id
stringlengths 9
9
| categories
sequence | date
stringlengths 10
10
| title
stringlengths 3
232
| abstract
stringlengths 4
42.4k
| keyword
stringlengths 6
360
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
ny0294621 | [
"technology"
] | 2016/06/14 | Microsoft Takes Aim at Sony With Cheaper Xbox, Virtual Reality and Cross-Platform Games | Microsoft on Monday unveiled a smaller, less expensive Xbox One and plans for a new console that can offer virtual reality games as it seeks to catch up with Sony in video game hardware. The new Xbox One S starts at $300 and costs up to $400 for a 2-terabyte hard drive; the Xbox One previously started at $349. The new device supports 4K video and is about 40 percent smaller than the original model. A special edition will be available in August and standard versions will come out later this year. Microsoft also revealed a product called Project Scorpio, a console with high-fidelity virtual reality that will be available by the end of next year. The announcements were made at E3, the Electronic Entertainment Expo, a video game trade show held annually in Los Angeles. Microsoft is competing fiercely against Sony in the console market, which has lost some of its shine as new forms of play — such as mobile games — come to the fore, but which remains a lucrative area with a dedicated demographic of hard-core gamers. Sony has sold about 40 million PlayStation 4s, which are its latest generation of consoles, with Microsoft estimated to have sold about 21 million Xbox One consoles, according to SuperData Research. The console makers are also trying to keep ahead of technology trends, with virtual reality regarded as a promising direction. Facebook, HTC and others have released virtual reality headsets and an early use of the technology is for games. Sony has already announced a virtual reality headset that will work with its PlayStation 4 console. Image Phil Spencer, the head of Xbox, announced the Microsoft Xbox One S at E3, a video game trade show in Los Angeles. Credit Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images Monday’s Xbox announcements are Microsoft’s attempt “to catch up” with Sony, said Joost van Dreunen, the chief executive of SuperData Research. In a presentation, the head of Xbox, Phil Spencer, called Project Scorpio a “serious inflection point” and said he was announcing the console months ahead of its release in order “to give our developers and partners the ability to take advantage of that capability now.” The new machine will be the first Xbox to offer virtual reality and will most likely be more expensive, so it is unlikely to cannibalize sales from the lower-priced Xbox One, said Michael Pachter, an analyst with Wedbush Securities. Microsoft also said that it expected more Xbox games to be compatible across all of its hardware products, and that many could also be played on platforms made by Apple, Google and Microsoft PC. The company also announced new communities and groups for Xbox game players, including realms for the popular Minecraft game that allow players to collaborate whether they use Xbox, iOS, Android or PC operating systems. “Xbox has become aware that it has to engage customers more,” Mr. van Dreunen of SuperData Research said. | Microsoft;Computer and Video Games;Sony;Xbox One;E3 - Electronic Entertainment Expo;Sony Computer Entertainment |
ny0031583 | [
"business",
"economy"
] | 2013/06/15 | European Ministers Clear Trade Deal | LUXEMBOURG — European Union ministers thrashed out a deal to begin trade negotiations with the United States late Friday after bowing to French demands to protect state-sponsored film and television industries. The breakthrough, which came after 13 hours of tense talks, should enable Britain to hail the start of the trans-Atlantic trade discussions when the leaders of the Group of 8 biggest economies hold a summit meeting on Monday in Northern Ireland. “The formal launch of negotiations between the world’s two largest trading blocs is now imminent,” Vince Cable, the British business secretary, said in a statement shortly after the deal was announced. “Achieving an agreement is in all our interests and would deliver a much-needed boost to the economies of all involved.” The divisive issue of shielding films, TV shows and other audiovisual services from competition could be debated again at a later stage, and that promises more wrangling ahead between European nations over what to offer the United States in exchange for lower tariffs and streamlined regulations. Although the French position could be scaled back, the fact that the other 26 trade ministers in the European Union acceded to France’s demand could make negotiations with the United States that much more difficult, given the protectionist impulses on both sides of the Atlantic that are likely to come into play. A trade pact would aim to lower barriers between the world’s two biggest trading partners. But before formal talks can start, the European Union’s 27 trade ministers needed to reach a unanimous deal to give the European Commission, the bloc’s executive arm, the formal authority to start the negotiations. The decision in Luxembourg was a preliminary victory for France, which fought hard for months to protect Europe’s so-called cultural exception, which is, in practice, a thicket of quotas and subsidies for audiovisual productions that promote locally and regionally produced content. “We are satisfied because we have the exclusion from the mandate for everything that is to do with audiovisual,” Nicole Bricq, the French trade minister, told a news conference. The guarantee was “written in black and white” in the agreement, she said. The European Union, which is plagued by low growth and high unemployment, broadly favors a trade pact with the United States to bolster the economy and generate new jobs. But the drawn-out negotiations in Luxembourg were a stark reminder of how the bloc’s members still are reluctant to set aside national priorities and to make collective decision-making a reality. Image Nicole Bricq, France’s trade minister, with Karel De Gucht, the European trade commissioner, at the European Union talks. Credit Yves Logghe/Associated Press The main sticking point on Friday was France’s demand to exclude audiovisual services, including future digital services, from the talks. Britain, along with countries including Spain and the Netherlands, was concerned that such an exclusion would prompt the United States to require protections of its own. The exclusion of audiovisual material from a trade deal would especially disappoint American technology and media companies, including the online movie distributor Netflix, which want easier access to European markets. The deal that emerged was a classic European accommodation allowing a flagship initiative — a trans-Atlantic trade pact — to move forward while leaving decisions on the thorniest questions, like how to manage digital services, for a later date. The compromise leaves the European Commission with the option to make a proposal, once the talks with the United States are under way, to use audiovisual services as a bargaining chip so long as all 27 member states agree that the advantages are sufficiently attractive. “There is no carve-out on audiovisual services,” Karel De Gucht, the European Union trade commissioner who will lead the negotiations with the United States, told a news conference.“We are ready to discuss it with our American counterparts and to listen to their views on this issue.” In a sign of the bitterness that nearly led to the collapse of the talks on Friday, Ms. Bricq, of France, accused some member states of pandering to American demands to keep the audiovisual industries as a bargaining chip. And, earlier in the day, in a thinly veiled reference to the European outcry over recent disclosures that the National Security Agency in the United States had gained access to online data from many of the biggest Internet companies, she added that “current events unhappily remind us” of American influence over the online world. How much progress Europe and the United States can make is an open question. Tariffs are already low, and the main goal — harmonizing regulations — is likely to pose a huge challenge for negotiators. There are also questions about their differences over regulations on a host of industries, including new technologies, car safety, pharmaceuticals and financial derivatives. | International trade;Europe;US;Treaties;Movies;TV;EU |
ny0094676 | [
"business",
"smallbusiness"
] | 2015/01/29 | Using Smartphones and Apps to Enhance Loyalty Programs | Nearly as long as there have been coffee shops and carwashes, all manner of businesses have handed out buy-10-get-one-free punch cards and hoped to reap the rewards of this simplest of loyalty marketing campaigns. But a new day is dawning. Smartphones and loyalty apps have begun offering small businesses enhanced program features and automated administration capabilities once affordable only to large companies like airlines and hotel chains. These capabilities also offer the equivalent of a real-world psychology lab for easily evaluating the effects of offerings and incentives on customer loyalty. “All organisms, in different ways, are drawn to goals,” said Oleg Urminsky, who teaches marketing research at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. “The closer we are to achieving our goals, the more motivated we are to keep doing something. As mice on a runway get closer to a food pellet, they run faster.” Similarly, he said, “as people get closer to having a completed card, the time between visits gets smaller.” Studies have also shown the psychological benefit of preloading a frequent buyer card with a couple of punches to make the dangled reward appear closer. A carwash that started one set of customers with a buy-eight-get-one-free card and a second set of customers with a 10-wash card already punched twice, found a few months later that nearly twice as many people (34 percent) given the illusion of a head start toward the same goal had redeemed the card as people (19 percent) who had to earn their first punch. Two researchers, Joseph Nunes and Xavier Drèze, have called this the endowed progress effect . Though useful, punch cards have shortcomings. For one thing, they’re no good if left behind on the refrigerator or misplaced. Do some cashiers triple-punch the cards of friends? Sure. Moreover, the motivating effects tend to fade, said Dylan Bolden, a partner at the Boston Consulting Group and co-author of a study last year called “Leveraging the Loyalty Margin: Rewards Programs That Work.” “If that’s the only thing you do, the punch card becomes more of a price promotion than a loyalty program,” Mr. Bolden said. In essence, the punch card is primitive compared with dynamic, app-powered loyalty programs. Capriotti’s, a 106-store chain of sandwich shops in 16 states, expects to introduce an app-based loyalty program early this year that its chief marketing officer, Jason Smylie, says will enable shop owners to enrich and fine-tune a prior punch card rewards program. “In addition to buy-10-get-the-11th free, we’ll have a points-based program where customers earn points and status per dollar spent,” said Mr. Smylie, explaining that rewards will rise with increasing status and core customers “will also get surprise-and-delight offers.” The software, developed by the company Punchh, will enable Capriotti’s to award a free drink or a dessert — as an unexpected reward at the cash register — to highly valued customers on perhaps 20 percent of their visits. “You’re not only rewarding the customers who are coming more frequently, you’re also giving people an incentive to show up,” he said. “I can come in and potentially get something for free. That’s awesome.” And effective. Psychologists have a name for this kind of reward — random intermittent reinforcement — and know it as a powerful way to encourage repeat behavior. Think no further than slot machines. Casinos have zeroed in on the gambling habits of their patrons through the use of smart cards rather than coins. Retailers can also now better know their customers through loyalty apps, which may also use data from Facebook profiles. Image The Capriotti's Sandwich Shop app: “You’re not only rewarding the customers who are coming more frequently, you’re also giving people an incentive to show up,” said Mr. Smylie. Credit Isaac Brekken for The New York Times “With apps you now can target specific customers and influence specific behaviors and keep track of all the results and understand the results,” Mr. Smylie said. “Because the check-level detail is now tied to a customer’s profile, we can understand what their purchasing behavior is, what their interests are and cross-reference that against their social media profiles and market to them more effectively and involve them at a deeper level with our brand.” Jitendra Gupta, an engineer and entrepreneur with a long background in customer-relations management software , said he started developing Punchh in 2010, when “social and mobile were coming together and we wanted to build a program for restaurants and local businesses to get to know their customers and bring them back.” The goal, he said, was to use social networks to drive word of mouth. If a visitor to the company’s Facebook page was referred there by a friend, the friend will be sent a notification saying, “Congrats, you just won an extra reward for referring your friend.” Mobile loyalty apps, Mr. Gupta explained, can also enable small businesses to run scratch-off sweepstakes programs or more involved games, along the lines of McDonald’s Monopoly stickers contests, long the province of Fortune 500 companies. Smartphone screens can also host engaging games — say, catching falling fruit or objects related to the business — and award a free menu item for reaching certain achievement levels. When children win, he said, the entire family may come in to redeem the reward. “Clearly, this is the best of times for loyalty programs,” said Mr. Bolden of the Boston Consulting Group, who recommended that small businesses “focus on the non-earn-and-burn aspects of the program.” He suggested that spas consider a separate waiting room for their app-identified best customers. “Or when the treatment is over, you hand the customer a glass of Champagne and strawberries,” he added. “If you’re an apparel retailer and you get in a new line from a new designer, invite the top 5 percent of your customers in first so they can see it before anyone else.” The point is that many effective rewards need not cost much to bestow. Moreover, smartphones that can pinpoint a user’s location may provide additional marketing opportunities to people who’ve downloaded loyalty apps. A mobile technology developed by Apple, iBeacon, allows businesses to know if a regular customer is near their storefront and ping them — or even greet them by name as they cross the threshold. For Dave & Buster’s, a food and drink establishment for adults built on games, “staying in the mind-set” of customers can be important, said Kevin Bachus, senior vice president for game and entertainment strategy. “We have to be in their decision set when they’re thinking of what to do tonight or we may miss out.” Part of the answer, he said, is mobile apps, but the challenge is figuring out timing and frequency of messages, and not to overdo it. “If you bombard them — say, when they’re on the way to their kid’s school — with a pop-up that says, ‘I notice you’re within a half mile of a Dave & Buster’s, come on in,’ that’s going to be aggravating,” he said. Better to ping New York Giants fans on Sunday, offering half-price beers to those wearing Giants blue. Professor Urminsky of the University of Chicago said a strategy built on mobile apps to reward loyalty — in essence, “a loyalty platform rather than an isolated loyalty program” — opens new possibilities for small businesses. “If it’s used wisely,” he said, “I think it will be a game changer.” | Mobile Apps;Small business;Customer service;Customer Loyalty Programs;advertising,marketing;Capriotti's |
ny0092648 | [
"sports",
"baseball"
] | 2015/08/07 | C. C. Sabathia Is Back to Vintage Form as Yankees Edge Red Sox | The scene grew tense at Yankee Stadium, or at least as tense as the fifth inning of a tie game against a last-place team can seem in early August. The Yankees were facing their archrivals, the Boston Red Sox, and the bases were loaded for David Ortiz. This was the moment for C. C. Sabathia. His 15th season has been his worst. His dependability as a bona fide starter has eroded. His confidence has wavered. He labored so much in his last start, in the searing Texas heat, that he was hospitalized with symptoms of dehydration. So with a familiar nemesis, Ortiz, digging in with nowhere to go, and with no margin for error, it was a good time for Sabathia to rustle the cobwebs off his Cy Young repertoire. He zipped a 94-mile-per-hour fastball past a heaving Ortiz before launching into a colorful tirade as he high-stepped off the mound, his emotions spilling over. It was a welcome, long-awaited sight for Yankees fans, and another followed soon after, when Jacoby Ellsbury launched a solo home run in the seventh. It was all the Yankees needed, and they held on to win, 2-1, in front of a sellout crowd. The homer came too late for Sabathia to earn a win, but after shutting down the Red Sox for six innings, with just one run and three hits allowed, along with eight strikeouts, Sabathia certainly deserved it. The temperate conditions at the Stadium helped. Sabathia’s last start, on July 30, featured temperatures pushing past 100 degrees at the start of the game. Sabathia threw 80 pitches in five innings but needed intravenous fluids shortly after retiring to the clubhouse. He later said he had never experienced anything like it in his career. The extra days seemed to refuel him, both physically and emotionally. He was undoubtedly fired up, and at one point in the fourth, the home-plate umpire, Rob Drake, came out to the mound to exchange words with Sabathia, a 6-foot-7 left-hander. Sabathia said after the game that Drake had taken umbrage with Sabathia’s body language during an at-bat by Hanley Ramirez. Drake apparently warned Sabathia to behave after he walked around the mound after striking Ramirez out. “I don’t think he needs to tell me anything,” Sabathia said, clearly still agitated by the exchange. “Don’t talk to me if I’m not talking to you. I think that’s a lot of umpires’ problems. They interpret your body language. That’s not his job. His job is to call balls and strikes.” The emotional wave rolled on into the fifth, and Sabathia needed it to get himself out of a bases-loaded jam. He had already surrendered the game-tying single, and up came Ortiz. They know each other well. For the most part, Sabathia has handled him admirably — Ortiz had a .239 batting average in 67 at-bats in his career against Sabathia coming into the game, with two home runs and 16 strikeouts. But he is always a threat, particularly in big moments in the Bronx. Sabathia dealt with him carefully, using breaking pitches early. Then he put him away with an inside fastball that seemed to cut in on Ortiz’s wrists as he swung through it. “I’m sure he was expecting the two-seamer,” Sabathia said. “It probably ran in further than he thought.” The Yankees had taken the early lead in the third against the left-hander Eduardo Rodriguez. After a single by Brett Gardner with two outs, Alex Rodriguez laced a ball to left field that sailed over Ramirez’s head. Though Ramirez recovered and hit the relay man smoothly, Gardner was not stopping at third. Head down, arms pumping, he kept steaming toward home, and his headfirst slide enabled him to slip a hand across home plate just before the tag was applied. Strangely enough, there was talk before the game about Gardner’s restraint on the basepaths of late, the fact that he had not collected a steal since June 12, a stretch of 43 games, after he had stolen 15 bases in 18 attempts in the first half of the season. “The thing is,” Gardner said, “with Alex and Tex swinging the bat so well behind us, you’re essentially in scoring position when you’re on first.” The two sluggers he was referring to, of course, were Rodriguez and Mark Teixeira, and his explanation proved prophetic. Rodriguez did not even need to find a gap to collect his 63rd R.B.I. this season; Gardner did the hard work for him. The Yankees took a 1-0 lead. They had opportunities to add to it, but they struggled against Eduardo Rodriguez — until Ellsbury turned on a 2-1 pitch in the seventh and sent the ball into the right-field seats. He had been batting just .202 since coming off the disabled list in early July. A deciding home run against his former team, though, could spark him. “I told myself to sit fastball and react to off-speed,” Ellsbury said. “I got an off-speed pitch and fortunately hit it well.” | Baseball;C C Sabathia;Red Sox;Yankees |
ny0222511 | [
"world",
"europe"
] | 2010/11/18 | Berlusconi, Italy’s Premier, Feels New Political Heat | ROME — Over the years, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has marveled Italians with his Houdini-like powers to escape the trickiest political traps and bounce back when all odds were against him. But this time around, as a political crisis deepens and looks poised to bring down the government within weeks, something is notably different in Italy . How can one tell? Because his former loyalists, who did not abandon him when he lost power in 2006 but who sense political weakness the way a dog smells fear, have visibly begun repositioning themselves for the next chapter — when Mr. Berlusconi is unlikely to be the leading man . “It’s an old Italian tradition that the tenor is idolized until people start booing him,” said Beppe Severgnini, a longtime Berlusconi critic whose latest book tries to explain the Italian leader to foreigners. This month, the booing has begun. It started at the top, with Gianfranco Fini, the co-founder of the center-right People of Liberty party, who withdrew four cabinet members on Monday. That move formalized a crisis that began when Mr. Berlusconi kicked him out of the coalition in July, costing him his parliamentary majority. But every day, the defections — or perceived defections — multiply. Last week, Vittorio Feltri, a longtime Berlusconi loyalist and the editor of Il Giornale , a newspaper owned by Mr. Berlusconi’s brother, gave a peculiar interview to a rival publication in which he criticized Mr. Berlusconi. “He’s tired and confused,” Mr. Feltri said in an interview in Il Fatto Quotidiano, an upstart left-wing daily. “He didn’t do a lot of things that he should have done.” For years, critics of Mr. Berlusconi stayed skittishly off the record, worried about jeopardizing their futures in a patronage society in which the billionaire Berlusconi has been the leading patron. That fear extended into government, where the prime minister routinely accused Mr. Fini and others who called attention to Italy’s problems of disloyalty. That, too, has begun to change. Today, politicians and other public figures who until this month were puzzlingly silent about Italy’s lack of competitiveness, low productivity, high debt, brain drain and tax evasion, among many other issues, have begun to speak openly. “Inside the P.D.L.” — Mr. Berlusconi’s People of Liberties party — “there’s a widespread sense that Berlusconi has reached the end of the line,” said Pier Ferdinando Casini, the head of the Union of Christian Democrats, a Catholic centrist party that was allied with Mr. Berlusconi in past governments but not the current one. “An empire’s an empire, but Julius Caesar is different from Caligula,” Mr. Casini added, making a wry reference to Mr. Berlusconi’s many sex scandals. He added that Mr. Berlusconi had not come through on a range of reforms, including to Italy’s justice system, infrastructure and health care. Mr. Casini is being courted furiously both by Mr. Fini and by the center-left Democratic Party. Each wants his votes — estimated at 5.8 percent in a recent poll in the newspaper Corriere della Sera — to help form a majority. Indeed, while there is a growing sense that Mr. Berlusconi is on the way out, no one, including veteran political analysts, has any clear sense of who is on the way in, making this the most dynamic and uncertain moment in Italian politics in 20 years. Ever since Mr. Berlusconi was first elected prime minister in 1994, he helped make Italian politics personality driven, with a right that orbited around him and a left that inevitably seemed divided because it lacked a Berlusconi equivalent. Mr. Berlusconi also helped create an illusion that Italy had a two-party system, with the help of a 2005 change to Italy’s electoral law, which allowed a coalition that got less than half the popular vote to have a parliamentary majority, causing Italy’s many smaller parties to lose clout. Mr. Casini and others want to change the law to create a new centrist grouping, most likely with Mr. Fini, Francesco Rutelli, a popular former mayor of Rome, and possibly Luca Cordero di Montezemolo, the president of Ferrari and a former president of the Italian Industrialists’ Association. The moment of truth for Mr. Berlusconi comes in mid-December. Both houses of Parliament are scheduled to vote on, and probably approve, the 2011 budget on Dec. 10. Mr. Berlusconi is scheduled to appear before both houses of Parliament on Dec. 13 — and he will face a confidence vote in both houses on Dec. 14, which may well bring down the government. On the same day, Italy’s Constitutional Court is expected to rule on whether a law that grants him immunity from prosecution is constitutional. But in a country where power politics is played at the highest level, with as much fancy footwork and feigned injuries as World Cup soccer, the game is not over. “Anyone who thinks that Berlusconi is dead and buried is completely mistaken,” Mr. Casini said. “If this crisis puts Berlusconi in the center and lets him play the victim, Berlusconi is capable of bouncing back,” he added. But, he said, “he’s in trouble when people hold him accountable for what he’s done.” | Italy;Berlusconi Silvio;Politics and Government |
ny0078212 | [
"sports",
"basketball"
] | 2015/05/13 | Pelicans Fire Their Coach | The New Orleans Pelicans fired Monty Williams on Tuesday. Williams has an overall record of 173-221, with two playoff appearances, since landing his first heading coaching job with the Pelicans in 2010. ■ The N.B.A. draft will be held at Barclays Center, the home of the Nets, on June 25. Brooklyn will be hosting the draft for a third straight year. ■ Lauren Jackson, a former W.N.B.A. most valuable player, will miss her third straight season with the Seattle Storm after undergoing knee surgery. | Basketball;Monty Williams;Coaches;New Orleans Pelicans |
ny0253266 | [
"business"
] | 2011/10/19 | Harold Leppo, Who Guided Lord & Taylor’s Expansion, Dies at 74 | Harold Leppo, who oversaw Lord & Taylor’s expansion into a national department store chain as its president during the 1970s and ’80s, died on Friday in Stamford, Conn. He was 74. The cause was lung cancer, his son, Daniel, said. Mr. Leppo had worked for the Filene’s department store company in Boston for 18 years, rising to vice president, when Joseph E. Brooks, Lord & Taylor’s chief executive, recruited him for the president’s post in 1977. Mr. Brooks had earlier been Mr. Leppo’s boss at Filene’s. Under their leadership the company grew from 19 stores in the Northeast, with its flagship at Fifth Avenue and 38th Street in Manhattan, to its present 46 stores nationwide. Mr. Leppo drew on his expertise in merchandising and sales promotion; for example, he pushed for stylish displays while advising against distracting decoration. “Otherwise the promotion overwhelms the product,” he told The New York Times in 1979. Mr. Leppo and Mr. Brooks resigned from Lord & Taylor in 1987 after its parent company, Associated Dry Goods, was acquired by May Department Stores. The next year Mr. Leppo became executive vice president of Allied Stores, under the company’s new owner, who was selling some subsidiary chains, including Ann Taylor. Mr. Leppo left Allied that year to bid for Ann Taylor but lost to a competing bidder, Mr. Brooks. The two remained close friends, Mr. Leppo’s son said. Mr. Leppo became a retail consultant in Stamford and later served on the boards of various retailers. Harold Leppo was born in Boston on Jan. 17, 1937. In 1959, he graduated from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, with a degree in marketing and began his climb at Filene’s. In addition to his son he is survived by his wife, Elaine; a daughter, Sara; and three grandchildren. | Leppo Howard;Executives and Management;Lord & Taylor;Deaths (Obituaries);Shopping and Retail;Leppo Harold |
ny0090616 | [
"business",
"dealbook"
] | 2015/09/15 | George Zimmer Takes On Men’s Wearhouse With Tuxedo Start-Up | Last year, George Zimmer was ousted from Men’s Wearhouse, the company he founded. His latest start-up, an online tailoring platform, is not doing so well. But now, Mr. Zimmer is sure he has a winner. On Tuesday, the graybeard ambassador of affordable suits will unveil his newest venture, Generation Tux, a website for tuxedo rentals. Generation Tux is the second company Mr. Zimmer, 66, has started this year. In May, he unveiled zTailors, which he hoped would be an “Uber for tailors.” But in an interview, Mr. Zimmer acknowledged that zTailors had not yet matched the success of Uber, the ride-hailing app valued at $50 billion. “We’re still losing millions of dollars,” he said. After more than three months in operation, zTailors was producing sales of about $200,000 a month, he said, and facilitating about 1,000 monthly matches between tailors and customers. That is not enough for the company to break even, Mr. Zimmer said. Those customers who use zTailors give the service high marks, but Mr. Zimmer said he had not figured out how to generate enough business yet. “We expect to grow a lot larger,” he said. “When we figure out the flywheel to generate demand, we think we have a winner.” When it comes to online tuxedo rentals, however, Mr. Zimmer is confident that given the perennial need for formal wear, and an increasingly tech-using consumer base, there is an enormous untapped market. “Generation Tux is definitely a winner,” he said. “I think it’s the best idea I’ve ever had.” Mr. Zimmer is certainly betting as much. Using mostly his own money, with small investments from friends and other investors, he has already spent more than $6 million to have 30,000 tuxedos made, construct an elaborate website and prepare a big distribution warehouse. Those 30,000 tuxes — along with accompanying shirts, cummerbunds, shoes and cuff links — are sitting in a 200,000-square-foot warehouse in Louisville, Ky., waiting for the online orders to start rolling in. Also in the warehouse: an army of tailors ready to make adjustments, and a dry cleaning business that Mr. Zimmer had constructed to service the inventory. With his foray into the tuxedo rental business, Mr. Zimmer is competing directly with his former company. Men’s Wearhouse rents more tuxedos than any other company, and has found it to be a surprisingly lucrative business. Mr. Zimmer’s former company reported $443 million in revenue in tuxedo rentals last year, up from $406 million in 2012. “Nobody had the idea that it was such a golden egg,” Mr. Zimmer said. “Tux rental is enormously profitable, like Microsoft profitability.” Yet Men’s Wearhouse, which last year merged with its rival Jos. A. Bank, has not yet started an online version of the business, leaving itself exposed to new competition. As a recent BuzzFeed headline put it: “Online Tux Rentals Are the Elephant in the Room for Men’s Wearhouse.” Renting expensive garments over the web isn’t a new idea. Rent the Runway, a successful start-up, has found a profitable niche renting expensive dresses to women who don’t want to spend hundreds — or even thousands — of dollars, for an item they might wear once or twice. And a few other start-ups, including Menguin, the Black Tux and SimpleTux, are already renting tuxedos online. But Mr. Zimmer says he believes that the combination of his investment and his name will allow Generation Tux to dominate the market in short order. “Our website is much more sophisticated than these other websites,” he said. For about $150, customers will receive a tuxedo, shirt, shoes, cuff links and a cummerbund or belt, delivered a week before they are needed. Rather than rent name-brand labels like Hugo Boss or Calvin Klein, Mr. Zimmer worked with designers to create a set of new Generation Tux-branded tuxedo designs, and produce them using luxurious Super 140s wool. When placing the order, customers enter their measurements into the Generation Tux website. Then at the warehouse, tailors will customize each garment before it is mailed out. If additional alterations are needed, men and women from zTailors will be on call to provide last-minute help. Each tuxedo will be embedded with an RFID chip, avoiding the need for any obvious labels that reveal the garment as a rental. That technology will also streamline operations at the warehouse, Mr. Zimmer said. “We don’t even have to open boxes to know what’s inside,” he said. To power the company, Mr. Zimmer has turned to Salesforce.com, a minor investor, and he is announcing Generation Tux at the big tech company’s Dreamforce event in San Francisco. “I don’t think the idea is particularly sophisticated,” Mr. Zimmer said. “I’m taking what had been a national tuxedo rental business and trying to do it online.” Even if the idea is not unique, Mr. Zimmer is going all in — spending millions of dollars of his own money before even registering his first sale — as he tries to build a winner. And if that means taking on Men’s Wearhouse, a company Mr. Zimmer founded, but which eventually spurned him, so be it. “We’re not trying to go after them,” he said. “They happen to be in the way.” | George A Zimmer;Suits;Generation Tux;Men's Wearhouse;Computers and the Internet;Tech Industry;Fashion |
ny0009878 | [
"sports",
"hockey"
] | 2013/02/16 | Devils Rally Past Flyers and Ducks Top Red Wings | David Clarkson scored on a deflection at 10 minutes 43 seconds of the third period Friday night, and the Devils rallied from a two-goal deficit to defeat the Philadelphia Flyers, 5-3, in Newark. Travis Zajac, Alexei Ponikarovsky and Patrik Elias scored the Devils’ other goals, with Ilya Kovalchuk getting the primary assist on each. Goaltender Martin Brodeur made 25 saves and had an assist, while Steve Bernier iced the game with an empty-net goal. ¶ Andrew Cogliano scored two of Anaheim’s three goals in the third period, sending the Ducks to a 5-2 victory over the Red Wings in Detroit. ... Craig Adams scored his first two goals of the season to lift the visiting Pittsburgh Penguins to a 3-1 win over the Winnipeg Jets. ¶ Chris Kreider, who scored five goals in a sensational N.H.L. debut in the playoffs last spring but struggled in his first regular-season games, was demoted to the Rangers’ A.H.L. affiliate in Connecticut. JEFF Z. KLEIN | Ice hockey;Devils;Flyers;Rangers;Anaheim Ducks;Red Wings;Chris Kreider |
ny0044512 | [
"sports",
"football"
] | 2014/02/02 | He’s Pete Carroll’s Guardian Tweeter | Ben Malcolmson had a cool, if not totally original, idea. As an enterprising football beat reporter for the student newspaper at Southern California, he decided to try out for Coach Pete Carroll’s powerhouse team even though he had not played the game since the fifth grade back home in Dallas. Carroll had a better and perhaps more calculated idea. He called Malcolmson’s bluff and took him as a walk-on. “Thought he was pulling one of the pranks he is known for, but he said I was fast and could catch the ball,” Malcolmson said. “I’m 6 foot 1, and back then, I was about 165 pounds, a rail, and had to put on another 20 pounds.” For the effort in the weight room, Malcolmson got his “ Paper Lion ” story, taking it to a level that George Plimpton never did. As a fifth-year senior working toward a master’s in communications management, he dressed for Trojans home games, including the 2007 Rose Bowl against Michigan. He even had a Reverse Rudy moment when Carroll yielded to the crowd and put him in for one end-of-game kneel-down by the quarterback in a victory against Notre Dame. Better yet, he got a right-out-of-college career as Carroll’s nonfootball-related assistant, a communications alter ego, staying with Carroll for three years at U.S.C. and making the move with him to Seattle and the N.F.L. “I enjoyed being a journalist,” said Malcolmson, 28, after experiencing his first Super Bowl media day with the Seahawks on Tuesday. “But I love being part of the team.” When confronted by a clever reporter, is it smarter to co-opt than conceal? For those looking for an ulterior motive, could that have been Carroll’s strategy all along? Image From right, Carroll, Reggie Bush and Matt Leinart in 2005. Malcolmson played one snap in his Southern California career. Credit Kevork Djansezian/Associated Press Or could Malcolmson have just become the accidental embodiment and example of how Carroll’s kinetic coaching — elevated as a college champion in starry Los Angeles but still thriving in rainy Seattle — has achieved a full-blown celebrity, despite a few unflattering developments that have swirled around his college and pro programs? At U.S.C., there was enough smoke to start a fire, leaving the Trojans in a chokehold of N.C.A.A. sanctions, just as Carroll was leaving for the N.F.L. In Seattle, there has been a string of drug suspensions that has left his team with a comically embarrassing handle, the Sea-Adderall Seahawks. But America loves winners — under Carroll, the Seahawks have ascended from two sub-.500 seasons to 11-5 to Sunday’s Super Bowl against Denver — and charismatic winners even more. Carroll may well have been an innocent bystander in the Reggie Bush recruiting scandal at U.S.C. and in no better position than any other coach or official in professional sports to prevent the use of performance-enhancing drugs. But Carroll — the hands-down winner of a recent ESPN.com poll that asked players to name a preferred head coach — may also have created the ideal persona to deal with the challenges of coaching the 21st-century N.F.L. athlete. Once derided as a too touchy-feely bundle of nervous energy during failed head-coaching stays with the Jets and the New EnglandPatriots, Carroll has developed the reputational heft that allows him to also be an authoritative figure while simultaneously striking the pose of everyone’s buoyant friend. Consider, for example, the statement Carroll made in October 2010, his first season with the Seahawks, with the dedicated assistance of Malcolmson. Carroll read that Bill Clinton was in Seattle to campaign for Patty Murray’s Senate re-election campaign. Having already once met the former president, Carroll asked Malcolmson to reach out to Clinton’s people to set up a meeting. “Me, Coach, the president and his assistant in a room for an hour,” he said. “They talked sports, education reform, general government policy, youth violence — going from one topic to another,” Malcolmson said. “It was amazing.” Soon after the Clinton meeting, a photograph of the two gray-haired extroverts appeared on Carroll’s Twitter feed. Unwitting or not, the message to the Seahawks and their fans was delivered, loud and clear: Pete Carroll, power coach, had arrived. Malcolmson operates Carroll’s websites and his Twitter feed, aware of the pitfalls, treading (and trending) carefully. “If I wasn’t shadowing him constantly, maybe it would be harder,” he said. “But I feel sometimes like I’m with him 24/7, and there’s a real like-mindedness. Sometimes, he’ll say, ‘Oh, you shouldn’t have used an exclamation point there.’ ” Not too often, apparently. On Carroll’s feed, many tweets are, true to character, punctuated with an exclamation point or three. This is not how Bill Belichick goes about his business, sending out platitudes and other rousing missives to 887,015 — and counting — as of late Friday afternoon. Then again, Carroll does coach in Seattle, the home of Microsoft and Amazon. He follows 328 people on Twitter, ranging from his players — including Richard Sherman and Russell Wilson — to LeBron James and Robinson Cano and Phil Jackson, and from Pat Summitt to the Foo Fighters, Pearl Jam and the Seattle-born rapper Macklemore. Spanning the generations, he had Malcolmson arrange to have Bill Russell, who lives in Seattle, speak to the team before a late-season game. “He mixes with those kinds of people really well; he knows a lot about them and what they do,” Malcolmson said. “I think they enjoy being around him because he gives off this positive energy that lifts people around him.” Malcolmson cited a most recent example, the N.F.C. championship game against San Francisco. “We’re down, 10-0 — all the momentum is with them,” he said. “He turns around, gives me this look that says, It’s about to turn. Then it did, and here we are, at the Super Bowl.” A Seattle victory would be the story the once-aspiring journalist would love to write. He will settle for 140-character tweets, exclamation points included. | Football;USC;Seahawks;Pete Carroll;Ben Malcolmson |
ny0159282 | [
"sports",
"hockey"
] | 2008/12/06 | Avery Suspended for 6 Games for Remarks | The N.H.L. has suspended Dallas Stars forward Sean Avery for six games for the inflammatory comments he made Tuesday before a game against Calgary, an unusually long suspension for off-ice comments. Commissioner Gary Bettman said the length of the suspension was due to the offensive nature of Avery’s comments and his history of disciplinary problems. “I wanted to be very clear to the fans that this isn’t something we tolerate,” Bettman said Friday in a conference call. “Sean has been warned in the past year that he was getting close to crossing the line.” Avery, 28, crossed it when he spoke to reporters after a morning skate Tuesday in Calgary, making derogatory comments about former girlfriends who have dated other N.H.L. players. Bettman suspended him immediately, pending a hearing, which was held Thursday in New York. Avery has already missed two games, so he will become eligible to play again Dec. 16, when the Stars host Phoenix. There is doubt, however, that Avery will return to the Stars after his suspension. Dallas Coach Dave Tippett has made strong comments about the team’s unwillingness to take Avery back. The team refused to issue Avery’s apology on Wednesday; his own publicist had to do it. General Manager Brett Hull, who was instrumental in the team’s signing of Avery and who attended the hearing Thursday, said the team would consider its options. Avery joined Dallas as a free agent in July, signing a four-year, $15.5 million contract. He had been with the Rangers since February 2007. Avery has also been ordered to have an evaluation and counseling for anger management, something Bettman said Avery had requested at the hearing. Despite Avery’s reputation as an agitator, this is the first time he has been suspended by the league. “It’s a process,” Hull said. “You don’t go to a retreat for a weekend and it’s fixed. Once the suspension is over, and once we find out the process he’s trying to go through, as an organization we’re going to decide as a group what direction we’re going to go. The players will have a chance to give their input.” The N.H.L. Players’ Association expressed alarm at the suspension and the Stars’ handling of the situation in a statement Friday from Paul Kelly, the executive director. “While the N.H.L.P.A. does not condone Sean’s comments, which were clearly inappropriate, the discipline imposed by the Commissioner is unprecedented both in its severity, as well as the process by which it was handed down,” the statement said. “We have also seen signals from the Dallas Stars that Sean’s contractual rights might be challenged. We are monitoring the situation as it develops, and we will evaluate all legal options as the circumstances warrant.” Bettman said Avery had received several warnings from league officials, including from him directly, about his behavior in the past. Avery has a history of on-ice provocations, including several in his stint with the Rangers, who acquired him in a trade. In November 2007, he was fined $2,500 for sparking what nearly became a brawl while the Rangers and the Maple Leafs warmed up before a game in Toronto. During the playoffs in April, the league instituted a rule after Avery attempted to distract Devils goalie Martin Brodeur by facing him, then waving his stick in Brodeur’s face. As a member of the Stars, he was involved in a screaming match with a television broadcaster in October, between periods of a game against the Rangers at Madison Square Garden; and he was accused of verbal abuse by fans during at least two games. Bettman said the league had tried to investigate those incidents but did not find enough independent corroboration. | Avery Sean;Hockey Ice;Dallas Stars;National Hockey League;Bettman Gary |
ny0239154 | [
"sports",
"ncaabasketball"
] | 2010/12/18 | Izzo Is Suspended for Game | Michigan State Coach Tom Izzo was suspended for one game for a secondary violation of N.C.A.A. rules related to a summer basketball camp. He will sit out the No. 14 Spartans’ game Saturday against Prairie View A&M. ¶Jamar Briscoe scored 14 points and assisted on Phil Jones’s layup with 7.4 seconds left as host Charlotte handed No. 7 Tennessee its second upset loss of the week, 49-48. charlotte | Izzo Tom;Michigan State University;National Collegiate Athletic Assn;Basketball;Camps and Camping;College Athletics |
ny0063771 | [
"nyregion"
] | 2014/01/22 | Man Arrested in the Killings of His Wife and Children | A man wanted in the stabbing deaths of his wife and two young daughters over the weekend has been arrested in Texas, the New York Police Department said on Tuesday. The man, identified as Miguel Mejia-Ramos, 28, was apprehended on Monday night on Interstate 10 in Schulenburg, midway between Houston and San Antonio, the police said. He was in a 2001 Chevrolet van with New York commercial license plates, the police said. Mr. Mejia-Ramos was taken to a hospital, where he was treated for stab wounds that did not appear life-threatening, the police said. It was not clear how he was injured nor was it clear when he would be brought back to New York to face charges. After the killings, the United States Marshals Service learned that Mr. Mejia-Ramos might be headed toward Mexico and sent messages and descriptions of him and his vehicle to law enforcement agencies along his possible routes, Kevin R. Kamrowski, a spokesman for the Marshals Service, said. A Texas state trooper spotted Mr. Mejia-Ramos’s van and was aided by members of the Schulenburg Police Department, the Fayette County Sheriff’s Office and the Marshals Service in making the arrest. As of Tuesday evening, he was being held in the Fayette County Jail. “It was a pretty quick little grab,” Alfredo Perez, another spokesman for the Marshals Service, said. “There was no drama.” The police had been searching for Mr. Mejia-Ramos since his wife, Deisy Garcia, 21, and their two daughters, a 1-year-old and a 2-year-old, were found dead in the bedroom of their home in Jamaica, Queens, on Sunday evening. All were stabbed multiple times, the police said. The children were found in their beds, and Ms. Garcia on the floor in a separate bedroom. The police have given no indication of a possible motive in the killings. Mabel Henriquez, a friend of Ms. Garcia, said she complained last fall that she had been abused, without providing details. And the police said that last year they responded to two domestic-violence calls at the family’s home on Sutphin Boulevard, though no arrests were made. Ms. Garcia, who danced with her church group and, according to her Facebook page, was a student at York College in Queens, and met Mr. Mejia-Ramos in the United States after she moved from Totonicapán, Guatemala. The family shared an apartment with her uncle and aunt and their two children, one of whom discovered the bodies. | Queens;Murders;NYC;Miguel Mejia-Ramos;Deisy Garcia;Texas |
ny0124422 | [
"world",
"americas"
] | 2012/08/04 | Peru: More Than 100 Sickened by Toxic Spill at Mine | More than 100 people in rural Peru have been sickened by the spill of a toxic copper concentrate produced at one of the Andean country’s biggest mines, the authorities said Friday. The Ancash regional health office said 140 people had been treated for “irritative symptoms caused by the inhalation of toxins” after a pipeline carrying the concentrate under high pressure burst open in their community. Most of those affected had joined in efforts to prevent liquid copper slurry from reaching a nearby river after the pipeline linking the Antamina copper mine to the coast ruptured last week in the village of Santa Rosa de Cajacay, said the community’s president, Hilario Morán. The people used absorbent fabric provided by the mine, but were not given gloves or protective masks, said Antonio Mendoza, the mine’s environmental director. Shortly afterward, people became ill. | Accidents and Safety;Mines and Mining;Peru |
ny0049128 | [
"nyregion"
