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ny0095311 | [
"us",
"politics"
] | 2015/01/21 | Republicans Have One Word for President’s Proposals and Veto Threats: ‘No’ | WASHINGTON — “No” seems to be all anyone wants to say in this town anymore. In his State of the Union address on Tuesday, President Obama enumerated policies that he opposed, from rolling back Wall Street regulations to exempting more businesses from their obligation to provide health insurance under the Affordable Care Act. To drive home his displeasure with the Republican agenda, the White House also issued two new veto threats in the hours before the president spoke — this time for bills that would ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy and accelerate approval of natural gas pipeline construction. For their part, Republicans immediately rejected most of the proposals that were central to Mr. Obama’s address, saying he was obviously not serious about working with them to pass consequential bipartisan legislation. The midterm elections may have delivered more power to Republicans, who control Congress, but the tenor of the president’s address and the Republican response to it showed there was no new dawn of cooperation. “I think this was a tremendous missed opportunity for this administration,” Senator Richard M. Burr, Republican of North Carolina, said. “When you start out with multiple veto threats and you show no willingness to even meet somewhere in the middle on issues that have been percolating for some time, it gives you very little hope that there’s going to be a breakthrough.” Video The president discussed tax increases on high-income earners and large financial institutions that would fund new initiatives during his State of the Union address. Credit Credit Stephen Crowley/The New York Times But in some ways, the Republicans may have the greater burden after promising to prove that they can govern productively after years of being mocked by the president as “the Party of No.” The president’s address signaled not only that he will make that transformation difficult, but also that he and fellow Democrats may adopt a form of the “No” strategy as their own. The parallels may not be exact, of course. Mr. Obama points out that many of the Republicans’ priorities seem designed to provoke him into issuing veto threats because they would dismantle popular pieces of his legacy. Yet, he and Congressional Democrats have to figure out how to assert themselves without becoming subject to the same label they have given Republicans: obstructionists. The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, accused the president of offering little more than “warmed-over proposals” and veto threats. Mr. McConnell told reporters that since the fall elections, the president had “almost without exception indicated he’s not for much of anything the American people voted for last November.” Limits on Presidents Acting Alone How a handful of presidential actions have been challenged in court, by Congress and by later presidents. Republicans also said that if the president wanted to ensure his legacy, he should strike a far more compromising tone than he did during his address. “I mean what he’s talking about so far he knows doesn’t have any chance whatsoever of passing,” Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, said. “I would think the president in his last two years would actually want to accomplish something. And if he focused on trade and education and cybersecurity, fixing ‘No Child Left Behind,’ making it easier to go to college, all those are areas where we can get some agreement.” But on Tuesday, Republicans were offering few specifics and retreated to their familiar criticisms of Mr. Obama: that he is a tax-and-spend liberal whose policies they could never endorse. “This president, to every problem his solution is, ‘More taxes, more government,’ “ Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, said. “The American people made clear the last thing we want is yet more taxes from Washington, more government spending, more debt, more regulations.” Mr. Cruz likened Mr. Obama’s approach to the famous “Saturday Night Live” spoof of the Blue Oyster Cult song “(Don’t Fear) the Reaper.” “To every problem,” Mr. Cruz said, “his solution was, ‘More cowbell! More cowbell!’ “ Republicans said that they were caught off guard by a major component of the president’s 2015 agenda, which he announced over the weekend and detailed further in his speech, to raise taxes and fees on the wealthiest taxpayers and the largest financial firms to pay for, among other things, tax breaks for the middle class and free community college . While these programs may prove popular with many Americans, Republicans said that they hoped the American public would see them as a ploy from a president who knows Congress will never pass them. “It’s the wrong way to approach things,” said Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, who urged Mr. Obama to focus on “those areas of agreement rather than start talking about things that divide us automatically.” Several Republicans said they had yet to see the White House reach out in a serious way to start building better relationships. And Tuesday’s speech, they said, did not help. “He had a most curious list of where he thought we could work together,” Representative Jason Chaffetz, Republican of Utah, said. “I didn’t understand where he was going with that or what he was trying to do.” Representative Tom Cole, Republican of Oklahoma, said, “I’ve seen very little outreach since the November election.” Instead, he said, “It’s been one provocative move after the other.” Some Republicans said they thought the president’s speech and his tone since his party lost badly in the midterm elections signaled that he was interested in seeing little accomplished in the next two years, allowing Democrats in 2016 campaigns to portray Republicans as incompetent stewards of Congress. “For him, it’s all 2016 partisan politics now, and Republicans shouldn’t waste time debating the merits of the president’s political talking points,” Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, said. “As the president tries to divide Americans and distract them from the failures of his administration,” Mr. Lee added, “we shouldn’t take the bait.” | State of the Union,SOTU,State of the Union 2015;Barack Obama;US;US Politics;Vetoes;Republicans |
ny0167268 | [
"sports",
"football"
] | 2006/01/10 | After a Tete-a-Tete, Barber Tones It Down | EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J., Jan. 9 - The Giants will not play another game for about seven months, until the preseason arrives in August, but their coach spent the morning after Sunday's playoff loss with the team's star running back in a one-on-one film session. Tom Coughlin said he was angered by Tiki Barber's choice of words the night before, when Barber told reporters after the team's 23-0 loss to the Carolina Panthers that the Giants were in some ways outcoached. Barber's punishment was akin to being called to the principal's office. Coughlin, bothered that Barber would single out the coaching staff -- and, by extension, Coughlin -- used the replays to show Barber the opportunities missed by players. Barber, whose relationship with Coughlin is a vital bridge between the coach and the rest of the team, emerged with a broader view of the loss and the blame. He never quite took back his words, choosing to expand them rather than retract them. He and Coughlin apparently left their meeting on good terms. Barber seemed surprised at the fuss, and Coughlin seemed ready to move on. "We had a good conversation," Coughlin said, declining to provide details. "It is always a good conversation with Tiki. He is a very positive guy. His attitude is great. He said something hopefully he regretted." Coughlin added: "We talked. We looked at some tape together. We continued to talk. And it ended up as it always does, a unified situation. Tiki has been a great, great player here." What caught Coughlin's attention Sunday was a news conference nearly an hour after the game. Barber, the N.F.L.'s second-leading rusher, who was held to 41 yards on 13 carries against Carolina, was asked how physical the Panthers had been on defense. "I don't think they were overly more physical than anyone else we'd played," he said. "I just think they had a good scheme. I think in some ways we were outcoached. They had more intensity than we did, they played more consistently than we did, and that's why they won this game." Other answers by Barber were sprinkled with references to Carolina's scheme and the Giants' inability to make adjustments. In noting that receiver Plaxico Burress had no receptions -- the first time that happened since 2000, Burress's rookie season in Pittsburgh -- Barber said, "That's a testament to our game plan not being the right one." Coughlin was not pleased. "We win or we lose as a team," Coughlin told reporters. "And that is the way it shall remain. We don't point fingers. We handle these stressful situations with class and distinction, or at least we try to." Coughlin added that sometimes people spoke out of frustration or without appropriate forethought. "From time to time it is important, again, to re-emphasize to our players that we can handle any form of adversity there is, as long as we remain together and we move forward together," he said. Before Coughlin addressed the news media for his season post-mortem, Barber stood at his locker and talked about the team's loss and its outlook for next season. About half of the roughly 30 questions Barber faced were about the episode with Coughlin. Barber amended his previous day's answers, saying that the Panthers had "out-everythinged" the Giants. He said the meeting with Coughlin gave him a bigger perspective. "I hadn't seen the film," Barber said. "So when I talked to him, we just started looking at it. It was a lot of execution. It was a lot of them making plays and us not." He added that the Giants "were outplayed more than anything." "Their players did better than ours," he said. "That shows up on film." With the relationship apparently patched up, Coughlin and Barber may have to agree to disagree. Coughlin was asked if the coaches could have devised a better offensive scheme against the Panthers. "No, I really wish I could say that," he replied, offering examples of plays that were unsuccessful because of missed assignments or tipped balls. Barber budged, but he did not entirely accept Sunday's postgame comments. "It probably was a mistake, because you guys are still talking about it," Barber told reporters. "It is what it is. I was feeling that way after the game. Whether it's right or not -- probably not -- because looking at the tape it was mostly us not performing as players." EXTRA POINTS Tiki Barber and defensive end Osi Umenyiora were named to the Associated Press All-Pro team. | NEW YORK GIANTS;CAROLINA PANTHERS;COUGHLIN TOM;BARBER TIKI;PLAYOFF GAMES;FOOTBALL |
ny0077242 | [
"sports",
"baseball"
] | 2015/05/31 | Creative Spending Benefits the Astros | Lance McCullers Jr. was new to the Fresno Grizzlies in mid-May, promoted to the Houston Astros’ highest minor league affiliate after 29 overpowering innings in Class AA. His plan all along was to pitch for Houston this season, but he figured he would have to prove himself at a new level before getting there. Then an Astros starter, Brett Oberholtzer, left a start with a blister on his index finger. Soon, the Grizzlies’ manager, Tony DeFrancesco, was calling a clubhouse meeting and announcing that McCullers was going to the majors. The first person to hug him, McCullers said, was shortstop Carlos Correa. “We’re really close,” McCullers said, “and he seemed really happy for me.” Without Correa, McCullers would probably be playing for the University of Florida instead of the Astros, for whom he is 1-0 with a 2.40 E.R.A. after three starts. Correa and McCullers were the Astros’ first choices in the 2012 draft, the first under the current collective bargaining agreement and the first for their general manager, Jeff Luhnow. The selections were intertwined. As teams prepare for this year’s draft on June 8, the Astros’ strategy stands out as an enticing — if risky — method of bundling talent. Since 2012, teams have been given different pools of bonus money depending on where they pick. Each slot comes with a recommended allowance, and teams are penalized for exceeding their overall pool. But creative spending is allowed, and it helped sway McCullers from his Florida scholarship, and a fourth-round pick, Rio Ruiz, from his plans to attend Southern California. “We didn’t want to just take the best player and pay the recommended amount, unless it was necessary,” Luhnow said. “If we could free up resources and take the best player, that was best for us. We believed Carlos Correa was the best player, and the rest of the top five probably didn’t.” With an unexpected chance to be the first overall pick, Correa accepted a $4.8 million bonus, well below his slotted value of $7.2 million. The Astros used the savings to give McCullers a $2.5 million bonus, well above his slotted value of $1.26 million. They spent the additional savings on Ruiz, who was traded to Atlanta in a January deal for Evan Gattis, who is their designated hitter. It was the kind of plan few teams had the bonus money to pull off. The Yankees, for example, picked 30th that June, with a slot value of $1.6 million for the pick. They chose a high school left-hander, Ty Hensley, who is now recovering from Tommy John surgery. McCullers, who went 41st, attended Jesuit High School in Tampa, Fla., and had season tickets to Yankees spring training games, once visiting the dugout at Steinbrenner Field in middle school. His father, Lance Sr., pitched seven years in the majors, including 1989 and part of 1990 with the Yankees. Coming from a baseball family helped give McCullers, 21, the maturity and perspective to navigate his path to the majors. When the Astros told him to concentrate on developing his changeup last summer, he did, knowing that his statistics would suffer. “When a guy throws 97 miles an hour, you really don’t feel like making it easy on the hitter by throwing something 88,” Luhnow said. “But to be successful in the big leagues, he was going to need it. He took his lumps and kept getting after it.” Pitching in high Class A in the California League last season, McCullers had a 5.47 earned run average, making 18 starts and allowing 18 homers. Yet when off-season workouts began, he told his trainer he planned to advance quickly. “We’re going to train to be a big leaguer,” McCullers said he told the trainer, Nicole Gabriel. “There’s no more ‘I’m a young prospect, I have time.’ It’s go time for me.” He added, “I just trained the whole off-season as if I was going to make a statement in camp and push toward the big leagues.” When he got there, on May 18 against Oakland, McCullers allowed one run in four and two-thirds innings — and made a fashion statement by wearing a Batman logo on the back of his spikes. That violated the major league dress code, as it turned out, but he collected his first victory in his next start with six strong innings in Detroit. Correa hit a home run out of the Grizzlies’ stadium on Tuesday. His combined stat line at two levels this season, entering Saturday’s games: a .333 average with 10 homers, 40 runs batted in and 18 steals. “He’s facing a lot of pitchers right now that have been in the big leagues, and that’s a good experience for him,” Luhnow said. “He’s handling it well and learning from it. I don’t know how long he needs, but I do think he will play in Houston this summer.” As they monitor Correa, the Astros have another draft to plan. Last June, they tried to repeat their 2012 strategy by signing the first overall pick, the high school left-hander Brady Aiken, to a below-slot deal and spreading the savings to other choices. But when they failed to sign Aiken, who has since had Tommy John surgery, they lost the slot value for his pick — and the players they drafted whose deals depended on Aiken’s. As compensation for losing Aiken, the Astros got the No. 2 overall pick in this June’s draft, to go with the No. 5 choice. They have a bonus pool of more than $17 million — and many options for how to spend it — as they try to fortify a farm system that now feeds the first-place team in the American League West. “We’ve paid our dues, and the fans have, with some losing seasons,” Luhnow said. “But we’re excited about where we are.” Feeling Lester’s Pain The Chicago Cubs’ Jon Lester set a major league record last week by extending his hitless streak to 59 at-bats. It is the longest streak of futility at the start of any major league career, and does not even include his 0-for-5 showing in two World Series. Lester broke a record set 20 years ago by Joey Hamilton of the San Diego Padres, who was 0 for 57. A few rungs down on the list is Don Carman, who started 0 for 48 and can relate to Lester’s woes. Lester had irregular hitting opportunities as an American League pitcher, as Carman did as a young reliever. “I was always the top hitter on my Little League team,” said Carman, who now works for the agent Scott Boras, helping clients with their mental skills. “I was the leadoff hitter in high school and hit .460. But I’ll never forget my first at-bat in the big leagues. It was just overwhelming how good they were.” Opposing pitchers, Carman said, were unrelenting against him. They knew he was hopeless at the plate and did not want to end up on his highlight reel. Carman eventually sought help from a Philadelphia teammate, the future Hall of Famer Mike Schmidt, who told him that when he slumped, he tried to let the ball travel as deep as possible. “It turns out that was pretty good advice,” Carman said. “A couple of years ago, I asked Miggy Cabrera what his approach was, and he said, ‘Just try to let the ball get as deep as you can.’ So there you go.” Carman applied the wisdom, he said, and surprised San Diego’s Storm Davis in 1987 by slapping a bouncer up the middle in a bunt situation. It was the first of 12 career hits for Carman — in 209 at-bats, good for a skimpy .057 career average. Joe Maddon, the Cubs’ upbeat manager, has said Lester has sound hitting mechanics and may surprise people by making his first hit a home run. If Carman is a guide, though, we should not bet on it. “My goal was to hit for the cycle — not for one day, but for a career,” Carman said. “I got that single out of the way, but I never did get to the rest of them.” Royals’ All-Star Push The Kansas City Royals have not visited Great American Ballpark in Cincinnati since 2010, but they might take it over next month. When the first All-Star balloting results were released last week, five Royals were leading at their positions: catcher Salvador Perez, outfielders Lorenzo Cain and Alex Gordon, shortstop Alcides Escobar and third baseman Mike Moustakas. All have played well this season, yet two others, first baseman Eric Hosmer and designated hitter Kendrys Morales, have probably been the team’s best run producers. If the balloting holds, the Royals will be the first team with five elected starters since the vaunted 1976 Cincinnati Reds, who sent Johnny Bench, Dave Concepcion, George Foster, Joe Morgan and Pete Rose. Like these Royals, those Reds were coming off a seven-game World Series the previous fall (the Reds won, the Royals lost). Most of those Reds players, however, were well established by 1976. None of the Royals leading the new ballot have ever been elected starting All-Stars. Perez started last year’s game as a replacement for Baltimore’s Matt Wieters, who was injured. | Baseball;Lance McCullers Jr.;Carlos Correa;Jeff Luhnow;Astros |
ny0139835 | [
"business"
] | 2008/02/19 | House Committee Questions Contract for Former Bush Appointee | WASHINGTON — The House Small Business Committee has asked for an investigation into how a newly retired Bush administration appointee with no experience in helping small businesses compete for government contracts received money from the Small Business Administration to do exactly that. The $1.2 million contract — 90 percent of the agency’s budget to provide advice and training to small disadvantaged businesses or businesses operating in high unemployment areas — went to the VBP Group, a company based in Paradise Valley, Ariz. The company’s owner, Vernon B. Parker, served as assistant secretary for civil rights in the Agriculture Department from April 2003 to January 2006. The post was created by Congress to help address the department’s historic discrimination against black farmers. A month after Mr. Parker, a former church pastor who is also a lawyer and a civil rights consultant, left the Agriculture Department, he founded the VBP Group. Certification by the S.B.A. to run one of its programs typically takes two years, unless the owner has prior experience in the area and receives a waiver. The VBP Group was four months old when it was certified. Steven C. Preston, the S.B.A.’s administrator, was questioned about the contract award to Mr. Parker at a hearing of the House Small Business Committee on Feb. 7. The next day, Mr. Preston reported that he had asked the agency’s inspector general, Eric Thorson, to look into the matter. “Based in the information provided by your staff, and some research conducted by my staff, I believe there is sufficient cause for concern over the events surrounding this contractor,” Mr. Preston wrote to Nydia Velázquez, Democrat of New York and chairwoman of the committee. Ms. Velázquez said in an e-mail message on Friday that the S.B.A. has long argued that it has had to cut programs because “the agency just didn’t have the funds.” She added: “It seems they only have money for Republican cronies.” Mr. Parker, 48, said, in a telephone interview on Friday, that he had legitimately obtained the S.B.A. contract after winning a waiver to become a qualified training provider in June 2006. In addition to serving at the Agriculture Department, Mr. Parker said he had worked at the federal Office of Personnel Management, becoming its general counsel in the early 1990s, according to his official biography. “My role is to teach businesses about civil rights issues and how the government views civil rights,” he said. Mr. Parker, who said in a second phone call that he had been contacted by the inspector general’s office, said he was working with James E. Selmon III on the program. Mr. Selmon was associate administrator for the Agriculture Department’s Rural Housing Service for two years, starting in 2002. Mr. Selmon, 37, said he had been conducting workshops in every state, “We instruct them on how to get government contracts,” Mr. Selmon said, by telephone from Houston, where he lives. “It’s everything from cost and pricing to administrative procedures and taxes.” Mr. Selmon said he was formerly employed by a Houston computer business and had worked for Unlimited Services Systems Management and Consultants, a firm based in Largo, Md., which provided S.B.A. training for three years, 2004 through 2006. Brenda Campbell, who owns Unlimited Services Systems Management, said she had won a fourth year of the training contract but that it had been rescinded without explanation. The S.B.A., citing the inspector general’s investigation, said it could not comment on Ms. Campbell’s assertion or provide access to the contracting officials involved. The inspector general’s office said it would not comment. Congressional Democrats and small business groups have long argued for the importance of the training program, which is the only government-financed program that teaches owners of small businesses about the complex procedures and language involved in applying for government contracts. Those contracts are often crucial to the financial well-being of small businesses, particularly minority- and female-owned businesses. Groups like the National Small Business Association say such training is vital, especially in a declining economy. “What we hear is that the reason more of our members don’t participate in government contracts is because it’s so confusing,” said Molly Brogan, the association’s spokeswoman. “The program helps them figure out what the lingo means and what they need to do.” The administration has asked for $1.5 million for the program for the coming fiscal year, which begins in October. Members of the small business committee have urged that the budget be increased to $2 million or more. As recently as 2001, the program awarded $3.2 million to a dozen groups, including well-known names like the Amos Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. Ms. Velázquez and the committee’s ranking Republican, Steve Chabot of Ohio, have pledged to look “into the use of funds to ensure the program has qualified business advisers.” | Small Business Administration;United States Politics and Government;Budgets and Budgeting;Parker Vernon B.;Inspectors General;Washington (DC) |
ny0159705 | [
"business"
] | 2008/12/14 | A Software Secretary That Takes Charge | SHOULDN’T your computer know a reasonable amount about your likes and dislikes? Wouldn’t it be great if it could anticipate your needs and take action without you pressing a key? Booking travel and restaurant reservations, rearranging meeting schedules or even taking a first cut at reading e-mail are among the mundane tasks that have remained beyond the reach of our PCs for decades. But now a new generation of Internet technologies, coupled with the investment of more than a third of a billion dollars, may be making meaningful progress. The concept of a software personal assistant has long captured the imagination of a generation of science fiction writers and computer scientists. Oliver G. Selfridge, the artificial-intelligence pioneer who died this month, is credited with coining the term “intelligent agent,” as well as the idea of a computer software “demon” — a simple software program that could monitor its environment and make appropriate responses when changes occur. With the arrival of personal computing in the 1980s, the idea took the form of highly choreographed “vision” statements from many Silicon Valley companies. The most memorable was the Knowledge Navigator video, by John Sculley, then chief executive of Apple, in which an interactive assistant on a video display, clad in a bow tie, does research for a college professor and nags him to return his mother’s phone call. But efforts to build useful computerized assistants have consistently ended in failure, including some of the Valley’s largest “craters” — ambitious undertakings ending as spectacular flameouts. The failures include General Magic, originally backed by Mr. Sculley, E-speak by Hewlett-Packard and Hailstorm by Microsoft. A Pentagon research project and two Silicon Valley start-up companies are about to try again. SRI International, a research group in Menlo Park, Calif., is approaching the end of a multiyear project called CALO, which stands for cognitive assistant that learns and organizes. CALO is financed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Pentagon and is one of the largest artificial-intelligence projects ever. Some public demonstrations have been given, but CALO is being developed largely out of the public eye because it is intended for the military. There is already one quiet commercial spin-off from the project. Siri Inc., based in San Jose, Calif., plans to introduce a personal assistance service in the first half of 2009. Still in “stealth” mode, with a small private test version of its service, Siri has raised $8.5 million from two venture capital firms. “We’re exploring concepts developed by the CALO project and applying them to the consumer,” said Adam Cheyer, Siri’s founder and vice president of engineering. He said that he expects the idea of personal assistance to gain momentum next year and that he thinks Siri will be joined by other competitors. A different tack has been taken by the entrepreneur Patrick W. Grady. He has put together a technology team at Rearden Commerce that has already begun to reach a business audience with an “intelligent” personal assistant oriented toward travel and entertainment. It will be available early next year for nonbusiness customers as well. Rearden is one of Silicon Valley’s most significantly financed but least known start-ups. Founded in 1999 before the dot-com crash, Rearden announced in April that it had recently raised an additional $100 million, for a total of $200 million in almost a decade. American Express and JPMorgan Chase each own 10 percent stakes. Why might Mr. Grady and Mr. Cheyer succeed while everyone who came before lies face down with arrows in their backs? Timing, for one thing. The promise of the Web 2.0 era of the Internet has been the interconnection of Web services. Mr. Grady says he has a far easier task today because the heavy lifting has been done by others. “This is the connective tissue that sits on top of the Web and brings you more than the sum of the parts,” he said. “I set out to deliver on the longstanding ‘holy grail of user-centric computing,’ a ‘personal Internet assistant.’” He promises to bring together all of the discrete online services needed for business travel that are now separate — for starters, travel, airport parking, car services, dining reservations, entertainment tickets, package delivery and video conferences. Imagine you are on a business trip and your computer discovers that your flight will be late. It automatically reschedules your dinner in New York, informs your three guests of the change and tells you they’ve been notified. REARDEN’S service is used by 2,500 American Express business customers, making it available to 1.6 million employees. Chase plans to start the service for its card members early next year. One of Rearden’s first customers was GlaxoSmithKline, the pharmaceutical maker. The company has made the service available to more than 50,000 users in the United States and Britain; the service helps to plan 3,000 to 4,000 trips a week. “We think of it as a personal executive assistant,” said Gregg Brandyberry, a vice president at the company, who counts on the service to notify his BlackBerry of changes in his schedule while he is traveling. Thomas D. Garvey, an artificial-intelligence researcher at SRI, said CALO passed an important milestone last week when it was used in a United States Army test of a command and control system at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. CALO watches users work with computer systems and then automates routine tasks, he said. With CALO doing mundane work, he said, Army officers can focus on more important matters. Have Mr. Grady or CALO or Siri cracked the code in the half-decade-long quest for a software personal assistant? Ordinary computer users will soon have a chance to find out. | Computers and the Internet;Software;Smartphones |
ny0143624 | [
"world",
"americas"
] | 2008/10/05 | Venezuela Bars Chávez Critic From Leaving | CARACAS, Venezuela — Military officials have prohibited Raúl Isaías Baduel, a retired general and a former confidant of President Hugo Chávez who is now one of his most strident critics, from leaving the country after accusing him of corruption in connection with his tenure as Venezuela’s defense minister. The travel ban was imposed late Friday night after military intelligence agents arrested Mr. Baduel and shoved him into an unmarked vehicle in front of two of his children and his wife, who was screaming at the agents, a scene captured on video and replayed repeatedly throughout this country on private television networks. Rafael Tosta, a lawyer for Mr. Baduel, who was released Friday night, said his client was also required to appear before a military tribunal every 15 days and was prohibited from publicly commenting on the accusations, which revolve around $14.5 million in missing funds. Mr. Baduel, who helped reinstall Mr. Chávez after a brief coup in 2002, has gone from being a hero of the president’s socialist-inspired revolution to one of its outcasts. Mr. Baduel emerged as one of Mr. Chávez most vocal opponents since resigning as defense minister last year. Critics of Mr. Chávez said the arrest was a distraction tactic before regional elections in November, when the president’s party will be faced with the possibility of losing control of important states, including Aragua, a bastion of active and retired military personnel where Mr. Baduel is said to wield influence. “If Baduel had remained quiet, everyone would be happy,” said Ismael García, a congressman who, like Mr. Baduel, broke with Mr. Chávez last year over a proposed constitutional overhaul that would have significantly increased the president’s power. Voters rejected the overhaul last December. | Venezuela;Chavez Hugo;Ethics;Armament Defense and Military Forces |
ny0197787 | [
"us"
] | 2009/07/04 | Man of Contradictions, Shaper of Modernity. Age? 500 Next Week. | He was born on July 10, 1509, a religious thinker and leader who may have done as much as anyone to shape the modern world. And yet after 500 years, John Calvin is still not an easy man to understand. Calvin is often imagined, if he is imagined at all, as the implacable snoop who enforced a prudish morality on the citizens of Geneva, a steely spinner of harsh theological doctrines about a depraved humanity and a fierce God predestining people to heaven or hell. “When we talk about our history, Calvin does not figure in the conversation,” Marilynne Robinson, prizewinning novelist, has complained, “or when he does, it is as Adam Smith’s censorious cousin.” In fact, as Ms. Robinson (in her 1998 collection of essays, “The Death of Adam”) and any number of historians have pointed out, Calvin was a product of Renaissance humanism, a student of the Greek and Roman classics who reread Cicero every year, a writer of exceptional grace and lucidity in both Latin and French, a man of prodigious learning, who did not dwell on damnation but rather exulted in a sovereign but not at all distant God, a God whose glory was manifest in the goodness of the world and the potential of humanity. In “Calvin,” a biography just published by Yale University Press, Bruce Gordon writes that Calvin “transformed the Erasmian and Reformation message of inner spirituality and the journey to salvation into a vision of church life that could be lived in the maelstrom of the early-modern world.” Calvin’s legacy has been traced in everything from modern marriage and modern science to modern liberal government and of course modern capitalism. By many accounts, he is a major source of modernity’s very understanding of the self. The lines between his own thought and actions and these later developments are not always straight, though. Movements he helped inspire sometimes took turns he would never have expected and might well have disavowed. He fought fiercely with civil authorities when he thought they were impinging on the right of the church to govern its own affairs, but, a law-and-order man to his toes, he would almost certainly have rejected the justifications of later Calvinists for violent resistance and rebellion against oppressive rulers. Still, those followers were pursuing paths his ideas had opened. The place of Calvin in economic history is similarly complex. Max Weber’s famous 1905 thesis “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” has been dealt so many body blows that the wonder is that it staggers on. Weber may not have got the historical details or the psychological dynamism right, yet when he proposed religious, especially Calvinist, roots of the calculating rationality, incessant striving and this-worldly asceticism fueling early capitalism, he was on to something. Professor Gordon, who teaches Reformation history at Yale Divinity School, knows exactly how complicated it is to trace modern realities to 16th-century roots. Indeed, putting Calvin back in the context of that very different world, a world suffused with religion and animated by spiritual forces, was, he says, one of the great challenges of writing his book. So is it fanciful, he was asked this week, to detect powerful traces of Calvin’s work and thought in, say, the American Constitution or in the Declaration celebrated this weekend? “Absolutely not,” he said. Yet the human being behind those ideas and actions remains either maddeningly elusive or contradictory. Little is reliably known about crucial passages in Calvin’s life. He came of age in a France where Roman Catholicism was being stirred by the currents of religious reform associated with Erasmus and Luther, but little precise is known of young Calvin’s evolving beliefs or the definitive religious break that led him from the study of law to theology and from his homeland into exile in Switzerland. That exile began at the end of 1534, the year he drafted his “Institutes of the Christian Religion,” a masterwork that he would constantly revise until, a quarter-century later, it had turned into an enormous handbook five times as long. To Professor Gordon, this first edition is astounding. “How this beautifully crafted expression and interpretation of God’s loving power,” he writes, “appeared from the hand of a 25-year-old exile who had never formally studied theology cannot be adequately explained by historical circumstances.” Of Calvin’s marriage and family life even less is known. Of his friendships with other religious leaders, by contrast, much is recorded in correspondence; but here the contradictions arise. Calvin cultivated intense relationships within tightly knit networks of fellow Protestants. But he had to dominate; when challenged, his anger, Professor Gordon writes, was “incandescent” and “volcanic.” He could be “ruthless” and “an outstanding hater.” Although he confessed these failings, his best efforts at correction and reconciliation never extirpated them. What always came first was his conviction of a calling, the calling of a prophet, in his case modeled on Paul, the evangelist, the interpreter, the planter of churches, the negotiator of differences, the disciplinarian of congregations. Today, such single-mindedness, especially if religious, seems unbalanced or baffling. It can be appreciated only when it drives a political, artistic or intellectual rebel struggling against long odds. That is the special value of Professor Gordon’s detailed portrait of Calvin as a man in constant motion, beleaguered by political and religious turmoil, a leader who “never controlled his agenda.” The political independence of a militarily weak Geneva was always precarious. Factions within the city were rife. European Protestantism was disunited, torn by bitter quarrels over the meaning of the Lord’s Supper and threatened by the revived power of the Catholic Hapsburgs. For Calvin, the long odds were also physical. From the crack of dawn to the last flicker of candlelight, he studied, he preached, he lectured, he joined and adjudicated debates, he wrote tirelessly, despite migraines, bowel problems, hookworms, kidney stones and eventually pulmonary tuberculosis. He was haunted, Professor Gordon says, with “a sense of the hourglass running out.” No one could have lived more of a purpose-driven life. Calvin was 55 when he died. To avoid any Catholic-like cult of a saint, he was buried in an unmarked grave, at his request. It is a fitting symbol. So much about him remains a mystery to the world that he nonetheless forever changed. | Calvin John;Religion and Belief;Calvinism;Christians and Christianity;History |
ny0277045 | [
"world",
"asia"
] | 2016/11/04 | Rodrigo Duterte’s Pledge to Stop Cursing Lands in the Gutter | HONG KONG — When President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines vowed last week to stop cursing, at God’s direct request, few people in the deeply Catholic country questioned his faith or the logistics of the apparently divine intervention. But some Filipinos placed bets on how long Mr. Duterte’s pledge would last because he curses regularly and had raised eyebrows by saying that President Obama “ can go to hell .” The answer: a long weekend. The voice of God spoke to Mr. Durterte on a flight home from Japan, he said after arriving in the Philippines on Oct. 27. According to the president, the voice, which he ascertained came from the Lord, said that the plane would crash unless he stopped cursing. So, he said, he agreed to watch his tongue. “A promise to God is a promise to the Filipino people,” he said. Mr. Duterte appeared to honor his pledge through the weekend and into Monday, when he visited wounded soldiers in the southern province of Sulu. But in Davao City on Monday, Mr. Duterte’s hometown in the southern Philippines, he cursed at some police officers. “Never enter into illegal drugs,” Mr. Duterte told the officers. “Son of a whore, I will kill you, I’m telling you.” The phrase, which he uttered in Tagalog, is often sprinkled into everyday speech in the Philippines for emphasis and is different from a similar phrase that is used as a direct insult. Still, its reappearance represented the end of Mr. Duterte’s brief venture into linguistic temperance. He appeared to be back in prime cursing form on Wednesday after a vow by Benjamin L. Cardin of Maryland, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to block any sale of assault rifles to the Philippine police. “Look at these monkeys, they are stopping the sale of 26,000 assault rifles,” he said, referring to United States officials. “You son of a whore, eh, I’m mad.” United States officials have objected to an antidrug campaign in the Philippines that has killed about 2,000 people since Mr. Duterte took office on June 30. The breaking of Mr. Duterte’s pledge to stop swearing did not receive much coverage in the Philippine news media. On social media, some users expressed exasperation with Mr. Duterte’s behavior: But others took it in stride: | Rodrigo Duterte;Philippines;Speeches;Indecency Obscenity and Profanity |
ny0206012 | [
"business",
"economy"
] | 2009/01/15 | Executive Calls ’30s Housing Solutions Superior | A former Fannie Mae executive has deemed Depression-era efforts to modify ailing mortgages more successful than those being used in the current housing crisis. The executive, Edward J. Pinto, who was Fannie’s chief credit officer in the late 1980s, argues in a paper prepared for a research group that current modification efforts by the government and banks are lagging because they typically include past-due payments in new loans and because homeowners are qualifying for new loans that are too big for them to handle. “We’re entering into this housing crisis in a much weaker position than we did during the Depression,” Mr. Pinto said in an interview. He is scheduled to deliver his paper, on which his remarks were based, to the American Enterprise Institute in Washington on Friday as part of a conference on the mortgage problems confronting the incoming Obama administration. More than half of all loan modifications handled by the Federal Housing Administration in 2008 have defaulted, according to Treasury Department data. That compares with 20 percent for the Federal Home Owners Loan Corporation, a similar Depression-era government agency set up to handle the mortgage fallout from the Depression, Mr. Pinto said. Mr. Pinto, a critic of Fannie who now works as an independent consultant on the mortgage industry, said that while the subprime crisis was often compared to the Depression, there were differences that made the current problem more acute. For example, he said, the Depression-era collapse in housing prices did not generally put homeowners at risk of owing the bank more than their house was worth. That is not the case today. Last month, Mr. Pinto testified before a Congressional committee that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, based on financial statements, now guarantee or hold 10.5 million nonprime loans worth $1.6 trillion — one in three of all subprime loans, and nearly two in three of all so-called Alt-A loans, often called “liar loans.” The figures exceed those reported by the two companies. | Subprime Mortgage Crisis;Great Depression (1930's);Mortgages |
ny0074427 | [
"world",
"asia"
] | 2015/04/07 | Bangladesh: Storm Toll Increases | The death toll from several days of high winds and heavy rain lashing northern Bangladesh rose to 41, the police and officials said Monday. The main causes of death were collapsing walls, falling trees, boats capsizing, lightning and electrocution, officials said. More than 200 people were injured, and thousands of mud houses were damaged. | Bangladesh;Rain;Wind;Fatalities,casualties |
ny0183822 | [
"world"
] | 2007/12/15 | Britain Overtakes U.S. as Top World Bank Donor | BERLIN — The World Bank , overcoming misgivings about its direction and leadership, said Friday that it had raised $25.1 billion in aid for the world’s poorest countries, a record sum that includes donations by China and Egypt, nations that were once recipients of such aid. For the first time, Britain overtook the United States as the biggest donor, a highly symbolic change given Washington’s traditional influence in choosing the bank’s president and charting its policies. Bank officials said the change in rankings was partly caused by currency swings, since the dollar has dropped in value against European currencies. But the willingness of the United States to cede its top spot was clearly the most closely watched element of the negotiations here. “The U.S. is stretching; Britain is stretching,” the bank’s president, Robert B. Zoellick , said in a conference call with reporters on Friday. Britain has “the advantage of a stronger currency, the pound,” he said. The record overall donations were a coup for Mr. Zoellick, a diplomat and former trade negotiator in the Bush administration, who replaced Paul D. Wolfowitz as bank president in July. Mr. Wolfowitz left after a bitter ethics dispute that frayed ties with aid officials, particularly among European governments. Britain’s pledge of $4.2 billion, and $2.2 billion from Germany — both big increases — suggested that the rift with Europe had been healed. German officials heaped praise on Mr. Zoellick, who skipped the negotiations to attend the United Nations meeting on climate change in Bali, Indonesia. “The atmosphere has improved and become more trusting,” said Eric Stather, the German deputy minister for economic cooperation and development. “He has shown a clear vision for the future of the bank.” Britain, the United States, Japan and Germany were the four largest donors among the 45 countries that pledged money to be used over the next three years. The total was 42 percent more than the bank raised in its previous campaign in 2005. In all, the World Bank collected $41.6 billion for its International Development Association, or I.D.A., which provides grants and interest-free loans to more than 80 poor countries, roughly half of them in Africa. Of that amount, $16.5 billion is from the World Bank’s internal funds, including previous donor pledges for financing debt forgiveness and contributions from two other World Bank divisions, the International Finance Corporation and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Mr. Zoellick pushed for these donations to jump-start the fund-raising effort, which he predicted would be arduous. The World Bank raised $32.1 billion in its last round of fund-raising. In addition to the declining dollar, countries are grappling with their own budget pressures. Moreover, the role of the International Development Association has come under question in development circles in recent years. Wealthier nations increasingly prefer to channel aid through their own development agencies. They also tend to earmark large contributions for specific diseases, like AIDS, or specific development projects, like ones relating to climate change and the environment. “It’s easier for governments to raise money for particular diseases,” Mr. Zoellick said. He has defended the International Development Association, noting that “this is the core funding that the poorest developing countries rely on.” Mr. Zoellick spent a lot of time persuading what he called “middle income” countries to donate aid to poorer countries. China, because of its vast foreign-exchange reserves, was an obvious target. Its undisclosed donation, though small, was a victory for his diplomacy. As for the United States, he played down its slide in the rankings. In percentage terms, he said, the American donation still represented a healthy increase from its last one. The United States Treasury secretary, Henry M. Paulson Jr., said the contribution of $3.7 billion was 30 percent higher than previous levels. Development experts said the loss of the top ranking was symbolically important, even if Britain had been closing in on the United States for years. More significantly, though, it shows that Europe has thrown its support behind the World Bank. “The Europeans were looking for a sense of direction and some confidence in where the bank was going,” said Nancy Birdsall, president of the Center for Global Development, a public policy organization in Washington. “This shows there is a renewed confidence.” | World Bank;Zoellick Robert B |
ny0171890 | [
"us",
"politics"
] | 2007/11/10 | Seeing Progress in Iraq, McCain Hopes for Credit | CONCORD, N.H., Nov. 9 — Now that President Bush’s decision early this year to send more troops to Iraq is showing signs of reducing the violence in Baghdad, Senator John McCain , who had long called for beefing up the American military presence there, is betting that the politics of the war are changing as well. Mr. McCain, Republican of Arizona, is making his early advocacy of the troop increase and his push for a change in strategy a central theme of his presidential campaign. He is using it to distance himself from the Bush administration, whose handling of the war he regularly denounces, and from his Republican rivals, none of whom, he says, displayed the leadership, courage or knowledge necessary to win in Iraq. “I was the only one, the only candidate for president of the United States on either side” who fought to change course by providing more troops, he told voters in Iowa this week. “I did everything in my power to try and change that strategy,” he said, referring to the course originally set by President Bush. “I was severely criticized by other Republicans for being disloyal. I said we had to have the strategy we are using now.” Mr. McCain is asking voters where his main Republican rivals — Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mitt Romney and Fred D. Thompson — were as the situation in Iraq deteriorated, pointing to their silence as evidence of lack of experience. “If they want to be president of the United States, they should have informed themselves,” he said in an interview in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. While not questioning his opponents’ patriotism, he said: “Giuliani could have informed himself by remaining on the Iraq Study Group. Some people tell me that he was fired. Some people tell me that he withdrew. Whatever it is, he didn’t show much interest in a war where young Americans are fighting and dying.” More than any Republican candidate, Mr. McCain has been an outspoken supporter of the war. While that appeared for much of the year to be a problem for him as the public grew increasingly disenchanted with the lack of progress in stabilizing Iraq, he is casting the glimmers of improvement there as a vindication and a selling point as he tries to get his campaign back on track. A poll by CBS News last month found that 33 percent of Americans believed the troop increase was making the situation better in Iraq, with 41 percent saying it had made no difference and 13 percent saying it had made things worse. Mr. McCain said that he did not know if Americans would be receptive to his view on the war, and that his unstinting support for the invasion might have cost him the support of many of the independent voters who helped propel his campaign in 2000. But he said that just as he had taken blame for the failures of the war, he would ask voters to recognize where he deserves credit. When Senator Sam Brownback, the Kansas Republican who recently ended his own bid for the presidential nomination and who had initially opposed the troop increase, endorsed Mr. McCain in Iowa on Wednesday, he said he had been wrong and Mr. McCain right. He even referred to the stepped-up effort as the “McCain surge.” But in highlighting the successes of the surge, Mr. McCain is walking a fine line, since Iraq has more often than not served as a graveyard for optimism. When Mr. McCain visited a Baghdad market in April, he was accused of painting an overly sunny description of the area’s safety, failing to note that he had been guarded by more than 100 soldiers in armored Humvees. Mr. McCain said he regretted how his poorly worded comments seemed to underplay the difficulties of the war. Now he is usually careful to highlight the challenges that remain in Iraq, specifically citing the problems with the country’s government and a corrupt police force. “I know and you know how frustrated and saddened Americans are about this war,” Mr. McCain said in Iowa. He said the war “was terribly mishandled for nearly four years” by Mr. Bush and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. When Mr. McCain’s wife, Cindy, joined him recently in South Carolina, she told voters that they have one son, a marine, overseas, and another at the United States Naval Academy. Mr. McCain said he started to realize America was off course on a trip to Basra in the summer of 2003, when a British colonel warned him that the situation, unchanged, was headed for disaster. He said that when he raised those concerns with Mr. Rumsfeld, he was ignored. In November 2004, Mr. McCain delivered a detailed speech to the Council on Foreign Relations in which he blasted the administration and critics of the war. “Simply put, there does not appear to be a strategy behind our current force levels in Iraq other than to preserve the illusion that we have sufficient forces in place to meet our objectives,” he said. But he campaigned for Mr. Bush in 2004, and even as Mr. McCain pushed for changes, he also often talked about progress. Other Republican candidates have said much less on Iraq, and their campaigns rejected Mr. McCain’s assertions that they had fallen short in their approaches. Adm. Robert J. Natter, an adviser to Mr. Giuliani, said: “I assume that Senator McCain’s emotions got the better of him. To even suggest Mayor Giuliani does not care about our servicemen and women serving and dying overseas is an example of letting politics come before thoughtful commentary on matters of national security.” Mr. Giuliani, the former New York mayor, has said he withdrew from the Iraq Study Group because he was considering running for president and did not want to interject partisan politics into the process. But he also missed several meetings before he withdrew, giving lucrative speeches on some meeting days. A search of archived news articles and transcripts from 2003 through fall 2006 turned up no reports of his calling for a change of course in military strategy in Iraq. Nor could his campaign point to any public statements on the issue. When he introduced his “12 Commitments” this summer, which he said represented America’s most important challenges, there was no mention of Iraq. Mr. Giuliani rarely speaks in detail of mistakes made in the war. In fact, he has said repeatedly that “we focus too much on Iraq,” obscuring the broader “terrorists’ war against us.” Mr. Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, went to Iraq for a day in May 2006, just months after the bombing of a golden-domed shrine in Samarra set off sectarian killing that was still sweeping the country. “I am not engaging in Monday morning quarterbacking,” Mr. Romney told The Boston Globe. “I supported the war, as did Congress and many Democrats. We have learned some lessons about the period immediately following major conflict. I believe we are doing the right thing.” Aside from mentioning “problems” in Iraq, he did not push for a change of course. In September 2006, as the surge was being considered, Mr. Romney said, “My inclination would be more boots on the ground, not less.” A spokesman, Kevin Madden, said, “Governor Romney is not interested in the idea of claiming credit for being the first to criticize.” He added, “Governor Romney is interested in showing the kind of leadership it takes to deliver solutions and attain results.” Mr. Thompson, a Tennessean who voted in 2002 to authorize the war just months before leaving the Senate, said little in public about war strategy in later years. “Despite retiring from the Senate in 2002, Fred Thompson has never hesitated from openly and honestly assessing the situation in Iraq,” said Todd Harris, a spokesman for the campaign. | Presidential Election of 2008;McCain John;Iraq |
ny0067147 | [
"business"
] | 2014/12/04 | Auto Safety Nominee Wants Finer Data Tools | WASHINGTON — President Obama’s choice to lead the nation’s top auto safety agency told a Senate committee on Wednesday that the agency, long criticized for failing to spot defects in cars, now faces so many consumer complaints that it has trouble keeping up. “We’re not even talking about connecting the dots, we’re just talking about the overload of having that many,” said Mark R. Rosekind, at a confirmation hearing before the Senate Commerce Committee. The number of annual complaints made to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has recently jumped to 75,000 from 45,000, or about 60 percent, he said, with only nine people to analyze them. And there are only 16 field investigators, he said. But Dr. Rosekind added that the problem was not just the number of data analysts, and he pointed to other industries that may offer innovative ways to interpret the data. For example, he said that aerospace and food safety organizations have well-developed ways for spotting problems among masses of data; government needs to take advantage of advanced technology like that, he said. Dr. Rosekind’s nomination comes at a time of uncertainty and turmoil at the agency, which has been without a permanent leader for nearly a year. The safety agency faces an internal review of its operations by the Transportation Department, its parent agency, as well as an investigation by that department’s inspector general. At the same time, the auto industry has increasingly become engulfed in a safety crisis, spurred by revelations that General Motors failed for more than a decade to a disclose a dangerous defect in millions of older cars that it has now linked to 36 deaths. More than 50 million vehicles — a record number — have been recalled in the United States this year. Dr. Rosekind, a psychologist who is a member of the National Transportation Safety Board, which analyzes accidents and makes recommendations, received a mostly friendly response from both Democrats and Republicans. But several lawmakers took the opportunity to urge Dr. Rosekind, if he is confirmed, to take a harder line with automakers and their suppliers. “These companies are way more afraid of a civil lawsuit than they are of N.H.T.S.A,” said Senator Claire McCaskill, the Missouri Democrat who presided over the hearing. “I think it’s really important that you keep that at the top of your list in terms of priorities. If you are not feared and respected, then you cannot do a good job.” She added, “I don’t think N.H.T.S.A. is either feared or respected at this point.” She pointed to the refusal of the Takata Corporation, an airbag manufacturer, to expand a recall that has been limited to certain geographic areas to the rest of the nation, despite the urgings of the safety agency. While there was no apparent opposition to Dr. Rosekind’s nomination, it was not clear whether the Senate would act before the session ends. But the ranking Republican member of the committee, John Thune of South Dakota, reiterated his criticism of the White House for leaving the post vacant for so long. The highway safety agency’s last permanent administrator, David L. Strickland, a former Senate committee staff member, quit nearly a year ago to take a job with a Washington law firm, part of a flow of government officials into the private sector , where they do work for the companies they formerly regulated. When Mr. Strickland left, in January, David J. Friedman took over as acting administrator, only eight months after he arrived at the agency, and served in that job until August of this year. Before coming into government service, he had worked on fuel economy and safety issues at an environmental group, the Union of Concerned Scientists. Dr. Rosekind’s opening statement mostly discussed auto safety, which has been the subject of multiple congressional hearings. He told the committee that safety was “a very personal priority for me since my earliest days,” because his father, a San Francisco police officer, was killed in the line of duty by a driver who ran a red light. “Through this single and profound event in my own life, I share in the individual and personal stories of so many people who have been affected by preventable tragedy on our roadways,” he said. Dr. Rosekind has been one of the five members of the National Transportation Safety Board since June 2010. Before that, he had his own consulting company, Alertness Solutions, for 12 years, and before that, he was the director of the fatigue countermeasures program at NASA’s Ames Research Center. A psychologist trained at Stanford and Yale, he completed a two-year postdoctoral fellowship program in sleep and chronobiology at Brown University’s Alpert Medical School. One issue frequently confronting the National Transportation Safety Board, and on which Dr. Rosekind has often shown expertise in public hearings, is how automatic systems can present information to a human operator. With the approach of automotive collision-warning systems and even self-driving cars, N.H.T.S.A. will face those issues, too. Already it is trying to position itself to regulate electronics in cars that could distract drivers. The N.T.S.B. is an independent agency, with no regulatory authority, and Dr. Rosekind had no administrative responsibilities. The agency that Dr. Rosekind has been nominated to head, which has an annual budget of about $800 million, sets various standards for cars and highways. | Mark R. Rosekind;National Highway Traffic Safety Administration;Automobile safety;US Politics;Appointments and Executive Changes;Legislation |
