Kings, Lions and Sharks are joined by Los Jaguares. The difference in conference size means different schedule setups for the four-team and five-team conferences. But all will play a 15-game schedule and have two bye weekends before the playoffs start with the quarterfinals in July. The final is scheduled for Aug. 6. The playoffs will include the four conference champions, the three next-highest-ranked teams from the Australasian group and the next highest-ranked team from the South Africa group. “We are faced with a competition structure that is not as simple as we would like,” admitted Tew. “But it is not as confusing as some people are making it out to be. I think once it gets under way, people will understand it better. “Clearly we do not need to throw any more travel into the mix, and we’ve got a limited window. I think we’ve done the best job we could given all those circumstances. “Is it perfect? Clearly not. Will we continue to work on it as it evolves? Yes.” Tew hopes the Jan. 1 arrival of the new Sanzar chief executive, Andy Marinos, will prevent similar problems during any future expansion. Marinos played Super Rugby and has held several positions in S.A.R.U., including most recently the post of general manager of commercial and marketing. This latest competition restructure was partly as a result of wanting to keep South Africa in Super Rugby, which meant agreeing to S.A.R.U. demands for a sixth team. “He will lead the conversations that we need to have to make sure any future expansion is part of a very carefully thought out strategic framework, which frankly we haven’t had in the past because we’ve kind of had to wait every five years for South Africa to recommit,” Tew said. “Not ideal, but that’s just the way it’s been.” | Japan;Argentina;New Zealand;South Africa;Australia;Sanzar |
ny0269483 | [
"sports",
"horse-racing"
] | 2016/04/10 | Ogden Mills Phipps: A King of the Sport He Helped Make Better | Dinny Phipps was as much a part of the landscape of the Oklahoma training track at Saratoga Race Course as the oak trees that Sunny Jim Fitzsimmons planted nearly 100 years ago and continue to shade the family’s barn. Most August mornings, Phipps sat out front in a golf cart and talked horses with jockeys and exercise riders, clockers and fellow owners. Behind him, his grandchildren darted between and behind impeccably bred thoroughbreds, their moms and dads keeping a watchful but never worried eye on them. After all, they, too, had once treated the shedrow as their summer playground. The smell of bacon wafted from the kitchen that looked out on the courtyard. The morning usually ended there with three generations of Phippses sitting down for breakfast. When the family returns to its barn at the finest racetrack in America, a seat at that table will be empty and a big hole in the heart of American horse racing will be apparent. Ogden Mills Phipps died on Wednesday at 75. Dinny was as old school as his given name. His ancestors were attached to the Carnegie steel empire. The family’s Bessemer Trust, established with that original fortune, now manages more than $88 billion for some of the world’s wealthiest people. It was thoroughbreds, however, that quickened his blood. Phipps was a survivor of racing’s golden age, and one of things that he was most proud of was how his family had successfully handed down its love of horses through the generations. The Phippses have spent hundreds of millions of dollars over the years following a blueprint that rewards patience. Image Orb gave Phipps his only Kentucky Derby win, in 2013. Credit David J. Phillip/Associated Press Dinny Phipps bred horses to race them — a shockingly quaint notion in an era when unproven colts and fillies are paraded through an auction ring and often fetch millions of dollars. He didn’t hurry still-developing 2-year-olds to the racetrack or retire his colts to stallion duty as soon as they won a couple of big races. Horses as old as 4 might run their first race in the family’s traditional black silks and cherry jockey cap and continue to run at 6 or 7. Phipps was a big man with a poker face and was given to laconic pronouncements. “Pigs get fed, hogs get slaughtered,” he often said about investing. “We are about the fillies: They provide consistency over generations,” he said of the family’s breeding strategy. But Phipps also was a warm conversationalist whose eyes twinkled when he told how, in the 1940s, when he was too young to be legally allowed on the racetrack, his father, Ogden, got him a seat on the starting gate at Saratoga every afternoon the family had a horse running. He also laughed at how his family’s mistakes remained part of thoroughbred racing lore. In 1936, Gladys Mills Phipps sold an underperforming 3-year-old who became a Depression-era hero by the name of Seabiscuit. In 