] | 2014/11/14 | 15 Are Charged With Defrauding Banks and Other Lenders of $20 Million | WHITE PLAINS — Many of the defendants were on Medicaid and were receiving food stamps. One couple even claimed they were homeless. Yet, according to the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan and the Federal Bureau of Investigation , they secured 25 mortgage loans totaling $20 million for residential properties in Brooklyn, Harlem and Monroe, N.Y., by vastly overstating their income, net worth and the amounts in their bank accounts. A majority of the loans, the authorities said, went into default and were never repaid. Preet Bharara , the United States attorney in Manhattan, on Thursday charged 15 men and women, 12 of them members of an extended family, with defrauding banks and other lending institutions out of the $20 million over a period of 10 years by lying about their assets and debts. Among banks said to have been defrauded were Bank of America and Credit Suisse First Boston. “They played the part of prince or pauper, depending on what scam was being perpetrated,” Mr. Bharara said at a news conference at the federal courthouse here. “People claimed to be millionaires when it suited them and claimed to be homeless when it suited them better.” A central figure in the scheme, the indictment said, was Irving Rubin, 58, of Brooklyn, who, it said, considered himself a real estate developer. Also indicted were his wife, Desiree, 57; his sons Yehuda, 29, of Monroe, and Joel, 33, of Brooklyn; and his brothers Abraham, 51, Jacob, 41, and Samuel, 59, all of Brooklyn. Yehuda Rubin and his wife, Rachel Rubin, 29, the indictment said, received $43,863 in Medicaid and food stamps over six years by declaring in various documents that their only income was as little as $180 per month from Ms. Rubin’s job. But to get loans totaling $1 million, Mr. Rubin listed his income from work and rents as $17,000 per month, and Ms. Rubin claimed she was earning $14,000 per month. Joel Rubin and his wife, Rivky, the indictment said, received $173,000 in Medicaid and food stamps over five years by telling government agencies they were homeless or earned income variously put at $130 or $180 per week. Yet they, too, received loans totaling $1 million by claiming Ms. Rubin’s job earned her $12,000 per month, the indictment said. Kenneth Gribetz, a former district attorney of Rockland County who is representing one of the defendants, said that banks deserve much of the blame for the easy-to-get loans. Image Preet Bharara, left, the United States attorney in Manhattan, spoke at a news conference with Sheriff Carl E. DuBois of Orange County. Credit Ángel Franco/The New York Times “I think that there was a period of time in the middle 2000s that banks were giving away loans at closing like it was water — without background checks,” he said. Mr. Bharara suggested much the same, saying that what contributed to the nation’s financial crisis “was the ability of people to get loans who should not get loans.” The investigation began three years ago in Orange County, where Monroe is, with a routine investigation of “a bad check,” the Orange County sheriff, Carl E. DuBois, said. An investigation of bank accounts “uncovered facts that did not add up,” and the case was turned over to the F.B.I. Sheriff DuBois took pains to underscore the cost to his county of Medicaid and food stamp fraud, noting that Orange County spends half its budget on such programs, causing enormous “strain for local taxpayers” and “threatening all operations of county government.” The proceeds from the loans, the indictment said, were used “to personally enrich” the defendants and pay off credit card debts and personal home mortgages or were used for other real estate projects. Yehuda Rubin, the indictment said, took part in at least 10 of the deceptive loans, acting as a borrower or as a person granted a borrower’s power of attorney, a mortgage broker or the distributor of the loan proceeds. Thirteen of the defendants were arrested in raids at their homes, and the two others surrendered later on Thursday. In Williamsburg and Borough Park in Brooklyn and in the village of Kiryas Joel in Monroe, news of the arrests spread quickly over WhatsApp and other digital circuits, with video clips of the raids included in many messages. By Thursday afternoon, eight defendants had been arraigned before United States Magistrate Judge Paul E. Davison as family members and friends packed the courtroom or huddled in tense conversations in the hallway. The eight pleaded not guilty, and bails were set at amounts ranging from $100,000 to $1 million. One of the $1 million bails was for Abraham Rubin, who the judge noted had served a four-month sentence for trying to bribe a “victim witness” with $500,000 in an unrelated investigation — the case against Nechemya Weberman, an unlicensed therapist in Brooklyn’s Satmar Hasidic community. Mr. Weberman was found guilty of sexually abusing a young client starting when she was 12. Most of the defendants were charged with conspiracy to commit bank fraud and wire fraud, which carries a potential sentence of 30 years in prison, and conspiracy to make false statements to lenders, which carries a maximum term of five years. Seven defendants were charged with theft of public money — Medicaid and food stamps — a charge that carries a maximum sentence of 10 years. One of those indicted was a real estate lawyer, Martin Kofman, 53, of Brooklyn, who the indictment said “distributed fraudulent loan proceeds between and among members of the conspiracy” and provided false information to lenders. Another was an appraiser, Pinchus Glauber, 35, of Chestnut Ridge, N.Y., who the indictment said inflated the value of properties held by the defendants. Mr. Gribetz, his lawyer, said, “We feel he is innocent of the charges and will be vindicated.” | Fraud;Irving Rubin;Mortgage loan;Medicaid;Banking and Finance;FBI;Preet Bharara |
ny0277508 | [
"nyregion"
] | 2016/11/29 | An Angry Encounter, Then a Hug | Dear Diary: I witnessed a verbal altercation between two women on the subway today. One was about 60 years old; the other was probably in her early 30s. The younger woman had a big bag around her shoulder and was holding onto a pole as the older woman entered the car. “Don’t you dare push me” the older woman yelled. “That is your perception,” the younger woman replied. “I did no such thing. You bumped into my bag.” The older woman insisted that the younger woman was wrong and escalated the argument. I tried to make eye contact with her to encourage her to calm down because I could sense that the situation was getting out of control. Then, to my surprise, the younger woman did something remarkable while she trying to keep her cool: She asked the older woman: “Do you need a hug?” “Why yes I do,” the older woman said. The two women embraced and forgave each other. | Subway;NYC |
ny0251225 | [
"business"
] | 2011/02/06 | Atlantic Records’ Julie Greenwald, Looking at Leadership | This interview with Julie Greenwald, chairwoman and chief operating officer of the Atlantic Records Group, was conducted and condensed by Adam Bryant . Q. When was the first time you were in a leadership role? A. After I graduated from Tulane University, I joined Teach for America. I asked to be stationed in New Orleans. I was assigned to a third-grade class at a school inside Calliope Projects. The school separated students by test scores that year, and I had the kids who were at the bottom. Most of my third-graders couldn’t read, and so it was very challenging. That was the first time I realized how you need to be so resourceful, because I saw that I was not going to be able to do the job by myself. So I went to the Tulane law school and I went to the African-American student association of lawyers and I told them my story. I said, “I need help because the only way we’re going to be able to teach them how to read is if we can get one-on-one time with them, and the way it’s set up is there’s really no one-on-one time because there are 26 kids.” Also, I said: “I need some role models. These kids should see you making a difference becoming lawyers, going to college, going to grad school.” I used all my Jewish guilt and I signed up about 30 volunteers. For the whole year, I was never alone. I had all these bright, wonderful law students coming into my classroom, so we could divide and conquer. And by the end of the year, a lot of my kids were reading, doing great in math, but it was a really stressful, hard year. Q. So how did you get into the music business? A. That summer I came to New York City to get a break. That’s when I met Lyor Cohen and started at Rush Management, which is crazy because I didn’t know anything about hip-hop music or rap music. But I had just spent that year inside Calliope Projects, being surrounded by these fantastic third-graders who loved listening to hip-hop music. It was really interesting how it all kind of worked out. Q. And what did you do at Rush Management? A. I was Lyor’s assistant. I didn’t even have a desk and a table. I had to literally sit on the arm of a couch. He would be on the phone talking, yelling, barking, and I would be doing itineraries, tracking down artists. Whatever he asked me to do, I did it. He would just send me on missions and say, “It’s your job to make sure Flavor Flav gets on the plane.” And Flavor Flav was a really nice guy, and he was super-wonderful, but he thought it was funny to lose me inside an airport, and so you had to quickly learn how to get along with artists and figure out exactly how to work them. Lyor used to give me crazy, impossible tasks to do. Q. And so what was the first job where people were clearly reporting to you? A. Lyor sent me from Rush Management to Def Jam records. I went to the promotions department and I saw that it was very disorganized and chaotic, so I pulled everybody together and I got things organized. Very quickly, they promoted me to be general manager of the department. Q. Was that an easy transition for you? A. No, because I was 22 or 23, and I was so young and new. So I just had to kill everybody with kindness, and I tried to make their jobs more efficient. I also outworked everybody. I was in that office at 8:30 in the morning. I didn’t leave that office till 11:30 at night. I outhustled everyone. Then Lyor said to me, “I need you to start a marketing department.” And I said, “I don’t know anything about marketing.” And he said, “Go learn.” And then he handed me the video department, and I said, “I don’t know anything about making videos,” and he said, “Go learn.” And then he handed me the finance and budgets and the art department, and before I knew it, he handed me every department in Def Jam. Q. What were some leadership lessons you learned along that trajectory? A. It really taught me that the best thing I could do for my company and my people is to move them around and have them learn what everybody else is doing, so they really understand the nuance of each person’s job and how tough it is. That way, people respect each other on a whole new level. Everybody has to kind of know everybody else’s job. They don’t actually have to do it, but they have to have a real understanding, so there’s a whole layer of respect to keep everybody working hard together. Q. Talk more about your leadership style now. A. I spend a lot of time in small meetings. I make sure, as we’re working on projects, that we constantly talk about culture and what we need and why something is not just one person’s responsibility. I’ll talk through an issue, and really make sure everybody understands that we all have to have ownership over the artist and over the project and over this company. We’re all in it together. We’re all going to win together and we’re all going to lose together. So what do we need to learn about each other’s departments? How do we make sure everybody’s working together better? Q. Can you talk more about the culture you’re trying to foster? A. In meetings, I constantly talk about how we have to be vulnerable, and that it’s not fair for some people in meetings to just sit or stand along the wall and not participate. If you’re not going to participate, then that means you’re just sponging off the rest of us. I’ll throw out ideas. Some of them will be horrible, and I’ll let people to the left of me or the right of me gong me and tell me that was the wackiest idea on the planet, and we’ll get through it. They won’t get fired. And then I’ll say to others, “O.K., you, what’s your idea?” It’s important for everyone to understand we’re a company where risk-taking is necessary. I know it’s not easy sometimes. I hate public speaking. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it. The only way I conquered it was being put on the spot all the time. In order to lead, you have to be a public speaker, and in order to be a department head, you need to be able to really drive the meeting and make sure everyone understands that the reason you’re the department head is because you’re a driver. You’re not just someone who’s taking a back seat. Q. How else do you run meetings? A. I’m not afraid to call a meeting and shove 17 people into a tiny office. We look like a clown car. But you know what? It’s O.K. because that’s when you feel like, “All right, we’re this tightknit unit.” So I started to assemble a whole other set of meetings in my office, and they’re like SWAT-team meetings, and somehow they’ve gotten bigger and bigger. Sometimes I look around and I think, “Am I an idiot that I’ve got 50 people crammed into my office?” But it’s so tight and we’re so on top of each other that you feel the “It’s us against the world, man.” We’re not in the conference room. And everybody’s on top of each other, so there’s no seating chart. All of a sudden it sets a whole new playing field where there’s no hierarchy. Everybody’s now on equal footing. It’s like a free-for-all. Q. Things you don’t tolerate? A. No politics. No stabbing each other. Anybody who tried that with me found out right away that I wasn’t going for it. If you disagreed with someone and you were afraid to tell her, but you told me, I’d bring both of you into my office and make you talk about it. I did enough of that in the beginning that people understood that if they didn’t confront another person to their face, I will blow up. If you’ve got an issue, you should be able to work it out. And when you can’t find resolution, I’m here to break the tie, no question. But don’t come to me to talk about someone else. That’s not going down tonight. Q. Let’s talk about hiring. How do you do it and what questions do you ask? A. I want to only hire people who I want to grow old with. You want to hire people who you want to look at as an extended part of your family, because I feel like we are a family. The first thing I do is sit with them to try to really get a vibe of where they come from, what’s their background, and how much they love music. “Why are you here? Do you understand we’re in the artist business?” You want people who love going out at night, who want to be out with you. We go out every night together. You want to love these people. You want to hang out with them socially at night, because if you don’t, it’s going to be a bummer. Q. What qualities are you looking for? A. Confidence. We’re a tight-knit bunch. You want to add somebody to the mix who’s confident, who’s going to speak up — someone who’s going to come in who has a new point of view, who has ideas, who’s not afraid to try to get in and become one of us and join the team. Q. How long are your interviews? A. If we get into a give-and-take, and if the rhythm is going, we can sit there and talk forever. If the rhythm’s not there and they’re not that interested and they’re not trying to engage me, it could be a short meeting because I think: “Somehow you got in to see me. Engage me. Make me fall in love with you. Because you know what? You’re going to have to sit next to an artist who’s going to have to fall in love with you, too.” I also constantly ask my senior team, every four to six months: “Do you have the best people underneath you? Do we really have people who are good enough to take your chair? And if not, let’s get rid of them. It’s O.K. because there’s great new people out there. Let’s make sure we always have the best here.” So, I’m constantly asking and pushing my staff to make sure that they feel like they’ve made the right hiring decisions. And if they didn’t, it’s O.K. It’s cool. It’s not a reflection of them. Let’s learn from it, and now let’s get the best person in there. And I try to let everyone know it’s about all of us, and that if you do have the wrong person, it’s not fair to all of us for you to have that weak link there. I’m constantly pushing and asking that because I don’t want complacency. Q. You talk to a lot of twentysomethings about jobs. What’s your broadest career advice for them? A. You have to differentiate yourself. If you want to get the job or even get promoted, you have to stand out, and you have to get there by being vulnerable, speaking up, being resourceful, because all we want is people who can handle impossible tasks and get them done and not say, “Well, I couldn’t.” You’ve got to be resourceful and you need to be a creative thinker, because what we’re doing today keeps changing. Every day it shifts, and you can’t be stuck in yesterday and just doing things a certain way because that’s what we did yesterday. People have to be ready for action, and they have to have some ideas. Don’t just show up and come in empty-handed. | Hiring and Promotion;Executives and Management;Atlantic Records;Greenwald Julie |
ny0274197 | [
"sports",
"tennis"
] | 2016/02/04 | Roger Federer Will Miss at Least Two Tournaments With Knee Injury | Roger Federer had knee surgery Wednesday to repair a torn meniscus and will miss tournaments in Rotterdam and Dubai this month. It is a rare injury setback for Federer, 34, who had relatively minor back problems in 2008 and 2013. A statement on his official website did not specify which knee is injured, though it said the injury occurred last Friday, one day after his Australian Open semifinal loss to Novak Djokovic. “While this is an unfortunate setback, I am encouraged and grateful that my doctor said the procedure was a success,” Federer said on his Facebook page . I am looking forward to attacking the rehabilitation process this afternoon with my team and working hard to get back out on tour as soon as possible. His next scheduled tournament is in Indian Wells, Calif., starting March 7. The organizer of the Rotterdam tournament, the former Wimbledon champion Richard Krajicek, said he got the news Tuesday. “Obviously, receiving this information yesterday evening is a major setback for us, as it is for the fans looking forward to his presence,” Krajicek said. “We hope to have Roger back next year.” | Tennis;Roger Federer;Knee;Sports injury |
ny0197534 | [
"world",
"europe"
] | 2009/10/14 | Sarkozy Defends Son's Nomination for Plum Job | PARIS — President Nicolas Sarkozy on Tuesday rallied to the defense of his 23-year-old son Jean, whose planned nomination as chairman of the agency that runs the premier business district in France has prompted charges of nepotism at home and abroad. The younger Sarkozy has been under fire as commentators and opposition politicians questioned his qualification for one of the most prized and powerful jobs in local politics. Weighing in for the first time, Mr. Sarkozy told journalists: “Throwing someone to the wolves, without foundation and in excessive fashion, is never good.” He spoke after a speech on high school reform, in which he stressed the need for equality of opportunity. The furor is the second political storm for his government in as many weeks. Last week, the opposition was calling for the resignation of the culture minister, Frédéric Mitterrand, for playing down the rape case involving the film director Roman Polanski and a passage in a 2005 memoir about paying for sex with boys in Thailand. But just as Mr. Mitterrand, who stayed put, was fading from the headlines, Jean Sarkozy became front page news. “My daddy is president,” read the main headline of the left-leaning newspaper Libération on Tuesday. A large photo of the president’s eldest son covered half the front page. While there is no evidence that the president was involved in his son’s nomination process, Le Monde carried an unusual front-page editorial, mulling whether Mr. Sarkozy’s presidency had become so quasi-monarchical that no one in his entourage dared to tell him to stop. “Have we regressed to a perverse court practice in which no one dares to tell the king that he is wrong?” the editorial asked. “This is the appropriation of a country by one family and clan,” Michèle Delaunay, an opposition Socialist lawmaker, said at the National Assembly. “What is his legitimacy?” Epad, a quasi-governmental body that runs the La Défense business district on the western edge of Paris, oversees a billion euros in annual spending. Plans to almost double the size of the district will only increase the clout of its planning board. Even Patrick Devedjian, 65, a member of Mr. Sarkozy’s government who is the outgoing chairman of Epad and has come up against the age limit of the job, appeared to take a swipe at his chosen successor by quoting the 17th century dramatist Corneille. “In souls nobly born, valor does not depend upon age,” he said. Jean Sarkozy appears to share not only his father’s mannerisms but his political ambition as well. Pundits have recorded his ascent assiduously, recently pointing to a new hair cut that transformed a long mane to a slick short cut. Like the president, he entered politics in his 20s in the Hauts-de-Seine department, which includes the wealthy western suburbs of the capital. He leads his father’s party in his father’s old constituency and is a member of the local council. If his nomination is approved, Jean Sarkozy would again be treading in his father’s footsteps — the president held the Epad job in 2005 and 2006. Two years ago, when his father was interior minister and Jean Sarkozy’s motor scooter was stolen, the police recovered it quickly and went to the extraordinary length of taking a DNA sample from his helmet. “Whatever I do, whatever I say, my legitimacy will always be questioned,” Jean Sarkozy told Le Parisien newspaper this week. Several ministers defended him Tuesday. The government spokesman, Luc Chatel, told LCI television that the Left was staging a “manhunt.” The minister for higher education, Valérie Pecresse, called Jean Sarkozy, who has not completed his undergraduate degree, “the natural candidate” for the post. | Sarkozy Nicolas;Nepotism;Sarkozy Jean;France;Paris (France) |
ny0023367 | [
"us",
"politics"
] | 2013/09/22 | Ad Campaigns Compete as Health Law Rollout Looms | WASHINGTON — President Obama waged a fierce fight to pass his health care law four years ago. But as his administration prepares to put it in place, he is facing an aggressive Republican campaign to prevent a successful rollout and deny him his most important legacy. Starting this week, the White House will kick off a six-month campaign to persuade millions of uninsured Americans to sign up for health coverage as part of insurance marketplaces that open for business on Oct. 1. If too few people enroll, the centerpiece of the president’s Affordable Care Act could collapse. But instead of offering the kind of grudging cooperation that normally follows even the most bitter of legislative battles, Mr. Obama’s foes have intensified their opposition, trying to deepen the nation’s anger about the health insurance program, which both sides often call Obamacare. Across the country, Republicans are eager to prevent people from enrolling, fearing that once people begin receiving the benefit they will be loath to give it up. And in Washington, lawmakers have cast the law as the evil villain in a legislative melodrama about the budget that is barreling toward another government shutdown. One group called Generation Opportunity distributed a Web video last week showing a creepy-looking Uncle Sam peering between a woman’s legs at a gynecologist’s office. “Don’t let government play doctor,” the video says at the end. “Opt out of Obamacare.” In the face of the intense opposition, the White House is pushing ahead with a vigorous public relations effort that will begin accelerating Monday, according to top White House aides in charge of the program. Officials said the rollout would include a presidential event this week in New York with former President Bill Clinton and a health care speech by Mr. Obama on Thursday in Maryland. Michelle Obama will urge mothers and veterans to enroll their families. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. will host a nationwide conference call with nurses to enlist them in the effort to spread the word. Members of the president’s cabinet will fan out across the country, lobbying constituent groups to prod their members into action. Those efforts will eventually be augmented by a Madison Avenue-style advertising campaign by insurance companies, which officials say are poised to spend $1 billion or more to attract millions of new customers. Some of the ads are likely to be aimed at young people, many of whom are uninsured but healthy — and great for the insurance companies’ bottom line. Image Speaker John A. Boehner and House Republicans celebrated on Friday after voting to eliminate money for the health law. Credit Gabriella Demczuk/The New York Times Liberal advocacy groups have also begun to organize door-to-door canvassing, much as they did on behalf of Mr. Obama’s two presidential campaigns. The overarching goal is to persuade many of today’s 48 million uninsured to sign up for insurance on the new exchanges created by the law. Crucially, officials need to woo older, sicker people without insurance as well as younger, healthier people, whose payments effectively subsidize those who will end up using more health care. Mr. Obama’s organizing strength among young adults — whom he won by a wide margin in 2008 and 2012 — may aid the campaign. “We will have to create buzz and engagement and adjust and reach people in a sustained way from October to the end of March,” said Tara McGuinness, who is leading the health care communications effort inside the White House. “This is about what makes sense for families, what’s affordable for them.” But even as Mr. Obama’s campaign accelerates, Republicans at all political levels are working against the law. The Republican National Committee has begun what it calls a monthlong awareness campaign, with a television booking operation to make sure that pundits opposed to the law are always available to counter its boosters. The committee’s effort has already booked local and national politicians on radio programs like “The Hugh Hewitt Show” and cable TV programs like “The Mike Huckabee Show.” A Republican committee Web site counts down the days, hours, minutes and seconds until what it calls the “Obamacare Train Wreck.” Other conservative groups are broadcasting television advertisements that urge people not to sign up for coverage under the health care law. Americans for Prosperity began broadcasting an ad last week featuring a cancer survivor who warns about the dangers of the law. It is the latest in a series of commercials featuring women criticizing the law. “Obamacare is dangerous — it can’t be implemented,” Tricia, the cancer survivor, says in the ad. “Your well-being judged by a bureaucrat in D.C. is devastating.” Republican state and local officials are trying to thwart the administration’s enrollment efforts by imposing restrictions and requirements on volunteers seeking to inform people about how to enroll in coverage plans under the law. The Heritage Action Fund organized a Defund Obamacare bus tour this summer that helped convince House Republicans that no federal budget deal should be made without stripping the money from the health law. Image The Web site of the Republican National Committee offers its take on the health law. And in Congress, House Republicans are threatening to shut down the government and risk a default unless Congress eliminates all of the financing for the law, effectively killing it. “Today, the constitutional conservatives in the House are keeping their word to our constituents and our nation to stand true to our principles, to protect them from the most unpopular law ever passed in the history of the country — Obamacare — that intrudes on their privacy and our most sacred right as Americans to be left alone,” Representative John Culberson, Republican of Texas, said on the House floor on Friday. Mr. Obama was blunt in a speech to the Congressional Black Caucus on Saturday night, saying he wanted to speak “as clearly as I can” about efforts to derail his health care law: “It’s not going to happen.” White House officials call the Republican efforts a “sabotage campaign” and concede that the assault on the law will make it harder to persuade people to sign up for insurance. In Florida, Missouri and Ohio, state officials have already moved to undercut efforts to enroll people in coverage. In Georgia, the state insurance commissioner, Ralph T. Hudgens, has said he will do “everything in our power to be an obstructionist.” The result, White House officials said, is likely to be confusion among some members of the public and the potential for a muddled message at exactly the worst time. People may get a knock on the door from someone urging them to sign up for insurance, only to see a television commercial a few minutes later urging them to “opt out” of the program. “It’s rather extraordinary, if you think about it, that there are efforts under way to prevent Americans from getting benefits that they lawfully could enjoy and should enjoy,” said Jay Carney, the White House press secretary. White House aides remain optimistic that some of what they describe as Republican antics will not be seen by the typical American. They are betting that support from Hollywood celebrities like Jennifer Hudson, Kal Penn and Amy Poehler — all of whom met with Mr. Obama this summer to lend their support for the health care campaign — will be more influential than Republican politicians. The singer Katy Perry, who has 43 million Twitter followers (more than Mr. Obama’s 37 million), urged fans to check out the options during last month’s Video Music Awards ceremonies. Aides are also counting on a network of volunteers, partly directed by Organizing for America, the president’s former campaign operation, to knock on thousands of doors in the weeks and months ahead. Last week, Mr. Obama joined a conference call with thousands of volunteers to encourage their efforts. “So we’re on our way to make sure that health care is affordable for every single American, and they’re not using the emergency room as their primary care provider,” Mr. Obama told the volunteers. “But that only happens with all of you.” | Obamacare,Affordable Care Act;Republicans;Barack Obama;Campaign advertising;Health Insurance |
ny0097178 | [
"world",
"asia"
] | 2015/06/05 | 20 Indian Soldiers Killed in Ambush in Manipur | NEW DELHI — At least 20 Indian soldiers were killed during an ambush Thursday by militants in the remote northeast of the country, in one of the deadliest confrontations in recent years. The attack, in the Chandel district of Manipur State close to the border with Myanmar, was carried out against a small convoy of army vehicles traveling from one army camp to another in the hilly and forested area about 60 miles south of the state capital, Imphal. “At least 20 soldiers were killed and 11 are injured,” said Col. Rohan Anand, an army spokesman in New Delhi. “The army convoy was first blasted using improvised explosive devices followed by rocket-propelled grenades and small-arms fire.” Several similar attacks have been reported in recent months in the states of Arunachal Pradesh and Nagaland. As Thursday’s ambush occurred in an area without phone communication, details were slow to emerge. “We are still waiting for the police party to come back,” said P. K. Tutusana, the spokeswoman for the Manipur police. India’s defense minister, Manohar Parrikar, condemned the assault and vowed in a statement that “those who have committed this cowardly act will be brought to book.” Manipur has 41 militant groups, though the government is currently in peace negotiations with 36 of them. However, the remaining five “are the most important ones,” said J. Suresh Babu the home secretary of Manipur. “This is a desperate attempt by militants to make their presence felt, and to try to make sure that people should not forget them.” | India;Military;Fatalities,casualties;Manipur State India |
ny0085786 | [
"business"
] | 2015/07/11 | McDonald’s Denies That Happy Meal Toy Curses | McDonald’s is standing by its latest Happy Meal toy, denying that its Minions are the foul-mouthed playthings that some of its fast-food customers say they are. In videos online, some customers said they heard a curse when, by tapping one of the toys against a hard surface, they activated its voice. “To me, it sure doesn’t sound like anything a kid should be hearing,” one commenter said on a YouTube video post. The restaurant chain introduced the toys on July 3 as a promotion of the animated film “Minions,” a prequel to the “Despicable Me” movies that feature small, yellow characters who talk gibberish. In a statement, McDonald’s denied the toy used bad language, and a company spokeswoman said that only a “very small number of customers” had complained. The company, which said there was no plan to remove the toy from distribution, added that the contention that “this toy is saying anything offensive or profane is not true.” McDonald’s says the toy emits three sounds — “para la bukay,” “hahaha” and “eh eh.” | McDonald's;Toy;YouTube;Minions;Restaurant |
ny0075794 | [
"sports",
"soccer"
] | 2015/05/02 | Celtic Near Scottish Title | The reigning champion, Celtic, is on the verge of retaining the Scottish Premier League title after thrashing Dundee, 5-0. Celtic, aiming for its fourth consecutive league title, Celtic could clinch the championship Saturday if Aberdeen fails to defeat Dundee United. ■ André-Pierre Gignac scored twice to move past the 100-goal mark in the French first division as Marseille won, 2-0, at struggling Metz to end a four-game losing streak and revive its Champions League hopes. (AP) | UEFA Champions League;Soccer;Celtic Soccer Team;Scottish Premier League |
ny0047301 | [
"world",
"middleeast"
] | 2014/11/29 | Italian and Palestinian Protesters Wounded by Israeli Forces | JERUSALEM — Israeli forces shot and wounded an Italian activist and a Palestinian demonstrator with live ammunition on Friday during a weekly protest in the West Bank village of Kufr Qadoum, according to local activists and Palestinian medical officials. Dr. Sameer Saliba of the Palestine Medical Complex in Ramallah identified the Italian as Prodo Corsi, 38, and said he was in moderate to serious condition after being hit by a bullet in his upper torso. A spokeswoman for the Israeli military said protesters, some using slingshots, hurled stones at the Israeli forces and burned tires. When tear gas failed to disperse the demonstrators, she said, soldiers fired at the two main instigators. The International Solidarity Movement, a pro-Palestinian organization with foreign volunteers in the West Bank, said in a statement that Mr. Corsi, known as Patrick, had been wearing a yellow high-visibility jacket when he was shot. The group quoted another unnamed volunteer who was in Kufr Qadoum as saying that Mr. Corsi “was just standing there, peacefully protesting,” when he was shot. The group identified the wounded Palestinian protester as Sami Jumma, 18. | Israel;Palestinians;West Bank;Civil Unrest;Prodo Corsi |
ny0203475 | [
"science",
"space"
] | 2009/08/30 | Indian Moon Orbiter Loses Contact | NEW DELHI (AP) — India ’s national space agency said that communications with its first unstaffed spacecraft to orbit the moon were lost on Saturday and that its scientists were no longer controlling the orbiter. Radio contact with the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft was abruptly lost at 1:30 a.m. local time on Saturday, said S. Satish, a spokesman for the Indian Space Research Organization . The agency’s monitoring unit near the southern city of Bangalore was no longer receiving data from the spacecraft, he said. The launching of Chandrayaan-1 last October put India in an elite club of countries with moon missions: the United States, Russia, Japan, China and members of the European Space Agency . The mission was part of India’s effort to assert its power in space and claim some of the business opportunities there. One focus was to prospect the lunar surface for natural resources, including uranium for nuclear fuel. The project aimed to increase India’s capacity to build more efficient rockets and satellites, especially through miniaturization, and open research avenues for young scientists. The spacecraft, which is not intended to land on the moon, had completed more than 3,400 orbits of the moon over 312 days. “We are studying the telemetry data and trying to figure out what is the problem,” Mr. Satish said. The space agency had received a great deal of data from the spacecraft, and most of the scientific objectives of the mission had been met, he said. The spacecraft had been controlled from a monitoring center southwest of Bangalore, which sent it commands to change direction and speed and to focus its cameras. Mr. Satish said it was no longer receiving commands. The $80 million lunar spacecraft has had other problems. In May, it lost a critical instrument called a star sensor. Two months later, it overheated, but scientists were able to resume operations. India plans to follow the Chandrayaan, which means “moon craft” in Sanskrit, by landing a rover on the moon in 2011. | India;Space;Moon;European Space Agency |
ny0116782 | [
"sports",
"global"
] | 2012/10/16 | Michael Barry — Cycling Is Cleaner Sport, Not a Safer One | A child’s sporting dream is precious. My dream to become a professional cyclist fueled a childhood of thrilling excursions, a healthy adolescence and lifelong friendships. Many of my peers in the professional peloton shared the dream. But, as I realized my goals, I found reality was far from what I had imagined. A decade ago, professional cycling was a ruthless place where cyclists were pressured to push their bodies to unhealthy limits and encouraged to take performance-enhancing drugs. Contracts were rarely longer than a year or two, many riders were paid wages below the poverty level, and the racing season was relentlessly long. There was little glamour to the job. But it was a job I chose and persisted at even after I made unethical, unacceptable decisions I deeply regret. The sport has become more humane in recent years, but the evolution must continue. Most of the images in my dreams have now become reality. There are many teams committed to racing clean, respecting their riders and providing proper care. But more needs to be done if the sport is to shake its past. Pro cycling needs to be restructured. The environment remains precarious on every level. Cyclists are required to sacrifice most other aspects of their lives to reach the top. Virtually year-round, we lead ascetic lives, where each movement on and off our bikes is calculated so we will perform to the best of our abilities. The demands are high. We leave home when we are young and quit school to enter the bubble of pro sports. Inside the bubble, we are sealed off from our families, our lifelong friends and foundation. We live in a world in which we are only as good as our last race, and the next race is the priority. Pro teams, which are financed with sponsorship and do not share in television rights, are a liability. Their existence is dependent on victories and results points maintained by the International Cycling Union, or the U.C.I., as it is better known. Teams that do not continue to build points lose their position in the WorldTour, the elite group of teams allowed to race in the top events like the Tour de France . Sponsors’ money swiftly disappears. Cycling must follow the long-established pattern of most pro sports, developing a league in which teams are stable and sustainable and where all profits are shared. The continual pressure to perform and to survive results in poor judgment and bad advice. When teams and riders are always in survival mode, ethical lines are easily crossed. Throughout much of my career, from my first races with the Canadian national team as a teenager, I was poorly advised. I often questioned the specialists. But ultimately, and stupidly, I set aside my doubts to start the next race. No athlete wants to be out of competition with an injury, and many will often risk damaging their bodies to compete. Too many times I have climbed back on my bike with broken bones to finish a race. Others have raced with concussions, often encouraged by their sporting directors or managers to continue. Like racehorses, cyclists are often patched up and set off, to help the team or to get a result. A decade ago, doping was tolerated and even encouraged. The risks and consequences fell to the riders. Although I accept full responsibility for my decision to follow that path, the problem was endemic and involved people on every level of the sport, most of whom profited far more than the riders. Many cyclists, who came from families living below the poverty line, saw doping as a way to survive and to make a living that exceeded what they could make on the farm or one that, at the very least, beat unemployment benefits. Fortunately, because of improved testing and increasing intolerance of banned substances, riders can now win the toughest races without drugs. For six years, I have raced clean and performed. Many of my teammates, who I am confident were also clean, won at the highest level. But there is still work to be done. Those of us who doped and lied and those who were accomplices and witnesses remained silent for a long time in a misguided attempt to protect our jobs, our reputations, our teams’ sponsorships and the image of the sport. It was wrong. We followed a code of silence guarding an unhealthy culture. Riders, staff and officials must not fear speaking the truth. When they do, real reforms will follow. The cyclists’ health and futures are still not always a priority. The demands on the athlete have increased as the sport has become more international. The peloton follows the sun, making the season virtually year-round. Most of us are away from home for roughly 200 days a year and race 90 days. At home, we continue training, resting one or maybe two days a week. The off-season, when we can let our bodies rest and recover, is vanishing. Our time off the bike is limited to two weeks to a month, at the end of October and into November. When we are not at the races, we are often in training camps to maintain our fitness. To tolerate the races and the lifestyle, far too many riders rely on addictive sleeping pills and painkillers that are permitted but extremely strong. Team doctors hand them out without considering the long-term effects. The U.C.I. has been reactive instead of proactive in its approach to many of the sport’s greatest problems. Doping was seriously addressed only after the 1998 Festina Affair, a police raid that uncovered the systematic doping at the Tour de France, made the problem public and official denial impossible. Testing was improved, but it was not enough. The riders’ health often remained secondary to performance and profits, and the environment remained toxic. Races have become increasingly dangerous in the last 10 years, and serious injuries more common. Yet, as it once did with doping, the U.C.I. denies there is a problem or blames the riders. Its role is to ensure we race on safe courses and to protect the athletes. After Wouter Weylandt died while racing in the 2011 Giro d’Italia, there was little investigation. A death on a mountainside is “part of the sport.” Sadly, the cycling world accepts the excuse. As a parent of two young boys, and a fan, I don’t. Formula One became safer and more sustainable after Ayrton Senna’s death in 1994, as the leaders of the sport banded together and solved the safety problems. The changes were sweeping and swift. We should not accept the risks, becoming numb to the consequences. Yet we have and we do. In the current structure, our voice is virtually mute and our representation weak. Continually battling one another for rankings points, we have little solidarity. Cyclists give in to the power above, because if we speak too loudly, we risk losing our tenuous jobs; many team managers have the same fears. If we speak too loudly, we are reprimanded for damaging the image of the sport that feeds us, a sport we love. So we follow the line and feed the culture that will eventually be our ruin. The greatest shift can occur if national governments have a role in forcing change. They have a stake in the sport, as road cycling is reliant on public roads, city centers and national parkland, as well as police services and planning departments, among others. Cycling is the people’s sport, free to watch from a doorstep or on a mountainside. It is a beautiful and intriguing to see. It can be liberating, healthy, sustainable and fun. It is an activity many governments around the world promote to improve their citizens’ health and to decrease road congestion. Pro cycling helps encourage people to ride to work, to pedal away in the gym or to tour the countryside. It is a sport that belongs to us all. The evolution must persist. The sport cannot continue to risk crushing our children’s dreams and damaging lives. | Bicycles and Bicycling;Doping (Sports);International Cycling Union;Tour de France (Bicycle Race) |
ny0019047 | [
"world",
"europe"
] | 2013/07/19 | Germany Backs Greece’s Austerity Measures | ATHENS — On a quick visit here amid tight security just a few hours after Greek lawmakers narrowly approved a new barrage of austerity measures, Germany’s finance minister on Thursday backed Greece’s efforts to revive its battered economy, saying the German government could provide financing for Greek businesses but ruling out a restructuring of the country’s huge debt burden. “The discussion about a debt haircut is not a good idea for Greece,” the finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, told a meeting of Greek and German business representatives, stressing that the topic could be addressed once Greece achieved a primary surplus — a measure of the economy without counting debt payments — but that for now there was no alternative to the tough economic reforms agreed upon with the country’s foreign creditors. “You have to stick to what has been agreed,” he said, expressing “admiration” for the government’s efforts. “Ten years ago, we were the sick man of Europe but we followed a tough course to emerge from the crisis,” said Mr. Schäuble, whose visit was widely seen as a bid to highlight the success of a Berlin-backed austerity program in Greece ahead of general elections in Germany in September. Yannis Stournaras, the Greek finance minister, said Athens remained dedicated to the recovery program, but he expressed concern about relentless austerity, noting that “the impact of the flow of capital from the European south to the European north on interest rates could pose a threat to the stability of the euro zone.” On the eve of his trip to Athens, Mr. Schäuble stressed that he was not representing Greece’s so-called troika of international lenders — the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund. “My visit comes at the request of the Greek prime minister to show that we trust Greece, that we want to do everything we can bilaterally to support Greece on its difficult path," Mr. Schäuble told the German TV station ARD on Wednesday. "I’m not the super-troika.” Despite the reassurances, security was tight in Athens, the capital, on Thursday, with 4,000 police officers on duty and a ban on public protests in the city center, amid concerns about public anger flaring up over a continuing austerity drive for which many Greeks blame Germany, the euro zone’s paymaster. There was little evidence of anger on the streets because of the heightened police presence. But most Greek newspaper headlines conveyed a simmering resentment. “Hail Schäuble, those who are about to die salute you!” proclaimed the left-wing publication Avgi. The center-right Kathimerini was one of the few to focus on reports that the minister planned to pledge 100 million euros, or $262 million, to a fund aimed at bolstering Greek businesses. Mr. Schäuble met with Prime Minister Antonis Samaras and other government officials, but in a break with protocol, there was no meeting scheduled with President Karolos Papoulias. The president, whose role is largely ceremonial, early last year had accused Mr. Schäuble of insulting Greece by questioning the country’s commitment to an austerity program imposed by international creditors. In a meeting heavy with symbolism, Mr. Papoulias met instead with Alexis Tsipras, the head of Greece’s main leftist opposition party, Syriza, for talks that centered on Greece’s longstanding demand for reparations from Berlin stemming from Germany’s occupation of Greece during World War II. In a televised exchange, Mr. Tsipras told Mr. Papoulias that Athens “should rise to the occasion and claim an unfulfilled historic debt.” Mr. Papoulias said he had broached the reparations issue with German authorities when he was foreign minister in 1995, without success. “But that doesn’t mean that the issue has been erased,” he said. Mr. Tsipras was accompanied on his visit to the president by the veteran leftist lawmaker Manolis Glezos, who achieved hero status in Greece after tearing down the Nazi flag from the Acropolis in 1941. Mr. Glezos said German occupiers took Greek hostages in the first days of the invasion so the Wehrmacht could hold a parade without protests. “Now Schäuble has come and all Greeks are hostages,” Mr. Glezos said in what appeared to be a reference to the authorities’ security crackdown. The leftist opposition, which is neck-and-neck in opinion polls with Mr. Samaras’s conservative New Democracy party, has decried four years of austerity in Greece as “slavery imposed by the troika.” But despite the vehement objections of the political opposition and labor unions, Mr. Samaras’s fragile coalition government pushed a new package of reforms into law early on Thursday. The bill, which includes a contentious plan for thousands of layoffs and wage cuts for civil servants, squeaked through the 300-seat Parliament with 153 votes, securing the release of the first installment of 6.8 billion euros in rescue loans approved by euro-zone finance ministers last week but raising questions about the ability of the government to enforce the cuts. The aid is being meted out in tranches to keep the pressure on Greece to honor its commitments to the troika, which has extended the country two bailouts worth 240 billion euros since the spring of 2010. | Euro Crisis;Election;Greece;Karolos Papoulias;Alexis Tsipras;Antonis Samaras;Yannis Stournaras;Syriza,Coalition of the Radical Left;European Central Bank |