ny0277504 | [
"sports",
"soccer"
] | 2016/11/11 | Venezuelan Soccer Official Pleads Guilty; Promises to Repay Millions in FIFA Case | The Justice Department announced on Thursday the 21st conviction in its world soccer corruption case focused on FIFA, the sport’s governing body, and affiliated regional soccer organizations. With 42 defendants publicly charged to date, the conviction marked a halfway point. The latest conviction was of Rafael Esquivel, the former president of Venezuela’s soccer federation and a top South American soccer official. He pleaded guilty on Thursday morning in federal court in Brooklyn to seven counts of racketeering conspiracy, wire fraud conspiracy and money laundering conspiracy. Mr. Esquivel faces a sentence of up to 140 years. Mr. Esquivel, 70, admitted that in the nearly three decades that he led Venezuela’s soccer federation, he had collected millions of dollars in bribe payments related to the sale of media and marketing rights to soccer tournaments, including notable South American competitions like the Copa Libertadores and the Copa América. Those bribes were routed to accounts he controlled at banks in the United States, he said. As part of his plea deal, Mr. Esquivel promised to pay more than $16 million to the United States government. That amount, the highest pledged by any convicted soccer official to date, adds to the roughly $200 million promised to the government by an array of business executives and soccer officials who have reached plea agreements with the Justice Department. (FIFA, a nonprofit association based in Switzerland, has asked for a portion of those forfeited funds.) Contributing to Mr. Esquivel’s worth are real estate holdings in the United States, including several rental properties in Hialeah, Fla. Tenants there were addressing monthly payments to him as recently as last year. Mr. Esquivel was among seven men arrested in Zurich in May 2015, when the United States announced its case. After nine months in a Swiss jail, he arrived in the United States early this year and was ultimately released on bail to live in the Miami area, where he is expected to remain until he is sentenced. A lawyer for Mr. Esquivel, David I. Goldstein, declined to comment on Thursday. No date for Mr. Esquivel’s sentencing was set. No defendant in the case, including those who entered pleas as early as 2013, has been sentenced yet. Of the 21 other men charged in the case but not convicted, four have pleaded not guilty in federal court in Brooklyn, while 17 others remain abroad, in countries including Trinidad and Tobago and Uruguay. | Soccer;FIFA;Bribery and Kickbacks;Copa Libertadores;Copa America;Racketeering;Rafael Esquivel;South America;Justice Department |
ny0136210 | [
"nyregion",
"nyregionspecial2"
] | 2008/04/13 | Savoring a Nice Local Perk: The Cheapest Gas Around | CALDWELL GIBBY LEWIS didn’t mind sitting in his white Ford S.U.V. in the middle of Bloomfield Avenue in the back of a line waiting for gas at the Impor Tech station near the center of town. It was, after all, the cheapest gas station in the state, or it was for at least one day recently, according to the popular Web site newjerseygasprices.com . The Web site is one of the many tools motorists are turning to in their desperate efforts to find cheaper gas as the prices keep going up, faster, it seems, than traffic on the New Jersey Turnpike. The list of cheapest stations, compiled with the help of people who write in from all over the state, of course changes constantly. Impor Tech was selling regular unleaded gas for the bargain price of $2.89 that day. Not that Mr. Lewis, 59, believed he was getting a deal. “Regular?” asked the station attendant, Sergiy Suvorou, 28. “Of course regular,” hollered the former Marine and father of three who recently took a second job to help cauterize the wound in his wallet made by his gas tank. Who can afford premium? In a nation where some states could see the price of gas eclipse $4 a gallon this summer, New Jersey ’s prices are often among the lowest in the nation, according to AAA, the automobile club, a fact that might surprise many from outside this region. In New Jersey — far from the oil fields of Texas or Alaska but where people love their cars and motorists buy 11 million gallons of gas daily — many stations still sell unleaded gasoline for a price that begins with a 2, not a 3. The prices are lower here for a variety of reasons, one being that many of the state’s 4,000 stations are independently owned and drive up competition, which drops prices. Another is that New Jersey is flush with refineries and gasoline infrastructure like fuel pipelines and deep harbors to import petroleum from around the world. But probably the biggest reason is that New Jersey has the nation’s third-lowest gasoline tax, at 14.5 cents a gallon, and it hasn’t gone up in almost two decades. When Gov. Jon S. Corzine proposed raising tolls earlier this year — something that New Jersey residents have told him time and again they do not want — Assemblyman John S. Wisniewski, a Democrat and chairman of the Transportation and Public Works Committee, proposed smaller toll increases as well as an increase in the gas tax. That idea is also not popular with New Jersey residents, who are already contending with rising property tax bills and other increasing fees associated with living in the state. Patricia Streater, 36, a Camden resident and gift shop clerk at Cooper University Hospital, recently handed a $10 bill to an employee at a Hess station in her hometown for three and a third gallons of regular gas for her red Chrysler convertible. “Ten bucks’ worth is the new five bucks’ worth,” she said. Only Wyoming and Alaska have lower gas taxes than New Jersey’s. In contrast, neighboring Connecticut and New York have the second- and third-highest taxes, respectively. This is why New York City cabdrivers like Makhan Singh, 49, love a fare to Newark airport. “We’re lucky when we come to Jersey, man, I save $5,” he said as he filled his 2006 Ford Crown Victoria with $3.09 unleaded at a Shell station blocks from the entrance to the Holland Tunnel. With six refineries, New Jersey is the fourth largest oil-producing state in the nation, according to the New Jersey Petroleum Council. It also has two major pipelines plus New York Harbor and Delaware Bay, which take in millions of gallons of crude oil from overseas. Money saved from not having far to ship gas is reflected in prices, said Jason Towes, co-founder of gasbuddy.com , which runs both newjerseygasprices.com and trentongasprices.com , online forums where motorists can post where they see the best prices. New Jersey is “a very competitive market and people are avid shoppers,” Mr. Towes said. Many residents visit multiple stations to fill their tanks. Kaela Keluskar, 25, a pharmacist who lives in South Brunswick and recently filled her blue Honda S.U.V. with $2.99 unleaded at an Exxon station in New Brunswick, said she will stop at a higher-priced station only when her tank is almost empty. “I’m going to get $10 worth,” she said. “So I can get to a cheaper station.” Tom Kloza, chief oil analyst for OPIS, a company that follows wholesale and retail prices of oil, said most stations make about 10 cents of profit on a gallon of gas, as they did five years ago, while the price of a tanker truck full of gas has risen to more than $30,000 from $7,000. A few chain operations, like Costco, the wholesale club, and Wawa, the convenience store, can afford to sell gas at slightly cheaper rates because they use that to lure customers in to buy more profitable items, Mr. Kloza said. “People go there because gas is $3.01 and then they go inside and buy a $3 coffee or a $2 Slim Jim,” he said. New Jersey’s gasoline could be even cheaper if it weren’t for the state’s ban on self-serve stations. It is one of only two states that ban self-service stations — the other is Oregon — and Governor Corzine learned shortly after he took office that residents aren’t willing to give up what some say is a costly perk. When the governor proposed plans for a pilot self-service program, his office got 1,400 phone calls and e-mail messages against the idea. Industry officials agree that full service costs drivers a penny or two per gallon, to pay the $8- to $9-an-hour salary that gas pumpers earn, but they disagree about whether the extra cost is worth it. Eric DeGesero, executive vice president of the Fuel Merchants Association of New Jersey, weighed in. “If we have lower gas prices and somebody else is pumping it for us, what’s the hurry to get rid of it?” he said. | Prices (Fares Fees and Rates);Oil (Petroleum) and Gasoline;Automobiles;New Jersey |
ny0148560 | [
"world",
"europe"
] | 2008/09/18 | Word of Mouth Fills German Brewer’s Steins | GRAFENHAUSEN, Germany — A country girl from the Black Forest has conquered the hearts of hipsters across big-city Berlin. Her name is Birgit Kraft, a play on words in her local dialect for “beer gives strength,” and she can be found, smiling in her traditional garb and holding a pair of beers, on the labels of Rothaus beer bottles. The cartoon maiden has not changed a bit since 1972, which is one of the secrets of her success. Beer from the state-owned brewery here deep in the Black Forest, founded as part of the St. Blasien monastery in 1791, has grown into a surprise hit in big cities around the country, and nowhere more so than in Berlin. Rothaus has managed to thrive in an era dominated by multinational beverage concerns, on little more than crisp beer and its quaint, old-fashioned image. When the first Oktoberfest keg is tapped in neighboring Bavaria at noon on Saturday, the tourist spectacle of the world’s largest beer festival will likely produce fresh records for visitors and consumption that will obscure the woes of a domestic beer industry that has been in slow decline for decades. Rothaus has succeeded in bucking the trend, more than doubling its output over the last 15 years — to nearly 24 million gallons last year from just over 10 million gallons in 1992 — during a period when German beer sales have fallen by more than 13 percent. The company has done it without television or radio commercials, relying almost entirely on word of mouth to sell the beer outside of its local market between Freiburg and Lake Constance in southwest Germany. “The ad agencies always wanted to seduce us into making not only a good beer but modern commercials,” said Thomas Schäuble, the head of the brewery and himself a native of the Black Forest region. “But people here in the Wild West of Germany are hard-headed,” he said with a chuckle. Every once in a while, a product captures the zeitgeist of a nation. Rothaus’s quirks — its famous brown bottles of Pilsener are known as Tannenzäpfle, or “little fir cones” — and even the fact that it is wholly owned by the state of Baden-Württemberg, lends it a sense of homeyness in a rootless era. That, in turn, has given it credibility with the anti-corporate, anti-globalization crowd. In Germany, where unrestrained capitalism is viewed with deep mistrust and populism is on the upswing, that is not such a small audience. “It has to do with tradition. They haven’t sold out,” said Basti Wisbar, 31, a bartender at Waldohreule, a bar in the trendy but traditionally counterculture neighborhood of Kreuzberg in Berlin. “I could never identify myself with a beer like Beck’s,” said Mr. Wisbar, referring to Germany’s top export, which belongs to the Belgian mega-brewer InBev, which bought Anheuser-Busch over the summer for $52 billion. Mr. Wisbar drinks Rothaus himself and said it was one of the most popular beers he served, though patrons often confuse the nickname of the girl on the bottle, asking for Little Red Riding Hood. Though its profit margin before taxes was an impressive 30 percent last year, the brewery’s overall sales slipped 3.7 percent, after the guzzling soccer fans drawn to Germany for the World Cup made the previous year a record breaker for the brewery. Preliminary figures for 2008 show sales resuming their upward trajectory, even as the beer market continued to shrink over all in Germany in the first half of the year. The brewery’s fairy tale image stands up to a visit. After miles of curving roads, over forested hills and alongside clean, sparkling lakes, there appears a cluster of pink buildings nestled on a hillside. Rothaus sits at an altitude of some 3,300 feet, and is known as Germany’s highest brewery. The brewery fell into state hands in 1806 as a part of the widespread secularization of church holdings under Napoleon. According to the brewery’s official history, it was legally incorporated in 1922, with all shares in the company still belonging to the state of Baden-Württemberg. The beer is brewed according to the German beer purity law, with just four ingredients: water, hops, malt and yeast. The water comes from nearby springs. It would all make for a perfect television commercial, if the brewery actually made commercials. Max Sachs, the master brewer at Rothaus, was proud to show off the computerized control center and high-tech laboratory for microbiological testing. The freshly filled bottles, clinking in a line, are marked with dates by a laser, and once packed in crates they are hefted by a robot arm. “We don’t just go around in monks’ cowls all the time,” said Mr. Sachs, whose interest in beer is more than just professional. As he enjoyed a few Rothaus Pilseners among tourists in the small beer garden at the brewery, Mr. Sachs said, “At its heart, a good beer should encourage you to keep drinking.” His boss, Mr. Schäuble, was once a conservative politician, and is also the brother of Germany’s forceful interior minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, who is often criticized as insensitive to the privacy concerns of citizens. Thomas Schäuble came under criticism when he started his job at Rothaus, tarred with the hard-to-shake label of “wine drinker.” In a recent interview he denied the charge, saying he enjoyed both beer and wine. With a typically sly smile, Mr. Schäuble insisted that he had drunk fewer than five Tannenzäpfle the day before, though adding more earnestly, “but not around a car.” Mr. Schäuble’s suspected weakness for good wine worries local residents less than concerns that the brewery will be sold to a multinational, despite churning millions of euros of dividends into the state coffers. Mr. Schäuble played down those fears, saying that the brewery was so beloved and such a positive aspect for the image of the state that politicians would never risk ruining it. “From the time when the brewery went from the church to the state the question of its sale has always come up,” said Mr. Schäuble. “Like the Loch Ness monster, it pops up every few years and then disappears again.” | Germany;Beer;Rothaus;Alcoholic Beverages;Sales;Advertising and Marketing |
ny0264666 | [
"sports",
"hockey"
] | 2011/12/15 | Russian City Embraces Soul of Lokomotiv Team Lost in Crash | YAROSLAVL, Russia — Yuri Fedotov remembers the exact date he first watched this city’s professional ice hockey team in action. It was Dec. 2, 1986 — a day that began a relationship of love and faith that he said endured, and in fact helped reassure him during the political and economic upheavals in his country over the last two decades. Though he marked the 25th anniversary of that game this month, Fedotov said he would most likely never attend another game. “I went from watching hockey on a black and white television, to my best friend being a player, to playing myself,” said Fedotov, 39, a real estate agent, gazing out over a frozen patch of the Volga River. “And I know now that I can no longer go back to that arena regardless of who is playing there.” Roughly three months have passed since a plane crash killed the players , coaches and support staff of the hockey club Yaroslavl Lokomotiv. The disaster left a void in this city, where, despite a preponderance of ancient Orthodox Christian cathedrals, the hockey arena has long seemed to be the preferred house of worship. The ties between Yaroslavl residents and Lokomotiv are difficult to overstate. Many of the 37 players and coaches who died in the crash were local boys who started training at the club’s hockey schools at age 5 or 6. They were neighbors and friends whom residents would see at the market or the movies. They occasionally popped by the local amateur pickup games, skating among weekend warriors with less talent, but no less love of the game. Fedotov’s best friend was Ivan Tkachenko, a star right wing on the fallen team. A father of two daughters with a son on the way, Tkachenko, 31, was known for hosting barbecues in the summer and for giving generously to children’s charities . Over the next nine months, the Lokomotiv hockey club will seek to replace a team that had become as essential to this thousand-year-old city as its ancient Kremlin. The club’s owners have promised that the team will be ready by September, the start of the next season of the Russian-led Kontinental Hockey League, or K.H.L. But for this town, revival will take more than signing new contracts and handing out jerseys. Any new team will have to be, as they say here, svoya — ours. “We can sign players from other teams from all over Russia, but they are not ours, and will not soon become so,” said Dmitri Lysikov, another lifelong fan, who plays in an amateur league with Fedotov. “Much was done in the last 20 years. An average team was made into one of the best. This is now destroyed and it will take a lot of time to rebuild.” In the emotional crush that followed the plane crash in September, the team’s executives were faced with a difficult choice. Some, including top K.H.L. officials, wanted Lokomotiv to push ahead with the current season, using borrowed players from other K.H.L. clubs. There was no shortage of volunteers, but Lokomotiv officials said they thought such an option would be unacceptable to their fans and a blow to the memory of the lost team. The club pulled out of this year’s K.H.L. season and made what many saw as a risky but necessary decision. The new team, it decided, would be built around the players of the Lokomotiv junior squad, a team of 18- to 22-year-olds who were short on experience but much loved in Yaroslavl, where the junior team is affectionately known as Loko. The job of molding them into a professional team was handed to Pyotr Vorobyov, a veteran coach known for his ability to develop young talent. Vorobyov coached the Yaroslavl professional team to its first Russian league championship in 1997, when the club was still known by its Soviet-era name, Torpedo. “The president and other leaders of our club approached this intelligently and perhaps nobly and honestly, and ultimately made the correct decision in my opinion,” Vorobyov said. “They considered the issue and decided not to build the team on the graves of people who were just killed. They decided not to rush, to allow for the bodies to cool in their graves and rebuild the team gradually on the basis of the youth team.” The club will have less than a year to do so. Loko played its first home game of the season on Oct. 7, exactly one month after the crash. The rink was sold out, but emotions were still strained. The team lost to the Chelyabinsk Polar Bears, 3-2. Since then, the team’s fortunes have improved. It rose to the top of the Volga Conference in the Youth Hockey League, or M.H.L.. And this week it moved up to the Higher Hockey League, or V.H.L., a professional league that is a Russian equivalent to the American Hockey League. The team was clearly ready: it won its first game in the V.H.L. on Monday, beating Neftyanik Almetyevsk, 5-1. Loko, though, has been forced to consider recruiting players from other teams to fill out its ranks. Vorobyov, the coach, said he was looking to bolster the team with second-tier players from other clubs, who he says can be more easily molded to fit Loko’s needs. Ultimately, as the team heads into the K.H.L. next season, it will begin to do what the other highly competitive teams in the league do: draft foreigners, a process that fans are watching with some trepidation. Vorobyov said such choices were unavoidable, and not a betrayal of the plan to keep the team as closely linked to Yaroslavl as possible. But most satisfying to Vorobyov is the hope that the best of current team — as many as 10 players — could eventually form the core of a reconstituted Lokomotiv roster. Among them is the team’s captain, Maksim Zyuzyakin, a 20-year-old forward who has been with the club since 2005. With his blond hair and fierce blue eyes, he bears a resemblance to Tkachenko, the popular right wing. They were supposed to make Lokomotiv’s fateful September flight together, Zyuzyakin having been slated for the professional team this season. But at the last moment he was scratched from the roster and bumped from his place on the plane. Zyuzyakin has become something of a symbol of Lokomotiv’s revival, a responsibility he says he is grateful to accept. “We have to work, we have to play to the fullest extent,” he said in an interview with the Ria Novosti news agency in October. “There can be no thoughts about anything else because there are a lot of expectations from us. We are the only hockey team in Yaroslavl now.” Since the crash, Loko has become as object of adulation for many in the city desperate for hockey’s return. On a frigid evening last month, hundreds of fans struggled up an ice-covered walkway and into the local hockey arena, Arena 2000, which was wrapped in the red, white and blue of Lokomotiv. Inside, the smells of popcorn and Russian meat pies called piroshki contributed to a carnival atmosphere. Older men sipped pregame beers and gangly teenaged boys in Lokomotiv scarves flirted with their classmates, some in hot pink neckwear emblazed with “Loko girls.” When Loko took the ice, the welcome from the packed arena was thunderous. “We completely support everything that they’re doing now,” said Andrei Bolshakov, 39, who said he was a lifelong fan. “We are happy that they are focusing on the young players, our players. The most important thing is continuity. The soul of the team must live on. It is the greatest memorial to our guys for this team to play and fight.” Other fans acknowledged that the journey would be long and difficult, but one that they were willing to endure together with the team. Indeed, even as Loko struggled in the game, giving up a string of goals and losing an early lead, the fans cheered, unleashing a roaring ovation as the clock ticked down to a loss. Not everyone, of course, is pleased with the pace of recovery. Others are not ready to move on at all. Some die-hard fans complained that Loko was not up to the task of competing professionally, and others said they feared the team would be overrun by imports. “Personally, I’ve lost interest,” said Fedotov, the real estate agent and recreational player. “I see that people want hockey to return to the city. But unfortunately, there are a large number of people who want to revive hockey quickly and at any cost. I don’t think those people quite understand what a team is.” The players acknowledged feeling pressure from the fans and the news media, both of which have been showering them with unaccustomed attention since the crash. “We need to follow our coach’s orders better,” Daniil Romantsev, an 18-year-old forward and Yaroslavl native, said after the loss last month. “There is a certain weight of responsibility. It’s important to win, to show results.” On the exterior of Arena 2000 is a large banner with photographs of the fallen team and the words “Our Team Forever” written in large black letters. It is one of the few outward signs of grief left at the arena, where, shortly after the crash, tens of thousands attended a public funeral for the team. Letters expressing condolences and newspaper clippings from the days after the crash that were affixed to the outside walls of the arena have begun to yellow and fade in the winter snows. The Lokomotiv locker room has been stripped bare and is undergoing a complete overhaul — “to start a new life,” said Vladimir Malkov, a native of Yaroslavl who has worked with the team for more than 20 years. He is now its press officer and unofficial historian. “If we continue to live in our memories, to live at the cemetery, we will never go forward,” Malkov said, suppressing tears. “We need to put them in our hearts and move ahead.” | Hockey Ice;Lokomotiv Yaroslavl;Kontinental Hockey League;Aviation Accidents and Safety;Russia;Yaroslavl (Russia);Deaths (Fatalities);Series;Roster's Rebirth A (Series) |
ny0148420 | [
"sports",
"othersports"
] | 2008/09/02 | On City Island, a Place for Anglers to Tell Their Fish Stories | Late August was bluefish time in the waters of Long Island Sound around City Island in the Bronx. But the talk among the men hanging out at Jack’s Bait and Tackle, on City Island Avenue, kept coming back to stripers. “I’m telling you, next year, the record gets broken — we’re going to see an 80-pound fish,” said the store owner, John DeCuffa. It was a significant prediction, given that the world record, 78 pounds 8 ounces, from 1982 still stands. On a weekday in late summer, the guys in the shop were still buzzing about several very big bass caught during July, including a 75-pound-4-ounce striper caught by Peter Vican, who weighed the fish on July 19 at the Snug Harbor Marina in Wakefield, R.I. Another large striper, weighing 52 pounds, was weighed in Aug. 21 at Jack’s. “That fish was not supposed to be here,” DeCuffa said in his video blog review of the 52-pounder. “But there’s still plenty of bait, plenty of bunker out there, and you might have a shot at a big bass even when you’re fishing the bluefish tournament,” which was Aug. 22 and 23. Around City Island, the major game fish species in summer are smaller striped bass (known as schoolies), bluefish, fluke, blackfish (also called tautog) and porgies (scup), with the occasional sand shark. The bigger striped bass — fish 15 pounds and larger — usually move to deeper water in the warmest weeks. “This year, we had the best striped-bass fishing in 30 years,” says Gary Buono, a lean, tan man in his 40s who fishes various Long Island shores and who stopped in at Jack’s to catch up on fishing reports. “You’d see 80 keeper bass on a party boat” during the peak season for stripers, in May through June, he said. The bigger bass move back through the sound in the fall during their southerly migration. DeCuffa, who lives in Carmel with his wife and three teenage children, is a natural showman on camera. His blog, jacksbait.blogspot.com , is a promotional element that would have been beyond everyone’s imagination when DeCuffa’s maternal grandfather, Jack Rumpf, started the bait-and-tackle store in 1945 after returning from service in the Marine Corps during World War II. Garrulous and barrel-chested, DeCuffa (referred to as Big John) took over as the store’s owner after Rumpf died in 1992. Now 45, DeCuffa has worked in the shop since he was 10, and kept the original name in honor of his grandfather. He has one full-time employee, Ricky Ortega, although his eldest son, John Jr., and his wife, Carol, often work in the shop. “This is one of the oldest, if not the oldest business on City Island that’s still in the original family,” DeCuffa said. “All the other business have changed hands.” He grew up on City Island, a fifth-generation “clam digger,” and said he planned to return after his youngest son finished high school. Jack’s is a social hangout, much like a barbershop, but with a huge stainless-steel refrigerator full of frozen bait behind the counter, a big sloshing tank of live eels and baitfish to the side, and long glass display cases stocked with fishing reels that gleam like miniature luxury cars. When regulars walk in to the long, narrow shop and shake hands with DeCuffa, the fishing talk starts another round. Two huge stripers, icons of the conversation, hang on the walls in Jack’s. One, caught in 2005, was more than 62 pounds, the largest landed in the waters around City Island. The other, a 58-pounder, was caught in 1979. Photographs cover a section of wall just to the left of a shelf full of spools of fishing line, providing an abridged history of catches taken to Jack’s, a lot of them big bluefish. DeCuffa said he had files full of so many photographs that he could “totally collage all four walls.” In 1960, Rumpf started selling bait wholesale as part of the business. DeCuffa has continued that, although he did not say which side of the business — bait or tackle — is more profitable. (He also owns a marina next door to the shop.) But bait, obviously, is not as easy to handle as hardware. Perishables like clams, worms and crabs have a limited shelf life, something that DeCuffa keeps in mind when delivering bait by truck to Brooklyn, Long Island and upstate New York. Being dependent on optimum angling conditions, he and Ortega end up discarding a lot of fresh bait on rainy days, when many anglers stay home. The live eels sell for $1.50 each. Live bloodworms are $8 a dozen, or $70 a case. Hector Valdez, a tall Manhattanite with a shaved head, a mustache and a tattoo of a striped bass on one calf, walked into Jack’s to buy frozen bunker tied up in white plastic bags. “When I was 15 years old, my father used to drop me off here,” Valdez said. “I first brought my son in when he was in diapers, and now he’s 14. I’ve had a boat in Big John’s marina for 18 years.” Vinnie Serratore, a Bronx resident who is a regular customer, shows the same kind of customer loyalty. He pays to have a spinning rod tip replaced with a gift certificate from the store. “Everybody I know, they know I come to Jack’s,” he said. Serratore said he fished often on party boats. “Night fishing has been phenomenal this year,” he said. “As soon as the sun goes down, boom.” Anglers who venture out in Jack’s rental skiffs focus on the rock-strewn waters around Hart Island, the Execution Rocks lighthouse and the unnamed hunks of rock to the east of Davids Island. But DeCuffa, who puts in 15-hour days April through October, says he does not have time to get on the water. “I don’t ever get to fish here myself,” DeCuffa said. “Once a year, around Christmastime, I go down to the Florida Keys. Yellowtail, grouper, snapper — that’s my thing.” | Fishing Sport;City Island (NYC);Fish and Other Marine Life;Long Island Sound |
ny0104500 | [
"nyregion"
] | 2012/03/30 | Quinn Exempts Part of Hudson Yards Project From Living-Wage Bill | Christine C. Quinn , the City Council speaker, already facing skepticism over her handling of legislation that would raise wages for some private-sector workers, has decided to add an exemption for one of New York’s biggest pending developments, Hudson Yards. A large portion of the Hudson Yards project, a 26-acre mixed-use development along the city’s Far West Side, is specifically excluded from the proposed so-called living wage legislation in a draft that was written by Ms. Quinn’s office and is now circulating among supporters of the bill. Ms. Quinn plans to ask her colleagues next month to approve the long-debated bill, which would require companies and developers that receive substantial city subsidies to pay their employees at least $10 an hour. She had already announced that the legislation would exempt tenants in projects that receive city subsidies from paying the living wage; only the direct employees of the developers and some contractors would be affected. The Hudson Yards exemption caught many of the bill’s supporters by surprise, according to people who were briefed about the legislation in telephone calls in recent days and in a meeting on Thursday morning. Some supporters of the legislation were already concerned that it would not apply to enough employers, and raised concerns that the bill was being further weakened. Councilman G. Oliver Koppell, a Bronx Democrat and one of the bill’s sponsors, acknowledged on Thursday that some advocates of the measure were unhappy with the new exemption, which would affect the portion of the Hudson Yards development between 10th and 11th Avenues. “While I’m not happy with excluding any project, the fact that one project is excluded, if that’s something that the speaker’s office insists on — in my view, that should not derail the whole deal,” Mr. Koppell said. A spokesman for the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, which has pushed for a living-wage measure and has been working with Ms. Quinn’s office on a compromise, emphasized on Thursday that the language was a work in progress. “We are still hammering out the details of the bill based on the framework of an agreement that was announced in January,” the spokesman, Dan Morris, said in an e-mail. “We do not yet have a final bill. A number of issues and proposals are still being discussed. We expect the bill to be finalized in the next few weeks.” A spokeswoman for Ms. Quinn, Maria Alvarado, made the same point, saying in an e-mail: “The final version of this bill and its details are still being drafted. The legislation has not been finalized.” A spokeswoman for the developer, the Related Companies, declined to comment. The living-wage bill is opposed by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and by the real estate community. But the Partnership for New York City, a business group, said in January that it would support a version of the legislation that exempted tenants. The proposed living wage is significantly higher than the state’s minimum wage, which is $7.25 an hour, and would be even higher, $11.50 per hour, for employers that did not provide employee benefits. The legislation is one of three measures addressing economic inequality that have proved challenging for Ms. Quinn as she has prepared to run for mayor next year. On Wednesday, the Council approved a bill that would require landlords who receive city subsidies to pay janitors, security guards and other service workers a “prevailing wage.” Ms. Quinn has said she does not support a third proposal, which would require many employers to provide paid sick leave. Related is one of the city’s largest developers, and it has been a significant contributor to political campaigns. Its employees have donated $34,200 to Ms. Quinn’s campaign. | Quinn Christine C;Hudson Yards (Manhattan NY);Living Wage;City Council (NYC);Wages and Salaries;Area Planning and Renewal;Mixed-Use Developments;Real Estate and Housing (Residential);New York City |
ny0043274 | [
"world",
"europe"
] | 2014/05/08 | Sheikh Nazim, Spiritual Leader to Sufis, Dies at 92 | Sheikh Muhammad Nazim Adil al-Qubrusi al-Haqqani, a leading figure of Sufism, the mystical branch of the Islamic faith, died on Wednesday in Nicosia, Cyprus. He was 92. Imam Shakir Alemdar, the vice grand mufti of Cyprus, confirmed the death. He called Sheikh Nazim one of the world’s great Islamic scholars and a spiritual leader to followers of Sufism, which traces its origins to the roots of Islam itself about 1,500 years ago. Sheikh Nazim was leader of the Naqshbandi-Haqqani Sufi order. He was born on April 23, 1922, in Larnaca, Cyprus, in the east Mediterranean. He received his first religious instruction from his grandfather, an Islamic scholar, before studying chemical engineering in 1940 at Istanbul University. In 1944, he visited Lebanon, where he received further religious instruction. He traveled within Europe in the 1970s and in the 1990s to the United States, where he gained many followers. He opened a study center in Fenton, Mo. Later in life, Sheikh Nazim received guests at his home in Lefka, Cyprus. He met Pope Benedict XVI during the pontiff’s 2010 visit. The encounter came as the pope was walking in a procession to a Mass at a Nicosia church near the United Nations-controlled buffer zone that divides the island into a breakaway Turkish Cypriot north and an internationally recognized Greek Cypriot south. Sheikh Nazim married in 1941 and had four children. | Sheik Nazim;Sufism;Cyprus;Obituary |
ny0127522 | [
"us"
] | 2012/01/08 | DePaul Students Cheer Win Against Pitt | Dan McGrath writes a column for The Chicago News Cooperative. No conference has experienced more upheaval from the continuing realignment in college sports than the Big East, despite its unquestioned stature as a basketball kingpin. The iconic league that Dave Gavitt invented (and ESPN nurtured) to feed the fervor for college hoops in the populous Northeast Corridor will be unrecognizable in a year or so, just as DePaul is getting the hang of Big East competition. Because of the money it generates, football calls whatever tune it wants in college athletics. The Big East came late to that party, and it never has been a welcome guest. DePaul, a basketball member since ’05, might have been wishing the league’s new look were in effect this season — the Blue Demons had to measure themselves against two Big East bluebloods as they began conference play last week. Top-ranked Syracuse was a bit much for them in an 87-68 New Year’s Day blowout. But DePaul bounced back on Thursday to stun Pittsburgh, 84-81, prevailing in a white-knuckle survival test that prompted students to rush the court at the sparsely populated Allstate Arena. “This is the new DePaul, baby,” the sophomore point guard Brandon Young exulted after bedeviling Pitt with a game-winning three-point play that capped a 26-point, six-assist, one-turnover night. “We can play in the Big East.” Still, it speaks to the chaotic, unashamedly mercenary state of college sports that two symbols of Big East excellence — Syracuse, a charter member, and Pitt, an affiliate since 1982 — will be leaving as soon as they’re allowed to. They’re following the football money to the Atlantic Coast Conference, even though both schools have compiled much more distinguished basketball résumés since the Big East was conceived in 1979. Boston College, Miami and Virginia Tech began the exodus with a move to the A.C.C. in 2003, but they were better at football than basketball. Now the Big East is in survival mode, sweating out its status as a Bowl Championship Series participant, which is worth millions each year. Boise State and San Diego State are coming aboard for football only, while Houston, Southern Methodist and Central Florida are joining in all sports, giving the Big East 10 football-playing members and 16 for basketball. And there will be no more infighting between the football haves and the football have-nots. “Every president of every institution is committed to stability, to making this work,” said Jean Lenti Ponsetto, DePaul’s athletic director. The league will encompass 15 states, four time zones and coast-to-coast sprawl, so its Big East handle is a misnomer. But truth in labeling has been sacrificed in the realignment scramble: The Big Ten Conference has 12 members; the Big 12 currently has 10. The move from Conference USA to the Big East was a significant upgrade for DePaul, and the Demons did not seem ready for it — they were an unfathomably bad 2-52 in their last three Big East seasons. Before Thursday, DePaul last won a Big East home game on Jan. 20, 2010. It hadn’t been .500 in the conference since Jan. 30, 2008, so forgive some overcaffeinated kids their floor-charging exuberance. “Students rushing the court — I loved every minute of it,” Young said. Oliver Purnell, DePaul’s second-year coach, put them up to it. He and his players visited campus dorms on Wednesday night with pizza and a message for the students: We need you. “It was great to have them involved like that,” Purnell said. The Demons won’t be sorry to see Syracuse go, even though the New Year’s visit of the unbeaten Orange drew a season-high 12,102 fans to Allstate. Syracuse ran a layup drill, hitting 59 percent of its first-half shots and opening a 29-point lead before easing up on the gas and winning by 19. Four days later, DePaul was a different team. Pitt is known as the physical, tough-minded embodiment of Big East basketball, accustomed to grinding out wins in games like these. But the young Demons didn’t back down and seemed to grow up before Purnell’s eyes, making all the plays with the game in the balance. Jeremiah Kelly, a senior survivor of that 2-52 carnage, made three of his four three-pointers. Young won it when he rolled through the lane for a left-handed layup, drawing a foul and adding a free throw to break an 81-all tie with 1.2 seconds left. Bedlam erupted at Allstate Arena. The sound was unfamiliar. Young runs the Demons with the brazen confidence of a born point guard. Cleveland Melvin is an active, athletic scorer, his slithery array of inside moves generally good for 20 points a night. Moses Morgan is a dangerous deep shooter with a quick release and no conscience. The three sophomores combined for 59 points, 13 rebounds, 9 assists and 7 steals against Pitt. They are Purnell recruits. They can play in the Big East, in any configuration. They symbolize hope. “The key to rebuilding is two or three good recruiting classes, and you grow them with positive experiences,” Purnell said. “Beating Pitt, having the students rush the court — that was a positive experience. With enough of them comes confidence. “But you get the big head, you stop working, you’re going to get thumped. It’s still the Big East.” | College Athletics;Basketball;DePaul University;Big East Conference |
ny0254126 | [
"sports",
"golf"
] | 2011/07/29 | Tiger Woods Returning From 11-Week Layoff | Tiger Woods ended an 11-week absence from the PGA Tour Thursday night with the surprising announcement that he would play next week at the W.G.C.-Bridgestone Invitational at Firestone Country Club. It is not surprising that Woods would return to a golf course where he has won seven times. What is surprising is that he is coming back to the golf course where his most recent memory is of playing probably the worst 72 holes of his professional career — shooting 18 over par and finishing 78th in the 80-man field last year. Then there are the other uncertainties. How much has he been able to strengthen the two injuries — a strained medial collateral ligament in his left knee and the strained Achilles’ tendon that was previously torn — that have kept him out of action since May 12? And how much work has he done on his game to prepare for Firestone’s bowling-alley fairways? None to speak of, according to his swing coach, Sean Foley, on CBSsports.com on Wednesday. Foley was confirming as much in text messages to friends late Thursday night, saying he and Woods would be getting back to work Friday for the first time since May. There is still the uncertainty about how Woods will fare without the familiar figure of Steve Williams on the bag. Williams, who caddied for Woods for 13 years and 13 of Woods’s 14 major championship wins, was fired last month during the AT&T National, ending one of golf’s most successful player-caddie relationships. Which brings up the other uncertainty in all this: who will replace Williams? Will Woods go with a temporary fix by calling on his boyhood friend Bryon Bell, who is now an executive with Woods’s golf course design group? Or will he pull out another major surprise at Firestone by announcing a permanent replacement? Golf Digest reported Thursday night that Bell would be on the bag. Bell caddied for Woods in his third and final United States Amateur championship victory in Portland, Ore., in 1996. He was implicated by Rachel Uchitel, the first of the women who figured prominently in the Woods sex scandal, as having sent her the plane tickets for her trip to Melbourne for the Australian Open in November 2009. The announcement on Woods’s Web site either ignored or glossed over all the uncertainties, which is what personal Web sites are for. Ditto for Woods’s Twitter post, which predictably enthused that the former world No. 1 is “feeling fit and ready to tee it up at Firestone.” If that is true, and Woods can return to previous form at the tough, old golf course — where before last year he had never finished out of the top five — then what we have shaping up is a competitive bonanza the remainder of the season. Every top player in golf will be at Firestone, as well as the following week at the P.G.A. Championship at the Atlanta Athletic Club. Would the folks at the P.G.A. of America think about livening things up for featured TV pairings the first two days of that event? Maybe with a threesome of Woods, Adam Scott and, well, why not Rory McIlroy? Or the freshly-minted British Open champion, Darren Clarke? Or Lee Westwood or Luke Donald or Martin Kaymer? Think golf fans, casual, lukewarm and hard-core, might tune in for that? | Woods Tiger;Golf;PGA Tour Inc |
ny0026633 | [
"business"
] | 2013/01/20 | Kon Leong of ZL Technologies, on Encouraging Creativity | This interview with Kon Leong, co-founder, president and chief executive of ZL Technologies, an e-mail and file archiving company, was conducted and condensed by Adam Bryant . Q. Tell me about some important leadership lessons you’ve learned. A. One of my early jobs was selling computer hardware. What I learned about selling was probably more valuable than my M.B.A. I had seen selling as a process just about logic. Then I realized that has nothing to do with it. Q. What was the insight? A. You have to present your story in their context, not yours. They don’t really care if you’re standing on top of a robot and quoting equations. If they’re in the deep part of the forest, you’ve got to talk the language of the deep forest. Salesmanship is more like a language unto itself. There is no right or wrong. It’s what you make of it, and what’s black can be gray, and what’s gray can be white. It depends on your framework. The challenge is to share the same framework so that you’re seeing the same page in the same way. Q. How do you hire? If you were interviewing me for a job, what would you ask me? A. I would want to know your goals for the job. Is it money? Learning? Fulfillment? What is it? I would try to figure out if our environment suits your goals. I would not try to sell you to get you to take the job. I also will ask, “How curious are you?” Q. I imagine that most people simply say, “Very.” A. But then I’d ask, “Outside the headlines, what were some of the most interesting things you’ve noted in the last couple of weeks, and tell me why, and what did you do about it?” That would reflect what you think is interesting, and that tells me a fair bit. If you can cite many disparate topics, that’s a step in the right direction. The point is, we’re trying to find the right fit. In a fast-changing environment, you need to learn more and more and more. There’s so much to learn, and you can’t be taught all the permutations and combinations of the answers, so you have to learn on your own. And to learn on your own, you need curiosity. Q. What other questions? A. I’ll ask: How willingly do you accept stuff, and how willing are you to question things? How creative are you in finding your own answers? For example, everyone knows in school that you cannot divide by zero. Why? I try to find if they’ve actually questioned things like that at any time. The point is, we’re usually handicapped by our own borders, and we will not think beyond them. I think there’s one rule of thumb in creativity: when you’re brainstorming, you have to suspend disbelief. That’s a key ingredient. There’s time enough to challenge it and poke holes, but not at the time of generation. I’ll also change the subject to one where they have some expertise. So I’ll ask what their passions are, and then I’ll ask questions. If it’s ornithology, I’ll start talking about the evolution of birds and ask questions like, “How do you think reptiles got feathers?” Image Kon Leong is co-founder, president and chief executive of ZL Technologies, an e-mail and file archiving company based in San Jose, Calif. Credit Earl Wilson/The New York Times Q. What else do you look for when hiring? A. Brains and drive. Those are the basics. Without them, it’s probably going to be a long shot. After we work through that, then it’s curiosity and attitude. Q. How do you get at the question of attitude? A. Are you willing to learn from your mistakes? Do you do that automatically? Are you willing to set the bar higher? Are you able to deal with failure? Can you bounce back from it? Q. What’s your take on the standard interview question about strengths and weaknesses? A. I never really ask about weaknesses, because it’s meaningless. I ask more about strengths, but I ask it from a different angle. I’m more interested in the answers from a more personal perspective as opposed to a professional environment. I’ll typically ask: How would you describe yourself in three words outside the work environment? And then: What do you consider your natural strength? What do you do that comes without any effort, that your peers struggle with and can’t even match? What is natural for you? Other skills emanate from that natural core. Someone once answered that question by saying, “People tend to just come and talk to me.” That really intrigued me. Q. What’s your natural strength? A. I can zoom in, zoom out. Q. What’s it like to work for you day to day? A. Certain aspects of my management style are extremely frustrating. There are many, many questions posed to me, many decisions asked of me. I try not to make them. I respond with more questions, because I want them to find the answer. It can be very frustrating to my employees, but I’m trying to get others to scale up and learn. They understand and accept my approach, but many still feel frustrated because they just want the answer. Q. What is your advice for students who are graduating from college? A. I tell all of them two things, and that goes for both undergrads and M.B.A.’s. First, experiment. If you’re 22 years old as an undergrad or if you’re 27 just out of your M.B.A., in both cases you’ve got a clean slate. You can go in any direction. So experiment. That can also mean taking a lower salary in order to experiment. This is all in hindsight, of course, because I didn’t do it. I went to Wall Street after getting my M.B.A. If you experiment in different jobs and functions in those two or three years out of school, you will have a much better shot at finding your sweet spot. And the sweet spot is the intersection between what you’re really good at and what you love to do. If you can find that intersection, you are set. A lot of people would kill for that because, at 65, they’re retiring and never found it. So don’t put so much emphasis on initial compensation. Don’t listen to all the harping from the family. Try to find your sweet spot and, once you find it, invest in that. You don’t want to get degrees just to do work you don’t really like. If you’re miserable, even if you make a lot of money, that’s still 40 years of your life. | Kon Leong;ZL Technologies;Management;Job Recruiting and Hiring;Creativity |
ny0026562 | [
"business",
"global"
] | 2013/01/02 | With a Mall Boom in Russia, Property Investors Go Shopping | MOSCOW — Shoppers who find that 250 stores aren’t enough can go ice skating, watch movies or even ride a carousel, all under a single roof. While it sounds like the Mall of America, this mall is outside Moscow, not Minneapolis. “I feel like I’m in Disneyland,” Vartyan E. Sarkisov, a shopper toting an Adidas bag, said recently while making the rounds of the Mega Belaya Dacha mall. Instead of bread lines, Russia is known these days for malls. They are booming businesses, drawing investments from sovereign wealth funds and Wall Street banks, most recently Morgan Stanley, which paid $1.1 billion a year ago for a single mall in St. Petersburg . One mall, called Vegas, rose out of a cucumber field on the edge of Moscow and became, its owners say, larger than the Mall of America if the American mall’s seven-acre amusement park is not counted in the calculation of floor space. A few offramps away on the Moscow beltway, another mall scored a different kind of victory: the Mega Tyoply Stan shopping center drew 57 million visitors at its peak in 2007, well ahead of the 40 million annual visits reported by the Mall of America. As American malls dodder into old age, gaptoothed with vacancies, Russia’s shopping centers are just now blossoming into their boom years, nourished by oil exports that are lifting wages. “It’s 1982 all over again in Russia,” said Lee Timmins, the country representative of Hines, a Texas-based real estate group that is opening three outlet malls in Russia, referring to the heyday of the American mall experience. Russians, he said, love malls. The mall boom illustrates an extraordinarily important theme in Russian economics these days. The growing crowds at malls, and the keen interest in Russian malls on the part of Wall Street banks, are signs that the emerging middle class that made up the street protests against Vladimir V. Putin in Moscow last winter is becoming a force in business as well as politics. Investors, who with money at stake are a bellwether of the new trends, are not waiting for the next round of protests; they are already placing bets on the rise of a broad affluent class in Russia. “Over the past 10 years, Russia has turned into a middle-class country,” Charles Slater, a retail analyst at Cushman & Wakefield, a commercial real estate consulting firm, said in an interview. “What better to do than go to an enclosed, warm environment with many things on offer, whether that be bowling, cinema or food courts, things the customers have not been used to in the past?” Moscow now has 82 malls, including two of the largest in Europe, according to the International Council of Shopping Centers, a New York-based trade association. Both are owned by Ikea Shopping Centers Russia , the branch of the Swedish assemble-it-yourself furniture franchise that manages 14 malls here. In Russia, malls are still novel; the first Western-style suburban mall opened in 2000. They are now changing hands as developers sell to institutional investors, like Morgan Stanley, shedding light for the first time on their eye-popping values. At the core of the attraction for investors is the rising disposable income of Russians, nudged along by policies favoring the middle class, lest their challenge to President Putin’s rule intensify. Russia has a flat 13 percent income tax rate. Most Russians own their homes, a legacy of post-Soviet privatizations, and so pay no mortgage or rent. Health care is socialized. Not surprisingly, then, Russians have become fanatical shoppers. Russians spend 60 percent of their pretax income on retail purchases, a category that includes food, according to Jones Lang LaSalle, a real estate consulting firm. The country in second place in Europe is Sweden, where retailing accounts for 40 percent of total private spending. Germans, by comparison, spend 28 percent of their salaries shopping, according to Jones Lang LaSalle. Malls, where the secrets of Western capitalism were finally peeled open and laid bare, with fast food, clothes, ice rinks, electronics and appliances wherever the eye falls, have mesmerized shoppers here — much as they did in their early years in the United States, from the 1960s to the 1980s. Image Shoppers wandered the streets at the Belaya Dacha Outlet Village. Credit James Hill for The New York Times Olga N. Zaitsova, 55, who was in the Mega Belaya Dacha mall with her granddaughter Anastasia, said she came every weekend, drawn by the warm play area for toddlers. “It’s just not comfortable to be outside when it’s so cold,” she said. When she shops, she said, “now we buy things we want, not things we need.” So, more malls are going up. The essayist Joan Didion, who wrote of malls as they first opened in Southern California in the 1960s, said that they were “like pyramids to the boom years.” They were cities, sparkling and ideal, “in which no one lives but everyone consumes.” A megamall built for Russians, not surprisingly, is subtly distinct from the idealized urban environment preferred by Americans, a result of careful analysis of consumer behavior and Russian retailing desires. Most Russian malls have a huge grocery store as an anchor tenant, rather than a department store. Russians are still struggling to find groceries in their neighborhoods. And the sight of row upon row of groceries, stacked to the ceiling, surely soothes a lingering sore spot in the soul of Russian women who were compelled, just two decades ago, to serve their children such items as canned seaweed and powdered milk. Moscow, the new capital of malls, has more floor space in malls than any other European city, with 34 million square feet. And as if to drive home the point that the Russian capital has long since moved on from the deprivation and hardship its name still evokes, it has shattered other shopping center records recently. Belaya Dacha was one of the largest malls in Russia from 2007 until 2010, when it was overtaken by Vegas . The interior space of Vegas is 4.15 million square feet, larger than the Mall of America excluding the Nickelodeon Universe amusement park. “This is a big world with a lot of people in it,” Dan Jasper, the spokesman for Mall of America, said. “I think it’s great they are building these things in Russia, too.” And a new record-setter is going up. Avia Park in northwest Moscow will have five million square feet of interior space including covered parking, which will make it the largest mall in the world outside Asia. So, the market is buzzing. Morgan Stanley is in talks to buy another mall, the Metropolis in Moscow, for more than $1.2 billion, according to real estate professionals close to the negotiations who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The seller is Capital Partners, a Kazakh developer that opened the mall in 2009. Malls in Russia appear to be following a familiar course. While some American malls continue to flourish decades after opening, the arc of a mall from buzz to blight has been established in the United States. But it is not here yet. Hines, which built one of the first megamalls in the United States, the Galleria in Houston, has made a big bet on outlet malls — one of the categories of retail space that have undercut the classic anchor-tenant model for malls in the United States. Others are strip malls and big-box parks, known as power centers. For owners of traditional malls, it is an ominous development. Hines opened an outlet mall a short drive from Mega Belaya Dacha on the territory of the same former collective farm, sharing the name — and, it hopes, some customers. It is called Belaya Dacha Outlet Village . It was so cold on a recent weekend that the few visitors at the site of the outlet mall cupped their mittens over their faces, and, puffing and stamping their feet, browsed the shop windows. Dmitry Razzhevajkin, a property manager with a doctorate in economics, watched intently, noting the monumental stakes of the experiment, a “first real test of street retail in Russia.” In retailing, Russia could well be where the United States was in the 1990s. Now, the United States has 685 class-A, superregional malls, the large-scale type flourishing in Russia today. But it also has 65,840 strip malls. | Russia;Shopping mall;Morgan Stanley;Foreign Investment |
ny0157261 | [
"business"
] | 2008/06/12 | S.E.C. Proposes Tighter Rules for Credit Ratings Companies | WASHINGTON (AP) — The Securities and Exchange Commission proposed new rules on Wednesday intended to stem conflicts of interest, expand disclosure for Wall Street’s credit rating industry and flag the ratings of more complex securities. The S.E.C. is seeking to make the ratings business more open while also encouraging new firms to enter. The three firms that dominate the $5 billion-a-year industry — Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s Investors Service and Fitch Ratings — have been widely accused of failing to identify risks in subprime mortgage investments. The most contentious element of the proposal would require ratings of complex securities, like those underpinned by mortgages or student loans , to be distinguished from those for more traditional securities, like corporate or municipal bonds. It drew an opposing vote from one of the three S.E.C. commissioners at a public meeting and a swift condemnation from a major Wall Street lobbying group. The three ratings agencies have downgraded thousands of securities backed by mortgages as home loan delinquencies have risen and the value of those investments has plummeted. The downgrades have contributed to hundreds of billions in losses and write-downs at major banks and investment firms. The ratings agencies are crucial financial gatekeepers, issuing ratings on the creditworthiness of public companies and securities. Their grades can determine a company’s ability to raise or borrow money and which securities, at what cost, will be purchased by banks, mutual funds, states or local governments. The vote was 3 to 0 to tentatively approve the proposed rules related to disclosure and conflicts of interest. Commissioner Paul S. Atkins cast the only vote against the proposal requiring ratings for complex securities to be distinguished from others, because the proposal could hurt the capital-raising efforts for mortgages, student loans, auto loans and other debt. | Securities and Exchange Commission;Ratings and Rating Systems;Stocks and Bonds;Standard & Poor's Corp;Moody's Investors Service Inc;Fitch Ratings |
ny0016369 | [
"world",
"americas"