1969, the family won a coin toss with Penny Chenery but chose to wait a year for a son or daughter of its Bold Ruler, passing up the chance to own Secretariat, the 1973 Triple Crown champion. Still, his family raised and raced champions in staggering numbers. Among them was the undefeated Personal Ensign, who caught the Kentucky Derby-winning filly Winning Colors at the wire of the 1988 Breeders’ Cup Distaff in her 13th and final race. He won his first and only Kentucky Derby in 2013 with a colt named Orb, who became dear to him not because he was ultra-accomplished, but, rather, because he was owned in partnership with his cousin Stuart Janney III and prompted an outpouring of good wishes from the public. “So many people were happy for us, and it has been very moving,” he said in the days after the race. The biggest legacy he left to the sport, however, was a result of his 32-year run as chairman of the Jockey Club, a company that started out as a breed registry, but one he transformed into a technology, media and research conglomerate. Its offshoots have poured tens of millions of dollars back into making the sport safer and more humane. It didn’t always make Phipps the most popular man in the sport, especially when he pushed for stricter drug rules and stiffer punishment for cheaters. It speaks to the sport’s fundamental problem that horse trainers and some owners vilified Phipps for wanting thoroughbreds to be drug-free and to be treated and cherished like the wonderful athletes that they are during their careers as well as after they left the track. “Quite simply, I see it as a way of giving back to a sport that has provided me with so much enjoyment,” he told the International Federation of Horseracing Authorities. “That was probably passed on to me from my dad, and I try to instill that sense of responsibility and commitment in my kids.” For Christmas, his daughter Daisy gave her father a wall hanging with halter plates featuring the names of the 50 Grade I winners who raced for the family stable. He was deeply moved and even more tickled that she had left room for the names of 22 future Grade I winners. His family clearly has accepted the challenge, and will continue to summer in Saratoga. | Horse racing;Ogden Mills Phipps |
ny0047639 | [
"business"
] | 2014/11/10 | Treasury Auctions Set for This Week | The Treasury’s schedule of financing this week includes Monday’s regular weekly auction of new three- and six-month bills and an auction of four-week bills on Wednesday. At the close of the New York cash market on Friday, the rate on the outstanding three-month bill was 0.03 percent. The rate on the six-month issue was 0.06 percent, and the rate on the four-week issue was 0.04 percent. The following tax-exempt fixed-income issues are scheduled for pricing this week: WEDNESDAY Charleston, S.C., $54.3 million of revenue bonds. Competitive. Fort Wayne, Ind., $63 million of revenue bonds. Competitive. Skagit County, Wash., $53 million of general obligation bonds. Competitive. THURSDAY California, $1.2 billion of general obligation bonds. Competitive. ONE DAY DURING THE WEEK California Communities Development Authority, $72.4 million of debt securities. Cain Brothers. Dickinson Independent School District, Tex., $64.4 million of unlimited tax refinancing bonds. J. P. Morgan Securities. Gainesville, Ga., $196 million of health system debt securities. Bank of America. Hamilton County, Ohio, Convention Facilities Authority, $70 million of improvement revenue refinancing bonds. Stifel Nicolaus Hawaii, $224.8 million of taxable general obligation bonds. J. P. Morgan Securities. Hawaii, $775.2 million of general obligation bonds. J. P. Morgan Securities. Hollywood, Fla., $54 million of water and sewer debt securities. Bank of America. King County, Wash., $65 million of limited tax general obligation improvement refinancing bonds. Piper Jaffray. Maine Municipal Bond Bank, $50 million of grant anticipation bonds. Bank of America. Missouri Joint Municipal Electric Utility Commission, $193.7 million of debt securities. Wells Fargo Securities. New York City Municipal Water Finance Authority, $379.6 million of water and sewer system revenue bonds. Ramirez. South Carolina, $87 million of housing finance debt securities. Citigroup Global Markets. Spring Branch Independent School District, Tex., $95.5 million of debt securities. Wells Fargo Securities Texas, $250 million of University of Texas revenue refinancing bonds. Morgan Stanley. Texas, $53.5 million of retirement facilities revenue bonds. Ziegler. Northside Independent School District, Tex., $67.6 million of tax refinancing bonds. Jefferies. Wisconsin, $355.4 million of general obligation refinancing bonds. Morgan Stanley. | Stocks,Bonds;Municipal bond;Auction |
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