ny0272181 | [
"world",
"middleeast"
] | 2016/05/28 | Iranian Students Lashed 99 Times Over Coed Party | TEHRAN — More than 30 college students were arrested, interrogated and within 24 hours were each given 99 lashes for attending a graduation party that included men and women, Iran’s judiciary has announced. The punishments, which were believed to be part of a wider crackdown by a judiciary dominated by hard-liners, were meted out in Qazvin, about 90 miles northwest of the capital, and were carried out in record time, Mizan, a news agency affiliated with the judiciary, reported on Thursday, citing the city’s prosecutor. The Qazvin prosecutor, Esmail Sadeghi Niaraki, said that more than 30 female and male students — the women were described as “half naked,” meaning they were not wearing Islamic coverings, scarves and long coats — were arrested while “dancing and jubilating” after the authorities received a report that a party attended both by men and women was being held in a villa on the outskirts of Qazvin. An arrest warrant was issued, he said, and the defendants were sentenced to 99 lashes after being questioned. “We hope this will be a lesson for those who break Islamic norms in private places,” Mr. Niaraki said. Mixed-gender parties, dancing and the consumption of alcohol are illegal in Iran, although they have become common over the past decade, especially in cities. Lashings have been used regularly as a punishment since the Islamic revolution of 1979, but in recent years the practice has been used more as a threat than an actual punishment. The arrests came a day after state news media reported raids on parties in Kerman and at a “singles home” in Semnan, both provincial capitals. In Kerman, 23 people were arrested, the official Islamic Republic News Agency reported on Wednesday, although it did not provide details about whether anyone had been punished. In Semnan, several “polluted singles houses were cleaned” and 97 people, including 10 women, were detained. Col. Mojtaba Ashrafi of the Semnan police told the news agency that the raids were carried out over a 48-hour period, after the authorities monitored for several weeks 58 homes in which single people were believed to be living. Living alone is not a crime in Iran, but Colonel Ashrafi told the agency that apartments occupied by single Iranians are more likely to be the site of criminal conduct, and he added that narcotics, alcohol and satellite receivers were found in some of the homes. Iran’s hard-line judiciary began a crackdown on such behavior after the sweeping victory of a reformist and moderate coalition in the Tehran constituency in parliamentary elections in February. President Hassan Rouhani has expressed hope that the presence of more allies in Parliament will allow his government to push for at least modest social changes and more personal freedoms. The judiciary has responded by stepping up its own activities, and last week it announced the arrest of several so-called Instagram models. A blogger was arrested, and prominent actors and actresses, who have huge social media followings in Iran, were given warnings about adhering to Islamic dress code and “Islamic behavior.” Judges in Iran have broad freedoms to interpret Islamic law, and according to the Constitution, the government and other institutions have no right to interfere with their decisions. | Iran;Corporal punishment;Islam;Sharia;Judiciary |
ny0003523 | [
"nyregion"
] | 2013/04/18 | Seeking Answers to Officer’s Murder-Suicide in Memories and Notes She Left | Just before his son was born, Dason Peters finally revealed to his mother what he could no longer hide: he would be a father. “Mommy, some girl has a baby from me,” his mother, Rosamund, remembered his saying. The news came as a shock; she was not only blindsided by the birth, but also unaware that her son was romantically involved with the baby’s mother, Rosette M. Samuel, a New York City police officer. Officer Samuel lived only a block from Mr. Peters’s family in Brooklyn, but she was mostly a stranger to them — a fact that barely changed even after the birth of the boy. It became an odd footnote to the murder-suicide on Monday in which the officer killed Mr. Peters, their 1-year-old son, Dylan, and then herself, using a 9-millimeter handgun that she was authorized to carry off duty. Detectives found two notes in Officer Samuel’s apartment: one to her 19-year-old son by a previous relationship; the other to an aunt, who she hoped would watch over the older son. Officer Samuel did not explain her motivation for killing Mr. Peters, the police said, but wrote to her eldest son that she killed his infant brother so he would not be a burden to his older brother. A third note was torn up and submerged in the toilet, and the police have yet to fully determine its origin or significance. The killing brought grief to a working-class corner of East Flatbush and raised disturbing questions about what had driven an outwardly stable mother to murder and suicide. Nothing in Officer Samuel’s official record appeared to indicate she was troubled, the police said. After the killing, Mr. Peters’s family described an accidental pregnancy and an increasingly distant relationship held together by the routines of child care. They also recalled recent episodes that hinted at a building jealousy. Mr. Peters, 33, was a proud father but kept Officer Samuel, 43, at arm’s length, his relatives said. He ate many dinners at home with his parents, with whom he lived on East 55th Street and had a close relationship, but never invited her to join. Image Dason Peters with his son, Dylan, in a family photo from the boy’s christening. Credit Victor J. Blue for The New York Times The coldness was reciprocal, his family said. She never invited them to her apartment around the corner on East 56th Street. Rare phone conversations were limited to details of child care and curt messages like “I’m outside,” Mrs. Peters said. “She was jealous that her life was not as smooth as his — he had all this support,” Mr. Peters’s father, Colburn, said. “We don’t know if she had the support of her parents.” “They weren’t a couple; my son lives here,” Mrs. Peters said, her voice cracking. Mr. Peters added: “He has a kid with her. That’s it.” Relatives of Officer Samuel’s declined repeated requests for interviews. The police said her 19-year-old son, who lived with her, was woken around 8 a.m. by an argument and fled when gunshots erupted. He then called 911. Dason Peters traveled regularly, on cruises and back to his native Guyana, his mother said. In the days leading up to the killing, he talked frequently on his cellphone with friends in Guyana about a coming trip on Monday. His younger brother, Daron, 16, recalled that Officer Samuel came to the house on Friday to pick up Dylan after her police shift, and when she left, the cellphone was gone. “Dason can’t find the phone,” his brother said. “I called the phone, nobody answered. He goes over there, then comes back over here, checks the house one more time.” On the third call, Daron Peters said, Officer Samuel answered. Dason Peters went over to her apartment to retrieve the phone, and returned several hours later before rushing off to his night shift working for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. The pair began dating about three years ago after crossing paths at a local laundromat and, later, at a banquet where city workers mixed, said Zay John, a high school friend of Mr. Peters’s and the baby’s godmother. Mr. Peters called Officer Samuel his girlfriend for a time, she said, but “when this event happened, they weren’t together.” “But,” she added, “they were committed to being co-parents.” | Brooklyn;Rosette M Samuel;Murders;Suicide;Dylan Peters;Dason Peters;NYC |
ny0168980 | [
"nyregion"
] | 2006/12/08 | Suicide in 2 Ethnic Groups Is Topic at Assembly Hearing | Young Hispanic women and elderly Asian women are at exceptionally high risk of attempting or committing suicide, mental health experts and advocates testified yesterday at a State Assembly hearing. The problem is fueled by cultural and linguistic isolation, the stress of immigration and a shortage of psychiatric and counseling services, according to advocates who attended the hearing in Lower Manhattan. The hearing focused on two groups whose experiences with depression and other mental illnesses are poorly understood by public health experts because little research has been done in this area. In New York City, teenage Hispanic girls are hospitalized for depression at a rate of 388 per 100,000 (compared with 374 for teenage white girls) and are hospitalized after attempting suicide or talking about it at a rate of 95.5 per 100,000 (compared with 88.5 for teenage white girls). Asian women 65 and older in the city have a suicide rate of 11.6 per 100,000, more than double the rate for non-Hispanic white women in that age group. Those figures were cited by a psychiatrist, Dr. Lloyd I. Sederer, the executive deputy commissioner of the City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. Sharon E. Carpinello, commissioner of the State Office of Mental Health, said that Central American and South American countries, especially Mexico, the Dominican Republic and Honduras, had some of the lowest suicide rates in the world, while Asian countries like Sri Lanka, China, Japan, South Korea, India and Singapore have some of the highest suicide rates. Observing that Hispanics in New York City report the highest levels of emotional distress — two to six times the level for whites, blacks and Asians — Ms. Carpinello said, “What is there about immigrating to this country and taking up residence that drives up the suicide rate?” A variety of explanations were offered at the hearing, which was led by Assemblyman Peter M. Rivera of the Bronx, chairman of a standing committee on mental health. Rosa M. Gil, the founder of Comunilife, a mental health agency, cited cultural factors. “Young Hispanic girls’ lives are marked by a deep sense of despair and hopelessness,” she said. “Through the imaginary life of television they see the other world, full of affluence, that is always trying to create additional needs and wants in them.” She added, “While the Latino family allows and even expects boys to rebel and be bad, girls are expected to be compliant and good,” resulting in internalized anger. A psychiatrist at the New York University School of Medicine, Dr. Antonio A. Abad, said that Hispanic adolescents reported higher rates of alcohol use than other youngsters and said there has been a surge in drug use in some Hispanic communities — both risk factors associated with suicide. The causes of depression in Asian women seem to be less understood. Cao K. O, executive director of the Asian American Federation of New York, said a survey in 2000 of older Asians in the city found that 40 percent reported symptoms of depression. A separate study of the effects of 9/11 on Asians in the city, Mr. O said, found that they “largely perceived professional mental health services to be unhelpful, inappropriate or irrelevant.” Two advocates at nonprofit groups — Ruchika Bajaj of the Coalition for Asian American Children and Families and Sandeep Bathala of Sakhi for South Asian Women — said that mental health services for women from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and other South Asian countries were particularly scarce. Women who are not proficient in English do not get help, Ms. Bajaj said, “until symptoms reach crisis proportions.” The most dramatic points in the hearing were the vivid descriptions of circumstances that caused women to try to kill themselves. Dally M. Sánchez, an advocate with the Westchester Independent Living Center in White Plains, testified that at 9, she reported being sexually abused by a family member, whom she had to testify against, and that at 11, she made the first of seven suicide attempts. After several hospitalizations, she said, she found a peer support group and a Spanish-speaking therapist at 15. “Because of cultural barriers, trauma often goes untreated, undetected, ignored and suppressed,” she said. Irene Chung, an associate professor of social work at Hunter College, who is working with the New York Coalition for Asian American Mental Health to study Chinese immigrants who attempt suicide, described a woman who had been physically and emotionally abused by relatives. The woman sought medical attention for chest pains that turned out to be psychosomatic symptoms. “Her untreated depression in turn prompted her to cut herself with a knife when she felt there was no one she could turn to for help,” Ms. Chung said. Dr. Sederer said the Health Department has taken measures to help. As part of a citywide depression initiative that began last year, primary care physicians have been asked to routinely administer a nine-question depression screening tool to their patients. Dr. Sederer also said the city had introduced depression screening into the Nurse Family Partnership, a program that helps poor first-time mothers, their babies and their families, and begun a Geriatric Screening Initiative to detect and treat depression in adults over 55. | Depression (Mental);Suicides and Suicide Attempts;New York State |
ny0081832 | [
"business",
"dealbook"
] | 2015/10/03 | Video: Supreme Court’s Business Docket Targets Class Actions | Big business is urging the Supreme Court to curb class action litigation in a series of cases that dominate the nine justices’ business docket in the coming months. The court returns for its new term on Monday with three major class action cases already scheduled for oral arguments this fall. Antony Currie and Reynolds Holding explain why Wall Street may want to pay more attention to Supreme Court decisions before placing bets. In other business cases of interest that will decided before the term ends in June, the nine justices will hear a challenge to government regulation of the electricity markets and decide whether civil racketeering laws can apply to a company’s actions overseas. The class action cases give the conservative-leaning court another opportunity to cut back on such litigation, as it has done in a series of rulings in recent years. The most significant of those handed victories to WalMart and Comcast. | Supreme Court,SCOTUS;Companies;Lawsuits;Comcast |
ny0064696 | [
"us"
] | 2014/06/11 | Campaigning for Environment, Seminary to Divest Some Holdings | The trustees of Union Theological Seminary, a historic cradle of liberal Protestantism in New York City, voted unanimously on Tuesday to divest the school’s $108.4 million endowment from fossil fuel companies. Union is said to be the first seminary to take up the divestment tactic in a campaign by environmentalists to combat climate change. Last month, Stanford University announced it would divest, but only from coal companies. The president of Union, Serene Jones, said, “Climate change poses a catastrophic threat, and as stewards of God’s creation we simply must act.” The seminary had already divested from tobacco and liquor companies. | Historic preservation;Union Theological Seminary;Endowments;Climate Change;Global Warming;College |
ny0123588 | [
"sports",
"soccer"
] | 2012/09/24 | After Fitting Tribute, Liverpool Falls Short Against Manchester United | LIVERPOOL, England — In the buildup to the Liverpool versus Manchester United match Sunday, there was little talk of the soccer game; the eyes of the world focused not on the field but the spectators surrounding it. The teams, the most successful in English soccer, have a long history — one that has regrettably been littered with the mocking of the dead. Some Liverpool supporters regularly mocked the 1958 Munich air disaster, in which 23 people — including eight Manchester United players — died after a European Cup game against Partizan Belgrade. Likewise, since the Hillsborough disaster of 1989, when 96 Liverpool fans died in a stadium crush, some Manchester United supporters have regularly sung about it, calling Liverpool fans “murderers” — a reference to the English newspaper The Sun’s erroneous claims that Liverpool supporters were to blame. A report released Sept. 12 exonerated Liverpool supporters; furthermore, it stated how the fans died because of the incompetence of the local South Yorkshire police force and ambulance service, with the full extent of efforts to cover up their mistakes highlighted. Fate would decree that Liverpool’s chance to remember the 96 at its home stadium, Anfield, would come against its fiercest rival. A week before, some Manchester United fans had sung “always the victims, it’s never your fault.” Supporters say the song refers not to Hillsborough, but to the racial dispute last season between Luis Suárez and Patrice Evra. In those two was yet another combustible element to the occasion. Their prematch handshake took place, as expected, without incident, both players aware that something more important was about to unfold. Manchester United’s 2-1 victory Sunday and the tribute before it unfolded beautifully, poignantly and without incident. Steven Gerrard and Ryan Giggs, Liverpool and Manchester United’s respective captains, released 96 balloons to signify those who died at Hillsborough. A stirring rendition of the club’s anthem, “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” was harmonized emotionally by 40,000 Liverpool fans before kickoff; cards around three of the stands spelled “Truth,” “Justice” and “96.” Though some complained about Manchester United fans’ singing songs during “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” there was little malice. Steps were taken to be careful over unsavory chanting, but it is a rivalry that will never be bereft of passion. When the whistle blew for the kickoff, it was time to turn an eye to the field. There was still an important 90 minutes ahead, particularly for Liverpool, which is having its worst start to a league season since 1911. Not in 101 years had it failed to win in the opening four league games. But attention soon shifted from the players toward the referee Mark Halsey. Liverpool had been playing much better than its league standing would have indicated, not allowing Manchester United near the ball. Unlucky not to be a goal ahead, Liverpool found itself a player behind. Jonjo Shelvey of Liverpool and Jonny Evans of United attempted to win a loose ball. Though Shelvey’s foot was slightly raised from the ground, so too were Evans’s feet. Halsey opted to send off Liverpool’s player, but not Manchester United’s. It was the first time the home crowd soured. Despite the red card, it had not been a vicious game. The card did not change the course of it, with Liverpool still outplaying its opponent, but it ultimately changed the score line. Gerrard, whose cousin Jon-Paul Gilhooley, 10, was the youngest victim of the Hillsborough disaster, put Liverpool ahead a minute into the second half, but Manchester United right back Rafael curled in a tying goal at 50 minutes. Halsey took center stage once more when he denied a penalty kick to Suárez, who appeared to have been fouled by Evans, then awarded one to Manchester United after Antonio Valencia fell weakly under a challenge from Glen Johnson. Robin van Persie converted the kick for the winner nine minutes from the end. Booing at the end of the game was reserved for the performance of the referee, not the home side. Though Liverpool has yet to win in five games, Sunday’s effort was one to be optimistic about. The day ended on a sour note for Manchester United after it had worked so hard to pay tribute to its rival, as well as win its fourth league game in a row. A group of its supporters sang “always the victims” after the match. This came after singing “where’s your famous Munich song?” during the game, in an attempt to goad Liverpool supporters into singing about the air disaster. But their actions were a small part of an important day of remembrance for Liverpool. The city and the club might have lost the game, but they won so much more this month. | Liverpool (Soccer Team);Manchester United (Soccer Team);Hillsborough disaster;Soccer;Hillsborough Stadium (Sheffield England);Accidents and Safety |
ny0147806 | [
"nyregion",
"nyregionspecial2"
] | 2008/07/13 | A Parking-Meter Furor Fuels a Budget Battle | WEST HARTFORD A decision by the town council here to spend $100,000 to replace parking meters in the downtown shopping district sparked a sort of taxpayer revolt that resulted in voters turning down the town budget last month and a campaign to vote down the latest budget in September. The parking-meter incident may have been a lightning rod for voter frustration with the increasing cost of everything from gasoline prices to taxes. Or it might have been, as some city officials said, an attempt by budget opponents to twist the offhand remarks of one town official to help ignite opposition to the budget and its 6.9 percent tax increase. The matter began in May, when the council decided to replace 375 meters — each serving two parking spaces — in the Center, as the shopping district is called, with new meters that serve one space each. John Phillips, the town’s parking manager, said that the old meters were beginning to malfunction. Replacing them with “consumer-friendly” meters that read prepaid cards had been a longtime goal, he said. The decision led the town manager, James Francis, to remark that now the town would not have to deal with complaints from the dozen people a month who get tickets for not being able to figure out how to use the meters, which require that drivers push a button indicating whether they are parking to the left or right of the meter. His comments, reported in the local newspaper, were widely circulated as the reason the town wanted to replace the meters. “You have to spend $100,000 because people can’t read?” said Elliot Check, a dentist and a member of the West Hartford Taxpayers Association who has lived here for 24 years. “I made that mistake once, and I haven’t done it again, and I don’t think the town should be paying for the individual’s mistake.” “Maybe they should take some of that money and have a class on how to use the meters,” said Ellyn Ziplow, a homemaker who is from Simsbury but parks in the Center here once a week. “They’re spending money on luxuries or nice-to-have things rather than things that are really important,” said Judy Aron, vice president of the taxpayers association. Mayor Scott Slifka said that the manager’s remarks were turned into “something sensational. It’s completely distorted. It’s become urban legend.” He said that while town officials did get many complaints from people who had misread the directions on the meters, it was not why they bought the new meters. He also said the parking meter revenues can only be used for parking-related expenditures. On June 17, voters overwhelmingly rejected the $216 million budget. After the defeat, the council trimmed $1.18 million from town departments, and the board of education cut $1.4 million by eliminating 19 teaching jobs. A new proposed budget comes with a 5.5 percent tax increase. Too high, the taxpayers association still says, and its members are working to gather enough signatures to force a second vote, which could be on the ballot in September. “People are losing their jobs. They’re cutting back on education. They’re cutting back on leaf collection, and this is their priority?” asked Theresa McGrath, the association’s secretary. “There’s nothing in the charter that says they can’t transfer funds,” she said, referring to the $100,000. “They do it all the time.” The mayor said the town cannot transfer those funds. “That’s completely, totally, absolutely 100 percent wrong,” he said. “The money can only be used for parking purposes unless the council repeals the existence of the fund.” The council won’t do that, he said, “We would immediately be penalized by the rating agencies, because it’s a very bad financial practice.” Even as the budget battle goes on, the new meters will be installed this summer. | Parking Meters;Connecticut;Budgets and Budgeting |
ny0083808 | [
"sports",
"autoracing"
] | 2015/10/31 | For One Formula One Racer, the Way Ahead Is To-And-Fro | Sergio Pérez of the Force India team probably knows better than most Formula One drivers how aptly the catchphrase “two steps forward, one step back” can apply to a career in elite racing. Pérez, the first Mexican driver to race in the series since Héctor Rebaque in 1981 and only the sixth ever, had started in the series in 2011, at the Sauber team. He was only 21 and quickly showed great potential, nearly winning a race in his second season, at the Malaysian Grand Prix of 2012. He twice finished second that season and also had a third-place finish, results that were extraordinary for a small-budget team like Sauber. As a result, in 2013 he was signed up to race at McLaren Mercedes , one of the most successful teams in Formula One history. It looked like the chance of a lifetime, a move that would launch a solid career and give Pérez a shot not only at race victories, but, eventually, a world drivers’ championship. But 2013 turned out to be the worst year in decades for McLaren Mercedes. The team achieved no victories or podium finishes. Pérez’s teammate was Jenson Button, the 2009 world champion, and not even he could make the car perform better. McLaren dropped Pérez late in the season. He was only 23 and it looked like his once-promising Formula One career might even be finished. But he signed a lucrative deal with the Force India team for the 2014 season, joining the highly rated German driver Nico Hülkenberg. Since then, both this year and last year, it is not Hülkenberg who has been visiting the podium for the team, but Pérez. (In addition to the Formula One season, the German driver this year raced in the Le Mans 24 Hours endurance race and won it.) Pérez raced to a brilliant third place at the Russian Grand Prix on Oct. 10 and finished fifth at the United States Grand Prix last Sunday in Texas. These results in consecutive races have set the stage for high expectations at his home race in Mexico City this weekend. “Things change so quickly in this sport from weekend to weekend,” Pérez said at the U.S. race in Austin last weekend. “Now this is in the past and we have to think forward for what is coming up. Up to now it has been a tremendous season, but we have to keep the momentum up for the last races of the year.” When a driver who has not yet proved himself joins a top team, as he did at McLaren, and the team then fails to live up to its historic expectations, the young driver will end up looking bad even if the fault lies not with him but with the team and the car. He will look even worse if the team then lets him go, as McLaren did Pérez. “That damaged my reputation quite a bit,” Pérez said, “but in the end, people in Formula One, they see your results and they see it’s worth it giving you a chance.” “You lose a lot of confidence and motivation,” he added, referring to the difficult year at McLaren. “I thought I am not willing to stay in just any team just in order to stay here in Formula One. There are a lot of other attractive series around and if I am not going to be in a position ever to fight for podiums or for wins in my whole career, there is no point to stay around.” At Force India, he has found a team that may not be one of the richest but is powered by the excellent Mercedes engine. His accomplishments with the team have reversed what looked to be a career slide, particularly as he has been performing better than Hülkenberg, 28. Force India also seems to be a better place for Pérez, who is still only 25, to develop his skills as a Formula One driver. “Luckily, Force India gave me the opportunity,” he said. “And there is plenty to come in the future, I believe, and I keep developing as a driver and keep getting better and better. So hopefully the chance of getting to the top one day will come.” Born in Guadalajara in 1990, Pérez grew up racing go-karts in Mexico, starting at the age of 6. He considered a career in professional soccer but then opted for racing, as did his older brother, Antonio, who now races in the Mexican Nascar stock car series. After excellent go-karting results throughout his childhood, he graduated to car racing in 2004. He took part in the Skip Barber series in the United States, before moving to Europe in 2005 to join the Formula BMW program. He finished 14th in his first year and sixth in his second. He moved to England in 2007 to race in the British Formula 3 series, where he won the National Series, which used an older chassis than the main series. He graduated to the main series the following year, and finished fourth after leading much of the season. In 2009, Pérez raced in the GP2 series, which is the highest level of open wheel racing below Formula One. In the Asian GP2 that year, he won five races and finished second over all. In 2010 he joined the Ferrari Formula One team’s driver development program and was thus viewed as a future driver for the Italian team. There had been speculation that he might join Ferrari as a driver in his second year in the series, but things change quickly in Formula One, and that move never happened. Pérez’s career has been backed by extensive support from the Mexican telecom company Telmex, and his rise has now coincided with the return of the series to Mexico for the first time in more than two decades. “Obviously it will be very intense and very loaded in terms of media and sponsors, and I think every day I am having some dinner, visiting someone,” he said, looking ahead to his Grand Prix weekend in Mexico City. “But we all know the main objective is to do well on Sunday, and whatever happens that’s what matters.” If his results continue to improve, Pérez said his next objective would be to try to get a drive at a top team, hoping to succeed where he did not with McLaren. Although Ferrari is greatly improving this season, at the moment there seems to be only one team capable of winning championships: Mercedes . “Getting into a team that will give me the chance to fight for world championships and for victories, that will be my main target,” Pérez said. “I’m in a great team, but still it is a midfield team trying to move to the top, and I’m sure that next year we can do a very big step with this team. Hopefully in the near future a big opportunity can come for me.” | Formula One;Car Racing;Mexico;Mexico City |
ny0188179 | [
"nyregion"
] | 2009/04/01 | Congress Is Again Weighing Aid for Ground Zero Rescuers | Barbara Burnette was on New York City’s all-city basketball team in high school. After joining the Police Department, where she rose to the rank of detective, she played on the police league’s women’s team. “Now the most I do is cough,” she told members of Congress on Tuesday. Her doctors have told her she may need a lung transplant, she said. Testifying before a House Judiciary subcommittee in Washington, Ms. Burnette said her lungs were damaged by inflammation and scarring as a result of weeks she spent in rescue and recovery efforts in the dust at ground zero in 2001. But because her illness did not manifest itself immediately, she said in testimony carried on the Internet, she missed the Dec. 22, 2003, deadline for applying for compensation from the Victim Compensation Fund that Congress established after the attack. The committee is considering a bill introduced in February by Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, a New York City Democrat, that would reopen the fund to new claimants. A similar effort died in Congress last year. But Ted Frank, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative research organization, testified that the measure would open the door to collusion between unscrupulous lawyers and, for example, a heavy smoker who worked briefly at the site and later developed lung problems. “This creates a ‘Field of Dreams problem,’ ” he said. “If you build it, they will come.” Mr. Frank, who said he spoke for himself, not the institute, added, “Attorneys will have every incentive to manufacture a diagnosis.” Michael A. Cardozo, New York City’s top lawyer, supported reopening the fund. He said that “nearly 11,000 heroic responders” had sued the city and contractors who worked at ground zero for compensation for illnesses that they said resulted from their rescue efforts there. Lawyers for the city said last year that a review of the plaintiffs’ medical records showed that many were not as sick as they claimed to be and some were not sick at all. Reopening the fund would allow them to claim compensation in return for abandoning legal action, Mr. Cardozo noted. Dr. James Melius, administrator of the New York State Laborers’ Health and Safety Trust Fund, a labor-management fund for construction workers, said “there should not be a great deal of difficulty” identifying people whose problems related to work at ground zero, “as opposed to cigarette smoking.” Richard Wood, president of Plaza Construction Corporation, warned that Congress’s decision could affect whether construction companies allow their workers to respond in future emergencies. | September 11 (2001);Medicine and Health;World Trade Center (NYC);United States Politics and Government;House of Representatives |
ny0133027 | [
"sports",
"golf"
] | 2012/12/13 | Colleen Walker, Nine-Time Winner on L.P.G.A. Tour, Dies at 56 | Colleen Walker, a nine-time winner on the L.P.G.A. Tour who captured the 1997 du Maurier Classic 10 months after giving birth, died Tuesday in Valrico, Fla. She was 56. The L.P.G.A. said that Walker, who was treated for breast cancer in 2003, died of a cancer recurrence that was diagnosed last year. Walker had been playing on the tour for 15 years when she earned her only victory in a major, rallying from four shots down entering the final round of the du Maurier at the Glen Abbey course in Oakville, Ontario, near Toronto. She shot an eight-under-par 65, capped by a 20-foot birdie putt, to win by two shots. It was Walker’s first victory since 1992, when she captured three tournaments. “It’s been five years and a baby,” she said. She had appeared in only seven tournaments in 1996 before leaving the tour to give birth to her son, Tyler, in October. “I’ve had a lot of time in the last year to think about golf and how much I want to play,” she said at the time. “I was itching to get back on the tour. Still, after having Tyler, I have a new perspective on life. Four-footers aren’t as important anymore.” A few weeks after that victory, she won the Star Bank L.P.G.A. Classic. “I don’t know how to explain it,” she told The Sun-Sentinel of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., the following January in looking back on her 1997 exploits. Her husband, Ron Bakich, who was also her coach, suggested that having a child made a difference. “She found inspiration,” Bakich said. “It’s a renewal of life.” But Walker was never in contention in the following two years on the tour, then tore cartilage in her left wrist when she hit a tree root on a swing in a 2000 tournament. The injury required surgery and caused continuing problems that restricted her to a few tournaments before she was found to have breast cancer in January 2003. She had chemotherapy and radiation treatment, then returned to competition in September of that year. She finished in a tie for 10th at a senior event, essentially an attempt to see if she could still play. But she retired from the L.P.G.A. Tour in 2004. Walker was born on Aug. 16, 1956, in Jacksonville, Fla., and grew up in Palm Beach, where she began playing golf at 14. She was an outstanding golfer at Florida State University; she received a degree in marketing, then joined the L.P.G.A. Tour in 1982. She excelled at her short game, but her first tour victory didn’t come until the 1987 Mayflower Classic. In 1988, she captured the Vare Trophy for the tour’s lowest scoring average and finished a career-high fifth on the money list. In addition to her husband and their son, Tyler Walker Bakich, an outstanding junior golfer, Walker is survived by her parents, Lamar and Mary Ellen Walker; a brother, Robin; and her stepsons, Warga and Huntley Bakich, The Tampa Bay Times said. Walker was upbeat after her breast cancer treatment, although in the months to come she was unable to stage the comeback she had envisioned. “What I want to do is go out and play good golf,” she told The Boston Globe in May 2004. “Will I be an inspiration? I hope so. If I can help awareness, I’m more than happy to help.” | Walker Colleen;Golf;Deaths (Obituaries) |
ny0129063 | [
"world",
"middleeast"
] | 2012/06/19 | Saudi Arabia Appoints Prince Salman as Crown Prince | BEIRUT, Lebanon — Saudi Arabia ’s Prince Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, who was governor of Riyadh for nearly 50 years until his recent promotion to Saudi Arabia’s defense minister, was officially named crown prince on Monday, making him the heir apparent to the 88-year-old King Abdullah . The promotion of Prince Salman, 76, to Crown Prince Salman, announced via royal decree broadcast on Saudi state television, had been expected following the sudden death on Saturday of Crown Prince Nayef bin Albdulaziz al-Saud. The selection was considered a natural choice because of Prince Salman’s reputation as an austere, hard-working family disciplinarian whose tasks included controlling the special jail for princes run amok. He will keep his job as defense minister. The royal decree also said Crown Prince Salman’s younger full brother, Prince Ahmed bin Abdulaziz, the deputy interior minister, had been promoted to interior minister, a post that Crown Prince Nayef had also held. Despite the speedy promotions, which carried no surprises, the sudden death off Crown Prince Nayef, who was buried on Sunday, has scrambled the complicated jigsaw puzzle of family rule in Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil exporter. King Abdullah, though ailing, remains at the helm. While he has loosened some aspects of public dialogue, most Saudis expect only glacial change. In confronting Arab Spring ferment elsewhere in the Middle East, the Saudis successfully bought at least temporary social peace last year when they announced a $130 billion public welfare program. “In the short run you are surrounded by revolutions all over and the Iranian threat, so the same policies will continue,” said Mahmoud Sabbagh, a young commentator. “I don’t think we will witness anything unexpected.” Nonetheless, Crown Prince Nayef’s death brings closer the day of reckoning when the Saudis will have to figure out how to move to the third generation of princes, the grandsons of King Abdulaziz al-Saud, who founded the kingdom in 1932. Estimates of the number of princes of the ruling clan run to more than 7,000, but critical decisions have always been tightly held among the top three or four, including the ministers of defense and the interior, who have always been sons of King Abdulaziz. Now that Prince Salman has been named crown prince, most Saudi analysts say that just two younger sons of King Abdulaziz are considered by the family to be monarch material — possessing the needed blend of shrewdness, government experience and rectitude. The roughly 10 other surviving sons are marred by ill health, a lack of ability, a whiff or worse of corruption, or a reputation for practices that violate the tenets of Islam, like drinking alcohol. Two other potential heirs are Prince Ahmed, believed to be 71, and Prince Muqrin, in his 60s. Prince Ahmed had been the deputy interior minister since 1975, and his promotion to interior minister makes him the kingdom’s law enforcement czar. Prince Muqrin is the head of intelligence, but one stumbling block may be that his mother was reportedly a Yemeni, and many members of the royal family are sticklers for pure Saudi genealogy. The Saudis are also sticklers for deferring to age. There are grandsons of King Abdulaziz with extensive government experience who are barely older than his youngest sons, and it is not clear if age or patrilineage will be the primary factor in deciding succession. One of those slightly older, experienced grandsons is Prince Khaled al-Faisal, the governor of Mecca. In 2006 King Abdullah created the Allegiance Council, which is made up of approximately 34 princes — one representative for each son of King Abdulaziz. It was supposed to decide the succession question, but King Abdullah exempted himself, and it has never been activated. That prompted unusual public grumbling by some members, notably by Prince Talal, who considers himself king material despite a renegade period in the early 1960s. One thing is certain: succession questions are decided behind palace doors, with no public participation. The choice of Prince Salman at least delayed any generational change. He is said to suffer from non-life-threatening back ailments, but in recent years many senior princes have become stooped. The sight of King Abdullah and his closest brothers all in a line and bent over on wobbling canes brings into clear focus what a gerontocracy the kingdom has become. Prince Salman took over the Defense Ministry in November upon the death of his full brother Prince Sultan, after supervising Riyadh’s growth from a minor town of around 200,000 people to a sprawling metropolis of more than 5.5 million. Other Saudi cities have faltered in their development — Jidda, the commercial capital, notoriously lacks a sewage system, for example. But Prince Salman created a Riyadh development authority with a representative from each ministry to cut through the red tape. The prince is variously described as disciplined, active, austere, sober and traditional but not hard-line. He is considered generally popular with the family and the public, and has traveled abroad widely. Saudi analysts peg him as a “moderate conservative” with ties to all the competing factions within the country, from strict Islamists to liberal intellectuals pushing for political change. | Saudi Arabia;Salman bin Abdul Aziz;Abdullah King of Saudi Arabia;Nayef bin Abdul Aziz;Appointments and Executive Changes |
ny0132843 | [
"sports",
"basketball"
] | 2012/12/15 | Carmelo Anthony’s Ankle Sprain May Keep Him From Cavs Game | Carmelo Anthony is questionable for Saturday’s home game against the Cleveland Cavaliers , the Knicks announced Friday. Anthony sprained his left ankle Thursday in the third quarter of the Knicks’ 116-107 victory over the Los Angeles Lakers . The Knicks say they have low expectations that Anthony will be able to play Saturday. The team is more optimistic that he will be able to suit up for Monday’s game against the Houston Rockets, which will be Jeremy Lin’s first game back at Madison Square Garden since the team decided not to match his offer sheet from Houston in the off-season. Anthony scored 30 points in Thursday’s win before he was fouled by Dwight Howard. “He went down kind of hard,” Coach Mike Woodson said. “You just never know until you get to him. He tried to run it off, but he couldn’t do it.” Anthony was treated Friday at the team’s training facility in Greenburgh, N.Y.; the Knicks did not practice. This is the second injury for Anthony this season. Earlier this month, he missed two games with a deep cut on his left middle finger after diving for a loose ball late in a road victory over the Charlotte Bobcats. The Knicks, who at 17-5 have the best record in the Eastern Conference, had an inspiring performance in their first game without Anthony, beating the defending champion Heat in Miami. But the Knicks fell in their next game, against the Bulls in Chicago. Most of the Knicks said they were not too concerned about the possibility of having to play without Anthony again for a few more games. “This team is deep enough to win games,” Jason Kidd said after Thursday’s game. “We’ve already proven that.” Anthony has never had an injury that required surgery, but he has missed games throughout his career. The only time he has played in every game in a regular season was in 2003-04, his rookie season. In the 2008-09 season, he missed three weeks with a broken bone in his right hand. Last year, he sat out eight games, a majority of the stretch known as Linsanity, with a groin injury. Raymond Felton said he was relieved to see Anthony walk out of the locker room Thursday night without crutches. “I was definitely concerned, but it’s good to see him walk out on his own,” Felton said. “He is a little sore, and he was limping, but it’s not that bad.” | Anthony Carmelo;New York Knicks;Basketball;Sports Injuries;Los Angeles Lakers;Cleveland Cavaliers |
ny0115919 | [
"nyregion"
] | 2012/10/04 | Irving Cohen, Catskills Maître D’Hôtel Matchmaker, Dies at 95 | Irving Cohen, who was known as King Cupid of the Catskills for his canny ability to seat just the right nice Jewish boy next to just the right nice Jewish girl during his half-century as the maître d’ of the Concord Hotel , died on Monday at his home in Boca Raton, Fla. He was 95. His son Bob confirmed the death. By all accounts the borscht belt’s longest-serving maître d’hôtel, Mr. Cohen worked at the Concord, in Kiamesha Lake, N.Y., from his early 20s until he was in his early 80s. He would have worked there longer, he said, had the hotel not closed in 1998. Officially, Mr. Cohen presided over three meals a day in the vast kosher empire that was the Concord dining room, helping thousands of patrons navigate its towering shoals of gefilte fish, pot roast, potato pudding and a great deal else. Unofficially (though only just), he was the matchmaker for a horde of hopefuls, who flocked to the Catskills ostensibly for shuffleboard and Sammy Davis Jr. but in actuality to eat, drink, marry and be fruitful and multiply, generally in that order. Thanks to Mr. Cohen, many did. In the 1940s, he paired the Concord’s original clientele. In the ’60s, he paired their children. And in the ’80s, he paired their children’s children. It is no exaggeration, Bob Cohen said Tuesday, to say that thousands of marriages resulted from his father’s sharp-eyed ministrations. And thus, simply by doing his job — which combined Holmesian deductive skill with Postian etiquette and a touch of cryptographic cloak and dagger — Mr. Cohen single-handedly helped perpetuate a branch of American Jewry. Irving Jay Cohen was born on the Lower East Side of Manhattan on May 11, 1917. After graduating from Seward Park High School, he found work as a busboy at Grossinger’s , another well-known Catskills resort. He eventually became a waiter there, serving the likes of John Garfield (né Jacob Julius Garfinkle), Milton Berle, Eddie Cantor and Irving Berlin. Mr. Cohen joined the Concord as a waiter in the late 1930s. In 1943, he became the maître d’, commanding a dining room that seated more than 3,000. Before long, he was taking phone calls from a multitude of mothers, who beseeched him to seat their eligible daughters beside eligible young men. Corresponding calls from mothers of sons were rarer, Mr. Cohen said, though not unknown. For making matches, Mr. Cohen relied on his keen ability to suss out subjects at a glance. Age, sex and marital status were of crucial concern, of course, but so too were occupation, tax bracket and geography. “You got to pair them by states and even from the same cities,” Mr. Cohen told The Daily News in 1967. “If they come from different places, the doll is always afraid the guy will forget her as soon as he gets home.” To keep track of demographic information, Mr. Cohen used a specially built pegboard, 10 feet long, on which each of the Concord’s hundreds of dining tables was represented by a circle. Around each circle was a set of holes, and as Mr. Cohen seated each diner, he stuck the appropriate hole with a color-coded peg — pink for single young women, blue for single young men, white for older people and several other colors denoting characteristics so secret they appear to have been known only to him. Though Mr. Cohen plied his trade well into the computer age, the pegboard endured. “Can a computer get to the human element?” he said in the Daily News interview. “I ask you, can a nice widow, maybe a little on the plump side, but nice, can she tell all her aches and dreams to a computer? Never!” Mr. Cohen’s first wife, the former Sarah Berzon, whom he married in 1944, died in 1982. He is survived by his second wife, Christine Golia; three children from his first marriage, Bob, Arnie and Barbara Cohen Parness; two stepsons, Ed and Christopher Ventrice; and grandchildren, step-grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Mr. Cohen’s dining-room savvy extended far beyond matters of the heart. As he recounted in the 1991 book “ It Happened in the Catskills ,” by Myrna Katz Frommer and Harvey Frommer, he was accosted one night by a guest, purple with rage. “My wife almost choked,” the man told him. “I’m going to sue the hotel for a million dollars.” The offending object was a small metal tag, called a plumba, affixed to meat to identify it as kosher. The tags were normally removed before cooking, but this one, on a chicken, had been overlooked. “What’s your name?,” Mr. Cohen asked the woman hurriedly. “Your address?” He raced to the dining-room microphone. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he intoned. “Mr. and Mrs. Sam Weinstein from Cedarhurst, Long Island, have just won a bottle of Champagne. Mrs. Weinstein is the lucky lady who wound up with the chicken with the plumba.” | Cohen Irving Jay;Concord Resort Hotel (Kiamesha Lake NY);Catskills (NYS Area);Deaths (Obituaries);Cohen Irving |
ny0249089 | [
"technology",
"personaltech"