] | 2013/10/09 | Rights Advocates Suing U.N. Over the Spread of Cholera in Haiti | Advocates for Haitian victims of the deadly cholera epidemic that first afflicted their country three years ago said they were taking the extraordinary step on Wednesday of suing the United Nations, asserting that the organization’s peacekeeping force in Haiti was responsible for introducing the disease through sewage contamination from its barracks. The lawsuit, which the advocates said they would file in Federal District Court in Manhattan on Wednesday morning, will be the strongest action they have taken in pressing the United Nations to acknowledge at least some culpability for the outbreak of cholera, a highly contagious scourge spread through human feces that had been largely absent from Haiti for 100 years. Cholera has killed more than 8,300 Haitians and sickened more than 650,000 in the earthquake-ravaged country, the poorest in the Western Hemisphere, since it first reappeared in October 2010. While the worst of the epidemic has eased, it still kills about 1,000 Haitians a year. United Nations officials have said they are committed to eradicating the cholera, but they have not conceded that the organization was inadvertently responsible for causing it. They also have asserted diplomatic immunity from any negligence claims, a position that has deeply angered many Haitians who consider it a betrayal of United Nations principles. Haitian leaders, while dependent on the United Nations to help maintain stability and provide other important services, have also expressed unhappiness over the cholera issue. In an address last Thursday at the annual United Nations General Assembly opening session, Haiti’s prime minister, Laurent Lamothe, spoke of what he called the “moral responsibility” of the United Nations in the outbreak, and said the efforts to combat it had been far from sufficient. Forensic studies, including one ordered by the United Nations, have identified the culprit bacteria as an Asian strain imported to Haiti by Nepalese members of the United Nations peacekeeping force, known as the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti , which was first authorized in 2004 and maintains about 8,700 soldiers and police officers there, drawn from more than three dozen member states. The forensic studies have also linked the spread of the cholera to a flawed sanitation system at the Nepalese peacekeeper base, which contaminated a tributary that feeds Haiti’s largest river, used by Haitians for drinking and bathing. Beatrice Lindstrom, a spokeswoman for the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti , the Boston-based rights group that prepared the lawsuit, said in a telephone interview that the listed plaintiffs were five cholera victims, who were seeking redress for themselves and all afflicted Haitians and their families. Ms. Lindstrom said the institute had decided to file the suit in New York because it is the site of United Nations headquarters and has an enormous Haitian expatriate population. “We are asking for the judge to find the United Nations liable,” she said. “It has violated its legal obligations through reckless actions that brought cholera to Haiti.” The lawsuit did not specify the amount of compensation sought, which Ms. Lindstrom said would be “determined at trial.” It was far from clear that the lawsuit would be accepted by the court, which affords broad latitude to diplomatic protections for the United Nations against such litigation. These protections are partly rooted in the formal legal conventions created with the inception of the United Nations after World War II. “The majority view is that the U.N. and U.N. entities are immune from domestic lawsuits,” said Jordan J. Paust, a professor of international law at the Law Center of the University of Houston. Eight months ago, Ban Ki-moon, the secretary general of the United Nations, informed Haitian leaders that it would not accept claims for compensation made by victims of the outbreak, citing a provision of the Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations. Ms. Lindstrom said the United Nations had also rebuffed her group’s attempts to address the issue. “They’ve refused to sit down for a conversation with the victims, or with us,” she said. Navi Pillay, the top human rights official at the United Nations, suggested on Tuesday from her headquarters in Geneva that Haiti’s cholera victims were entitled to some compensation, although she did not specify who should provide it. Farhan Haq, a spokesman for Mr. Ban, declined to comment on the lawsuit but asserted that the United Nations remained dedicated to helping Haiti overcome the epidemic. “The United Nations is working on the ground with the government and people of Haiti both to provide immediate and practical assistance to those affected,” Mr. Haq said in a statement, “and to put in place better infrastructure and services for all.” | UN;Lawsuits;Haiti;Cholera;Epidemic;United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations |
ny0198483 | [
"nyregion"
] | 2009/07/17 | Albany Senate Fails to Act on Bill Preserving Bloomberg’s School Control | ALBANY — The State Senate was on track to adjourn in the early morning hours on Friday without acting on legislation that would preserve Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg ’s control of New York City schools after the mayor refused to make any changes to the bill. As the second day of round-the-clock legislative sessions wound down, it appeared that senators would leave town for the summer and not take up the issue — a priority of Mr. Bloomberg’s — until September. It was another setback for the mayor’s legislative agenda in Albany, where he has been repeatedly thwarted by lawmakers who complain that he employs a my-way-or-the-highway approach. The failed negotiations over the school control bill were a replay of similar battles the mayor has fought in Albany in the last few years — like his campaign to construct a stadium on the West Side of Manhattan and his plan to charge drivers a fee to enter the busiest parts of Manhattan. “The mayor’s people are telling us they will not budge, they will not accept anything that isn’t their version of the bill,” said Senator Bill Perkins, a Harlem Democrat who is one of several senators from the city calling on the mayor to accept the changes. “We live in a democracy, not a dictatorship.” Mr. Bloomberg’s aides and Republican allies accused Democrats of waiting until the last minute to voice their objections to a proposal that had been debated for months. And they said Democrats had reneged on a pledge to bring the measure to a vote before they adjourned. “One hundred and fifty thousand employees, 1,500 schools, 1.1 million children being held up — for what?” said Senator Martin J. Golden, a Brooklyn Republican. “It is time for this bill to move forward.” Senate Democrats are advocating a number of changes, which would provide training for parents who wish to take a more active role in their children’s educations, form a commission to study school violence and enhance the city’s cultural curriculum. But the mistrust that has come to define the mayor’s relationship with Albany hindered the negotiations: Democrats wanted the changes codified in law; the mayor’s office opposed that, and promised instead to have the school chancellor carry them out administratively. The two sides briefly discussed outlining the amendments in a memorandum of understanding, which the mayor was apparently willing to sign. But those talks collapsed after the mayor’s office said Democrats had tacked on a number of new demands. For now, the school system is not likely to see its status quo disturbed, at least until classes begin in September. Authority over schools is still effectively in the hands of the mayor, whose schools chief, Joel I. Klein, was given the power to approve contracts after the law that gave the mayor control expired in June. The mayor, who did not appear in Albany himself to negotiate, sent two of his senior aides, Deputy Mayors Kevin Sheekey and Dennis M. Walcott, this week. But their presence at times seemed only to inflame tensions. Mr. Walcott held an impromptu press conference in the hallway outside the offices of the Capitol press corps in which he accused Senate Democrats of piling on demands at the last minute. “It’s just constantly throwing things on and then trying to make us into the entity that’s delaying this, when in fact, in reality, I think that they made a pledge to us,” Mr. Walcott said. “And the responsibility is to honor that pledge and have it come to the floor.” Senators are wary of and bitter toward Mr. Bloomberg, who has made no secret of his scorn for Albany’s hostility toward many of his policies. The mayor seemed to further antagonize senators on Wednesday when his chief spokesman issued a statement saying he would ask the governor to call senators back into session until they passed the bill. “The mayor’s posture has frustrated members of the Senate who have an honest and deep desire to pass an enhanced mayoral control bill,” said Senator Kevin S. Parker, a Brooklyn Democrat. No Texting, or Else Thumb jockeys, beware. If you are caught texting or e-mailing while driving anywhere in the state, it could cost you $150. The State Senate passed a bill on Thursday that would ban the use of portable electronic devices while driving. It is already illegal to talk on cellphones without a headset, but the new law expands the ban to include using a cellphone or any other portable electronic device to view, send or compose “e-mail, text messages or other electronic data.” The law, which has already passed the Assembly, would also forbid drivers with a learner’s permit to have more than one passenger in the vehicle who is under 21 and not a member of their immediate family. | Education and Schools;Bloomberg Michael R;New York City |
ny0202589 | [
"world",
"asia"
] | 2009/08/27 | China's Press: Still Not Free, but More Freewheeling | BEIJING — Modern Weekly is about as hip as it gets in China, and about as successful as it gets in this country’s small universe of independent magazines. It comes in a glossy, large format with slick graphics, lots of short quotes and pictures and some sophisticated reporting in separate sections — news, business, lifestyle and culture — including a good deal of news, business, lifestyle and culture in countries other than China. The flagship publication of Shao Zhong, the People’s Republic of China’s first private media entrepreneur, the magazine has a circulation of 700,000, relatively still small given the country’s population of 1.3 billion, but it is nonetheless a trend-setter in this country, where the media in general are still heavily censored and controlled. “We give our readers an amazing amount of information,” Mr. Shao said during a recent conversation in his Beijing office. “We tell them a lot about what’s going on in the world, and in these areas there’s a lot of space.” What Mr. Shao, who uses the English name Thomas, meant by a lot of space is political space, room for reporters to roam. He was responding to the inevitable question from a foreign journalist about what restrictions he has to accept in order to run a successful magazine empire in China. He wouldn’t, he was asked, be doing much reporting on Tibet or on violations of human rights in China, would he? “I tend to stay away from topics like that,” Mr. Shao said. Of course he does, and he has to. It’s the bargain that Chinese journalism has to make to survive in this country, where everybody knows what can and can’t be reported. When a couple of weeks ago, for example, China’s public security bureau arrested Xu Zhiyong, an activist lawyer and founder of the Open Constitution Initiative, which advocates the rule of law in China, the news was widely reported abroad, but blacked out in China itself. (Although Mr. Xu was released on bail on Sunday, he is still expected to face charges of tax evasion.) Similarly, there’s very little reporting on the situation in the western region of Xinjiang, scene of last month’s ethnic riots, except for dutiful repetition of the government’s position and denunciations of Rebiya Kadeer, the exiled Uighur leader whom China blames for the disturbances. Chinese readers are likely to find in their own press more about the private life of Barack Obama than about their own president, Hu Jintao, because reporting is pretty free on Mr. Obama yet tightly regulated on Mr. Hu. In a recent issue of Mr. Shao’s Modern Weekly, there was a two-page spread on what the magazine called “India’s Secret Submarine,” all by way of reporting on India’s naval development over the past decade or so. It is out of the question of course that Modern Weekly would carry out an unauthorized examination of China’s naval development, which would be deemed a state secret. As everybody knows, the press is not free in China. Yet there’s no question that things are changing, and Modern Weekly illustrates the emergence of a press that, certainly, is at least more freewheeling than ever before in China, and separate from the government. “Rarely will you find a successful magazine these days that’s completely run by the government,” Mr. Shao said. Mr. Shao, 48, is tall, lean, and casual. He started out in his native town of Guangzhou in China’s south, where he put in a few years in city government, as a member of the Guangzhou City Development and Planning Commission. Around 1990, he said, he began, thanks to China’s opening to the outside world, to see a lot of foreign magazines, and he contrasted them unfavorably to those being published in China, which, he said, were “ugly.” He got some very specific inspiration from a book, “Seventy Years of Time Magazine” that chronicled how Time’s founder, Henry Luce, built his magazine publishing empire, a story that inspired Mr. Shao to strive to be a sort of Chinese Luce — ironic, given Luce’s famous animosity to China’s Communists. Mr. Shao liked the way Luce’s magazines combined pictures and texts and divided coverage into sections — similar to the sections that Mr. Shao publishes in Modern Weekly. But in China, anyone who wants to publish a magazine has to find a partner with a publishing license, and that means a state-owned newspaper or magazine, which, essentially furnishes legal cover, making no investment, taking no risk, and doing no work. “There have been a lot of difficulties,” Mr. Shao said. “I’ve failed in some startups and lost some partners, that sort of thing. You have to collaborate with a license holder, and when you’re successful, they just take you over.” Mr. Shao’s first partner for his first weekly startup was the Guangdong Daily, which, after a while, took control of that magazine, showing Mr. Shao to the door. “When that happens, there’s nothing you can do,” he said. “You can’t sue the guy. You just have to start over.” That’s what Mr. Shao has done, clearly with success. His company, Modern Media Group, now publishes 10 magazines, with 10 different official license partners; it has a staff of 700 employees and offices all around China. His Beijing office, where I met him, is sleekly modern, like his magazines, and is adorned with large contemporary paintings of the sort being sold for millions of dollars at Sotheby’s these days. If Mr. Shao feels frustrated by the restrictions still placed on journalists in China, he doesn’t show it. He seems happy to be able to be private entrepreneur with enough scope to publish magazines that he feels are useful, and perhaps that’s the broader compromise made in China today — you can operate freely in lots of areas, as long as you agree to stay out of the areas that the authorities have fenced off. “Nobody tells you what to do,” Mr. Shao said. “There are no rules. You have to feel your way around with content and not send up any red flags, so we concentrate on international news and also lifestyle and trends, which have much less to do with government.” It’s a useful thing to do, Mr. Shao feels as well as a profitable one. “We put our readers in step with what’s going on in the world,” he said. | Freedom of the Press;China;Magazines |
ny0027026 | [
"us"
] | 2013/01/29 | Mississippi: Crews Cleaning Up Oil After Barge Crash | Cleanup crews were skimming oil on the Mississippi River near Vicksburg on Monday after a barge struck a bridge, rupturing a compartment holding 80,000 gallons of oil. The authorities said that the spill was light and that only a sheen had been spotted. Orange booms were stretched across part of the river downstream, and small boats patrolled the area as oil was pumped from the ruptured tank into another tank on the same barge. Officials did not yet have an estimate of how much oil had been transferred or how much had spilled into the Mississippi. A Coast Guard spokesman said a tug was pushing two tank barges when the crash occurred around 1:30 a.m. Sunday. Both barges were damaged, but only one leaked. The authorities declared the bridge safe after an inspection. | Mississippi;Mississippi River;Oil and Gasoline;Accidents and Safety;Oil spill;Boat Accidents |
ny0268621 | [
"world",
"europe"
] | 2016/04/02 | Brussels Airport’s Reopening Delayed by Security Dispute | PARIS — Concerns over security at Brussels Airport have delayed its reopening, the airport operator said on Friday, more than a week after two suicide bombers heavily damaged the departure terminal. Florence Muls, a spokeswoman for the airport, said that it was unclear whether it would be able to open on Saturday morning. “We are still waiting for a green light from the federal police,” Ms. Muls said, adding that airport security was not directly managed by the airport authorities. She said the reopening would depend on the outcome of labor negotiations between unions representing police officers at the airport and the Interior Ministry. The unions have been discussing their security concerns with senior management in the Belgian federal police before and after the terrorist attack on March 22, in which two suicide bombers detonated explosives in the departure hall just before 8 a.m. The unions have threatened not to go back to work if their requests for additional safety measures are not addressed. The Belgian government met on Friday to discuss the reopening of the airport, which is several miles northeast of Brussels, in Zaventem. But officials said afterward that they would wait for the negotiations between unions and police officials to succeed before setting a date for the reopening. “For us, security is paramount, but we have to find solutions at the negotiating table with police unions,” the deputy prime minister, Kris Peeters, said after the meeting. “I hope that we are going to find solutions as quickly as possible.” In a statement on Thursday, the airport authority said that the airport was “technically ready” to resume commercial flights, using a temporary setup for passenger check-ins. Ms. Muls said that the airport would be able to process 800 departing passengers an hour, about 20 percent of its normal capacity. The airport has been closed since the attacks that killed 32 people and injured hundreds. A third suicide bomber attacked the Maelbeek subway station in Brussels, near the European Union headquarters, more than an hour after the airport bombings. Subway service in the Belgian capital is still disrupted. On Wednesday, a group of police officers working at the airport wrote an open letter expressing deep concern about the absence of security checks for nontravelers entering the airport and about the number of baggage handlers and other staff members suspected of having criminal records or of being sympathetic to the Islamic State. Vincent Gilles, the head of Belgium’s largest police union, said on Thursday that repeated requests for increased security at the airport before the attacks went unheeded and that a request made in December to install a security check outside the entrance to the airport terminal had been rebuffed. Arnaud Feist, the chief executive of Brussels Airport, told the Belgian broadcasting company RTBF on Friday that setting up checks at entrances would only move the threat outside the building. “A fairly compact grouping of people standing in line might be more problematic than people who are spread out in the airport,” he said. He also said he was not aware of any airport workers with criminal records or who were sympathetic to the Islamic State. Separately, news agencies reported on Friday that an Italian court had approved the extradition to Belgium of an Algerian man who was arrested last week in Salerno and accused of forging documents used by people involved in the March 22 attacks in Brussels and the Paris attacks in November. | Brussels Attacks;Airport;Airport security;Brussels;Terrorism |
ny0272335 | [
"nyregion"
] | 2016/05/10 | Regular on New York’s ‘Worst Landlords’ Lists Is Charged | For decades, Steven Croman was a successful landlord in New York City. His companies bought up more than 140 Manhattan apartment buildings, often filled with rent-regulated tenants. And then, methodically, he pushed them to leave, buying them out of their leases for relatively modest sums or, if that did not work, harassing them until they left, tenants said. He was a regular on “ worst landlords ” lists . His tenants even started a website against him. Mr. Croman’s business came to embody in many ways how rent regulations have eroded in the city, putting housing out of reach for more and more people. He was able to deregulate most of his rent-stabilized apartments within just a few years of buying the buildings, enabling him to collect much higher rents. On Monday, though, his fortunes took a different turn. Mr. Croman, 49, turned himself in to the authorities around 7 a.m. in Lower Manhattan. He was charged with 20 felonies, including grand larceny, criminal tax fraud, falsifying business records and a scheme to defraud, relating to accusations he inflated his rental income to secure more than $45 million in bank loans. He faces up to 25 years in prison. His mortgage broker, Barry Swartz, 53, was charged with 15 felonies. The New York State attorney general’s office, which investigated Mr. Croman for almost two years, also filed a lawsuit against Mr. Croman on Monday, seeking to force him to give up his real estate business and pay millions of dollars in restitution to tenants and penalties. The spiraling cost of housing in the city and the shrinking stock of rent-regulated apartments have increasingly become a focus of city and state officials. Mayor Bill de Blasio, a Democrat, has made affordable housing a cornerstone of his administration, announcing in 2014 plans to build or preserve 200,000 units over 10 years. The de Blasio administration and the office of Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman, a Democrat, set up a joint task force last year to go after property owners who harass tenants in rent-stabilized and rent-controlled apartments, one of the few ways that people with low incomes can afford to live in the city. A Brooklyn landlord was arrested last summer as part of the campaign, but he owned only one building. Mr. Croman’s business, built over 25 years and with properties stretching from the Lower East Side to the Upper West Side of Manhattan, is on another level. He is the highest-profile landlord in recent years to face such serious accusations in the city. Mr. Schneiderman called him the “Bernie Madoff of landlords” at a news conference on Monday. The criminal charges, he said, should “send a powerful message” to landlords who “see rent-regulated apartments as gold mines.” Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s tenant protection unit , after its own investigation, made a criminal referral to Mr. Schneiderman’s office. In its lawsuit, the attorney general’s office accused Mr. Croman of harassing and coercing “countless working-class and low-income families out of their longtime homes.” Mr. Croman then turned those vacant rent-regulated apartments into lucrative market-rate units, often with shoddy and illegal construction that violated lead-safety laws and endangered tenants who remained in the buildings, court documents said. For Robin Tzannes, who has lived in a Croman building on East Sixth Street in Manhattan for more than four decades, each day brought new horrors: no hot water, no cooking gas, and dust from construction that burned her throat and eyes. “It’s simply harassment,” she said in an interview on Monday. The attorney general’s suit also included Mr. Croman’s director of security, Anthony Falconite, a former New York City police officer accused of abusing his former position, and said he intimidated tenants into giving up their apartments. Mr. Croman is accused of using various methods to force out rent-controlled tenants. His employees referred to tenants as “targets” and competed to push out the most, the lawsuit said. A property manager who persuaded a tenant to take a buyout was said to have earned a bonus of up to $10,000. Mr. Croman would walk through his office chanting, “buyouts, buyouts,” court documents said. At one point, Mr. Falconite told a property manager through a text message that obtaining buyouts was a “team sport.” The lawsuit said the property manager, Christine Bermudez, then responded: “I know that!! Who’s our next target? We have to start lining them up!!!” If tenants did not leave voluntarily, the suit said, Mr. Croman had other tactics. He turned their buildings into hazardous construction sites , avoided making repairs and failed to maintain services such as heat, electricity and hot water. His companies also repeatedly filed baseless lawsuits against tenants. In internal emails, company employees acknowledged that such suits would “aggravate” tenants or pressure them to accept buyouts, the attorney general’s lawsuit said. In some cases, Mr. Croman’s employees would not acknowledge receiving tenants’ rent checks, and then his companies sued the tenants for unpaid rent. Cynthia Chaffee, who has lived in a Croman building on East 18th Street in Manhattan for 38 years, knows firsthand how such tactics can erode tenants’ resolve. Mr. Croman took her to Housing Court 11 times, she said, even though she was not behind on the rent. Another tenant, Nelida Godfrey, said she racked up $240,000 in legal fees. In all this, Mr. Croman had one person he relied on more than any other: Mr. Falconite, whom he described as his “secret weapon.” The attorney general’s office accused Mr. Falconite of lying to get into tenants’ apartments, of posing as a repairman, a building manager, a U.P.S. deliveryman, an inspector. He would do “building sweeps,” knocking on the door of every rent-regulated unit in a building. Once inside, Mr. Falconite would accuse tenants of illegally occupying the units, demand their identification and take their photographs without permission, the lawsuit said. Then he would stalk them, it said, confronting them at work and even following them out of state. The goal: to intimidate them into leaving. Sylvana Jakich, who lives on Ridge Street in Manhattan, recoiled when asked about Mr. Falconite, who she said pushed out half of the tenants in her building. At one point, she recalled, he threatened to get his friends “from the Police Department to handcuff” her for peeking into a vacant apartment. Once he pushed a tenant out of a rent-regulated unit, Mr. Croman turned his attention to redoing the apartment to justify increasing the rent to market rate. But the attorney general’s office said it found many examples of illegal construction in Mr. Croman’s buildings. His companies did construction without obtaining the proper permits at least 175 times, the lawsuit said. He also regularly told his employees to ignore orders to stop working from inspectors with the city’s Buildings Department. The city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene found impermissibly elevated levels of lead dust in Mr. Croman’s buildings more than 20 times, including levels over 65 times the legal threshold, according to the attorney general’s office. Even after the health department ordered Mr. Croman to fix the lead hazards, he did not, the lawsuit said. Mr. Croman and his mortgage broker, Mr. Swartz, pleaded not guilty to the criminal charges on Monday in State Supreme Court in Manhattan. Outside the courtroom, Benjamin Brafman, Mr. Croman’s lawyer, emphasized that the criminal allegations were entirely separate from the claims of tenant harassment. “The charges in this case are defensible,” Mr. Brafman said. | Landlord;Steven Croman;Real Estate; Housing;Rent;Barry Swartz;Affordable housing;Fraud;Manhattan;NYC |
ny0041918 | [
"nyregion"
] | 2014/05/11 | A Plan Built on Assumptions | This past week, on a day when fast-food workers gathered in front of a McDonald’s in downtown Manhattan to announce that they would strike again on May 15 to demand higher wages, clergy members from various denominations around New York joined hundreds of laborers for a service and pray-in at Riverside Church, calling on state legislators to allow cities to set their own minimum wage. The economic realities of life in New York City so often seem to require holy intervention. According to the Fiscal Policy Institute, a research group, more than 1.25 million residents, 37 percent of all workers living in the city, make less than $15 an hour. More than half of workers who live in the Bronx subsist in this category; in Brooklyn, which has one of the most competitive housing markets in the country, the figure is 41 percent. Even when the state’s minimum wage increases to $9 an hour as it is meant to do in two years, its purchasing power will still be 25 percent below its peak, 46 years ago. According to a report released by the city comptroller’s office last month, median apartment rents in New York City rose by 75 percent from 2000 to 2012, a rate significantly higher than the country’s on the whole, as the real incomes of New Yorkers declined. You could keep yourself incredibly busy, making it impossible to read anything by or about Thomas Piketty if you simply committed to digesting recent analyses of the city’s housing crisis. Another report, from New York University’s Furman Center , used the example of a rookie firefighter and a substitute teacher, with one child, who 14 years ago could have afforded 70 percent of the city’s available rental units. Between 2007 and 2012, they would have been able to afford fewer than half. Driven by this dispiriting math, Mayor Bill de Blasio on May 5 released his 10-year housing plan , which seeks to deploy $41 billion in public and private funding, $8.2 billion of it coming from the city, to preserve 120,000 existing units of affordable housing while creating 80,000 new ones. When you consider that the city’s most recent Housing and Vacancy Survey, conducted in 2011, put the number of subsidized units in the city at 297,620, a figure that includes more than 175,000 apartments, decades old, belonging to the New York City Housing Authority, you get a sense of the program’s aggressive ambition. Or rather an inkling of seemingly untenable optimism; the plan relies on a rate of housing production higher than anything we have witnessed in a long time. The lauded housing initiative for low- and moderate-income New Yorkers during the Koch administration resulted in the creation and rehabilitation of about 150,000 apartments over a similar time frame, many of them born of renovations to vacant buildings in the Bronx, Harlem and Central Brooklyn that had been lost to the misery and ashes of the 1970s. There is no such analogous derelict housing stock today, which means that much of the building that will happen will be building up. And here, as with the obvious and Olympian challenges of financing, is where so many complications lie. One of the many commendable aspects of the mayor’s plan, which is over 100 pages long, is the interest it extends beyond construction to fostering communities and facilitating economic integration. This means that commercial thoroughfares like Pitkin Avenue in Brooklyn, for example, would presumably no longer exist merely as corridors of poverty retail (a cellphone store next to a fried-chicken chain next to a purveyor of cheap tank tops). Better services would, in theory, bring more moderate-income tenants to historically troubled neighborhoods. Implicit in this paradigm is the idea that affluent New Yorkers living in well-tended corners of the city would also open themselves up to neighbors who might be less privileged. It was telling that the mayor announced his plan in the gentrified, multimillion-dollar brownstone world of Fort Greene, Brooklyn. At every point along the spectrum, including the high end, the only way to have cheaper housing is to have more of it, an idea that many New Yorkers are happy to embrace until submission to the principles of supply and demand means looking out at a 30-story tower 15 feet away. Within days of the plan’s release, residents in and around One Brooklyn Bridge Park, an expensive condominium complex converted from an old printing plant on the Brooklyn Heights waterfront, drafted a petition objecting to a proposal for a high-rise complex next door, where the city is considering placing middle-income housing alongside luxury properties. The dissenters appeared to see no irony in the fact that they held out the Pierhouse, a low-rise building going up in the north end of the park, where the smallest apartments are selling for $2 million and the larger ones closer to $11 million, as an example of more mindful development. Any modicum of economic diversity left in TriBeCa, otherwise a temple of hedge-fund wives migrating between 6,000-square-foot lofts and SoulCycle, exists because of the 39-story towers of Independence Plaza North, built as a Mitchell-Lama complex in the 1970s. When the buildings aged out of the program a decade ago, tenants fought and continue to fight to keep some portion of the apartments within the reach of the artists and electricians and teachers and waitresses who live there. The legal battles are an object lesson for the city in the challenges of preserving the affordability of subsidized housing. Over the next 10 years, more than 53,000 rental units, including some in Mitchell-Lama buildings, will risk losing their subsidies and be subject to market rates. “It’s never that you just sit back and say you’ve won,” said Diane Lapson, who is president of the tenants’ association. At this point there is more commonality than friction between market-rate tenants and the old guard. “My mantra has been rent protection for everybody,” she said, explaining that she seeks to keep rents from escalating for luxury tenants as well. “They are often two working people paying $5,000 a month,” Ms. Lapson said. “They aren’t millionaires either.” | Bill de Blasio;Real Estate; Housing;Rent;NYC;Affordable housing |
ny0291870 | [
"science"
] | 2016/01/13 | U.S. Restricts Movement of Salamanders, for Their Own Good | The Fish and Wildlife Service is barring the door against 201 species of salamanders, making it illegal to import them or move them across state lines, the agency announced on Tuesday. Scientists hope the ban will help prevent a devastating outbreak from driving native salamander species extinct. In 2013, scientists in the Netherlands discovered a species of fungus infecting native fire salamanders . Later research revealed that the fungus, called Batrachochytrium salamandrivorans, or Bsal, was carried by Asian salamanders that were imported into Europe as pets. While the fungus was harmless to the Asian amphibians, it was lethal to the Dutch ones. Although Bsal has continued to spread in Europe, there is no sign that it has taken hold in the United States. But if the vigorous pet trade goes unchecked, scientists fear that it is only a matter of time before Bsal threatens some of the 190 salamander species that live in the United States. The Fish and Wildlife Service estimated that from 2004 to 2014, nearly 2.5 million live salamanders, representing 59 species, were imported into the United States. “With the highest biodiversity of salamanders in the world here in the United States, we’re very concerned about the risk this fungus poses,” said David Hoskins, assistant director of the agency’s Fish and Aquatic Conservation Program. Over the past year, Mr. Hoskins and his colleagues reviewed the scientific research on Bsal. They concluded that the fungus posed a serious threat to some native species. Other species may be able to withstand Bsal, but they could become carriers, spreading it to vulnerable salamanders. Any harm suffered by salamander populations could have widespread ecological consequences. Salamanders are important predators of invertebrates like snails, worms and insects, and they make up a huge portion of the biomass in many forests. “We’re concerned about the impact at all levels,” Mr. Hoskins said. The Fish and Wildlife Service decided to block the transport of species of salamanders that could potentially serve as carriers of the fungus. Of the 201 species on the list, 67 are native to the United States. The agency ruled out trying to inspect salamanders, because it is difficult at a glance to tell healthy animals from ones carrying Bsal. Violators will face fines and possible prison sentences of up to six months, and salamanders will be confiscated. The new rule, to be published on Wednesday, is being enacted under the Lacey Act , a law passed in 1900. Typically, the law has been used to control trade involving animals that are predators or competitors of native species, such as boa constrictors or carp. The only animals that have been previously singled out as hosts of dangerous pathogens are salmon, trout and char. But rather than banning them outright, the Fish and Wildlife Service allows the fish if they have been certified pathogen-free. The new rule is also unusual for the speed with which it is going into effect. “We needed to move quickly,” Mr. Hoskins said. Normally the process can take months. By enacting a temporary rule, the Fish and Wildlife Service can start a ban effective on Jan. 28. The agency is accepting public comments for 60 days, after which it will decide on a final rule. “This is pretty impressive,” said Karen Lips, a salamander expert at the University of Maryland who has been among the scientists calling for a ban. She said it would give her and her colleagues time to understand Bsal better and look for ways to fight it. “We’re looking at this as a bit of breathing room,” she said. Dr. Lips also viewed the salamander ban as a precedent for protecting other species from pathogens that are circulating worldwide. “This is great for salamanders, but there’s still more to be done on the broader scale.” | Salamander;Fungus;Fish and Wildlife Service;Biodiversity |
ny0042567 | [
"world",
"europe"
] | 2014/05/19 | Front-Runner in Ukraine Election May Be Shifting Putin’s Stance | KIEV, Ukraine — On a Sunday in December when the Ukrainian uprising seemed about to tip into wide-scale violence, Petro Poroshenko, a pro-Western billionaire, thrust himself between antigovernment protesters and riot police officers clashing outside the presidential headquarters, climbed on a bulldozer that was threatening to plow through the crowd and grabbed an orange plastic megaphone. “Friends, calm down,” he shouted, as pro-government thugs brought in to antagonize the demonstrators cursed him and hurled anti-Semitic slurs, though he is a member of the Ukrainian Orthodox faith, not Jewish. As chaos swirled, Mr. Poroshenko, 48, stood his ground, helping keep injuries to a minimum, but also cementing his status as a leader of the pro-European opposition and defying the stereotype of the superrich above it all. Now, with less than a week to go until a presidential election here, Mr. Poroshenko is once again at the center of a fracas that most of his fellow oligarchs would rather avoid. The latest polls show Mr. Poroshenko, a confection magnate known as the Chocolate King, as the heavy favorite, likely to avoid a runoff with his strongest opponent, former Prime Minister Yulia V. Tymoshenko. Ms. Tymoshenko insists that the polls are wrong and that she will surge ahead. A poll by the Kiev International Institute of Sociology, conducted April 29 to May 11, found Mr. Poroshenko supported by 34 percent of all voters, compared with 6 percent for Ms. Tymoshenko and 4 percent for Sergey Tigipko, a member of Parliament and former economics minister; 25 percent said they were undecided. The survey had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points. Among voters who said they had made up their minds, Mr. Poroshenko was supported by 54.7 percent — enough to avoid a runoff — with 9.6 percent for Ms. Tymoshenko and 6.7 percent for Mr. Tigipko. With the country still roiled by separatist violence in the east, the growing air of inevitability around Mr. Poroshenko, who has deep business interests in Russia, has redrawn the Ukraine conflict. It has presented the Kremlin with the prospect of a clear negotiating partner, apparently contributing, officials and analysts say, to a softening in the stance of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. After weeks of threatening an invasion, Mr. Putin now seems to have closed off the possibility of a Crimea-style land grab in the east, and even issued guarded support for the election to go forward. “You can have a kind of a civil war and this kind of gray zone and be completely separated and face a higher degree of economic sanctions,” said Adrian Karatnycky, an expert on Ukraine at the Atlantic Council, describing the choice facing Mr. Putin. “Or you can see if it’s possible to bargain with this new guy, who has businesses in Russia, who has never been known to be a big ultranationalist.” Mr. Poroshenko is a veteran of Ukrainian politics, having served as foreign minister under President Viktor A. Yushchenko; as economics minister under the ousted president, Viktor F. Yanukovych; and as a longtime member of Parliament, including a stint as speaker. “The reasoning on Poroshenko is that he is a pragmatist and he was in the Yanukovych government,” Mr. Karatnycky said. “He is a person who is a dealmaker. From that point of view, it may mean that Putin is willing to give it a chance of trying to get something out of this.” Exactly what Mr. Putin wants to get remains to be seen. Some analysts believe he wants a guarantee that Ukraine will not join NATO. Others think he will settle only for a federalized government that permanently weakens Kiev, while still others believe he will continue destabilizing the country. Recently, Mr. Poroshenko has struck a conciliatory tone, promising to mend ties with Russia and saying at a news conference on Sunday that he opposed holding a referendum on Ukrainian membership in NATO. He has also sought to bring normalcy to the campaign, assuring voters that he will provide security if elected but stressing a more traditional message: jobs. “A new way of life means to be well off,” Mr. Poroshenko said, repeating his campaign slogan during a recent visit to a turbine factory in the eastern city of Kharkiv. “A new way of life means that the priority of any government, any authority should be to create new jobs. Our first goal is to guarantee security to all who live in Ukraine, to lead us out of the state of military tension.” In recent weeks, however, he has kept some distance from the provisional government, which is viewed with deep suspicion in the east. Mr. Poroshenko’s support for European integration will inevitably complicate his talks with Russia if he is elected. There is also a personal element to any negotiations. The Russian government has seized and closed a main factory and warehouse of his company, Roshen, in Lipetsk in southern Russia. Among Ukraine’s political cognoscenti, Mr. Poroshenko’s election is regarded these days as a foregone conclusion. “He is going to be president,” said Mustafa Nayyem, a reporter with the online news site Ukrainska Pravda who is leading a team preparing the questions for debates on Channel 1, the national television station. Mr. Poroshenko’s views already carry heavy influence in the provisional government in Kiev, including his belief that the government must crack down on armed insurgents in the east. In some respects, Mr. Poroshenko is already being treated as president-in-waiting. In recent weeks, he has been meeting regularly with world leaders. But while the West seems excited about the prospect of a Poroshenko presidency, some good-government advocates in Ukraine fear that Mr. Poroshenko’s business interests and his ties to other oligarchs may mean he would largely maintain the status quo. Mr. Poroshenko’s path to the presidency was eased substantially in March when his main rival, the former boxer Vitali Klitschko, agreed to drop out of the race, endorse Mr. Poroshenko and run for mayor of Kiev instead. The deal was reached at a meeting in Vienna orchestrated by Dmitry V. Firtash, the gas-trading tycoon, who was a longtime political patron of Mr. Yanukovych and has close business ties to Gazprom, the Russian state-controlled energy giant. Mr. Firtash’s role has raised concerns among some Western officials who are hoping to prevent a recurrence of surreptitious and corrupt side deals that have bedeviled Ukraine since Soviet times. During a recent 90-minute debate between Mr. Poroshenko and two other candidates, he seemed comfortable with the attention accorded him as front-runner. He spoke easily, his words punctuated by hand gestures. His positions were mostly uncontroversial, but with a clear Western bent. “The main direction of development has to be European integration,” he said at one point, “And it’s not a subject for discussion.” | Election;Petro Poroshenko;NATO;Yulia V Tymoshenko;Vladimir Putin;Ukraine;Russia;Crimea |
ny0124081 | [
"us"
] | 2012/09/22 | Christian College Wins Free Massachusetts Campus | The owners of a historic campus in the hills of western Massachusetts announced Friday that they would give it to a Christian college from Phoenix. The Northfield campus will be a new home for Grand Canyon University, the first for-profit Christian school in the country. The other finalist, the North American Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention, backed out of the running. More than 100 organizations, from culinary schools to TV ministries, expressed interest in the free 217-acre property along the Connecticut River, which its owners value at about $20 million. Grand Canyon’s financial strength, growth and vibrant Christian life made it a great choice, said Steve Green, president of the Oklahoma City-based Hobby Lobby craft store chain, whose family owns the campus. It once housed the Northfield Mount Hermon prep school, founded by the 19th-century evangelist D. L. Moody. The Greens bought it in 2009 and later offered to give it away to a group that would honor Mr. Moody’s commitment to traditional Christian teachings. Grand Canyon has about 7,000 traditional students and 40,000 online students. | Colleges and Universities;Massachusetts;Grand Canyon University;For-Profit Schools;Christians and Christianity;Northfield (Mass) |
ny0269182 | [
"nyregion"
] | 2016/04/28 | De Blasio’s Office Gets Subpoenas as Inquiries Into Fund-Raising Continue | The office of Mayor Bill de Blasio has received subpoenas from federal and state prosecutors in connection with a series of overlapping investigations into his fund-raising activities, the counsel to the mayor said on Wednesday. The subpoenas came from Preet Bharara, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, and from the Manhattan district attorney’s office. “City Hall has been subpoenaed,” the counsel, Maya Wiley, said in a statement. “We are fully cooperating with the investigation. The mayor has not been personally served.” The subpoenas went to at least one of Mr. de Blasio’s top aides, Emma Wolfe, according to a person familiar with the matter, and to Ross A. Offinger, his campaign finance director, according to another person familiar with the matter. It was not clear when they were received. The precise nature of the information sought in the subpoenas was not immediately clear, but the origin of the subpoenas and their targets suggested that the authorities were delving deeper into aspects of Mr. de Blasio’s fund-raising on behalf of State Senate Democrats in 2014. Both Ms. Wolfe and Mr. Offinger were directly involved in discussions with potential donors, including at a meeting in September 2014 at which the mayor also spoke. A lawyer for Mr. Offinger, Harlan A. Levy, said his client had committed no crimes. “Mr. Offinger did nothing wrong,” Mr. Levy said. “He is a highly respected fund-raiser who was simply doing his job.” Karen Hinton, the mayor’s top spokeswoman, declined to comment “on details of the investigation” but said “all involved followed the letter of the law.” She added that Ms. Wolfe is “a highly regarded public servant whose integrity should not be questioned.” Mr. de Blasio made electing fellow Democrats to the State Senate a priority in late 2014 and actively worked to direct contributions to state and county party committees. Those committees then financed several candidates in difficult races. Mr. de Blasio’s lawyers have said the entire process was routine and legal. But the transactions came under criminal scrutiny after complaints from Republicans to the State Board of Elections prompted an investigation by the board’s enforcement counsel, Risa S. Sugarman. Her report , recommending a criminal inquiry by prosecutors, was leaked late last week, prompting strong criticism from Mr. de Blasio and his lawyers, who suggested there had been political motivations behind the investigation and the leak. The subpoenas suggest, however, that prosecutors are looking seriously at whether the fund-raising activities went over the line. In the case of the 2014 election, they are looking to see whether donations to candidates were funneled through county party committees to evade contribution limits, a violation of state law and a possible felony. A subpoena also went to BerlinRosen, a public affairs consulting firm that has provided political advice and press officers for Mr. de Blasio’s campaign efforts, according to one of the people familiar with the matter. Those efforts included the nonprofit Campaign for One New York, which the mayor created to advocate his agenda and which collected contributions from those with business before the city. Federal investigators are also looking at the nonprofit; several contributors also gave money to the Senate campaign. “We’re proud of the work we do for our clients,” said Jonathan Rosen, a principal at BerlinRosen as well as a close friend and adviser of the mayor. “We have acted appropriately and in accordance with the law at all times.” | Campaign finance;Bill de Blasio;New York;NYC;Subpoena;State Legislature elections;Emma Wolfe;Ross A. Offinger |
ny0095985 | [
"us"
] | 2015/01/06 | Ohio: Mayor Faults Inquiry Into Shooting by Police | Mayor Frank Jackson of Cleveland says he did not trust a state agency to investigate the fatal police shooting of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy who was carrying a pellet gun, because he believes the agency mishandled the investigation of a 2012 shooting that led to charges against officers and a settlement with families of two people killed. Mayor Jackson, a Democrat, said he was influenced by the review of the 2012 chase in which police fired 137 rounds at two unarmed suspects. He said the city decided to hand over the investigation of Tamir’s shooting to the Cuyahoga County Sheriff’s Office because he was not confident a proper, transparent investigation would be conducted if the Bureau of Criminal Investigation and Ohio’s attorney general handled it. Attorney General Mike DeWine, a Republican, on Monday said his office completed “a thorough investigation with a great deal of transparency” and that nothing has raised questions about the validity of that work. | Cleveland;Police Brutality,Police Misconduct,Police Shootings;Tamir E. Rice;Frank Jackson |
ny0155072 | [
"world",
"middleeast"
] | 2008/01/15 | Judge and U.S.-Linked Sunni Fighters Are Killed in Iraq | BAGHDAD — Gunmen in two cars assassinated a respected and high-ranking Iraqi appellate court judge and his driver in western Baghdad on Monday morning, Iraqi officials said. Hours later, in Diyala Province, three American-backed Iraqi militiamen died after they entered a building that blew up and collapsed on them, the Iraqi police said. Judge Amir Jawdat al-Naeeb, a Sunni Arab in his 60s, was killed by gunmen as he was being driven to work, shocking other Baghdad judges and lawyers, who regarded him as one of the country’s most competent and even-handed jurists. The attack appeared to be part of a longstanding campaign by militants to kill doctors, professors, lawyers and other professionals. The judge’s friends said they could not think of any case or decision that might have prompted someone to kill him. “This is a disaster for the Iraqi judiciary,” said Aswad al-Monshedi, leader of the Union of Iraqi Lawyers. Judge Abdul Sattar al-Beragdar said that Judge Naeeb was known for his independence. “I think he was assassinated by outlaws and gangsters targeting good Iraqis,” Judge Beragdar said. Bahaa al-Araji, a leader of the bloc of lawmakers loyal to the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, said that when he was working as a lawyer in the early 1990s he often appeared before Judge Naeeb. Mr. Araji described him as a one-man “legal reference for Iraq .” He said the judge was from a well-known tribe in Ramadi, and moved to Baghdad many years ago. Despite being a Sunni with high standing in the government, he never joined the Baath Party of Saddam Hussein, Mr. Araji said. At least eight other people were killed in Iraq on Monday, said reports from Iraqi authorities and wire services. The dead included Fayadh al-Moussawi, a senior official with Mr. Sadr’s political organization in Basra. The worst attacks occurred just northeast of Baghdad in Diyala, which is the most dangerous region in Iraq. The province has a volatile mix of militant Sunnis and Shiites, as well as Shiite-dominated security forces with a history of sectarian conduct. One week ago the American military began its third major initiative in the past year to drive Sunni militants from Diyala. Similar operations are under way in three other northern provinces. So far, 60 “suspected extremists” have been killed and 193 arrested in all four provinces, the military said in a statement on Monday. The statement seemed to underscore the guerrillas’ wide-ranging infrastructure and weapons stockpiles. During the operations, American and Iraqi forces have discovered 79 weapons hideaways containing more than 10,000 light machine gun rounds, 2,000 heavy machine gun rounds and about 100 homemade bombs in various stages of construction. In a particularly deadly area of central Diyala known as “the breadbasket,” soldiers also discovered an underground bunker system that included a bomb-making workshop and living quarters. Many of the Sunni militants are believed to have fled in advance of the operation, just as they did before another large operation last summer. But they left plenty of deadly traps behind. Six American soldiers were killed last Wednesday in a house where a huge explosion, apparently set off by a hidden trigger wire, collapsed the home on them. At least five other house bombs have been discovered in the past week. House bombs have become a common weapon of the insurgents in Diyala, who in many cases have been able to move large amounts of explosives into a house without being detected by American or Iraqi forces or reported by neighbors or onlookers. The latest such attack happened Monday south of the provincial capital of Baquba and involved an American-Iraqi force and members of an American-recruited Sunni Arab militia known as an Awakening group. At least three Awakening guards were killed when they entered a house, only to have it explode, the Iraqi police said. The force was searching for fighters from Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the mostly home-grown insurgent group that American officials say is foreign-led. Six Iraqi policemen were also wounded, the police said, and another Awakening guard was shot to death in a village nearby. The American military also disclosed on Monday that Haji Uday, the leader of a large Sunni Awakening militia in Baquba, died on Sunday when his vehicle collided with a dump truck near Khalis while it was being escorted by the Iraqi police. The accident injured six other Iraqis. The military said it was investigating the crash. | Iraq;Sunni Muslims;Bombs and Explosives;United States Armament and Defense |
ny0104892 | [
"world",
"americas"
] | 2012/03/24 | Cuban Ice Cream Headed to Venezuela | CARACAS, Venezuela — Venezuela sends Cuba oil. Now Cuba will send Venezuela ice cream. The government of President Hugo Chávez announced on Friday an agreement with Cuba to create a factory here to produce Coppelia ice cream, a brand famous in Cuba for its tropical flavors, including mango, pineapple and guava. For years Venezuela has been propping up the weak Cuban economy by sending oil. In return, Cuba sends Venezuela other goods, services and manpower, including thousands of doctors. It has also sent military advisers, whose presence has at times caused friction and resentment within the Venezuelan military. The announcement of the latest deal said that representatives of the two countries had discussed a timeline for construction of the factory “over the medium term,” but did not provide a cost estimate or say who would pay. Over the years the Chávez government has announced numerous economic cooperation agreements with allies, many of which, like Friday’s, were short on details. Some were never carried out. The press release from the Venezuelan government credited the idea for the ice cream plant to Mr. Chávez, whose relationship with Cuba runs much deeper than oil or ice cream. Mr. Chávez has made it a matter of principle to support Cuba because like Venezuela, it is a socialist country. He speaks often of his friendship with Fidel Castro , the former Cuban president, and of turning to Mr. Castro for advice. Mr. Chávez has undergone three operations for cancer in Cuba since last summer. The most recent took place last month, and Mr. Chávez returned to Venezuela only on March 16, after recuperating in Cuba for nearly three weeks. It was not clear if he came up with the idea for the ice cream plant during his recent stay, but he has talked a fair amount about the food he ate during his recuperation. On his return from Cuba, he told of sitting down to a lunch of fish and salad with Mr. Castro, in which they discussed their fish preferences. He said they ate dessert, but not what kind. “Fidel was paying attention to what I eat and don’t eat and what I shouldn’t eat,” Mr. Chávez said. The relationship with Cuba has been often attacked by Mr. Chávez’s political opponents, who resent the subsidized oil shipments and the presence of the military advisers. Henrique Capriles Radonski, who is running against Mr. Chávez in a presidential election scheduled for October, criticized him for going to Cuba for his cancer surgery, saying it sent a message to Venezuelans that medical services in their own country were not adequate. | Ice Cream;Cuba;Venezuela;Chavez Hugo;Castro Fidel;International Trade and World Market;Politics and Government;Factories and Manufacturing;Coppelia |
ny0209463 | [
"sports",
"baseball"
] | 2009/12/19 | In Signing Nick Johnson, Yankees Turn Johnny Damon Away | The fourth game of the World Series was tied, 4-4, with two outs, no base runners and a 1-2 count on Johnny Damon in the top of the ninth inning last month in Philadelphia. With one more strike, the Phillies would have come to bat in a frenzied ballpark against the shaky Phil Coke, needing one run to even the series. Damon never let that happen. He fouled one pitch, took two balls, fouled two more and lashed a single to center off Brad Lidge. Then Damon stole two bases on one pitch and scored the go-ahead run in the most pivotal sequence of the World Series. The Yankees ’ 27th championship will be Damon’s legacy, and a powerful one. Maybe the marriage should have continued. Publicly and privately, the Yankees acknowledge that there is no better man for the job of No. 2 hitter than Damon, even at 36 years old. But it is over for the Yankees and Damon, and as long as Nick Johnson passes his physical, there is no going back. Johnson and the Yankees agreed in principle Friday to the one-year, $5.5 million contract they negotiated Thursday. The contract contains incentives based on plate appearances and a mutual option for $5.5 million in 2011. Damon said in a text message Friday that the Yankees had offered two years and $14 million, while he had offered to return for two years and $20 million. That was true, a Yankees official confirmed, but by then, the Yankees and Johnson had nearly finished their deal and it was too late to turn back. The official, who was granted anonymity because the Johnson deal has not been announced, said that Damon’s agent, Scott Boras, wanted a two-year, $26 million deal when he spoke with General Manager Brian Cashman on Wednesday. In a telephone interview, though, Boras said the Yankees did not begin negotiations with him until Thursday at 4 p.m., when they proposed the two-year, $14 million offer. Boras said he soon countered at two years and $20 million, and Cashman rejected it. “The reason they did it is they said they did not have the budget for that type of proposal and they were going in a different direction,” Boras said. “That was the end of it.” The Yankees showed Boras last December that they could stretch their budget for a player they must have, signing Boras’s client Mark Teixeira after Cashman persuaded the managing general partner, Hal Steinbrenner, to authorize the deal. But Teixeira had several high bidders. The Yankees do not think Damon has many suitors, and they did not want to bid against themselves. They also had a much cheaper alternative. It was not Juan Miranda, the minor leaguer whose name Cashman floated at the winter meetings last week. It was Johnson, the former Yankee who had a .426 on-base percentage for Washington and Florida last season and was eager to play for a winner. The deal with Johnson came together quickly, and the Yankees official said it was all but finished by the time Boras made the two-year, $20 million proposal. The Yankees believe their Johnson deal motivated Boras to lower Damon’s asking price; Boras suggested that Damon was never a priority. In any case, it is tough to be a mid-30s free agent, as Damon’s former teammate Bobby Abreu could tell him. Abreu, who was 34 last winter, made $16 million in 2008 but was startled to find little interest in free agency. Abreu waited for an offer of more than two years before settling on a one-year, $5 million deal with the Angels. He had a strong season for the Angels, and re-signed quickly last month for two years and $19 million. Could the Yankees be making a mistake by replacing Damon with Johnson? Actually, Johnson is not precisely taking over for Damon. In the big picture, the Yankees are swapping two older left-handed hitters who made $26 million in 2009 (Damon and Hideki Matsui ) for two younger left-handed hitters whose contracts average about $14 million in 2010 (Curtis Granderson and Johnson). They are replacing a speed guy and a slow guy with another speed guy and another slow guy. The Yankees ultimately decided that Matsui was more of a health risk than Johnson. That notion would have been laughable a few years ago, when Matsui was an iron man and Johnson was brittle. But the Yankees feared that Matsui’s surgically repaired knees would only get worse, while Johnson seems to have no pre-existing injuries. Johnson works the count well, a trait the Yankees value, and like Matsui, he excels against left-handers. Granderson does not, but he appealed to the Yankees for his defense, power and youth. Damon hits left-handers better than Granderson and makes more contact. He was, as Cashman said on Thursday, the perfect fit for the Yankees’ lineup. Maybe the timing Damon showed in the World Series was simply off in December. It rarely ends smoothly with departing free agents, but Damon was classy when writing about the Yankees in a text message on Thursday night. “I wish them all the best,” he said. | New York Yankees;Damon Johnny;Baseball;Johnson Nick;Cashman Brian;Matsui Hideki;Granderson Curtis |
ny0110108 | [
"business"
] | 2012/05/24 | Toll Brothers Beats Forecasts | Toll Brothers , the luxury-home builder, reported a second-quarter profit that beat estimates as orders rose in an improving housing market. Net income was $16.9 million, or 10 cents a share, for the three months through April, compared with a loss of $20.8 million, or 12 cents a share, a year earlier, the company said Wednesday. The average estimate of 18 analysts in a Bloomberg survey was for a profit of 3 cents a share. The housing market in the United States is stabilizing as rising employment and record-low mortgage rates lure buyers. Toll Brothers, based in Horsham, Pa., benefits from increased demand for move-up homes and a wealthier customer base with access to cash and credit. The company said quarterly orders surged 47 percent from a year earlier in a robust spring selling season. “Orders were the belle of the ball,” Stephen East, an analyst with the International Strategy and Investment Group, wrote in a note Wednesday. “This sits distinctly at the top of our rosy expectation.” Purchases of new homes in April increased 3.3 percent from the previous month to an annual pace of 343,000, the Commerce Department said. The rate was 316,000 a year earlier. The improving real estate market is enabling buyers to sell starter houses and move up to larger properties, including those offered by Toll. Sales of previously owned homes rose 3.4 percent in April to a 4.62 million annual rate, the first increase in three months, the National Association of Realtors said on Tuesday in Washington. Toll’s home-building revenue for the quarter increased 17 percent from a year earlier to $373.7 million. Closings rose 14 percent to 671 homes. Orders climbed to 1,290 homes from 879 a year earlier. The company’s backlog, an indication of future sales, rose 37 percent to 2,403 homes. By value, the backlog jumped 49 percent to $1.5 billion. “It appears that the housing market has moved into a new and stronger phase of recovery,” the chief executive, Douglas C. Yearley Jr., said in a statement announcing the earnings. “The spring selling season has been the most robust and sustained since the downturn began.” The average price of a Toll Brothers home under contract was $585,000 in the second quarter. The company said the average price of closings in the next two quarters would be $560,000 to $580,000. The company expects to deliver 2,700 to 3,200 homes in the 2012 fiscal year, with closings in the fourth quarter about 10 percent higher than in the third. Toll rose 2.7 percent to $27.75 Wednesday on the New York Stock Exchange. The shares have gained 36 percent this year, matching the advance in the 11-member Standard & Poor’s 1500 Homebuilding index. | Toll Brothers Inc;Company Reports;Real Estate and Housing (Residential);Sales |
ny0128161 | [
"sports",
"olympics"
] | 2012/06/02 | Far From Home, Amantle Montsho Chases Olympic Dream | DAKAR, Senegal — Amantle Montsho’s room, about 100 square feet, has no window to the outside. When she flipped on the light switch one day after practice, a flickering bulb did little to illuminate the space. Montsho plopped onto the pink blanket covering her twin-size bed. She was 3,600 miles from home, living in an austere dormitory among 19 elite athletes from throughout Africa who have come to train at a more sophisticated facility. The local languages are Wolof and French; she is fluent in neither. Each day, her routine is the same. She eats, sleeps and trains her body to run one lap around a track as fast as possible. There are little to no social activities, no corporate functions with sponsors, almost no visitors. In this bustling city on mainland Africa’s westernmost tip, she is as anonymous as she is Spartan in her existence. Montsho, a 28-year-old track athlete from rural Botswana, is the world champion in the 400 meters and a likely medal contender at this summer’s London Olympics . In many ways, she embodies the state of the modern international sports industry: a woman from a poor village in a country where female athletes are rarely encouraged, she is the beneficiary of programs designed to support such athletes. With the Olympics offering an ever bigger and more lucrative global stage, Montsho willingly lives in near isolation in her quest for gold. “I think it’s an advantage for me because when I’m here, I’m not doing anything,” she said. “Here, I am just concentrating on my training. “I’m here to do my business.” For every country that lavishes money and fame on its Olympic hopefuls, there are many more, like Botswana, that have precious little in the way of a sports development system. To overcome the disparity — and with the hope of expanding its audience into more corners of the globe — the governing body for track and field, known by its acronym, I.A.A.F. , established eight training centers, including the one here, to give promising athletes like Montsho access to better resources. For Montsho, who won her world title last year by three-hundredths of a second, the opportunity may be priceless. Government and sports officials in Botswana hope that she will become the first person from their country to win an Olympic medal. She already has an endorsement deal with Nike that provides her with running gear and appearance fees. Since she entered the training program in Dakar in 2006, Montsho has shaved three seconds off her 400-meter time, advanced to the finals in the 2008 Beijing Olympics and won several international titles. A gold medal in London, she said, “would mean everything to me.” “It’s what I have left to do.” The Coach, the Program At any time, 16 to 25 athletes are based at the Dakar training center, housed in a stadium shared with a soccer team and a cast of locals who roam unobstructed past a security guard. Anthony Koffi, a middle-aged native of Ivory Coast, coaches the 400-meter runners and hurdlers. With a shaved head, wire-frame glasses and a rotund belly, he is a jovial presence on the track, communicating in high-fives, rubbery facial expressions and yelps in French and English. “Too heavy!” “Push!” “Allez!” Koffi’s group of seven athletes includes runners from Senegal, Sudan, Gambia and Botswana. He has coached for more than 20 years, the last decade at the Dakar facility. He has yet to have an athlete win a medal at the Olympics. Montsho is his best hope. Amantle Montsho (pronounced ah-MAHNT-lay MONT-sho) says Koffi is “like a father,” and he talks about her like family, too. Montsho shares a birthday with one of Koffi’s sons. “When I see Amantle, I think it’s my son, you know?” he said. “Naturally, we have a relationship like that.” Koffi’s training sessions, usually six days a week, are a rotation of workouts on the beach, in the nearby hills, on an outdoor track and in a weight room adjacent to the track. The runners are always on time, spending 10 minutes or more before practice stretching on the track as crows caw overhead. One morning, a Senegalese boy with a scab on his right knee and a torn T-shirt perched behind them, fiddling with an empty Coke bottle. “Why aren’t you in school?” Koffi said in French. The boy did not look up from the plastic bottle. Koffi, with the wave of a hand, shooed him away. “The kids,” he said, “they come here instead of school.” The training center was founded in 1997. Like others in Jamaica and Cuba, the program is intended to pool athletes like Montsho from small countries and train them with elite coaches in a central location. Two world champions have emerged from the Dakar facility — Amy Mbacke Thiam, a 400-meter runner from Senegal, in 2001, and Montsho. The center’s annual budget is $180,000 (plus $1,300 per month per athlete), with money going to salaries for three coaches, a director and a physiotherapist. About $41,000 a year is spent on housing and operations. While some athletes mingle on their own, social programs and extracurricular offerings are generally limited to language and information technology courses. Since opening, some 280 athletes have lived at the center, according to the I.A.A.F. The weight room under the track is basic. Weights, some rusted, are hoisted over a wooden weight lifting pad. The room is lit only by the sunlight that streams through the windows. No music plays. The occasional car horn, jingle of a horse-drawn cart or bray of a goat breaks the quiet from outside. “Amantle, go over there,” Koffi said, gesturing toward a weight set with two men standing by it. Montsho spotted for the men as they squatted nearly 400 pounds, her metallic purple nails poking out of lifting gloves. (“In track you can have long nails,” Montsho said. “So mine are always colorful.”) After their squats on the machine, she assumed her pose under the bar, flipping her ponytail above it to prevent pinching. With ease, she completed a set of five lifts. “For men, some of the weights are too hard, but for me, sometimes they’re too easy,” she added. “Now, I know you have to run with your whole body.” Montsho’s strength and speed have improved in the last six years, though the methods for tracking her performance are far from sophisticated. Koffi pulled a stack of small notebooks lined with graph paper from his backpack. “Each runner, I track their progress,” he said, leafing through the pages, covered with a scrawl of names and numbers. He went to the entries for Montsho’s times. “With this, we can show that she improved,” he said. Rattling off some data from memory, Koffi traced Montsho’s ascent. In April 2006, when she arrived in Dakar, she ran the 400 in 52.69 seconds. By May that year, she was down to 52.14. “I could see she had a natural talent,” Koffi said. In 2007, she ran a 50.9. A year later, at a meet in Ethiopia, Montsho finished in 49.83. In 2009, Montsho ran 49.89 in Berlin. In 2010, she won the African championship in 50.03. At the world championships last year in South Korea, she ran 49.56 — a time slightly faster than what Christine Ohuruogu of Britain ran to win gold at the 2008 Beijing Games. “She has desire to improve,” Koffi said. “That’s important.” One morning, Koffi told his athletes to run several 300-meter sprints. In batches of three or four, the runners charged in spurts around the track, doing nearly two dozen sets. Montsho ran her first sprint with two men. Passing Koffi in his baggy polo shirt and cargo shorts, toting a clipboard and a timer, Montsho asked, “Is it O.K.?” The sweat was already beading around her temples. Koffi shouted back, “51.4 seconds.” She was not yet warmed up, Koffi said. He predicted she would do eight sprints under 50 seconds. Her second sprint was timed in 48.8 seconds. Then 47.4, 47.3. Time after time, she zoomed past the other runners. Montsho’s second-to-last sprint was 49 seconds. She and the others were exhausted, their breathing audible from several feet away. Montsho’s purple headband was tossed aside and her ponytail was matted. She sat on the grass beyond the finish line and told Koffi she was tired. “Maybe get 46-something now,” Koffi said. “Your best time!” “I run at my own tempo,” Montsho said. Koffi laughed. Montsho hoisted herself up and walked to the starting line. Koffi yelled, and off she went. Beep. “Forty-six four,” Koffi said, reading his stopwatch. “That’s your personal best.” As Montsho collapsed on the grass, he playfully bowed and said he was truly impressed. “I’m running faster than I was last year,” Montsho said, walking away from the track. “That’s good.” An Outsider in Dakar Montsho was not the first Botswana runner to go to the Dakar facility, but she has lasted the longest. Isaac Makwala, a 400-meter specialist, left Dakar in 2010 for a training center in Jamaica, said Bobby Gaseitsiwe, sports development officer for the Botswana National Sports Council. “He didn’t like it,” Gaseitsiwe said. “A man didn’t like the conditions there, but Amantle showed that toughness.” She decided to stay, but begged Gaseitsiwe to try to get another Botswana runner at the center, a woman if possible. At the time, she was the lone woman from Botswana competing on the national level, Gaseitsiwe said. “Are we developing athletes, or are we developing men?” Gaseitsiwe asked. “This was a girl who was there, who was never intimidated by men.” Finding another woman willing to live so far from home would not be easy. But in 2010, Gaseitsiwe had a candidate. A female athlete from Botswana was sent to Dakar, but within weeks she was on a flight home. She was pregnant, Gaseitsiwe said, but had not told officials. “It’s very difficult when someone has a baby,” Gaseitsiwe said. “It’s totally impossible.” Two men from Botswana joined the Dakar program in 2011, and one has since left. Montsho remains the country’s only female representative. “It’s not easy to stay here,” she said. “You have to be strong.” For Montsho, the differences between Botswana and Senegal can be stark. The only child of Victor Nkape and Janet Montsho, who separated two years after her birth, she grew up running around her father’s cattle post in Maun, next to of one of the continent’s most prominent wild-game reserves. Dakar, by contrast, is a densely populated commercial hub for West Africa, dotted with mosques and cacophonous outdoor markets. Dakar is predominantly Muslim; Botswana is mostly Christian, which is Montsho’s faith. The languages she speaks fluently — English and Setswana — are rarely heard here. “I don’t really like Dakar,” she said, strolling outside the stadium. She pointed to burning trash, gray mounds dotting the grounds outside the stadium like inverted moon craters. A sheep tethered to a post on the stadium grounds bleated a few feet away. “Too many people. There’s no space to move.” Montsho, typically shy, does not chat with any of her fellow runners as she warms up or lifts weights in the gym. She often wears ear buds, listening to South African gospel music and monitoring Facebook on her smartphone. “Amantle on Facebook!” Koffi said, mimicking the motion of someone typing furiously with two hands on a phone. “All the time!” On Facebook, Montsho opens up slightly. Her profile on the site is not public, but she has nearly 5,000 friends who eagerly post comments on her wall along with photos. In a fusion of Setswana and English, Montsho discusses things like her training routine, Botswana literature, drug testing and religion. She reveals a different side of herself — instead of her uniform of a ponytail, sports bra and running pants, photos show her with her hair down, wearing jeans, shades, hoop earrings and the occasional gown. The most intimate revelation came in an update of her relationship status in February, when it changed from “single” to “in a relationship.” Yet, when asked about dating or marriage, she said: “I travel too much. That stuff can wait.” Montsho has a laptop computer, a BlackBerry with a local Senegal phone number, a mobile phone for Internet access and an iPhone for when she is at home in Botswana. Cellphone reception in Senegal is patchy, and Montsho checks her e-mail once a week. Facebook largely replaced text messaging, at a fraction of the cost. “It’s how I know what’s going on in Botswana,” she said, her long nails clicking away on her phone. “This is much better than before.” Most of her free time — mornings, afternoons and nights — is spent in her room, looking at Facebook and watching Indian soap operas, dubbed in French or English, on a small television. Sometimes the power goes out, a situation all too familiar to the residents of Dakar. One afternoon, Montsho was slouched on her bed, waiting for the power to be restored. “You do nothing,” she said. “Just lay down. Very boring and quiet outside.” Koffi, her coach, urges Montsho to get away from the training facility and dorm to explore Dakar more. “I try to tell her to go out, go dance, listen to music, go relax,” he said. “It helps the stress if the runners feel more normal.” Montsho does not follow his advice, preferring to stay in her room when she isn’t training. Looking Ahead Montsho will compete in the Prefontaine Classic on Saturday in Eugene, Ore., one of a handful of meets she plans to participate in leading up to the London Games. Some of her chief rivals are in Saturday’s field, including Sanya Richards-Ross of the United States and Jamaica’s Novlene Williams-Mills, who defeated Montsho at a meet in Shanghai last month. After the Olympics, Montsho said, she might be ready to leave Dakar and her strictly focused life and return to Botswana, where she has attained widespread fame. She has considered starting her own business, coaching or pursuing higher education in Botswana’s capital, Gaborone. She has family, friends and property there. Last summer, when Montsho visited Gaborone, she was mugged at a mall. She was not injured, but her bag was stolen. In response to the incident, the Botswana National Olympic Committee said it did not have the money to provide Montsho with security. “It’s a learning experience for us, too,” said Botsang Tshenyego, a member of the committee. “We’ve never had professional athletes before.” For now, in Dakar, she can walk the streets alone and unrecognized — usually. Heading to a morning beach workout, Montsho declined to take the bus, parked outside her dorm, in favor of the five-minute walk to Yoff Beach. By 8:30, the beach, the city’s de facto gym, was full of locals, mostly men, working out. Montsho tossed off her sneakers and wiggled her toes, idling before a grueling workout of sprints in the sand. After the workout, some young Senegalese approached her, saying they had seen her on television and were happy to see her in person. She smiled and quickly jogged off, into the distance with the ocean at her side, leaving the noise of Dakar behind. | Montsho Amantle;Track and Field;Olympic Games (2012);Dakar (Senegal);Botswana;Series;One and Only The (Series) |
ny0187304 | [
"sports",
"baseball"
] | 2009/04/29 | No-Hit Streak for High Schooler Schuster Ends | Patrick Schuster’s bid for a fifth consecutive no-hitter ended Tuesday in the third inning of his Mitchell High School team’s Class 6A District 7 semifinal against Gaither in Clearwater, Fla. Drew Doty, who came into the contest batting .441, laced an 0-1 pitch into right field for a double . Schuster, a 6-foot-2 senior, had not allowed a hit since March 24. Gaither beat Mitchell , 8-4. Schuster, a left-hander, allowed three hits and five runs, with five strikeouts and five walks in five innings. Schuster, who struck out 60 while stringing together a state-record-setting four no-hitters, struggled Tuesday. In the first inning, he issued two walks and hit a batter and his teammates committed two errors as Gaither took a 1-0 lead. After working out of a bases-loaded jam in the first, Schuster retired the side in order in the second. In the third, he hit Mike Danner, the batter before Doty, with a fastball, bloodying his nose. Schuster, 18, has accepted a scholarship to the University of Florida but will consider turning professional if he is a high selection in the June draft. KAREN CROUSE | Baseball;Interscholastic Athletics |
ny0033864 | [
"business",
"international"
] | 2013/12/31 | Fire at Swatch Workshop Causes Production Delays | MADRID — The Swatch Group , the world’s largest watchmaker, said on Monday that production of some watch components would be delayed for as long as two months after a fire destroyed one of its Swiss workshops. Nick Hayek, the company’s chief executive, said that the damage was limited and that the production delay would have more of an impact on watchmakers that buy components from the company than on watch retailers. Mr. Hayek estimated that the overall cost of the fire, including production delays, would be 20 million to 25 million Swiss francs, or $23 million to $28 million, part of which was likely to be recouped once production returned to normal. The fire broke out on Sunday and swept through a workshop at a factory in Grenchen, in northwestern Switzerland, that galvanizes metal components to protect them from rust. Another workshop also had some damage because of smoke from the fire. The factory is operated by ETA, a manufacturing subsidiary of Swatch. It was closed on Sunday, so nobody was hurt in the blaze. Swatch is best known for its extended portfolio of watch brands, including Omega, Tissot and Longines and its playful plastic watches. But Swatch also produces more than half of the watch movements made in Switzerland and sells them and other inner workings through ETA and other subsidiaries to makers of some of the world’s most expensive timepieces. “Such a fire is very rare, but when you have over 150 factories, you know that you can also have flooding and all sorts of accidents,” Mr. Hayek said by telephone. The Swiss police are investigating the accident, but Mr. Hayek suggested that the most likely explanation was “a technical issue with a machine that could have started the fire.” Mr. Hayek said the fire had created “a big bottleneck” for galvanizing, but he added that he was confident delayed orders could be handled by some of the other workshops within the Swatch Group that specialize in the process. | Fires;Swatch Group;Switzerland;Watches and Clocks;Accidents and Safety;Manufacturing |
ny0294414 | [
"science"
] | 2016/06/15 | How to Become a Shadow Angel in the Morning Dew | On a cloud-free day, just as the sun is rising and dew drops cling to blades of grass, go out onto your lawn. Turn your back to the sun. Now, look at your shadow. A dazzling white light will glow like a halo around your head. This optical phenomenon is known as heiligenschein , which is German for “holy light” or “saintly appearance.” And early in the morning, when the air is moist and the temperature is still cool enough to prevent dew from quickly evaporating — about 55 to 70 degrees Fahrenheit — is a lovely time to become a shadow angel. ( Check out this map to know what temperature is best for dew at what time of day .) “It’s best viewed when the sun is low and you have a nice long shadow,” said Steven Ackerman , an atmospheric scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who has experienced the phenomenon numerous times. The heiligenschein is created by retro-reflection, the same process that makes cats’ eyes glow when light peeks into a dark room. When light shines through a spherical object attached to some kind of background material (like a cat’s eye, which has a reflective layer at the back of it, on the retina, or water drops suspended on blades of grass), this apparitionlike glow can appear. In the case of holy light, the nearly spherical dewdrop acts as a lens, focusing the light onto one point on the blade before shooting it back out the same way it entered. Light bouncing like this appears brighter around your head because your eyes are directly opposite the sun, or located right at what is called the antisolar point. Every person has their own antisolar point. This is why you won’t see a halo around someone standing beside you (unless they’re peeking over your shoulder, making their shadow near your eyes). Or why if you take a photo, and hold the camera at your hips instead of your eyes, the halo will appear there in the picture. The aura appears white, not green, because the sunlight doesn’t fully penetrate the blade and absorb its color before bouncing back out. “Anything bright and reflective tends to wash out and go to white really quickly,” Dr. Ackerman said. Image Because of heiligenschein, a faint halo appeared around the helmet of Neil Armstrong’s spacesuit during the moon landing. Credit NASA And the light that creates heiligenschein isn’t restricted to reflecting off grass. You can also spot an airplane’s heiligenschein from an airplane window, just around the plane’s shadow as it passes over bare fields, as long as the sun is behind it. On the moon, light that creates it bounces off moon dust — just look at Neil Armstrong’s shadow . | Sunlight;Grass;Light;Science and Technology |
ny0115018 | [
"nyregion"
] | 2012/11/06 | Stuck on 2nd Floor, Daydreaming of Going Outside | Wearing a baggy gray sweatshirt, looking like a small, shy Buddha, Andrew Branch sat on the clean hardwood floor. His legs, which he cannot fully extend, were curled under him. His wheelchair offers neither maneuverability nor comfort, so he spends a lot of time on all fours in a cluttered, one-bedroom apartment in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, parts of which are covered in protective plastic. “I really can’t draw,” he said, “but I know how to make a kite.” After getting adjusted, using his arms and fists to maneuver himself into place, Mr. Branch, 38, who has had quadriplegic cerebral palsy since birth, demonstrated his skills. He leaned forward, gripping the pen in his right hand, using his thumb and index finger. He stabilized himself and a piece of notebook paper using the heel of his right hand, and then, slowly, proceeded to draw remarkably straight lines. His left arm hung by his side, and the fingers of his left hand, which he cannot extend, were curled into a loose fist. In the almost 12 years Mr. Branch has lived in the United States, he has sometimes gone an entire year without going outside. He spends his days playing video games like Xena, watching sports on television or just daydreaming. In St. George, Barbados, he spent most of his life with his grandmother, Hilda Branch, who died in 2000. There, he went to the museum and the zoo. In early spring he watched for kites. “I used to fly round kites, square ones, rectangle ones,” he said as he positioned himself more comfortably. “I prefer the round ones though. You can dive and do circles. The other ones don’t really dance. The one I drew could do it. It has five bones.” Mr. Branch has always been cared for by his family. His sister, Nathalie Wiles, 26, looks after him in the daytime until his mother, Janet Wiles, 57, rushes home in the late afternoon from her service-industry job at a hotel in Midtown Manhattan. Then, Nathalie Wiles is free to go to her part-time job. They would take him outside if they could, but the apartment is on the second floor of a building with no elevator, and four to five people are needed to carry Mr. Branch downstairs. Janet Wiles is aware that there are only so many favors she can ask of friends and neighbors, so she waits for doctor’s appointments to ask for help taking him out. Even then, it can be impossible. “People have to work,” she said. And she is not sure how long she and her daughter can maintain this schedule. The future weighs on Mrs. Wiles. “If I get sick, I can’t take care of him,” she said. “What happens?” “I need someone to take care of him; it’s so stressful,” she added. “Some nights I lay down, and I can’t sleep. There’s so much on my mind.” She tried for nine years, through several city agencies, to obtain services for her son through United Cerebral Palsy. But without any documentation regarding the initial diagnosis of his cerebral palsy, she was met with frustration. Then in 2010 the case came to Colette Samuels, herself a native of Barbados and a case manager at Brooklyn Community Services. Mrs. Samuels immediately understood what needed to be done. She began by making calls to Barbados, eventually reaching the country’s Ministry of Education and Human Resource Development. She finally obtained the necessary records, and Mr. Branch was accepted for services in March by New York’s Office for People with Developmental Disabilities. He has been referred to United Cerebral Palsy case management, but there is a long waiting list for work-readiness and residential programs — the very services that could be life-changing for Mr. Branch and his family. He said he looked forward to working and meeting new people. Progress is being made, but there is an important final step. To be certain he keeps all of the services he can obtain through United Cerebral Palsy, he must become a United States citizen. His residency expires in 2016, but the process leading to citizenship can take years. In 2011, Mrs. Wiles began putting aside a few dollars every month to pay the application fee, but she was living paycheck to paycheck, without any government assistance. With rent alone at $1,050 per month, the $680 for the citizenship application was out of reach. To move things forward, Mrs. Samuels persuaded Mrs. Wiley to accept a little help. Through Brooklyn Community Services, one of the seven agencies supported by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund, she secured the money for Mr. Branch’s application. It was filed on July 19. Now the family waits. It could be a year before Mr. Branch will be interviewed by immigration officials. As this happens, Mr. Branch is on his way to becoming a true New Yorker. When asked for a favorite baseball team, he mentions the Yankees. But he has not left Barbados far behind. “I prefer cricket,” he said, admitting he had never seen a live game. “I don’t really fancy baseball.” | Cerebral Palsy;Brooklyn Community Services;New York Times Neediest Cases Fund;United Cerebral Palsy Assn;Office for People With Developmental Disabilities (NYS);Brooklyn (NYC) |
ny0138933 | [
"business"
] | 2008/02/05 | Economy Fitful, Americans Start to Pay as They Go | For more than half a century, Americans have proved staggeringly resourceful at finding new ways to spend money. In the 1950s and ’60s, as credit cards grew in popularity, many began dining out when the mood struck or buying new television sets on the installment plan rather than waiting for payday. By the 1980s, millions of Americans were entrusting their savings to the booming stock market, using the winnings to spend in excess of their income. Millions more exuberantly borrowed against the value of their homes. But now the freewheeling days of credit and risk may have run their course — at least for a while and perhaps much longer — as a period of involuntary thrift unfolds in many households. With the number of jobs shrinking, housing prices falling and debt levels swelling , the same nation that pioneered the no-money-down mortgage suddenly confronts an unfamiliar imperative: more Americans must live within their means. “We don’t use our credit cards anymore,” said Lisa Merhaut, a professional at a telecommunications company who lives in Leesburg, Va., and whose family last year ran up credit card debt it could not handle. Today, Ms. Merhaut, 44, manages her money the way her father did. Despite a household income reaching six figures, she uses cash for every purchase. “What we have is what we have,” Ms. Merhaut said. “We have to rely on the money that we’re bringing in.” The shift under way feels to some analysts like a cultural inflection point, one with huge implications for an economy driven overwhelmingly by consumer spending. While some experts question whether most Americans, particularly baby boomers, will ever give up their buy-now/pay-later way of life, the unraveling of the real estate market appears to have left millions of families with little choice, yanking fresh credit from their grasp. “The long collapse in the United States savings rate is over,” said Ethan S. Harris, chief United States economist for Lehman Brothers . “People are going to start saving the old-fashioned way, rather than letting the stock market and rising home values do it for them.” In 1984, Americans were still saving more than one-tenth of their income, according to the government. A decade later, the rate was down by half. Now, the savings rate is slightly negative, suggesting that on average Americans spend more than their disposable income. Though the savings rate does not account for the increased value of stock and property, or the gains on retirement accounts, many economists still view it as the most useful gauge of the degree to which Americans are making provisions for the future. For the 34 million households who took money out of their homes over the last four years by refinancing or borrowing against their equity — roughly one-third of the nation — the savings rate was running at a negative 13 percent in the middle of 2006, according to Moody’s Economy.com . That means they were borrowing heavily against their assets to finance their day-to-day lives. By late last year, the savings rate for this group had improved, but just to negative 7 percent and mostly because tightened standards made loans harder to get. “For them, that game is over,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Economy.com. “They have been spending well beyond their incomes, and now they are seeing the limits of credit.” Many times before, of course, Americans have found innovative ways to finance spending, even when austerity seemed unavoidable. It could happen again. The Me Decade was declared dead in the recession of the early 1980s, only to yield to the Age of Greed and later the Internet boom of the 1990s. Over the longer term, the economy should keep growing at a pace that reflects improving productivity and population gains. But for the first time in decades, credit is especially tight as the bursting of the housing bubble has spread misery across the financial system. In homes now saturated with debt, conspicuous consumption and creative financing have come to seem a sign of excess not unlike that of a suntan in an age of skin cancer . The return to reality is on vivid display at shopping centers, where consumers used to trading up to higher-price stores are now heading to discounters. Wal-Mart and T. J. Maxx are thriving, but business has slowed at Coach , Tiffany and Williams-Sonoma . Not long ago, Elena Gamble would have looked at the Cadillac parked across the street from her modest home in Elk City, Okla., and felt a twinge of jealousy. “We live in a small town, and everybody looks at your clothes and what you drive and where you have your hair done,” said Ms. Gamble, who earns about $2,600 a month as a grievance counselor at a local prison. Now, she and her husband — a prison guard who brings home $2,000 a month — are grappling with $10,000 in high-interest debt. They no longer go to the movies or out to eat, except occasionally to McDonald’s . They quit their Internet service. Their car was repossessed. “What we say now is, ‘If we can’t afford it, we can’t buy it,’ ” Ms. Gamble said. And when she looks across the street at that Cadillac, her envy has been replaced by pity for the neighbor on the hook. “I say, ‘Oh my, you’re living here, and driving that? There’s got to be something wrong,’ ” Ms. Gamble said. “ ‘You’re in debt, and you’re in trouble.’ ” For decades, that envy has been a prime engine of economic growth. Debt-willing consumers hungering for the latest-generation this and the fastest that kept factories busy from Michigan to Malaysia . From 1980 to 2007, consumer spending swelled from 63 percent of the economy to over 70 percent, according to Economy.com, while the share of after-tax income absorbed by household debt increased from 11 percent to more than 14 percent. During the technology boom of the 1990s, an extravagant mind-set took hold. In ads for the discount broker Ameritrade , a spiky-haired hipster ridiculed middle-aged professionals for settling for conventional returns. Even after the “stock market as money machine” line of thinking proved bogus, extra spending continued. The Federal Reserve cut interest rates to near record lows, banks marketed mortgages with exotically lenient terms and another fable of wealth creation took hold: the notion that housing prices could go up forever. The come-ons for stocks were replaced by a new crop of advertisements. A house was no longer a mere place to live; it was a checkbook that never required a deposit. Between 2004 and 2006, Americans pulled more than $800 billion a year from their homes via sales, cash-out mortgages and home equity loans. “People have come to view credit as savings,” said Michelle Jones, a vice president at the Consumer Credit Counseling Service of Greater Atlanta . Some Americans have so much wealth that they can spend enough to fuel much of the economy. The top fifth of American earners generates half of all consumer spending, noted Dean Maki, chief United States economist at Barclays Capital. For the others, some say credit is an intrinsic part of modern life, and Americans will soon be back for more. “A river of red ink runs through the history of the American pocketbook,” said Lendol Calder, author of “Financing the American Dream: A Cultural History of Consumer Credit.” “Partly because of desire, partly because of optimism, partly because lenders have been free to invent useful borrowing tools that minimized shame and bother,” he added, “I think it will take a great catastrophe, greater than the Great Depression , to wean Americans from their reliance on consumer credit.” Credit counselors are now swamped by calls not just from people of modest means, but from professionals earning six-figure incomes, their access to finance warping their distinction between necessity and desire. “The longer someone has lived on a high income, the harder it is for someone to cut back,” said Manuel Navarro of Money Management International in San Diego . “I ask them, ‘Do you really need to have a 60-inch flat-screen TV hanging on your wall?’ ” Fran Barbaro has an M.B.A. and a résumé of computer industry jobs with salaries reaching $150,000 a year. She used to have a stock portfolio worth about $1 million. She hung original art on the walls of her three-bedroom house in Boston . But divorce, illness and motherhood drained her savings. Her home is worth less than she owes, and she owes another $200,000 to credit card companies, banks and tax collectors. Ms. Barbaro, 50, said she knew she was living beyond her means. But her house demanded work. Her two boys needed after-school programs running $25,000 a year. Medical bills multiplied. “These were simple day-to-day expenses,” she said. “The money was always there.” Until it wasn’t. Her take-home pay is $5,200 a month, but her debt payments reach $4,400. Ms. Barbaro has rented out her house while negotiating to lower her mortgage. She has moved to an apartment, where her sons sleep in the lone bedroom while she sleeps on a pull-out sofa. “It’s the worst,” Ms. Barbaro said. “How do you salvage what you have and hopefully go back?” | Consumer behaviour;Credit card;Income;US Economy |
ny0135155 | [
"business"
] | 2008/04/10 | Report Finds Two Kinds of Tax Fraud Have Spread | Thieves are increasingly obtaining fraudulent tax refunds by using the identities of lawful taxpayers, according to a government watchdog report released Wednesday. The report, an annual document from the Treasury inspector general for tax administration, also noted a rise in the theft of taxpayer identities by people seeking to work without paying federal taxes on their wages. The Internal Revenue Service rarely prosecutes such cases, the report said. Taxpayers who fall victim to either scheme face an uphill battle in sorting things out with the I.R.S., the report said. That is because the agency’s policy is to investigate identity-theft cases only if they are accompanied by “other criminal offenses having a large tax impact.” Employment-related identity scams tend to involve lower-wage taxpayers, and confidentiality rules prohibit the I.R.S. from contacting employers to alert them. The 41-page report painted a picture of a startling rise in identity-theft cases involving taxes, using data from the Federal Trade Commission, which maintains an identity-theft clearinghouse. From 2002 to 2007, the report said, the number of fraudulent tax returns filed as a result of identity theft increased more than sixfold, to nearly 21,000, from just over 3,000. Employment-related identity theft more than doubled during the same period, to more than 35,000 instances. Over all, according to the F.T.C. data, nearly a quarter of the identity-theft complaints that the commission now receives are tax-related. Calling the thefts “a growing national problem,” the Treasury report urged the I.R.S. to come up with a comprehensive strategy to combat the fraud and said the agency had not “placed sufficient emphasis on employment-related and tax fraud identity-theft strategies.” In a response included with the report, the I.R.S. agreed that it could do more to stop fraudulent refunds. The agency has copious warnings on its Web site about identity-theft scams, which typically involve the use of someone else’s Social Security number. But, citing the rules against sharing taxpayer information, it disagreed with the report’s recommendation that it fight employment-related identity theft by contacting employers whose workers appear to be using someone else’s identity. The F.T.C.’s clearinghouse is open to all law enforcement agencies but is generally not used by the I.R.S., which said in its response that the commission’s identity-theft data was often not complete enough to warrant starting a criminal investigation. | Internal Revenue Service;Federal Trade Commission;Tax Evasion;Taxation;Federal Taxes (US) |
ny0080087 | [
"sports",
"hockey"
] | 2015/02/09 | Weathering Late Rally, Islanders Reach First | Mikhail Grabovski’s shot from the slot midway through the second period stood up as the winning goal for the Islanders, who hung on for a 3-2 victory over the host Buffalo Sabres on Sunday. Colin McDonald and the rookie Anders Lee also scored for the Islanders, who nearly squandered a 3-0 lead. Travis Hamonic had two assists in helping the Islanders earn their second win in six games and reach first place in the Metropolitan Division. The Sabres’ Marcus Foligno had a goal and an assist in his first game after missing 19 with a hand injury. Drew Stafford also scored for Buffalo, but the Sabres managed just eight shots through two periods and were outshot, 31-10, over all. Buffalo was coming off a 3-2 win over Dallas on Saturday and dropped to 2-16 in its past 18 games. LIGHTNING 5, DUCKS 3 Brian Boyle scored the first of his two goals during a three-goal first period for Tampa Bay in a win over visiting Anaheim. Valtteri Filppula, Nikita Kucherov and Ryan Callahan also scored for the Atlantic Division-leading Lightning, whose franchise-record 10-game home winning streak ended Saturday in a 4-2 loss to Los Angeles. Anaheim fell a point behind Nashville for the N.H.L.’s best record. BLACKHAWKS 4, BLUES 2 Marian Hossa broke a third-period tie with a power-play goal, then clinched a victory for Chicago with an empty-net goal against host St. Louis. Bryan Bickell had a goal and assisted on the go-ahead tally for Chicago, which also got a goal from Marcus Kruger. Vladimir Tarasenko and David Backes each scored a goal for St. Louis, which has lost two straight after a franchise-record 13-game point streak. The Blues are 20-5-2 at home. CANADIENS 3, BRUINS 1 Carey Price made 34 saves to help visiting Montreal to a season sweep over Boston. Dale Weise and Max Pacioretty each had a goal and an assist for the Canadiens, who completed their first regular-season sweep of the Bruins since 2007-8. Price has won seven of eight and allowed 11 goals in that span. He extended his shutout streak against Boston to 159 minutes 25 seconds until David Pastrnak scored with 4:31 remaining. Boston goaltender Tuukka Rask made 31 saves but dropped to 3-13-3 against Montreal. FLYERS 3, CAPITALS 1 Wayne Simmonds scored a go-ahead goal early in the third period, and Philadelphia won at Washington despite losing its starting goaltender, Steve Mason, to an injury. Jakub Voracek scored on an empty net, his 18th goal of the season, and Mark Streit also scored for the Flyers, who have won five of six. Mason, who stopped all eight shots he faced, left the ice at 11:18 of the second period and was helped to the locker room. The team later announced that he had a lower-body injury. Ray Emery made five saves in relief. Alex Ovechkin scored his 33rd goal, moving into a tie with the Rangers’ Rick Nash for the league lead. JETS 5, AVALANCHE 3 Mathieu Perreault and Dustin Byfuglien each had a goal and two assists as Winnipeg ended a six-game slide with a win over visiting Colorado. Ben Chiarot, Bryan Little and Jacob Trouba also scored for the Jets. Tyson Barrie, Matt Duchene and Alex Tanguay scored for the Avalanche, who are winless in their last three. Michael Hutchinson picked up his 15th win of the season, making 25 saves for Winnipeg, while Semyon Varlamov fell to 14-13-7 for Colorado. Barrie opened the scoring for the Avalanche at 10:56 of the first period, but the Jets responded in the second with four straight goals. PREDATORS 3, PANTHERS 2 Filip Forsberg scored a tying goal on a power play with 4:43 left in regulation and recorded the shootout winner in Nashville’s win at Florida. Forsberg, who leads the Predators with 18 goals, tied the score with a shot from the right circle that went over Roberto Luongo’s shoulder. In the fifth round of the shootout, Forsberg poked the puck past Luongo. Carter Hutton stopped 34 shots to help the Predators win for the fourth time in five games. | Ice hockey;NHL;Mikhail Grabovski;Anders Lee;Colin McDonald;Buffalo Sabres;Islanders |
ny0208056 | [
"world",
"europe"
] | 2009/06/24 | Albanians, Cut Off, Get Set to Vote | TIRANA, ALBANIA — With parliamentary elections approaching on Sunday, many Albanians say they feel like Hysen Demiraj, a 45-year-old driver and former political prisoner, who was born in a jail cell during Albania’s brutal dictatorship and says he still feels imprisoned in a country that is unfairly isolated and ostracized. “We Albanians are tired of feeling cut off from the world,” he said on a recent day after waiting for hours in scorching sun for a German visa, one among a small army of visa-seekers. “We are the forgotten part of Europe and it doesn’t feel so good.” The intense alienation might seem surprising given that this poor, southern Balkan country joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in April — a moment of enormous symbolic and psychological resonance for a place severed from the west for more than 40 years under the Stalinist leader Enver Hoxha. Yet Albanians clamor for more. Young and old say they want Albania to join the European Union so they can travel freely to neighboring Greece or Italy, without long visa lines or sneaking in under the cover of night — as hundreds of thousands have done since 1990. Others are fed up in a country where Amnesty International says more than 18 percent of the population is estimated to live below the poverty line of $2 a day, and adequate healthcare often depends on a bribe. Whether the election is peaceful, free and democratic, analysts and diplomats say, will help determine the progress toward international rehabilitation. Albania’s recent application for E.U. membership already faces deep skepticism; the bloc is overextended and fears admitting lawlessness through the back door. Washington, meanwhile, which lobbied hard for Albania’s NATO membership, will be deeply embarrassed if the vote goes awry. Nearly every election here since the fall of communism in 1991 has been contested, with losers accusing winners of vote-rigging or worse. Audrey Glover, head of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s election monitoring mission here, noted that stakes were higher this time because Brussels and Washington were watching closely. “Albania needs to prove it has embraced Western democratic standards,” she said. “If it doesn’t go well, it will make things very difficult.” Albanians could be in for a tumultuous ride. Even before Ambassador Glover arrived, the election commission chief, who is appointed by Prime Minister Sali Berisha, tried unsuccessfully to block her appointment. Mr. Berisha, aides say, is still smarting from her conclusion in the 1996 elections, when she was a monitor, that his Democratic Party had engaged in fraud. Campaigning has already taken a bloody turn. Last week, a regional leader for a small conservative party was killed in a car blast that members of his party labeled a bomb attack. A week earlier, a young supporter of Mr. Berisha was fatally shot after an argument over a campaign poster. In May, an opposition lawmaker was killed. Even if the election itself is peaceful, some Western diplomats say they are alarmed that hundreds of thousands of rural voters do not yet have the necessary identification documents for voting. Albanians are also voting for the first time under a new proportional representation system, prompting concerns that a messy coalition-forming process could plunge the country further into murk. With little to distinguish the policies of left and right, the election has come down to a gladiatorial, personality-driven contest between two men. Slightly ahead in polls is the incumbent Mr. Berisha, a heart surgeon and rightist reformer whose government has been dogged by corruption charges and who is campaigning on his success at linking Albania to NATO and thus restoring stature in the world. His challenger is Edi Rama, the mercurial, Socialist mayor of Tirana for the past eight years, a former artist who has splashed lurid bright paint on the city’s once dilapidated buildings, removed ninety tons of garbage and invested in education and health care. His authoritarian streak has caused some critics to mock him as “Tirama.” Mr. Rama’s Socialist Party has accused the prime minister of trying to cover up the government’s alleged complicity in an explosion in March 2008 in a munitions depot in Gerdec, a national tragedy that killed 26 people and wounded 300. Mr. Berisha, in turn, has accused Mr. Rama, who has refused to resign as mayor and put his name on his party’s list, of cowardice and treachery. Mr. Rama’s aides say he will resign after the Socialists win the election. “Edi Rama, you are going to go in the garbage,” roared Mr. Berisha at a recent rally in Divjake, a small coastal town. Earlier, he had challenged the mayor to fight him like Skanderbeg, the national hero who battled Ottoman invaders. Altin Raxhimi, an Albanian writer, asserted that the election pitted one man who had delivered international prestige against another who was delivering essentials like electricity and clean drinking water. “Rama has turned Tirana into a city that now wears lipstick, he made a once unlivable city livable,” Mr. Raxhimi said. “Albania got into NATO under Berisha, but he is not liked by many Albanians because he is a populist who once brought the country to the brink of civil war.” Indeed, many still recoil at memories of 1997, when many of Albania’s 3 million or so people lost their life savings in a pyramid scheme, prompting thousands to loot the country’s arms stockpile. Nearly 1,500 people were killed. Thousands sought asylum in Italy and Greece. Mr. Berisha, president at the time, resigned and spent eight years in opposition before becoming prime minister in 2005. Since then, Albania has experienced strong economic growth, while Mr. Berisha has improved infrastructure and built roads, including a new road connecting Albania and Kosovo, which cost €1 billion, or $1.4 billion, that critics consider an extravagant folly and fans laud as an essential trade route. He has fought organized crime and astutely cultivated ties in Washington. Ilir Meta, a former prime minister whose center-left Socialist Movement for Integration could prove to be the kingmaker, called Mr. Berisha “an Emperor king” and said Mr. Rama was “intoxicated by power.” “Albania has an image problem in the world and we need to have free and fair elections; otherwise it will drag down the country’s image for years to come,” he said. “The whole world will be watching us.” | Elections;Albania;European Union |
ny0207488 | [
"world",
"middleeast"
] | 2009/06/26 | Premier Casting U.S. Withdrawal as Iraq Victory | BAGHDAD — Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki has taken to calling the withdrawal of American combat troops from Iraq ’s cities by next Tuesday a “great victory,” a repulsion of foreign occupiers he compares to the rebellion against British troops in 1920. And the Americans are going along with it, symbolically and substantively. American commanders have hewed far more closely to the June 30 deadline for withdrawing combat forces from Iraq’s cities than expected only a few weeks ago, according to American and Iraqi officials. They have closed outposts — even in Baghdad and still-troubled Mosul in the north — that they had initially lobbied the Iraqis to keep open, having concluded, the officials said, that pressing the case would be counterproductive given the political significance that Mr. Maliki had given the deadline. The day itself has been declared a national holiday, though it is not yet clear whether Iraq will hold the “ feast and festivals ” he recently promised. American and Iraqi officials acknowledge the risks — to Mr. Maliki’s political position and to Iraqis’ safety. On Wednesday, four days after the last American base in Sadr City closed, a bomb hidden on a motorcycle cart killed at least 76 people and wounded more than 150 in a market in the neighborhood. On Thursday, at least seven bombs exploded around the country in what appeared to be a message from extremists days before the deadline. A great deal of Mr. Maliki’s political support rests on the fact that violence has declined since the carnage of 2006 and 2007, that he has rebuilt the security forces, that he has presided over the beginning of the end of the American war. He rarely mentions any American role in the improved security in Iraq — though 130,000 American troops remain in the country. “We will not ask them to intervene in combat operations related to maintaining public order,” he said in an interview with Le Monde published last week. “It is finished.” With the deadline now only days away, a drastically reshaped American military posture has emerged, largely because of Mr. Maliki’s insistence. Bases built over months and years have been dismantled, often in weeks. The once ubiquitous presence of American armored vehicles on Baghdad’s streets has largely ended. More than 150 American bases or outposts have been closed in Iraqi cities this year — 85 percent of the total, an Iraqi official said — including some that commanders considered crucial. The Americans asked to keep open an outpost in Sadr City, the Shiite neighborhood in Baghdad that once served as the base of Shiite militias, only to be rebuffed. “This is one we wanted,” Brig. Gen. John M. Murray said. “The Iraqi government said ‘no,’ so now we are leaving.” The Americans even acquiesced to requests to suspend virtually all American operations — even in support roles — for the first few days of July to reinforce the perception that Mr. Maliki desires: that Iraqi security forces are now fully in control of Iraq’s cities. “They will be invisible for the people,” Ali al-Adeeb, a senior leader in Mr. Maliki’s Dawa Party, said of the Americans. “They will turn into genies.” Far from a celebration, the deadline has provoked uncertainty and even dread among average Iraqis, underscoring the potential problems that Mr. Maliki could face if bloodshed intensifies. Even some Iraqi officers are worried. Brig. Gen. Mahmoud Muhsen, a commander with the First Division of the Iraqi National Police, grimly predicted that sectarian violence could return. He warned that control of Iraq’s borders remained ineffective, allowing more foreign fighters to enter. “They are taking away all the equipment that the Americans provide,” he said, “and with the agenda of countries neighboring Iraq, it is a recipe for disaster.” The Sadr City attack, like others recently, appeared intended to discredit Mr. Maliki’s government, to test its security forces and to undermine the public sense of improving security. To some degree, they already have. “When the Americans get out of city centers, a big war will start,” a woman who identified herself as Um Hussan said amid the wreckage of a bombing on Monday outside her house in the Ur neighborhood of Baghdad. It has been months, she added, since she last saw American forces there. “We ask God to help us for what is coming,” she said. Iraqi and American officials anticipate attacks in the days surrounding Tuesday’s deadline, as extremists, Sunni and Shiite, seek to exploit the American withdrawal. The security agreement between Iraq and the United States that set the June 30 deadline for withdrawing from the cities, and from the country by 2011, gave American commanders broad discretion to continue operations. But decisions on what Americans remain where — doing what — ultimately now rest with the Iraqis, and the Americans have deferred in negotiations. “We will be gone in whatever way the Iraqi government tells us to be gone,” said Lt. Col. Timothy M. Karcher, commander of the forces departing Sadr City. It is far from a complete withdrawal, of course. Thousands of American troops will remain in Baghdad and other cities, merely shifting their role from combat to training and advising. So far there are no restrictions yet on the American use of helicopters, a regular reminder overhead of remaining firepower. The Americans have been strikingly sensitive to Mr. Maliki’s political position, emphasizing Iraqi primacy in all public remarks. They have declined to specify how many American troops will remain in cities, seemingly fearful of undercutting Mr. Maliki’s public declarations of a full withdrawal. The chief military spokesman, Brig. Gen. Stephen R. Lanza, said that only an “extremely small” number would remain at the request of the Iraqis, conducting training and operations that the Iraqis could not yet do on their own, like emergency medical evacuation. Much of the complicated work of dismantling and removing millions of dollars of equipment from the combat outposts in the city has been done during the dark of night. Gen. Ray Odierno, the overall American commander in Iraq, has ordered that an increasing number of basic operations — transport and resupply convoys, for example — take place at night, when fewer Iraqis are likely to see that the American withdrawal is not total. In his discussions with the Americans, officials said, Mr. Maliki has shown far more pragmatism than his public remarks about repulsing foreign occupiers might suggest, requesting, for example, that American explosive removal teams keep sweeping Baghdad’s streets. Still, his strong language and what one Western adviser described as his inflated sense of the abilities of his own forces have left him little room, politically, to backtrack should the security situation worsen significantly. “Symbolically,” General Lanza said of the withdrawing American forces ahead of Tuesday, “this is what we want for the Iraqis as a sovereign nation.” | Iraq;Maliki Nuri Kamal al-;United States Defense and Military Forces;Iraq War (2003- ) |
ny0277432 | [
"nyregion"