] | 2011/05/12 | Tryx Camera Pays Tribute to the Well-Loved Flip Camcorder | This column might look like a review of Casio ’s radically designed Tryx camera. But it’s really a thinly disguised defense of single-purpose gadgets. The Tryx ($250) is a very simple camera. It has only two buttons. It has no optical zoom. It doesn’t have an image stabilizer. You can’t remove the battery. You can’t set the aperture or shutter speed. Casio is calling it “the Flip of still cameras.” That, of course, is a reference to the incredibly simple Flip pocket camcorder. People loved the Flip because it worked: the first time, every time. When something happened worth filming, you pressed the big red button on the back. You didn’t mess with tapes or disks or menus or mode dials or flipping out a screen. That’s why the Flip became outrageously popular. Its maker sold two million Flips in the first six months. It became the No. 1 bestselling camcorder on Amazon.com , and remained there ever since. As of last month, its sales represented 37 percent of all camcorders, and kept climbing. And then Cisco killed it. That’s right. Two years ago, Cisco bought the Flip for $590 million. Then last month, it shut down the whole division and fired 550 people. The blogosphere reverberated with a rationale: “Smartphones killed it. Nobody needs a dedicated recording machine when the phone can record video.” But if that were true, then Flip sales would not have still been climbing at the time of its demise. If that were true, we wouldn’t still be buying 35 million still cameras a year (phones have still cameras, too). If that were true, nobody would buy GPS units for their cars. Phone photography, phone video and phone GPS have their places. But they’re different places. They’re additional places. They don’t replace single-purpose gear in their traditional roles. You’re not going to take iPhone pictures of your wedding. Normal people don’t suction-cup their phones to their windshields for navigation. And you won’t be able to fire up the video app on your phone in time to catch your toddler’s sudden adorable burst of singsong. No, Cisco killed the Flip for its own business reasons — primarily to demonstrate to shareholders, after last year’s stock nose dive, that it’s serious about focusing on its core businesses. All right, rant over. Now then: the Tryx. This gadget isn’t just dedicated to a single purpose. It’s also dedicated to a single audience: young, fun-loving adults. It has a lot going for it. First is the wild design. At first glance, it looks exactly like an iPhone: a thin, black slab. And you can use it that way, holding it as you would an app phone. But the outer edge is, in fact, a sturdy rectangular frame. The body of the camera connects to a hinge at one end of it. You can push it around the hinge in a complete circle, through the frame and back around again. It’s a little bit like those toy gyroscopes. The outer metal circles don’t move — you can grip that framework while the flywheel spins madly inside. (That’s the best analogy I could think of. Leave me alone.) Once the camera body is rotated away from its starting position, you can also tip it up or down 270 degrees on a second pivot point, so that it points more toward the sky or the ground. Very trycky indeed. This design makes possible a bunch of neat shooting options. The swiveling camera clicks at 90-degree stopping points, but there’s enough friction that you can stop it at any point. So you can use the frame as a tripod, propping the camera at any angle. You can use the frame as a hanger, so the camera dangles from a branch or wall nail or lamp knob, for superstable shooting. And because the lens is on the frame and not the body, self-portraits are a piece of cake, too. In these configurations, you’ll usually want to be able to fire the shot without pressing the shutter button. There’s a self-timer, of course, but also a really cool motion-activated shutter. On the supersharp, three-inch touch screen, you drag a hand icon wherever you want — say, the upper-right corner. Then, once you’ve stepped into the frame, you move your hand to that spot in the composition, and wave. Two seconds later, the shot fires. You can wave again for another shot, and another. Absolutely brilliant. When you’re capturing video, you can grip the empty frame as a handle; the whole affair looks like you’re holding a traditional camcorder, since the camera body flips 90 degrees away in either direction (lefties, rejoice!). It’s like, yes, the Flip camcorder; there’s no zoom and no stabilization, and the video looks terrific (1080p high definition). There’s an HDMI jack right on the camera, so you can connect it directly to a TV for playback. The name Tryx is apropos for a couple reasons. In addition to all of those body-frame tricks, this camera does some pretty rocking photographic tricks, too. Its Slide Panorama mode lets you whip the camera around you in space; it snaps many photos and then stitches them together into one enormously wide panorama, instantly and incredibly well. It’s a lot like the extremely useful Sweep Panorama mode on Sony cameras, except that on the Casio, your panorama can capture a full 360-degree circle around you. There’s an example among the sample photos that accompany this article at nytimes.com/personaltech . The touch screen harbors a few tricks of its own. Instead of using the tiny shutter button next to the screen, you can tap anywhere on the screen itself to fire the shot. You can use two-finger, iPhone-style pinch-and-spread techniques to zoom into a photo you’ve taken. You can drag across the screen to flip through your pictures. The image on the screen always flips upright, no matter what crazy angle you’ve twisted it into. When you twist the camera body upright, you can even film tall, skinny videos. What a weird, weird camera. Sometimes it seems like a Flip camcorder, in that it’s fast, fun and fumble-proof. Sometimes it feels like a point-and-shoot camera (an Advanced menu lets you adjust the exposure, white balance and ISO — light sensitivity — but not manual focus, aperture or shutter speed). Sometimes it seems like a phone; for example, it has an LED video light instead of a real flash. (At the moment, in fact, the Tryx has no still camera flash at all; Casio says that a coming software update will turn the LED light into a flash for stills.) The photos are slightly better than a phone’s, but not as good as, say, those from a Canon pocket camera. There’s a softness to them, a tendency to “blow out” the bright areas into pure white, and some pretty bad distortion at the edges of the frame. (That’s a side effect of the camera’s extremely wide-angle 21mm lens.) Since there’s no stabilization, there are plenty of ruined blurry shots in low light. Now, most people should probably opt for something more traditional; for the same money, you can get much better pictures. There’s still value in Casio’s crazy experiment, though. Many of the Tryx’s ideas — the wave shutter, multitouch screen, the frame concept, 360-degree panoramas — deserve to live on in other, future cameras. And many among Casio’s intended audience — those fun-loving young adults — will get a lot of joy out of this camera. Especially if the price drops, as Casio hints that it will in a few months. The bottom line: the Tryx is great-looking, superslim, a blast to use and almost Flip-simple. Above all, it’s solid evidence that there’s value in a single-purpose gadget. | Camera;Casio |
ny0013997 | [
"world",
"middleeast"
] | 2013/11/23 | Questions on Drone Strike Find Only Silence | WASHINGTON — Standing on the marble floor just outside the House chamber, Faisal bin Ali Jaber looked lost in the human river of hard-charging lobbyists, members of Congress and staffers. It is not every day that a victim of American drone strikes travels 7,000 miles to Washington to look for answers. Now he stood face to face with Representative Adam B. Schiff — a California Democrat who had carved out 20 minutes between two votes on natural gas policy — to tell his story: how he watched in horror last year as drone-fired missiles incinerated his nephew and brother-in-law in a remote Yemeni village. Neither of the victims was a member of Al Qaeda. In fact, the opposite was true. They were meeting with three Qaeda members in hopes of changing the militants’ views. “It really puts a human face on the term ‘collateral damage,’ ” said Mr. Schiff, looking awed after listening to Mr. Jaber. A gaunt civil engineer with a white mustache, Mr. Jaber spent the past week struggling to pierce the veil of secrecy and anonymity over the Obama administration’s drone strike program, which targets militants in the hinterlands of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen. He did not have much luck. He met at length with a half-dozen members of Congress, as well as officials from the National Security Council and the State Department. Everywhere, he received heartfelt condolences. But no one has been able to explain why his relatives were killed, or why the administration is not willing to acknowledge its mistake. It was an error with unusual resonance. Mr. Jaber’s brother-in-law was a cleric who had spoken out against Al Qaeda shortly before the drone killed him. The nephew was a local policeman who had gone along in part to offer protection. The strike, in August 2012, drew widespread indignation in Yemen, and was documented in The New York Times and later by human rights groups, along with a number of other strikes that accidentally killed innocent people. A Yemeni counterterrorism official called Mr. Jaber hours after the strike to apologize for the mistake. Mr. Jaber wrote an open letter to President Obama, but received no answer. The same is true of a Pakistani family who lost a grandmother in a drone strike and visited Washington briefly late last month, in what appears to be the first such visit to Congress. In May, Mr. Obama responded to rising criticism of the targeted killing program and acknowledged in a speech at the National Defense University in Washington that some innocent people had been killed. The president promised greater transparency, but the administration still refuses to discuss specific strikes or to apologize or pay compensation for strikes that went wrong. When American officials have offered estimates of civilian casualties in drone strikes, their numbers have been far lower than those given by research groups and journalists. Image Faisal bin Ali Jaber, center, with Medea Benjamin of Code Pink, left, and Baraa Shiban, who investigates drone strikes. Credit T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York Times Mr. Jaber’s visit — and that of the Pakistani family — comes as a congressional effort is building to force the administration’s hand. Early this month, the Senate Intelligence Committee added to the annual intelligence policy bill a requirement for an annual report giving the number of “combatants” and “noncombatant civilians” killed or injured in the previous year in drone strikes outside conventional wars. The report would give only total numbers, not details of each strike or the names of those killed. Mr. Schiff, who met Mr. Jaber on Wednesday, plans to sponsor a similar bill in the House. Mr. Jaber’s visit was sponsored by the peace group Code Pink , which organized an accompanying protest in front of the White House last week, and Reprieve , a human rights group based in London. Unlike some of the activists who embraced him and apologized to him wherever he went, Mr. Jaber strikes a very humble and unassuming attitude about his family’s tragedy. He says he does not presume to pass judgment on the drone strike program itself, but wants acknowledgment and an apology. “I learned two things,” he said when asked to sum up his week in Washington. “First, the American people and their organizations are very kind and well meaning, and the Congress members also were very sympathetic. But on the other side, there are politicians who seem to be trying to keep everything secret.” Mr. Jaber offers a harrowing account of the drone strike. It was the day after his son’s wedding in his native village, Khashamir, and he was eating dinner at home with several relatives when they heard a whirring from the sky. Looking out the window, he and his relatives saw a flash, and then heard a series of terrific crashes, “as if the whole mountain had exploded.” The village erupted in panic. Mr. Jaber’s daughter, who was very close to the strike, was so traumatized that she did not get out of bed for three weeks, he said. The mother of one of the dead men went into a coma after she heard the news and died a month later. When Mr. Jaber arrived on the scene that night, less than a mile from his house, he found bits of charred human flesh spread on the ground, he said. It was not until two hours later, through the accounts of witnesses, that the identities of the dead men and what had happened to them became clear. Mr. Jaber’s brother-in-law, the imam, had been approached earlier that evening by three Qaeda militants who were angry about a speech the imam had delivered condemning terrorism. The imam reluctantly agreed to talk to the men, but just in case he was accompanied by Mr. Jaber’s nephew, the policeman. The volley of missiles killed all five men. Like most Yemenis, Mr. Jaber deplores the influence of Al Qaeda in his country, which is one of the world’s poorest. He fears that the drone strikes are fostering greater militancy and anger at America. But above all, he finds the administration’s silence baffling. At one point during his week in Washington, Mr. Jaber got a tour of the National Mall and other landmarks with another Yemeni who had been flown over for the visit, a young woman named Entesar al-Qadhi. Both of them said they were overwhelmed by the dignity and calm of the Mall, so different from the crowds and poverty of Yemen. “They have such a beautiful country here, such a beautiful city,” Ms. Qadhi said as she strolled along. “Why do they need to go chasing someone with bombs in the desert?” | Drones;Targeted Killings;Civilian casualties;Yemen;US Politics;Code Pink;Faisal bin Ali Jaber |
ny0209930 | [
"world",
"asia"
] | 2009/12/08 | Talks Are Set for U.S. Envoy in North Korea | SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — President Obama is sending a veteran diplomat to North Korea on Tuesday for the highest-profile talks between the United States and North Korea since he took office pledging to reach out to America’s adversaries. A basic question is whether the diplomat, Stephen W. Bosworth, can extract a firm commitment from the North to rejoin nuclear disarmament talks and whether this time North Korea is serious about peace on the peninsula. Mr. Bosworth is scheduled to fly from a United States military base near Seoul to Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, to see if the North will return to the international disarmament talks that it abandoned this year. Neither side has said whom Mr. Bosworth will meet with during his three-day visit, although he is widely expected to sit down with Kang Sok-ju, the first vice foreign minister. He is considered the chief foreign policy strategist for the country’s reclusive leader, Kim Jong-il. “The main question is whether Bosworth will meet with Chairman Kim Jong-il,” said Kim Yong-hyun, a professor of North Korean studies at Dongguk University in Seoul. “Such a meeting would demonstrate that both the U.S. and North Korea intend to resolve the nuclear issue.” American officials would say only that the North Koreans had promised high-level meetings for Mr. Bosworth. The State Department, in briefing reporters before his trip, said that Mr. Bosworth had a narrow mission: to find out whether the North would return to the stalled disarmament talks. The State Department also said that he would be offering no inducements to lure North Korea back to the negotiating table. Chinese and North Korean officials have suggested that Pyongyang might be willing to return, but American officials said that Mr. Bosworth did not know what the North would decide. Mr. Bosworth’s visit comes after a year of threatening rhetoric and rising tensions on the Korean Peninsula. | United States International Relations;Bosworth Stephen W;North Korea |
ny0125785 | [
"us",
"politics"
] | 2012/08/09 | Obama Assails Romney on Women’s Health Care | DENVER — President Obama made one of his strongest pitches to date for the women’s vote, which is crucial to his re-election, telling a mostly female crowd of 4,000 here on Wednesday that Republicans led by Mitt Romney would take them back to the era of the 1950s. Mr. Romney, who was in Colorado last week, on Wednesday was in another swing state, Iowa, which Mr. Obama will tour by bus next week. Their itineraries underscored the push to mobilize supporters and win over the few undecided voters in the relatively few battleground states that will decide the election. In Des Moines, Mr. Romney called for developing a range of energy resources including wind power, but he pointedly did not mention his opposition to an administration-supported tax credit for the wind industry that Republican leaders in both Iowa and Colorado strongly favor. Iowa Republicans, including Gov. Terry E. Branstad, have publicly criticized Mr. Romney for his stance. And in Colorado, Mr. Obama is stoking the controversy during his two-day, four-stop visit. But at his first stop at a Denver campus shared by three colleges, Mr. Obama’s emphasis was on women’s health and reproductive issues. He was introduced by Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown Law School graduate who this year became a hero to women’s groups, and the target of conservatives like Rush Limbaugh, who called her “a prostitute,” after Republicans blocked her from testifying in Congress for insurance coverage of contraception. “When it comes to the economy, it’s bad enough that our opponents want to take us back to the same policies of the last decade — the same policies that got us into this mess in the first place,” Mr. Obama said. “But,” he added, “when it comes to a woman’s right to make her own health care choices, they want to take us back to the policies more suited to the 1950s than the 21st century.” Mr. Obama departed from his usual, broader stump speech to focus on his health insurance law, and to reopen a debate over contraception that roiled the Republican presidential nomination contest this year and helped solidify his support among women. “The decisions that affect a woman’s health, they’re not up to politicians. They’re not up to insurance companies. They’re up to you,” he said. “And you deserve a president that will fight to keep it that way.” Generally, about 6 in 10 female voters support the president, nationally and in many swing states, helping to offset a gender gap that has white male voters opposing him by roughly the same margin. In Colorado, however, Mr. Obama’s lead among women is not so wide, according to a new poll for Quinnipiac University/The New York Times/CBS News. And that helped account for Mr. Romney’s narrow five percentage point edge among Colorado voters over all. Obama advisers disputed the poll’s methodology and said their own surveys showed the president with a slight lead. Mr. Obama, as he has lately, purposely called the health care law by the pejorative that Republicans gave it — Obamacare — “because,” he said, “I do care.” He criticized Mr. Romney for promising to repeal the law and to end public financing of Planned Parenthood. And Mr. Obama cited the benefits that would be lost without the law: coverage for people with pre-existing medical conditions and for young adults under 26 years old on their parents’ policies; savings for older Americans with large prescription drug bills; mandated coverage of preventive services like contraception; and insurance company rebates. From Denver, Mr. Obama flew west to Grand Junction for a rally of 2,400 supporters in an area he did not win in 2008. On Thursday, he will visit Pueblo and Colorado Springs, and draw attention to his support for — and Mr. Romney’s opposition to — renewing federal tax credits for wind energy production. As in Iowa, another leader in harnessing wind, news coverage of the issue has not been kind to Mr. Romney, noting that he supports oil subsidies even as he attacks the wind credits and other parts of what he calls Mr. Obama’s costly obsession with “green jobs.” A column this week in The Denver Post began, “Is Romney trying to blow it?” In Iowa, Mr. Branstad told reporters recently that the Romney campaign suffered from “confusion” over the credit, echoing earlier criticism from Representative Tom Latham and Senator Charles E. Grassley, both senior Republicans in Congress. The Romney campaign argues that the tax break, which is due to expire this year, is a government intrusion into the free market — a position that has Tea Party support. Mr. Romney told campaign activists, “We have got to take advantage of America’s extraordinary energy resources — coal , oil, gas, nuclear, renewables, wind, solar, ethanol, you name it.” | Obama Barack;Romney Mitt;Presidential Election of 2012;Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (2010);Women and Girls |
ny0069798 | [
"sports"
] | 2014/12/14 | Team Brunel Wins Second Leg of Volvo Ocean Race | The Dutch skipper Bouwe Bekking executed a masterly passing maneuver to guide Team Brunel to a 16-minute victory in the second leg of the Volvo Ocean Race after 23 days on the open seas. The 5,200-nautical-mile stage, from Cape Town to Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, had been packed with incidents as the fleet dodged a midleg tropical storm as well as icebergs in the early stages. | Sailing;Volvo Ocean Race |
ny0254753 | [
"us",
"politics"
] | 2011/07/13 | Medicare and Medicaid Cut Proposals Stir Opposition | WASHINGTON — Budget negotiators have not found a way to avert a government default on federal debt obligations, but with their ideas to cut Medicare and Medicaid they have managed to provoke opposition from almost every major group that represents beneficiaries and health care providers. The latest provocation was a list of proposed savings presented at the White House this week by the House majority leader, Representative Eric Cantor, Republican of Virginia. Mr. Cantor said Tuesday that the ideas had all been seriously discussed, with varying levels of Democratic support, in seven weeks of negotiations led by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. But with House Republicans adamantly opposed to new taxes, Democrats said they would not accept cuts in Medicare that reduced benefits. Mr. Cantor’s list included 27 proposals that he said would save up to $353 billion over 10 years, in the context of a budget deal that could save anywhere from $2 trillion to $4 trillion over the same period. Items on the list touched off howls of protest from lobbyists and Democratic lawmakers who saw details for the first time on Tuesday. Some of the proposals would hit Medicare patients in the pocketbook, charging co-payments for home health care and clinical laboratory services like blood tests. One proposal would increase premiums and co-payments for beneficiaries with relatively high incomes. Another would require millions of recipients to pay more of the costs now covered by private insurance policies that supplement Medicare. The Congressional Budget Office says the proposal could save Medicare up to $53 billion over 10 years, mainly by curbing the use of health care by people with supplemental coverage known as Medigap policies. Studies show that such policyholders use about 25 percent more services than Medicare patients who have no supplemental coverage, the budget office said. But Medigap policies are popular with older Americans, who like the financial security they get from the extra insurance. “The Medigap proposal would shift costs onto Medicare beneficiaries,” said Howard J. Bedlin, vice president of the National Council on Aging , a service and advocacy group. “Our fear is that many would go without the care they need and end up in a hospital emergency room, which costs Medicare more than proper treatment would have cost.” Likewise, Mr. Bedlin said, the proposed co-payments for home health care would “significantly increase out-of-pocket costs for many low-income widows with multiple chronic conditions.” When such co-payments were seriously considered in the past, Democrats wheeled some of the widows into the Capitol to denounce the idea. Mr. Cantor’s list includes $100 billion in savings from Medicaid over 10 years — the same amount sought in a White House proposal that has caused consternation among some officials at the Department of Health and Human Services. Laboratories were surprised to learn Tuesday of the proposal to start charging Medicare beneficiaries a $1 co-payment for each lab test. Lab tests and home health visits are now exempt from such cost-sharing. Alan B. Mertz, president of the American Clinical Laboratory Association , a trade group, said that collecting the co-payments from beneficiaries would be “a huge administrative hassle.” The average lab test costs $12 or $13, Mr. Mertz said, and labs typically “do not have a face-to-face relationship with patients.” In many cases, he said, “we will not be able to collect the money, or the cost of collecting it will be more than the amount of the co-payment.” Representative Paul D. Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin and chairman of the House Budget Committee, said the din of criticism was disappointing. “These are not big Medicare savers,” Mr. Ryan said in an interview. “They do not save a lot of money in the whole scheme of things. If we come to a political paralysis over a few hundred billion dollars, the credit markets will really start turning on us.” The Obama administration said Tuesday that instead of cutting benefits or increasing co-payments, Congress should increase the power of an independent agency, created by the new health care law, to make sweeping cuts in the growth of Medicare spending. At a hearing of the House Budget Committee, Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, said the new agency, the Independent Payment Advisory Board , would be a backstop to ensure a sharp reduction in the growth of Medicare spending per beneficiary. Mr. Ryan said the 15-member board was “just a mechanism to take power out of the hands of politicians so they can absolve themselves of responsibility for the inevitable price controlling and rationing that is to come in Medicare.” Such rationing, he said, “is not necessary if you do fundamental Medicare reform.” | Medicine and Health;Federal Budget (US);Health Insurance and Managed Care;United States Politics and Government;House of Representatives;Senate;Medicaid;Medicare |
ny0038819 | [
"sports",
"golf"
] | 2014/04/18 | Kuchar Shares Lead at RBC Heritage | Matt Kuchar continued his stellar play from the Masters by putting together a strong start at the RBC Heritage on Hilton Head Island, S.C., shooting a five-under-par 66 to share the first-round lead with Scott Langley and William McGirt. | Golf;Matt Kuchar;Scott Langley;William McGirt |
ny0003919 | [
"us"
] | 2013/04/16 | Witnesses Describe Scene After Blasts at Boston Marathon | BOSTON — About 100 feet from the end of the 26.2-mile Boston Marathon, explosions shook the street and sent runners frantically racing for cover. The marathon finish line, normally a festive area of celebration and exhaustion, was suddenly like a war zone. “These runners just finished and they don’t have legs now,” said Roupen Bastajian, 35, a Rhode Island state trooper and former Marine. “So many of them. There are so many people without legs. It’s all blood. There’s blood everywhere. You got bones, fragments. It’s disgusting.” Had Mr. Bastajian run a few strides slower, as he did in 2011, he might have been among the dozens of victims wounded in Monday’s bomb blasts. Instead, he was among the runners treating other runners, a makeshift emergency medical service of exhausted athletes. “We put tourniquets on,” Mr. Bastajian said. “I tied at least five, six legs with tourniquets.” The Boston Marathon, held every year on Patriots’ Day, a state holiday, is usually an opportunity for the city to cheer with a collective roar. But the explosions turned an uplifting day into a nightmarish swirl of bloodied streets and torn-apart limbs as runners were toppled, children on the sidelines were maimed, and a panicked city watched its iconic athletic spectacle destroyed. The timing of the explosions — around 2:50 p.m. — was especially devastating because they happened when a high concentration of runners in the main field were arriving at the finish line on Boylston Street. In last year’s Boston Marathon, for example, more than 9,100 crossed the finish line — 42 percent of all finishers — in the 30 minutes before and after the time of the explosions. This year, more than 23,000 people started the race in near-perfect conditions. Only about 17,580 finished. Three people were killed and more than 100 were injured, officials said. Deirdre Hatfield, 27, was steps away from the finish line when she heard a blast. She saw bodies flying out into the street. She saw a couple of children who appeared lifeless. She saw people without legs. “When the bodies landed around me I thought: Am I burning? Maybe I’m burning and I don’t feel it,” Ms. Hatfield said. “If I blow up, I just hope I won’t feel it.” She looked inside a Starbucks to her left, where she thought a blast might have occurred. “What was so eerie, you looked in you knew there had to be 100 people in there, but there was no sign of movement,” she said. Ms. Hatfield wondered where another explosion might occur. She turned down a side street and ran to the hotel where she had agreed to meet her boyfriend and family after the race. Amid the chaos, the authorities directed runners and onlookers to the area designated for family members meeting runners at the end of the race. It was traditionally a place of panting pride, sweaty hugs and exhausted relief. But on Monday, it became a place of dread, as news of the attack spread through the crowd and people awaited word. One woman screamed over the din toward the streets roped off for runners: “Lisa! Lisa!” Some saw the explosions as clouds of white smoke. To others, they looked orange — a fireball that nearly reached the top of a nearby traffic light. Groups of runners, including a row of women in pink and neon tank tops and a man in a red windbreaker — kept going a few paces at least, as if unsure of what they were seeing. Image A wounded man was loaded into an ambulance. At least three people were killed and more than 140 were injured from the blasts. Credit Jim Rogash/Getty Images Some runners stopped in the middle of the street, confused and frightened. Others turned around and started running back the way they came. “It is kind of ironic that you just finished running a marathon and you want to keep running away,” said Sarah Joyce, 21, who had just finished her first marathon when she heard the blast. Bruce Mendelsohn, 44, was at a party in a third-floor office above where the bombs went off. His brother, Aaron, had finished the race earlier. “There was a very loud boom, and three to five seconds later there was another one,” said Mr. Mendelsohn, an Army veteran who works in public relations. He ran outside. “There was blood smeared in the streets and on the sidewalk,” he said. Mr. Mendelsohn could not be sure how many people had been killed or wounded, but among the bodies he said he saw women, children and runners. The wounds, he said, appeared to be “lower torso.” As Melissa Fryback, 42, was heading into the home stretch, she realized she was on pace for one of her best times ever. She steeled herself for the last three miles and finished in 3 hours 44 minutes. She met up with her boyfriend, and the two had made it about two blocks from the finish line when they heard the blasts. “I can’t help but wonder that if I hadn’t pushed like that, it could have been me,” she said. Boston hospitals struggled to keep up with the flow of patients. Massachusetts General Hospital admitted 29 patients, 8 of them in critical condition; several of them needed amputations, a spokesman said. Late Monday night, Brigham and Women’s Hospital said it had seen 31 patients who were wounded in the explosions, ranging from a 3-year-old to patients in their 60s. As many as 10 were listed in serious condition, and 2 were in critical condition. The Rev. Brian Jordan, a Franciscan priest based in Brooklyn, said he was in Boston to say a pre-race Mass near the starting line for a group of about 100 friends who were running. The group included Boston firefighters, Massachusetts State Police officers and several Army soldiers recently returned from Iraq. Father Jordan, a veteran runner of 21 Boston Marathons himself, was about a block away from the blasts when they occurred, heading toward the course to watch his friends finish the race. “I never heard that type of sound before,” he said by telephone. “It was like cannons.” He said he made his way through the fleeing crowd toward the explosions. “I saw some blood,” he said. He realized he could be more effective wearing his Franciscan habit, so he returned to the firehouse and donned the brown robe of his order, and then headed back out into the streets. “All I could do was try to calm people down,” Father Jordan said. “Marathons are supposed to bring people together.” Jeff Constantine, 46, ended his first marathon a mile from the finish. It took 10 minutes to find out why. He was planning to finish the race at almost exactly the time that the bomb went off. “If I didn’t freeze up, if I hadn’t been slow, I would have been right there,” he said. His family had traffic to thank. They were running late after watching Mr. Constantine run up Heartbreak Hill, the race’s most challenging stretch, and never made it to the finish line. | Boston Marathon Bombings;Boston |
ny0263272 | [
"us",
"politics"
] | 2011/12/16 | Disagreement Over Payroll Tax Cut’s Impact on Social Security | WASHINGTON — For all of the partisan brawling over President Obama ’s call to extend a temporary payroll tax cut for 160 million Americans, one concern is bipartisan: a significant minority of Democrats and Republicans say that cutting the taxes that finance Social Security benefits will further undermine the program. The Obama administration, many budget experts (but not all) and the chief actuary for the Social Security Administration say the proposal will do no such thing. But some conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats who agree on little else are just as adamant that it will. Both parties predict the payroll tax cut will be extended beyond its Dec. 31 expiration, though the question of how — or whether — to pay for it and some other unrelated issues in the year-end legislation continued to hold it up on Wednesday. Still, the disagreement over the tax cut lingers. It is less over money than philosophy, and reflects a debate as old as the 75-year-old program about Social Security’s fundamental structure. Critics predict that one extension will lead to another as politicians balk at raising taxes to their former level, especially if unemployment remains high. “Imagine that next December the unemployment rate is 8 percent and a year later it’s 7.4 percent,” said Robert Reischauer, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office , who is one of two public trustees for Social Security. “We’ll still be trying to stimulate employment and terminating the payroll tax holiday will be a big hit on most families, one that will hurt job growth.” Democrats fear that repeated extensions would disrupt the link that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt forged to lock in support for Social Security: with workers taxed for their benefits, politicians would not cut them. And Republicans object that transferring general revenues to Social Security to offset the tax cut makes the program more like welfare, and worsens the federal budget deficit. Politics aside, the bottom line is that a temporary tax cut is inconsequential to Social Security’s long-term health, from an accounting perspective. The threat remains the financial pressure of an aging population. Social Security is essentially a pay-as-you-go system, with payroll taxes from workers flowing back out to retirees, survivors and the disabled. Last year, before the tax cut, the system for the first time since 1983 collected less in taxes than it paid out to 55 million beneficiaries — $49 billion less. The program’s operating deficits will grow as more of the 78 million baby boomers become eligible. But trust fund reserves built up over years of annual surpluses will not run out until 2036, when tax revenues will cover three-quarters of benefits, trustees project. That projection would be unchanged by Mr. Obama’s proposal to extend and expand the payroll tax relief that he and Congressional Republicans agreed to a year ago to spur the economy, because they also agreed to transfer general revenues to Social Security to make up the difference. The trust fund “would be unaffected by enactment of this provision,” Stephen C. Goss, the chief actuary for Social Security Administration, wrote to administration officials — just as he had about the tax bill a year ago. The 12.4 percent payroll tax is split between employees and employers, and the current break reduces workers’ share by 2 percentage points, to 4.2 percent. Because that reduces Social Security revenues this year by about $105 billion, the program is credited with that amount from general revenues. And workers get credit for the full tax for purposes of calculating their future benefits. This fall, with the economy still fragile, Mr. Obama proposed as part of his $447 billion job-creation plan to extend the tax cut for 2012, increase it to 3.1 percentage points and expand it to employers for their first $5 million of payroll — in effect cutting the tax in half for employees and most employers. His proposal, which was more popular with Mr. Obama’s political advisers than with Treasury officials, would have reduced Social Security revenues by $240 billion next year. Democrats recently limited their proposal to employees and the self-employed, cutting its cost to $185 billion given complaints from liberals and conservatives. Last December liberal lawmakers, conservatives and advocates for the elderly mostly went along with the tax cut since it was intended for a year only. But when the White House began talking of an extension months ago, after economists predicted that economic growth would slow half a percentage point without the tax cut, opponents in both parties mobilized. Sixty-one liberals in the House, nearly one-third of the Democrats there, wrote to Mr. Obama in July to say they were “gravely concerned that yet another, unacceptable cut to Social Security’s revenue stream appears to be on the table.” Citing the Bush-era tax cuts that were supposed to end in 2010, they expressed fear that the payroll tax cut would become permanent as politicians shied from letting them lapse. Mindful of some Republicans’ goal of privatizing Social Security, the Democrats suggested that tinkering with the payroll tax “may be used as the first step in a larger battle to fundamentally dismantle Social Security.” Six years ago, Democrats successfully derailed President George W. Bush ’s plan to partially privatize Social Security by letting workers divert 2 percentage points of their payroll taxes to personal retirement accounts. Charles Blahous, Mr. Bush’s adviser on the issue, recently wrote that the payroll tax cut and the extension that Mr. Obama initially proposed would reduce revenues to Social Security more over two years than Mr. Bush’s plan would have over its first decade. The Bush plan, however, also would have reduced workers’ future benefits commensurate with the taxes they diverted to personal accounts — a feature that helped defeat the proposal. Mr. Blahous, now one of two public trustees for Social Security, said in his analysis that the payroll tax cut “would take a major step toward transforming Social Security from what it has long been — an earned benefit, funded by separate worker payroll taxes — into an income-tax based system more akin to welfare.” That is not the worry of the other public trustee, Mr. Reischauer. “The nightmare that I have is that when it comes time to raise the tax back up to 6.2 percent, conservatives are going to propose that these two percentage points of payroll tax be devoted to individual accounts.” Mr. Reischauer said. “That will precipitate a huge fight and could change Social Security in a fundamental way.” | Payroll tax;House of Representatives;Federal Budget;US Politics;Jobs;Social Security |
ny0004195 | [
"sports",
"soccer"
] | 2013/04/17 | 20 Creative Years of Francesco Totti: Why Stop? | LONDON — As Italy’s clubs, by their own admission, lag behind the powers of the European giants, one player goes on and on, extending his own chapter as a Roman god in his game. Francesco Totti was born a Roma fan and probably will die an idol in the city where, for 20 years now, his profile has been higher than that of any rock star or politician. Totti is 36 now, but age cannot wither his desire to go on playing for his club, and maybe even for country. His role is what the Italians call a fantasista — a creator on the field. Of course, the lungs and the limbs slow with the years, but last month, when Totti passed the 20-year milestone in continuous service in the top league, Cesare Prandelli, the national team coach, refused to rule out the fantasy of recalling Totti to the Azzurri. That would be extraordinary, because it has been seven years since the Roma playmaker played on an Italian team that won the World Cup. He was coming back from injury then, but still he was able to produce moments of invention after spending barely any time to recover properly from a broken leg. Totti was able to give moments — inspirational moments — to that World Cup squad. He can still produce flashes of skill, of creativity, of finishing experience beyond the scope of ordinary athletes. That is why Roma clings to him, and he to Roma. Last month, he eclipsed the Serie A scoring feat of one of Italy’s most revered goal artists, the Swede Gunnar Nordahl. Before that, Totti had passed the records of Giuseppe Meazza and José Altafini. Totti’s current total of 227 goals in 530 appearances in Serie A puts him second on the all-time scoring chart behind Silvio Piola, who notched 290 goals in 556 games for five Italian teams between 1930 and 1954. False modesty is unlikely ever to afflict Totti. “If I had played as a center-forward for my entire career,” he said, “I would have scored more than 300 goals and already have overtaken Silvio Piola.” Indeed he might, because from the moment that Totti began playing organized soccer, at the age of 8, he was never just a striker. His many team coaches since then have toyed with his versatility, with his breathtaking quality to pick out a pass, with his imagination to shape a game and not simply to strike. His role is defined as a “trequartista.” The Italians have a word for everything in soccer. The trequartista is the pivotal role in attack, though it is neither a striker nor a creator, per se, but three-quarters of both those positions. Lionel Messi would be a trequartista in Italian eyes, just as Roberto Baggio and Alessandro Del Piero have been, and as Dennis Bergkamp so elegantly proved in the Netherlands, Italy and England. They are, or were, like government ministers without portfolio. Sometimes they suffered for their versatility, but only in the arithmetical sense that means that Totti will probably run out of time to contemplate overtaking Piola’s mark in history. He has compensations. Gianluigi Buffon, the Juventus goalkeeper who has shared many of Totti’s great moments in an Italian jersey, recently posted an open letter to his Roman friend on the Italian news agency ANSA. “Twenty years in Serie A,” Buffon wrote. “What an achievement. I still have an image of your first goal in my mind, it was a Roma-Foggia match. “We’re friends,” it went on. “You know how much I care about you. We started together in the Under-15 side, we had some splendid years together in the Azzurri, and we continue as opponents in Serie A. “You often scored against me (10 times to be precise), like a champion who has forgotten our friendship. Then at the final whistle, there are smiles between us again.” And so it went on, a lifetime of playing, sharing, and competing against one another. “The two of us are lucky,” Buffon concluded. “Once you get past 30, every season is worth seven.” For the goalie, the mid-thirties are less threatening. Many goalies, notably the Italian Dino Zoff, go on into their forties. But it is a far greater challenge out on the field, either in defense, where Paolo Maldini was peerless beyond his 40th birthday, or in midfield and attack, where the Welshman Ryan Giggs strides on in his 40th year for Manchester United in England. Age at that point is such a pain. Players can ignore it (or make team managers and coaches turn a blind eye to it) only if they have an innate technical quality and if they get their heads around the fact that they need to change their style and emphasize the cerebral, not the athletic. They have to use their stored knowledge about the game to help others on the team reach their maximum potential. Totti has let it be known he wants more. He has publicly asked for a new contract. He no doubt fears the after-life of sports as much as he relishes getting up in the morning and slogging out to training or working out in the gym. He tries to defy time — not because he needs the money. He cannot need more pain from the kicks that such a creative man takes on the field. But he knows he is (almost) incomparable for as long as he can raise the pace on the field. The Stadio Olimpico is his Coliseum, and he is not yet ready to take a step back and start wondering what exactly he does with the rest of his life. “There is only one player who is doing things I could never do,” he said last month, demonstrating again that he is not a pretentiously modest Roman. “And that is Messi.” “The numbers,” he added, “speak for themselves.” | Roma Soccer Team;Soccer |
ny0081692 | [
"sports",
"football"
] | 2015/11/01 | Jets-Raiders Preview: Darrelle Revis Faces Fresh Talent | 4 p.m., CBS Matchup to Watch Amari Cooper vs. Darrelle Revis Cooper, drafted fourth over all in May, leads all rookies with 33 receptions, 519 yards and three touchdowns, and only two other receivers — Cleveland’s Travis Benjamin and Indianapolis’s T. Y. Hilton — also have four catches of at least 40 yards. Last week, Cooper became the first rookie to record at least 100 receiving yards in three of his team’s first six games since Mike Ditka in 1961, but on Sunday he visits Revis Island. Revis has six takeaways this season — three interceptions, three fumble recoveries — though he was beaten for a touchdown two weeks ago by Pierre Garcon of Washington and almost again last week in New England until Julian Edelman dropped the pass. Cooper may not have their experience, but he has Revis’s respect. Said Revis, “He’s a talent.” NUMBER TO WATCH 39 That is the age of Oakland safety Charles Woodson, who remains a force, even as one of the league’s oldest players. In October, Woodson was selected as the conference defensive player of the month for the fifth time, trailing only the former Bills defensive end Bruce Smith (six) for the most times. This season, he also became the only player in league history to intercept two passes in a game — doing it against Peyton Manning — at age 39 or older. QUOTATION OF THE WEEK ‘That’s my favorite stadium to play in. Every time before the game, I’ll run to the black hole and I’ll just stare at them and mean mug them and they just throw stuff at you. It’s fun.’ Jets receiver BRANDON MARSHALL, below, when asked about the boisterous, chain-mail-wearing crowd at Raiders home games. | Football;Amari Cooper;Jets;Raiders |
ny0229293 | [
"world",
"europe"