] | 2016/11/11 | New York Today: A Championship of Chess Prodigies | Updated, 10:05 a.m. Good morning on this gusty Friday. Nearly 750 chess prodigies will flood the cafeteria and classrooms of Public School 11 in Chelsea this morning, sitting silently, shoulder to shoulder, at long rows of tables. The heat is on. The World Chess New York City Junior Championship begins today, along with its adult counterpart . The tournament is hosted by Chess in the Schools , a nonprofit that uses chess to help inner-city students excel in the classroom. Jace Oxley, 14, a highly ranked, self-taught contender from the Bronx, has played in about 100 chess tournaments since he learned the game on his computer in second grade. We watched him practice at the Chess in the Schools headquarters this week, and he told us his priorities ahead of the championship: finishing his homework early, getting a good night’s sleep and fueling up on granola bars. A message to his challengers: “I play to my fullest extent. No mercy to them.” Vicki Yang, 14, a Chess in the Schools participant from Brooklyn who will be helping out at today’s junior event, grew up being told that chess was not for girls. She did not listen. The ninth grader has now competed in close to 1,000 chess tournaments, as far away as Thessaloniki, Greece, and climbed to a rating of 2094, a calculation based on performance against other players. (For comparison, the reigning world champion, Magnus Carlsen , has a rating just below 2900 .) “Chess has a lot of possibilities, and after every move there are a lot of possibilities,” she said. “That expanded my view about other things in life — like the classes I could take, the possibilities in my future, the choices I can make and the consequences they may have.” Image The Chess in the Schools headquarters in Midtown Manhattan. Credit Misha Friedman for The New York Times Here’s what else is happening: Weather It’s going to take a bit of strategy to enjoy the weekend’s checkered weather. Today looks lovely, with sunny skies and a high of 60 . (Fair warning: blustery winds are in the forecast.) Saturday’s challenge: chilly temperatures that could feel as low as the 20s and 30s with the wind. It ends with a fall day fit for a queen: clear skies and warmer temperatures are predicted for Sunday. In the News • Thousands mourned at the funeral of Sgt. Paul Tuozzolo, the first member of the city’s Police Department to be killed on duty in just over a year. [ New York Times ] • Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo struck a deal with developers and union construction officials to revive an affordable-housing program. [ New York Times ] • New Yorkers disappointed by the results of the presidential election have been finding moments of catharsis in an unexpected place — a subway station. [ New York Times ] • Advocates are pressing Mayor Bill de Blasio to finance a program that would offer half-price subway and bus fares to poor New Yorkers. [ New York Times ] • Donald J. Trump found support among an Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn that would seem to have little in common with Middle America. [ New York Times ] • Protests in the city continued against Mr. Trump. [ NY1 ] • Expect four years of traffic in Midtown surrounding Trump Tower, a transit expert said. [ Gothamist ] • A group of politicians is urging Mr. de Blasio to build a gondola over the East River as a transportation alternative when the L shuts down. [ DNAinfo ] • McSorley’s Old Ale House in the East Village, one of the city’s oldest bars, was closed because of a rodent problem. [ New York Post ] • The New Jersey Senate majority leader called for the impeachment of Gov. Chris Christie over the George Washington Bridge lane-closure scandal. [ Crain’s New York ] • Today’s Metropolitan Diary: “ A Silent Agreement on York Avenue ” • Scoreboard: Lightning zap Islanders , 4-1. • For a global look at what’s happening, see Your Friday Briefing . Coming Up Today • The Rockettes Christmas Spectacular opens for the season at Radio City Music Hall. 11 a.m., 2 p.m., 5 p.m. and 8 p.m. [Prices vary, tickets here ] • Watch the Veterans Day Parade march up Fifth Avenue, from 26th to 52nd Street, beginning at 11:15 a.m. [Free] • The New York Korean Film Festival begins at Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens. 7 p.m. [$12] • Coreyah, a band bridging traditional and contemporary Korean music , performs at Flushing Town Hall in Queens. 8 p.m. [$16, tickets here ] • Savor the Bronx , the borough’s restaurant week, continues with special menus and discounts at select eateries. [Through Nov. 18] • Devils at Sabres, 7 p.m. (MSG+). Knicks at Celtics, 7:30 p.m. (MSG). The Weekend Saturday • The Salon Art + Design , a show with historical, modern and contemporary furniture and fine arts, at the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan. 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. [$25] • Celebrate Diwali , the Hindu festival of lights, with dancing from India, henna painting and more, at Flushing Town Hall in Queens. 1 p.m. [$20, tickets here ] • The Blue Hill Troupe presents a production of The Pirates of Penzance at the Theater at St. Jean’s on the Upper East Side. 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. [Prices vary] • Fill up at the Brooklyn Crush Wine & Artisanal Food Festival at Industry City: Factory Floor in Brooklyn. 2:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. [ Tickets start at $69] • The comedian Jim Breuer hosts a stand-up show at St. George Theater on Staten Island. 8 p.m. [$39, tickets here ] • Devils host Sabres, 7 p.m. (MSG+). Islanders at Panthers, 7 p.m. (MS+2). Knicks at Raptors, 7:30 p.m. (MSG). Nets at Suns, 9 p.m. (YES). Rangers at Flames, 10 p.m. (MSG+). • Watch “The New York Times Close Up,” featuring The Times’s politics editor, Carolyn Ryan , and other guests. Saturday at 10 p.m. and Sunday at 10 a.m. on NY1. Sunday • Take your toddler to a kid-friendly Rolling Stones cover concert at Brooklyn Bowl on Wythe Avenue. 11:15 a.m. [$10, tickets here ] • Watch some Magic at Coney at the Coney Island Museum in Brooklyn. Noon. [Tickets start at $5] • Commemorate the 240th anniversary of the Battle of Fort Washington with Revolutionary War-era activities at Fort Tryon Park in Manhattan. Noon to 3 p.m. [Free] • A ballet rendition of “Dracula” — with ballerinas, bats and dancing gargoyles — at Lehman College in the Bronx. 6 p.m. [ Tickets start at $25] • Looking ahead: George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker , starring the New York City Ballet, opens for the season in less than two weeks. • Jets host Rams, 1 p.m. (FOX). Rangers at Oilers, 9:30 p.m. (MSG). • For more events, see The New York Times’s Arts & Entertainment guide . Commute • Subway and PATH • Railroads : L.I.R.R. , Metro-North , N.J. Transit , Amtrak • Roads : Check traffic map or radio report on the 1s or the 8s . • Alternate-side parking : suspended for Veterans Day. • Ferries : Staten Island Ferry , New York Waterway , East River Ferry • Airports : La Guardia , J.F.K. , Newark • Weekend travel hassles: Check subway disruptions and a list of street closings . And Finally... Welcome back, Rockefeller Center Christmas tree! We have missed you so. The Norway spruce — which this year is 94 feet tall, the second tallest they’ve ever installed — was cut down on Thursday and will arrive at the rink, via crane, on Saturday. Image Oh Christmas tree, oh Christmas tree. Credit Heather Ainsworth/Associated Press The tree has roots (still) in Oneonta, N.Y., and weighs a hefty 14 tons. It’ll be crowned with a Swarovski star next week and then dazzle with 50,000 lights at the end of the month . The tree has been a New York tradition for more than 70 years, beginning, less formally, in the Great Depression, when construction workers would line up next to a tree at Rockefeller Plaza to collect their holiday paychecks. It’s (almost) the most wonderful time of the year. New York Today is a weekday roundup that stays live from 6 a.m. till late morning. You can receive it via email . For updates throughout the day, like us on Facebook . What would you like to see here to start your day? Post a comment, email us at [email protected] , or reach us via Twitter using #NYToday . Follow the New York Today columnists, Alexandra Levine and Jonathan Wolfe , on Twitter. You can find the latest New York Today at nytoday.com . | Chelsea;NYC |
ny0182232 | [
"us",
"politics"
] | 2007/12/27 | In Their Own Words | Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton , Democrat of New York, speaking Wednesday in Mount Pleasant, Iowa. " This is the very first day and the first event of what we’re calling ‘Big Challenges, Real Solutions’ — that’s our theme, that’s what we believe this election is about. ... It’s not going to be easy, this job never is — it’s the hardest job in the world. But it’s a job that I believe is going to make such a difference again in the lives of Americans. On Jan. 20, 2009, someone will raise his or her hand to take the oath of office in front of our Capitol. And then that person will go to the Oval Office. And on the desk in the Oval Office will be a stack of problems. Ending the war in Iraq. Trying to figure out how to get the economy working again for middle-class and hard-working Americans. Trying to make good on our hope and goal of providing health insurance to the 47 million without it, and the millions more who have it — except their insurance company won’t give them the help they need when their doctors say they require it. ... Picking a president starts in eight days with the caucuses right here in Iowa. You have an awesome responsibility. The entire country, and even the world, will be watching. I want you to ask yourself, who will be the best president? Who, if something happened that none of us can predict now, would be there able to respond and act on behalf of our country immediately? Who can use experience and qualifications and contacts and ideas and plans to get us moving together again? If you will go and stand up for me, I will stand up for you every single day in the White House. ” | Clinton Hillary Rodham;Presidential Election of 2008 |
ny0016501 | [
"sports",
"cycling"
] | 2013/10/31 | Canadian Cyclist Admits ‘Short-Lived’ Drug Use | OTTAWA — Ryder Hesjedal, a Canadian cyclist who was a teammate of Lance Armstrong’s and won the Giro d’Italia last year , admitted Wednesday that he had used performance-enhancing drugs. The confession by Hesjedal, the only Canadian to win a major cycling tour, came after a book excerpt in a Danish newspaper said he and two other Canadian cyclists had sought doping instruction from the book’s writer, Michael Rasmussen, a Danish rider who has acknowledged using performance-enhancing drugs. In a brief statement issued by his team, Garmin-Sharp, Hesjedal offered few specifics about his drug use, indicating only that it had “happened more than 10 years ago” and had been “short-lived.” In the excerpt from the book, “Yellow Fever,” which was published in Politiken, a newspaper based in Copenhagen, Rasmussen said he had taught the three Canadians how to inject EPO, a hormone that stimulates the production of red blood cells, during a stay at his house in Italy in 2003. Rasmussen said the three, who were mountain biking at the time, had been looking to improve their results at the Olympics the following year. Hesjedal won a silver medal at the world mountain biking championships in 2003 and was on the verge of winning a gold medal in mountain biking at the 2004 Olympics when he was sidetracked by a flat tire. In 2004, he switched to road racing and joined Armstrong’s team. “I chose the wrong path,” Hesjedal said in his statement. “I sincerely apologize for my part in the dark past of the sport.” Hesjedal never tested positive. There has been speculation, however, that Hesjedal is among the many riders whose names were blacked out in the United States Anti-Doping Agency’s report on Armstrong’s use of performance-enhancing drugs. Travis Tygart, the agency’s chief executive, did not respond to questions about whether Hesjedal was included in the report. But he confirmed that Hesjedal, in a joint interview this spring with the agency and the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport, described his doping history. “Athletes like him, and others, who have voluntarily come in, taken accountability for their actions and have been fully truthful, are essential to securing a brighter future for the sport of cycling,” Tygart said in an email. The Canadian center said in a statement that because Hesjedal’s doping had occurred more than eight years ago, he “unfortunately” could not be punished, adding that it was unable to make his confession public. | Ryder Hesjedal;Doping;Lance Armstrong;Biking |
ny0260022 | [
"sports",
"baseball"
] | 2011/06/05 | A Leaner, Fitter Berkman Regains His Form in St. Louis | ST. LOUIS — Lance Berkman played in a World Series with Andy Pettitte. Last fall, they were teammates again in the playoffs. They are each from Texas, earnest and friendly, married with four children, borderline Hall of Famers who pepper conversation with words like heck and golly. Pettitte is retired now, and Berkman has kept playing — quite successfully, so far — with the St. Louis Cardinals . Coming off the worst season of his career, Berkman is hitting .329. “It wouldn’t surprise me if he hits .300 the next three or four years,” said Philadelphia’s Roy Oswalt, who was teammates with Berkman in Houston for a decade. “It was probably good to get to a different atmosphere like he did, and he likes it in St. Louis. But Lance has been a great player since we’ve been together, and I don’t expect any less.” Berkman, 35, started last week with the best on-base and slugging percentages in the National League, but then he went hitless in a four-game series with the San Francisco Giants. For all of his quietly consistent production over the years, he still chastises himself for being so streaky. So when Berkman talks these days with Pettitte, who is almost 39, he is happy for him, but also envious. Stress-free retirement sounds pretty good. “He could have made a lot of money this year, because the Yankees desperately needed him, but I’ve talked to him several times and he’s like, ‘I don’t miss it at all,’ ” Berkman said. “He loves being with his kids; he’s coaching his second son’s baseball team. “It’s definitely appealing. I mean, heck, who wouldn’t want to just kind of do whatever you want without having the pressure of having to perform on a nightly basis hanging over their head? But I also don’t want to give it up too soon, either.” Retirement was never an option for Berkman after last season, even though he ended it as a part-time player for the Yankees, used mostly against right-handers. For the season, he had the lowest batting average (.248), on-base percentage (.368) and slugging percentage (.413) of his 13-year career . Berkman explored a return to Houston, but the Astros passed. He spoke with the Oakland Athletics and the Chicago Cubs, but said his first choice was the Cardinals, the team he faced in two memorable playoff series. “Even though, at that time, I didn’t like the Cardinals at all, I certainly respected the way they play,” Berkman said. “Every Cardinals team I’ve ever played against, they’ve always played hard. Every night, it seems, they have an attitude, they have an edge.” The Cardinals recognized that if .368 is the worst on-base percentage of a player’s career, it might be wise to buy low. The problem was where to play him, with Albert Pujols entrenched at first base. Berkman had not played the outfield since 2007, and he needed to lose weight. Berkman has two nicknames, both exaggerations based on his physique. One came from the radio host Dan Patrick, who asked Berkman if he looked like any celebrities. Berkman said his mother once told him he looked like Elvis Presley, and Patrick said it must have been the fat version. Fat Elvis stuck. The other nickname came from another radio show. The hosts asked Berkman to give himself a nickname, and he picked, of all things, Big Puma . His reasoning? “I’m sleek and powerful and fast and secretive,” Berkman said, though besides powerful — he has 339 career home runs — he really is none of those things. “Heck, I love to joke around,” Berkman said. “But the reality is I’m a good athlete; I’m not like a bumbling guy. I’m not like a ballerina and I don’t do a lot of things gracefully. But you can’t play all three outfield positions and first base — and switch-hit — and not be a good athlete. I mean, you just can’t do it.” Berkman is jowly, but he is not exactly Bartolo Colon. He is 6 feet 1 inch, 220 pounds, down 15 or 20 from last season, said John Mozeliak, the Cardinals’ general manager. Mozeliak said the team monitored Berkman’s conditioning before offering him a one-year, $8 million deal, which he signed after passing a routine physical. “What was real interesting about him is he had lost significant weight and looked like he had converted it into muscle,” Mozeliak said. “His physical presence was much different. His work ethic this off-season indicates the kind of person he is. He really prepared for this year.” The implication is that Berkman was not prepared for last season, but Mozeliak said Berkman was simply able to do more because he was healthier to begin with. Berkman had surgery on his left knee last spring, an operation he now says he regrets. Even after surgery, the knee still struggled to bear weight when Berkman hit left-handed, causing him to drift in his swing, robbing him of power and making him late on fastballs. If he started his swing sooner, he was early on breaking balls. He compared his swing to a roundhouse punch: longer and lighter than a short, direct jab. Berkman hit .267 left-handed last season and .171 right-handed, his natural but weaker side. The splits this season are about as far apart, but much higher — .346 as a lefty, .275 as a righty. “One thing I like about him that I have a hard time with is he never overswings,” left fielder Matt Holliday said. “He just remains so relaxed, and his swing is always the same. If I don’t get any hits, I’m looking to change something — the more the better, the harder the better, I battle that. But he seems to have that under control.” Holliday has managed fine this season, with a .342 average that led the league when he was placed on the disabled list Thursday with a quadriceps injury. It is the latest blow for a team also playing without the star right-hander Adam Wainwright; his replacement, Kyle McClellan; and third baseman David Freese. Pujols is healthy, but he recently went a month between home runs, and his unresolved contract status hangs over the franchise. The staff ace, Chris Carpenter, is 1-5, and Ryan Franklin lost his closer’s role in April. In spite of it all, the Cardinals are leading the N.L. Central, largely because of Berkman, who fights aches and pains he never felt before. “I took a swing the other day and I was like, ‘Golly, my back,’ ” he said. “I mean, I didn’t hurt it, but I could just feel it, whereas you wouldn’t ordinarily even think about it. It’s harder to stay healthy, that’s for dang sure. Every time I move quick, I feel like I’m just about to pull a muscle.” Berkman is not complaining, just keeping things light, smiling through the aging process, happy to have a sturdier knee and his old, punchy swing. He has made all the money he will ever need, and produced a combined on-base and slugging percentage higher than that of Willie Mays and Hank Aaron. He is thrilled to be a Cardinal, and not too interested in many other spots. A year from now, he just might have more time to hang out with Pettitte. “I mean, who knows, there’s only a handful of places that I’d play,” Berkman said. “It’s going to have to be a good situation or, heck, I’ll take it to the house.” | Berkman Lance;Baseball;St Louis Cardinals |
ny0082424 | [
"sports",
"baseball"
] | 2015/10/18 | Dominating Cubs, Matt Harvey Shows He’s Far From His Limits | The moment Matt Harvey had been dreaming about all season came in the seventh inning Saturday. The Mets were clinging to a two-run lead, and the Chicago Cubs were threatening, and the Citi Field crowd was on its feet chanting his name. Harvey struck out Tommy La Stella swinging through a changeup and skipped off the mound, pumping his fist and letting out a tribal roar. The crowd erupted. Down the right-field line, Mr. Met gave out high-fives. This season had been a trying one for Harvey as he worked his way back from Tommy John surgery. He struggled with his command, fought general fatigue, dealt with his innings limit and then dealt with a controversy over it. At one point, he was villainized by the New York tabloids. His performance in Game 1 of the National League Championship Series, then, against the Chicago Cubs, seemingly validated the trouble he had gone through. Harvey outpitched the postseason veteran Jon Lester and set a tone for the start of the series, throwing seven and two-thirds strong innings, holding the Cubs’ young offense to two runs, and leading the Mets to 4-2 victory. Image Daniel Murphy had a solo home run in the first inning to open the Mets’ scoring. Credit Jason Szenes for The New York Times “I wanted this game bad,” Harvey said. Before the game, his teammates noticed that Harvey was relaxed and loose, goofing around in the clubhouse. Through four innings, Harvey had a perfect game and was throwing better perhaps than he had all season. He retired the first 12 batters on 44 pitches, striking out six of them. He had command of all four pitches. His curveball and slider had their usual bite. His changeup kept the Cubs off balance. His fastball even touched 97 miles per hour. The crowd chanted “Har-vey! Har-vey!” They seemed to have forgiven Harvey for the controversy that engulfed him in September, when Scott Boras, his agent, raised questions about how much Harvey should pitch down the stretch, in his first year back from serious elbow surgery. Harvey tried not picking sides, but some fans interpreted that as a sign that he put his health ahead of the team. Boras had a point, though. Once the postseason started, Harvey was entering uncharted territory. He had thrown 1941/3 innings entering this game, a career high, and he had looked gassed in his first playoff start, during five grueling innings against the Los Angeles Dodgers. As Harvey’s pitch count rose Saturday, he plunked Anthony Rizzo with an 0-2 fastball, spoiling his perfect game. Starlin Castro punched the next pitch to center field, and Juan Lagares misplayed it, allowing it to sail over his head and letting Rizzo score. The Cubs might have added another run, too, but Yoenis Cespedes threw out Castro, who tried to score from second on a single by Javier Baez. Harvey smacked his glove in anger as he walked off. If that weren’t enough, the leadoff batter in the sixth, Dexter Fowler, struck Harvey’s right triceps with a line drive. Harvey shrugged it off and retired the side in order, on just 10 pitches. He allowed two runners in the seventh, but he struck out Baez and La Stella to end the inning. In the dugout, Manager Terry Collins asked Harvey how he felt, and Harvey insisted that his arm and triceps felt fine and that he should pitch the eighth. “I talk to this guy every day,” Collins said. “I know exactly what he’s made of. I know exactly what he’s about, and he wants the baseball. He wants it.” Amid the raucous clubhouse celebration after they beat the Dodgers on Thursday, Harvey was doing a TV interview in the corner, saying that the work he had put in after the operation had been worth it to be in this moment, when he heard a commotion from across the room. Harvey craned his neck and looked over as a group of his teammates huddled around a man in a dress shirt who doused him with Champagne. Image The Mets’ Travis D’Arnaud rounded first after hitting a solo home run in the sixth against Jon Lester, giving the Mets a 3-1 lead. Credit Jason Szenes for The New York Times “Sandy,” Harvey said with a grin, turning back to the camera. All season, Mets General Manager Sandy Alderson had led the Mets’ handling of Harvey, directing when he needed rest, making sure he was within his innings limit, making peace with Boras. In short, Alderson had seen to it that Harvey would be pitching now. “Anybody that had any doubts about his toughness or his desire to go out there and pitch should take notice tonight,” Michael Cuddyer said of Harvey. “The guy’s a beast; he’s an animal. Tonight he proved it. He wanted to be out there, he wanted to compete.” Harvey ended with nine strikeouts. He might have finished the eighth inning, too, but Kyle Schwarber hit a solo home run, his fourth of the postseason. In their first six postseason games, the Mets’ four young starters have compiled a 2.92 E.R.A. and 49 strikeouts in 37 innings. With the way the starters are pitching, the Mets’ offense simply has to keep up, which it did Saturday, working Lester for eight hits and four runs. Daniel Murphy homered in the first inning, the Mets strung together three singles to score another run in the fifth, and Travis d’Arnaud crushed a solo home run off the Mets’ red Home Run apple in the sixth. “I’ve never seen that before,” said Murphy, who was first called up by the Mets in 2008. When Murphy had come to bat for the first time, the crowd gave him a standing ovation. Then Murphy promptly drove a Lester cutter off the facing of the second deck, sending the crowd into a frenzy. It was his fourth home run of the postseason. It also made him the first Met to hit home runs in three consecutive playoff games since 1969, when Donn Clendenon did that and was named the most valuable player of the World Series. Murphy paused and pumped his fists before he entered the dugout. He has never been known as a power hitter, which made his star turn all the more remarkable. He hit 14 home runs during the regular season, a career high. And his four postseason home runs had come off Clayton Kershaw, Zack Greinke and Lester — three elite starters. That Murphy was terrorizing the Cubs seemed almost eerie. The billy goat that was said to have contributed to the Cubs’ ongoing curse happened to be named Murphy. “A unique coincidence,” Murphy said. Fittingly, though, Murphy accounted for the final out Saturday, too, making a diving stop on a hard hit ground ball from La Stella. Murphy let out another roar and pumped his fists again as the Mets celebrated, a scene that has started to become familiar this October. | Baseball;Playoffs;National League;Matt Harvey;Chicago Cubs;Mets |
ny0172170 | [
"nyregion"
] | 2007/11/07 | Frank Viola, Leader in Sport of Racing Pigeons, Dies at 87 | Frank Viola, one of the grand old men of a grand old New York sport — pigeon racing — died on Oct. 3 at his home in the Bath Beach section of Brooklyn. He was 87. The cause was chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, his nephew Peter Viola said. Mr. Viola’s death was not formally announced until this week. Pigeon racing in the United States is at least a century old, but the sport really took hold in this country in the decades after World War II. Then, it was impossible to walk down the street in certain New York neighborhoods (among them Bensonhurst and Bath Beach) without one’s eyes being drawn upward by wheeling flocks of birds, which exploded into the air like fistfuls of thrown confetti. These were no ordinary street birds, but racers — homing pigeons whose care, feeding and lively under-the-table handicapping were the consuming pastime of a generation of New York men. Though racing pigeons are the same species as the common variety (both are rock doves), they are to New York’s street birds what Secretariat would be to a Central Park carriage horse. A true racing pigeon, which can fly up to 70 miles per hour, is a thoroughbred — all speed, muscle and pedigree. It can find its way back to its coop from nearly a thousand miles away. Prices for the best birds can run to thousands of dollars, even hundreds of thousands. For almost nine decades, Mr. Viola raised flocks of the finest pigeons he could buy, trucking them hundreds of miles from the city for the enormous thrill (and the less enormous monetary reward) of seeing them race home again. Throughout the city, on tenement rooftops and in tiny urban backyards, other men — immigrants or, like Mr. Viola, sons of immigrants — were doing the same. Mr. Viola, who kept as many as a hundred birds at a time, won his share of races. But he was best known for sponsoring what was considered one of the most prestigious races of the year, the Frank Viola Invitational, a 400-mile contest in which the birds are released in Ohio and fly back to New York. Begun in the early 1990s, the invitational is one of the few truly lucrative pigeon races in the country, with a total purse, put up by Mr. Viola, of more than $200,000. (Mr. Viola, who earned his living as a construction supervisor, did well in the stock market, his nephew said.) With his death, the race will no longer be held. Mr. Viola, whose gruff manner belied the tender care he lavished on his brood — he plied them with vitamins, electrolytes and specially prepared food — was considered an especially fine judge of birdflesh. He could spot one of his own pigeons in a whirling flock a block or two distant, his nephew said. Studying a prospective purchase, he examined its eyes with a jeweler’s loupe, looking for the telltale subtleties of color and form that are believed to indicate prowess. “He paid thousands of dollars for birds, but he would never sell a bird,” Peter Viola said in a telephone interview on Monday. “If you wanted one, and you came to the house and he liked you, he would give you the bird, with two stipulations: that you don’t sell it and you don’t kill it.” Frank Peter Viola was born in Brooklyn on Jan. 7, 1920, to a family that kept racing pigeons. (The family name is pronounced vee-OH-lah.) His mother died when he was an infant, and Frank left high school to work with his father, a plasterer from Calabria, Italy. When the United States entered World War II, Frank Viola enlisted in the Army. He served in five European campaigns and was wounded on the beach at Normandy, his nephew said. Mr. Viola’s pigeons also served: when war was declared, he donated them all to the military, which often used the birds to carry messages across enemy lines. Mr. Viola’s first wife, Mary, died in the late 1960s; his second marriage ended in divorce. Besides his nephew Peter, of Staten Island, he is survived by his third wife, Kathleen, and many other nieces and nephews. Today, pigeon racing is mostly an old man’s game. In the postwar years, there were scores of racing clubs in the greater New York area; perhaps a dozen survive. But even now, on certain fine Saturdays and Sundays, one can see men tautly poised on the city’s rooftops, scanning the sky for a few distant specks winging home. | Deaths (Obituaries);Viola Frank;Pigeons |
ny0278964 | [
"nyregion"
] | 2016/11/13 | World (or at Least Brooklyn) Stops for Lost Dog | Bailey, a 2½-year-old goldendoodle, lived a placid, largely uneventful life on a block of handsome brownstones in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, until 7:15 on the morning of Oct. 24. That was when her owner leashed her to a metal chair outside Henry’s Local, a coffee shop on Henry Street, and went in for an iced latte. Another customer entered the cafe. Bailey, startled, jumped to the side. The chair crashed to the sidewalk. The noise spooked Bailey further. She bolted — down Henry Street, dragging the clattering chair behind her, with her owner, Orna Le Pape, in pursuit, yelling: “Bailey, stop! No! No!” Bailey ran diagonally through the intersection at Carroll Street. Then the chair snagged on something. Bailey broke free, leaving the chair and her leash and ID tags behind. She turned right at the When in Rome hair salon onto her block, President Street. She ran right past her house, and she kept going. Ms. Le Pape, 47 and fit but no match for a sprinting dog, lost sight of Bailey at the next corner, but passers-by yelled directions: “She went that way!” Bailey went left and left again, toward the waterfront. When Ms. Le Pape got to Columbia Street, on the far side of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, no one was on the street. She screamed Bailey’s name. She guessed at a direction to run. She passed people. No one had seen her. Gone. Every week, dozens of dogs and cats go missing in New York City. Their distraught owners put up signs. Some turn up alive. Some do not. Over the next few days, Bailey somehow became a phenomenon, a cause, and in her rarefied corner of Brooklyn and beyond, a social media star. Now it was around 7:30 on a Monday, a school and work day, though Ms. Le Pape, a psychotherapist, had no patients scheduled until evening. She ran home, got her car and began an aimless, frantic drive in search of the dog. She called home and told her 14-year-old son to find photos of Bailey (a dog with a shaggy tan-cream coat, a chestnut beard and enormously long eyelashes) and start printing out fliers. She drove home, picked them up, walked to a nearby copy shop to make more and started posting them, crying all the while. Image Ms. Le Pape canceled sessions with her evening patients, citing a family emergency. All day, she wandered the tidy precincts known collectively as Brownstone Brooklyn. Up Columbia to Atlantic Avenue, down Hicks Street by the expressway, west to the factories and warehouses of Red Hook, swinging by the dog run beneath by the highway overpass. Everywhere Ms. Le Pape went, people seemed compelled to help. They asked for an extra flier so they could post it on Facebook, or make copies and tape them up elsewhere. They offered suggestions — call vets, call shelters, call animal rescue places, go to the police. “I went to the sanitation garage, down by the water, and the guy said, ‘I’m announcing this on roll call until they find her,’” Ms. Le Pape said. “I ran into absolute strangers who said they were going to church to pray for my dog.” Ms. Le Pape spared no expense. For $149.95 she registered with LostMyDoggie.com , which robo-called 1,250 of her neighbors, alerting them to look out for Bailey. She printed over a thousand fliers. Omar at the copy shop would not take her money. In the evening, Ms. Le Pape became fixated on Brooklyn Bridge Park, a mile and a half north of her house — a quiet place to hide for a dog who hates loud noises. From 11:30 p.m. to 1:30 a.m., Ms. Le Pape and her mother, who had come out from Manhattan to help, wandered the deserted park, calling the dog’s name. Nothing. Tuesday: Day 2. Ms. Le Pape started getting calls from people who said they had seen Bailey the day before. She was able to reconstruct some of Bailey’s route: 7:30 a.m. on Monday near the Brooklyn Bridge, a mile and a half north of her house. Then a mile and a half southeast of the bridge at Nevins and Degraw Streets. At 10:30 p.m. on Monday, Bailey had been spotted on Henry Street, five blocks from her house, but running the wrong way. That first day she covered at least 4 miles, probably considerably more. Ms. Le Pape went to the city pet shelters in East Harlem and East New York, Brooklyn. Nothing. More acts of kindness. Near the Fairway supermarket in Red Hook a man flagged her down. “He said, ‘I see you’re offering a reward on your sign. I have the winery that’s down here — tell people the reward is they can come for a tasting and a tour.’” It is not clear why the search for Bailey drew such an outpouring of support. Part of it may be that Carroll Gardens retains an intimate small-town feel. It certainly did not hurt that she was a particularly appealing dog. “I don’t know if the entire neighborhood would mobilize for an aggressive-looking dog,” Ms. Le Pape said. A cynic might wonder if class had anything to do with it. A friend of Ms. Le Pape’s had another theory. “She said, ‘At a time like this, when there’s so much turmoil going on around the election, here’s this story that everyone can latch on to and be on the same side. Everyone wants a lost dog found.’” In the late afternoon, Ms. Le Pape’s mother noticed signs for a beagle named Edie, who lived three blocks from Bailey and had also run off while leashed to a chair on the same day as Bailey. “I thought it would be a great idea to join forces,” she said. She called one of Edie’s owners, Olly Smith. “I can’t talk right now,” he said. “I think we’ve just found our little dog’s body.” Edie had been hit by a car on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Image Bailey, a goldendoodle, at home. Credit Demetrius Freeman for The New York Times At 4:30 a.m. on Wednesday, Ms. Le Pape was awakened by a dream: Bailey is downstairs, go downstairs. “I didn’t listen to the voice because it was crazy.” In the morning, Ms. Le Pape went on Facebook. Under “Trending” (a list based on her location, her own social network and broader algorithms), the top topic was Bailey. Outside, she found dog poop on the sidewalk in front of the house. It appeared to be a few hours old. It looked like Bailey’s. “I thought, ‘What if I pick it up and took it to the vet and had them analyze it?’” Ms. Le Pape recalled. “I was reaching for anything.” Ms. Le Pape canceled her Wednesday appointments to continue the search. “We heard you have to do at least a three-mile radius,” she said. In her part of Brooklyn, there are something like 1,500 blocks within a three-mile radius. At 10 p.m. on Wednesday evening, more than 60 hours after Bailey dashed off, Ms. Le Pape was riding a bike two neighborhoods from home, calling Bailey’s name, and her phone rang. “This woman is panting and puffing,” she recounted. “She says, ‘I’m following your dog, trying to stay with her.’” Bailey was on Sackett Street, just a few blocks from home. Ms. Le Pape flew down Columbia Street. She ran into the woman: “She said, ‘I was trying to call you again — we lost her.’” The phone rang again. Someone had just seen Bailey in Red Hook, on Van Brunt Street. And again: “I see your dog,” a man told her. Bailey was on Degraw Street, heading in the direction of home. Ms. Le Pape called her mother. “I just sort of screamed something to the effect of, ‘Everyone get downstairs!’” Ms. Le Pape’s older son opened the door. There was Bailey, at the top of the stoop. She was starving and dehydrated. She had lost eight pounds. Her paw was bleeding. But she was intact. Ms. Le Pape and her mother began to notify everyone who had been helping with the search, including Edie’s grieving owner, Olly Smith. “This is the most wonderful news,” he wrote back. “We’re so, so happy for you all.” Bailey has resumed her old life, with one notable change: the coffee place. “I still go there every day,” Ms. Le Pape said. “But without her.” | Dog;Social Media;Carroll Gardens Brooklyn |
ny0248243 | [
"us"
] | 2011/05/07 | Representative Gabrielle Giffords on Road to Recovery | Representative Gabrielle Giffords went out to dinner in Houston last Sunday with her husband, Capt. Mark E. Kelly , and two friends, a spokesman said Friday. The couple dined with Tilman and Paige Fertitta at The Grotto, which is owned by Mr. Fertitta’s company, Landry’s Restaurants. Mr. Fertitta flew Ms. Giffords, Democrat of Arizona, on his private plane from Tucson to Houston for rehabilitation two weeks after she was shot in the head on Jan. 8. Ms. Giffords was cleared by doctors to travel to Florida to watch her husband’s space shuttle launching, which was scrubbed last week. NASA said it would be rescheduled for no earlier than May 16. | Tucson Shooting (2011);Space Shuttle;Giffords Gabrielle;Kelly Mark E;Texas |
ny0275325 | [
"sports",
"olympics"
] | 2016/02/10 | Olympic Fencer, a Muslim, Settled on a ‘Sport Without Alteration’ | A trip to the Olympics, a meeting with the president and a potential gold medal all began at a stop sign in Maplewood, N.J. Ibtihaj Muhammad played a lot of sports growing up, including softball, tennis, track and volleyball. But because her Muslim faith mandated that her arms and legs be covered, her mother, Denise, regularly adjusted uniforms, adding stretch pants for track and sweatpants for volleyball. “My parents were on a mission to find a sport without alteration,” Muhammad said. When she was 13, and at that stop sign, her mother noticed through big windows a group of fencers working out in the cafeteria at Columbia High School. Denise had seen enough. “They’re totally covered,” she said. “You should try that.” Seventeen years later, Ibtihaj Muhammad is not only an accomplished fencer but also an Olympian, having clinched qualification for the Games in a meet in Athens this month. Last week, she met President Obama. Image Muhammad, right, practiced with her 24-year-old sister, Faizah Muhammad-Towfiek, at the Fencers Club in Manhattan. Credit Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times “My parents didn’t give us a choice about playing sports, just which sport to play,” said Muhammad, the middle of five children. Her mother “saw sports as a way of keeping an eye on us from 3 to 5,” she added. Muhammad ended up attending Columbia High School, and fought with the épée, one of the three swords used in Olympic competition. When the team graduated its saber stars, her coach encouraged her to switch, but she was reluctant. It turned out she was much better at saber. The swords differ in the blade and the guard where they are gripped. Sabers score with the edges of the blade rather than the tip, and the sword tends to be moved in more of a slashing motion. Saber competition looks closer to the fencing one would see in an old movie starring Errol Flynn . “It’s the closest representation of who I am,” Muhammad said. “I’m very aggressive, that’s who I am.” Saber matches often last only five minutes rather than the 15 you might see in épée. “The amount of time you have to process what’s going on is much shorter,” Muhammad said. Image From left, Muhammad, Dagmara Wozniak and Mariel Zagunis displayed their gold medals from the women’s saber team fencing competition at the Pan Am Games last July in Toronto. Credit Felipe Dana/Associated Press When she fought in épée, she said, “I had trouble staying awake.” Muhammad went on to fence at Duke, where she majored in international relations and African studies and had a minor in Arabic. She is believed to be the first American Olympian in any sport to compete while wearing a hijab, the head scarf that covers her hair. Wearing it beneath her fencing uniform “is not something I’ve ever really thought about,” she said. “I get asked about it a lot,” Muhammad added. “People ask Muslim women about it — not just athletes — all the time. Like, aren’t you hot? On a hot day, you’d still wear a shirt and pants. I would not leave the house without it.” Muhammad will fence in Rio de Janeiro in the individual and team saber events. (The team will be formally announced in April.) The fencing team events rotate in and out of the Olympics; there was no team event for women’s saber in 2012, a disappointment to the Americans, who had won the bronze medal in the event at the world championships in 2011 with Muhammad on the team. Olympic rules permitted a maximum of two Americans in the individual event, leaving Muhammad out. The Americans have continued to shine in women’s saber in the years since and have now won five consecutive team medals at the world championships, including a gold in 2014. Muhammad was a part of all five teams, giving her a great chance at an Olympic medal in Rio. The team is led by Mariel Zagunis, the most accomplished fencer in American history, winner of individual Olympic gold medals in 2004 and 2008 and still one of the best in the world. Russia and Ukraine are the main opposition. Muhammad’s accomplishments led her to be invited when Mr. Obama made his first visit as president to an American mosque last week in Baltimore. Muhammad was among the prominent American Muslims invited to a round-table discussion with the president before his speech. The subject was “the varying concerns that people have within the Muslim community, like Islamophobia, mass incarceration, anti-Muslim rhetoric,” Muhammad said. “I talked about my experiences as a minority member of Team U.S.A.” Muhammad is glad her mother noticed the fencers in the cafeteria that day. “On a Saturday, you’ll see 200 kids here learning to fence” under the auspices of the Peter Westbrook Foundation, she said at the Fencers Club in Midtown Manhattan. “Sports gives girls a sense of confidence that’s very hard to find in this society.” | Ibtihaj Muhammad;Fencing;Muslim Veiling;Muslim Americans;2016 Summer Olympics |
ny0019650 | [
"sports",
"baseball"
] | 2013/07/30 | Comeback by Mets Puts Halt to 2 Streaks | MIAMI — Baseball players may sometimes seem stone-faced and even-keeled, but they are not oblivious. That was how Mets Manager Terry Collins described it, anyway, when asked early Monday about his team’s inability to figure out the last-place Miami Marlins this season. The players knew very well, Collins said, that they were 3-8 against the Marlins before beginning a four-game series here Monday. They also knew very well that they should do better. On Monday the Mets displayed the doggedness needed to pull out a come-from-behind 6-5 victory at Marlins Park. It was a moral victory more than anything, a should-win game over the National League’s worst team. But it was satisfying all the same. It improved the Mets’ record to 47-56, dropped the Marlins to 40-64 and restored a positive vibe to the Mets, who had lost three straight over the weekend to the Washington Nationals. “We’ve lost three in a row, we’re not exactly a bundle of joy at the moment,” Collins said after the game. About the comeback, he added, “It brought us out of a huge hole, and I think it’s a great step moving forward.” The Mets turned the tables with a thrilling seventh-inning rally. Eric Young Jr. drilled a one-out double to left field, and he scored when Daniel Murphy poked a single, also to left. David Wright popped out to right field, but Murphy advanced to third on a stolen base and a wild pitch. Marlon Byrd rolled a hard grounder up the middle to drive in Murphy and tie the score at 5-5. “It seems like every year there’s one team that just has your number, doesn’t matter who you are,” Byrd said about the Marlins, who beat the Mets five consecutive times before Monday. Byrd helped ensure there would be a different outcome this time. Ike Davis came up next and sent a line drive to right field, setting Byrd loose around the bases. The relay throw home was on point, and so Byrd slid feet-first as the ball arrived to the plate, his hands above his head, pantomiming a safe call, before he even stopped moving. When the umpire did the same, the Mets were up, 6-5. “I honestly didn’t think he had a chance, but he was running his butt off, so that was awesome,” Davis said. Image Marlon Byrd scoring the decisive run under the Marlins’ Jeff Mathis in the seventh inning. Credit Wilfredo Lee/Associated Press He added about the victory: “It’s big, especially, here. Obviously the Nats kind of whupped us a little bit. But we’ve struggled winning here, and it seems like every game we play here comes down to the last hitter.” It was so Monday, too, as closer Bobby Parnell induced a hard groundout from Giancarlo Stanton to strand runners on the corners to seal the win. The comeback saved Jeremy Hefner from a third straight loss. Over an eight-start stretch beginning June 4, Hefner’s 1.76 earned run average topped the major leagues. But his season has taken an erratic turn. In his last two starts before Monday, he pitched a combined six and a third innings while giving up 13 earned runs. On Monday, Hefner issued a career-high five walks while pitching five and a third uneven innings. He was not particularly sharp, but neither was the Mets’ defense. Hefner gave up five runs, but two were unearned. Hefner was handed a 3-0 lead in the top of the third, after Murphy hit a two-run single and Wright added a run-scoring double down the line. Those were the only runs the Mets scored off Jacob Turner, the Marlins’ starter. Hefner did not allow a hit until the fourth inning, but the first one opened the floodgates. Stanton hit a leadoff double, and he scored one out later when Ed Lucas looped a triple to deep center field. Hefner hit Donovan Solano, but after he induced a pop-up, he got Turner to ground a ball to shortstop and seemed to have escaped the jam. But Omar Quintanilla, so sure-handed this season, bobbled the ball between his legs, and both runs scored, tying the game at 3-3. Two innings later, the Marlins built upon a leadoff walk and went ahead, 5-3, on Jeff Mathis’s two-run single. Hefner said he would need to continue to tweak his mechanics. “It was a grind today,” Hefner said. “I’m going to have games like that.” He added, “They’re much easier to take after a win, though.” INSIDE PITCH Jon Niese joined the Mets at Marlins Park on Monday afternoon to throw a bullpen session. Niese, who has been on the disabled list since June 21 with a partially torn rotator cuff, began a rehabilitation assignment last Saturday, pitching two innings. Niese suggested he would need only two more appearances before he could rejoin the Mets. His next start will come Thursday at Class A. | Baseball;Mets;Miami Marlins |
ny0260826 | [
"world",
"asia"
] | 2011/06/17 | After Inspections, China Moves Ahead With Nuclear Plans | BEIJING — After taking a step back in the wake of Japan’s nuclear disaster this year, energy-hungry China is moving cautiously ahead with its ambitious nuclear energy program. That is the message that Chinese officials have been giving to visiting environmental experts and local news media. According to a statement posted Tuesday on the Web site of the Ministry of Environmental Protection, the vice minister, Li Ganjie, told a visiting delegation from the United States that China had completed an inspection of the country’s 13 nuclear power plants. The statement implied that the plants had passed the test, which was announced in April after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant disaster in Japan. By October, Mr. Li said, the ministry will have tested 28 plants under construction. Until those inspections are completed, he said, China will not approve the plants for operation. The decision to move forward was not a surprise. With China’s energy demand estimated to be rising by 12 percent a year, the country’s leaders have declared nuclear power to be an important part of China’s energy future. The government wants to have 100 plants operational by 2020. “The fundamental issue for China is their demand for power is exceptional,” said James Maguire, a regional managing director of power construction at Aon Risk Solutions in Hong Kong. “Nuclear is an important part of the mix.” Indeed, even during the Japanese crisis, China and other growing countries, like India, declared that they were moving ahead with their nuclear plans. Although China has shown an impressive ability to develop new nuclear technologies , it still faces many challenges that its review may have ignored, said Thomas B. Cochran , a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington. Some Chinese sites are near densely populated areas or the coast, where they may be susceptible to the sort of tsunami that hit the Japanese plant in March. “In China’s case, they’ve got some serious problems to deal with, and they’re probably not going to deal with them,” Mr. Cochran said. Less problematic, he said, is the issue of what to do with the used nuclear fuel. China stores its fuel at the sites of nuclear plants, as do most countries. But unlike Iran, another country with nuclear plants, China already has nuclear weapons, so few analysts are worried that it may reprocess the fuel and create weapons-grade plutonium, he said. | China;Nuclear Energy |
ny0054480 | [
"science"
] | 2014/07/01 | A Solar Show With Mixed Reviews | Solar maximum is now. Indeed, the maximum — the peak of the 11-year sunspot cycle, when the sun erupts with solar flares and energetic bursts of electrons and protons — may have already passed. As solar maximums go, this has been a tepid one, particularly when measured against some predictions that it would be ferocious; it has been called a “minimax.” But neither does it rival a quiet period in the second half of the 1600s that coincided with the onset of the Little Ice Age, a prolonged chill in Europe. “This cycle is not abnormally small,” said W. Dean Pesnell , the project scientist for NASA’s orbiting Solar Dynamics Observatory . Of the 24 solar cycles since the mid-1750s when people began keeping detailed counts of sunspots, “it looks like fifth smallest,” he continued. “It might be the fourth. It might be the sixth. It’s not going to be at the bottom.” The sun erupted with several giant solar flares last month but has been mostly quiet the past two weeks. “I think the general consensus is that we’ve passed the peak,” said C. Alex Young , a solar astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. But he added that some of the biggest solar storms in history occurred on the downward side of the solar cycle, and even a weak cycle can generate ferocious outbursts. “I think the expectation right now is we might see another burst of this activity five or six months from now,” Dr. Young said. “We might still have some big events.” Perhaps more than anything else, the current maximum has taught solar scientists that they have a lot more to learn about the sun. In 2006, at the end of the previous solar cycle, Mausumi Dikpati , a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., undertook an ambitious endeavor — a computer model using the basic physics of the sun to forecast what would happen next. Her model made two main predictions: The cycle would start slowly, and it would be a big one, one-third to one-half stronger than the last one. Her first prediction came to pass. The lull stretched for four more years , leading to some speculation that the sun was on the cusp of another Maunder Minimum, the sunspotless era of the 1600s. (Although the Maunder Minimum coincided with the Little Ice Age, it is not known whether the intensity of a sunspot cycle could influence the earth’s climate. The difference in the amount of the earth-warming radiation coming from the sun between solar minimum and solar maximum is minuscule.) But her second prediction was wrong. In part, that was because the model did not capture the sun’s split personality this time around. The sunspots peaked first in the sun’s northern hemisphere, in 2011, and then faded away, leading to an intermission when the sun was almost blank at what was supposed to be maximum. Solar physicists expected that the southern hemisphere would belatedly perk up, and last fall it did, producing a second peak that was larger than the first. “This was very unusual,” Dr. Dikpati said. “If they would have overlapped, it would have been a strong cycle.” Dr. Dikpati and Dr. Pesnell were members of a panel that was to come up with a consensus prediction in 2007 but could not. The panel instead split, some agreeing with Dr. Dikpati on a strong maximum. Others, including Dr. Pesnell, expected a weak maximum, based on other indicators like the strength of the magnetic fields near the poles at solar minimum. “That one worked pretty well,” Dr. Pesnell said. “But now we’ll get in a room and harrumph for a while.” They will have more data to think about. Convection within the sun moves gases from the equator toward the poles, and many solar scientists think the speed of that flow helps determine the strength of the sunspot cycle. Some argue that a faster flow induces stronger magnetic fields and more sunspots. Others argue the reverse, that a faster flow inhibits sunspots. Not only do the scientists disagree on the theory, but at present they do not even agree how fast the flow is moving, with different techniques measuring different speeds, Dr. Pesnell said. “We’re getting better, and we argue,” he said. “That’s how we do science.” | Sun;NASA;Computers and the Internet;Tech Industry |
ny0029430 | [
"world",
"asia"
] | 2013/06/05 | Putin Discusses Economist Sergei M. Guriev’s Flight From Russia | MOSCOW — President Vladimir V. Putin made his first comments about a top economist’s flight from Russia , saying he had exaggerated the pressure put on him by investigators and had actually left for family reasons. The economist, Sergei M. Guriev, is a high-profile liberal intellectual who worked closely with the government of Mr. Putin’s predecessor, Dmitri A. Medvedev. Mr. Guriev announced last week that he had left Russia because he feared that the authorities could seize his passport or even detain him. He had been questioned by state investigators in a conflict-of-interest case stemming from a report that harshly criticized the prosecution of the oil tycoon Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky. In recent months, Mr. Guriev has been a frequent and vocal critic of Kremlin policy, and he announced last May that he had donated money to the opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny, a highly unusual step for someone so well connected in Russia’s elite circles. But Mr. Putin dismissed Mr. Guriev’s account at a news conference on Tuesday, saying he was free to return to Russia at any time. “His wife lives and works in Paris,” Mr. Putin said, answering questions after the European Union-Russia summit meeting in Yekaterinburg. “No one was threatening him. He constantly goes to see her. If he wants to come back, let him come back.” Mr. Putin went on to say that he was not aware of any grounds for detaining or imprisoning Mr. Guriev, who stepped down as rector of the New Economic School but remains on the board of Russia’s largest consumer bank. The bank’s shareholders re-elected him last week, and the bank’s chairman said he could participate in board meetings via teleconference. Mr. Putin said that “if he did not violate anything, then 100 percent nothing threatens him — 100 percent.” Asked if he could guarantee Mr. Guriev’s safety if he returned, Mr. Putin answered: “What, is there is some basis for imprisoning him? I don’t know anything about this. I just heard this name recently, and I don’t know if he has some sins before the law.” Mr. Guriev said he was questioned three times by investigators and was particularly unsettled by a warrant in late April demanding five years’ worth of personal and professional e-mails, as well as searches of his home and office. He said he had been troubled by several remarks an investigator made during an informal exchange: once, he was told that his fate was better than that of the Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov; at other points, the investigator asked if he was considering leaving Russia and if he had an alibi. Mr. Guriev said on Tuesday that Mr. Putin’s comments were not persuasive, adding that Mr. Putin had made similar remarks in private settings and that “my problems continued and even intensified.” “I also heard that he said he would not interfere in the work of the Investigative Committee,” Mr. Guriev said by e-mail. “I respect this choice. But given what I have seen, I would rather be in a different country.” | Russia;Sergei M Guriev;Economy;Vladimir Putin |
ny0045341 | [
"world",
"asia"
] | 2014/02/26 | Sri Lanka Denounces Push to Open War Inquiry | NEW DELHI — Sri Lanka’s government on Tuesday forcefully rejected a call for an international war crimes investigation into the country’s bloody civil war, adding to tensions with the United Nations’ human rights body. In its official response to a highly critical report released on Monday by the United Nations’ high commissioner for human rights, Navi Pillay, the government said Ms. Pillay’s call for an independent international investigation “reflects the preconceived, politicized and prejudicial agenda which she has relentlessly pursued with regard to Sri Lanka.” The government dismissed accusations that its vast military presence in the northern part of the country was responsible for a surge in sexual violence against women; that the authorities had failed to return huge swaths of land to Tamil civilians, who are an ethnic minority; and that the government had undermined the independence of Sri Lanka’s judiciary. It also said the reason it had not prosecuted anyone for massacres in which security forces are known to have taken part was that proof had been difficult to obtain. Officials also rejected claims that the government had curtailed press freedoms, pointing to the “spread of social media networks and online news outlets.” Sri Lanka has hired a Chinese company to block access to many online news outlets. The government warned in its response that the “international network of the L.T.T.E. still remains active,” referring to a defeated rebel group, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. Nearly five years have passed since the Sri Lankan government ended a 30-year civil war in which an estimated 40,000 people died in the war’s final phase, many of them civilians. A growing number of videos and photographs that appear to show summary executions have been leaked, and witnesses have described brutal rights violations. When Ms. Pillay visited Sri Lanka in August and criticized the country’s “increasingly authoritarian direction,” the government called her biased. In the report released Monday, her office criticized the government’s failure to establish independent mechanisms to investigate credible allegations that, if proved, “would amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.” The report listed several unresolved “emblematic cases,” including the killing in 2006 of five students in the town of Trincomalee, the deaths later that year of 17 aid workers and the capture and killing in 2009 of the 12-year-old son of the Tamil Tigers’ leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran. The United Nations Human Rights Council has already passed two resolutions pressing the Sri Lankan government to investigate war crimes, and it is expected next month to consider a far tougher resolution that would establish an independent international investigation. Fred Carver of the Sri Lanka Campaign for Peace and Justice, a global organization, said on Tuesday that the Sri Lankan government was “not interested in constructive engagement at all,” and that its growing hostility toward international human rights organizations was isolating it. Amnesty International supported Ms. Pillay’s call for an independent investigation. “It’s utterly shameful that five years after Sri Lanka’s armed conflict ended, the victims and family members have yet to see justice,” Polly Truscott, the organization’s deputy Asia-Pacific director, said in an emailed statement. Sri Lanka’s national languages minister, Vasudeva Nanayakkara, said on Sunday that the United States was using resolutions in the human rights body “to force regime change.” The dispute may complicate Commonwealth Day celebrations in London early next month, which include a reception hosted by Queen Elizabeth II. President Mahinda Rajapaksa is chairman of the Commonwealth of Nations, but Britain has supported calls for an international war crimes investigation. A spokesman for Mr. Rajapaksa said campaign commitments might prevent him from attending. Sri Lanka will hold elections in two crucial provinces on March 29, one day after the United Nations council is expected to consider its latest resolution regarding the country. The resolution may help Mr. Rajapaksa consolidate support among Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese majority, which overwhelmingly supported his government’s efforts to end the civil war and view the international criticism as unfair. | Sri Lanka;Human Rights;Navi Pillay;UN |
ny0238455 | [
"us",
"politics"
] | 2010/06/22 | Court Affirms Ban on Aiding Groups Tied to Terror | WASHINGTON — In a case pitting free speech against national security, the Supreme Court on Monday upheld a federal law that makes it a crime to provide “material support” to foreign terrorist organizations, even if the help takes the form of training for peacefully resolving conflicts. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for the majority in the 6-to-3 decision, said the law’s prohibition of providing some types of intangible assistance to groups the State Department says engage in terrorism did not violate the First Amendment. The decision was the court’s first ruling on the free speech and associations rights of Americans in the context of terrorism since the Sept. 11 attacks. The law has been an important tool for prosecutors: Since 2001, the government says, it has charged about 150 defendants for violating the material-support provision, obtaining about 75 convictions. The court’s majority said deference to the other branches was called for, given the threat posed by terrorism. “At bottom,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote, “plaintiffs simply disagree with the considered judgment of Congress and the executive that providing material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization — even seemingly benign support — bolsters the terrorist activities of that organization.” Justices John Paul Stevens, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Anthony M. Kennedy and Samuel A. Alito Jr. joined the majority decision. The material-support law bars not only contributions of cash, weapons and other tangible aid but also “training,” “personnel” “service” and “expert advice or assistance.” Justice Stephen G. Breyer took the unusual step of summarizing his dissent from the bench. He said the majority had drawn a false analogy between the two kinds of assistance. “Money given for a charitable purpose might free up other money used to buy arms,” Justice Breyer said from the bench. But the same cannot be said, he continued, “where teaching human rights law is involved.” The decision was a victory for Solicitor General Elena Kagan, who argued the case in February and whose confirmation hearings for a seat on the court are scheduled to start next week. But Chief Justice Roberts said the government had advanced a position that was too extreme and did not take adequate account of the free-speech interests at stake. “The government is wrong,” the chief justice wrote, “that the only thing actually at issue in this litigation is conduct” and not speech protected by the First Amendment. But he went on to say that the government’s interest in combating terrorism was enough to overcome that protection. In his written dissent, which was joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor, Justice Breyer said the majority had been too credulous in accepting the government’s argument that national security concerns required restrictions on the challengers’ speech and had “failed to insist upon specific evidence, rather than general assertion.” The law was challenged by, among others, Ralph D. Fertig, a civil rights activist who has said he wanted to help the Kurdistan Workers’ Party in Turkey find peaceful ways to achieve its goals. On Monday, Mr. Fertig said the decision, which effectively ended 12 years of litigation, was a grave disappointment. “This is a very dark day in the history of the human rights struggle to assist groups overseas that are being oppressed,” he said. The other plaintiffs were a doctor and six domestic organizations. Some of them said they had sought to help the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, a group that seeks to create an independent Tamil state in Sri Lanka. Both groups, along with Hamas , Hezbollah , the Khmer Rouge and some 30 others, were designated as terrorist organizations by the State Department. The United States says the Kurdish group, sometimes called the P.K.K., has engaged in widespread terrorist activities, including bombings and kidnappings. The Tamil group, the government said, was responsible for a 1996 bombing that killed 100 people and injured more than 1,400. The plaintiffs said they had sought to aid only the two groups’ nonviolent activities. For instance, they said, they wanted to offer training in how to use international law to resolve disputes peacefully and “how to petition various representative bodies such as the United Nations for relief.” That sort of help, they said, was speech protected by the First Amendment. David D. Cole, a lawyer for the plaintiffs with the Center for Constitutional Rights, said the court’s rejection of that argument was disappointing. “This decision basically says the First Amendment allows making peacemaking and human rights advocacy a crime,” Mr. Cole said. The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, ruled in 2007 that bans on training, service and some kinds of expert advice were unconstitutionally vague. But it upheld the bans on personnel and expert advice derived from scientific or technical knowledge. All nine justices said the appeals court was wrong to strike down the law as too vague. They differed, though, about the role the First Amendment had to play in analyzing the law and whether it should be read to apply only where a defendant intended to support a designated group’s terrorist activities. Chief Justice Roberts emphasized what he said was the limited reach of the decision, which applies only to activities coordinated with the designated groups. Other sorts of speech remain protected, he said. “Plaintiffs may say anything they wish on any topic,” he wrote. “They may speak and write freely about” the Kurdish and Tamil groups, “the governments of Turkey and Sri Lanka, human rights and international law.” Indeed, the chief justice added, the plaintiffs are free to become members of the two groups. What they cannot do is make a contribution to a foreign terrorist organization, even if that contribution takes the form of speech. “Such support,” he wrote, “frees up other resources within the organization that may be put to violent ends,” “helps lend legitimacy to foreign terrorist groups” and strains “the United States’ relationships with its allies.” Justice Breyer, in dissent, said the activities at issue “involve the communication and advocacy of political ideas and lawful means of achieving political ends.” It is elementary, he went on, that “this speech and association for political purposes is the kind of activity to which the First Amendment ordinarily offers its strongest protection.” The majority opinion said it expressed no view about whether Congress could bar assistance to domestic groups. But Justice Breyer said he feared that the decision in the case, Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, No. 08-1498, had implications for all sorts of speech said to threaten national security. The majority’s logic, he said, amounts to “a rule of law that, contrary to the Constitution’s text and First Amendment precedent, would automatically forbid the teaching of any subject in a case where national security interests conflict with the First Amendment.” | material support;Terrorism;Supreme Court;Decisions and Verdicts;Fertig Ralph D;First Amendment (US Constitution) |
ny0018332 | [
"business"
] | 2013/07/27 | G.M. Dismisses Executives as India Begins Investigating Recall of Vehicles | General Motors has forced out several executives and managers, including the head of its global engine operations, as the company’s recall of vehicles in India raises questions about improper emissions tests. G.M. said on Friday that it had dismissed the employees for violating unspecified company policies. One of the executives was Sam Winegarden, a vice president in charge of engine programs, who retired this week after 44 years with G.M., the nation’s largest automaker. The management shake-up came after the Indian government began an investigation into the recall this week of 114,000 Chevrolet Tavera utility vehicles sold by G.M. in India. Indian news reports said the government was investigating whether G.M. had improperly manipulated the weight and engine performance in the Tavera during emissions testing and certification. A G.M. spokesman, Greg Martin, declined to say whether the employees had been forced to leave because of the government investigation. “General Motors’ investigation into our recall of the Chevrolet Tavera, which is built and sold exclusively in India, identified violations of company policy,” G.M. said in a statement. “G.M. subsequently dismissed several employees.” One person briefed on the dismissals, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said at least 10 employees, mostly in India, were involved. The highest-ranking employee was Mr. Winegarden, who is based in the United States and is the top engineer for the company’s engine operations worldwide. The company, which said it was voluntarily recalling the vehicles, acknowledged that the Indian government was aware of “an emissions issue” with the Tavera, one of G.M.’s mainstream models in the country. Image Sam Winegarden, a vice president, retired this week after 44 years with G.M., which said he had violated company policies. Credit Jeffrey Sauger for General Motors “G.M. India informed Indian government authorities of an emissions issue involving the Tavera BS3 meeting certain specifications on July 19,” the company said. The company stopped production of the Tavera in India this month. It said it would make changes to vehicles built as far back as 2005 and perform the required engineering validation. It gave no timetable for notifying customers and doing the work. The recall is a setback for G.M.’s growth plans in India, particularly if it damages the reputation of the American automaker. “Our customers are at the center of everything we do,” said Lowell Paddock, head of G.M. India, when he announced the recall. On Thursday, G.M. reported that its net income in the second quarter dropped 19 percent, partly because of smaller-than-expected profits in Asia. G.M.’s chief financial officer, Daniel Ammann, said on Thursday that India was among the international markets where G.M. struggled during the quarter. The decision to oust executives is in keeping with a zero-tolerance policy about violation of corporate ethics led by G.M.’s chief executive, Daniel F. Akerson. “We take these matters very seriously and hold our leaders and employees to high standards,” the company said. “When those standards are not met, we will take the appropriate action to hold employees accountable.” Last year, Joel Ewanick, G.M.’s chief marketing officer, was forced to resign after questions were raised inside the company about his handling of a sponsorship deal with a British soccer team. | Cars;India;GM;Recalls and Bans;Chevrolet Division of General Motors;Greenhouse gas |
ny0274461 | [
"us"
] | 2016/02/20 | Florida: Applications to NASA Are Sky High | NASA announced Friday it received a record number of applicants — some 18,300 — for its next astronaut class. That is more than double the record of 8,000 for the first space shuttle class in 1978. This time, NASA hit social media hard to promote the openings. The odds of getting picked are small; eight to 14 Americans will be chosen. NASA expects it will take a year and a half to whittle down the list. Candidates need to be United States citizens with a bachelor’s degree in science, math or engineering. Like the eight-member class of 2013, the future astronauts will train to fly to the International Space Station on capsules under development by SpaceX and Boeing, as well as on NASA’s Orion spacecraft intended for deep-space exploration. The application period closed Thursday. | NASA;Space |
ny0116363 | [
"business",
"global"
] | 2012/10/18 | Greek Negotiations Hit Snags, From Inside and Out | ATHENS — The latest make-or-break moment for Greece has turned into yet another wait-and-see. The Greek government had hoped to sew up a €13.5 billion, or about $17.7 billion, austerity budget package this week, before a summit meeting of European officials begins Thursday in Brussels. There, leaders were prepared to consider granting Athens more time to fix its finances and cement assurances that Greece could and should stay in the euro currency union. Instead, the Greek prime minister, Antonis Samaras, will show up at the gathering with something short of an agreement. His budget-crunching negotiations have hit new snags within his fragile coalition government and with the so-called troika of international lenders over the scope and details of the austerity plan. Until there is an agreement, the troika is unlikely to unlock a €31.5 billion loan tranche that debt-wracked Greece needs to keep from defaulting by the end of next month. Without an austerity blueprint, what was supposed to be a fast-track European effort this week to support Greece seems to have slowed, even as European leaders are distracted by the expansion of the euro crisis to Spain. For Greece, the delay means European officials may have to hold an extraordinary meeting sometime in November, perhaps not before the U.S. presidential election on Nov. 6, to debate further relief for Greece. Whatever happens in Brussels, Greece is bracing for another nationwide strike Thursday, when employees in the public and private sectors plan to halt work to protest the prospect of further salary and pension cuts. Trains from the airport to central Athens are not expected to run; air traffic controllers are to walk off the job from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., disrupting flights. A strike two weeks ago began peacefully but was marred by small-scale clashes in Athens between protestors and the police. The Greek delay has sent European Union leaders scrambling to cast things in a positive light, heading into the Thursday-Friday summit meeting. An E.U. diplomat said Wednesday that leaders might issue a statement to encourage Greece and the troika “to close the deal.” But another official, who spoke anonymously because talks were continuing, added that any statement might serve to play down the slow pace of the negotiations with Athens, while also lending support for Mr. Samaras, whom many E.U. leaders consider the last best hope for turning Greece around. Indeed, the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, yet again underscored her desire to keep Greece in the euro, saying Tuesday night in Panama that Greece should remain. “But the work on that is not complete,” Ms. Merkel said, “and there is still a lot that must be done in the coming days and next few weeks.” While an agreement, like so many others, is expected to come down to the wire, as Europe’s leaders convene for what was supposed to be a debate over further integrating the European Union, at least part of the discussion could nonetheless be distracted by questions about whether Greece will be able to sustain its place within the euro zone. Ms. Merkel has recently had to admonish several times officials from North European countries, and from within Germany, to stop publicly casting doubt on Greece’s place within the union. The protests in Greece are expected to gain steam in the coming months — as politicians in Mr. Samaras’s fragile three-party governing coalition are acutely aware. The Greek leaders have been fighting demands by the troika — the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank and the European Commission — for new, steep salary cuts and tax increases that could risk deepening a five-year recession or adding to Greece’s staggering 25 percent unemployment rate. The negotiations have stumbled before, including a few weeks ago when tensions ran so high that the troika left Athens temporarily. On Tuesday night they once again appeared to have hit a wall. Two influential members of Mr. Samaras’s coalition warned they would not vote for troika demands that Greece abolish an automatic 9 percent wage increase that is given every three years to private-sector workers, among other changes to labor laws. In an apparent bid to soothe nerves, Poul Thomsen, who heads the I.M.F.’s negotiations with Greece, declared in a rare public statement late Tuesday that the parties had reached an agreement on “most policy issues.” And the troika issued a statement from Brussels Wednesday declaring that the way had been paved for “the completion of the review,” which they hoped would lead to an agreement “over the coming days.” Still, the negotiating tensions in Athens this week underscore the realpolitik that has frustrated Greece’s lenders — and that has characterized Greece’s efforts at reform ever since Athens helped ignite Europe’s debt crisis three years ago, when it admitted to falsifying its financial accounts to gain euro membership. Since then, lenders have pressed Greece time and again to whittle its outsized government and streamline impediments in the private sector so the country can operate more like a modern, well-functioning business, restoring growth and jobs. But the three governments that have run Greece in the past three years have been loath to fire any of the nation’s 700,000 public workers, an influential voting bloc. And now, with unemployment at 25 percent, it is considered anathema to accede to the troika’s demands to fire at least 15,000 government employees. Although those jobless would get unemployment benefits for about a year, they would face almost impossible odds against being rehired — a situation that politicians fear would lead to further unrest. As it is, anger over austerity and government corruption have fueled a rise in the popularity of extreme leftist and rightist parties in Greece. Those groups are biding their time in the event that Mr. Samaras’s government falls, when they would hope to sweep into a power vacuum. For the rest of Europe, yet another change of government would raise doubts anew over Greece’s ability to stay in the euro union. Greek officials also don’t want to cut automatic private-sector wage increases that had been negotiated under a centrally bargained national collective labor contract, for fear of stoking social unrest. Labor costs here have already fallen by an average of 15 percent in the past three years, a trend that economists argue is necessary to make Greece competitive again. And yet, investors have still not been willing to venture back into Greece. In fact, multinational companies continue to leave. Last week, Coca-Cola Hellenic, which constitutes more than 16 percent of the Athens Stock Exchange, said it was moving its headquarters to Switzerland and shifting its listed shares to London. During the summer, Moody’s investor service had downgraded the company’s Greek operations, citing concerns about a possible Greek exit from the euro; the downgrade lifted the company’s borrowing costs. And Credit Agricole, one of France’s largest banks, beat a retreat from Greece this week by selling its Emporiki Bank unit here at the symbolic fire sale price of €1. Investors say that despite pledges by Mr. Samaras to enhance Greece’s cumbersome business environment, red tape and corruption linger, creating uncertainty and high costs that are deterrants to starting new businesses. Structural reforms meant to improve the functioning of the economy will take years to bear fruit. Greek banks are barely lending into the economy, helping to stoke the demise of tens of thousands of small and medium-sized businesses. The banks are supposed to get 85 percent of the forthcoming €31.5 billion loan tranche to replenish depleted capital, but whether they will then lend easily again is an open question. Meanwhile, there is the lingering question of how Greece can sustain itself financially. Mr. Samaras will try to persuade his European partners in Brussels to give Greece a total of four years to implement the €13.5 billion austerity package, once it comes together. The thinking: spreading out the pain will allow the economy, which is now suffering a 6.4 percent contraction, to move toward a slow recovery, bringing more money into the state’s coffers. But efforts by Mr. Samaras to persuade lenders to help out by reducing the amount of money the country owes them seem to be going nowhere. The European Central Bank, for instance, is resisting pleas that it reduce the interest payments that Greece must make on Greek government bonds already held by the E.C.B. “If you were to reduce Greece’s debt it would give Greece more time to implement long term reforms,” Megan Greene, director of economic research on Western Europe at Roubini Global Economics, said. “The problem is that more time means more money, and I’m not sure where money is going to come from.” Niki Kitsantonis contributed reporting. James Kanter contributed reporting from Brussels. | Greece;European Sovereign Debt Crisis (2010- );European Union;Budgets and Budgeting |
ny0201058 | [
"nyregion"
] | 2009/09/21 | Hotel Worker Is Charged With Strangling a Woman | A hotel worker was charged on Sunday with killing a 48-year-old woman who was found strangled, with a bread knife plunged into her neck, at a condominium and hotel complex on Central Park South, the police said. The suspect, Derrick W. Praileau, 29, of 1521 White Plains Road, in the Bronx, was taken to Manhattan Criminal Court on Sunday afternoon and later charged with second-degree murder in the death of the woman, Andree Bejjani, whose body was found on Saturday in a 10th-floor apartment at the Jumeirah Essex House , where Mr. Praileau worked. He was ordered held without bail. Law enforcement officials said that in a confession recorded on video, Mr. Praileau placed himself at the scene of the crime early Saturday, having gained access to the apartment Ms. Bejjani was staying in by using several key cards, including one from a fellow employee. The police said they were able to track the cards’ use to determine that Mr. Praileau had entered the apartment about 6 a.m. He was seen by surveillance cameras dragging linens off an elevator about 8 a.m., they said. On Saturday afternoon, a maid found the body of Ms. Bejjani, naked from the waist down, her nightgown pushed up, with a rope around her neck and the knife in her neck, the police said. Law enforcement officials said investigators were looking into the possibility that there was a sexual motive in the killing. Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said there did not appear to have been any “previous relationship” between the two. Ellen Borakove, a spokeswoman for the medical examiner, said that the cause of death was strangulation. Ms. Bejjani, who worked in real estate investment, had lived in Dubai, the police said. She had been staying at the apartment, which she was leasing, since sometime in August, they said. Mr. Praileau worked in the hotel’s housekeeping department, the police said. A statement from the hotel said he was a long-term employee. The Essex House, a 45-story Art Deco building, was completed in 1931. In 2005, Sheik Muhammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, now the ruler of Dubai, paid about $440 million for the building, which includes condominiums and hotel rooms. “This incident occurred in one of the private condominiums at the Essex House complex,” said a statement from the hotel. “Our sincere condolences go out to the victim’s family, and we have offered our full support during this difficult time.” Sean Johnson, 32, a construction worker who lives across the hall from Mr. Praileau in the Parkchester section of the Bronx, said that Mr. Praileau lived with his wife and two children in the four-story brick apartment building. “They’re quiet,” Mr. Johnson said. “They barely ever do anything. He rarely comes outside unless he’s going to work or to the store.” He said Mr. Praileau kept to himself. “I say ‘hi’ every day,” Mr. Johnson said. “I shake his hand. You don’t ever know who is living next to you.” He said he saw detectives escort Mr. Praileau out of the building on Saturday. “He just walked with his head down and walked across the street,” Mr. Johnson said. | Murders and Attempted Murders;Manhattan (NYC) |
ny0135949 | [
"world",
"asia"
] | 2008/04/24 | Lawyer Scolds Cambodia Tribunal Judges | PHNOM PENH, Cambodia (AP) — Cambodia’s genocide tribunal abruptly adjourned a pretrial hearing for a Khmer Rouge leader on Wednesday after his lawyer, who is French, erupted at the judges because thousands of pages of documents had not been translated into French. The judges later said they would issue a warning to the lawyer, Jacques Vergès , for courtroom conduct that caused the hearing’s postponement. Mr. Vergès, 83, who is representing Khieu Samphan, the former Khmer Rouge president, in his appeal against pretrial detention, has earned notoriety with a client list that has included the Nazi Gestapo officer Klaus Barbie, the Venezuelan terrorist Carlos the Jackal and Slobodan Milosevic, the former Yugoslav president. The tribunal has charged Mr. Khieu Samphan with crimes against humanity and war crimes committed when the Communist Khmer Rouge held power from 1975 to 1979. About 1.7 million people died from starvation, disease, overwork and execution as a result of the group’s policies in trying to build a classless society. Mr. Khieu Samphan, 76, has repeatedly denied responsibility for any atrocities. Mr. Vergès stormed out of Wednesday’s closed-door hearing, telling reporters that judges had asked Mr. Khieu Samphan to find a new lawyer. “French is an official language of the tribunal,” he told the reporters, in French. “There is not one page of the case file against Mr. Khieu Samphan translated into French.” He added, “I should be capable of knowing what my client is blamed for.” After Mr. Vergès refused to participate further, the judges suggested that Mr. Khieu Samphan might want to appoint a new lawyer to represent him — and then adjourned the hearing. “I have been a lawyer for 50 years; it is the first time I have seen judges ask an accused to change his lawyer,” Mr. Vergès said. “This is a scandal!” One of the Cambodian prosecutors, Chea Leang, said the court was facing difficulty translating thousands of pages of documents for all its cases into the three official languages used by the tribunal, Khmer, English and French. But she contended that Mr. Vergès’s refusal to participate in the hearing because the documents had not been translated into French was “unreasonable” because the proceedings were not part of the actual trial. Mr. Vergès and Mr. Khieu Samphan have said they have known each other since they both were active in left-wing student activities in Paris in the 1950s. Mr. Khieu Samphan has been detained by the tribunal since Nov. 19. He is one of five former senior leaders in custody. The long-delayed tribunal is expected to hold its first trial this year. Many fear that the Khmer Rouge’s aging leaders could die before being brought to justice. Mr. Khieu Samphan’s lawyers say that he held no real power as the Khmer Rouge’s head of state and that he is not guilty of the crimes with which he is charged. Mr. Khieu Samphan has blamed the Khmer Rouge chief, Pol Pot, who died in 1998, for the group’s policies. Expressionless before the court, Mr. Khieu Samphan stood when asked to introduce himself Wednesday and said he lived a life of poverty after the fall of the Khmer Rouge. “I didn’t have any job, and after leaving the jungle, I depended on my wife, who supported the whole family,” he said. | Cambodia;Verges Jacques;War Crimes Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity;French Language;Khieu Samphan |
ny0256377 | [
"sports",
"baseball"
] | 2011/08/19 | Mets Get Poor Mileage Out of Their Broken-Down Bullpen | This season, the sight of a Mets reliever jogging toward the mound has often felt like a harbinger of bad things to come. And the numbers support that view. The Mets’ bullpen has an earned run average of 4.27, the second worst in the National League going into Thursday’s games and the fourth worst among the 30 major league teams. Those numbers include the 422/3 innings and respectable 3.16 E.R.A. compiled by their former closer Francisco Rodriguez when he was with the Mets this season. After he was traded to the Milwaukee Brewers on July 12, the Mets’ bullpen became significantly shakier. One reliever with particularly unsightly numbers is Ryota Igarashi, who is the final half of a two-year, $3 million contract. His E.R.A. this season is 5.56 and over two seasons it is 6.45, making him one of only eight pitchers in Mets history with at least 40 innings pitched and an E.R.A. over 6.00. All of Igarashi’s appearances have been in relief, including the final inning of Wednesday’s 7-3 victory over San Diego, in which he surrendered two runs. Others on that dubious list include Calvin Schiraldi , who had a 7.63 E.R.A. in 432/3 innings in 1984 and 1985 before becoming known as the Boston pitcher the Mets rallied against in the 1986 World Series, and Dock Ellis , who had a 6.04 E.R.A. over 85 innings in 1979. Manager Terry Collins has become increasingly exasperated by the general inability of his relievers to get batters out, but at this point he appears ready to let them continue to try to prove themselves over the final six weeks of the season. “I’m going to let them finish out the year,” Collins said. “We’ve brought up about everybody there is in Buffalo, I think, at some time this summer, so we know what they’ve got.” DIFFERENT DIRECTIONS On the last day of the 2007 season, the Philadelphia Phillies, capitalizing on the Mets’ collapse, sneaked past them to claim the N.L. East title and a spot in the playoffs. They were eliminated in the first round but since then have become the dominant power in the N.L., with three more division titles, two World Series appearances and one championship. Three-quarters of the way through the 2011 season, they appear to be the team to beat when October arrives. And then there are the Milwaukee Brewers, who beat out the Mets for the wild-card spot on the last day of the 2008 season and who likewise took advantage of awful play by the Mets down the stretch. Like the Phillies in 2007, they did not last long in the postseason and they failed to even finish at .500 in 2009 and 2010. But when they arrive at Citi Field on Friday for a three-game weekend series, they will be riding a huge run — 19 victories in their last 22 games — that has given them a commanding lead in the N.L. Central. They are almost certain to be back in the postseason this year, as are the Phillies. The Mets, meanwhile, are still trying to get back to 2006, when they won their last East title. JAY SCHREIBER METS’ KARMA GOES WEST Carlos Beltran joined the San Francisco lineup on July 28, and the Giants won that day, beating the Philadelphia Phillies, 4-1. But they lost the next five games with Beltran in the middle of the order and 8 of 11 over all before Beltran sat down with a strained right hand that now has him on the disabled list. Not that the Giants have played any better since he was sidelined, losing five of the nine games that followed. The Giants have gone 8-13 since they traded with the Mets for Beltran, giving up a minor league pitcher who was a No. 1 draft pick in exchange for a 34-year-old outfielder with a surgically repaired knee. They were one game ahead of the Arizona Diamondbacks in the N.L. West when the trade was made, and going into Thursday’s action they were two and a half games behind. Mets fans can only wonder if it’s all a coincidence or whether Beltran took some of the Mets’ bumpy karma with him when he went from the East Coast to the West Coast. After all, he had been one of the few Mets regulars to stay healthy this season, playing nearly every day despite his troublesome knee. If you’re a Mets cynic, you could argue that he was overdue to land on the disabled list and that it just happened to occur after he switched uniforms. With the Mets in 2011, Beltran batted .289, with 30 doubles, 15 home runs and 66 runs batted in, solid numbers all around. In the last season of his seven-year deal, he impressed the team’s new management with his play and his clubhouse presence. And the Mets, before they traded him, even inquired if he would consider re-signing with them as a free agent for the 2012 season. He is batting .244 for San Francisco, in 45 at-bats, with no home runs and just 2 R.B.I. He still has time to make an impact with the Giants, and help them defend their unlikely 2010 World Series championship. Mets fans will be watching. JAY SCHREIBER | Baseball;New York Mets;Rodriguez Francisco;Igarashi Ryota;Collins Terry L;Beltran Carlos |
ny0034686 | [
"nyregion"
] | 2013/12/13 | Art on Staten Island | Fairly or not, Staten Island doesn’t typically top the list of places you’d expect to encounter cutting-edge art in New York City. But as the island’s artists come together this weekend for another installment of “ Second Saturday Staten Island ,” an art walk, the Miser wonders whether that won’t change soon enough. You can start your ramble at the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art at the Snug Harbor Cultural Center. From 2 to 4 p.m., this year’s resident artists, the Korean-born painter Heewon Seo and the New York multimedia artist Kevin Dejewski, will present their work at a free reception. (1000 Richmond Terrace, Building C; 718-448-2500; snug-harbor.org.) A few blocks from Snug Harbor is the historic Unitarian Church of Staten Island, which will screen the hourlong PBS documentaries “Cézanne in Provence” and “Anything Is Possible,” about the South African artist William Kentridge. The free double feature begins at 5 p.m. Image Kevin Dejewski’s screen shot of video generated by weather data at the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art on Staten Island. Credit Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art (312 Fillmore Street; 718-447-2204; uucsi.org.) Wrap up the evening at Deep Tanks, a gallery and performance space near the ferry station. In addition to the opening of “/raz/,” an installation by Suzanne Lettieri and Michael Jefferson, there will be the performance pieces “Transmissions,” by Mr. Dejewski, and “Clearing the Mind,” by Jayoung Yoon. (150 Bay Street; 917-597-5175; deeptanks.com.) Other worthy pursuits include working with glass at Make.SI and joining the Staten Island Dance Jam . A car or bus map might come in handy, but the intrepid adventurer should consider covering the healthy distances between stops on foot. A POET’S CENTENNIAL The Miser’s granddad hailed from the mountains of West Virginia, a region rendered precisely, if somewhat improbably, by the New York-born poet Muriel Rukeyser in her long-verse narrative “The Book of the Dead,” proving again that an outsider’s evocation of a place can often be as true as a native’s. Rukeyser would have turned 100 on Sunday, and this weekend offers at least two chances to celebrate her life and work. On Friday at 6 p.m., the Center for the Humanities at the City University of New York will host a free panel devoted to the latest developments in Rukeyser scholarship. (365 Fifth Avenue, at 34th Street, Manhattan; 212-817-2005; centerforthehumanities.org.) On Saturday from 2 to 5 p.m., poets will gather at Poet’s House in Lower Manhattan for discussion and readings in honor of Rukeyser, who died in 1980. Admission is $10; $7 for students and adults over 65. (10 River Terrace, at Murray Street, Battery Park City; 212-431-7920; poetshouse.org.) | Art;Staten Island;Muriel Rukeyser;Poetry |
ny0209888 | [
"business"
] | 2009/12/08 | Leon Fleisher, Far From a Rock Star, but Still Able to Cause a Ruckus | I’M old enough to remember when flying was something special. I was about 15 years old when I took my first plane trip. I thought it was a great adventure. All the passengers were wearing their nicest clothes and everyone was looking forward to their trips. I still think flying is an adventure. But I do miss those good old days of plane travel. I travel so much that I have to take the delays and cancellations in stride. I’ve even managed to adapt to security rules. I’m an older guy. And I always tried to explain to security that taking off my belt might result in my pants falling down around my ankles. Security didn’t seem to care. So I found a belt that doesn’t set off the alarms. Most of the time now security will let me go through without taking off my belt. And they are always surprised when the alarm doesn’t go off. I really like flying with the Asian airlines. They know how to treat passengers. I was on one plane, I believe it was All Nippon Airways, where they had an onboard disk contraption with a pole that allowed you to stretch your back. They even gave me some bamboo, covered with studs, which acted as a foot massager. I don’t talk much while in flight. Occasionally, someone will recognize me, and that’s always very nice. But mostly, I just watch a movie or study a musical score. It’s always interesting, though, when you see someone who is well known. My own brush as a fan came in the form of Sophia Loren. I was in Paris, waiting in line at the airport, and all of a sudden the people in front of me turned around. I figured it wasn’t because of me, so I turned around and I saw Ms. Loren. My heart started racing. I made a decision to approach her and thank her for her achievements. She was lovely and gracious. As a musician, I do try to keep up with what’s current. My wife, Katherine, is far better at it than I am. Actually, she’s very hip and likes alternative rock. We were flying to Singapore and were seated in first class. My wife turned to me and said that our fellow seatmates were the Kings of Leon, an alternative rock band. She was excited, and I was impressed with the fact that I had heard of them. They were very nice and very well behaved. Unlike classical musicians, rock musicians always get a bad rap for causing problems on planes. A few years ago, I was traveling with some fellow musicians, David Jolley and Michael Tree. While we were waiting at the departure gate, Michael was entertaining us with some fascinating stories. We were so enthralled by his stories that we missed our flight. We didn’t realize it until an agent came up to us asking if we were supposed to be on a flight that was already about 100 yards away from the gate. We asked why they didn’t announce the flight was boarding. She replied that they had announced it three times. The agent called the flight and asked if they could return to pick us up. That was impossible. A compromise was reached. The flight would wait for us. But they weren’t happy. We had to walk to the plane and then climb some rickety stairs to get on board. The crew and passengers were all staring at us as we made our way to our seats. I think a few of them may have hissed. Which just goes to show, you don’t have to be a rock musician to cause a ruckus. | Fleisher Leon;Music;Airlines and Airplanes |
ny0001059 | [
"us"
] | 2013/03/17 | Man Accused of Rape of Girl and Murder of Her Mother Reports Jail Beating | SYRACUSE (AP) — A man accused of killing a Syracuse woman and raping her 10-year-old daughter during a carjacking was beaten and his nose was broken on his first day in jail, the authorities said. The man, David Renz, was arraigned Friday morning at a court in East Syracuse on charges that he abducted the mother and daughter as they left a gymnastics class in Clay, N.Y., a Syracuse suburb. The police said the girl was raped and her mother was stabbed to death before their attacker fled into the woods. The 10-year-old girl was found by a passing motorist, who called 911. Mr. Renz was captured a short time later. Mr. Renz had a swollen face and tissues stuffed up both nostrils when he appeared in federal court on Friday to face a probation violation charge. “I have a broken nose,” he told his lawyer, according to The Post-Standard in Syracuse. His lawyers, James Greenwald and Kenneth Moynihan, said Mr. Renz had been assaulted by other inmates at the Onondaga County Justice Center, where he was taken after his arrest on Thursday night. Sheriff Kevin Walsh of Onondaga County told the newspaper that he was looking into why Mr. Renz had been put into a holding area with other prisoners — not the usual practice in holding someone facing such accusations. Sheriff Walsh said Mr. Renz has been segregated from other prisoners and was being watched around the clock. “We’re dealing with a man who is innocent until proven guilty,” he said. “He’s got to be protected.” At the time of the attack, Mr. Renz was awaiting trial on federal child pornography charges and was supposed to be wearing an electronic monitoring bracelet tracking his whereabouts. The authorities said they believed Mr. Renz had cut the device off. Tampering attempts with those devices are supposed to sound an alarm, and probation officials were investigating what went wrong, said John Duncan, an executive assistant United States attorney. | David Renz;Murders;Rape;Child Abuse;Syracuse NY;Prison;Assault |
ny0243666 | [
"us"
] | 2011/03/15 | Owsley Stanley, Artisan of Acid, Is Dead at 76 | Owsley Stanley, the prodigiously gifted applied chemist to the stars, who made LSD in quantity for the Grateful Dead, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Ken Kesey and other avatars of the psychedelic ’60s, died on Saturday in a car accident in Australia. He was 76 and lived in the bush near Cairns, in the Australian state of Queensland. His car swerved off a highway and down an embankment before hitting trees near Mareeba, a town in Queensland, The Associated Press reported. Mr. Stanley’s wife, Sheilah, was injured in the accident. Mr. Stanley, the Dead’s former financial backer, pharmaceutical supplier and sound engineer, was in recent decades a reclusive, almost mythically enigmatic figure. He moved to Australia in the 1980s, as he explained in his rare interviews, so he might survive what he believed to be a coming Ice Age that would annihilate the Northern Hemisphere. Once renowned as an artisan of acid, Mr. Stanley turned out LSD said to be purer and finer than any other. He was also among the first individuals (in many accounts, the very first) to mass-produce the drug; its resulting wide availability provided the chemical underpinnings of an era of love, music, grooviness and much else. Conservatively tallied, Mr. Stanley’s career output was more than a million doses, in some estimates more than five million. His was the acid behind the Acid Tests conducted by the novelist Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, the group of psychedelic adherents whose exploits were chronicled by Tom Wolfe in his 1968 book “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.” The music world immortalized Mr. Stanley in a host of songs, including the Dead’s “Alice D. Millionaire” (a play on a newspaper headline, describing one of his several arrests, that called him an “LSD Millionaire”) and Steely Dan’s “Kid Charlemagne.” So widely known was Mr. Stanley that he appears in the Encyclopedia Britannica article on LSD under the apparently unironic index term “ Augustus Owsley Stanley III (American chemist) .” The Oxford English Dictionary contains an entry for the noun “Owsley ” as “an extremely potent, high-quality type of LSD.” In 2007, Mr. Stanley was the subject of a long profile in an issue of Rolling Stone magazine commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love. In short, Mr. Stanley lent the ’60s a great deal of its color — like White Lightning, Monterey Purple and Blue Cheer, the varieties of his LSD that were among the most popular. (He did not, contrary to popular lore, release a product called Purple Haze; in interviews, he sounded quite miffed that anything emerging from his laboratory could be thought to cause haziness rather than the crystalline clarity for which he personally vouched.) He also lent the era much of its sound, developing early, widely praised high-fidelity sound systems for live rock concerts, including the Dead’s towering “wall of sound.” Mr. Stanley was previously a ballet dancer and a member of the United States Air Force. Augustus Owsley Stanley III was born on Jan. 19, 1935, to a patrician Kentucky family. His paternal grandfather, for whom he was named, was a congressman, governor of Kentucky and United States senator. (Somewhat prophetically, given his grandson’s future pursuits, the elder Mr. Stanley was a vigorous public foe of Prohibition.) Young Owsley, whose adolescent hirsuteness caused him to be known ever after as Bear, was sent to a military preparatory school in Maryland. He was expelled in the ninth grade for furnishing the alcohol that, as he told Rolling Stone in 2007, had nearly all his classmates “blasted out of their minds” on homecoming weekend. He briefly attended the University of Virginia before enlisting in the Air Force, where he learned electronics. He later worked in Los Angeles as a broadcast engineer for radio and television stations. He also studied ballet and for a time was a professional dancer. In 1963, Mr. Stanley enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley. The next year, he encountered LSD, a transformative experience. “I remember the first time I took acid and walked outside,” he said in the Rolling Stone interview. “The cars were kissing the parking meters.” Mr. Stanley had found his calling, and at the time it was at least quasi-legitimate: LSD was not outlawed in California until 1966. What he needed to do was learn his craft, which he accomplished, as Rolling Stone reported, in three weeks in the university library, poring over chemistry journals. Soon afterward, he left college and a going concern, the Bear Research Group, was born. In 1965, he met Mr. Kesey, and through him the Dead. Enraptured, he became their sound man, early underwriter, principal acolyte, sometime housemate and frequent touring companion. With Bob Thomas, he designed the band’s highly recognizable skull-and-lightning-bolt logo . Mr. Stanley also made many recordings of the Dead in performance, now considered valuable documentary records of the band’s early years. Many have been released commercially . Mr. Stanley remained with the band off and on through the early ’70s, when, according to Rolling Stone, his habits became too much even for the Grateful Dead and they parted company. (He had insisted, among other things, that the band eat meat — nothing but meat — a dietary regimen he followed until the end of his life.) His other clients included John Lennon, who, according to “The Beatles,” a 2005 biography by Bob Spitz, contracted to pay Mr. Stanley for a lifetime supply of his wares. In 1970, after a judge revoked Mr. Stanley’s bail from a 1967 drug arrest, he served two years in federal prison. There, he learned metalwork and jewelry making , trades he plied in recent years. Mr. Stanley, who became an Australian citizen in the 1990s, was treated for throat cancer in 2004. In the Rolling Stone interview, he attributed his survival to his carnivorous diet. (A heart attack he had suffered some years earlier he ascribed to eating broccoli as a child, forced on him by his mother.) Besides his wife, Sheilah, Mr. Stanley’s survivors include two sons, Pete and Starfinder; two daughters, Nina and Redbird; eight grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. Though he helped transform the culture, Mr. Stanley asserted that he had never meant to do so. As he told The San Francisco Chronicle in 2007, he had set out only to make a product he knew he could take, because its ingredients were known. “And my friends all wanted to know what they were taking, too,” Mr. Stanley said. “Of course,” he added “my ‘friends’ expanded very rapidly.” | Stanley Augustus Owsley III;LSD (Lysergic Acid Diethylamide);Drug Abuse and Traffic;Deaths (Obituaries);Drugs (Pharmaceuticals) |
ny0089234 | [
"sports",
"football"
] | 2015/09/28 | Eagles Expose the Jets’ Deficiencies | EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. — The last time the Jets began a season with three consecutive victories, it was six years ago, in Rex Ryan’s first year as coach. That bunch bragged about its swagger and its talent and its defense, about its everything — comporting itself, then, as the antithesis of the Jets under Todd Bowles today. Bowles demands excellence from his players and expects humility in return. And also perspective. The Jets changed in silence Sunday after absorbing their first defeat of the season, by 24-17, at the hands of the previously winless Philadelphia Eagles, in a performance that exposed the Jets’ deficiencies and resembled so many other embarrassing showings at MetLife Stadium. The result evoked an opinion offered last week by quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick, who said the Jets were not good enough to look past Philadelphia. He was right. There were inopportune penalties and missed tackles and misguided tosses — by quarterbacks and receivers alike — and the type of mistakes that could imperil their season if they go unaddressed. Afterward the Jets discussed the critical moments — including a foolish lateral by Brandon Marshall that led to a Philadelphia touchdown; the missed tackles on an 89-yard punt return by Darren Sproles; and the second of Fitzpatrick’s three interceptions, which dashed any legitimate hopes of a comeback — with a certain detachment. Image The Jets' Brandon Marshall, right, attempted to lateral the ball while being tackled in the second quarter. The play was ruled a fumble when the Eagles recovered. Credit Adam Hunger/Associated Press The Jets acknowledged the poor tackling, the opposing receivers they had left open and how they had benefited from several drops by Sproles and Ryan Mathews, who tormented the defense with wheel routes. The Jets were disappointed, not deflated. “I don’t look at it as a setback,” cornerback Antonio Cromartie said. “I look at it as a lesson learned.” As to what that lesson was, Cromartie vowed that the Jets would not start this slowly again. They allowed 24 points — 7 more than they had given up total in victories against Cleveland and Indianapolis — in the first 28 minutes and did not score until six seconds remained before halftime. Unable to handle prosperity — and that whole falling-behind-by-24-points thing — the Jets dropped into a second-place tie in the A.F.C. East with Rex Ryan’s Buffalo Bills, behind unbeaten New England. The Jets also fell to 0-10 against the Eagles. Through word and deed across their first three games, the Jets have tried to forge an identity. Even with star receivers like Marshall and Eric Decker, they have striven to control the clock with a power running game and have thrived when the defense creates turnovers and shortens the field for Fitzpatrick; four of their six touchdown drives against Cleveland and Indianapolis started inside the opposition’s 29-yard line. When the defense produces only one takeaway — instead of, say, the five it forced in each of the last two games — the Jets’ offense must perform at maximum efficiency. Even more than other teams, the Jets cannot afford a four-turnover day. Of the Eagles, Bowles said, “They beat us at our own game.” The absence of Chris Ivory, who said he could have played despite a sore quadriceps, diluted the Jets’ running game (47 yards on 16 rushes) and compelled Fitzpatrick into throwing 58 passes, tying a career high. Some of those were tipped at the line of scrimmage, a tactic Philadelphia Coach Chip Kelly said his team emphasized all week as the Eagles tried to avoid a loss that would have shoved their season toward oblivion. Aware of how quickly Fitzpatrick tends to release the ball, they sought to disrupt his timing. They clogged the passing lanes, prolonging his time in the pocket and obscuring his view — as they did soon after the Jets narrowed the deficit to 10 on a 7-yard touchdown reception by Jeremy Kerley, playing the slot in place of Decker, with 9 minutes 37 seconds remaining. The Jets regained possession after Demario Davis recovered a fumble. And then Brandon Bair deflected Fitzpatrick’s pass, which fluttered to Jordan Hicks for the interception. “I might have created a problem for myself there with the way that I moved,” said Fitzpatrick, who completed 35 throws for 283 yards and two touchdowns. Without Ivory softening the defensive front with his punishing style, the Jets gained all of 23 rushing yards before halftime. Without Decker (knee) drawing coverage away from Marshall, who was double- and even triple-teamed much of the game, the Jets’ passing attack fizzled. On their first six possessions, the Jets managed one first down. To begin their seventh, which started after they ceded a 23-yard touchdown reception by Mathews that extended the Philadelphia lead to 17-0, Fitzpatrick connected with Marshall for what was to that point the Jets’ longest play, a 15-yard catch. But Marshall, while being tackled, tried to gain a few more yards by lateraling to Jeff Cumberland. “That was probably the worst play in N.F.L. history,” Marshall said. He added: “You can’t do that. The damage outweighs the reward so much.” The ball caromed off the helmet of Eagles linebacker Connor Barwin and bounced to Hicks, who returned the fumble 11 yards to the Jets’ 36. Seven plays later, after Davis was penalized 15 yards for slamming Sproles after stopping him, Sproles slipped into the end zone from a yard out. On the sideline, Bowles took Marshall aside and admonished him. Image The Eagles Walter Thurmond managed to keep his feet in bounds while hauling in one of Ryan Fitzpatrick's three interceptions. Credit Al Bello/Getty Images “He understood,” Bowles said. “A play too late, but he understood.” Marshall finished with 10 catches and 109 yards and a touchdown, but he also regretted not extending his arms enough on a Fitzpatrick pass downfield in the fourth quarter. Marshall could only deflect it, into the arms of Walter Thurmond for an interception. Nick Folk’s 53-yard field goal with 2:34 left made it a one-possession game, but the Eagles recovered the subsequent onside kick and — aided by a Quinton Coples penalty on a third-and-16 that gave them an automatic first down — ran out the clock. The Eagles poured onto the field, and so did the Jets, who viewed their second-half shutout as little consolation. “We just didn’t score,” linebacker Calvin Pace said. Score enough, he meant. The Jets might not have looked past Philadelphia, but when confronted by the Eagles on Sunday, they did not play well enough to win, and they knew it. EXTRA POINTS Darrelle Revis, who played while nursing a sore groin, sat out the Eagles’ final drive after hurting his hamstring. Those injuries can be temperamental, and Revis said little about it other than “I’ll be fine.” ... Todd Bowles did not have immediate updates on the conditions of two players who left the game with injuries, tight end Jeff Cumberland (head) and guard Willie Colon (knee). ... Geno Smith was the Jets’ backup quarterback in his first game active since a teammate’s punch broke his jaw on Aug. 11. | Football;Todd Bowles;Darren Sproles;Philadelphia Eagles;Jets |
ny0011788 | [
"nyregion"
] | 2013/11/03 | A Review of ‘The High Water Mark,’ at Luna Stage | It is a sorry fact of life that sometimes and somehow we lose touch with our oldest and closest friends. Such is the case of Janet and Lily, the middle-age characters of “The High Water Mark,” a new play by Ben Clawson that Luna Stage is presenting in West Orange. Chums since their girlhood, Janet and Lily have grown apart in recent years. Lately they get together only through sporadic phone calls, birthday celebrations and what they call “fancy brunches.” Lily married a wealthy entrepreneur, and now she aimlessly dwells in lonely suburban luxury. Janet is a high school teacher who recently underwent an ugly divorce. “You know what they say: Divorce brings out the best in people,” Janet observes. “His lawyer was his brother. Mine was on a billboard. That’s how you end up in a hovel.” Not exactly a hovel, Janet’s furnished one-bedroom rental is a dismal abode. This is where the two-act play is set, as Lily loudly and drunkenly barges back into Janet’s life in the small hours of the night. Dressed too desperately for clubbing in black leather leggings and a glittery top, the 40-something Lily is a reckless, self-absorbed creature. Lily demands wine and comfort from the ever-anxious Janet, who reluctantly warms up (with the help of a few drinks) to her too-long-absent best friend. Both obviously suffering from midlife angst, the women fondly recall their rare good times and their more frequent bad experiences, like weeping in the ladies’ room at each other’s weddings. Image Ms. Maulella and Ms. Profitt. Credit Steven Lawler Darkly talking about burning her bridges, Lily fishes out of her capacious handbag a side mirror from the vintage Jaguar she has just wrecked, a loaded revolver and scads of cash. She suggests that Janet join her on a sentimental journey to New Orleans, where long ago they once enjoyed a blissful six-day vacation. The second act occurs in the dreary light of the next afternoon when, unfortunately, neither the women nor the play goes anywhere interesting. A plot point about a mortifying home video that goes viral on the Internet drums up some conflict and humor, and later on there is a farcical face-off between the characters. A surprisingly trivial piece, “The High Water Mark” is a lesser effort by Mr. Clawson, a talented 29-year-old playwright whose “Dangers of Electric Lighting” was first produced by Luna Stage in 2011. That drama, regarding the epic feud between Thomas Edison and Nikolai Tesla, offered history, substance and wit. At best, “The High Water Mark” is an amusing study in friendship that runs as deep as the bottom of a wine glass. The comedy has been staged with a serious hand by Cheryl Katz, Luna Stage’s artistic director, upon a thoroughly drab set designed by Charles Murdock Lucas. Perhaps they feel that such realism lends the thin play a greater emotional heft, but it merely looks bleak. Fortunately, some bright acting contributes the color that the visual production withholds. Swaggering beneath an unflattering hairdo and heavy mascara as the overblown Lily, Sabrina Profitt assuredly depicts her character’s impulsive behavior, whether mistakenly swigging from a designer bottle of soap or running her somewhat foul mouth in overdrive. Resembling an angular descendant of the comedian Stan Laurel, Andrea Maulella provides an intense portrayal of the forlorn Janet. Initially apologetic in her straitened circumstances, Janet later reveals a streak of repressed rage that justifies her notoriety as an Internet sensation known as “Mom With Knife.” Ms. Maulella’s elastic performance easily encompasses the wide mood swings of Janet’s character. Thanks to such vigorous acting, “The High Water Mark” at least succeeds as a passable diversion. | Theater;West Orange NJ;Luna Stage;Andrea Maulella;Sabrina Profitt;Ben Clawson |
ny0240935 | [
"sports",
"baseball"
] | 2010/12/13 | Cliff Lee Keeps Yankees and Rangers Guessing | As a pitcher, Cliff Lee is the model of brisk efficiency, walking virtually no one and often retiring the side in order. But as he tries to decide whether his future should be with the Texas Rangers or the Yankees , Lee and his agent have taken their time. On Sunday, there was no word which way Lee was leaning, leaving both teams in suspense and leading some people in baseball to speculate that Lee and his agent, Darek Braunecker, were stalling in the hope of getting more money from the Rangers. Several people in baseball who were closely monitoring the situation said they had not gotten any clues this weekend about which team Lee would pick. However, they said a decision could come by Monday. The Yankees increased their offer to Lee on Thursday to seven years at more than $20 million a year. What is less clear is what Texas is offering, although people briefed on the negotiations think it is for less years and money than the Yankees’ offer. “We have not been told anything to this point,” Yankees General Manager Brian Cashman said. If the Rangers increased their offer, it could allow Lee to re-sign with the Rangers without leaving too much money on the table. Barry Axelrod, a veteran agent who represented Craig Biggio and Rick Sutcliffe when they were the top free agents on the market and were deciding among several teams, said players deserved as much time as they needed to make a decision. “One of the biggest misconceptions of free agency is that it’s all a bowl of cherries looking at these offers and turning down millions of dollars,” Axelrod said in a telephone interview. “Some guys just take the most money, but in the end the money is usually about the same and it becomes a painstaking process of looking at all the aspects of the clubs and making a decision.” Axelrod said that he developed a list of 15 to 20 factors about a team for players to analyze, including the strength of the team’s farm system, the climate and the team’s chances of being a contender. “Some guys actually don’t like to be close to home because it puts more pressure on them,” he said. One of the advantages many people think the Rangers have over the Yankees is their proximity to Lee’s home in Arkansas. Ultimately, Axelrod said, the process can become extremely stressful. “In this process, it takes weeks, months,” he said. “You get wined and dined by these teams and they tell you how much they like you and you begin to build a relationship with them and begin to really like them. The hardest part is telling the teams ‘No.’ I remember sitting in a hotel room with Sutcliffe in 1984 as we were calling the other teams to tell them where he was going to sign. We both had tears in our eyes.” Such calls might be going out from Lee’s agent to the Yankees or the Rangers as early as Monday. | Lee Cliff;New York Yankees;Texas Rangers;Baseball;Free Agents (Sports) |
ny0215088 | [
"world",
"europe"
] | 2010/03/25 | E.U. Weighs Its Own System to Track Cash for Terrorism | BRUSSELS — The European Commission said Wednesday that it wanted to develop its own system to track terrorist finances and that such a system would require the United States to contribute information on American citizens’ transactions. The announcement is part of intensifying efforts by Brussels to resolve an acrimonious battle within the European Union over how to identify, track and pursue suspected terrorists and their financiers. Last month, the European Parliament blocked a provisional deal between the European Union and Washington to permit the continued exchange of such data. The move by Parliament was partly a bid to assert new powers to decide issues concerning European security jointly with E.U. governments. But the move also reflected deepening unease in Europe over the way personal data are increasingly used by companies and by governments. Seeking to ease those concerns, the E.U. justice commissioner, Viviane Reding, called on the United States to agree to equal treatment of information about Europeans and Americans under any new, formal system for sharing data. “The future agreement would explicitly provide U.S. reciprocity should the E.U. set up its own terrorist-finance tracking program,” Ms. Reding said at a news conference in Brussels. A pledge from the Americans to support a European system would provide “confidence in a new round of negotiations with our U.S. partners,” she added. The requirement proposed by Ms. Reding was part of a negotiation proposal that must be approved by E.U. member states before formal talks begin with Washington. The U.S. Mission to the European Union declined to comment on whether Ms. Reding’s proposal would be acceptable to the United States. But it said in a statement that the European Union and the United States should “quickly move forward with constructive negotiations toward a long-term agreement.” The statement also warned of “vulnerabilities caused by the current interruption” to the program. Whether the European Union could ever establish its own terror-finance squad is unclear. Such a system would be expensive. It also would require E.U. member states to delegate powers — possibly to a single member state — to oversee the effort in a policy area where European countries still zealously guard their sovereignty. In the meantime, the commission and E.U. governments are seeking to create a system that can be integrated with the U.S. program. Questions about sharing bank data emerged in 2006, after it was reported that a Belgian cooperative responsible for routing about $6 trillion each day among banks, brokerage houses, stock exchanges and other institutions had provided information about transactions involving thousands of Americans and others in the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The cooperative, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, or Swift, is near Brussels. The revelation added new protest in the United States and Europe at the way the Bush administration was handling the fight against terrorism. | Terrorism;European Union;United States;Banks and Banking;Finances;Data Storage |