] | 2010/07/12 | Switzerland, Beloved Bollywood Extra, Draws Indians | ENGELBERG, Switzerland — Vishal and Jagruti Purohit had traveled here from Mumbai, India , on their honeymoon, but they had a greater mission: to find the small village church that provided the backdrop for a scene in their favorite movie, a 1995 Bollywood blockbuster called “ The Brave Heart Will Take the Bride .” In the scene, two young Indians, played by Mr. Purohit’s favorite actor and actress, see their love seeming to come to an end. She kneels and prays, while he cavorts in the dark, neo-Gothic church. In the end, she breaks off an engagement and he wins her hand. The young couple knew that the scene had been shot on location in a church in the small town of Montbovon, a couple of hours drive from this Alpine village of winding streets, low chalets and abundant geraniums. But which church? The first church Mr. Purohit, 24, spied had the sharply pointed steeple that he and his wife recognized from the film, but the interior was not right. The altars were different, the vaulting not rounded but sharp. Disappointed, they left the church and returned to their tour bus, where a tour guide helped solve the puzzle. The exterior scenes in the film had been shot around this church with the sharply pointed steeple, he told them. For the interior shots, though, the director had chosen the church of St. Grat, a short distance away. Delighted, Mr. Purohit and his wife bounded over to the second church with its familiar interior and struck poses for honeymoon photographs, aping the Bollywood stars they so admired. For years, Bollywood’s producers and directors have favored the pristine backdrop of Switzerland for their films. The greatest of the Bollywood filmmakers, Yash Chopra , is a self-professed romantic who has made a point of including in virtually all his films scenes shot on location in this country’s high Alpine meadows, around its serene lakes, and in its charming towns and cities to convey an ideal of sunshine, happiness and tranquillity. In the process, they have created an enormous curiosity about things Swiss in generations of middle-class Indians, who are now earning enough to travel here in search of their dreams. “The moment you cross the border it is something else,” Mr. Purohit said, “where the scenario changes.” “No noise, no pollution, no crowds,” said Kamalakar Tarkasband, 72, a retired army officer. Swiss tourism officials and their Indian counterparts are capitalizing on this obsession. The number of nights spent by Indian tourists, who come mostly in summer (few ski ), has doubled in the last decade to 325,000, and the numbers continue to grow. Mr. Tarkasband was traveling with the Purohits and a busload of other Indians who had spent the last 12 hours visiting movie locations around Switzerland. Most of the sites were from “The Brave Heart Will Take the Bride,” produced by Mr. Chopra and directed by his son Aditya Chopra. On their 12-day tour, marketed as the Enchanted Journey and organized by the Indian affiliate of the Swiss travel agency Kuoni, the travelers watched DVDs of Bollywood film scenes shot in Switzerland while traveling from site to site. They posed, laughing, for snapshots imitating their film heartthrobs. “This is the way Switzerland is positioned in our minds; it was the place for romance and natural beauty,” said Sanket Shah, 21, from Pune, India, who got a degree in management and went to work as a guide for Enchanted Journey. Raj Kapoor may have been the first Indian director to use foreign sites for shooting on location — in Venice, Paris and Switzerland — when he filmed his 1964 hit, “ Sangam .” But the entire bus knew the story of how Mr. Chopra spent his honeymoon in the Swiss resort of Gstaad . “He promised his wife on his honeymoon that every movie he made would have to have one romantic song or scene in Switzerland,” said Rajendra Choudhary, 24, who also studied management in Pune and joined the Enchanted Journey. Mr. Chopra, now 77, kept his promise. Most of the Swiss sequences are dream scenes in which lovers dance or romp on Alpine meadows strewn with flowers or roll in the snow in unlikely flimsy Indian garb on wintry slopes. The fascination proved to be infectious, and by now about 200 Bollywood films feature sequences shot in Switzerland. Between stops for photographs, the travelers laughed at clips of films by Mr. Chopra and other directors, sang along to tunes from film soundtracks, and competed for prizes in Bollywood trivia quizzes. Since Kuoni and its partners began the Enchanted Journey tours in April, about 55 groups have signed up for tours. The company, whose shareholders include Mr. Chopra’s Yash Raj Films studio, now plans to add a 15-day tour, individual customized film tours and honeymoon trips. “It’s dream tourism,” said Marco Casanova, a Swiss businessman and partner in the tour group. Cashing in on the enthusiasm, the town of Thun held its first Bollywood film festival in May. But not everyone shares the dream. In June, the Zurich newspaper Tages-Anzeiger featured an article with the headline “Into the Luxury Hotel with a Gas Cooker,” noting that “in some hotels an entire caste of guests is no longer desired: the Indians.” The article catalogued the complaints of hotel managers: guests who cook curry dishes on camping stoves in their rooms; guests who use bath oils that blacken tubs; guests who book for a husband and wife, only to show up with the entire family. In Engelberg, where a visitor is more likely to encounter a woman in a sari than hear the clang of a cowbell, some European tourists are unsettled. “I can imagine that a German or a Dutchman might not imagine Switzerland this way,” Mr. Casanova said. “They want the Swiss pastoral idyll.” Swiss animosity toward foreigners was directed at immigrants, not tourists. “Tourists come, but leave again,” he said. For the last 23 years, André Gobat has managed the Hotel Cathrin , in the shadow of 10,623-foot Mount Titlis . He acknowledges benefits to the town from the Indian tourism, like the recent prosperity of the elegant Terrace Hotel, a landmark since 1905 that now accommodates Indian tour groups. For him, the contrast is not so much Indians or Chinese versus Germans and Dutch, but rather individual tourists versus groups. “We built a golf course, hiking trails, for private tourists,” Mr. Gobat said of the town. “Group tourists don’t use them.” Moreover, tour groups dine in their hotels and do not frequent local restaurants. “For me, the mixture is not as good as it should be,” he said. “Go out in the evening; the village is empty.” | Switzerland;India;Travel and Vacations;Movies;Bollywood |
ny0230585 | [
"sports",
"baseball"
] | 2010/09/10 | Andy Pettitte’s Comeback Is as Consistent as His Career | Trenton If Andy Pettitte had to start a postseason game, even in a minor league rehabbing role, of course it would be Game 2. “They pushed it back a day,” he said before breezing through a 51-pitch, four-inning, two-hit, no-run outing for the Trenton Thunder on Thursday night in an Eastern League playoff against the New Hampshire Fisher Cats. “You know, I was kind of worried about pitching Game 1.” This was Pettitte’s little joke about his Class AA step toward returning to the Yankees from too much injury time off, all the way back to July 18 when he was shut down while on an 11-2 run with a strained left groin. The longtime vice sergeant of rotational arms, Pettitte once had a run of nine consecutive Game 2 starts in the American League division series, ending when he left New York after the 2003 season to pitch at home in Houston. In the context of the Yankees’ World Series-or-bust bravado, Pettitte’s three-year abandonment of the Bronx was largely forgettable and forgivable. “Even with the years he wasn’t here, it still seems like he’s always been here,” Derek Jeter said this week. Pettitte was always present and accounted for in that faithful, fallback position, never the poster boy, just good old Andy, even when caught in baseball’s performance enhancement flytrap with his former best friend, Roger Clemens. To borrow from Clemens’s lexicon on Pettitte’s version of their steroid conversations, it is amazing what people will misremember when an offending party can admit his culpability in a straightforward, heartfelt manner. In 2007, Pettitte struck many people as being sincerely sorry for using human growth hormone — five years earlier to help him recover from an injury, he said — and look at him now. “I look at Andy and I’m so proud of him, the way he’s handled adversity, in some cases self-inflicted,” said Buck Showalter, the Orioles manager who had Pettitte as a Yankees rookie in 1995. Showalter noted Pettitte’s ensnarement in the Mitchell report as Pettitte has endured it, in passing and without condemnation. It should by now be apparent that Pettitte is a skilled survivor — of a relationship with the earth-scorching Clemens, of various injuries and of George Steinbrenner’s machinations to make him disappear when the still-meddling Boss was convinced Pettitte’s best days were behind him. Here he is, 38, widely considered to be indispensable to the Yankees’ chances of defending their 27th championship next month, most of all by his teammates. “When you say he’s the No. 2 pitcher, you also have to say that he’s the leader of our pitching staff,” said C. C. Sabathia, the 19-game winner and unquestioned ace. “I mean that because of his longevity here, the way he’s pitched, his knowledge of the game. He’s the first person I talk to when something goes wrong. In every sense of the word, he’s definitely the leader and we’ve really missed him the last few weeks.” On a grander, more career-encompassing scale is a reality coated with irony. While the recently indicted Clemens scrambles to collect the shards of his reputation, Pettitte, his once devoted little fraternity brother, is picking up steam as a Hall of Fame candidate. “I would never sell him short of accomplishing anything,” Showalter said. On whether the numbers will be strong enough for Cooperstown — Pettitte’s record is 240-137 — Showalter asked: “Is Sandy Koufax in the Hall of Fame?” Koufax made the Hall with 165 victories, based on a six-year run of otherworldly dominance. Showalter ceded the apples-and-oranges nature of the comparison but added: “Sometimes I wish we would reward more of consistency. You’re able to assume certain things with Andy Pettitte. That’s a real dangerous word for managers, but with Andy that’s one thing you can put in the pile over here with ‘I can assume that.’ ” Postseason victories, for starters. Pettitte has more, 18, than any other pitcher in history, fueled by the Yankees’ familiarity with October and by the expanded postseason. What also should work in his favor is that the Hall is sprinkled with pitchers far short of the oft-mentioned metric of 300 wins, including Whitey Ford (236) and Catfish Hunter (224). If the discussion is narrowed to earned run average — Pettitte’s is a relatively high 3.87 — it must be recognized that he has pitched against the designated hitter in a hitter’s league in an age of homer-friendly ballparks. On the Hall debate, Sabathia eagerly weighed in, saying: “Guys don’t get as deep into the games and don’t pitch as long as guys did back in the day. I mean, they throw Curt Schilling’s name around about getting in. If he gets a vote, then Andy — five rings and those postseason wins — should be in for sure.” The mere possibility took Showalter back to his first Pettitte sighting as a Yankees minor league coach in the early 1990s. He was standing behind the screen with Tony Cloninger, who had been with Pettitte during his first year in the system. “Hey, this kid out here has a chance to be really good,” Cloninger told Showalter. “But can you go out and say a few words to him about getting in shape?” “Andy was a little pudgy back then,” Showalter said. “Just dropped a little word on him and when I saw him the next year I thought, ‘God, he’s lost too much weight.’ ” Showalter’s point was how Pettitte always aimed to please and how well his good nature served him when he might have clammed up, or turned churlish, like Clemens. Even here, Pettitte bought steaks for the clubhouse, signed autographs, was dead serious when he said he really did not want to pitch the Yankee youth into an early hole. No worries; he was pleased with his command, had enough stamina to throw an additional 14 pitches in the bullpen before heading to Texas to join the Yankees and determine if he will make another rehab start or face major league hitters next as he builds up for October. “Andy will figure out what he needs to do and he’ll be there for them, as usual,” Showalter said. “You think about Andy, you think about winning.” No doubt some will always think of him as another drug user, but inside the Yankees’ clubhouse Pettitte has a soaring stature, the standing that Clemens had until his disastrous end. Pettitte is the man now with the Texas-size sportsman’s credibility to go along with a Hall of Fame candidacy that may not be surging but certainly is not shrinking. | Pettitte Andy;Baseball;New York Yankees;Trenton Thunder |
ny0014711 | [
"us",
"politics"
] | 2013/10/03 | Q. and A. on the Government Shutdown in the U.S. | PARIS — The United States government is in a political and financial crisis that could reverberate around the globe. Why is this happening? How will this be felt worldwide? These events are bewildering in Washington, and perhaps even more so to readers around the world. Richard W. Stevenson , a veteran Washington correspondent and editor and now the European editor of The International Herald Tribune, explains basic issues behind the crisis. Do you have questions about how the U.S. government shutdown may affect your country or your personal life? Tell us » Q. Let’s start with the most fundamental question: What exactly is going on in Washington? A. You mean, other than proving that there are times when the notoriously fractious Italian political system can muster more unity than America’s political leaders? There are two distinct but related issues playing out. One is the partial shutdown of the U.S. government. The other is the prospect that the same political forces that led to the shutdown could trigger what everyone agrees would be an even bigger problem: a financial crisis, in as little as two weeks, in which the U.S. government would be unable to pay all of its bills, including interest payments on some of its debt. If that crisis came to pass, it could undercut the traditional status of U.S. government debt as the global standard for investment safety and set off harmful financial and economic repercussions around the world. Q. How did things escalate to this point? A. If you listen to President Obama and his fellow Democrats, it’s because the Republican Party has become captive to its extreme right wing, the Tea Party conservatives who have adopted a confrontational, no-surrender approach to policy disputes. If you listen to conservatives, it’s because Mr. Obama — mostly through the new health-insurance system that is taking effect in the United States — is endangering the very principles on which the country was founded, starting with individual liberty and the free market system. In other words, this isn’t so much about specific policy or budget disputes, where the two sides can split the difference. It’s an ideological dispute in which a relatively small band of Republicans in particular is unwilling to compromise on what they consider deeply held principles. They believe passionately in what they stand for and in many cases draw strength from strong support from their constituents in states and districts that share their views. They have chosen to make a stand, at a not-insubstantial political risk to their party, but at little personal political risk because they are elected in overwhelmingly Republican districts. Even some Republicans are queasy about maybe having pushed things too far, and the early signs are that public opinion is on the side of the Democrats. Some of the conservative criticisms of Mr. Obama’s policies, the health care overhaul in particular, seem based more on emotion and perception than on fact; it is hard to sustain an argument that the program amounts to socialism when it is built around competition among corporate insurers for the business of individuals and companies. Under Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican candidate for president and a self-professed conservative, the state of Massachusetts implemented a health care plan almost identical to what Mr. Obama signed into law on the national level. Q. O.K., but how did all of that result in the government shutting down? A. Republicans, especially in the House of Representatives, where they control a majority of seats, have been increasingly aggressive in recent years in using the budget process to demand concessions from Mr. Obama and the Democrats, who control the Senate. Every year, the House, the Senate and the president are supposed to agree on a new budget and spending authority for the government. If they can’t agree — and increasingly they can’t — they usually fall back on a temporary measure that keeps the money flowing and the government operating. Sometimes those temporary measures have to be extended several times in a year. As conservatives in the House (and to some degree the Senate) have become more insistent on blocking Mr. Obama, they have turned to brinkmanship over the budget, but most previous incidents have been resolved before the government has needed to turn out the lights. This time, there was no last-second deal. The government’s authority to spend money ran out just after midnight on Tuesday, forcing many agencies to shut down or substantially scale back their activities. Functions deemed essential, including those related to national security, will continue more or less as normal. Q. Hasn’t this happened before? A. It has. Back in 1995, President Bill Clinton faced a similar battle with House Republicans, led by Newt Gingrich, the fiery conservative who was then the speaker of the House of Representatives. The government shut down for two stretches in late 1995 and early 1996. The confrontation did not end well for Republicans, who were widely blamed for putting their political agenda ahead of what was best for the country as a whole. The episode led to recriminations inside the party, including the eventual downfall of Mr. Gingrich. The current speaker and Republican leader, John A. Boehner, was part of the Republican leadership team at the time and is well aware of the risks his conservative wing is imposing on the party now. Q. So why doesn’t Mr. Boehner just face down the conservatives? A. The core conservatives taking the hardest line in the 435-seat House probably amount to no more than several dozen. But they represent a vocal, motivated and increasingly organized populist movement — for the most part under the Tea Party banner — that threatens and carries out challenges from the right against Republican colleagues who waver from strict conservative positions. There are a number of centrist House Republicans who are pushing for a quick end to the showdown and are discussing parliamentary maneuvers that would ally them with Democrats to resolve the issue. But there have been no large-scale defections among Republicans. And the Republican leadership has little appetite for passing bills in the House by relying on Democratic votes to make up for losses in its own ranks. So Mr. Boehner has a tough job. Breaking in any open way with the conservatives would probably cost him his job as speaker. Leading them to compromise with the White House will also be tricky, especially if Mr. Obama holds to his position of not negotiating over his health care bill or the need to increase the national debt limit without conditions. But hanging tough through a long government shutdown — and a potential crisis around the debt limit — also carries the possibility that voters will judge the Republican Party to be incapable of governing, which is pretty much what happened in 1995 and 1996. Q. What’s the next step? What is being done to keep the bigger problem of the debt-limit crisis from coming to pass? A. Mr. Obama is cranking up the political pressure on the Republicans to avert making the problem worse. He summoned Congressional leaders to the White House on Tuesday to insist they authorize an increase in the level of the national debt without any conditions. He brought in a group of Wall Street executives to warn of the consequences for the American and global economies if the debt limit is not increased and the government cannot pay all its bills, including interest on some of its debt. But it is not clear whether Republicans will be willing to give up what they might see as additional leverage to win concessions from Mr. Obama. Q. How is it that the U.S. still has such high ratings from the credit-rating agencies, especially in comparison to many European nations? A. For one thing, the current problem in the United States is more political than substantive. When it comes to the potential for a default, the problem is not that the government cannot afford to pay its debts; the problem is that the government cannot pay all of what it owes creditors if its ability to manage its cash flow is constrained by a partisan fight over a law that limits its ability to issue new debt. The United States certainly faces long-term challenges related to the cumulative debt it has built up over the decades, but its annual budget deficit has been coming down sharply and the growth of federal spending has actually been reined in by all the partisan fighting over the budget. Many European countries face much more challenging fiscal problems, and have never enjoyed the same confidence that the markets place in the United States. Standard & Poor’s actually downgraded U.S. government debt by a notch during the last showdown over the debt limit, in 2011. But investors have not paid much attention, in part because they continue to judge U.S. government securities to be safer than any other option at a time of continuing global financial unease. Having said that, an actual default would no doubt have implications for the credit rating of the U.S. government. Q. How much collateral damage and job losses might result from the shutdown? A. The short answer is that it really depends on how long the shutdown goes on and how it is resolved. Something like 800,000 federal workers have been furloughed and are not being paid. Regions with especially high proportions of government employees, like Washington, D.C., will feel more pain than places with relatively little federal presence. If the shutdown goes on for a number of weeks, the effects could be felt nationally; some economists have predicted that economic growth could be nearly a percentage point lower in the fourth quarter than it would be otherwise if the government does not reopen this month. The economic impact would be much greater if the debt limit was not increased and the government was forced to default on some of its debt. | US Politics;Closings;Federal Budget;Obamacare,Affordable Care Act;US National Debt |
ny0198974 | [
"business",
"media"
] | 2009/07/09 | Blowout Ratings for Jackson’s Farewell, Online and Off | On television and on the Internet, tens of millions of viewers tuned in to Michael Jackson ’s star-studded memorial service on Tuesday, making it one of the most watched farewells in history. Media outlets have treated much of the last two weeks as an expansive public funeral for the pop star, culminating in Tuesday’s service at the Staples Center in Los Angeles. Mr. Jackson had been planning a comeback tour at the time of his death on June 25. Nielsen Media Research said Wednesday that the 18 channels that simulcast the service had a combined average of 31 million at-home viewers during the nearly three-hour event. The service drew a bigger TV crowd than the funerals for two former presidents, Ronald Reagan in 2004 and Gerald Ford in early 2007. Princess Diana’s funeral drew about 33 million viewers in 1997. (In comparison, the combined audience total was only slightly higher than an average episode of Fox’s “American Idol” singing competition.) Mr. Jackson’s memorial also attracted millions of online viewers. Citing internal data, CNN.com said it served 4.4 million live video streams during the service; MSNBC.com said it counted 3.1 million. Yahoo reported 5 million total streams. The high viewership seemed to support the editorial decision-making of the news executives who had defended their saturation coverage of Mr. Jackson’s death. “There is a tremendous amount of interest in this story,” said Bart Feder, the senior vice president for programming at CNN. Mr. Jackson’s death caused the ratings for cable news channels to spike in ways they had not since the presidential election. Jackson-focused editions of the late-night ABC News program “Nightline” drew bigger audiences than its late-night comedy competition. E, the entertainment cable channel, said its daylong memorial on Tuesday was the highest-rated weekday in its history. The exhaustive and sometimes lurid coverage after Mr. Jackson’s death prompted some news media critics to ask, rather loudly at times, whether the coverage was overblown. “All we hear about is Michael Jackson,” said Representative Peter T. King, Republican of New York, in a YouTube video on Sunday. “Let’s knock out the psychobabble. He was a pervert, a child molester, he was a pedophile. And to be giving this much coverage to him, day in and day out, what does it say about us as a country?” In a poll in late June by the Pew Research Center for People and the Press, 58 percent of respondents said they were following the coverage of Mr. Jackson’s death fairly closely or very closely, making it one of the most followed stories of a celebrity’s death in at least a decade. At the same time, 64 percent of respondents said news organizations provided too much coverage of his death. Jim Bell, the executive producer of the “Today” show, said he understood why some people were wondering whether the media coverage had been overblown, but said, “Michael Jackson is probably as big a star as we’ve ever had in this country.” Mr. Bell and other news executives said the coverage was justified because there were many unanswered questions about Mr. Jackson’s life and death. Among the strands of coverage: the unclear circumstances regarding his death, the guardianship of his young children and the outpouring of emotion from fans. “I think it will be reverberating for some time,” Mr. Bell said. The TV audience for Mr. Jackson’s memorial represented about 20 percent of all American households with TV sets. According to Nielsen, 21 percent of households watched live coverage of the not-guilty verdict in Mr. Jackson’s trial on charges of sexual abuse in 2005. Later on Tuesday, a combined total of 20 million people watched the prime-time specials about the singer on ABC, CBS and NBC. Akamai, a company that handles Internet traffic for a variety of large clients, said the high levels of interest on Tuesday were eclipsed by only one other event: the inauguration of President Obama in January. A number of news Web sites worked with Facebook and Twitter to incorporate streams of personal status updates next to live video coverage of the memorial. MSNBC.com showed more than 75,000 tweets. “People want to share the moment,” said Charlie Tillinghast, the publisher of MSNBC.com . “It’s a collective experience.” Mr. Jackson edged Mr. Obama in at least one category. Facebook said that Mr. Jackson had about seven million fans on his official Facebook page, giving him the largest single following of any public figure on the site — including Mr. Obama, who clocks in with six million fans. | Jackson Michael;Funerals;Ratings and Rating Systems;Television |
ny0221130 | [
"sports",
"tennis"
] | 2010/02/07 | U.S. in Control Against France in Fed Cup | Melanie Oudin and Bethanie Mattek-Sands won the opening singles to give the United States a 2-0 lead against France in the quarterfinals of the Fed Cup on Saturday in Lievin, France. Oudin defeated Pauline Parmentier, 6-4, 6-4, after Mattek-Sands outlasted Alize Cornet, 7-6 (7), 7-5. “Alize is a great player, and I knew I was going to have to grind the match out,” Mattek-Sands said. “I knew it wasn’t going to be easy, and I think that coming with that mind-set really helped me.” Mattek-Sands, ranked 140th in the world, rallied from 5-2 down in the first set and clinched the tie breaker after an unforced error by Cornet. She converted her third match point when Cornet netted an approach shot. “I had my chance, but I didn’t seize it,” said Cornet, who has lost all six of her Fed Cup singles matches. “Stress prevailed over everything,” she added. “I was shaking almost throughout the first set.” In the second match, Oudin broke Parmentier in the fifth game and held serve to take the first set on a forehand error by Parmentier. In the second set, Parmentier had five break points for a 4-2 lead but failed to convert any of them. Oudin did not miss her chance at 4-4 and broke Parmentier to get the opportunity to serve for the match. Oudin sent a backhand into the net but won when Parmentier’s backhand sailed long. “Pauline had quite a few chances,” Nicolas Escudé, France’s captain, said. “But in tennis, you have to win the key points. Now we have our backs against the wall.” Reverse singles and the final doubles match are scheduled for Sunday in the best-of-five series. SA OPEN FINAL IS SET Feliciano López of Spain and Stéphane Robert of France advanced to the final of the SA Open in Johannesburg after eliminating the highest-seeded players. Lopez upset top-seeded Gaël Monfils of France, 3-6, 6-1, 7-6 (1), and Robert ousted second-seeded David Ferrer of Spain, 7-5, 6-4. Monfils struggled in the second set after hurting his knee and was broken twice, winning just eight points on his serve. Robert, 29, reached the first ATP Tour final of his career. He changed his style of play after returning to the game six months ago after a bout with hepatitis. CILIC ADVANCES Top-seeded Marin Cilic of Croatia defeated third-seeded Jürgen Melzer of Austria, 7-6 (5), 6-4, to reach the final of the Zagreb Indoors tournament in Croatia. He will face Michael Berrer, who beat Philipp Petzschner, 7-6 (6), 7-5, to reach his first ATP Tour final. | Tennis;Fed Cup;Oudin Melanie;Mattek-Sands Bethanie |
ny0027149 | [
"us",
"politics"
] | 2013/01/16 | A Shift for G.O.P. as ‘Party of Business’ | WASHINGTON — Not for the first time, the White House made known on Monday that top administration officials had reached out to corporate executives for their help in getting Republicans in Congress to compromise on pending budget issues. But as both President Obama and industry chieftains are finding, today’s Republican Party is hardly so quick to bow to big business. Corporate chiefs in recent months have pleaded publicly with Republicans to raise their taxes for the sake of deficit reduction, and to raise the nation’s debt limit without a fight lest another confrontation like that in 2011 wallop the economy. But the lobbying has been to no avail. This is not their parents’ Republican Party. In a shift over a half-century, the party base has been transplanted from the industrial Northeast and urban centers to become rooted in the South and West, in towns and rural areas. In turn, Republicans are electing more populist, antitax and antigovernment conservatives who are less supportive — and even suspicious — of appeals from big business. Big business, many Republicans believe, is often complicit with big government on taxes, spending and even regulations, to protect industry tax breaks and subsidies — “corporate welfare,” in their view. Image Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, disputes the idea that his party is tied to big business, as represented by leaders like David Cote, of Honeywell, and Mark Bertolini, of Aetna. Credit Joshua Roberts/Reuters “One of the biggest lies in politics is the lie that Republicans are the party of big business,” Ted Cruz, a new senator from Texas and a Tea Party favorite, told The Wall Street Journal during his 2012 campaign. “Big business does great with big government. Big business is very happy to climb in bed with big government. Republicans are and should be the party of small business and of entrepreneurs.” The tension, so evident last month in the tax fight over the fiscal deadline, is apparent again as Mr. Obama and a new Congress contend over the even more pressing need to increase the nation’s debt limit next month. Big business is so fearful of economic peril if Congress does not allow the government to keep borrowing — to pay creditors, contractors, program beneficiaries and many others — that it is nearly united in skepticism of, or outright opposition to, House Republicans’ demand that Mr. Obama first agree to equal spending cuts in benefit programs like Medicare and Medicaid. That explains the administration’s outreach to corporate chiefs, like Monday’s conference call. Mr. Obama wants business’s support to buttress his vow that he will never again negotiate over so essential an action like he did in 2011, when the nation flirted with default and the economy suffered. Vexing Republicans, many business leaders are siding with him. “I’m agreeing with the president — you should not be using the debt limit as a bargaining chip when it comes to how you run the country,” said David M. Cote, chief executive of Honeywell, and a Republican. “You don’t put the full faith and credit of the United States at risk.” Image David Cote Credit Carlo Allegri/Reuters As a new warning was issued Tuesday about a possible credit downgrade, even the hard-line conservative group Americans for Prosperity, financed by the billionaire Koch family, urged Republicans not to use the debt limit as leverage for deep spending cuts. Another flash point between Republicans and corporate America: Even as they pocket big campaign contributions from business, many Republicans resent that the donors play both sides of the political fence. A senior aide to a House Republican leader summed up the feeling: “Corporate America isn’t the friend to Republicans that most people assume. So I think there is a healthier sort of skepticism that is brought into those meetings” with business leaders. (Chief executives still have some sway; no critics wanted to be identified slamming them.) Some of the Republicans’ distancing from big business is a matter of political tactics — to alter their image as the party of wealth and corporate power. A writer for the conservative Weekly Standard said of the fiscal fight last month, “While big business cozies up to Obama once again, Republicans have an opportunity to enhance their reputation as the party of Main Street.” A news release e-mailed in late December from the office of Speaker John A. Boehner captured the changed dynamic. On a day when Mr. Obama met executives from the Business Roundtable, a group that for decades was close to Congressional Republicans, the subject line on the Boehner e-mail, abbreviating “President of the United States,” read: “GOP to Meet With Small Biz While POTUS Meets With Big CEOs.” Courtship of business has been central to the president’s postelection legislative strategy, both to repair relations strained in his first term and to gain allies who might influence Republican lawmakers in the second. Yet Republicans on Capitol Hill profess bemusement, saying that administration officials misread their party. Image Mark Bertolini Credit Jacquelyn Martin/Associated Press “They trot out these big business executives and just assume, ‘Well, these guys are big business — if they just go tell Republicans what to do, they’ll do it.’ That’s just a cartoon version of how things work,” said a House Republican adviser. But the White House was not alone late last year in believing that a group called Campaign to Fix the Debt — the biggest and best-financed mobilization of corporate clout in lawmakers’ memory, with more than 150 chief executives and $46 million — could create pressure for a bipartisan grand bargain of tax increases and entitlement program reductions to stabilize the federal debt. There was no such deal in December, and people in both parties agree that Fix the Debt has had no impact so far. Yet the coalition is back: “I definitely think this is a marathon, not a race, so it’s not going to all happen when we want it to happen,” said Mark T. Bertolini, chief executive of Aetna and a leader in the coalition. Privately, however, some Republicans in the group concede their advocacy has limits among the new breed of Republican lawmakers. With each year, “you’re getting even further away from the big-city, corporate domination of the Republican Party,” said Merle Black, a scholar of Southern politics at Emory University. And if a Republican in a conservative district did back a deal with Mr. Obama, Mr. Black added, “It won’t get you very far if you say, ‘Well, I talked to the corporate guys and they’re all for this.’ “ | US Politics;Federal Budget;US National Debt;Republicans;Barack Obama;Business Roundtable;Campaign to Fix the Debt |
ny0283927 | [
"us",
"politics"
] | 2016/07/12 | G.O.P. Seeks Criminal Inquiry of Hillary Clinton’s Testimony to Congress | WASHINGTON — Republican leaders asked the Justice Department on Monday to open a criminal investigation into whether Hillary Clinton lied to Congress in testimony last fall about her private email server, opening a new front in their long-running attacks on the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. The Republican request, five days after the department closed a yearlong investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s handling of classified information in the emails, threatens to shadow her through the campaign and perhaps even into the White House if she is elected. In a letter Monday evening, House Republicans asked the Justice Department to determine whether Mrs. Clinton had “committed perjury and made false statements” during her appearance in October before a special House panel on the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya. The letter was signed by Representatives Jason Chaffetz, Republican of Utah, who leads the Oversight Committee, and Robert W. Goodlatte, Republican of Virginia, who leads the Judiciary Committee. The Justice Department declined to comment on the request. In a Twitter post, Brian Fallon, a spokesman for the Clinton campaign, called the Republican request “another futile, partisan attempt to keep this issue alive now that the Justice Dept has declared it resolved.” Mrs. Clinton has said she regrets the decision to use a private email server for official communications as secretary of state, but she has defended the truthfulness of her public remarks. Legal analysts said that while it appeared unlikely the F.B.I. would ultimately find enough evidence to prosecute Mrs. Clinton on charges of lying to Congress, there might be enough to warrant opening an investigation. That alone could prove damaging to her campaign. Republicans have seized on a number of contradictions between what Mrs. Clinton told Congress about her private email server and what the F.B.I. found in its investigation. Mrs. Clinton told the House Select Committee on Benghazi, for instance, that she had turned over all her “work-related” emails to the State Department and that “nothing” in the more than 60,000 emails routed through her private server “was marked classified at the time I sent or received it.” The F.B.I. investigation found that, in fact, there were “thousands” of work-related emails that her lawyers did not turn over, and that a handful of emails were marked classified at the time — although the State Department now says they should not have been. Still, it would be difficult for prosecutors to show that she intended to mislead Congress — a high legal bar — and that she should be criminally prosecuted for it. In eight hours of testimony during a marathon 11-hour session of the Benghazi committee, Mrs. Clinton was careful to hedge a number of answers about her email system by saying that she was basing her statements on information from her lawyers. “There’s not a snowball’s chance in hell that she’d be convicted of anything,” Rusty Hardin, a prominent Texas lawyer, said in a telephone interview. Mr. Hardin won an acquittal of the baseball pitcher Roger Clemens in 2012 when the Justice Department — acting on a similar referral from Congress — accused him of lying to Congress about his use of steroids. Video James B. Comey, the director of the F.B.I., and Hillary Clinton gave significantly differing accounts of her email use as secretary of state. Credit Credit Todd Heisler/The New York Times Mr. Hardin said that “somewhere in that 11 hours, there might be something that turned out wasn’t accurate, but she’d have to be certifiably insane to intentionally mislead them when there’s a criminal investigation going on.” Michael Bopp, a Washington lawyer who has examined similar referrals from Congress, said that criminal charges against Mrs. Clinton appeared doubtful because of the difficulty in establishing whether she intended to lie to Congress, rather than simply making statements that later proved untrue. “I do think they’re going to feel obligated to open an investigation,” he said, “but it will be difficult to bring a case.” Republicans sent a separate letter on Monday to James B. Comey Jr., the F.B.I. director, criticizing his decision not to seek criminal charges in the case and asking him to explain his thinking. For Democrats, the threat of another Republican-inspired investigation was more evidence of what they see as a partisan witch hunt meant to derail Mrs. Clinton’s campaign. “The F.B.I. said there was no case, but the Republicans just try and keep it alive,” Henry Waxman, a former Democratic congressman from California, said in a telephone interview. Mr. Waxman, who sought a Justice Department investigation in the Clemens case, predicted that prosecutors would decline to move forward against Mrs. Clinton and that Republicans would then “complain that the Justice Department is acting on political reasons.” Representative Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland, the top-ranking Democrat on the Oversight Committee, said that Republicans “are now completely unloading on Secretary Clinton with everything they’ve got — right before the presidential conventions.” It is fairly unusual for members of Congress to refer cases to the Justice Department for criminal investigation. One of the last major referrals came in 2014, when the Republican-led House Ways and Means Committee voted to seek a criminal investigation against Lois Lerner, who was a central player in accusations that the Internal Revenue Service improperly targeted conservative nonprofit groups. After an investigation, the Justice Department declined last year to bring charges against her or anyone else. At a hearing last week before the House Oversight Committee, Mr. Comey was asked by Republicans whether Mrs. Clinton’s public statements — both to Congress and elsewhere — appeared to contradict what the F.B.I. had found. Representative Mark Meadows, Republican of North Carolina, said to Mr. Comey that based on those contradictions, “isn’t it a logical assumption she may have misled Congress, and we need to look at that further?” “I can understand why people would ask that question,” Mr. Comey said. He drew guffaws from some Republicans when he said that while he believed Mrs. Clinton had testified truthfully to the F.B.I. in a closed interview this month, his investigators had not examined the separate question of whether she lied under oath to Congress in her testimony. Mr. Comey told Mr. Chaffetz that such an inquiry would require a formal referral from Congress. “You’ll have one,” Mr. Chaffetz told him. “You’ll have one in the next few hours.” Like many things in Congress, the referral did not move quite as quickly as predicted. It took the Republicans two business days to put in their demand — which, for Congress, was still pretty fast. | 2016 Presidential Election;Benghazi Attack 2012;Classified Information;House of Representatives;Congress;Justice Department;Hillary Clinton;US Politics;Email;State Department |
ny0129557 | [
"world",
"asia"
] | 2012/06/30 | China: Astronauts Finish Mission and Return to Earth | China ’s first female astronaut and two other crew members returned safely to Earth on Friday from a 13-day mission to an orbiting module that is a prototype for a future space station. Their spacecraft, the Shenzhou 9, parachuted to a landing on the grasslands of the Inner Mongolia region around 10 a.m. China declared the first manned mission to the Tiangong 1 module, the space program’s longest and most challenging yet, a major step for the country’s ambitious program. The mission was carried out by the astronauts Jing Haipeng, Liu Wang and Liu Yang, above, China’s first woman in space, and it included both remote control and piloted dockings with the module and extensive medical monitoring of the astronauts as part of preparations for a permanent space station. | China;Space;Liu Yang;Space Stations;Space Shuttles |
ny0143038 | [
"business"
] | 2008/11/12 | Law Firms Feel Strain of Layoffs and Cutbacks | You know things are bad when even lawyers are getting laid off. In downturns of years past, law firms exploited corporate failures and bitter, protracted lawsuits to keep busy and keep billing. But in this still-unfolding crisis, the embittered and the bankrupt have been relatively slow to appear, at least in court. Law firms in turn are feeling the strain. Thelen and Heller Ehrman, two firms whose deep San Francisco roots extend back decades, have collapsed outright, in part because of the business slowdown. Each firm left several hundred lawyers out in the cold. Many others, including Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal and Katten Muchin Rosenman, two Chicago firms ranked among the nation’s hundred most profitable by American Lawyer magazine, and the international giant Clifford Chance have jettisoned dozens of associates. Still others, like Powell Goldstein, a firm based in Atlanta with more than 200 lawyers, are merging with larger rivals in deals that may be bids for stability. Over all, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on Friday that the legal services industry lost more than 1,000 jobs in October. This is not how it is supposed to work; businesses are supposed to need lawyers in good times and bad alike. A few big companies are in dire straits or well beyond, including the collapsed Lehman Brothers and Circuit City, and the number of corporate bankruptcies is beginning to rise , according to the American Bankruptcy Institute. The group reported there were 18,456 bankruptcies in the first half of this year, compared with 12,985 during the same period of last year. But because the financial crisis damaged Wall Street first, corporate collapses in many other sectors — automobiles, airlines and the like — have not happened, at least not yet. A wave of big company litigation — those suits that pit armies of associates against each other — has also not materialized. A recent survey by one big firm, Fulbright & Jaworski, found fewer large companies reporting new lawsuits against them this year. Although executives may desperately want to sue one another over recent losses, they may not know how big those losses are or want to know how big they are. In any event, cash is precious in this downturn, and litigation is both costly and risky. “You have to wait and see if you have any damages and, if so, what they are,” said Ward Bower, a principal at Altman Weil, a consultant in Newtown Square, Pa., to law firms. “That tends to cause a lag.” The number of lawyers affected at big firms is tiny when measured against the thousands of jobs disappearing at brokerage firms and banks. But in the rarefied world of corporate law, layoffs are unusual. It is striking to have just 20 associates sent packing — as a spokesman confirmed had happened at Clifford Chance, which has 3,900 lawyers worldwide. Lawyers at firms that have taken such drastic steps say that the problem is simply that they have too many people with the wrong kinds of expertise at the wrong time. Sonnenschein, for example, cut about 24 of its 700 lawyers last month, mostly people who worked on real estate deals or related transactions, said Linda Butler, a spokeswoman for the firm. The layoffs were the second round for Sonnenschein, which cut more than 30 earlier in the year. McKee Nelson, a New York firm, announced last week that it had shaved 17 corporate and finance associates, reducing its complement of lawyers to 174. In a statement, the firm cited the “devastation that befell the credit markets.” Bell Boyd & Lloyd, a Chicago-based firm with about 260 lawyers, cut loose 10 associates, also blaming “unprecedented market conditions.” Beyond the current crisis, corporate clients are trying to rein in spending on law firms. Now that firms are increasingly desperate for business, some corporate general counsels say, the firms are more willing to accept less profitable payment arrangements that do not reward the firms for simply assigning more lawyers to spend more time on a project. A survey of about 600 corporate executives by Acritas, a London-based research firm, found that 32 percent expected billing practices to change over the next two years. “Rather than having hourly rates, we are increasingly negotiating flat fees or fixed fees, or success fees,” which include a premium based on predetermined conditions, said Ivan K. Fong, chief legal officer and secretary at Cardinal Health in Dublin, Ohio, and chairman of the Association of Corporate Counsel. Some law firms have resisted those changes, he continued, but may find they have to accept clients’ wishes. “It’s a pretty significant change,” Mr. Fong said, and it is occurring as companies use internal lawyers for more work, to control costs and take advantage of the broader expertise of their own legal staffs. Lawyer departures, whether voluntary or through layoffs, pose special risks to firms. Layoffs scare off law school recruits, who crave security and wealth. “Students are also very much aware that ‘if they did that last year, it can happen to us again,’ ” said Mark Weber, assistant dean for career services at Harvard Law School. He said that this year, offers of employment are harder to come by and firms are hiring fewer interns for next summer. Lawyers’ voluntary departures create the perception that a firm’s condition is deteriorating. If enough lawyers leave, perception becomes reality. Thelen, founded in San Francisco in 1924, suffered several defections over the past year. Those departures, combined with the credit squeeze, led the partners to decide to dissolve last month, said Douglas E. Davidson, managing partner of the New York office. “Our commercial litigation practice did not get as active as it might have in the past when the economy slowed,” so there was not enough other work to offset the decline in corporate business, Mr. Davidson said. “The depth of the economic downturn here is, of course, something that we haven’t seen for maybe 60 years, and so we were more seriously impacted.” While there are plenty of lawsuits filed by investors against companies, an anticipated explosion of litigation by corporations against one another has been held up just like any other corporate spending, said Stephen P. Younger, a partner at Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler in New York. “Clients often don’t want to invest in discretionary litigation in a downturn,” Mr. Younger said. Responding to government investigations has been keeping lawyers busy but does not generate continuing work for armies of associates, like a big lawsuit does, he said. “There are tons of government investigations going on now.” The slowdown also has made it much harder for lawyers looking for work to find positions, said Robin S. Miller, a principal at Corrao, Miller, Rush & Wiesenthal Legal Search Consultants in New York. “It’s a bad market,” Ms. Miller said. While the litigation departments at some firms are busier, activity is less widespread than anticipated, she said. As for bankruptcies, she said that most of the activity is concentrated in financial services, so it is not providing work for lawyers who serve other industries. “The last time we saw anything like this, this bad, was in the early ’90s,” Ms. Miller said. “But it’s starting to feel even worse.” | Legal Profession;Layoffs and Job Reductions;Bankruptcies;United States Economy;Recession and Depression;Subprime Mortgage Crisis |