ny0217672 | [
"science"
] | 2010/05/04 | Chimpanzees Use Tools to Help Their Sex Lives | The human ego has never been quite the same since the day in 1960 that Jane Goodall observed a chimpanzee feasting on termites near Lake Tanganyika. After carefully trimming a blade of grass, the chimpanzee poked it into a passage in the termite mound to extract his meal. No longer could humans claim to be the only tool-making species. The deflating news was summarized by Ms. Goodall’s mentor, Louis Leakey: “Now we must redefine tool, redefine Man, or accept chimpanzees as human.” So what have we actually done now that we’ve had a half-century to pout? In a 50th anniversary essay in the journal Science, the primatologist William C. McGrew begins by hailing the progression of chimpanzee studies from field notes to “theory-driven, hypothesis-testing ethnology.” He tactfully waits until the third paragraph — journalists call this “burying the lead” — to deliver the most devastating blow yet to human self-esteem. After noting that chimpanzees’ “tool kits” are now known to include 20 items, Dr. McGrew casually mentions that they’re used for “various functions in daily life, including subsistence, sociality, sex, and self-maintenance.” Sex? Chimpanzees have tools for sex? No way. If ever there was an intrinsically human behavior, it had to be the manufacture of sex toys. Considering all that evolution had done to make sex second nature, or maybe first nature, I would have expected creatures without access to the Internet to leave well enough alone. Only Homo sapiens seemed blessed with the idle prefrontal cortex and nimble prehensile thumbs necessary to invent erotic paraphernalia. Or perhaps Homo habilis , the famous Handy Man of two million years ago, if those ancestors got bored one day with their jobs in the rock-flaking industry: “Flake, flake, flake.” “There’s gotta be more to life.” “Nobody ever died wishing he’d spent more time making sharp rocks.” “What if you could make a tool for... something fun?” I couldn’t imagine how chimps managed this evolutionary leap. But then, I couldn’t imagine what they were actually doing. Using blades of grass to tickle one another? Building heart-shaped beds of moss? Using stones for massages, or vines for bondage, or — well, I really had no idea, so I called Dr. McGrew , who is a professor at the University of Cambridge . The tool for sex, he explained, is a leaf. Ideally a dead leaf, because that makes the most noise when the chimp clips it with his hand or his mouth. “Males basically have to attract and maintain the attention of females,” Dr. McGrew said. “One way to do this is leaf clipping. It makes a rasping sound. Imagine tearing a piece of paper that’s brittle or dry. The sound is nothing spectacular, but it’s distinctive.” O.K., a distinctive sound. Where does the sex come in? “The male will pluck a leaf, or a set of leaves, and sit so the female can see him. He spreads his legs so the female sees the erection, and he tears the leaf bit by bit down the midvein of the leaf, dropping the pieces as he detaches them. Sometimes he’ll do half a dozen leaves until she notices.” And then? “Presumably she sees the erection and puts two and two together, and if she’s interested, she’ll typically approach and present her back side, and then they’ll mate.” My first reaction, as a chauvinistic human, was to dismiss the technology as laughably primitive — too crude to even qualify as a proper sex tool. But Dr. McGrew said it met anthropologists ’ definition of a tool: “He’s using a portable object to obtain a goal. In this case, the goal is not food but mating.” Put that way, you might see this chimp as the equivalent of a human (wearing pants, one hopes) trying to attract women by driving around with a car thumping out 120-decibel music . But until researchers are able to find a woman who admits to being anything other than annoyed by guys in boom cars, these human tools must be considered evolutionary dead ends. By contrast, the leaf-clipping chimps seem more advanced, practically debonair. But it would be fairer to compare the clipped leaf with the most popular human sex tool, which we can now identify thanks to the academic research described last year by my colleague Michael Winerip . The researchers found that the vibrator, considered taboo a few decades ago, had become one of the most common household appliances in the United States . Slightly more than half of all women, and almost half of men, reported having used one, and they weren’t giving each other platonic massages. Leaf-clipping, meanwhile, has remained a local fetish among chimpanzees. The sexual strategy has been spotted at a colony in Tanzania but not in most other groups. There has been nothing comparable to the evolution observed in distributors of human sex tools: from XXX stores to chains of cutely named boutiques (Pleasure Chest, Good Vibrations) to mass merchants like CVS and Wal-Mart . So let us, as Louis Leakey suggested, salvage some dignity by redefining humanity. We may not be the only tool-making species, but no one else possesses our genius for marketing. We reign supreme, indeed unrivaled, as the planet’s only tool-retailing species. Now let’s see how long we hold on to that title. | Monkeys and Apes;Sex;Science and Technology |
ny0294928 | [
"world",
"americas"
] | 2016/12/04 | Thousands in Brazil Protest Gutting of Anticorruption Measures | RIO DE JANEIRO — Thousands of protesters fanned out on the streets of Brazilian cities on Sunday to voice indignation with political leaders who are trying to stymie anticorruption investigations. The protesters focused much of their ire on the politicians at the helm of Brazil’s scandal-ridden Congress , including Rodrigo Maia, the speaker of the lower house, and Renan Calheiros, the powerful head of the Senate, after lawmakers gutted an anticorruption bill last week. That move touched a nerve among many people in the country as Brazil mourned the victims of the crash of the plane carrying the Chapecoense soccer team last Monday. In a marathon session, the lower house rewrote the legislation to curb the power of prosecutors and judges guiding graft inquiries. The administration of President Michel Temer, who took office just six months ago after a bitter fight to impeach his predecessor, Dilma Rousseff, is showing signs of vulnerability over corruption scandals in its ranks and its inability to mend an ailing economy. While many protesters expressed disgust with Mr. Temer’s allies in Congress, the demonstrations also showcased how movements that were once on the fringe — like backing the restoration of Brazil’s monarchy or supporting far-right candidates and even a military coup — are gaining resonance on the streets. “Democracy is a beautiful thing in Sweden, maybe Switzerland, but Brazil just isn’t ready,” said Juarez A. Nunes, 76, a lawyer who attended the protest in São Paulo. “We have so many laws, yet try finding people who obey them.” Turnout was lower on Sunday than at some of the protests over the past year calling for the ouster of Ms. Rousseff, who faced charges of manipulating the federal budget to conceal mounting economic problems. Mr. Temer, while grappling with dismal approval ratings, did not seem to be in the cross hairs of many protesters. Either way, Mr. Temer, the leader of the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party, a centrist organization that is growing more conservative, is struggling to find his footing as Brazil’s political mood remains dour. Mr. Temer tried to avoid attending the memorial service for the victims of the Chapecoense tragedy, reportedly out of fear of being booed at a large public gathering. But after relatives of the soccer players killed in the crash lashed out at him, he changed his mind. His allies in Congress are facing scorn, especially Mr. Calheiros, who will stand trial in a case in which a lobbyist for a construction company paid child support for a daughter of Mr. Calheiros’s from an extramarital affair. Mr. Calheiros received the gutted anticorruption bill last week in the Senate after its passage in the lower house and unsuccessfully tried to accelerate a vote on the legislation. In a statement, he said Sunday that the protests were “legitimate and, if hewing to the rules, should be respected.” | Chapecoense de Brasil;Brazil;Civil Unrest;Michel Temer;Renan Calheiros;Politics;Corruption;Legislation;Dilma Rousseff |
ny0216022 | [
"us"
] | 2010/04/17 | Daryl F. Gates, L.A.P.D. Chief in Rodney King Era, Dies at 83 | Daryl F. Gates, whose aggressive approach to law enforcement as chief of the Los Angeles Police Department was both admired for its innovation and criticized for the racial unrest it provoked, died Friday at his home in Dana Point, Calif. He was 83. In a statement, the Police Department said he died after “a short battle with cancer.” Mr. Gates began his police career in 1949 as a Los Angeles patrolman. It ended when he was forced to resign in June 1992, after 14 years as chief, in the wake of riots that followed the acquittal of four police officers in the highly publicized beating of Rodney King . The years in between were a raucous era in which Los Angeles almost doubled its population while becoming overwhelmed by drugs, gangs, guns and a tide of violent crime. Mr. Gates, who embraced the tough, principled and inflexible strategy of his mentor, William H. Parker, the former Los Angeles police chief, responded to that climate by stressing discipline in the ranks of his 8,000-strong department, enlarging the police presence in the streets and developing new policing tools. Mr. Gates pioneered the use of police helicopters to fight crime across the nearly 470 square miles of his city, and he helped develop the Special Weapons and Tactics, or SWAT, unit, made up of elite mobile teams of highly trained officers. SWAT teams deployed sophisticated surveillance equipment, assault weapons and paramilitary skills to neutralize threats. Hundreds of police departments in the United States and around the world have since developed SWAT units. In Los Angeles, they had a prominent role in maintaining order during the 1984 Summer Olympic Games, a period widely regarded as the high point of Mr. Gates’s career. Another initiative was DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education), a program, begun in the early 1980s, in which officers go into schools to teach students how to resist peer pressure to use drugs, join gangs and engage in violence. Millions of American students now receive the DARE curriculum each year. But as Los Angeles grew more dense and diverse, as crime increased and as cultural mores and racial attitudes shifted in the ’80s, Mr. Gates’s oversight of the department came under mounting criticism. Black and Hispanic residents accused the police of treating them harshly and Mr. Gates of doing little to rein in his officers. They said the department’s emphasis on making arrests invited confrontation and discouraged good will in minority neighborhoods. The city’s mayor, Tom Bradley, who was black and a Democrat, was a fierce critic of Mr. Gates, a conservative Republican. So were members of the Los Angeles City Council, several members of the city’s Congressional delegation and the editorial pages of the city’s two major daily newspapers, The Los Angeles Times and The Daily News. The criticism intensified in March 1991, when Rodney King, a black convicted robber and parolee, was viciously beaten by white officers after a high-speed car chase. The beating was videotaped by a bystander and repeatedly broadcast around the world, provoking widespread revulsion and an intense national debate about police brutality, race relations, poverty and Mr. Gates’s leadership. Mr. Gates said he was appalled by what he saw on the videotape but defended the department, contending that the officers’ conduct had been an “aberration.” That assessment was disputed by a commission appointed by the city to investigate allegations of police brutality. The panel, led by Warren Christopher, a prominent lawyer who later became secretary of state in the Clinton administration, issued a damning report. It found that a “significant number” of officers had often used excessive force, especially against members of minorities, and that these officers had rarely been disciplined; that police reports were frequently falsified to protect abusive officers; and that messages between patrol cars — many quoted in the report — documented racial animosity, contempt for official restraints and violent attitudes among officers. The commission also said that the department’s record in hiring and promoting minority members was insufficient. Over the next 13 months, Mr. Gates vigorously fended off calls for his resignation while struggling to manage the department. Among those who defended him was Gov. Pete Wilson, a fellow Republican, who said the department under Mr. Gates was “one of the best.” In April 1992, four white officers accused of assault in the beating of Mr. King were acquitted by an all-white jury. The decision set off three days of rioting, which left 53 people dead, about 2,500 injured and more than $400 million in property damage, mostly in the South-Central neighborhood. A second commission, led by William H. Webster, the former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency, faulted the police, the mayor and the City Council for poor planning, poor coordination and poor reaction to the jury’s decision. In October 1992, four months after his resignation, Mr. Gates acknowledged that he had made errors in command but remained unapologetic. “Clearly that night we should have gone down there and shot a few people,” he said. “In retrospect, that’s exactly what we should have done. We should have blown a few heads off.” After leaving the department, Mr. Gates began a characteristically entrepreneurial new career. He published a well-received, best-selling memoir, “Chief: My Life in the L.A.P.D.” (Bantam, 1992), worked briefly as a radio talk-show host, founded a private investigations firm, made film and television appearances, developed a series of popular police-action video games, and served as the chief executive of Global ePoint, a manufacturer of digital video surveillance systems. Daryl Francis Gates was born into a working-class family on Aug. 30, 1926, in Los Angeles, the second of three sons of Paul and Arvilla Gates. The family moved frequently during the Depression after his father, a plumber, lost his business and became a heavy drinker, often disappearing for days. Mr. Gates’s mother supported the family by taking jobs in the Los Angeles garment industry. Mr. Gates first encountered the Los Angeles Police Department in 1942, when he punched a police officer who had been writing him a ticket for double-parking in front of a movie theater. He and a friend were arrested but released without charges after they apologized to the officers. A year later, Mr. Gates enlisted in the Navy and served aboard the destroyer Ault in the South China Sea. When the war ended, he enrolled at Pasadena City College, where he met Wanda Hawkins, who became his first wife. He later transferred to the University of Southern California and had plans to attend law school after graduation. But married and with the first of three children on the way, he dropped out of U.S.C. in September 1949 and joined the Los Angeles force. He later finished the requirements at U.S.C. and earned an undergraduate degree. Mr. Gates’s marriage ended in divorce in 1968. His second marriage, to Sima Lalich, a United Airlines flight attendant, ended in divorce in 1994. His survivors include two daughters, Kathy Perricone and Debby Ladesma; a son, Lowell; a brother, Steve, a retired Los Angeles police officer; five grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. Mr. Gates often said that working with his men was the most gratifying part of his job and his life. In an interview with The Los Angeles Business Journal in 2007, he summed up the principles of leadership and loyalty that earned him respect within the ranks. “Sometimes officials can be too quick to assess blame, for political reasons, without realizing the damage that can be done to the rank and file,” he said. “When I was chief I coined the phrase the ‘L.A.P.D. Family.’ When my officers had problems, I had problems. Once you publicly humiliate an officer, demote or reassign them, you’ve lost them totally, so you better think twice before you take that step. There are ways you can acknowledge the public’s concerns but not rush to judgment before you have all the facts.” | Gates Daryl F.;Los Angeles Police Department;King Rodney Glen;Deaths (Obituaries);Police Brutality and Misconduct;Police;Race;Crime and Criminals;Los Angeles (Calif);Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) |
ny0289901 | [
"world",
"europe"
] | 2016/01/29 | Russia Dismisses German Warnings About Exploiting Teen Rape Claim | MOSCOW — The Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, on Thursday dismissed what he called Germany’s accusations that Russia was exploiting the mysterious disappearance of a 13-year-old Russian-German girl, who lives in eastern Berlin, to pursue its political aims. Russia’s prime state TV station, Channel One , brought up the case last week. The report identified the girl only as Liza and said her 30-hour disappearance had been reported on Jan. 11. Her relatives claimed that she had been kidnapped and raped by three migrants. Instead of opening a criminal case based on the allegations, the police “covered them up,” a man, identified as the girl’s uncle, told Russian television. But Berlin police who investigated the case and examined the girl have rejected her account of being abducted and forced to have sex. State prosecutors are reportedly investigating at least one suspect on possible charges of having sex with the girl, who is under the age of consent, which in Germany is 14. If charges are brought, it is not clear whether they would be statutory rape or child abuse. The case has riled the Russian-language Internet, with many commentators using it to suggest — sometimes in almost abusive terms — that Germany is failing to act against the dangers posed by hundreds of thousands of new migrants. Last week, several demonstrations were held around Germany by Russian-speaking Germans claiming that they felt unsafe. Speaking amid the heated public reaction in Russia , Mr. Lavrov claimed during his annual news conference on Tuesday that the girl’s disappearance “was hushed up for a long time for some reason.” A spokesman for the German government, Steffen Seibert, declined to comment in response. But on Wednesday, Germany’s foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, warned against politicizing the case, and the Russian ambassador was invited to the Foreign Office for discussions. The foreign ministry spokesman, Martin Schäfer, noted archly at a regular news conference on Wednesday that the ministry “has the most complete trust in the work of the Berlin judiciary and police,” but “a little bit less trust in the objectivity, transparency and real readiness to clear things up” on the part of some Russian journalists. He noted that Mr. Lavrov had many positive things to say about Russian-German relations and that he was interested in close cooperation over the situation in rebellious eastern Ukraine in particular. But as far as the Liza matter, he reiterated: “It is really quite bad, or so we believe, if such a case is used politically. It really is not suited to that.” On Thursday, Mr. Lavrov said the misunderstanding was caused by Germany’s failure to share necessary information about the girl’s disappearance. “In accordance with all rules that exist in the civilized world, we are entitled to be informed about all incidents that involve Russian citizens,” Mr. Lavrov said during a visit to the former Soviet republic of Turkmenistan. On Saturday, an estimated 700 Russian-Germans demonstrated outside the chancellery in Berlin, and on Sunday there were demonstrations that involved a few thousand people at several locations across southern Germany. In one town, Villingen-Schwenningen in the southwest, the police reported up to 1,300 protesters, some holding banners saying, “Respect for German culture.” | Rape;Sergey V Lavrov;Germany;Missing person;Russia;Channel One;Frank-Walter Steinmeier;Middle East and Africa Migrant Crisis,European Migrant Crisis;Kidnapping and Hostages |
ny0150097 | [
"sports",
"football"
] | 2008/09/15 | For Giants, a Blowout Win Isn’t a Breather | ST. LOUIS — On the final score sheet, the Giants ’ 41-13 victory against the Rams on Sunday looked like a one-sided game, and that is probably how the fans will remember it. What may be forgotten is that the Giants (2-0) led by only 7 points in the fourth quarter against a woeful St. Louis team that was booed occasionally by its home fans, at least those among the announced gathering of 61,377 who braved the morning wind and rain — remnants of Hurricane Ike — to half-fill the Edward Jones Dome at the noon kickoff. But after the Rams got close, the Giants “were really able to impose our will,” defensive end Justin Tuck said. “That’s the mark of a champion,” he added. Perhaps it is. Tuck certainly helped, scoring the second of the Giants’ three late touchdowns on a 41-yard interception return. And that was just one of several unusual plays in a victory that increased the Giants’ winning streak to 12 in a row away from home over two seasons. Another play was made by Eli Manning , the Giants’ quarterback, to set up John Carney’s 33-yard field goal with two seconds left in the half, giving the Giants a 13-6 lead. Fighting to avoid a sack with his right arm in the grasp of a defender, Manning completed a pass to Brandon Jacobs by throwing left-handed. It is something Manning practices while warming up, just in case. “I’m not bad at it,” Manning said. “But I wouldn’t say I’m great at it.” Manning completed 20 of 29 passes (the others with his right arm) for 260 yards with three touchdowns to three receivers. The first was in the first quarter for 33 yards to Plaxico Burress . The others were to Amani Toomer, on a 10-yard play in the third quarter, and to Ahmad Bradshaw , on an 18-yard play in the fourth. Perhaps remembering Manning’s escape-artist skills during the winning drive in last season’s Super Bowl, Burress smiled when discussing Manning’s left-handed pass. “He seems to do something each week that kind of surprises us a little bit,” Burress said. After Manning completed the pass, Burress said he looked to the Rams’ sideline and saw Jim Haslett, the defensive coordinator, laughing. “It was funny,” Burress said. But no Giants were laughing with 10 minutes 46 seconds left in the fourth quarter, when the Rams’ Torry Holt cut the Giants’ lead to 20-13 by outwrestling free safety Kenny Phillips for the ball in the end zone on a 45-yard pass from quarterback Marc Bulger. “I had it in my hands,” Phillips said. “It rolled around. They gave it to him. He never had it.” Video replays seemed to contradict Phillips’s assertion, showing Holt lying on the ground, reaching out with his left arm and cradling the ball for the touchdown. But the Giants responded. Coach Tom Coughlin said, “We needed a drive to stick it in the end zone.” What followed was a six-play, 82-yard drive that culminated in Bradshaw’s touchdown reception. Bradshaw scored another touchdown on a 31-yard run to complete the Giants’ scoring. He finished with five carries for 52 yards. Brandon Jacobs led the Giants with 93 yards on 15 carries. Derrick Ward carried eight times for 58 yards. The three running backs go by the nicknames Earth, Wind and Fire. Jacobs is Earth, but the players are still debating who is Wind and who is Fire. Bradshaw said he was just happy to get the ball, having gone without a carry in the Giants’ 16-7 victory over Washington in the season opener. “I just sit and wait for my time,” said Bradshaw, who added that he did not mind backing up the other running backs. “We’re like brothers,” Bradshaw said. “It takes three good backs just to get through a year.” If the receivers are also like brothers, they are a larger group of siblings. Eight Giants caught passes, led by Toomer with six receptions and Burress with 81 yards. The Rams might have pulled off an upset victory if they had not hurt themselves with crucial penalties. But some of their most frustrating moments came when no flags were thrown. In the first quarter, Bulger handed off to Steven Jackson, and their legs became tangled. Jackson was stopped for no gain and Bulger was limping so badly he called a timeout. “It is just shocking and disappointing that we are playing like this,” Jackson said of his team’s performance. In the fourth quarter, the Rams’ Dane Looker got open behind the secondary at the Giants’ 25. But Looker turned one way and the pass from Bulger went the other. The ball landed harmlessly on the artificial turf with no one around it. Tuck said the linebackers and defensive backs disrupted Bulger’s rhythm by bumping his receivers before they could get into their pass routes. The coordination of the defense and the multiple contributions of the skilled players on offense made the Giants seem formidable in many aspects of the game. “We have a lot of weapons,” Manning said. “We’re going to mix it up.” | Manning Eli;New York Giants;St Louis Rams;Football;Burress Plaxico;Toomer Amani;Bradshaw Ahmad;Tuck Justin;Bulger Marc |
ny0228900 | [
"us"
] | 2010/07/01 | Day 71: The Latest on the Oil Spill | E.P.A. Releases Data on Dispersants Initial tests of Corexit, the oil dispersant that BP is using in the Gulf of Mexico, and of competing products, find that all available dispersants that could be used on the spill range from “practically nontoxic” to “slightly toxic,” according to the Environmental Protection Agency. The dispersants, which were tested on shrimp and on a small fish called the inland silverside, break oil into particles that are easier for microbes to consume. Paul Anastas, the agency’s assistant administrator for research and development, cautioned that more testing was needed to study how toxic the dispersants are when mixed with oil. This round of testing studied only the chemicals themselves. A Closer Look at the Loop Current Government scientists are on their way to study the gulf’s loop current to see if it will carry oil around the tip of Florida and up the Atlantic coast. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ship Nancy Foster on Wednesday began a two-week survey in the eastern gulf and the Florida Straits. The team will collect samples of water and marine life at different depths and will look for oil, dispersants and tar balls in the water column. Plan to Help Migratory Birds The United States Fish and Wildlife Service announced Wednesday that it was working with partners to anticipate and minimize the impact of the spill on the millions of waterfowl and other birds that will migrate to wintering and stopover habitats along the Gulf Coast. Commander Retires From Coast Guard Adm. Thad W. Allen officially retired from the Coast Guard on Wednesday. He will continue his duties as the national incident commander of the oil spill. An interactive map tracking the spill and where it has made landfall, live video of the leak, a guide to online spill resources and additional updates: nytimes.com/national . | Oil (Petroleum) and Gasoline;Offshore Drilling and Exploration;Accidents and Safety;BP Plc;Gulf of Mexico |
ny0235147 | [
"business"
] | 2010/01/21 | Tailoring Its Approach, Starbucks Rebounds | SEATTLE — Young people wearing hoodies and chunky glasses are sipping microbrew beers and espressos, nibbling on cheese and baguettes made at a local bakery and listening to a guitarist strum and sing. The scene could be at any independent coffeehouse around the country. Instead, it is at a Starbucks -owned shop called 15th Avenue Coffee and Tea . The new store, one of two in Seattle’s trendy Capitol Hill neighborhood, grew out of a series of brainstorming sessions by a group of Starbucks employees after Howard D. Schultz, Starbucks’ chief executive, told them to “break the rules and do things for yourself.” The directive was part of his effort, since he returned as chief executive two years ago, to turn the struggling company around by injecting the multinational chain with a dose of the urgency, nimbleness and risk-taking of a start-up company. “We lost our way,” he said. “We went back to start-up mode, hand-to-hand combat every day” to find it. “And with the kind of discussion and focus that probably we had not had as a company since the early days — the fear of failure, the hunger to win.” There are indications that Starbucks’ turnaround efforts are working. On Wednesday, the company reported that in the first quarter , which included the important holiday season, net income was $241.5 million, up from $64.3 million in the year-ago quarter. Revenue climbed 4 percent, to $2.7 billion. Same-store sales were up 4 percent, reversing steady declines. In the last year, the company’s stock has nearly tripled to $23.29, though that is still significantly below the record high of nearly $40 in 2006. But even if Mr. Schultz, who bought the first six Starbucks stores in 1987, still sees the company through an entrepreneur’s eyes, it is no longer a start-up and its stores are not local coffeehouses. Some analysts wonder whether Starbucks is refusing to accept its new identity. “That kind of resonance it had at one point is going to be hard to recapture,” said Bryant Simon, a history professor at Temple University and author of a book about Starbucks titled “Everything but the Coffee.” “It’s his own sense of the brand overtaking what’s doable right now.” When Mr. Schultz returned in January 2008, Starbucks had just posted its first quarterly decline in the number of transactions at stores in the United States. As the chain opened a record 2,571 stores in 2007, the onetime growth stock lost 42 percent of its value. Then, in a one-two punch, consumer spending plummeted, and Starbucks, selling a luxury rather than a necessity, was one of the first to feel the pinch. Meanwhile, competition emerged from a new corner of the market when McDonald’s began serving espresso. When Mr. Schultz, standing at the bar in one of the new Seattle shops and sampling espressos with whole milk, talks about Starbucks, he uses phrases like “the authenticity of the coffee experience” and “the romance, the theater of bringing that to life.” But that does not match the reality of many Starbucks customers, who rush through each morning on their way to work, or many of its former customers, who have rejected the chain’s cookie-cutter shops in favor of small local shops that serve more carefully made coffee. Mr. Schultz’s first job upon returning was to halt the marathon store openings, lay off 1,500 United States store employees and 1,700 global corporate employees and figure out how to get the remaining 150,000 to think like employees of a scrappy little company that just wants to serve a good cup of coffee. Starbucks’ coffee buyers, for example, had chosen only varieties of beans that were produced in large enough quantities to supply all Starbucks stores. They rejected coffees made in small batches, which artisanal coffeehouses specialize in. Mr. Schultz changed that. “We’re not one size fits all.” Even as Mr. Schultz tries to manage more like a start-up founder, he has given in to traditional big-company ideas that he had previously resisted. Last year, Starbucks embraced customer research surveys and ran its first major advertising campaign. Entrepreneurs, more than traditional chief executives, “keep shaking things up and pulling the stakes out of the tent because they like the mud and the chaos of reinventing, and Howard has a bit of that in him,” said Warren Bennis, founder of the Leadership Institute at the University of Southern California, who has known Mr. Schultz since the mid-1990s. But he has also noticed that Mr. Schultz has developed “more gravitas, more depth.” Mr. Bennis added, “I don’t think he’s going to become the classic entrepreneur who can invent but doesn’t manage.” Mr. Schultz brought Cliff Burrows, who was managing stores abroad, back to Seattle to run American operations. One of the first discoveries he made talking to customers seemed basic, but had been lost in Starbucks’ push to open stores. Coffee drinkers in the Sun Belt, it turns out, prefer cold drinks, while those in the Northeast generally like drip coffee and those in the Pacific Northwest drink more espresso. Yet the executives in charge of regions of the country were divided along time zones and out of touch with what different customers wanted. Mr. Burrows shifted the geographic divisions. “All of a sudden you start to see it’s not a numbers game — it’s about consumers influenced by where they live,” he said. Mr. Schultz also recruited Arthur Rubinfeld, who had left the company in 2002, to return as president of global development in charge of choosing sites and designing stores. To shed the sameness, Mr. Rubinfeld is trying to give each store a feeling of “local-ness,” he said, reflecting the neighborhood and its architectural history. At the University Village store in Seattle, for example, there is a long communal table hewn from an ash tree that fell in the Wallingford neighborhood of Seattle, and it is lined with electrical outlets because at night it is filled with students studying. At the Starbucks stores in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, bunches of wildflowers sit in mismatched jugs on tables found in antique shops. Beans are ground to order and poured through a cone like those used in artisanal coffeehouses. On the outdoor patio, coffee grounds are piled in a bucket with a handwritten sign encouraging neighbors to take them for composting in their gardens. One customer, Joshua Covell, was visiting from San Francisco, where he said he never went to Starbucks. “All the Starbucks have that cookie-cutter feel,” he said. “It’s natural not to like corporate giants, but you can see they’re trying.” But Sylvia Lee, a doctor who lives in the neighborhood, said she was excited when she saw the shop was opening — until she discovered it was owned by Starbucks. “No one wants to be the duped customers won over,” she said. For Starbucks, the stores are partly learning laboratories. Some of the things they sell, like small-batch beans and brewed-to-order cups of coffee, will appear in other stores. But they are also venues for Mr. Schultz to scratch his start-up founder’s itch. He said he planned to open similar stores in other cities, complete with local artists’ work and salvaged furniture. “I think we’ll be able to scale this in a similar fashion at a lower cost.” | Starbucks Corp;Coffeehouses;Company Reports |
ny0127382 | [
"sports"
] | 2012/01/26 | The Tigers’ Confounding Royalty Payment to Prince Fielder — Leading Off | Just about the same time Prince Fielder’s gargantuan, nine-year, $214 million contract agreement with the Detroit Tigers set baseball jaws dropping on Tuesday — the wows stemming from how long the contract is, the eye-popping total and that it was the Detroit Tigers shelling it out — it got its whiff of irony by arriving on exactly the same day “Moneyball” was nominated for the Oscar for Best Picture. Yes, again baseball decided the glories of overspending are more attractive than team/movie scenarios that make penny-pinching and Scott Hatteberg a star. Tigers owner Mike Ilitch joined the “go big or go home” trend in a dramatic way, but as Bob Wojnowski writes in The Detroit News , none of this should surprised us anymore. It is easy to argue this is just pure insanity, particularly because as Tim Brown points out on Yahoo.com , the usual money machines in New York and Boston weren’t even driving up the bidding this year. So Ken Rosenthal of Foxsports.com is among those flabbergasted by the irrationality of it. But this was all about Ilitch wanting a World Series ring, so he went big: big player, bigger contract, gigantic risk, writes Mitch Albom in The Detroit Free Press . It came only days after General Manager Dave Dombrowski had declared Fielder a poor fit for the team, but he apparently found a very large shoehorn in short order, writes Danny Knobler on CBSSports.com , to make room for the one-two punch of Fielder and Miguel Cabrera. The payday seemed to bail agent Scott Boras out of a jam, writes Jerry Crasnick on ESPN.com , because jackpot time seemed to be slipping away. The deal brings Fielder back to the city where his dad Cecil became a star, which means a new spotlight will shine on their estrangement. Cecil Fielder did say in a radio interview on Tuesday that the two are working on repairing their relationship, but it is likely to create many uncomfortable moments along with the memories of a young Prince hitting batting practice homers with his dad at Tiger Stadium. And the sad thing about baseball’s richest-take-all system is, spending usually works. The Tigers now have 8/1 odds of winning the World Series , according to Las Vegas bookmakers. “Moneyball” has only 30/1 odds of winning Best Picture . Beyond baseball’s silly season news, it was hard not to feel a different kind of awe at the scene in State College, Pa., where thousands of people came to say their last goodbyes to Joe Paterno. It included his large family and larger family of ex-players, writes Ivan Maisel on ESPN.com , who turned the trip to Penn State into a sort of pilgrimage. SI.com’s Joe Posnanski writes that Paterno did not spend his last days broken-hearted, as many suspect. He did die as the last of his coaching generation, although Tim Keown of ESPN.com writes that if we learned anything from Paterno’s downfall, it’s that the reality of that generation is nowhere near its mythical image. The major sporting event progressing in our pre- Super Bowl lull is tennis’s Australian Open, where Andy Murray showed enough grit to reach the semifinals again, writes Ravi Ubha on ESPN.com . Bad news: he gets to play Novak Djokovic in the semifinals, frequently where Murray’s Grand Slam dreams go to die. The other semifinal will pit old rivals Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer , whose rivalry has a new twist after some pre-tournament sniping, writes Bruce Jenkins on SI.com . Petra Kvitova and Maria Sharapova advanced to the semifinals with victories early Wednesday, which has highlighted the new joy Sharapova seems to have for the sport, writes Richard Evans on Foxsports.com . Joy will not be lacking for Prince Fielder or for Detroit. No, the only question there is, was it worth the price? Follow Leading Off on Twitter: twitter.com/zinsernyt | Baseball;Australian Open (Tennis);Tennis;Super Bowl;Detroit Tigers;Pennsylvania State University;Fielder Prince;Federer Roger;Nadal Rafael;Ilitch Mike |
ny0062164 | [
"us"
] | 2014/01/17 | Utah: Joint Tax Returns for Some Gay Couples | Same-sex couples married during a brief period when gay marriage was allowed in Utah can jointly file state taxes, the State Tax Commission said Thursday. Utah briefly allowed same-sex marriages when a federal district judge ruled on Dec. 20 that a state ban on gay marriage was unconstitutional. His ruling was stayed by the United States Supreme Court while the state appeals but not before about 1,400 gay couples married. To file joint state taxes, couples must have wed before the end of the tax year, the commission said, pointing out that the Supreme Court had not issued its stay before the end of 2013. | Same-Sex Marriage,Gay Marriage;Tax;Homosexuality;Utah;Marriage;Income tax |
ny0119530 | [
"sports",
"olympics"
] | 2012/07/29 | Lochte Takes Gold in 400 Medley | LONDON — At the end of the 400-meter individual medley Saturday night, Michael Phelps , the world’s most celebrated swimmer, hopped out of the pool before anyone else. It was his only first of the night. After winning every Olympic event he entered in 2008 for a record eight gold medals, Phelps, a 16-time medalist, failed to win a medal of any kind in the opening event of his fourth and final Summer Games. He finished fourth, and looked listless doing so. He never led in a race that his American rival Ryan Lochte won by nearly four seconds — with the same seeming ease as Phelps four years ago at the Beijing Games. Lochte, who was 10 seconds slower than Phelps in the 400 I.M. in 2004 and four seconds behind him in Beijing, said, “Tell you what, it was weird not having Michael with me on the medal stand.” He added, “Whenever Michael swims, he’s always on the medal stand, no matter what.” It was a shocking development for Phelps, whose stranglehold on so many events allowed him to emerge from a relatively niche sport into a global marketing presence. He created so much distance between himself and the rest of the world over the last eight years that everyone was inspired — no, forced — to work harder and dream bigger to try to bridge the gap. No one has chased Phelps more doggedly than Lochte, who, after losing to him in both individual medleys in Beijing, spent the next four years decreasing his sugar and fat intake and just as drastically increasing his mileage in the pool and his muscle. As Lochte moved to catch and pass Phelps, Phelps hardly committed to intense training in the two years after his performance in Beijing. Such a career turn was not only predictable but also the main argument people made in trying to persuade him to retire after his historic romp in 2008. What other mountain could Phelps find the motivation to climb? He had the hubris to believe that he could freeze the clock, especially in the 400 I.M., an event in which he had not competed in an international final since Beijing. The events that Phelps swims are among the hardest, and with every passing year, his body’s rebellion grew harder to ignore. He has spoken of not recovering as well between sets, workouts, seasons. Mark Spitz was 22 when he retired, and it was not coincidence that many of the top swimmers throughout history left the sport well before they approached their 30s. It is hard physically, mentally and emotionally to remain buoyant. Phelps’s London Games debut — the first of seven events he is expected to compete in here — was his worst showing in an Olympic final since a fifth-place finish in the 200 butterfly at the Sydney Games in 2000. He was 15 years old then, and so callow he forgot to tie his suit before one of his races. When Phelps spoke last week of wanting to recapture his teenage self from those Games, he meant the fun, not the finish. Phelps, 27, entered Saturday night’s final at the London Aquatics Centre as the most seasoned competitor in the history of the event. The owner of the world record since August 2002, he was the two-time defending Olympic champion. With a victory, Phelps would have become the first male swimmer to win an event in three consecutive Olympics. But he is not out of chances. He is also the two-time defending champion in the 200-meter individual medley — a race in which he will again face Lochte — as well as the 100-meter butterfly and the 200-meter butterfly. From the opening butterfly leg on Saturday, Phelps could not keep pace with Lochte, his decade-long rival, an ominous sign given that Phelps is the fastest butterfly swimmer in history. And in the final 100 he failed to catch two other swimmers: Thiago Pereira, who finished second to give Brazil its first medal in the event since 1984, and Kosuke Hagino, the top qualifier for the final, who was trying to become Japan’s first Olympic champion in the event. That Phelps lost to athletes from countries with no recent history of success in the event is further evidence of his ripple effect. On his way to becoming the greatest swimmer ever, Phelps became the current that has carried all swimmers further than they once believed possible. Phelps’s performance blindsided his longtime coach, Bob Bowman, who did not see it coming even after Phelps barely made the final in eighth place, with a swim that was over four seconds slower than his preliminary result in Beijing. “I expected in the 4:06, 4:07 range,” Bowman said of Phelps, who was clocked in 4 minutes 9.28 seconds, well off the 4:03.84 he recorded in the 2008 Olympic final. Lochte’s winning time was 4:05.18, a personal best. After pulling himself out of the water, Phelps walked across the deck without looking back. “It’s frustrating,” he said during a short interview with reporters. “I was under 4:10 twice in the last month and a half.” He added: “It’s pretty upsetting. I think the biggest thing now is trying to get past this and move forward.” When the results on the scoreboard became final, Lochte did not beat his breast, let loose a primal scream or raise his arms like a heavyweight after delivering the knockout punch. “I think I’m in kind of shock,” he said. Ninety minutes later, the wonder had not been wiped from his face. He had taken off the white baseball cap that he put on immediately after his race. Lochte, who turns 28 on Friday, said it was an early birthday gift from his younger brother Devon. Some people were quick to read into Phelps’s failure to congratulate Lochte in the water or on the deck and quicker to point out that he never mentioned Lochte’s victory in his postrace comments. If Phelps was being less than gracious, Lochte was not aware of it. He said Phelps approached him in the warm-down area and congratulated him on keeping alive the United States’ winning streak in the event. The last time a non-American won the men’s 400 individual medley was 1992, when Lochte was turning 8. “A lot of people say Michael is inhuman,” Lochte said. “But you know what? He’s just like all of us. He just trains harder, and he knows how to win. That’s what you have to learn.” | Olympic Games (2012);Phelps Michael;Lochte Ryan;Swimming;United States |
ny0212625 | [
"business",
"mutfund"
] | 2017/01/13 | The Bond Market Is Shifting, So Steady Yourself | The forces that rejuvenated the stock market late last year have changed the profile of the fixed-income market. Heading into the fourth quarter, for example, funds that invest in long-term government debt had been up more than 13 percent for the year as investors favored relatively safe bets on a sluggish economy. But as market interest rates shot up on hopes of accelerating growth and fiscal stimulus from the incoming administration of Donald J. Trump — hopes that contributed to the big rally in stocks — long-term government bond funds fell by double digits in the final three months of the year and finished 2016 up just 1 percent. The Vanguard Long-Term Government Bond E.T.F., for instance, fell nearly 12 percent in the final three months of 2016 and finished the year up only 1.2 percent for the year. At the same time, investor appetite for lower-quality bonds has been on the rise, with high-yield bonds up nearly 2 percent in the fourth quarter. The SPDR Bloomberg Barclays High Yield Bond E.T.F. has gained nearly 2 percent since Dec. 1 and returned 14.4 percent in 2016. “In one fell swoop, the market was recalibrated,” said Carl P. Kaufman, managing director for fixed-income strategy at Osterweis Capital Management. “The question is: Does it continue?” Mr. Kaufman said that investors aren’t likely to find that out until at least the first few months of the Trump presidency. But he said he thought “the markets are going to take a breather and see what happens until then.” In the meantime, market strategists warn investors not to dramatically overhaul their core fixed-income strategy. To be sure, many investors believe that the smartest strategy in 2017 is not to fight the Federal Reserve or fiscal stimulus. With the Fed indicating that there could be three modest rate increases in 2017, after the central bank’s quarter-point rise in December, investors are generally being advised to “shorten up” their bond portfolios by putting new money to work in short-term debt that will lose less value than long-dated bonds when market rates rise. Even if the Fed is overestimating the number of rate increases to come — as policy makers did in 2016, when they entered the year forecasting four rate increases but only delivered one — “you’re not being paid a lot to extend out” in terms of maturities, said Jeff Klingelhofer, a portfolio manager and managing director at Thornburg Investment Management. At the same time, the Trump administration’s calls to lower household and corporate tax rates and to increase spending on infrastructure projects are expected to energize growth — or at the least breathe some new life into an aging economic recovery that’s been unfolding for nearly eight years. And these stimulative policies are generally viewed as a sign that it’s safe to bet on institutions with less-than-pristine credit. But within this framework, fixed-income strategists advise investors to err on the side of caution. “The markets have mostly overreacted at this point,” Mr. Klingelhofer said. “Most investors would agree that we’re in the later stages of this recovery — maybe we’re in the seventh inning, maybe the eighth, but we’re not in the second inning when it comes to growth.” Therefore, he said, even if investors want to add to their high-yield exposure, the prudent move may be to focus on the higher-quality end of the junk bond spectrum — for instance with a bond rated BB or B. Andrew C. McCormick, head of T. Rowe Price’s United States taxable bond team, said that with the Fed poised to continue lifting short-term rates, there may be a more attractive way to gain exposure to the noninvestment grade market: bank loan securities with interest rates that float with market rates. Bank loan funds post gains when rates are on the rise, but this is particularly true now that the Fed’s December increase has pushed the three-month London Interbank Offered Rate, or Libor, up to 1 percent. While rates on bank loan securities generally float with the market, in many cases that only happens if Libor is at or above 1 percent. With Libor at that threshold, this form of noninvestment grade debt should have more appeal. Moreover, the typical bank loan fund has about one-tenth the exposure to the energy sector as high-yield bond funds do. While energy prices have recently stabilized, plummeting prices in 2015 led to a jump in the default rate for high-yield debt early last year. Bank loans also sport ultrashort maturities. The average bank loan fund has a duration of less than 0.4 year, implying that if market rates were to rise by 1 percentage point, these funds would fall less than 0.4 percent in value. By contrast, the average duration of a junk bond fund is 3.6 years. “You’re taking virtually no duration risk in bank loans,” says Kathy A. Jones, chief fixed-income strategist for the Schwab Center for Financial Research. Meanwhile, she adds, bank loan debt hasn’t had the run-up that high-yield bonds have enjoyed. Kate Warne, an investment strategist with the brokerage Edward Jones, said investors shouldn’t assume too much when it comes to the bond market. For example, while it may seem certain that rates are poised to rise, “the Fed has overestimated the number of rate hikes they expect pretty consistently,” she said. Moreover, with bond yields generally higher in the United States than overseas, foreign money will continue to pour into domestic bonds, which should keep a lid on how high rates can rise. This is an argument for sticking with a traditional strategy like a bond ladder, she said, in which investors divide their fixed-income stake into bonds maturing in routine intervals to mitigate interest rate risks. Rather than abandoning the laddered approach by selling longer-dated bonds, investors may choose to add to their cash stake to take advantage of rising rates sooner. “But don’t ignore intermediate- and long-term bonds,” she said. Ms. Jones of Charles Schwab said that investors may think they know what’s to come in the economy or from the Trump administration in 2017, “but in reality, we are operating under a cloud of uncertainty. Everyone may be expecting taxes to be cut or counting on infrastructure spending, but we simply don’t know what the specific policy prescriptions will be,” she said. | Stocks,Bonds;Government bond;Debt;Interest rate |
ny0247384 | [
"world",
"africa"
] | 2011/05/27 | Tunisia: A Call to Delay Election | Tunisia’s electoral commission said Thursday that it wanted the first national election since the toppling of the country’s longtime strongman delayed for three months. The commission proposed holding the vote for a constituent assembly on Oct. 16 instead of in July to allow organizers more time. The electoral commission pointed to “numerous shortcomings and deficiencies” in the organization of the election. It noted in particular that about 3 million Tunisians are not included in the electoral database and that hundreds of thousands others do not have valid identity cards. The constituent assembly’s main job will be to write a new constitution. It was not clear whether the commission’s decision was final or if it could be overruled by the interim government, which will examine the issue Tuesday. Earlier this week, the government recommended keeping the initial date. Those in favor of holding the election in July argued that an earlier vote would help bring political stability to the country. | Tunisia;Elections;Middle East and North Africa Unrest (2010- ) |
ny0026582 | [
"sports",
"football"
] | 2013/01/02 | Was Bills-Oilers Game in 1993 Greatest Rally, or Biggest Fade? | It seemed like a logical decision at the time. It was a cold, windy day at Rich Stadium in suburban Buffalo in 1993, and the hometown Bills were behind, 35-3, in the second half of a first-round playoff game against the Houston Oilers. With the outcome seemingly no longer in question and the weather rather uninviting, many fans simply chose to go home. The score was not the lone reason for pessimism. The Bills were playing without Jim Kelly, their franchise quarterback; linebacker Cornelius Bennett, the N.F.L.’s defensive player of the year; and running back Thurman Thomas, the offensive player of the year, who injured his hip early in the third quarter. And the Oilers had crushed Buffalo, 27-3, the week before. “I almost never, ever, ever give up, but at that point, I kind of did give up,” said Barb Beebe, who was at the game and is the mother of Don Beebe, then a receiver for Buffalo. But just as it looked as if all hope was lost, the Bills proceeded to mount the largest comeback in N.F.L. history, a victory that two decades later — Thursday will mark the game’s 20th anniversary — still resonates in western New York. Some of the fans who left early did not realize until much later that the Bills came back to win. Others heard it unfold on the radio. The game did not sell out, so it was not televised locally. The Bills did not allow fans who left the game to re-enter the stadium. The only way for those who left to get back into the stadium was to climb over an imposing fence. Many did just that until late into the game, when the team began to allow fans with ticket stubs back in the stadium. Frank Reich, who was filling in for Kelly, said that when the Bills were facing the seemingly insurmountable deficit, a teammate reminded him that when Reich was in college, he led Maryland back from 31 points down to beat Miami. “I knew it could be done, but I don’t think anyone was thinking about winning the game at that point,” Reich said recently. “It was about being a professional and not getting embarrassed.” The improbable comeback was propelled by two botched kicks, a shanked punt, a bobbled snap and a noncall by the officials. A short kickoff set up a 50-yard scoring drive by Buffalo that cut the lead to 35-10. Then Bills kicker Steve Christie recovered his own kickoff — Marv Levy, then Buffalo’s coach, still insists the play was a flub and not a planned onside kick. Three plays later, Beebe caught a 38-yard touchdown pass on first down to make it 35-17. Replays show that he stepped out of bounds before making the catch. Barb Beebe, who insists her son never stepped out of bounds, said that was the point when she regained hope. Cris Dishman, who was a cornerback for Houston, still says the noncall cost the Oilers the game. “Why didn’t someone think of instant replay sooner?” he said. “Then that greatest comeback never would have happened.” Reich threw three touchdown passes in seven minutes against the N.F.L.’s third-best pass defense to cut the deficit to 35-31. He then threw another touchdown pass to Andre Reed for the third time to give Buffalo a 38-35 lead. The Oilers soon had a chance to tie, but holder Greg Montgomery bobbled the snap to botch a 31-yard field-goal attempt. Warren Moon drove the Oilers to the Bills’ 9 in the waning moments of regulation, and Houston kicked a field goal with 12 seconds left to send the game to overtime. The Oilers got the ball first, but Nate Odomes picked off Moon’s pass at Houston’s 37, leading to a Christie field goal that gave the Bills a 41-38 win. Image A field goal in overtime sent the Bills, and fans, into a frenzy with a 41-38 win against the Oilers. Credit Bill Sikes/Associated Press The Bills poured onto the field in celebration, and the fans who stayed — or returned — hugged and kissed one another, cried tears of joy and sang “Shout,” the team’s theme song, for the seventh and final time in the game. At the postgame news conference, Reich recited lyrics to a Christian song that he said inspired him before taking questions. Dishman was more direct. “It was the biggest choke in history,” he told reporters. “Everyone on the team, everyone in the organization choked today.” Dishman, now an assistant secondary coach with the San Diego Chargers, has not changed his opinion. “I stick with that statement because that’s what happened,” he said recently. “We didn’t finish the game.” Dishman said that the Oilers lost the game more than the Bills won it, but one of his former teammates, Don Maggs, an offensive lineman who is now an analyst at Progressive Insurance, did not agree. “The Bills earned it,” he said, refusing to cite bad calls or bad luck for the loss. In Buffalo and elsewhere around the country, the game came to be known as “The Comeback,” but in Houston, it is still referred to as “The Choke.” The Oilers fired the defensive coordinator Jim Eddy and the defensive backs coach Pat Thomas the day after the game, and a local radio station held a funeral for the team, complete with coffins and servers from Hooters as pallbearers. Bills fans were convinced that the team’s luck had changed, but after road victories against the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Miami Dolphins, they were routed by the Dallas Cowboys, 52-17, in Super Bowl XXVII and again the next year. The Oilers, who made the playoffs seven years in a row, started the next season 1-4 but won 11 straight before losing in the first round of the playoffs for the fourth time in five years. The franchise moved to Tennessee in 1997, and Rich Lord, a longtime host at Sports Radio 610 in Houston, said he believed that “The Choke” — along with other Oilers playoff failures — paved the way for the team’s departure. Lord said that the Oilers’ playoff collapses lingered in the city’s collective psyche, and that even now, Texans fans expected their team to come up short at this time of year. Two years after the Oilers moved, the franchises again met in the playoffs. This time, the Bills were the hard-luck losers, going down to the Tennessee Titans on a disputed kickoff lateral play in the final seconds of a game now called the Music City Miracle. The Bills have not been back to the playoffs since. The Bills’ comeback was voted the fifth-most memorable game in league history in an NFL Films poll in 2000, and ESPN in 2004 rated it the third-biggest collapse in sports history. Maggs, who said he hoped another team would break the comeback record, also acknowledged it was a game for the ages. “They came back from 32 points down with Kelly out,” he said. “You have to admit, it’s one of the greatest games in history — for the Bills, but not for us.” Steve Tasker, a standout special-teams player for the Bills who is now an analyst for CBS, called “The Comeback” part of the heritage of western New York, a game that proved once and for all that leaving early was never a good idea. “It was the ultimate it’s-not-over-till-it’s-over cliché,” he said. | Football;Bills;Don Beebe;Frank Reich;Nate Odomes;Warren Moon;Houston Oilers |
ny0274219 | [
"us"
] | 2016/02/05 | D.C. Crime Bill Would Pay People to Avoid Committing Crimes | Avoid criminal activity for a chance to earn $9,000? It’s a choice that some Washington residents may be able to make if lawmakers approve new legislation aimed at changing the city’s approach to crime prevention. Under the proposal, modeled on a similar effort in Richmond, Calif., a new office would be created to identify individuals “who pose a high risk of participating in, or being a victim of, violent criminal activity.” The legislation seeks funding to cover stipends for about 50 individuals a year, who would be paid to follow a program “involving life planning, trauma informed therapy, and mentorship.” The plan is part of sweeping anti-crime legislation — the Neighborhood Engagement Achieves Results Amendment Act of 2016 — that won unanimous approval by the District Council on Tuesday. It will face a final vote on March 1, before heading to the mayor and Congress. The bill would also establish an office tasked with developing a public health strategy to address violence, a crime-prevention program focused on people in need of assistance and additional police training and reforms. “The bill that we passed is a comprehensive crime bill that is seeking to target the root causes of crime,” said Kenyan R. McDuffie, the District Council member who introduced the legislation, in a statement on his website. The stipend program, he noted, is just one component of that. DeVone L. Boggan, who created and runs the Richmond program, has credited it with causing a sharp drop in firearm-related murders in the San Francisco Bay Area city since it was initiated in 2010. The program has graduated 68 fellows, with 24 others currently enrolled. The participants earn incremental payments up to $9,000 as they complete a “life map,” an action plan created with the help of a city employee. Image DeVone L. Boggan, left, the director of an anti-crime program in Richmond, Calif., with DeVondre Woodards, a fellow of the program, and the Representative George Miller, Democrat of California, in 2013. Credit Photo Courtesy of DeVone L. Boggan Mr. Boggan pointed out, however, that the most popular incentive is not the money. It’s the trips, he said. Successful participants are eligible for “horizon-building educational excursions” that could include a visit to a college campus in the state, or even traveling to London, Paris or South Africa. The difference between who gets to go where is critical. Those who take trips outside California, Mr. Boggan said, have to be willing to travel with a mortal enemy. “And oftentimes,” he said, “what they find out through the experience is that they actually like the guys that they’ve been trying to kill better than the guys they’ve been hanging out with.” The Washington legislation is intended to lay the groundwork for a similar program, Mr. McDuffie said, but the details of how it will operate will be left to a director hired to run the office. The bill did not specify how large the individual stipends would be, but a city assessment of the program’s cost pegged them at $9,000 a year. How the city handles the funding of the stipends — right now, the plan is to set aside public money for the program — could represent a touchy issue with potential critics of handing out taxpayer money. The district’s chief financial officer, Jeffrey S. DeWitt, has raised questions about the viability of the overall crime-prevention bill, estimating its cost over four years at $25.6 million, a sum he said in a filing that the city cannot currently afford. Mr. McDuffie said he planned to go through the district’s 2016 budget “with a fine-toothed comb” to make sure the funds already allocated to crime-prevention efforts are being spent in the most effective way. Donations, which Richmond has relied on entirely to fund its stipends, are not outlined in the Washington program, and Mr. McDuffie said any fund-raising efforts would be at the discretion of the program’s director. | Washington DC;Legislation;Crime;Kenyan McDuffie;Richmond CA;DeVone L. Boggan |
ny0050735 | [
"nyregion"
] | 2014/10/19 | Events in New Jersey for Oct. 19-25, 2014 | A guide to cultural and recreational events in New Jersey. Items for the calendar should be sent at least three weeks in advance to [email protected]. Comedy MORRISTOWN Mayo Performing Arts Center Bill Cosby. Oct. 19 at 3 and 7 p.m. $59 to $109. Mayo Performing Arts Center, 100 South Street. 973-539-8008; mayoarts.org. RED BANK Count Basie Theater Amy Schumer. Oct. 24 at 7:30 p.m. $29.50 to $79.50. Count Basie Theater, 99 Monmouth Street. 732-842-9000; countbasietheatre.org. Film CAPE MAY East Lynne Theater Company, the First Presbyterian Church of Cape May Classic short silent films. Live organ accompaniment by Wayne Zimmerman. Oct. 19 at 8 p.m. $10 and 15. East Lynne Theater Company, the First Presbyterian Church of Cape May, 500 Hughes Street. eastlynnetheater.org; 609-884-5898. NORTH BRUNSWICK Regal Cinema Commerce Center Rutgers Jewish Film Festival, with international films, American premieres, and appearances by filmmakers and scholars. Oct. 29 through Nov. 9. Regal Cinema Commerce Center, 2399 Route 1 South. 848-932-4166; bildnercenter.rutgers.edu. RIDGEWOOD Ridgewood Public Library 12th Annual Reel Voices Film Festival, with “Point and Shoot,” a documentary, and the subject of the film, Matthew VanDyke. Oct. 24 at 7:30 p.m. $5. Ridgewood Public Library, 125 North Maple Avenue. 201-670-5600, ext. 114; ridgewoodlibrary.org. For Children CAMDEN Adventure Aquarium “Hippo Haven,” with Button and Genny, Nile hippos. Continuing. $18.95 and $25.95; children under 2, free. Adventure Aquarium, 1 Riverside Drive. adventureaquarium.com; 856-365-3300. Music and Dance BASKING RIDGE Ridge Performing Arts Center “Rigoletto,” a fully-staged production of Verdi’s opera by the MidAtlantic Opera, conducted by Jason C. Tramm. Oct. 26 at 5 p.m. $35 and $55. Ridge Performing Arts Center, 268 South Finley Avenue. 973-216-7282; midatlanticopera.org. EAST BRUNSWICK East Brunswick Public Library José Obando Salsa Trio, musical performance. Oct. 19, 2 to 4 p.m. Free. East Brunswick Public Library, 2 Civic Center Drive. 732-390-6772; ebpl.org. LAMBERTVILLE Saint Andrew Episcopal Church Teresa Walters, pianist, performs works by Liszt, Beethoven, Chopin and Schumann. standrewslambertville.org. Oct. 25 at 7:30 p.m. $20 to $40. Saint Andrew Episcopal Church, 50 York Street. 609-397-2425; standrewslambertville.org. MONTCLAIR Alexander Kasser Theater “Apropos,” performed by the Symptoms, a Hungarian contemporary dance company. Through Oct. 19. $20. Alexander Kasser Theater, 1 Normal Avenue. peakperfs.org, 973-655-5112. MONTCLAIR Trumpets Jazz Club Diane Moser’s Composers Big Band Annual Peace Concert: Tribute to Daniel Pearl World Music Days, with Lisa Sokolov and Caleb Rumley. Oct. 22, at 8 and 10 p.m. $15. Trumpets Jazz Club, 6 Depot Square. 973-744-2600; trumpetsjazz.com. MORRISTOWN Morristown United Methodist Church The Hanover Wind Symphony. Oct. 25 at 7:30 p.m. $15 and $20. Morristown United Methodist Church, 50 S. Park Place. morristownumc.com; 973-538-2132. NEW BRUNSWICK State Theater Jessica Lang Dance, contemporary ballet. Oct. 23 at 8 p.m. $27 to $57. George Benson, jazz. Oct. 24 at 8 p.m. $35 to $95. State Theater, 15 Livingston Avenue. statetheatrenj.org; 732-246-7469. PATERSON Ivanhoe Wheelhouse Zinc Nine Psychedelic at musiXplore, combining unpredictable improvisation with music. Oct. 19 at 1 p.m. $7 suggested donation. Ivanhoe Wheelhouse, 4 Spruce Street. 201-666-1881; musixplore.org. PRINCETON Richardson Auditorium The Richardson Chamber Players present “Russian Treasures,” with works by Rachmaninoff, Medtner and others. Oct. 19, 3 to 5 p.m. $5 and $15. Richardson Auditorium, in Alexander Hall on the Princeton University campus. 609-258-9220; princetonuniversityconcerts.org. RED BANK Count Basie Theater Preservation Hall Jazz Band with Allen Toussaint. Oct. 19 at 7:30 p.m. $19.50 to $59.50. Count Basie Theater, 99 Monmouth Street. 732-842-9000; countbasietheatre.org. RINGWOOD Ringwood Public Library Mario Prisuelos, classical pianist from Madrid. Oct. 26 at 2 p.m. Free. Ringwood Public Library, 30 Cannici Drive. ringwoodlibrary.org; 973-962-6256. SUMMIT Unitarian Church in Summit Alan Broadbent, jazz pianist, plays with the bassist Harvie S and the drummer Mark McLean at Afternoon Music. Oct. 26 at 4 p.m. $20 and $25; students free. Unitarian Church in Summit, 4 Waldron Avenue. ucsummit.org; 908-273-2899. WESTFIELD Presbyterian Church New Jersey Festival Orchestra, led by David Wroe, presents “Flesh and the Devil,” a 1926 classic movie starring Greta Garbo and John Gilbert, with live orchestral score by Carl Davies and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7. Preconcert talk by Dr. Barbara Thomson at 6.15 p.m. Nov. 1 at 7 p.m. $13 to $75. Presbyterian Church, 140 Mountain Avenue. 908-232-9400; njfestivalorchestra.org. Outdoors PRINCETON Terhune Orchards Fall Harvest Festival, with apple and pumpkin picking, wagon rides, corn maze, adventure barn, live music and more. Weekends through Nov. 2. $5. Terhune Orchards, 330 Cold Soil Road. 609-924-2310; terhuneorchards.com. Spoken Word EAST ORANGE East Orange Public Library October Cultural Café presents, Abiodun Oyewole, poet, teacher and founding member of The Last Poets, who will read from his new book of poetry, “Branches of the Tree of Life.” Oct. 23, 6 to 8:30 p.m. East Orange Public Library, 21 South Arlington Avenue. 973-266-7049; eopl.org . EWING College of New Jersey A Visual Voyage: Opening Lecture: Dr. Nick Clark, founding director of the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, presents a lecture titled “Invention and Appropriation in 20th-century Picture Book Art.” Oct. 22 at 4 p.m. Free. College of New Jersey, 2000 Pennington Road, AIMM Building, Room 125. 609-771-2198; tcnjartgallery.pages.tcnj.edu. MADISON Museum of Early Trades and Crafts “Battles of Trenton and Princeton” from the vantage point of the New Jersey militiaman. Oct. 19, 1 to 3 p.m. $3 and $7. Museum of Early Trades and Crafts, 9 Main Street. 973-377-2982; metc.org. NEWARK New Jersey Performing Arts Center Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, with readings, discussions and more. Oct. 23 through 26. $20 to $40 for day passes. New Jersey Performing Arts Center, 1 Center Street. njpac.org; 888-466-5722. Theater BLOOMFIELD Robert Van Fossan Theater, Westminster Arts Center “She Loves Me,” a musical in concert form, with music by Jerry Bock, lyrics by Sheldon Harnick and a book by Joe Masteroff. Oct. 24 through 26. $18 to $25. Robert Van Fossan Theater, Westminster Arts Center, corner of Franklin and Fremont Streets. 973-566-9255: 4thwalltheatre.org. CAMDEN South Camden Theater Company, Waterfront South Theater “Broken Glass,” Arthur Miller’s study of a struggling marriage in 1930s New York. Through Oct. 26. $20. South Camden Theater Company, Waterfront South Theater, 400 Jasper Street. 866-811-4111; southcamdentheatre.org. CAPE MAY Cape May Stage, the Robert Shackleton Playhouse"Other Desert Cities,” by Jon Robin Baitz. Through Oct. 31. $15 to $35. Cape May Stage, the Robert Shackleton Playhouse, 405 Lafayette Street. capemaystage.com; 609-770-8311. FREEHOLD Center Playhouse “Bus Stop,” comedic drama by William Inge. Through Nov. 9. $20 and $25. Center Playhouse, 35 South Street. 732-462-9093; centerplayers.org. HOBOKEN Edge Lofts “Cyrano,” an adaptation by Jo Roets of “Cyrano de Bergerac,” by Edmond Rostand, presented by the Mile Square Theater. Through Oct. 26. $12 and $22. Edge Lofts, 1405 Clinton Street. 201-683-7014; milesquaretheatre.org. LONG BRANCH New Jersey Repertory Company, Lumia Theater “Angels and Ministers of Grace,” drama by Elaine Smith. Oct. 23 through Nov. 23. $35 to $60. New Jersey Repertory Company, Lumia Theater, 179 Broadway. 732-229-3166; njrep.org. MAPLEWOOD Burgdorff Cultural Center “P.S. 69: A Teacher Grows in Brooklyn,” by Susan Jeremy and Mary Fulham. Oct. 19 at 2 p.m. $15 and $30. The Theater Project, Burgdorff Cultural Center, 10 Duran Road. 908-809-8865; thetheaterproject.org . METUCHEN Forum Theater “Blithe Spirit,” comedy by Noël Coward. Oct. 30 through Nov. 2. $10 to $20. Forum Theater, 314 Main Street. 908-930-3210; DragonflyArtsNJ.com. MIDDLETOWN Navesink Library Theater “Brighton Beach Memoirs,” by Neil Simon. Through Nov. 2. $18; students and seniors, $15. Navesink Library Theater, Sears and Monmouth Avenues. 732-291-9211; monmouthplayers.org. MILLBURN Paper Mill Playhouse “Can-Can,” musical by Cole Porter. Through Oct. 26. $36 to $91. Paper Mill Playhouse, 22 Brookside Drive. 973-376-4343; papermill.org. MORRIS TOWNSHIP Bickford Theater “Sophie Tucker: Last of the Red Hot Mamas,” by Richard Hopkins, Jack Fournier and Kathy Halenda, and starring Gwendolyn F. Jones. Through Oct. 19. $20 to $45. Bickford Theater, 6 Normandy Heights Road. morrismuseum.org; 973-971-3706. NEW BRUNSWICK Crossroads Theater “Letters From Zora: In Her Own Words,” a one-woman show with Vanessa Bell Calloway about the triumphs and struggles of Zora Neale Hurston. Through Oct. 26. $35 to $55. Crossroads Theater, 7 Livingston Avenue. 732-545-8100; crossroadstheatrecompany.org. NEW BRUNSWICK George Street Playhouse “Outside Mullingar,” romantic comedy by John Patrick Shanley. Through Nov. 2. George Street Playhouse, 9 Livingston Avenue. 732-246-7717; gsponline.org. NEWARK Victoria Theater, New Jersey Performing Arts Center “Golda’s Balcony,” drama by William Gibson, starring Tovah Feldshuh as Golda Meir. Through Oct. 19. $59 to $79. Victoria Theater, New Jersey Performing Arts Center, 1 Center Street. 888-466-5722; njpac.org. SUMMIT Dreamcatcher Repertory Theater at Oakes Center “100 Years,” comedy by Richard Dresser. Through Oct. 19. $30 and $35. Dreamcatcher Repertory Theater at Oakes Center, 120 Morris Avenue. dreamcatcherrep.org; 908-514-9654. TRENTON Mill Hill Playhouse, Passage Theater Company “Little Rock,” drama based on the story of the Little Rock Nine. Through Oct. 26. $12 and $30. Mill Hill Playhouse, Passage Theater Company, 205 East Front Street. 609-392-0766; passagetheatre.org. UNION Premiere Stages at Kean University “At Liberty Hall,” by James Christy. Through Oct. 19. $15. Premiere Stages at Kean University, 1000 Morris Avenue. kean.edu/premierestages; 908-737-7469. UNION Zella Fry Theater, Kean University “The Importance of Being Earnest,” comedy by Oscar Wilde. Through Oct. 25. $10 to $15. Zella Fry Theater, Kean University, 1000 Morris Avenue. 908-737-7469; keanstage.com/seasontickets / theatre.as p . WEST ORANGE Luna Stage “Lines in the Dust,” drama by Nikkole Salter. Through Nov. 9. $20 to $35. Luna Stage, 555 Valley Road. lunastage.org; 973-395-5551. Museums and Galleries ASBURY PARK Heaven Gallery “Five New Artists,” paintings, prints and photographs. Through Oct. 26. Free. Heaven Gallery, 721 Cookman Avenue. 732-774-4799. BASKING RIDGE Farmstead Arts Center “NJEAA Art of the Horse,” New Jersey Equine Artists’ Association group show, various media. Through Nov. 29. Farmstead Arts Center, 450 King George Road. 347-927-8748; farmsteadartscenter.org. BEDMINSTER The Center for Contemporary Art “You’re U.S.: At Home With America,” multimedia exhibition of 30 profiles. Through Oct. 25. Mondays through Thursdays, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Fridays and Saturdays, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. The Center for Contemporary Art, 2020 Burnt Mills Road. 908-234-2345; ccabedminster.org. CLIFTON Clifton Arts Center “Louis Bouché Part II: The Modern Artists Era,” oil paintings and murals. Through Oct. 25. $3. Wednesdays through Saturdays, 1 to 4 p.m. Clifton Arts Center, 900 Clifton Avenue. 973-472-5499; cliftonnj.org/notices/f737fa02. CLINTON Hunterdon Art Museum Fall art exhibitions: “A Clay Bestiary,” animal ceramics; “Giovanna Cecchetti: The Consciousness of Infinite Goodness,” paintings and works on paper; “Members Exhibition 2014.” Through Jan. 4. “Warren Muller,” a study on objects and luminescence. Through Nov. 9. Donation, $5. Tuesdays through Sundays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Hunterdon Art Museum, 7 Lower Center Street. 908-735-8415; hunterdonartmuseum.org. ENGLEWOOD One River Gallery “Two River 2014,” group show of contemporary Brooklyn artists. Through Nov. 1. Mondays through Thursdays, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Fridays and Saturdays, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. One River Gallery, 49 North Dean Street. onerivergallery.com; 201-266-5244. EWING The College of New Jersey “Visual Voyage: Exploring the Media and Styles of Award Winning Children’s Book Illustrators,” with 50 works by picture book artists. Oct. 22 through Dec. 14. Tuesdays through Thursdays, noon to 7 p.m.; Sundays, 1 to 3 p.m. The College of New Jersey, 2000 Pennington Road. 609-771-2633; tcnj.edu/artgallery. FREEHOLD Monmouth County Historical Association Museum and Library “Farm: Agriculture in Monmouth County, 1600-2013.” Through Dec. 31. Tuesdays through Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monmouth County Historical Association Museum and Library, 70 Court Street. monmouthhistory.org; 732-462-1466. GALLOWAY Stockton College Art Gallery “Alan Cohen: Boundaries,” photographs, and “Going Solo and Tandem,” works by Marilyn Keating and Debra Sachs. Through Nov. 9. Mondays through Saturdays, noon to 7:30 p.m.; Sundays, noon to 4 p.m. Stockton College Art Gallery, 101 Vera King Farris Drive; 609-652-4214; stockton.edu/artgallery. GLASSBORO Rowan University Art Gallery “Mel Chin: Disparate Acts,” works questioning the objectivity, reliability and integrity of information. Through Nov. 1. Free. Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Wednesdays, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.; and Saturdays, noon to 5 p.m. Rowan University Art Gallery, 201 Mullica Hill Road. 856-256-4521; rowan.edu/artgallery. HALEDON American Labor Museum/Botto House National Landmark “Border Angels,” photographs by Pamela Calore and Sara Gurling. Through Dec. 31. $5 suggested donation. Wednesdays through Saturdays, 1 to 4 p.m., or by appointment. American Labor Museum/Botto House National Landmark, 83 Norwood Street. labormuseum.net; 973-595-7953. HOBOKEN Hoboken Historical Museum “Hoboken, Ellis Island and the Immigrant Experience, 1892-1924.” Through Dec. 23. $2. Tuesdays through Thursdays, 2 to 7 p.m.; Fridays, 1 to 5 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, noon to 5 p.m. Hoboken Historical Museum, 1301 Hudson Street. 201-656-2240; hobokenmuseum.org. LINCROFT Monmouth Museum “Who’s Your Mama: Visions of Our Mentors,” works from the National Association of Women Artists. Through Nov. 2. $7. Tuesdays through Thursdays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Fridays, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Sundays, noon to 5 p.m. Monmouth Museum, 765 Newman Springs Road. 732-747-2266; monmouthmuseum.org. MADISON Drew University New paintings by Claire Sherman, on selected weekends and by appointment. Oct. 17 through Nov. 21. Tuesdays through Fridays, 12:30 to 4 p.m. Drew University, 36 Madison Avenue. 973-408-3758; drew.edu/korngallery. MADISON Museum of Early Trades and Crafts “The American Revolution in New Jersey: Where the Battlefront Meets the Homefront.” Through Feb. 13, 2015. $3 to $13; members, free. Tuesdays through Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.; Sundays, noon to 5 p.m. Museum of Early Trades and Crafts, 9 Main Street. metc.org; 973-377-2982. MONTCLAIR The Gallery at Hillside Square “Interval Travels: An oil painting series by Andrea Geller.” Oct. 24 through Jan.23. Reception: Oct. 24, 6 to 9 p.m. Mondays through Fridays, 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. The Gallery at Hillside Square; 8 Hillside Avenue. 201-281-1214 ; mailto:[email protected] gellerart.com . MONTCLAIR Montclair Art Museum “100 Works for 100 Years: A Centennial Celebration,” art from the collection. Through Nov. 9. “From Heart to Hand: African-American Quilts From the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts.” Thirty quilts, primarily from western Alabama. Through Jan. 4, 2015. “Sanford Biggers: Danpatsu,” video on outdoor monitors examines themes of cultural difference and identity. Through Jan. 4. “Robert Barry: Diptych, Window-Wallpiece for the Montclair Art Museum,” allusive words in a site-specific installation. Through Jan. 4. $10 and $12; members and children under 12, free. Wednesdays through Sundays, noon to 5 p.m. Montclair Art Museum, 3 South Mountain Avenue. 973-746-5555; montclairartmuseum.org. MORRISTOWN Atrium Gallery Fall/Winter Exhibit, group show. Through Jan. 7. Mondays through Fridays, 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Atrium Gallery, 10 Court Street. 973-540-0615; artintheatrium.org. MORRISTOWN Haggerty Education Center, Frelinghuysen Arboretum “Sightseeing,” photographs by Michal Barkai. Frelinghuysen Arboretum’s Haggerty Gallery. Through Oct. 31. Haggerty Education Center, Frelinghuysen Arboretum, 353 East Hanover Avenue. arboretumfriends.org; 973-326-7601. MORRISTOWN Macculloch Hall Historical Museum “Made in New Jersey: A Celebration of Decorative and Fine Arts.” Through Oct. 30. $6 to $8; ages 6 to 12, $4; 5 and under, free. Wednesdays, Thursdays and Sundays, 1 to 4 p.m. Macculloch Hall Historical Museum, 45 Macculloch Avenue. maccullochhall.org; 973-538-2404. MORRISTOWN Morris Museum “Portrait of an Athlete: Special Olympics of New Jersey and United States Paralympics,” photographs by Pete Byron. Through Nov. 16. $7 to $10. Tuesdays through Saturdays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Sundays, noon to 5 p.m. Morris Museum, 6 Normandy Heights Road. 973-971-3700; morrismuseum.org. MORRISTOWN Morristown National Guard Armory 38th Annual Morristown CraftMarket, a fine art and craft show with over 160 artists from 25 states. Through Oct. 19. $10. Morristown National Guard Armory, 430 Western Ave. 201-457-1675; morristowncraftmarket.org. MOUNT HOLLY ABstract EXpressions Contemporary Art Gallery “Twice Abstracted: Photographs by Adel Gorgy and Paintings by Robert Bloomberg.” Through Nov. 28. Fridays, 1 to 7 p.m.; Saturdays, noon to 7 p.m. ABstract EXpressions Contemporary Art Gallery, 70 High Street. abstractexpressionsgallery.com; 609-267-7513. NEW BRUNSWICK Museum of American Hungarian Foundation “40th Anniversary of Rubik’s Cube,” from the Rubik’s Cube collection of Andre Farkas. Through Jan. 31, 2015. $5. Tuesdays through Saturdays, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.; Sundays, 1 to 4 p.m. Museum of American Hungarian Foundation, 300 Somerset Street. 732-846-5777; ahfoundation.org. NEW BRUNSWICK Rutgers University, Douglass Library “Momentum: Women/Art/Technology,” works by Grimanesa Amorós. Through Nov. 7. Mondays through Fridays, 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Rutgers University, Douglass Library, 8 Chapel Drive. 732-932-3726; iwa.rutgers.edu. NEW BRUNSWICK Zimmerli Art Museum “Sports and Recreation in France, 1840-1900.” Through Jan. 11, 2015. “Odessa’s Second Avant-Garde: City and Myth,” trends in art from the 1960s to the 1980s. Through Oct. 19. “Bugs and Frogs and Toads! Oh My!,” children’s book illustrations by Nancy Winslow Parker. Through June 2015. “A Place in America: Celebrating the Legacy of Ralph and Barbara Voorhees,” prints and drawings of America’s landscape. Through Feb. 8, 2015. “Oleg Vassiliev: Space and Light,” paintings and works on paper by the Russian artist. Through Dec. 31. “Jesse Krimes: Apokaluptein: 16389067,” works made by Mr. Krimes while he was incarcerated. Through Dec. 14. Free to $6. Tuesdays through Fridays, 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, noon to 5 p.m. Zimmerli Art Museum, 71 Hamilton Street. 848-932-7237; zimmerlimuseum.rutgers.edu. NEWARK The Newark Museum “City of Silver and Gold From Tiffany to Cartier.” Through 2015. “Great Balls of Fire! Comets, Asteroids, Meteors,” a touring interactive show. Through Jan. 4, 2015. “Korea, Land of the Diamond Mountains,” decorative arts, clothing and works on paper from Korea. Through Jan. 25. “Gone Fishin’: Aquatic Imagery in Asian Art,” folding screens, hanging scrolls, ceramics and sculpture. Through March 1. $7 and $12; members, free. Wednesdays through Sundays, noon to 5 p.m. The Newark Museum, 49 Washington Street. 973-596-6550; newarkmuseum.org. PRINCETON Morven Museum and Garden “Hail Specimen of Female Art! New Jersey Schoolgirl Needlework, 1726-1860.” Through March 29, 2015. $5 and $6. Wednesdays through Fridays, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, noon to 4 p.m. Morven Museum and Garden, 55 Stockton Street. morven.org; 609-924-8144. PRINCETON Princeton University Art Museum “Chigusa and the Art of Tea in Japan.” Through Feb. 1, 2015. Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Thursdays, 10 a.m. to 10 p.m.; Sundays, 1 to 5 p.m. Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton University campus. artmuseum.princeton.edu; 609-258-3788. PRINCETON Princeton University Library “Nova Caesarea: A Cartographic Record of the Garden State, 1666-1888,” maps and atlases of a number of New Jersey counties. Through Jan. 25, 2015. Mondays through Fridays, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, noon to 5 p.m. Firestone Library and Museum, Princeton University, 1 Washington Road. 609-258-1470; library.princeton.edu. SOUTH ORANGE Meadowland Park “IN-SITE: The Intersection of Art and Architecture,” self-guided, outdoor exhibition of over 20 sculptures from 16 artists throughout Meadowland Park along the river walkway and into the business district of South Orange. Through Oct. 21. Free. Meadowland Park, North Ridgewood Road. 201-207-1876; pierrofoundation.org. SUMMIT Visual Arts Center of New Jersey “Doppler Shift,” international group show. Through Jan. 18, 2015. Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, 68 Elm Street. 908-273-9121; artcenternj.org. TRENTON Mala Polska “Reflections of Poland,” paintings and carved reliefs by Ewa Zeller and Jerzy Chojnowski. Through Nov. 10. Daily, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Mala Polska, 1046 Brunswick Avenue. 609-937-2880. TRENTON New Jersey State Museum “A Shadow Over the Earth: The Life and Death of the Passenger Pigeon,” through June 2015. “Drawn to Dinosaurs: Hadrosaurus Foulkii,” 25-foot cast of a dinosaur and a life-size illustration. Through Dec. 31. " New Jersey on Display: World’s Fairs and the Garden State,” stories of pioneering entrepreneurs like Thomas Edison. Through Jan. 4, 2015. Suggested donation, $5. Tuesdays through Sundays, 9 a.m. to 4:45 p.m. New Jersey State Museum, 205 West State Street. statemuseum.nj.gov; 609-292-6464. UNION CITY William V. Musto Cultural Center “Same Difference,” group show. Through Oct. 19. Mondays through Fridays, 9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.; Saturdays, noon to 4 p.m. William V. Musto Cultural Center, 420 15th Street. 201-271-2279; unioncitymuseum.org. WESTWOOD Westwood Art Gallery “The Moveable Feast,” paintings and prints by Helen Frank. Through Nov. 26. Reception: Oct. 19, 2 to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Westwood Art Gallery, 10 Westwood Avenue. 201-666-1800; westwoodartgallery.com. | Art;The arts;New Jersey |
ny0034216 | [
"us"
] | 2013/12/06 | Families See Colorado as New Frontier on Medical Marijuana | FOUNTAIN, Colo. — As their children cooed from wheelchairs and rocked softly in their arms, the marijuana migrants of Colorado clasped hands, bowed their heads and said a prayer of cautious thanks. They thanked God for the dinner of roast turkey and mashed potatoes, for their children and for the marijuana-based serum that has drawn 100 families to Colorado on a desperate pilgrimage to quell the squalls of seizures inside their children’s heads. They have come from Florida and Virginia, South Carolina and New York, lining up to treat their children with a promising but largely untested oil that is considered legal medicine in this cannabis-friendly state. “Thank you for bringing us together,” said Aaron Lightle, whose wife and 9-year-old daughter, Madeleine, moved here after the girl’s neurologists suggested removing part of her brain to stop her relentless seizures. “In crazy ways, maybe. But hey, we’re here.” Amen, they said. Their migration is one of myriad ways that a once-illicit drug is reshaping life here in Colorado, which now stands at the forefront of the national debate over legalizing drugs. While these families are seeking treatment through a medical marijuana system that has existed for years, they are arriving at a time when the drug is becoming a mainstream part of public life, made legal for recreational use in a historic vote last year. The Justice Department has warily allowed Colorado and Washington State, which passed a similar measure, to go ahead with their plans to regulate recreational marijuana, even though it remains illegal under federal law. The first retail marijuana shops in Colorado are poised to open in January. Strains of sativa and indica plants flourish in basements across the state. This week, the Denver City Council moved toward allowing people to smoke marijuana on their property, though smoking in public would still be prohibited. Image Madeleine Lightle’s parents have brought her to Colorado Springs after a neurologist suggested removing part of her brain to stop her seizures. Credit Matthew Staver for The New York Times The new arrivals call themselves marijuana refugees. Many have left jobs and family members behind in states where marijuana remains outlawed, or cannot be used to treat children. While some have moved their entire families, others are splintered, paying rent and raising children in two states. During the holidays, they join family gatherings through video chats and swap iPhone pictures of Christmas trees. But as more arrive to register their children as medical-marijuana patients, they have knitted together a random family here, across the suburbs and foothills of Colorado’s Front Range. They are Muslims and conservative Christians, liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans. Now, they cook dinners and babysit for one another. They meet to compare progress and seizure diaries. They discuss the best ways to feed the oil to their children. They wait, and hope for results that mirror the astonishing successes they have seen in television reports and online videos. “I put what fit in my car and drove out here,” said Marisa Kiser, whose 19-month-old son, Ezra, has had seizures since he was 3 days old. The families have hung their hopes on a marijuana oil called Charlotte’s Web, which is made by a medical marijuana dispensary in Colorado Springs. The business, called Indispensary , also sells a variety of highly potent marijuana and edibles. Buyers of the medical marijuana must present certifications from two practicing Colorado doctors. Image Some say the oil, known as Charlotte’s Web, has relieved their children of severe seizure disorders. Credit Matthew Staver for The New York Times Charlotte’s Web is a rich amber and as thick as cold honey. It smells like marijuana and tastes like raw plants. Joel Stanley, one of five brothers who run the dispensary, says the oil is low in THC, which gets users high, but contains a wealth of a cannabidiol, or CBD, a chemical that provides no buzz, but that marijuana advocates and medical researchers say has a variety of medical uses. A month’s supply of the oil can cost $150 to $250, and some families say they receive financial help from a nonprofit group related to the dispensary called the Realm of Caring Foundation . In a YouTube video produced by Realm of Caring, two mothers describe how their children were transformed after taking the oil for a few months. In one section, Paige Figi recalls how seizures had jolted her daughter Charlotte every 15 minutes, leaving the girl unable to walk or talk. In the next shot, the girl dances in a pink leotard and shouts, “Ballerina!” The other mother featured in the video, Heather Jackson, was so convinced by the potential of CBD that she is now the executive director of the Realm of Caring Foundation. Ms. Jackson said her son, Zaki, who once had 200 seizures a day, still faces a host of developmental disabilities, and will probably need help for the rest of his life. But she said he had gone 14 months without a seizure. A pretreatment recording of electrical activity in his brain showed a heaving chaos of huge spikes and deep troughs. A readout taken several months in showed smoother rises and falls. “It’s really incredible,” Ms. Jackson said in an interview. “For whatever reason, this has put his syndrome into remission.” Image Parents like Marisa Kiser, center, snuggling with her son, Ezra, and Cristi Bundukamara and her son Reggie, 14, have become part of a community of families in marijuana-friendly Colorado. They moved to the state to explore an oil derived from marijuana. Credit Matthew Staver for The New York Times There is only scattered medical research to substantiate the claims, in large part because marijuana’s outlaw status has kept it off limits for many scientists in the United States. Studies as far back as 1975 have suggested that cannabidiol can prevent spasms in lab animals, and a few researchers in the United States have conducted limited studies on people. Dr. Margaret Gedde, a Colorado physician who has recommended medical marijuana to dozens of families with severely epileptic children, recently conducted a small survey that offered promising results. Of 11 families who treated their children with high-CBD oil, eight reported that their children’s seizures had fallen by 98 to 100 percent. The other families reported smaller but noticeable declines. Dr. Gedde and her co-researcher, Dr. Edward H. Maa, an assistant professor of neurology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, will present their research to the American Epilepsy Society at a meeting next week. But the clinical trials matter little to parents who have watched their children sustain cracked skulls and broken arms during seizures, who have spent holidays in the emergency room, whose toddlers are taking barbiturates. After years of watching their children slowly vanish behind a firestorm of seizures, or the debilitating side effects of powerful prescription drugs, they said marijuana seemed worth a try. The families’ stories have been covered extensively in the local newspaper, The Gazette . “We really didn’t have any other options,” said Annie Koozer, whose family left Tennessee in search of help for their 2-year-old daughter, Piper, who has a rare genetic condition called Aicardi syndrome, in which the structure that connects the two hemispheres of the brain is deformed or missing. Since she was 3 months old, the girl has endured 400 seizures a day. After treatment by five neurologists and nine increasingly debilitating seizure medications, the family moved to Colorado in August. Ms. Koozer’s husband, Justin, called it the family’s last-ditch effort to help Piper. They signed a lease on an apartment and began giving her the oil about a month ago. Waves of seizures still attack her , leaving her parents helpless, worried she will stop breathing. But they said Piper sleeps more, seems more alert and appears to have fewer spasms now — sometimes as few as two or three each day. They do not know what will happen, whether the progress is real or sustainable. But they have decided to keep at it. And they have decided that this place, 1,300 miles away from their extended family, is now home. | Colorado;Medical Marijuana;Seizures;Epilepsy;Medicine and Health;Children |
ny0271408 | [
"sports",
"hockey"
] | 2016/05/04 | Predators Get Back Into Series With Sharks; Blues Rout Stars | Shea Weber scored the go-ahead goal and had an assist and the Predators beat the San Jose Sharks, 4-1, in Nashville on Tuesday night to close the gap to two games to one in the teams’ Western Conference semifinals series. James Neal and Filip Forsberg each scored on the power play for the Predators, Colin Wilson also had a goal, and Pekka Rinne made 26 saves. Patrick Marleau had the only goal for the Sharks, who lost for the first time away from San Jose this postseason. Game 4 is Thursday night. The Predators not only lost the first two in San Jose, but they were also facing the N.H.L.’s best regular-season road team. The Sharks also went 4-2 in Nashville in winning first-round series in both 2006 and 2007. Nashville has not lost a game in regulation on home ice to San Jose since Feb. 25, 2012, with the lone defeat in seven games a shootout loss April 2. This time, the Predators shut down the Sharks’ power play, killing four penalties after San Jose went 3 of 5 in the first two games. BLUES 6, STARS 1 Alexander Steen and David Backes had two goals apiece, and the St. Louis defense put the clamps on visiting Dallas in an easy victory that gave the Blues a two-games-to-one edge in the teams’ second-round series. Vladimir Tarasenko had a goal and two assists, Troy Brouwer had a goal and assist, and Brian Elliott was strong when he needed to be for the Blues in their first lopsided triumph of the postseason. Their other five wins were decided by one goal. The Blues finished 2 points behind the Western Conference champion Dallas in the regular season and have control of the series heading into Game 4 Thursday night in St. Louis. St. Louis scored four unanswered goals after Colton Sceviour gave Dallas the early advantage. The Blues scored three times in a breakaway second period. | Ice hockey;Playoffs;Nashville Predators;San Jose Sharks;St Louis Blues;Dallas Stars |
ny0133853 | [
"business"
] | 2008/03/30 | Foreclosure Machine Thrives on Woes | NOBODY wins when a home enters foreclosure — neither the borrower, who is evicted, nor the lender, who takes a loss when the home is resold. That’s the conventional wisdom, anyway. The reality is very different. Behind the scenes in these dramas, a small army of law firms and default servicing companies, who represent mortgage lenders, have been raking in mounting profits. These little-known firms assess legal fees and a host of other charges, calculate what the borrowers owe and draw up the documents required to remove them from their homes. As the subprime mortgage crisis has spread, the volume of the business has soared, and firms that handle loan defaults have been the primary beneficiaries. Law firms, paid by the number of motions filed in foreclosure cases, have sometimes issued a flurry of claims without regard for the requirements of bankruptcy law, several judges say. Much as Wall Street’s mortgage securitization machinery helped to fuel questionable lending across the United States, default, or foreclosure, servicing operations have been compounding the woes of troubled borrowers. Court documents say that some of the largest firms in the industry have repeatedly submitted erroneous affidavits when moving to seize homes and levied improper fees that make it harder for homeowners to get back on track with payments. Consumer lawyers call these operations “foreclosure mills.” “They get paid by the volume and speed with which they process these foreclosures,” said Mal Maynard, director of the Financial Protection Law Center, a nonprofit firm in Wilmington, N.C. John and Robin Atchley of Waleska, Ga., have experienced dubious foreclosure practices at first hand. Twice during a four-month period in 2006, the Atchleys were almost forced from their home when Countrywide Home Loans, part of Countrywide Financial , and the law firm representing it said they were delinquent on their mortgage. Countrywide’s lawyers withdrew their motions to seize the Atchleys’ home only after the couple proved them wrong in court. The possibility that some lenders and their representatives are running roughshod over borrowers is of increasing concern to bankruptcy judges overseeing Chapter 13 cases across the country. The United States Trustee Program, a unit of the Justice Department that oversees the integrity of the nation’s bankruptcy courts, is bringing cases against lenders that it says are abusing the bankruptcy system. Joel B. Rosenthal, a United States bankruptcy judge in the Western District of Massachusetts, wrote in a case last year involving Wells Fargo Bank that rising foreclosures were resulting in greater numbers of lenders that “in their rush to foreclose, haphazardly fail to comply with even the most basic legal requirements of the bankruptcy system.” Law firms and default servicing operations that process large numbers of cases have made it harder for borrowers to design repayment plans, or workouts, consumer lawyers say. “As I talk to people around the country, they all unanimously state that the foreclosure mills are impediments to loan workouts,” Mr. Maynard said. LAST month, almost 225,000 properties in the United States were in some stage of foreclosure, up nearly 60 percent from the period a year earlier, according to RealtyTrac, an online foreclosure research firm and marketplace. These proceedings generate considerable revenue for the firms involved: eviction and appraisal charges, late fees, title search costs, recording fees, certified mailing costs, document retrieval fees, and legal fees. The borrower, already in financial distress, is billed for these often burdensome costs. While much of the revenue goes to the law firms hired by lenders, some is kept by the servicers of the loans. Fidelity National Default Solutions, a unit of Fidelity National Information Services of Jacksonville, Fla., is one of the biggest foreclosure service companies. It assists 19 of the top 25 residential mortgage servicers and 14 of the top 25 subprime loan servicers. Citing “accelerating demand” for foreclosure services last year, Fidelity generated operating income of $443 million in its lender processing unit, a 13.3 percent increase over 2006. By contrast, the increase from 2005 to 2006 was just 1 percent. The firm is not associated with Fidelity Investments. Law firms representing lenders are also big beneficiaries of the foreclosure surge. These include Barrett Burke Wilson Castle Daffin & Frappier, a 38-lawyer firm in Houston; McCalla, Raymer, Padrick, Cobb, Nichols & Clark, a 37-member firm in Atlanta that is a designated counsel to Fannie Mae ; and the Shapiro Attorneys Network, a nationwide group of 24 firms. While these private firms do not disclose their revenues, Wesley W. Steen, chief bankruptcy judge for the Southern District of Texas, recently estimated that Barrett Burke generated between $9.7 million and $11.6 million a year in its practice. Another judge estimated last year that the firm generated $125,000 every two weeks — or $3.3 million a year — filing motions that start the process of seizing borrowers’ homes. Court records from 2007 indicate that McCalla, Raymer generated $10.4 million a year on its work for Countrywide alone. In 2005, some McCalla, Raymer employees left the firm and created MR Default Services, an entity that provides foreclosure services; it is now called Prommis Solutions. For years, consumer lawyers say, bankruptcy courts routinely approved these firms’ claims and fees. Now, as the foreclosure tsunami threatens millions of families, the firms’ practices are coming under scrutiny. And none too soon, consumer lawyers say, because most foreclosures are uncontested by borrowers, who generally rely on what the lender or its representative says is owed, including hefty fees assessed during the foreclosure process. In Georgia, for example, a borrower can watch his home go up for auction on the courthouse steps after just 40 days in foreclosure, leaving relatively little chance to question fees that his lender has levied. A recent analysis of 1,733 foreclosures across the country by Katherine M. Porter, associate professor of law at the University of Iowa, showed that questionable fees were added to borrowers’ bills in almost half the loans. Specific cases inching through the courts support the notion that figures supplied by lenders are often incorrect. Lawyers representing clients who have filed for Chapter 13 bankruptcy, the program intended to help them keep their homes, say it is especially distressing when these numbers are used to evict borrowers. “If the debtor wants accurate information in a bankruptcy case on her mortgage, she has got to work hard to find that out,” said Howard D. Rothbloom, a lawyer in Marietta, Ga., who represents borrowers. That work, usually done by a lawyer, is costly. Mr. Rothbloom represents the Atchleys, who almost lost their home in early 2006 when legal representatives of their loan servicer, Countrywide, incorrectly told the court that the Atchleys were 60 days delinquent in Chapter 13 plan payments two times over four months. Borrowers can lose their homes if they fail to make such payments. After the Atchleys supplied proof that they had made their payments on both occasions, Countrywide withdrew its motions to begin foreclosure. But the company also levied $2,793 in fees on the Atchleys’ loan that it did not explain, court documents said. “Every paycheck went to what they said we owed,” Robin Atchley said. “And every statement we got, the payoff was $179,000 and it never went down. I really think they took advantage of us.” The Atchleys, who have four children, sold the house and now rent. Mrs. Atchley said they lost more than $23,000 in equity in the home because of fees levied by Countrywide. The United States Trustee sued Countrywide last month in the Atchley case, saying its pattern of conduct was an abuse of the bankruptcy system. Countrywide said that it could not comment on pending litigation and that privacy concerns prevented it from discussing specific borrowers. A generation ago, home foreclosures were a local business, lawyers say. If a borrower got into trouble, the lender who made the loan was often a nearby bank that held on to the mortgage. That bank would hire a local lawyer to try to work with the borrower; foreclosure proceedings were a last resort. Now foreclosures are farmed out to third-party processors who hire local counsel to litigate. Lenders negotiate flat-fee arrangements to try to keep legal bills down. AN unfortunate result, according to several judges, is a drive to increase revenue by filing more motions. Jeff Bohm, a bankruptcy judge in Texas who oversaw a case between William Allen Parsley, a borrower in Willis, Tex., and legal representatives for Countrywide, said the flat-fee structure “has fostered a corrosive ‘assembly line’ culture of practicing law.” Both McCalla, Raymer and Barrett Burke represented Countrywide in the matter. Gee Aldridge, managing partner at McCalla, Raymer, called the Parsley case unique. “It is the goal of every single one of my clients to do whatever they can do to keep borrowers in their homes,” he said. Officials at Barrett Burke did not return phone calls seeking comment. In a statement, Countrywide said it recognized the importance of the efficient functioning of the bankruptcy system. It said that servicing loans for borrowers in bankruptcy was complex, but that it had improved its procedures, hired new employees and was “aggressively exploring additional technology solutions to ensure that we are servicing loans in a manner consistent with applicable guidelines and policies.” The September 2006 issue of The Summit, an in-house promotional publication of Fidelity National Foreclosure Solutions, another unit of Fidelity, trumpeted the efficiency of its 18-member “document execution team.” Set up “like a production line,” the publication said, the team executes 1,000 documents a day, on average. OTHER judges are cracking down on some foreclosure practices. In 2006, Morris Stern, the federal bankruptcy judge overseeing a matter involving Jenny Rivera, a borrower in Lodi, N.J., issued a $125,000 sanction against the Shapiro & Diaz firm, which is a part of the Shapiro Attorneys Network. The judge found that Shapiro & Diaz had filed 250 motions seeking permission to seize homes using pre-signed certifications of default executed by an employee who had not worked at the firm for more than a year. In testimony before the judge, a Shapiro & Diaz employee said that the firm used the pre-signed documents beginning in 2000 and that they were attached to “95 percent” of the firm’s motions seeking permission to seize a borrower’s home. Individuals making such filings are supposed to attest to their accuracy. Judge Stern called Shapiro & Diaz’s use of these documents “the blithe implementation of a renegade practice.” Nelson Diaz, a partner at the firm, did not return a phone call seeking comment. Butler & Hosch, a law firm in Orlando, Fla., that is employed by Fannie Mae, has also been the subject of penalties. Last year, a judge sanctioned the firm $33,500 for filing 67 faulty motions to remove borrowers from their homes. A spokesman for the firm declined to comment. Barrett Burke in Texas has come under intense scrutiny by bankruptcy judges. Overseeing a case last year involving James Patrick Allen, a homeowner in Victoria, Tex., Judge Steen examined the firm’s conduct in eight other foreclosure cases and found problems in all of them. In five of the matters, documents show, the firm used inaccurate information about defaults or failed to attach proper documentation when it moved to seize borrowers’ homes. Judge Steen imposed $75,000 in sanctions against Barrett Burke for a pattern of errors in the Allen case. A former Barrett Burke lawyer, who requested anonymity to avoid possible retaliation from the firm, said, “They’re trying to find a fine line between providing efficient, less costly service to the mortgage companies” and not harming the borrower. Both he and another former lawyer at the firm said Barrett Burke relied heavily on paralegals and other nonlawyer employees in its foreclosure and bankruptcy practices. For example, they said, paralegals prepared documents to be filed in bankruptcy court, demanding that the court authorize foreclosure on a borrower’s home. Lawyers were supposed to review the documents before they were filed. Both former Barrett lawyers said that with at least 1,000 filings a month, it was hard to keep up with the volume. This factory-line approach to litigation was one reason he decided to leave the firm, the first lawyer said. “I had questions,” he added, “about whether doing things efficiently was worth whatever the cost was to the consumer.” James R. and Tracy A. Edwards, who are now living in New Mexico, say they have had problems with questionable fees charged by Countrywide and actions by Barrett Burke. In one month in 2002, when the couple lived in Houston, Countrywide Home Loans withdrew three monthly mortgage payments from their bank account, Mrs. Edwards said, leaving them unable to pay other bills. The family filed for bankruptcy to try to keep their home, cars and other assets. Filings in the bankruptcy case of the Edwards family show that on at least three occasions, Countrywide’s lawyers at Barrett Burke filed motions contending that the borrowers had fallen behind. The firm subsequently withdrew the motions. “They kept saying we owed tons and tons of fees on the house,” Mrs. Edwards said. Tired of this battle, the family gave up the Houston house and moved to one in Rio Rancho, N.M., that they had previously rented out. Countrywide tried to foreclose on that house, too, contending that Mr. and Mrs. Edwards were behind in their payments. Again, Mrs. Edwards said, the culprit was a raft of fees that Countrywide had never told them about — and that were related to their Texas home. Mrs. Edwards says that she and her husband plan to sue Countrywide to block foreclosure on their New Mexico home. Pamela L. Stewart, president of the Houston Association of Debtor Attorneys, said she has become skeptical of lenders’ claims of fees owed. “I want to see documents that back up where these numbers are coming from,” Ms. Stewart said. “To me, they’re pulled out of the air.” An inaccurate mortgage payment history supplied by Ameriquest, a mortgage lender that is now defunct, was central to a case last year in federal bankruptcy court in Massachusetts. “Ameriquest is simply unable or unwilling to conform its accounting practices to what is required under the bankruptcy code,” Judge Rosenthal wrote. He awarded the borrower $250,000 in emotional-distress damages and $500,000 in punitive damages. Fidelity National Information Services has also been sued. A complaint filed on behalf of Ernest and Mattie Harris in federal bankruptcy court in Houston contends that Fidelity receives kickbacks from the lawyers it works with on foreclosure matters. The case shines some light on the complex relationships between lenders and default servicers and the law firms that represent them. The Harrises’ loan servicer is Saxon Mortgage Services, a Morgan Stanley unit, which signed an agreement with Fidelity National Foreclosure Solutions. Under it, Fidelity was to provide foreclosure and bankruptcy services on loans serviced by Saxon, as well as to manage lawyers acting on Saxon’s behalf. The agreement also specified that Saxon would pay the fees of the lawyers managed by Fidelity. But Fidelity also struck a second agreement, with an outside law firm, Mann & Stevens in Houston, which spelled out the fees Fidelity was to be paid each time the law firm made filings in a case. Mann & Stevens, which did respond to phone calls, represented Saxon in the Harrises’ bankruptcy proceedings. According to the complaint, Mann & Stevens billed Saxon $200 for filing an objection to the borrowers’ plan to emerge from bankruptcy. Saxon paid the $200 fee, then charged that amount to the Harrises, according to the complaint. But Mann & Stevens kept only $150, paying the remaining $50 to Fidelity, the complaint said. This arrangement constitutes improper fee-sharing, the Harrises argued. Texas rules of professional conduct bar fee-sharing between lawyers and nonlawyers because that could motivate them to raise prices — and the Harrises argue that this is why the law firm charged $200 instead of $150. And under these rules, sharing fees with someone who is not a lawyer creates a risk that the financial relationship could affect the judgment of the lawyer, whose duty is to the client. Few exceptions are permitted — like sharing court-awarded fees with a nonprofit organization or keeping a retirement plan for nonlawyer employees of a law firm. “If it’s fee-sharing, and if it doesn’t fall into those categories, it sounds wrong,” said Michael S. Frisch, adjunct professor of law at Georgetown University. Greg Whitworth, president of loan portfolio solutions at Fidelity, defended the arrangement, saying it was not unusual for a company to have an intermediary manage outside law firms on its behalf. The Harrises contend that the bankruptcy-related fees charged by the law firms managed by Fidelity “are inflated by 25 to 50 percent.” The agreement between Fidelity and the law firm is also hidden, according to their complaint, so a presiding judge sees only the lender and the law firm, not the middleman. Fidelity said the money it received from the law firm was not a kickback, but payments for services, just as a law firm would pay a copying service to duplicate documents. In response to the complaint, Fidelity asserted in a court filing that the Harrises’ claims were “nothing more than scandalous, hollow rhetoric.” But the Fidelity fee schedule shows a charge for each action taken by the law firm, not a fee per page or kilobyte. And Fidelity’s contract appears to indemnify Saxon if the arrangement between Fidelity and its law firm runs afoul of conduct rules. Mr. Whitworth of Fidelity said that the arrangement with Mann & Stevens did not constitute fee sharing, because Fidelity was to be paid by that law firm even if the law firm itself was not paid. He also said that by helping a servicer manage dozens or even hundreds of law firms, Fidelity lowered the cost of foreclosure or bankruptcy proceedings, to the benefit of the law firm, the servicer and the borrower. “Both parties want us to be in the middle here,” Mr. Whitworth said, referring to law firms and mortgage servicing companies. THE Fidelity contract attached to the complaint also hints at the money each motion generates. Foreclosures earn lawyers fees of $500 or more under the contract; evictions generate about $300. Those fees aren’t enormous if they require a substantial amount of time. But a few thousand such motions a month, executed by lawyers’ employees, translates into many hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue to the law firm — and the lower the firm’s costs, the greater the profits. “Congress needs to enact a national foreclosure bill that sets a uniform procedure in every state that provides adequate notice, due process and transparency about fees and charges,” said O. Max Gardner III, a consumer lawyer in Shelby, N.C. “A lot of this stuff is such a maze of numbers and complex organizational structure most lawyers can’t get through it. For the average consumer, it is mission impossible.” | Foreclosures;Housing;Mortgages;Bankruptcies;Countrywide Financial Corp;Fidelity National Information Services Inc;Fannie Mae |
ny0151722 | [
"nyregion"
] | 2008/08/21 | In Hospital, Victim Tries to Recall Brooklyn Attack | By now, thousands of people have seen the mugging of Lilian France. They have watched the surveillance video of the stranger in the cap choking her from behind, and then stealing Ms. France’s purse — and her cane — when she collapsed. On television and countless Web sites, the video, perfectly framed and crystal clear, has provoked widespread outrage. But Ms. France, 85, has not seen it. “They didn’t allow me to watch the television,” she said in telephone interview on Wednesday from her hospital bed in Brooklyn. “As a matter of fact,” she said, “they took the television.” That might be for the best. Since she was attacked a week ago in the elevator of an apartment building in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, Ms. France has had to contend with medical problems apart from the bruises and cuts she suffered during the mugging. She is diabetic and suffers from hypertension, according to a niece, Claire France, who said her aunt had also been showing the emotional strain of the attack. She has become jumpy around nurses and visitors she does not know, her niece said. A session with a psychiatrist on Wednesday, to talk about what happened during the attack, brought on more stress. “She’s truly exhausted,” her niece said. The authorities have said they believe that the man who attacked Ms. France might be responsible for a dozen similar attacks in Crown Heights, Kensington and Flatbush in Brooklyn this summer. In elevators, lobbies and stairwells, the man has attacked victims from behind, making off with cash, groceries and cellphones. Ms. France was going to visit her niece when she was attacked and robbed. The man captured on the elevator’s security camera stole about $900 — money Ms. France planned to give to her grandnieces. At a news conference on Wednesday in front of the apartment building where Ms. France was attacked, local officials tried their best to smoke out the assailant, raising the reward for information about him to $14,000 from $12,000. City Councilwoman Letitia James appealed to Ms. France’s neighbors. “Step forward and snitch, because it is your duty and your obligation,” she said. Her niece brought Ms. France her favorite beef soup on Wednesday, and in recent days, a good Samaritan sent her a new cane. During the interview, she said she had a headache. “I’m 85 — that’s almost 90,” said Ms. France, a retired seamstress. For now, she did not need to see the video. “I experienced part of it,” she said. At one point during the attack, she remembered asking herself whether she was dreaming. For the rest of it, she was unconscious. | Muggings;Brooklyn (NYC) |
ny0176237 | [
"business"
] | 2007/07/26 | Apple Profit Soars 73% as Sales Rise | SAN FRANCISCO, July 25 — Apple on Wednesday reported a 73 percent jump in quarterly profit on strong sales of Macs and iPods, beating Wall Street forecasts. It also alleviated some concerns about early sales of the iPhone . Investors were spooked on Tuesday when AT&T, which provides service for the phone, said it had activated just 146,000 iPhones in the day and a half from its release to the end of the quarter, far fewer than some analysts had expected. That sent Apple’s stock down 6 percent. But Apple executives said on Wednesday that the company had actually sold 270,000 iPhones in that period, a number that seemed to calm investors’ fears. The executives said Apple expects to sell 1 million iPhones this quarter, and reiterated its goal of selling 10 million phones by the end of 2008. The company plans to release the phone in Europe in the fourth quarter. “Our view is the starting gun has been fired and we’re off to a great start,” said Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief operating officer, in a conference call with analysts. “Our primary focus is not on initial sales but on creating a third business for Apple.” By comparison, Apple executives said, it took nearly two years for Apple to sell 1 million iPods. It is not entirely clear why so many early iPhone customers did not activate their phones right away, but Apple executives acknowledged that many customers experienced activation problems during the first week. Peter Oppenheimer, Apple’s chief financial officer, apologized for the problems and said they had been fixed. Shares of Apple climbed more than 9 percent, or $12.92, in after-hours trading. They closed at $137.26, up $2.37, in regular trading. The gains more than made up for the losses on Tuesday. Investor excitement over the iPhone’s potential has helped drive up Apple shares more than 50 percent since the product was announced in January. The company’s profit was $818 million, or 92 cents a share, compared with $472 million, or 54 cents a share, in the quarter a year earlier. Analysts had forecast a profit of $645.6 million, or 72 cents a share, according to a survey by Thomson Financial. The company shipped 1.76 million Macs during the quarter, representing 33 percent growth over the year-ago quarter, and 9.82 million iPods, for growth of 21 percent. “We’re thrilled to report the highest June quarter revenue and profit in Apple’s history, along with the highest quarterly Mac sales ever,” said Steven P. Jobs , Apple’s chief executive. Apple’s revenue for the quarter increased to $5.41 billion from $4.37 billion last year, beating Apple’s own projection of $5.1 billion. Apple has decided to book sales from the iPhone handsets, which cost $500 or $600 depending on the model, as subscription revenue over 24 months. The company recognized $5 million in revenue from the iPhone and related products during the fiscal third quarter, which ended June 30. The company’s gross margins rose substantially during the third quarter, to 36.9 percent from 30.3 percent in last year’s quarter. Mr. Oppenheimer said Apple’s margins benefited from favorable pricing for components like memory chips. “The upside was clearly the health of the Mac business,” said A. C. Sacconaghi, an analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein & Company. “Apple’s in a really attractive position, where the Mac’s component prices are falling but they’re able to charge the same prices.” Apple issued a conservative forecast for the fourth quarter, predicting revenue of about $5.7 billion and earnings per share of about 65 cents, as well as a drop in profit margins. Mr. Oppenheimer noted that the fourth quarter includes the school buying season, in which Apple typically offers costly back-to-school promotions and sells more lower-margin entry-level Macs. He also said he expected to see component prices rise somewhat during the quarter. Analysts have become accustomed to restrained forecasts from Apple. “Guidance for Apple has become a throwaway,” Mr. Sacconaghi said. “They guide conservatively and routinely beat it.” | Apple Inc;Company Reports;iPhone;Sales;Jobs Steven P |
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