ny0088046 | [
"nyregion"
] | 2015/07/25 | An Alligator Tours New York City, Joining Some Famous Fauna | So this alligator was crossing 9th Ave in #Inwood ...no, really. At 205 Str. Cops took him to Animal Control #whatnext pic.twitter.com/EG5Z3bkQPl — NYPD 34th Precinct (@NYPD34Pct) July 23, 2015 A stray alligator roaming the streets of Manhattan has given jaded New Yorkers yet another reason to marvel at their urban jungle and the wild creatures that occasionally roam through it. The reptile, about three feet long, showed up in the Inwood neighborhood on Thursday. The police reported its appearance in a post on Twitter that sounded like the start to a chicken-crossing-the-road joke. “No, really,” they added. An alligator. It is not the first time that a stray wild creature has caught the city’s attention. Raccoons are a common sight in Central Park, at least one of them so habitually that he has a name, Rocky. There are sightings of hawks and bald eagles , and a baby black bear was found dead in Central Park last year. A coyote roamed Manhattan before being captured in April. Pale Male, a red-tailed hawk with a Fifth Avenue nest and a global following, became a celebrity after starring in a film “The Legend of Pale Male,” which opened in 2010 at the Angelika Film Center in Greenwich Village. The blog Urban Hawks tracks urban wildlife in the city, but mostly fowl friends and their mates, many with names, of course: In addition to Pale Male, Junior and Charlotte at 888 Seventh Avenue, it documents hawk hangouts at Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, Riverside Park, Inwood Hill Park and Highbridge Park. And the New York City police have found an odd assortment of wildlife, such as boa constrictors and other alligators as pets in apartments. Ming the Bengal tiger, for example, was raised in a Harlem public housing complex in 2003. It was not clear whether the Inwood alligator was a local or a transplant, though it was thought to have been someone’s pet that escaped or was abandoned. One man in the neighborhood thought the creature might have “just came up the river” from the end of the street where a small park meets the Harlem River. “I came out real quick and there was a bunch of police officers outside and there was a little, small crocodile facing the gate,” the man, Paul Perez, told 1010 WINS radio. A Brooklyn-based animal rescuer, Sean Casey, said the reptile appeared to be an American alligator. “Assuming it was kept well, at that size it could be 1 or 2 years old,” he told The Daily News . “It’s probably someone’s pet they either dumped or it escaped.” On social media, the newcomer was scrutinized. | Alligator;Social Media;NYPD;Inwood Manhattan;NYC |
ny0149796 | [
"nyregion"
] | 2008/09/06 | City Firefighter Is Accused of Beating Man in Robbery | A city firefighter joined a robbery gang last year, donning a ski mask and pistol-whipping an intended victim, federal prosecutors said Friday. The firefighter, Ricardo Louis, 30, was arrested Friday at his home in Queens, officials said. He is accused of being part of a ring that stole money and drugs from drug dealers and held up businesses. Firefighter Louis, who has worked for three years as a firefighter and is based in Engine 275 in Jamaica, Queens, has been suspended without pay, fire officials said Friday. According to a criminal complaint filed in federal court in Manhattan by an F.B.I. agent, he took part in attempted robbery of a Queens businessman in April 2007. Seven men said to be members of the gang were arrested in July 2007. One of them was a city police officer, Darren Moonan, who prosecutors said worked as a driver and lookout for the ring. According to the complaint, Firefighter Louis was recruited for the gang in March 2007 by a gang member who has since been arrested and is now cooperating with prosecutors. That gang member told prosecutors that he approached him because he believed he was in debt and needed money, and that the firefighter agreed to take part in a robbery. A week later, the complaint states, the firefighter, the gang member who recruited him and another gang member went to their intended victim’s workplace, watched him leave, drove to his house in Queens and waited. When the man arrived home, the complaint said, Firefighter Louis and his recruiter jumped out of their car in ski masks and ordered the man to open his safe. The man yelled for help, and Firefighter Louis hit him on the head with a gun and knocked him to the ground, the complaint said. The man continued to call for help, and the robbers fled without taking anything, the complaint said. Phone records showed 18 calls between Firefighter Louis and two phones used by the gang member who recruited him on the day before and the day of the robbery attempt, the complaint stated. Afterward, the complaint stated, he told the member who recruited him that the attempt was a good “warm-up” and that he was ready for the next robbery. He was not charged in any other cases. Firefighter Louis’s lawyer, James Toner, was not immediately available for comment on Friday night. | Robberies and Thefts;Fire Department of New York;Gangs;Crime and Criminals;Queens (NYC) |
ny0108154 | [
"world",
"americas"
] | 2012/05/05 | Mexico: 23 Bodies Discovered | Twenty-three bodies, nine of them hanging from a bridge and the rest decapitated and found in a van, were discovered Friday in Nuevo Laredo, across the border from Laredo, Tex., the Mexican authorities said. The heads of the decapitated victims were later found in three coolers near a municipal building. The gruesome discovery, believed to be related to battles among criminal gangs, comes less than a month after the dismembered remains of 14 men were found in the city’s downtown. Nuevo Laredo is in Tamaulipas State, one of the country’s most violent. | Mexico;Gangs;Murders and Attempted Murders;Tamaulipas (Mexico) |
ny0292423 | [
"us"
] | 2016/06/05 | Jury Out on Effectiveness as Some States Make Voting Easier | SALEM, Ore. — A parade of Republican-controlled states in recent years has made it more difficult to cast a ballot, imposing strict identification requirements at polling stations, paring back early-voting periods and requiring proof of citizenship to register. Then there is Oregon. It is leading what could become a march in the opposite direction. From January through April, Oregon added nearly 52,000 new voters to its rolls by standing the usual voter-registration process on its head. Under a new law, most citizens no longer need to fill out and turn in a form to become a voter. Instead, everyone who visits a motor-vehicle bureau and meets the requirements is automatically enrolled. Choosing a political party — or opting out entirely — is a matter of checking off preferences on a postcard mailed later to registrants’ homes. With the change, Oregon now boasts perhaps the nation’s most painless electoral process; mail-in ballots long ago did away with polling places’ snaking lines and balky voting machines Whether painless equals effective, however, is another question. For while officials here hope automatic registration fuels a jump in voter turnout, the results of experiments elsewhere and the statistics from last month’s Oregon presidential primary — the first in which the new voters could cast ballots — have been decidedly mixed. Getting more people registered, it seems, does not necessarily mean getting more people to vote. Regardless, Oregon’s example is gaining traction. California, Vermont, West Virginia, and this week Illinois have followed Oregon in enacting automatic-registration laws; none have yet been put in effect. Twenty-three other states and the District of Columbia have considered similar measures since last year, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s School of Law. “I think states like Oregon, West Virginia and the others deserve a lot of credit for trying to bring voting rights into the 21st century,” said David Becker, the director of election initiatives for the Pew Charitable Trusts. Yet in a year when voting is as much a partisan football as a patriotic duty, even the civics book notion of expanding the electoral franchise has a political cast. To many conservatives, automatic registration is largely a Democratic pushback to a wave of voting restrictions enacted by Republican state legislators who claim to be combating voter fraud. Most experts say the kind of fraud the laws are said to target barely exists. Just as Republicans may assume — and sometimes say outright — that voting restrictions depress Election Day turnout of students, minorities and other traditionally Democratic constituencies, Democrats may assume that expanding registration will bring more of those same voters into their fold. “When you get people living in poverty, people of color, young people registered, yes, they tend to vote progressively,” Jennifer Williamson, the Democratic majority leader of the Oregon House of Representatives, said in an interview. “But regardless of what the outcome is, removing the barriers for people to vote is the right thing to do.’’ Excepting West Virginia, the states that have enacted auto-registration laws are controlled by Democrats . A Chicago-based group mounting a nationwide campaign for the laws is headed by former political strategists for President Obama, who also has urged the states to follow Oregon’s lead. Oregon’s bill became law without a single Republican vote. So did California’s. And while Vermont and West Virginia registration laws won bipartisan backing, some analysts suggest that was partly because those states have too few unregistered minorities to be points of political dispute. If automatic registration gains steam nationally, however, the impact could be sizable. The Census Bureau says that at least 41.1 million of the 219 million people eligible to vote in 2014 were not registered. California alone had roughly 6.6 million eligible but unregistered voters as of last October, state officials said. Enrolling them could conceivably change the political landscape. While the majority are white, census data show they are also disproportionately Asian and Hispanic, lower-income and young. Other studies indicate they are less educated and less engaged with politics and their communities than are regular voters. While those characteristics often fit Democratic voters, that is not always so. Lower-income, less-educated white voters, for example, are reliably Republican and are strong supporters of Donald J. Trump’s presidential bid. Whatever their leanings, the crucial question is whether they will turn out on Election Day. The answer is unclear. Image Oregon Gov. Kate Brown signing an automatic voter registration bill in Salem last year. Credit Don Ryan/Associated Press Samuel S. Wang, a Princeton University professor of neuroscience and a longstanding elections analyst , leads the optimists. He notes that participation in programs like organ donation and savings plans rises dramatically when people have to opt out of them instead of opting in. In jurisdictions that allow Election Day registration at polling stations — a method almost as simple as automatic registration — average turnout is 7.8 percentage points above the national average, he said. Were automatic voter registration to generate the same increase, the electorate would gain 14.7 million voters. “It will potentially have a larger increase than any amount of shoe-leather get-out-the-vote,” he wrote in an email. But many experts are skeptical. The citizens swept on to the rolls by automatic registration, they say, are by definition those who have not made voting a priority. And the political landscape is littered with electoral fillips that had little impact on Americans’ sorry electoral behavior. “Most studies show that election reforms don’t affect turnout very much, and when they do, the people who turn out look a lot like the people who are already voting,” said Barry C. Burden, the director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Elections Research Center. The 1993 National Voter Registration Act — the “motor voter” law — aimed to increase registration by requiring motor vehicle and public-assistance offices to offer patrons a chance to enroll as voters. But one study concluded that motor-vehicle bureau registrations have remained fairly constant , even as the population has increased. Voting by mail vastly simplifies casting a ballot, and the states that mandate it — Oregon, Colorado and Washington — have turnout rates well above the national norm. Yet states from Mississippi to Minnesota have comparable or even higher turnout . And studies in California and Washington suggested that mail-in ballots generally raise turnout only when combined with other get-out-the-vote efforts . Delaware’s electronic registration system is all but automatic: computers flag unregistered motor-vehicle bureau customers, and clerks offer them a paperless registration process that requires only a signature on an electronic pad. The state’s elections commissioner, Elaine Manlove, raves about it. “We have no paper anymore,” she said. “It freed up tons of office space and made things faster.” But from 2010 to 2015, state records indicate, Delaware added only about 26,000 Democrats and independents — and lost 2,853 Republicans. That’s an increase of less than 4 percent. And Oregon? Secretary of State Jeanne P. Atkins says the jury is still out. By one measure, citizens greeted auto-registration with a yawn. Of the 55,092 Oregonians automatically enrolled at motor-vehicle offices through April 30, only 12,621 mailed back postcards regarding their registration status — and about one in three asked to be deregistered. Of those who chose a party, 4,776 ticked the Democratic checkbox, a share considerably greater than the party’s 41 percent share statewide. Another 2,671 became Republicans, well below the party’s 28 percent share. Jim Moore, a political-science professor and election analyst at Oregon’s Pacific University, said election reforms like mail-in balloting have triggered similar bumps in Democratic registration or turnout, but that they were short-lived. “In the long run, everything settles into its demographic place and the electorate reflects who we are as a people,” he said. “This doesn’t say anything about the next election.” The good news was that those voters turned out in droves to support their presidential candidates, in proportions roughly equal to Democratic and Republican turnout statewide. But unaffiliated voters — those who never returned a postcard — all but stayed home. Although unaffiliated voters could not vote in the presidential primaries, more than one in five statewide still cast ballots in nonpartisan races. Among those who were automatically registered, however, the number was closer to 1 in 16. Ms. Atkins, the secretary of state, said any genuine impact of the registration changes will be clear only after more voters are automatically enrolled and can vote in elections open to everyone. The voters enrolled through April comprise less than 2 percent of the state’s registered voters. “We have a lot to learn over the next several election cycles,” she said, “but I think we can say so far, so good.” | Voter registration;Oregon;US states;California;Vermont;West Virginia;Illinois |
ny0067959 | [
"science"
] | 2014/12/16 | Study to Examine Effects of Artificial Intelligence | Scientists have begun what they say will be a century-long study of the effects of artificial intelligence on society, including on the economy, war and crime, officials at Stanford University announced Monday. The project, hosted by the university, is unusual not just because of its duration but because it seeks to track the effects of these technologies as they reshape the roles played by human beings in a broad range of endeavors. “My take is that A.I. is taking over,” said Sebastian Thrun, a well-known roboticist who led the development of Google’s self-driving car. “A few humans might still be ‘in charge,’ but less and less so.” Artificial intelligence describes computer systems that perform tasks traditionally requiring human intelligence and perception. In 2009, the president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, Eric Horvitz, organized a meeting of computer scientists in California to discuss the possible ramifications of A.I. advances. The group concluded that the advances were largely positive and lauded the “relatively graceful” progress. But now, in the wake of recent technological advances in computer vision, speech recognition and robotics, scientists say they are increasingly concerned that artificial intelligence technologies may permanently displace human workers, roboticize warfare and make of Orwellian surveillance techniques easier to develop, among other disastrous effects. Dr. Horvitz, now the managing director of the Redmond, Wash., campus of Microsoft Research, last year approached John Hennessy, a computer scientist and president of Stanford University, about the idea of a long-term study that would chart the progress of artificial intelligence and its effect on society. Dr. Horvitz and his wife, Mary Horvitz, agreed to fund the initiative, called the “One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence.” In an interview, Dr. Horvitz said he was unconvinced by recent warnings that superintelligent machines were poised to outstrip human control and abilities. Instead, he believes these technologies will have positive and negative effects on society. “Loss of control of A.I. systems has become a big concern,” he said. “It scares people.” Rather than simply dismiss these dystopian claims, he said, scientists instead must monitor and continually evaluate the technologies. “Even if the anxieties are unwarranted, they need to be addressed,” Dr. Horvitz said. He declined to divulge the size of his gift to Stanford, but said it was sufficient to fund the study for a century and suggested the amount might be increased in the future. Dr. Horvitz will lead a committee with Russ Altman, a Stanford professor of bioengineering and computer science. The committee will include Barbara J. Grosz, a Harvard University computer scientist; Deirdre K. Mulligan, a lawyer and a professor in the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley; Yoav Shoham, a professor of computer science at Stanford; Tom Mitchell, the chairman of the machine learning department at Carnegie Mellon University; and Alan Mackworth, a professor of computer science at the University of British Columbia. The committee will choose a panel of specialists who will produce a report on artificial intelligence and its effects that is to be published late in 2015.In a white paper outlining the project , Dr. Horvitz described 18 areas that might be considered, including law, ethics, the economy, war and crime. Future reports will be produced at regular intervals. Dr. Horvitz said that progress in the field of artificial intelligence had consistently been overestimated. Indeed, news accounts in 1958 described a neural network circuit designed by Frank Rosenblatt, a psychologist at Cornell University. The Navy enthusiastically announced plans to build a “thinking machine” based on the circuits within a year for $100,000. It never happened. Still, Dr. Horvitz acknowledged, the pace of technological change has accelerated, as has the reach of artificial intelligence. He cited Stuxnet, the malicious program developed by intelligence agencies to attack Iranian nuclear facilities, as an example. “My grandmother would tell me stories about people running outside when they saw a plane fly over, it was so unusual,” he said. “Now, in a relatively few decades, our worry is about whether we are getting a salt-free meal when we take off from J.F.K. in a jumbo jet.” | Artificial intelligence;College;Eric Horvitz;Sebastian Thrun;John L Hennessy;Stanford |
ny0085886 | [
"business",
"dealbook"
] | 2015/07/29 | R.B.S. to Further Reduce Stake in Citizens Financial Group | LONDON — The Royal Bank of Scotland said on Tuesday that it intended to further reduce its stake in the Citizens Financial Group, the American retail bank it spun off in an initial public offering last year. R.B.S., which is based in Edinburgh, said it planned to sell 75 million shares of the American bank, equivalent to a 14 percent stake. It could also sell an overallotment of 11.25 million shares, the bank said in a news release . If the overallotment is fully exercised, R.B.S. would retain a 24.7 percent stake. R.B.S. has a 40.8 percent stake in the bank. R.B.S. also said that Citizens Financial intended to rebuy a further $250 million in stock at the offering price in a directed buy back. Shares of Citizens Financial closed down less than 1 percent at $25.94 in New York on Monday. It would signal the second major sale by R.B.S. this year as it looks to reduce its holdings in Citizens Financial. R.B.S. has said it plans to fully exit the American bank by the end of 2016. In September, Citizens raised $3 billion in its initial public offering in New York. It was the second-largest I.P.O. in the United States last year, behind the $25 billion debut of the Alibaba Group, the Chinese Internet juggernaut. In March, R.B.S. sold a further $3.2 billion in shares of the Citizens Financial. R.B.S., about 80 percent of which is owned by the British government, has scaled back its global ambitions and is shaping itself into a Britain-focused retail and corporate lender. It has sold or spun off several businesses in recent years, including Citizens Financial. In February, R.B.S. reported its seventh consecutive annual loss . It said it would dismantle its global investment bank and reduce the number of countries where it operates to about 13 from 38, resulting in significant job cuts. In June, George Osborne, the chancellor of the Exchequer, announced plans for the government to begin to sell down its stake in the lender, which received a bailout of 45 billion pounds, or about $69.9 billion, during the financial crisis in 2008. Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs are serving as global coordinators on the latest Citizens offering. | Royal Bank of Scotland;Citizens Financial Group;Mergers and Acquisitions;IPO;George Osborne;Edinburgh;US |
ny0202262 | [
"nyregion"
] | 2009/08/05 | Jilted by a Queens Wedding Vendor, Newlyweds Get Help From the State | Like most brides, Debbie Ervolino was eager to see the photos of her wedding. There were the bridesmaids, in purple, under the gazebo. There was Mrs. Ervolino in a white halter dress coquettishly twirling a red parasol. And then there was the shot of the bride with the parents of a close childhood friend — lifelong neighbors who were practically family — who have both died since the 2007 wedding. Mrs. Ervolino suspected nothing when Queens Bridal Center, the photography studio that had the originals of her pictures, called to demand her remaining $650 balance in cash. She had just returned from her honeymoon at the Hard Rock resort in Orlando, Fla., and was too happy to worry, so she paid the bill. But then the studio stopped returning her calls. Finally, her wedding planner told her the bad news: Queens Bridal Center had gone bankrupt. “I was panicked,” Mrs. Ervolino, 26, recalled recently. She was most worried, she said, because she could barely remember parts of the wedding ceremony — with all the excitement, she said, “it’s a little blurred in your memory” — and the studio had her wedding video, too. Nearly two years later, Mrs. Ervolino still has no wedding album. But she and her husband — and about 550 other aggrieved couples — are finally getting some satisfaction. Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo threw the book at the owners of Queens Bridal, along with its sister companies, Q-Pid Corporation and Majestic Bridal Center, which also closed. In the end, the owners agreed to pay a total of $250,000 in restitution to couples who paid for wedding photos that were never delivered, or who, like Jessica and Chadd LaMay, had to scramble at the last minute to find replacement photographers after the companies closed. “This is a story of wedding dreams turned into a planning nightmare,” Mr. Cuomo said in a statement last month. And his displeasure is mild compared with that of a bride scorned. “I think they’re bad, bad people. I think karma will get them,” said Mrs. LaMay, 31, a vitamin marketer from Huntington, N.Y. “Businesses are struggling all over the place, and they pretty much messed with people that are just starting out in life,” she said. “The last thing you want is to have bad memories of that day — and spend even more.” Luckily for the distressed newlyweds whose photos were in the studios’ possession, the images still existed. Most couples have been able to retrieve theirs and have them printed elsewhere. Peter Rubin, identified by the attorney general’s office as a lawyer for the owners, Beth, Glen and Mark Ullo and Jack Simon, did not return a phone call seeking comment. The family-owned business had locations in Maspeth, Queens, and in Long Island towns — Mineola, Lindenhurst and Elmont — each incorporated separately. Mrs. LaMay found out about the bankruptcy 10 days before her 2007 wedding at the Hyatt in Hauppauge. She was particularly looking forward to having a photo of the couple’s daughter, now 2 ½, who was going to wear an ivory dress matching her mother’s taffeta gown. She panicked. Her husband, Chadd, 34, who works for his family’s excavation business, is “a big picture person,” she said. “He’s all about having memories of an event,” she recalled. “I was like, ‘If I don’t have a photographer, he’s not going to show up that day.’ ” Another wedding studio, Hollywood DJs, “saved the day,” she said, by taking the job at the last minute. Mrs. LaMay was even more thrilled when she got a call from prosecutors and was able to help them build their case. She was particularly irked, she said, that the company had cashed one of her checks after going out of business. For her part, Mrs. Ervolino, an accountant, and her husband Matt, 31, a plumber, retrieved the negatives, digital files and video from their wedding in Sayville, N.Y. But she cannot bring herself to send them out again to have an album made. “It’s hard for me to trust somebody else,” she said. “I’m a little scared to hand it over to someone.” Under a settlement agreement, the company owners will also pay $75,000 to the state in penalties and fees, and are permanently banned from providing photography and video services unless they file a $100,000 bond with the attorney general — who seems to have emerged as a wedding hero of sorts. “He is going to get the bridal vote,” Mrs. LaMay said. | Weddings and Engagements;Bankruptcies;Cuomo Andrew M;Queens (NYC);Attorneys General;New York State;Queens Bridal Center;Q-Pid Corporation;Majestic Bridal Center |
ny0194966 | [
"world",
"africa"
] | 2009/11/24 | Obama Issues Sharp Rebuke of Mugabe | WASHINGTON — In honoring Zimbabwe ’s tenacious women protesters at the White House on Monday, President Obama gave his sharpest critique yet of President Robert Mugabe, the octogenarian who has ruled the southern African country with repressive zeal since 1980. Mr. Obama bluntly referred to him as a dictator. “In the end, history has a clear direction and it is not the way of those who arrest women and babies for singing in the streets,” he said. “It is not the way of those who starve and silence their own people, who cling to power by the threat of force.” Mr. Obama’s decision to publicly recognize Women of Zimbabwe Arise , or Woza, whose members have taken to the streets for years to demand democracy, will probably confirm Mr. Mugabe’s belief that the United States and the West are out to topple him, already a recurrent theme in the state-run media he controls. Though engaged in a power-sharing government since February, Mr. Mugabe and his ZANU-PF party have deployed state security forces to arrest and jail rival politicians and party workers, human rights lawyers and civic leaders. Regional heads of state, worried that the government led by Mr. Mugabe and his nemesis, Morgan Tsvangirai, will crumble, have insisted the men settle their differences in coming weeks, but so far Mr. Mugabe has shown no inclination to bend. The United States has limited political leverage in southern Africa, but Mr. Obama has repeatedly spoken out about Mr. Mugabe’s misrule — notably when he welcomed Mr. Tsvangirai to the White House in June, when he addressed the Ghanaian Parliament in July and in his remarks on Monday. Mr. Mugabe and his military commanders reacted angrily to the Sept. 30 congressional testimony of Assistant Secretary of State Johnnie Carson that the United States was providing support to Mr. Tsvangirai’s office “for communications and capacity building.” Likewise, they resented the testimony of Earl Gast, a senior official with the U.S. Agency for International Development, that the United States “will help democratic political parties rebuild their structures.” In his remarks, Mr. Obama seemed to be trying to give heart to Woza’s leaders, Magodonga Mahlangu and Jenni Williams, each arrested more than 30 times over the years, and to thousands of other Woza women who he said have faced being “abducted, threatened with guns, and badly beaten,” and have shown “they can sap a dictator’s strength with their own.” At the ceremony in the East Room, Woza was awarded the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award. To an audience filled with generations of the Kennedy family, including Ethel Kennedy, the widow of Mr. Kennedy, Mr. Obama noted the death over the summer of Senator Edward M. Kennedy. It was the first time in the award’s 24-year history that Senator Kennedy did not present the honor in memory of his brother. “Ted knew that Bobby’s legacy wasn’t a devotion to one particular cause, or a faith in a certain ideology — but rather, a sensibility,” Mr. Obama said. “A belief that in this world, there is right and there is wrong, and it is our job to build our laws and our lives around recognizing the difference.” Mr. Obama himself talked not just about the recent repression under Mr. Mugabe, but also about past crimes, noting that Ms. Mahlangu, as a young girl in the 1980s, had witnessed the Matabeleland massacres, which he described as “the systematic murder of many thousands of people, including her uncle and several cousins, many of whom were buried in mass graves they’d been forced to dig themselves.” | Zimbabwe;Obama Barack;United States International Relations |
ny0152655 | [
"business",
"worldbusiness"
] | 2008/08/12 | Cost-Cutting in New York, but a Boom in India | GURGAON, India — On the top floor of a seven-story building in this dusty aspiring metropolis, Copal Partners churns out equity, fixed income and trading research for big name analysts and banks. It is a long way from the well-cooled corridors of Wall Street, and quarters are tight; business is up about 40 percent this year alone. “This is one bulge-bracket bank,” said Joel Perlman, president of Copal, pointing toward a team behind an opaque glass wall. “And this,” he said, motioning across a narrow corridor “is another.” The banks edit and add to what they get from Copal, a research provider, then repackage the information under their own names as research reports, pitch books and trading recommendations. Wall Street’s losses are fast becoming India’s gain. After outsourcing much of their back-office work to India, banks are now exporting data-intensive jobs from higher up the food chain to cities that cost less than New York, London and Hong Kong , either at their own offices or to third parties. Bank executives call this shift “knowledge process outsourcing,” “off-shoring” or “high-value outsourcing.” It is affecting just about everyone, including Goldman Sachs , Morgan Stanley , JPMorgan , Credit Suisse and Citibank — to name a few. The jobs most affected so far are those with grueling hours, traditionally done by fresh-faced business school graduates — research associates and junior bankers on deal-making teams — paid in the low to mid six figures. Cost-cutting in New York and London has already been brutal thus far this year, and there is more to come in the next few months. New York City financial firms expect to hand out some $18 billion less in pay and benefits this year than 2007, the largest one-year drop ever. Over all, United States banks will cut 200,000 employees by 2009, the banking consultancy Celent said in April. The work these bankers were doing is not necessarily going away, though. Instead, jobs are popping up in places like India and Eastern Europe, often where healthier local markets exist. In addition to moving some lower-level banking and research positions to support bankers and analysts in New York and London, firms are shipping some of their top bankers from those cities to faster-growing developing markets to handle clients there. Owing in part to credit weaknesses and billion-dollar charges from the subprime crisis, “people who were off-shoring high value jobs are increasing the intensity of that, and people who were not are now in the planning stage,” said Andrew Power, a financial services partner at Deloitte Consulting. Wall Street banks started cautiously sending research jobs to India a few years ago, hiring employees by the handful and running pilot programs with firms like Copal, Office Tiger, Pipal Research and Tata Consultancy Services . In 2003, JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley said they planned to move a few dozen research jobs to Mumbai , Lehman Brothers was working on a pilot program to create research presentations in India and both Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs said they had not moved any research to the country. Five years later, the trickle is a flood. Third-party firms say they are seeing a 20 to 40 percent upswing in business this year alone. Morgan Stanley has about 500 people employed in India doing research and statistical analysis. About 100 of Goldman Sachs’ 3,000 employees in Bangalore are working on investment research. JPMorgan has 200 analysts in Mumbai working for its investment banking operations around the world, doing industry analysis, and compiling data and charts for marketing materials. It has an additional 125 analysts in Mumbai supporting the bank’s global research division. Citigroup employs about 22,000 people in India, several hundred of whom work in investment research. Deutsche Bank has 6,000 employees in India, according to the bank’s Web site. Deutsche started a pilot program to outsource some research in 2003, and would not provide any update. Theoretically, as much as 40 percent of the research-related jobs on Wall Street, tens of thousands of jobs, could be sent off-shore, said Deloitte’s Mr. Power, though the reality will be less than that. The jobs off-shore are more likely to come from the investment bank and trading divisions of Wall Street firms, rather than the sales side, which produces analyst reports about companies and industries, said Andy Kessler, a former analyst who has written several books about Wall Street. “There’s a huge amount of grunt work that has been done by $250,000-a-year Wharton M.B.A.’s,” Mr. Kessler said. “Some of that stuff, it’s natural to outsource it.” He added, “These are middle of the office jobs, not back office, but they’re not the people on the front line.” After research, the next wave may include more sophisticated jobs like the creation of derivative products, quantitative trading models and even sales jobs from the trading floors. Proponents of the change say Wall Street’s wary embrace of the activity may signal the beginning of a profound shift in the way investment banks are structured, with everyone but the top deal makers, client representatives and the bank management permanently relocated to cheaper locales like India, the Philippines and Eastern Europe. In the future, executives in India like to joke, the only function for highly paid bankers in New York or London will be to greet clients and shake hands when the deals close. “Wall Street has to look at the world differently,” said Manoj Jain, the chairman of Pipal Research, a 400-person firm with offices in Chicago , Delhi and Gurgaon. Moving high-value jobs out of high-cost cities is “no longer a hypothesis,” he said. Pipal has “more work than it can take” right now, he said, and is seeing new clients beyond United States banks, like investment management companies and European financial firms. Like analysts at most offshore research operations, Pipal’s number crunchers do not make recommendations, or generally put their name to the research they write. Instead, they work with the big-name bank or fund analyst to create the research that they want. Permanently moving banking jobs out of New York or London is a touchy subject on Wall Street. Many investment banks, including Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch and Citigroup, would not make executives available to discuss the topic. Press officers for most banks asked not to be quoted or argued over semantics. For example, one spokesman said his bank’s fast-growing India support operations are not an outsourcing facility, but a “center of excellence”; another argued that large cost cuts at his bank’s New York and London headquarters were really “re-engineering” so the bank should not be included in such an article. “Some of that is self-serving,” Octavio Marenzi, chief executive of Celent, said of the impulse to keep quiet. “If I admit that research analysts can be off-shored to India, that means that I could too.” He said the “more advanced firms” will be able to use the cost differences and talent pools in India, and in the future in China , to their advantage. A few banks have openly embraced off-shoring. Credit Suisse has 6,500 employees around the world working in lower-cost locations in India, Poland and Singapore . Of these about 500 are doing high-value jobs. “We have people helping the execution of deals, data gathering, helping to build financial models, writing research, and doing scenario analysis,” said Vineet Nagrani, head of knowledge process outsourcing at the bank. The bank has small teams working on fixed-income research, credit research and foreign exchange research, “all of which are going to grow” Mr. Nagrani said. Credit Suisse is also doubling the number of investment bankers and private bankers in India who deal with local clients in the next 12 months. The bank’s clients, so far, seem happy. “As long as clients get a good quality product and can talk to their favorite research analyst” they do not care if the grunt work is done in New York or India, Mr. Power said. Third-party outsourcing firms face two hurdles when winning this business, N. Chandrasekaran, chief operating officer of Tata Consultancy Services, said. First, banks need to be confident that third parties are capable of doing the work. Second, they need to decide whether they want to move the work out of the bank at all. To address the first issue, Tata sets up pilot programs with clients. A new Tata office in Cincinnati , which will employ 1,000 people in three years, is intended to give the company a United States presence. In addition to growth outside India, these outsourcing experts are bringing in Chinese nationals, Arabic speakers and even the very people they are replacing: business school graduates from America. Daniel Peng, who will be a senior at Dartmouth next year, is working in the equity research department of Copal Partners as a summer intern. “I thought it would be a good emerging markets experience,” he said. Tellingly, Mr. Peng still hopes for an old-fashioned Wall Street job when he graduates. New York would be “ideal,” he said. | Bank;India |
ny0278621 | [
"nyregion"
] | 2016/11/06 | World Chess Smackdown on South Street! Be There! | In the other big showdown this coming week, two guys will play chess at the South Street Seaport. It’s a match for all the marbles in the chess world. How many marbles that is remains to be seen. It has been 21 years since the World Chess Championship was last held in New York, and in that time, chess has boomed in the city, especially among young children. But the question remains: Is it possible to get American audiences excited about an activity without action, when games can stretch out to six hours, and a match lasts for three weeks? Hurdles, shall we say, abound. “Chess itself, watching chess, is boring,” said Maurice Ashley, the first African-American to earn the title of grandmaster, who now provides commentary and runs a tournament called Millionaire Chess, which has struggled to find an audience or sponsors. “It’s boring, it’s complicated, it’s hard. These are all the stereotypes about the game. If you don’t break down that giant wall, you almost have no chance.” The World Chess Championship this year, which will begin on Nov. 11 and run until Nov. 30, pits the champion, Magnus Carlsen of Norway, against Sergey Karjakin of Russia. Mr. Carlsen is the closest thing to a big name in chess, with his own app and several endorsement deals, including a 2010 ad campaign for the Dutch fashion company G-Star Raw that paired him with the actress Liv Tyler. Image Magnus Carlsen of Norway, with the actress Liv Tyler, is the closest thing to a big name in chess. Credit Theo Wargo/WireImage, via Getty Images A September event with Mr. Carlsen at the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City drew 100,000 live streams, said Paul Hoffman, the museum’s president and chief executive officer and a major chess booster. “He has crossed over from just being a celebrity in the chess world to being a true celebrity,” Mr. Hoffman said. “He’s the first chess player to be a model.” On a recent noontime at Edward R. Murrow High School in Midwood, Brooklyn, a perennial chess powerhouse, members of the chess team all said they loved Mr. Carlsen but expressed mixed levels of enthusiasm about watching the match. Anthony Saquisili, a sophomore, said he was excited about it, even though the games were to start at 1:30, during school hours. “I want to see the tactics and the styles,” he said. “With Magnus, sometimes he’s mysterious.” Though soccer and basketball moved much faster, Anthony said, watching chess was just as exciting, because “the game is more serious.” Brian Arthur, the Murrow team’s captain, said he hoped to pick up pointers by watching. Earl Chase, a senior, said he had better things to do. “I’m more interested in my own games,” he said. “Like if I’m on the subway, I’m playing on my phone. But watching, I find it boring. I’m not going to lie to you.” In Midtown Manhattan, inside the sleek offices of Chess in the Schools, which provides instructors at 44 schools, students seemed more interested in their own upcoming tournaments, though a few said they planned to watch. “It’s not like football, where you get to watch with your family, eat food,” said Kayla Edwards, a sophomore at the Urban Assembly School of Business for Young Women. Image Mr. Carlsen, the current champion, will meet Sergey Karjakin of Russia. Credit James Hill for The New York Times If there is a buzz at the elementary level, Michael Propper, who leads ChessNYC, a for-profit company that runs programs in 40 New York schools, and Russell Makofsky, who runs the Impact Coaching Network, both said they had not heard it. “Chess has no idea how to create a market,” Mr. Propper said. In recent years, sports marketers have found ways to present intrinsically low-action contests like poker or video games to mass audiences. Championship tournaments for the League of Legends video game, which pump up the decibels and the adrenaline, sell out the Staples Center basketball arena in Los Angeles in hours. Chess, though, doesn’t have the drama of poker betting or the sensory rush of video games, said Rick Burton, a professor of sports management at Syracuse University. “You have to have a Bobby Fischer, Boris Spassky component to it,” he said, referring to the 1972 match in which chess seemed to embody the Cold War conflict and reached millions of American homes for five hours a day on live television. “We know there are a lot of people who play chess. But this generation of sports fans is looking for the action gratification faster. If it’s two guys holding their foreheads leaning over a board, I don’t think that sells in the U.S. “Maybe you need rock music and psychedelic lights and video. Purists would have me drawn and quartered for saying that.” Image The Marshall Chess Club in Greenwich Village. Credit Misha Friedman for The New York Times To turn the match into an “event,” the organizer, Agon Limited, which is based in Russia, has built a V.I.P. lounge area where tickets to a single game cost as much as $1,200 for opening day (watch Adrian Grenier of the HBO show “Entourage” make the ceremonial first move!), and are offering online simulcasts of the 12-game match for $15 and up. Regular tickets start at $75 a day. The simulcasts will include commentary and virtual reality streaming, intended to give viewers the feeling of being in the room with the players. “It’s a different sport now,” said Ilya Merenzon, chief executive of Agon. “Right now it’s a computer game and a sport and a show. We’re not trying to reach those who are completely uninterested in the sport. But those who know how to play, for them it’s quite amazing because they have 360-degree virtual reality, and chess engines” — computer software that analyzes the odds of winning with each more — “make the experience different. You’re following online on your smartphone. “So it’s a very different experience from what we’re used to. It may be the perfect game to follow on smartphones.” By late October, neither player was available for interviews, which typifies part of the challenge faced by the game. Fans want stories, Mr. Carlsen’s manager, Espen Agdestein, said. “You need personalities, rivalries,” he said, adding that there would be more excitement in New York if an American contender were playing. “You have Magnus. He already is bigger than the tournament. Even the big tournaments aren’t what made him.” Agon declined to provide sales figures for tickets or online streaming, but in a statement the company said sales were “extremely strong” and noted that tickets for the second day, Nov. 12, had sold out. Image Kayla Edwards said of the game, “It’s not like football, where you get to watch with your family, eat food.” Credit Misha Friedman for The New York Times Mr. Merenzon said his main goal with this tournament was to interest American brands in sponsoring chess; this, he said, would enable the World Chess Federation to better organize and promote its events, which now resemble one-off regional tournaments more than, say, a tennis Grand Slam. “We think the product is amazing, but we understand that nobody knows it,” Mr. Merenzon said. “We’re in New York not to sell but to show. For us, bringing it to New York is like a coming-out party. If they like the party and they like the numbers, they will continue it.” Jordan Kobritz, chairman of the sports management department at the State University of New York at Cortland, said the high V.I.P. prices, with their promise of exclusivity and contact with celebrities, generated the right kind of excitement. “They created the perception that this is important,” he said. “You need to be there, or be there virtually.” At the Marshall Chess Club in Greenwich Village, John Hechtlinger, a retired portfolio manager who holds the rank of master, said he missed the palpable energy of Fischer and Spassky but was curious about the virtual reality simulcast. “For 15 bucks it’s worth trying,” he said. “Tickets are priced too high.” But another member, Bruce Mubayiwa, said he could not wait, adding that he planned to volunteer at the venue so he could attend for free. “Karajkin is Magnus’s peer,” Mr. Mubayiwa said. “He’s got great nerves and a massive team behind him working to expose Magnus’s weaknesses.” Mr. Hechtlinger said: “Now I’m getting excited about it. No kidding. Where do you apply? I’m going to do that.” | Chess;World Chess Championship;NYC;advertising,marketing;Agon;World Chess Federation;Magnus Carlsen;Sergey Karjakin |
ny0235791 | [
"us"
] | 2010/01/23 | Simulators Prepare Soldiers for Explosions of War | FORT EUSTIS, Va. — A Humvee bumps along a dirt road fringed by mountains, their snowy peaks glinting in the sun. Rifle shots crackle from a rocky bluff, signaling a Taliban ambush. Suddenly an explosion rocks the vehicle, tossing it from side to side before it bounces to an uneasy stop, smoke billowing into the cab. This is a roadside bombing, Hollywood style. But this is no film set. The Humvee is part of an elaborate simulator that prepares soldiers for one of the most hazardous jobs in Afghanistan today — driving. Training to defend against the Taliban’s most lethal weapon, the improvised explosive device, or I.E.D., can feel a bit like taking a ride at Disney World these days. Or watching a 3-D movie. Or playing an interactive computer game. The simulator is just one example of how the Pentagon is trying to harness the high-tech wizardry of the entertainment industry to counter the low-tech bombs, which have killed more American troops in Afghanistan over the last two years than gunfire. Known as I.E.D. Battle Drill, the system uses amusement-ride hydraulics that can make passengers feel as if they are hitting potholes or buried mines. Screens surrounding the vehicle on three sides display Afghan-like terrain in high-definition video sharp enough to discern rocks on the roadside and leaves on the scrubby bushes. “This is better than anything I can recreate in the field,” said Maj. Michael Dolge, a Fort Eustis trainer who experienced several bombs attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan. “I think my gunner would have had some unpleasant memories if he rode in it.” The simulator is just one of several game playing or virtual-reality devices the Defense Department has hustled into operation as I.E.D. casualties have risen. At Fort Bragg, N.C., and Camp Pendleton, Calif., soldiers and Marines have begun training on a program created by the Institute for Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California that uses fictional video narratives and a multiplayer computer game. In one video, an insurgent played by an actor demonstrates how I.E.D.’s are built, planted and detonated; in another, an American soldier describes how his team responded to a bomb attack. The session finishes with a 15-minute interactive computer game in which one team tries to avoid getting blown up by the other. In another application of gaming technology, Defense Department programmers working in a strip mall near Fort Monroe, Va., have taken daily intelligence reports, surveillance data and satellite images from Iraq and Afghanistan to produce computer-generated simulations of the latest I.E.D. tactics and technology. The high-quality graphics, which can depict Blackhawk helicopters or sandal-shod insurgents, are generated by a commercially available war-gaming software called Virtual Battle Space 2. Completed simulations are then e-mailed to commanders and intelligence officers around the world. Mark Covey, who oversees the simulations unit, said many officers were initially skeptical about his simulations until someone compared an insurgent video posted on the Internet to one of his productions depicting the same attack. They were virtually identical. The counter-I.E.D. systems are just one part of a broader trend by the military to use virtual reality, 3-D technology and computer game software to train deploying troops and treat combat-scarred veterans. The firm that helped convert an actor into the creature Gollum in the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, Motion Reality, has created a 3-D virtual reality training program that simulates small-unit combat missions. Therapists at several military and veterans hospitals are also using a system known as Virtual Iraq to treat post-traumatic stress disorder. The system, based on a computer game called Full Spectrum Warrior, helps patients to re-imagine, with the help of virtual reality goggles and headphones, the sights and sounds of combat experiences as a way of grappling with trauma. The effectiveness of the new technology is still being studied. But some critics warn that computer games and virtual reality systems used for training are only as effective as their software, meaning that programs that underestimate the creativity of the enemy may leave even the best-trained troops with a false sense of mastery. But advocates say the new training systems can be easily updated to reflect changing realities on the ground. And they point to other advantages, including that most systems can be transported to the war front. Trainers say that the I.E.D. Battle Drill’s greatest benefit may be in teaching soldiers to stay alert for unusual details in the landscape that might signal buried bombs or impending ambushes. Those clues could be as obvious as a speeding truck or as subtle as a pile of rocks. Crews that spot those clues and respond are rewarded by moving onto more complex scenarios. Those who do not get blown up. “The best way to defeat an I.E.D is to find it,” said Master Sgt. David Richardson, a veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq who now trains soldiers at Fort Eustis. Getting blown up is also instructive, trainers say, because it gives soldiers a taste of disorientation that might help them recover faster from a real attack. “The first reaction is to freeze,” said Gary Carlberg, training chief for the Joint IED Defeat Organization, or Jieddo, a Pentagon agency. “But if I can build up your threshold through one or two explosions, you won’t freeze and become a target.” The simulator grew out of the kind of alliance between the military and the entertainment industry that has become more common since 9/11. At the behest of Jieddo, Richard Lindheim, a former film studio executive and past director of the Institute for Creative Technologies, recruited a team of experts. Cinematographers invented a high-definition camera capable of seamless 360-degree shots. A veteran sitcom writer plotted the training scenarios. Gaming programmers built those scenarios into videos. And a company that has created rides for Universal Studios and Disney manufactured the equipment. Mr. Carlberg said: “We’re not going to armor ourselves out of this problem. But if we can, we take the most valuable, flexible resource we have, the human being, and maximize it, that will make a significant difference.” | United States Defense and Military Forces;Improvised Explosive Devices;Three-Dimensional Devices;Virtual Reality (Computers);Afghanistan War (2001- );Iraq War (2003- );Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder;University of Southern California;Defense Department |
ny0065596 | [
"nyregion"
] | 2014/06/07 | Karen DeCrow Dies at 76; Feminist Lawyer and Author Led NOW | Karen DeCrow, who was president of the National Organization for Women during the 1970s, a turbulent period in which she helped lead campaigns for passage of the Equal Rights Amendment and against sex discrimination in education and sports, died on Friday at her home in Jamesville, N.Y., a suburb of Syracuse. She was 76. The cause was melanoma, said her longtime friend Rowena Malamud, who is president of the Greater Syracuse chapter of NOW. Ms. DeCrow was the group’s current vice president. Ms. DeCrow was a writer, a lawyer and a tireless campaigner for women’s rights. Her causes were national but also local. In the early 1970s, she represented a 7-year-old girl who wanted to play Little League baseball but was being denied. “Over my dead body will girls ever play Little League baseball,” a coach told her at the time. “If one of them ever struck out a boy, he would be psychologically scarred for life.” The girl played, but Ms. DeCrow was not done with sports. As president of NOW from 1974 to 1977, she fought off pressure from the National Collegiate Athletic Association to limit the reach of Title IX, the federal law passed in 1972 that bans sex discrimination in educational institutions that receive federal money. The law, which was strengthened in 1975 to ensure equal access to sports, has been widely credited with revolutionizing women’s athletics. “I just hope all that playing and practicing won’t keep women out of the library, studying, learning, getting ready to take advantage of Title VII, the really important federal law, the one that prohibits job discrimination,” Ms. DeCrow told The New York Times in 1997. Not all of her campaigns were successful. The Equal Rights Amendment, which would make discrimination against women unconstitutional, has yet to pass, but not for lack of effort by Ms. DeCrow. During the 1970s and ’80s, she crisscrossed the United States in support of it and had scores of debates with Phyllis Schlafly, one of its most prominent opponents. Ms. DeCrow was born Karen Lipschultz on Dec. 18, 1937, in Chicago, the oldest of two daughters of a businessman and a former ballet dancer who stopped working outside the home after she married. Ms. DeCrow attended Chicago public schools. As a teenager, she sent short stories to top magazines, hoping to be published. She graduated from Northwestern University in 1959 with a degree in journalism. She struggled to find appealing work after college, finally accepting a job as fashion editor at Golf Digest, though she had little interest in fashion or golf. She went on to work for other magazines and for publishing houses. In 1967, after a brief first marriage, she was living in Syracuse with her second husband, Roger DeCrow, a computer scientist, and working in a small publishing house when she and some of her female colleagues realized that they were being paid less than their male counterparts. She decided to join the nascent group NOW and then formed a chapter in Syracuse and became president of it. “I wasn’t a feminist,” she told The Times in 1975. “I just wanted more money.” By 1968, she was serving on the board of the national group. As president she served without pay, the last NOW president to do so. “I joined NOW on an issue of pay,” she said. “Of course, now I don’t get any pay at all.” Ms. DeCrow ran unsuccessfully for mayor of Syracuse in 1969 while attending the Syracuse University School of Law in her early 30s. She graduated in 1972, the only woman in her class, she told interviewers. In 1988 Ms. DeCrow was a co-founder of World Women Watch, dedicated to combating sex discrimination worldwide. In 2009 she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame . Both of her marriages ended in divorce. She is survived by a sister, Claudia Lipschultz. For several years, Ms. DeCrow wrote for The Syracuse Post-Standard and its website. She published several books, including two in the early 1970s, “The Young Woman’s Guide to Liberation” and “Sexist Justice — How Legal Sexism Affects You.” In 2008, she told The Syracuse Post-Standard that she was cautiously pleased with the progress women had made. “I am lucky enough to have been involved in a movement that really moved,” she said. “But then, are we done? No, we’re not done.” | Karen DeCrow;National Organization for Women;Women's rights,Feminism;Obituary |
ny0106892 | [
"business",
"media"
] | 2012/04/09 | F.C.C. Pushes for Web Site on Political Ad Spending on TV | The government is moving forward with a plan to make local television stations post information about political advertising on a central Web site. Owners of local stations have tried to block the proposal, but it appears likely to be approved by the commissioners of the Federal Communications Commission when they convene later this month. By law, stations are required to keep so-called public files at their offices for inspection by members of the public. The files typically include information about programming, staffing and spending on political ads. But few people know the files exist, and even fewer go to stations to view them. The F.C.C. wants to change that by having the stations upload the files to an F.C.C. Web site. The agency first tried to do so back in 2007, but was stymied by legal challenges. It renewed the effort last fall, leading to complaints from major TV broadcasters. In comments before the agency in January, a broadcaster trade group asserted that the required uploading would be an unnecessary financial burden for local stations and would have “no clear public benefit.” The clear public benefits, according to advocates of the proposal, are easier access to public information and added transparency about the political ads that frequently dominate the public airwaves during campaigns. The files identify the buyers of political ads and the prices paid for them. On Friday, the F.C.C. signaled that it would vote on the proposal at its meeting on April 27. Acknowledging the feedback from stations, the proposal will give smaller stations two more years to start uploading new additions to their files about political ad spending. At the outset, only the affiliates of ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox in the top 50 TV markets will be required to do so. The F.C.C. says the initial uploading will cost less than $1,000 for a typical station, and will save the stations money over time by avoiding printing and storage costs. The uploaded files will be searchable — but only inside one file at a time. At least at first, it won’t be possible to conduct searches across all the files, to determine which person or political group has spent the most money on ads across the country, for instance. Critics have said that without fully searchable files, Internet accessibility is only a slight improvement over the status quo. Last month, the nonprofit news Web site ProPublica decided to recruit its readers in an effort to scan the political ad files of local stations and publish them online. The site’s social media editor, Daniel Victor, said, “We tend to like the idea of public data being online.” | Federal Communications Commission;Political Advertising;Television;Advertising and Marketing;Computers and the Internet |
ny0169061 | [
"nyregion"
] | 2007/03/03 | Manhattan: Man Gets Five Years in Plot to Bomb Subway | A man was sentenced yesterday to five years in prison for conspiring to blow up the Herald Square subway station in 2004. The man, James Elshafay, had pleaded guilty and testified against the mastermind of the plot, Shahawar Matin Siraj, last year at a trial in Federal District Court in Brooklyn. Mr. Siraj and Mr. Elshafay were caught with crude diagrams of the subway station on Aug. 27, 2004, three days before the Republican National Convention. Prosecutors said the men wanted to avenge the abuses of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. At the time of the arrests, the authorities said that the men never obtained explosives and had not been linked to known terrorist groups. Mr. Elshafay, the son of an Egyptian father and an Irish mother, told jurors at Mr. Siraj’s trial that he was taking medication for depression and schizophrenia. Mr. Siraj was sentenced in January to 30 years in prison. | Sentences (Criminal);Terrorism;Siraj Shahawar Matin;Manhattan (NYC) |
ny0015924 | [
"world",
"europe"
] | 2013/10/10 | Director of British Domestic Intelligence Agency Defends Spying Policies | LONDON — Warning that there are thousands of Islamic extremists who view British citizens as “legitimate targets,” the chief of Britain’s domestic intelligence agency, MI5, said this week that recent leaks about government spying capabilities had caused enormous damage, handing “the advantage to the terrorists.” The comments by Andrew Parker , who was appointed director general of the agency in April, were a harsh rejoinder to widespread criticism that American and British surveillance programs, some of them revealed by Edward J. Snowden, the American intelligence analyst, are an excessive and even illegal intrusion into personal privacy. His remarks were the most vigorous defense of Britain’s counterterrorism policies by a government official to date, including its monitoring of Internet and telephone communications. In a speech on Tuesday night to the Royal United Services Institute, a defense and security research organization, Mr. Parker called “utter nonsense” claims that the British electronic eavesdropping agency, Government Communications Headquarters , known as GCHQ, listened in on “everyone and all their communications,” insisting that surveillance was tightly controlled. “Far from being gratuitous harvesters of private information, in practice we focus our work very carefully and tightly against those who intend harm,” he said, insisting that adequate safeguards were in place to protect innocent citizens. “The reality of intelligence work in practice is that we only focus the most intense intrusive attention on a small number of cases at any one time,” he said. Intelligence intercepts are crucial tools in national defense, Mr. Parker said. “Reporting from GCHQ is vital to the safety of this country and its citizens,” he said. MI5, known formally as the British Security Service and responsible for domestic security and counterintelligence, expects one or two major attempts at terrorism in Britain every year, Mr. Parker said. Citing the recent killings at a mall in Nairobi , Kenya, and the civil war in Syria, he said terrorism had become more diffuse and less predictable, with more sophisticated use of encryption technology. “Threats are diversifying, but not diminishing,” he said. It was Mr. Parker’s first public speech since becoming director general. He has spent three decades working for MI5 and was director of its counterterrorism division at the time of the London bombings in July 2005 , becoming deputy director general in 2007. Alan Rusbridger, the editor of the newspaper The Guardian, which has published many of the Snowden revelations, said Mr. Parker had said “what you’d expect him to say” as an intelligence professional. “But MI5 can’t be the only voice in this debate,” Mr. Rusbridger told the BBC, contrasting the more open discussion in the United States with the less robust one here. The intelligence services “will say that’s the haystack, they need that and they will look for needles in extremely controlled circumstances,” Mr. Rusbridger said. “The question is: Who gets the oversight of that? There has to be a wider debate.” Mr. Parker called Al Qaeda and its affiliates in Pakistan and Yemen “the more direct and immediate threats” to Britain. The Yemeni group, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, has succeeded in smuggling explosives onto airplanes three times in the past four years, though its efforts have been foiled by faulty technology or by intelligence provided by human espionage. He said the conflict in Syria was producing new threats, with extremist Islamist groups aspiring to attack Western targets. The intelligence agencies are working to monitor British and Western citizens who have traveled to Syria to fight and then returned home. A number of those returning have been stopped at the border and some have been arrested, he said, without elaborating. Mr. Parker said 330 people had been convicted of terrorism-related offenses in Britain between Sept. 11, 2001, and the end of March 2013. Of those, 121 remain in prison; almost 75 percent of them are British. In the first few months of this year, he said, there have been four trials tied to terrorist plots, including plans for another attack on public places using bombs in backpacks, as in July 2005; two plots to kill soldiers; and one to attack a march of a far-right English organization. In each case, he said, there were guilty pleas, with 24 people convicted. He argued that technology allowed Western governments to stay ahead of terrorism. “What we know about the terrorists, and the detail of the capabilities we use against them, together represent our margin of advantage,” Mr. Parker said. “That margin gives us the prospect of being able to detect their plots and stop them. But that margin is under attack.” Mr. Parker did not mention Mr. Snowden by name. Now in Russia to avoid extradition to the United States, Mr. Snowden leaked information to The Guardian and other newspapers that have revealed mass surveillance programs like Prism, run by the National Security Agency in the United States, and the Tempora program in Britain. The two countries share their intelligence findings. Anger over the surveillance revelations continues in both countries. In Britain, Nick Pickles, director of the civil liberties advocacy group Big Brother Watch , said Mr. Parker had delivered a “partial picture” and a defense that lacked detail or transparency. “Nothing in this speech did anything to assist a more informed picture or address public concern about the scale of the information being collected by the agencies,” Mr. Pickles said. “The fact he does not feel GCHQ’s reach should be publicly discussed is in stark contrast to the U.S. government’s efforts to maintain public confidence by bringing further transparency and oversight to the reach of the N.S.A.” | Government Surveillance;Security Service MI5;Government Communications Headquarters Great Britain;NSA;Great Britain |
ny0178027 | [
"business"
] | 2007/09/01 | Firm Is Issued Subpoena in Inquiry on Student Loans | The New York attorney general Andrew M. Cuomo has subpoenaed the First Marblehead Corporation as part of his investigation of the student-loan industry in the United States. The company, based in Boston and the third-largest securitizer of student loans , received a subpoena on Aug. 22, according to a statement yesterday on its Web site. The subpoena reflects Mr. Cuomo’s seven-month investigation of the $85-billion-a-year industry. The investigation has led to the firing of financial aid officials at Columbia University in New York and the University of Texas at Austin. Mr. Cuomo has looked at 12 lenders and more than 24 colleges and universities for conflicts of interests and preferential treatment in exchange for gifts, stock options and payments. “We provide outsourcing solutions for lenders,” a First Marblehead spokeswoman, Janice D. Walker, said in a telephone interview. “He’s already reached out to lenders, so it’s not unexpected that he would reach out to us.” While the company does not lend directly to students, it often has contact with them through partnerships with lenders. “We work with schools, but it’s on behalf of lenders to help operate programs that serve student borrowers,” Ms. Walker said. She declined to specify what Mr. Cuomo asked for. Jeffrey B. Lerner, a spokesman for Mr. Cuomo, did not immediately return a call for comment. Mr. Cuomo and Congressional committees are looking into a practice in which loan companies provide payments to universities or perks to school officers in exchange for being designated as “preferred” lenders. Since it was founded in 1991, First Marblehead has helped lenders finance 1.4 million loans to more than 850,000 students, according to a company statement. The company reported revenue of $880.7 million in the year that ended June 30 and net income of $371.3 million. | Student Loans;Cuomo Andrew M |
ny0290094 | [
"business",
"international"
] | 2016/01/28 | Maureen Chiquet Is Leaving as C.E.O. of Chanel | PARIS — Twenty-four hours after Chanel ’s Paris couture show was called among the best of the season, the company confirmed that Maureen Chiquet, chief executive of Chanel and one of the few women at the helm of a global luxury business, would leave at the end of this month. American-born and a former executive at Gap, Ms. Chiquet, 52, has been chief executive at Chanel, the private French company owned by the billionaire Wertheimer family, since 2007. The company said Wednesday that Ms. Chiquet was departing “due to differences of opinion about the strategic direction of the company.” A spokesman also said that Chanel’s chairman, Alain Wertheimer, the grandson of the original business partner of the founder, Gabrielle Chanel, would take over the operational management of the company during the search for a new chief executive. Mr. Wertheimer and his brother, Gérard, who rarely take front-row seats at Chanel fashion shows or talk to the news media, have $11.8 billion fortunes and are the sixth- and seventh-richest people in France, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. “During her nine years as global C.E.O., Maureen Chiquet oversaw the successful international expansion of the House of Chanel, enhanced its luxury positioning and timeless image, and grew the business in all categories. She also established a truly global organization and enhanced the culture and leadership of the company,” the company’s statement said. “Chanel is grateful for what Maureen has done to bring Chanel into a new era of its development, in close collaboration with the leadership team, and wishes her continued success.” Often considered the ultimate in French luxury, Chanel reported a 38 percent rise in annual profit in 2015, a rare growth story during a year where the luxury industry as a whole suffered. After several years of the economic slowdown taking its toll on sales growth in mature and emerging markets, Bain & Company has forecast that the global market for personal luxury goods is heading for its weakest year since 2009, with sales this year expected to rise to $280 billion, up as little as 1 percent from 2014 levels. But Chanel, known for its perfumes, $4,000 quilted handbags and its creative director, Karl Lagerfeld , has been one of the more resilient performers in the industry, claiming double-digit sales growth in every major market. Chanel does not disclose financial performance figures, although MainFirst estimates 2015 net income of 1.2 billion euros, or about $1.3 billion, on revenue of €6.5 billion. Its estimated 13 percent sales compound annual growth rate is nearly double that of the global luxury goods average over an 18-year period. The company has led the sector with crucial strategic decisions, such as standardizing prices worldwide last April after gaps grew between regions because of volatile exchange rates, opening museum exhibitions devoted to its craftsmen and smart social media activity, often twinned with extravagant runway shows. In the past, the brand built life-size airport hangars, casinos and supermarkets to showcase the latest collections. The Cruise 2016 collection is scheduled to be held in Havana in May. All eyes will be trained on the front row, to see if Mr. Wertheimer is there. | Chanel;Maureen Chiquet;Fashion;Appointments and Executive Changes |
ny0136505 | [
"nyregion"
] | 2008/05/03 | Fading Sounds of an Elegant Manhattan | For the last 14 years, some of the most welcoming sounds in Midtown Manhattan have been the voice and piano of Daryl Sherman, heard as you enter the Waldorf-Astoria hotel at Park Avenue and 49th Street. As you ascend the green carpeted stairs to the lobby, her music invites you into a world of elegance where the spirit of Cole Porter, a longtime resident of the Waldorf, still hovers. As of Sunday evening, those sounds will be stilled. A few weeks ago, Ms. Sherman received word that for economic reasons her tenure at the cocktail terrace between the Empire and Hilton Rooms would end. Saturday and Sunday’s performances are four-hour laps, from 3:30 to 7:30 p.m. Last year, the Hilton hotel chain, which owns the Waldorf-Astoria, was sold to the Blackstone Group of investors. Such sales almost always entail streamlining the operations and cutting back expenses. Ms. Sherman is one the very last and finest of a vanishing breed of singer-pianists who used to hold forth in the lobbies of luxury hotels in Manhattan. At the end of last year, the Cafe Pierre in the Pierre hotel was closed for renovation, ending the two-decade engagement of its longtime musical fixture, Kathleen Landis. The Waldorf still has live piano music in Peacock Alley on the way to the hotel’s Lexington Avenue entrance, but that serves as ambient background tinkling. Ms. Sherman, an effervescent 50-something woman, makes music suited to the foreground as well the background. The piano she has played is not any old keyboard but Cole Porter’s piano, a brown, hand-painted midsize Steinway grand adorned with decorative scrolls and courtly, bewigged dancing figures. Constructed in 1907, it was presented by the hotel in 1945 to Porter, who had already lived there for six years; it was moved to the lobby after his death in 1964. It is an impressive instrument, especially in the lower register, whose resonance Ms. Sherman sometimes demonstrates to patrons sipping tea (there is a full tea service in the afternoon) or cocktails. If you spent enough hours on the terrace listening to her play, sing, and spin anecdotes from her storehouse of musical lore, sooner or later you might absorb most of the history of American popular song. Introducing Porter’s perennially requested “Night and Day” early Friday evening, she remarked, “This is not me playing — this is Cole Porter’s spirit playing by Ouija board.” After finishing the instrumental introduction, she sang the rest of the song, then smiled and said, “That was me, just so you’ll know.” Songs from the Porter musicals “The New Yorkers” and “Jubilee” followed, as well as her own song, “Welcome to Manhattan,” which she described as “a contemporary song that sounds like a 30s song,” and it does. “The 30s are my decade — Depression,” she joked. A jazz baby who plays a buoyant stride piano, Ms. Sherman grew up in Woonsocket, R.I., the daughter of the jazz trombonist Sammy Sherman, who took her to jam sessions as a child. In 1974, three years after graduating from the University of Rhode Island, she moved to New York and began performing in Manhattan jazz clubs, both as a soloist and in small ensembles. She has many distinguished jazz mentors, most notably the trumpet player Dick Sudhalter, who introduced her to the classics of the Bing Crosby-Paul Whiteman era. The sunny, steadily swinging style of Mildred Bailey is a particularly strong influence. Her 1999 album, “Celebrating Mildred Bailey and Red Norvo” (Audiophile) pays her homage, and Ms. Sherman hopes someday to honor Ms. Bailey in a one-woman music-theater piece. Ms. Sherman’s newest album, “New Orleans” (Audiophile), is her response to Hurricane Katrina . Vocally, Ms. Sherman is frequently compared to Blossom Dearie, who has a similarly light touch and sly playfulness, but Ms. Sherman’s voice is fuller with a sweet twirling vibrato. If her singing evokes pleasure and playfulness, it isn’t all sunshine and flowers. Her rendition of a song associated with Ms. Bailey, the Carl Sigman-Duke Ellington ballad “All Too Soon,” was sultry and wistful Friday. Some of the best advice about singing she ever received, she recalled, was from the great jazz interpreter Sylvia Syms, who died in 1992: “Stop listening to the sound of your own voice and find the crux of the song and work back from that.” Ms. Sherman has a chin-up attitude about the future. “I’ve been very lucky,” she emphasized, “and I’m grateful for the last 14 years.” Then she giggled. “Now all I have to do is find a rich man to buy the hotel and pay for a facelift when I really need it.” | Sherman Daryl;Waldorf-Astoria Hotel;Hotels and Motels;Music;Park Avenue (NYC) |
ny0199698 | [
"sports",
"baseball"
] | 2009/07/12 | The Evolution of Tim Wakefield, Knuckleball Pitcher | BOSTON — The first baseman loved throwing knuckleballs. That was a problem for Stan Cliburn in his first managing job with the Watertown Pirates in upstate New York in 1988. Almost every day, Cliburn began fielding practice by reminding his first baseman to throw the ball straight. “I’d catch him throwing that knuckleball around the infield all the time,” Cliburn said. “I had to tell him we weren’t fooling around.” Tim Wakefield , the frolicking first baseman, tried to entertain teammates before Cliburn marched on the field. but he was perpetually caught fiddling with the pitch. Before long, Cliburn and others learned, Wakefield was not fooling around anymore. What started as an aimless way to toss a pitch that danced eventually became Wakefield’s vocation . He realized that a .189 batting average in his first season at Class A was going to make him an afterthought. By his second season, Wakefield had begun the transformation from a floundering hitter to an apprentice knuckleball pitcher. The transformation was steady, then superlative, then stagnant, then steady, remarkably steady, in the last 15 seasons with Boston. Wakefield has been a reliable back-of-the-rotation starter for the Red Sox , a solid pitcher who devours innings and succeeds with a pitch no faster than 68 miles per hour. And at the age of 42, after uncorking thousands of knuckleballs since his major league debut with Pittsburgh in 1992, Wakefield will make his first appearance at the All-Star Game on Tuesday in St. Louis. The knuckleball was a desperate way for him to prop up a teetering career. But he has used the pitch to tiptoe to 189 wins, to secure two World Series rings and to keep going and going. “It’s a pretty cool story,” Wakefield said. “It makes me understand how blessed I am to have had a second chance.” He said his selection for the All-Star team was his first since he was chosen for a travel squad in Florida as an 18-year-old. He is 11-3 to lead the American League in wins, but he also has a 4.31 earned run average, which is not in the league’s top 20. Still, Wakefield, who is the oldest first-time All-Star since Satchel Paige at 46 in 1952, said he valued innings pitched more than any other statistic. Wakefield was a phenomenal rookie who almost helped Barry Bonds and the Pirates reach the World Series in 1992. Three years later, his knuckleball had taken too many unexplained detours, so the Pirates released him. Wakefield was unemployed for six days before Boston signed him to a minor league contract. Since then, he has performed like a pitcher who punches a clock. Wakefield has started more games than any other pitcher in Red Sox history and has also been their closer. He gave up a devastating home run to the Yankees’ Aaron Boone in the 2003 postseason. A year later, he saved the bullpen in a blowout Game 3 loss during the A.L. Championship Series , an unselfish move that helped the Red Sox as they rallied to stun the Yankees in seven games, then won their first World Series in 86 years. “Sometimes, pitchers drift into never-never land on the days they don’t start,” said Toronto’s Kevin Millar, Wakefield’s former teammate. “As a position player, you appreciate guys that are in the dugout when they’re not starting. Wakey was always there.” Wakefield’s achievements almost never happened. He homered in his first pro at-bat, which might have been the highlight of his hitting career. He was not immediately assigned to a minor league team by the Pirates in 1989, his second pro season, so he stayed at extended spring training. That can be a baseball wasteland. Fortunately for Wakefield, Woody Huyke, who managed the Gulf Coast League Pirates, spotted him flipping a knuckleball in the outfield on a steamy day in Sarasota, Fla. Huyke asked him to throw a few more. Then Huyke asked him to take the mound and float more pitches. Huyke studied the ball’s gyrations and locked that image into his memory. During an organizational meeting later that season, Huyke said, the Pirates discussed releasing Wakefield because he had shown no promise. An eighth-round draft pick who signed for $15,000, Wakefield did not come close to being the hitter who set home run records at the Florida Institute of Technology. At that point, Huyke interjected. “I told them, ‘If you’re going to release him, make sure you look at his knuckleball,’ ” Huyke said. “The ball had a lot of movement. You never knew where it was going to go.” Wakefield had told Cliburn, his first manager, he would never make it to the majors as a hitter, so he happily agreed to undergo a drastic makeover to try to master a trick pitch. “I had to do it or finish school and get a job,” Wakefield said. “I had to take it seriously.” He was emotionally drained in his first minor league season because his grandfather Lester died less than a month after he arrived in Watertown. Wakefield struck out 92 times in 256 at-bats over two seasons, so throwing the knuckleball gave him some freedom. Joe Ausanio, a former Yankees pitcher who played with him at Watertown, said Wakefield had tremendous power and was a stellar athlete. But Ausanio said that Wakefield’s long swing “had some holes” and that he could not adjust to hitting sliders. “When he hit it, he really hit it,” Ausanio said. “But when he didn’t, he looked foolish.” So Wakefield the hitter looked the way Wakefield the pitcher often makes hitters look. “He messes you up,” said Boston’s Dustin Pedroia, who has faced Wakefield in spring training. “He controls it. He can move it left or right. He’s perfected a pitch that pretty much no one else throws.” Millar jokingly described Wakefield as a pitcher who is “66 years old and throws 65 miles an hour.” But he also offered a serious scouting report. “The problem is he can make you look as stupid as you can,” Millar said. As Wakefield sat in the first-base dugout at Fenway Park on Thursday, he recalled some important knuckleball mileposts. The day he first threw the pitch to his father in the backyard, the conversation he taped with the knuckleballer Charlie Hough so he could repeatedly absorb the advice, and his gradual ability to handle any failure that stemmed from throwing a pitch as soft as a marshmallow. Twenty years ago, Wakefield became a knuckleball pitcher, not a pitcher who throws a knuckleball. To the proud Wakefield, there is a major distinction between those descriptions. Wakefield is a knuckleball pitcher and has been ever since he stopped fooling around. “It was my only option,” he said. “I had to take that road.” | Wakefield Tim;Baseball;Athletics and Sports;Boston Red Sox;Pittsburgh Pirates |
ny0088557 | [
"nyregion"
] | 2015/09/20 | The Spirit of the ’70s, in Pictures | During her peripatetic career as a photographer, Susan Wood has caught John Lennon and Yoko Ono in intimate moments, helped to get the movie “Easy Rider” financed and snapped photos of celebrities, including Tom Wolfe , Edward M. Kennedy , Ralph Lauren and a couple of famous models discreetly nude. Some 25 photos (more if you count all the images on a contact sheet showing Diane von Furstenberg shopping for clothes in 1970), an album cover and a video are now on display in “Right On! The Lennon Years, Photographs by Susan Wood 1968-1978,” at the Mulford Farm Museum in East Hampton. The 16-by-22-inch framed prints are suspended on rods — no nails allowed — in an 18th-century barn that is maintained by the East Hampton Historical Society . The images have never been publicly displayed before, though many have appeared in magazines like Vogue, People, New York and Look. Image The writer Susan Sontag in 1970. Credit Susan Wood “We wanted to get people onto the property who wouldn’t usually come here,” said Richard Barons, executive director of the historical society, which last fall was the host of an exhibition of movie-set stills by Ms. Wood, who lives in Amagansett. This year, the subject matter is a bit broader, he said, exploring the zeitgeist of a decade far more recent than the eras usually covered by the organization. The John and Yoko photos have been a major draw, he said. Those images weren’t easy to get, Ms. Wood recalled during a recent visit to the barn, which has a few benches for visitors and a video screen tucked inside a straw-covered corner stall. She was assigned to take the photos in England in November 1968 for a Look magazine cover story that ran in March 1969. When Ms. Wood arrived, she said, Ms. Ono was in a London hospital, trying to preserve a pregnancy that later ended in a miscarriage, and Mr. Lennon was spending nights on the floor beside her. Image The writer Tom Wolfe at a launch party for New York magazine in 1968. Credit Susan Wood “I tried to be a speck on the wall,” Ms. Wood said. She met with them again a few weeks later, this time in the office of Apple Corps, the Beatles’ company. “I felt from their body language that they were reluctant,” she said. So she drew Mr. Lennon aside and said that she and Betty Rollin, who was writing the article, would leave for a while and go shopping. (Ms. Wood, Ms. Rollin and Ms. Ono all happen to be Sarah Lawrence graduates, Ms. Wood said.) “John said, ‘Just a second,’ and went to speak with Yoko,” she said. When he returned, he asked, “Can we come?” After that, everything went smoothly, said Ms. Wood, who got them to pose casually in and around their home in Surrey, near London — eating lunch, throwing playful glances at each other, standing deadpan in black outfits in front of their white car, stretched out in their bathtub fully clothed. “The pictures showed a couple in love. They had a rapport, something special,” Ms. Wood said. Image The model Cheryl Tiegs in 1970. Credit Susan Wood She discusses the stories behind some of her pictures in a video that was made by Deirdre Brennan, an Irish photographer who is also the curator of the exhibition. Ms. Wood had hired Ms. Brennan, who has lived in the United States but is now back in Ireland, to help archive her photographs. During that process, Ms. Brennan suggested to Ms. Wood that she show her work. One slightly risqué photograph shows the model Janice Dickinson from behind, completely nude, looking over her shoulder at the camera. Ms. Dickinson was relaxing between poses in a 1978 photo session, at a house in Amagansett, for an advertising campaign for Wamsutta sheets. Ms. Wood said that Ms. Dickinson, noticing her in the room, said, “Susan, take the shot.” Image Senator Edward M. Kennedy with his niece Kym Smith in 1976. Credit Susan Wood Cheryl Tiegs is also shown undressed, lying on her stomach in a sauna in 1970, but arranged so that much of her body is hidden. “That was a Vogue assignment,” Ms. Wood said. Other scenes look more spontaneous, even if some are not. A broadly-smiling Gloria Vanderbilt races down a Manhattan street after her two rambunctious sons, Anderson Cooper and Carter Vanderbilt Cooper, in 1976. Ralph and Ricky Lauren cavort with their children, David, Andrew and Dylan, outside their East Hampton home in 1977, all wearing jeans or overalls. Mr. Wolfe talks to a television reporter at the launch party for New York magazine in 1968. Mr. Kennedy plays with his niece Kym Smith in his sister Jean Kennedy Smith’s townhouse in Manhattan in 1976. Susan Sontag leans back in a leather chair in Ms. Wood’s West Village, Manhattan, studio in 1970. Ms. Wood joined “Easy Rider” as a stills photographer in 1968 before the film’s financing was entirely in place, she said. The stars, Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, who wrote the script for the hippie road epic with Terry Southern (and who appear in Ms. Wood’s photographs hanging out with other actors, smoking and looking oh so cool), needed to pitch a potential backer. But they had no storyboard or synopsis. “I asked them to tell me the story, and I said, ‘Let’s put it on tape,’ ” Ms. Wood said. There was no time to type it up, so they just took the tape to the meeting. “It sounded terrific,” she said. “They came back with a check.” | Photography;Susan Wood;East Hampton Historical Society;East Hampton NY |
ny0128509 | [
"sports",
"cycling"
] | 2012/06/11 | Wiggins Triumphs in Alps to win Critérium du Dauphiné | Bradley Wiggins won the Critérium du Dauphiné in the French Alps for the second year in a row, finishing 1 minute 17 seconds ahead of his Sky teammate Michael Rogers. | Bicycles and Bicycling;Wiggins Bradley |
ny0136332 | [
"world",
"asia"
] | 2008/04/14 | Malaysia Opposition Chief Rallies to Seek Top Post | KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — When he emerged from prison four years ago, the opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim was a weakened and gaunt figure, all but written off by the Malaysian political elite. But on Monday, Mr. Anwar, resurgent and confident after leading opposition parties to their strongest gains in a half century, will celebrate his political rehabilitation in front of a crowd expected to be in the thousands at a soccer stadium here. During his nearly four decades in politics, Mr. Anwar, 60, has gone from being a radical Islamic student leader to deputy prime minister and then, after a highly political trial and a prison term, Malaysia’s dissident in chief. A ban on holding political office, imposed by the judge who in 1999 sentenced him to six years in prison for abuse of power, will expire Monday, allowing Mr. Anwar to pursue the job he has coveted for at least a decade: prime minister. “There’s no rush,” Mr. Anwar said in a recent interview in his office in a two-story suburban house outside Kuala Lumpur. “I don’t need to be prime minister tomorrow.” Yet he and his allies have not dawdled since capturing five of the most populous and wealthy of Malaysia’s 13 states in the March 8 elections. The governing coalition won an uncomfortably slim 51 percent of the vote, and Mr. Anwar said he was wooing possible defectors. He needs only 30 members of Parliament to cross over to bring down the federal government. He also recently forged a pact among the three main opposition groups, called the People’s Alliance, to govern the states they control jointly. The opposition’s gains have thrown the United Malays National Organization, which has governed Malaysia since its independence from Britain in 1957, into disarray. Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, fighting for his political life, said Friday, “I will not remain for very long.” Governing party delegates from Penang, his home state, which the opposition captured in March, have called for him to step down. So have other influential party figures, including Mahathir Mohamad , the former prime minister who dismissed Mr. Anwar from the government in 1998 after a power struggle. Mr. Abdullah is being challenged within the party by Razaleigh Hamzah, a prince from Kelantan, a northern state, and a former finance minister. Mr. Razaleigh and Mr. Anwar offer starkly different visions for Malaysia. For the first time in decades, voters in multiethnic Malaysia are faced with a fundamental ideological choice of whether to continue with an authoritarian system largely segregated by race that has dominated politics here for decades, or to experiment with a more liberal democracy that treats ethnicity as secondary. Mr. Razaleigh, 71, has couched his bid in the traditional language of Malay nationalism, appealing to the largest of the country’s three main ethnic groups. “We successfully vanquished the scheming colonizer and continued our struggle to claim independence armed only with a devoted spirit towards our race, religion, culture and homeland,” he said in his recent speech announcing his challenge to Mr. Abdullah. Mr. Anwar, by contrast, promises profound changes to the country’s authoritarian laws and political system of ethnic segregation, in which each main ethnic group — Malay, Chinese and Indian — has traditionally had its own political party. His multiethnic partners have vowed to abolish a system that gives ethnic Malays discounts on houses, scholarships and a quota of 30 percent of shares in companies listed on the stock market. Since his release from prison, Mr. Anwar has rarely missed an opportunity to call for “accountability and good governance” in Malaysia, where dissidents are regularly jailed without trial, students are barred from politics and government contracts are given to friends and allies of those in power. He says his goal now is to put his words into action. The People’s Alliance has declared that government contracts in the states it controls are subject to open bidding. Government officers in Selangor, the wealthy state next to Kuala Lumpur, have been ordered to declare their assets. In Perak, a large multiracial state in the north, the government is giving permanent land titles to the ethnic Chinese minority who previously received only fixed-term leases. In Penang, the People’s Alliance government is setting up interfaith councils to review disputed decisions and policies that hurt certain groups. The People’s Alliance is breaking religious and ethnic taboos, redefining the relationship among Muslims, who form a majority of Malaysia’s 26 million people, and Buddhists, Christians, Sikhs and other groups. Mr. Anwar says he and his allies are trying to prove that they can reach decisions on the country’s thorniest issues. Although Mr. Anwar is a Malay Muslim and his coalition includes a conservative Islamic party, one of the first major initiatives of the People’s Alliance was the approval of a giant, modern pig farm outside Kuala Lumpur to serve Chinese and other non-Muslim residents. Muslims consider pigs unclean, and the governing coalition has attacked the decision. “We will defend that,” Mr. Anwar said of the farm. “Even relatively contentious issues of the Muslims we are able to deal with.” The corruption and sodomy charges brought against Mr. Anwar are considered by many here to have been trumped up. The sodomy conviction was overturned in 2004. And he has cultivated many friendships among world leaders. Still, he needs to win over detractors from all three major ethnic groups who say that his transformation from Islamic radical to champion of ethnic minorities smacks of expediency. Ibrahim Suffian, director of the Merdeka Center, an independent polling agency here, said Malaysians had refrained from voting for the opposition in the past because of a fear of the unknown. But he said he detected less fear in this election and almost no regret by voters afterward. Mr. Anwar is ready to capitalize on the sentiment. He must be a member of Parliament to become prime minister, so he has not ruled out having a political ally resign from Parliament, then running in the ally’s place. If his People’s Alliance woos enough defectors to capture a majority in Parliament, he said, his wife, Azizah Ismail, who is a member of Parliament, could temporarily become prime minister. “Malaysia after 50 years of independence must have a mature political system,” he said. | Malaysia;Ibrahim Anwar;Mohamad Mahathir;Abdullah Ahmad Badawi;Politics and Government;Leaders and Leadership;Political Prisoners;Sentences (Criminal) |
ny0004220 | [
"us"
] | 2013/04/10 | Student Arrested in Stabbing at Texas College | At least 14 people were injured, four of them seriously, in stabbing attacks at a community college campus in a Houston suburb on Tuesday, the authorities said. A 20-year-old student, Dylan Quick, was arrested and charged with aggravated assault in the attack at the CyFair campus of Lone Star College. Officials said he appeared to have attacked students “at random” with a razor-type knife before students and staff members wrestled him to the ground. The Harris County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement that the suspect had been planning the attack at the campus for some time and had had fantasies of stabbing people to death since he was in elementary school. Witnesses initially reported “a man on the loose stabbing people” on Tuesday morning at the campus, officials said. Four victims were flown to a hospital, with two in critical condition, according to the Sheriff’s Office. Image Dylan Quick was arrested and charged with aggravated assault in the attack at the CyFair campus of Lone Star College. Credit Harris County Sheriff's Office The school was placed on lockdown around 11:40 a.m. School officials sent an alert to students reporting the episode and asking them to find a secure location. In January, three people were injured in a shooting at the college’s North Harris campus. The Lone Star College System has six campuses in the Houston area. In the shooting, Trey Foster, 22, a student, was charged with two counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. The police said Mr. Foster had pulled out a .40-caliber pistol and fired at another student because the student bumped into him. The stabbings on Tuesday took place near the Health Science Center at the campus at 9191 Barker Cypress Road in the community of Cypress. The campus, 25 miles northwest of Houston, has about 19,000 students. Despite initial reports of a second assailant, officials said surveillance video confirmed that there had been only one. They said no firearms had been involved. At a news conference, Rand Key, the senior vice chancellor of the college system, said the campus would remain closed for the rest of the day and reopen on Wednesday. | Lone Star College;Assault;Trey Foster;Houston;College;Texas;Dylan Quick |
ny0243032 | [
"world",
"asia"
] | 2011/03/31 | Khmer Rouge Official’s Sentence Opposed | BANGKOK — Prosecutors and defense lawyers asked for drastic changes this week in the sentence given to the former commandant of the Khmer Rouge ’s main prison. In a three-day hearing outside Phnom Penh, prosecutors asked for a maximum sentence of life in prison. The defense asked for an acquittal that could allow release of the defendant, Kaing Guek Eav , better known as Duch. He is the first Khmer Rouge official to stand trial for atrocities committed when the radical Communist regime held power in Cambodia , causing the deaths of an estimated 1.7 million people from 1975 to 1979. Four other senior Khmer Rouge leaders are expected to stand trial this summer. Last July, Duch (pronounced DOIK) was sentenced to 35 years in prison for war crimes and crimes against humanity after an emotional and sometimes lurid trial describing the torture and killing of inmates at the Tuol Sleng prison. The sentence was reduced to 19 years for time served and because of technicalities, arousing an outcry from survivors of the Khmer Rouge regime. It meant that Duch, now 68, could possibly walk free one day. More than 14,000 prisoners were held and interrogated at Tuol Sleng; only a handful survived to see the Khmer Rouge driven from power by a Vietnamese invasion. During the trial, Duch acknowledged and apologized for his crimes. Then, on the final day, he fired the French lawyer who had constructed this defense. His Cambodian co-counsel said Duch was not guilty and demanded his immediate release. During the appeal hearings this week, his lawyers repeated that demand. “He had no other choice than to implement the orders. Otherwise he would have been killed,” one of his lawyers, Kang Ritheary, told the judges. Prosecutors, meanwhile, said the court had given too much weight to mitigating factors like Duch’s cooperation and his qualified expressions of remorse. “We call for the imposition of a life term, reduced to 45 years,” said a prosecutor, Andrew Cayley. A ruling is expected this summer. | Cambodia;Kaing Guek Eav;War Crimes Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity;Khmer Rouge;Sentences (Criminal) |
ny0262511 | [
"nyregion"
] | 2011/12/03 | Jury in Seabrook Trial Is at Impasse on First Count | The jury deliberating in the trial of City Councilman Larry B. Seabrook reported on Friday afternoon that it was at an impasse on the indictment’s first count, which charges him with accepting thousands of dollars in illegal gratuities from a Bronx businessman whom he helped to obtain a boiler contract for the new Yankee Stadium. “We cannot come to an agreement” on Count 1, the jury wrote to Judge Robert P. Patterson Jr. of Federal District Court in Manhattan near the end of its first full day of deliberations. “Is there any instruction you can give?” the jury asked. Judge Patterson responded that the jury should consider the other 11 counts in the indictment, which charge Mr. Seabrook, a Democrat from the Bronx, with participation in a series of fraudulent schemes to direct more than $1 million in taxpayer money to nonprofit groups he controlled so he could funnel over $600,000 to family members and friends. After the jury was sent home late Friday, Mr. Seabrook, 60, told reporters outside the courthouse that he felt “hopeful.” One of his lawyers, Edward D. Wilford, said, “Every time that the jury asks for information, it’s a sign that they have been paying attention.” Another lawyer, Anthony L. Ricco, added, “We live in a society where people look at the same set of circumstances and have a different view.” Prosecutors declined to comment. The jury seems to be undertaking an exhaustive review. Late Thursday, jurors sent a note listing 12 categories of exhibits and testimony it wanted to review. Late Friday, they asked for over two dozen exhibits and other materials. The note about their disagreement over Count 1 did not reveal how the jurors might be split. The apparent impasse, though, suggests the panel is grappling over an issue that stems from the first day of testimony three weeks ago. That day, the Bronx businessman, a government witness, seemed to undercut the prosecution’s case when he testified that the thousands of dollars he gave Mr. Seabrook and his political organization after the councilman helped him to secure the boiler contract had not involved a “quid pro quo.” Mr. Wilford highlighted that testimony in his closing argument to the jury on Thursday. Earlier, a prosecutor, Brent Wible, made it clear that a quid pro quo had nothing to do with the charges against Mr. Seabrook. “It is a crime to demand secret thank-you payments for official work,” Mr. Wible said, “and that is exactly what happened here.” | Seabrook Larry B;Frauds and Swindling;Bronx (NYC);New York City;Politics and Government |
ny0290495 | [
"business",
"dealbook"
] | 2016/01/26 | Why Martin Shkreli Will Talk on Social Media but Not to Congress | Martin Shkreli has made a name for himself by talking in the face of federal securities fraud charges, as well as fighting back against claims that he embodies greed in the pharmaceutical industry. But two congressional committees will not hear from him as Mr. Shkreli plans to assert the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination to refuse to answer questions and turn over documents related to the drug price increase. Mr. Shkreli can take to social media to communicate his views, but the Constitution lets him refuse to talk to those who desperately want him to speak to them. The key is that testimony before Congress — unlike a post on Twitter — is under oath, and lawyers steer their clients clear of that situation if there is any risk that the statements could be used in a future prosecution. So we have the odd situation of some who loves to talk, as The New York Times pointed out , getting to pick and choose when he does so. The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform issued a subpoena to Mr. Shkreli on Jan. 11, which he subsequently posted on Twitter , requiring him to appear at a hearing that was scheduled for Tuesday about recent drug price increases — although the weekend’s blizzard has caused the hearing to be postponed . He was chief executive of Turing Pharmaceuticals when it increased the price of Daraprim, a 62-year-old drug, in September to $750 a tablet from $13.50. Mr. Shkreli was indicted in December in the Federal District Court in Brooklyn on charges of securities fraud related to a hedge fund he managed and claims that he misused the assets of another pharmaceutical company to pay off investors in the fund. He resigned his position at Turing when the charges came to light, which are unrelated to his move to raise the price of Daraprim. Nevertheless, Mr. Shkreli’s lawyer informed the committee that his client planned to assert his Fifth Amendment privilege because Turing is being investigated by the Federal Trade Commission over possible antitrust violations. Although the agency cannot pursue criminal charges, a violation could result in a prosecution, remote as that possibility might be. Asserting the Fifth Amendment does not require that the witness demonstrate that a statement can lead directly to criminal charges, and the person can even proclaim innocence but still assert the privilege. The Supreme Court explained in Hoffman v. United States that the constitutional protection extends to statements “which would furnish a link in the chain of evidence needed to prosecute the claimant for a federal crime.” That is a low threshold, so even the remote possibility that the antitrust investigation could lead to a criminal prosecution gives Mr. Shkreli a plausible basis to refuse to answer questions. That does not mean he can skip the hearing altogether. A Jan. 22 letter from Representative Jason Chaffetz, Republican of Utah and chairman of the committee, states that a failure to appear will result in Congress seeking to hold him in contempt. Congressional committees usually insist that witnesses who intend to assert the Fifth Amendment appear before them and refuse to answer questions in public. This leads to a bit of meaningless political theater of members of Congress haranguing the person and decrying the unfortunate state of affairs caused by the use of a constitutional right — unseemly, to be sure, but it usually makes the evening news. Howard B. Schiller, the interim chief executive of Valeant Pharmaceuticals who was also scheduled to testify at the committee hearing, said at a JPMorgan Chase health care conference recently that “you survive these things and then you move on.” So the law allows Mr. Shkreli to assert the privilege against self-incrimination, but he will have to endure the slings and arrows sent his way on Capitol Hill. Congress could grant Mr. Shkreli immunity to allow him to testify, but the lessons learned almost 30 years ago in the Iran-contra investigation show the dangers of following that path. The convictions of Oliver L. North, the former Marine Corps lieutenant colonel and National Security Council aide, and others were set aside because the prosecution violated the immunity given to allow them to testify on Capitol Hill. Mr. Shkreli also received a subpoena from the Senate Select Committee on Aging issued on Dec. 24, requiring him to produce documents from Turing related to the Daraprim price increase as part its investigation of pharmaceutic pricing. He has asserted the privilege against self-incrimination and refused to turn over any records. On the floor of the Senate last week , Senator Susan M. Collins, Republican of Maine and the committee chairwoman, said that “absent a valid justification of the grounds for invoking the Fifth Amendment, Mr. Shkreli’s assertion could hinder our important investigation.” The law is less clear about when a former corporate employee can assert the Fifth Amendment to refuse to turn over business records. The privilege against self-incrimination does not protect the content of voluntarily created documents, so an individual cannot refuse to turn over incriminating correspondence just because it might help the government prove a violation. Nor can a corporation refuse to comply with a subpoena for its records because the constitutional protection does not extend to a “collective entity,” according to the Supreme Court’s decision in Braswell v. United States . But the Fifth Amendment can protect the act of turning over records by an individual because that conduct communicates information about the existence of the documents, who possesses them and that they are covered by the subpoena. This is known as the “act of production” aspect of the privilege against self-incrimination, and it can be used to keep records away from the government because an individual cannot be compelled to communicate incriminating information. The interesting question is whether any records Mr. Shkreli may have are those of Turing, a limited liability company that would not be able to claim the Fifth Amendment, or are being held by him in a personal capacity. If they are corporate records, then he cannot refuse to turn them over as a representative of the company, even though he has resigned as its chief executive. But if a court were to conclude they are personal documents because he is no longer affiliated with the company, then the act of production could be incriminating and so he could refuse to turn them over to the Senate committee. The issue of how to treat corporate records when they are in the hands of a former employee is not entirely clear. A decision of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in Manhattan called Three Grand Jury Subpoenas Duces Tecum permitted former employees to assert the Fifth Amendment for corporate documents in their possession. Judge José A. Cabranes dissented in that case, arguing that it creates a “powerful incentive” for former employees “to abscond with subpoenaed records in order to avoid judicial power.” If Congress sought to enforce its subpoena requiring the Turing records, the case is likely to be heard in the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia, which has not yet taken a position on this issue. So it is unclear at this point whether Mr. Shkreli would be vindicated by asserting the Fifth Amendment, although in the short term he can keep the records from being turned over to the Senate committee until any litigation over enforcing the subpoena is resolved. Mr. Shkreli is likely to keep up his barrage of comments on social media, no doubt tweaking Congress about its pursuit of him. The Fifth Amendment will let him refuse to answer questions, and maybe even keep documents from his time at Turing. The right to silence can be frustrating to those who are demanding answers. | Martin Shkreli;Securities fraud;5th Amendment;Social Media;Turing Pharmaceuticals |
ny0137981 | [
"business",
"media"
] | 2008/05/08 | Cablevision Unit Buys Sundance Channel | Rainbow Media, the cable programming subsidiary of Cablevision, said Wednesday that it was purchasing the Sundance Channel, which shows independent films and other programming, for $496 million in stock and cash. The 12-year-old channel, available in nearly 30 million homes, was operated as a joint venture of NBC Universal, the CBS Corporation and Robert Redford, the actor, director and producer. Mr. Redford will remain with the network, although he will not retain an ownership stake. Cablevision said the transaction would be financed through a tax-free exchange of General Electric shares, which Cablevision received when NBC bought the Bravo cable channel in 2002, along with a cash adjustment at closing. NBC’s parent, G.E., would receive shares for its 57 percent stake, while CBS and Mr. Redford would receive cash for their 37 percent and 6 percent stakes. Last week, Cablevision took a step toward another acquisition, submitting a $650 million bid for the newspaper Newsday. The company said that Sundance would remain a distinct channel, dismissing speculation that Cablevision would combine the Sundance Channel with IFC, the competing film channel it introduced in 1994. Richard Greenfield, an analyst with Pali Research, estimated that Cablevision’s acquisition equated to a price of $19 per subscriber. The Rainbow Media unit also includes the movie and drama channel AMC, the women’s-oriented channel WE and the HD networks Voom. “Programming that attracts a dedicated viewing audience has always been Rainbow’s mission, and we think that Sundance Channel is an excellent fit and consistent with that rich heritage,” Tom Rutledge, the chief operating officer for Cablevision, said in a statement. “We also believe that with Rainbow’s resources we will have a tremendous opportunity to build upon Sundance Channel’s success.” Members of the Sundance Channel’s board broached the possibility of a sale in April 2007. Neither NBC Universal nor CBS was willing to sell its stake to the other party, so the financial services firm UBS started talks with external buyers late last year. “The challenges facing an independent programmer today are profound,” Larry Aidem, the president of the Sundance Channel, wrote in an e-mail message on Wednesday. Another independent channel, Oxygen, was sold to NBC Universal last year. The Weather Channel, owned by Landmark Communications, is on the auction block. The Sundance Channel primarily shows films with an independent or artistic bent. It has garnered attention for original series like “Iconoclasts,” a conversation series pairing two widely known personalities; “Live From Abbey Road,” an artist interview program; and “The Green,” an environmental documentary series. Last month, ahead of Sundance’s first upfront presentation for prospective advertisers, the channel announced a slate of seven original shows incorporating themes of environmentalism and aesthetic design. It also acquired the United States rights to “Spectacle: Elvis Costello With ...,” a discussion and performance series to be produced by Elton John. While Sundance gets attention for its original series, 70 percent of its programming consists of documentaries and other films. “Our heritage will always be dedicated to features and documentaries,” Laura Michalchyshyn, Sundance’s executive vice president and general manager of programming and creative affairs, told reporters last month. | Cablevision Systems Corp;Sundance Channel;Television;Mergers Acquisitions and Divestitures;Sundance Film Festival (Park City Utah) |
ny0169293 | [
"world",
"europe"
] | 2007/03/30 | Nun Who Claims Cure by John Paul II Emerges to Make Her Case | PARIS, March 29 (Agence France-Presse) — A French nun at the center of the Vatican case for beatifying Pope John Paul II prepared Thursday to step into the limelight after nearly two years of secrecy. The nun, Sister Marie-Simon-Pierre, 45, a nurse in a Paris maternity clinic, has testified to the Vatican that she was miraculously cured of Parkinson’s disease after praying to the late pope. Her identity had been kept secret “due to the seriousness of the investigation, which was conducted with great serenity and out of respect for the private life of the nun,” Archbishop Claude Feidt of Aix-en-Provence said in a statement. Sister Marie-Simon-Pierre is to hold a news conference in Aix-en-Provence on Friday, before traveling to Rome. There, she is to take part in the process that will culminate with the beatification of the pope, which would put him on the first step to sainthood. A yearlong Vatican investigation was completed last week into the testimony provided by the nun, who had suffered from Parkinson’s disease since 2001. The Rev. Luc-Marie Lalanne, who led the investigation, said the final decision whether a miracle had occurred rested with Pope Benedict XVI. Sister Marie-Simon-Pierre is a member of the Congregation of Little Sisters of Catholic Maternity Wards from Puyricard, near Aix-en-Provence. She has worked at the Sainte-Félicité clinic in Paris since late last year. The French daily Le Figaro, which spoke to some co-workers at the clinic, described her as a “dynamic and discreet little nun.” The newspaper quoted excerpts of her testimony in which she described how in April 2005, her health had deteriorated, and she was being “ravaged by the disease week after week.” “I felt myself weakening day after day, and I could not write,” she said, adding, “If I did, it was barely legible.” After the death of John Paul that month, her congregation began to pray to the late pope — who also suffered from Parkinson’s disease, a degenerative disorder with no known cure — to intercede. In June, Sister Marie-Simon-Pierre asked to be relieved of her duties but was told by her mother superior to stay the course and to write the name John Paul II on a piece of paper. The words were illegible. Later that evening, she retired to her room and said she “felt compelled to write as if someone were telling me, ‘Pick up your pen and write.’ ” “The writing was clearly legible,” she said. That night, she recalled waking up “stunned that I had been able to sleep.” “My body was no longer in pain.” She attended Mass that morning and said that after emerging from church, “I was convinced that I was cured.” Sister Marie-Simon-Pierre ended treatment, and on June 7, a neurologist who had been treating her for the past four years told her that “all indications” of the disease had disappeared. At the end of 2006, she left Puyricard for Paris. where she joined the team of nurses at the Sainte-Félicité clinic. Convincing evidence of a miracle — usually a medical cure with no scientific explanation — is essential in the beatification process. The Rome diocese’s Web site carries dozens of testimonials from individuals claiming cures at the hands of the pope. But to qualify as a miracle the recovery must be sudden, complete and permanent, and inexplicable to doctors. | Paris (France);Beatifications and Canonizations;John Paul II;Popes;Roman Catholic Church;Nuns;Medicine and Health |
ny0296052 | [
"world",
"middleeast"
] | 2016/12/31 | ISIS Claims 2 Bombings in Baghdad, While Fighting to Hold On to Mosul | BAGHDAD — Two bombings claimed by the Islamic State killed at least 25 people in central Baghdad on Saturday as fighting intensified in the northern city of Mosul, where government forces are trying to rout the jihadists from that city, their last major stronghold in the country. The blasts, including one suicide attack, tore through a busy market in the Sinak neighborhood, the police said. A pro-Islamic State news agency said the assailants had targeted Shiite Muslims, whom they regard as apostates. The Islamic State has continued to launch attacks in Baghdad, the heavily fortified capital, even after losing most of the northern and western territory it seized in 2014. The recapture of Mosul would probably spell the end for the Islamic State’s self-declared caliphate, but the militants would still be capable of fighting a guerrilla-style insurgency in Iraq and plotting or inspiring attacks on the West. The second phase of a United States-backed offensive, launched on Thursday after weeks of deadlock, has encountered fierce resistance. Conventional American forces deploying more extensively in this phase are now visible close to the front lines. The renewed push involved heavy clashes on the southeastern and northern fronts on Saturday. An elite Interior Ministry unit continued to push on Saturday through the Intisar district of Mosul, where an American-trained army unit had struggled to advance after entering the district, in the southeastern part of the city, in November. Video At least two dozen people were killed in central Baghdad on Saturday when two bombings, claimed by the Islamic State, hit the city. Credit Credit Ali Abbas/European Pressphoto Agency Heavy gunfire was audible and attack helicopters fired overhead as hundreds of civilians fled their homes, a Reuters cameraman said. In the north, a separate army unit pressed toward the border of Mosul proper after recapturing several outlying villages in recent days. “There is a battle in Argoob area, which is considered the gateway to Hadba,” Lt. Col. Abbas al-Azawi said by telephone, referring to a strategic northern neighborhood. Since the offensive began on Oct. 17, elite forces have retaken a quarter of Mosul, in the biggest ground operation there since the 2003 United States-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein. Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has said the group would be driven out of Iraq by April. Although the militants are vastly outnumbered, they have embedded themselves among Mosul residents, hindering Iraqi forces who are trying to avoid civilian casualties. Despite food and water shortages, most civilians have stayed in their homes rather than fleeing as had been expected. One resident reached by telephone late on Friday said a rocket had landed on a house in the eastern Mithaq district, killing six members of one family. “We have not seen Daesh since the Iraqi forces restarted their offensive,” he said, using an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State. “We hear the sounds of large car bombs. Today I heard no fewer than 10 huge explosions.” | Terrorism;ISIS,ISIL,Islamic State;Baghdad |
ny0019676 | [
"us",
"politics"
] | 2013/07/08 | Kerry’s Wife Is Flown for Emergency Care | Teresa Heinz Kerry, the wife of Secretary of State John Kerry, became ill with a serious medical condition during a vacation on Nantucket on Sunday and was flown to a hospital in Boston for emergency treatment, the State Department said. Mrs. Heinz Kerry, 74, grew sick while staying at the family’s vacation home on the Massachusetts island and was in critical condition. She appeared to have a seizure of some kind, according to one person informed about the situation. An ambulance was summoned to the house around 3:30 p.m. and left shortly afterward for Nantucket Cottage Hospital. By Sunday evening, doctors had stabilized her but her condition was judged too serious for the small facility on Nantucket. She was flown along with medical personnel on her own private plane to Boston and transported to Massachusetts General Hospital. Mr. Kerry, who had arrived on the island a few days earlier after a long overseas trip, accompanied her to Boston. “The family is grateful for the outpouring of support it has received and aware of the interest in her condition, but they ask for privacy at this time,” said Glen Johnson, a spokesman for Mr. Kerry. Image John and Teresa Heinz Kerry in 2008. She received a diagnosis of breast cancer the next year. Credit Michael Dwyer/Associated Press Mrs. Heinz Kerry, an heiress to the H. J. Heinz ketchup fortune, became well known to many Americans during her husband’s unsuccessful presidential campaign in 2004. She was previously married to former Senator John Heinz, a Pennsylvania Republican who died in an airplane crash in 1991, and married Mr. Kerry, then a Democratic senator from Massachusetts, in 1995. Her sometimes bracing candor on the campaign trail at times made Mr. Kerry’s aides uncomfortable. At one point, she suggested that the first lady, Laura Bush, a former teacher and librarian, had never “had a real job.” She later apologized, saying she had forgotten Mrs. Bush’s work history. Born in Mozambique, educated in South Africa and Switzerland, and fluent in five languages, Mrs. Heinz Kerry has served for years as the board chairwoman of the Heinz Family Foundation and is a patron of environmental causes. Among other things, the foundation awards $250,000 grants each year to individuals who have made significant contributions in areas like arts, technology and public policy. In September 2009, she was found to have breast cancer and she later disclosed it publicly and urged women to have regular mammograms. After treatment, she was deemed cancer free. Mr. Kerry spent a long Fourth of July weekend at Nantucket with his wife and came under criticism when he went boating on the day that President Mohamed Morsi of Egypt was ousted by the military. The State Department flatly denied that he had been on a boat that day, only to retract that two days later. Mr. Kerry had been due to return to Washington for meetings this week with Chinese officials and had been expected to make his sixth trip to the Middle East since taking office this year. | Teresa Heinz Kerry;Emergency medicine;John Kerry;Massachusetts General Hospital;Heinz Family Foundation |
ny0018941 | [
"world",
"europe"
] | 2013/07/10 | Russia Says Nonprofits Violate ‘Foreign Agent’ Law | MOSCOW — Russian prosecutors said Tuesday that 215 nongovernmental organizations had violated a contentious new Russian law that requires them to register as “foreign agents,” potentially setting the stage for a new wave of legal confrontations. Russia’s general prosecutor, Yuri Y. Chaika, reported on the results of a law passed last November, which requires nonprofit groups to label themselves foreign agents if they receive financing from overseas and are deemed to engage in political activities. Most nonprofits here resolved to defy the new law, saying the term foreign agent is redolent of cold war espionage and would discredit their work in the eyes of the public. Mr. Chaika said that most organizations had “either suspended their operations or abandoned foreign financing” after the law went into effect, and that 22 groups continued to use funds from abroad in defiance of the law. He said the 215 organizations had received a cumulative 6 billion rubles, or about $180 million, in the course of three years. Seventeen organizations, he said, received financing through foreign embassies. President Vladimir V. Putin has accused foreign governments of using nonprofit organizations to undermine Russia’s political system, but on Tuesday he suggested that Mr. Chaika show lenience. “Analyze this practice to avoid errors and to see if any organization has been rated as a foreign agent, although it does not engage in politics,” he said, according to Interfax. | Nonprofit;Vladimir Putin;Russia |
ny0025381 | [
"us"
] | 2013/08/01 | In Missouri, Race Complicates a Transfer to Better Schools | ST. CHARLES, Mo. — When the Missouri Supreme Court upheld a law in June allowing students from failing school districts to transfer to good ones, Harriett Gladney saw a path to a better education for her 9-year-old daughter. But then she watched television news clips from a town hall meeting for the Francis Howell School District, the predominantly white district here that her daughter’s mostly black district, Normandy, had chosen as a transfer site. Normandy, in neighboring St. Louis County, has one of the worst disciplinary rates in the state, and Francis Howell parents angrily protested the transfer of Normandy students across the county line, some yelling that their children could be stabbed and that the district’s academic standards would slip. “When I saw them screaming and hollering like they were crazy, I thought to myself, ‘Oh my God, this is back in Martin Luther King days,' ” said Ms. Gladney, 45. “ ‘They’re going to get the hoses out. They’re going to be beating our kids and making sure they don’t get off the school bus.’ ” Public schools here in the St. Louis region, as in many other metropolitan areas across the country, have struggled for decades to bridge a wide achievement gap between school districts — a divide that often runs along racial and socioeconomic lines. By affirming the right to transfer students out of failing school districts, the State Supreme Court opened the doors for hundreds of families to cross the lines and move their children into better schools. But the ensuing contention has shown that the process remains a tricky one, complicated by class, race, geography and social perceptions. “Most folks are for having equal opportunity, having good schools for everyone,” said Patrick J. Flavin, an assistant professor of political science at Baylor University who recently wrote a report on the black-white achievement gap in schools. “We’re all about that in the abstract. You start to see support levels drop when it turns into a real-life thing.” In 2010, nearly three out of four black students and four out of five Latino students in the United States attended schools made up mostly of minority students, according to a report published last year by the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles. More than half of the 28 public school districts — excluding charter and specialty districts — in the city of St. Louis, St. Louis County and St. Charles County combined are at least 75 percent black or white. Of the nine districts that are at least three-quarters white, all but one scored a perfect 14 on the state’s performance rating scale. The six mostly black districts scored an average of 7. Image Credit The New York Times Racial segregation has lingered in this region, the result of generations of discriminatory zoning and real estate practices. Efforts to reverse it have included a court-ordered program that has been busing thousands of black St. Louis students to mostly white suburban schools since the early 1980s. The separate transfer law, which the Legislature passed two decades ago, did not directly target segregation, but it addresses the issue in practice. Unaccredited districts, so classified based on a state performance formula, must designate a district to which they will send students wishing to transfer. Parents may choose to send their children to a different accredited district, but then they will be responsible for their own transportation. The transfer law was invoked several years back when Normandy, which is 97 percent black, took in students from another predominantly black district that eventually dissolved. Supporters of the law noted that there was no outcry when students from that mostly black district were transferring to Normandy, which at that time had been accredited. Normandy, Riverview Gardens and the Kansas City Public Schools are currently the state’s only unaccredited districts. Those districts will remain responsible for paying for students who have transferred. “I think they’re already killing schools like ours indirectly because they’re taking the resources,” Ty McNichols, the Normandy superintendent, said of the law. “It’s going to negatively impact us because of the financial side.” Educators and parents also argue that the law could leave students facing instability because they would have to return to their home district if schools regained their accreditation. Many administrators and parents raised concerns of crowded classes and of teachers having to slow down to allow students from struggling districts to catch up. Some school districts are setting class-size policies, but it is unclear whether they would legally be able to refuse transfer students even if they reach the capacity they set. Normandy and Riverview Gardens, also in St. Louis County, have each received transfer requests from about 1,000 students. Riverview Gardens administrators chose a second district, Kirkwood, to bus their students to, because their first choice, Mehlville, said it could not accommodate all of the transfers. Some parents have criticized the law for not giving taxpayers a say in what happens in their own districts and accused the state of abandoning the unaccredited districts instead of working to improve them. Race Plays a Role in School Transfers in St. Louis 12 Photos View Slide Show › Image Dan Gill for The New York Times “We have been made like we’re going to stand on the steps the first day of school and spit on them,” said Andrea Stopke, 35, who has three children at Francis Howell and started an online petition to change the transfer law. “That’s not the case. We are going to welcome these kids and we’re going to help them. But because we’re doing that it doesn’t mean that something doesn’t need to be done to fix it.” For decades, St. Louis’s urban population has been dwindling, often because parents seek better schools for their children in the suburbs. That was the case for many parents in the Francis Howell district, who insisted that their opposition had nothing to do with race, but with school performance data and news reports that painted Normandy as the state’s most dangerous district. “I think that any time you disturb a culture — you’re bringing in a variable that is unknown — I think it has the ability to create some unrest because you don’t know how the variable’s going to play out in the culture you already have,” said Pam Sloan, the Francis Howell superintendent. But some Francis Howell parents have said that the transfer students could bring much-needed diversity to their district, and some argued that concerns were overblown because the transfer program would attract mostly good students. “I don’t really see gang-related kids busing themselves an hour to go to St. Charles to sell drugs and pick fights,” Chris Mellor, 45, who has three children in the Francis Howell district, said as he stood on the deck of a pool in his subdivision of multistory brick-and-siding houses. But Joseph Zakrzewski, 51, who has one child in the Francis Howell district and another who recently graduated, said he thought that some “troublemakers” would be among the transfers, and that Normandy students might struggle to keep pace academically. “Their A and B kids are probably going to be our C and D kids,” he said. For Patrice McHaskell, who is black, the decision to transfer four of her children from the Normandy district to the Francis Howell district was personal. From fifth grade through high school, she rode about an hour on a bus each morning from her north St. Louis home to a mostly white suburban district. The experience, she explained, was life-changing. Ms. McHaskell, 39, said she even became friends with a boy who was part of a racist group called the Skullheads. They bonded in shop class, collaborating on a project to build a bench and a birdhouse. “Having that, being able to have the diversity, being around different cultures and everything,” she said, “has taught me how to handle the world.” | Missouri;K-12 Education;Racial segregation;State supreme court;Black People,African-Americans;Race and Ethnicity;St Louis |
ny0258452 | [
"business"
] | 2011/01/07 | Goldman’s Facebook Deal Based on Calculated Risks | Goldman Sachs’s rivals must be kicking themselves. The firm’s nearly $2 billion investment connection with Facebook is relatively small financially, but it’s big in franchise terms. After the lumps Goldman took last year, the deal showed the firm could still wrap its tentacles around an important client for mutual benefit. Goldman could still lose money on the deal for its shareholders, partners and clients. And questions remain as to whether its plan to invest $450 million of its own capital alongside $1.5 billion from others through a single investment entity violates the spirit of Securities Exchange Act disclosure rules. That means there’s still a chance the deal could backfire financially or in the realm of public opinion. But taking calculated risks is what separates Goldman from run-of-the-mill competitors. The Facebook effort also involved stitching its sometimes conflicting strands of business into a fabric that suited a priority customer. That’s a way both to fend off rivals and to mitigate risk in the deal. The Goldman coup surely started with an investment banking relationship with Facebook’s executives and its board, including the early venture capital supporters Peter Thiel and Jim Breyer. Other banks can do that, too, however. So something more was required: capital. Even without the backing of some of its in-house money managers, Goldman found the cash. Its chief executive, Lloyd Blankfein , carved out a slice of the balance sheet — a bold call given that many bank executives are paralyzed trying to figure out the impact of regulatory changes on proprietary investments. Moreover, Goldman’s Silicon Valley bankers enlisted the private wealth management division to bring in customers as investors. That doesn’t just generate fees, it allows Goldman to boast that it brings clients deals other banks can’t match. The firm’s powerful network of alumni also played a role. Digital Sky Technologies, a Facebook shareholder that’s investing at least $50 million more, counts former partners of the bank among its executives. There are other tentacles poised for the future, too. Goldman will probably take Facebook public eventually, for a juicy fee. And its private bank may make new customers of the social network’s founders and employees when that happens. The likes of Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse should be wondering whether and how they can coordinate their various appendages on such A-list deals so successfully. Balancing Act Commodities markets should like economic growth. Yet despite positive data from Germany and the United States, prices are wobbling. The problem is that oil, food and metals prices have all thrived on a weak dollar, cheap money and inflows into real rather than financial assets. Recovery, a firmer dollar and higher interest rates are giving investors more to think about. There could be a lot of volatility ahead. This week’s lurches come at the end of a superstrong run. The Reuters-Jefferies CRB commodity index jumped 10 percent in December, taking its annual rise for 2010 to 15 percent. Commodities were ripe for a correction. But their fall may signal more than that. Dollar weakness and central bank money printing helped lift a broad range of commodities, as well as gold, last year. Hedge funds made hay with trades that shorted the dollar and went long on commodities. Steep price gains had a marked speculative element. Now, however, a dollar rally looks on. Yields on Treasuries have risen strongly since October, making dollar assets more appealing. The euro zone periphery crisis is another reason to switch out of the single currency and into the dollar. As the dollar rises, commodities, which are priced in dollars, tend to fall. But the influence of real levels of supply and demand must also be taken into account. Real demand for many commodities should be well supported if global growth is indeed firm. Yet stronger growth, too, has its negative side. Inflation is up in China, India and even the euro zone. Asia has already seen interest rate rises. The liquidity taps that provided investors with cheap money are closing. Stronger growth, but probably a stronger dollar, higher global inflation and interest rates, and perhaps less liquidity: that sums up the countervailing forces in commodity markets in 2011. The tide of money that surged into commodities last year may no longer flow so reliably. ROB COX and IAN CAMPBELL | Commodities;Social Networking (Internet);Interest Rates;Facebook.com;Goldman Sachs Group Inc;Digital Sky Technologies;Blankfein Lloyd C |
ny0295892 | [
"business",
"economy"
] | 2016/12/07 | Portland Adopts Surcharge on C.E.O. Pay in Move vs. Income Inequality | Moving to address income inequality on a local level, the City Council in Portland, Ore., voted on Wednesday to impose a surtax on companies whose chief executives earn more than 100 times the median pay of their rank-and-file workers. The surcharge, which Portland officials said is the first in the nation linked to chief executives’ pay, would be added to the city’s business tax for those companies that exceed the pay threshold. Currently, roughly 550 companies that generate significant income on sales in Portland pay the business tax. Under the new rule, companies must pay an additional 10 percent in taxes if their chief executives receive compensation greater than 100 times the median pay of all their employees. Companies with pay ratios greater than 250 times the median will face a 25 percent surcharge. The tax will take effect next year, after the Securities and Exchange Commission begins to require public companies to calculate and disclose how their chief executives’ compensation compares with their workers’ median pay. The S.E.C. rule was required under the Dodd-Frank legislation enacted in 2010. Portland’s executive-pay surcharge will be levied as a percentage of what a company owes on the city’s so-called business license tax, which has been in place since the 1970s. City officials estimated that the new tax would generate $2.5 million to $3.5 million a year for the city’s general fund, which pays for basic public services such as housing and police and firefighter salaries. Criticism of how much chief executives are paid has risen in recent years as their compensation has grown substantially. In 2015, the median compensation for the 200 highest-paid executives at public companies in the United States was $19.3 million, up from $9.6 million five years earlier. Comparing such compensation with how much lower-level employees earn is likely to show a very wide gulf. A 2014 study by Alyssa Davis and Lawrence Mishel at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal-leaning advocacy group in Washington, found that chief executive pay compared with the earnings of average workers had surged from a multiple of 20 in 1965 to almost 300 in 2013. Thomas Piketty , a professor at the Paris School of Economics and an authority on income inequality who wrote “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” said he favored the Portland tax as a first step. “This is certainly part of the solution,” Mr. Piketty wrote in an email, “but the tax surcharge needs to be large enough; the threshold ‘100 times’ should be substantially lowered.” Taxing companies that dole out outsize executive pay in Portland was the idea of Steve Novick , a former environmental lawyer who has been a Portland city commissioner since January 2013. “When I first read about the idea of applying a higher tax rate to companies with extreme ratios of C.E.O. pay to typical worker pay, I thought it was a fascinating idea,” Mr. Novick, a Democrat, said in a telephone interview. “It was the closest thing I’d seen to a tax on inequality itself.” Mr. Novick, who lost a bid for re-election last month, said he had begun weighing such a tax about a year ago, but did not discuss it publicly until September. Another supporter of the tax is Charlie Hales , the mayor of Portland. “Income inequality is real, it is a national problem and the federal government isn’t doing anything about it,” Mr. Hales, a Democrat, said in a telephone interview. “We have a habit of trying things in Portland; maybe they’re not perfect at the first iteration. But local action replicated around the country can start to make a difference.” Mr. Hales, who did not seek re-election, will leave office at the end of the month. Portland officials said other cities that charge business-income taxes, such as Columbus, Ohio, and Philadelphia, could easily create their own versions of the surcharge. Several state legislatures have recently considered bills structured to reward companies with narrower pay gaps between chief executives and workers. In 2014, a bill in California proposed reducing taxes for companies whose executives were paid less than 100 times above the median worker. The bill did not pass. Among those objecting to the new tax was the Portland Business Alliance , a group of 1,850 companies that do business locally. Alliance officials have predicted that the measure would not have the desired result of reducing income inequality. “We see it as an empty gesture,” said Sandra McDonough, the alliance’s president and chief executive, in a telephone interview. “We think they’d be far better off trying to work with business leaders to create more jobs that will lift people up and improve incomes.” Publicly traded companies, she added, are “an easy group to pick on.” Mr. Hales conceded that the pay ratio is “an imperfect instrument” with which to solve the problems of income inequality. “But it is a start.” | Executive Compensation;Corporate tax;Income Inequality;Portland Oregon |
ny0216398 | [
"us"
] | 2010/04/07 | Study Finds More Woes Following Foster Care | Only half the youths who had turned 18 and “aged out” of foster care were employed by their mid-20s. Six in 10 men had been convicted of a crime, and three in four women, many of them with children of their own, were receiving some form of public assistance. Only six in 100 had completed even a community college degree. The dismal outlook for youths who are thrust into a shaky adulthood from the foster care system — now numbering some 30,000 annually — has been documented with new precision by a long-term study released Wednesday, the largest to follow such children over many years. Researchers studied the outcomes for 602 youths in Illinois, Iowa and Wisconsin, and compared them with their peers who had not been in foster care. Most youths had entered the foster care system in their early teens and then were required to leave it at 18 or, in the case of Illinois, 21. “We took them away from their parents on the assumption that we as a society would do a better job of raising them,” said Mark Courtney , a social work researcher at the University of Washington who led the study with colleagues from the Partners for Our Children program at Washington and the Chapin Hall center at the University of Chicago . “We’ve invested a lot money and time in their care, and by many measures they’re still doing very poorly.” Over the last decade, the federal government and many states have started to assist former foster care youths with education grants, temporary housing subsidies and, in some places, extra years of state custody and support. The new data showed that just over half of them are doing reasonably well and benefit from such aid. But they throw a spotlight, researchers said, on two groups that need more sweeping and lasting help. About one-fourth of the people in the study, mainly women, are receiving public aid and struggling to raise their own children, usually without a high school degree. Researchers found that one in five in a second group, mainly men, are badly floundering, with multiple criminal convictions, low education and incomes and, often, mental health or substance abuse problems. Once they leave foster care, these most troubled youths often have no reliable adults to advise them or provide emotional support, said Gary Stangler, director of the Jim Casey Youth Opportunities Initiative , a private foundation. “When these kids make a mistake, it’s life altering, they have nothing to fall back on,” Mr. Stangler said. Finding a mentor who provides “that backbone you need” has made all the difference, said Cameron Anderson, 21, of Tampa, Fla., who entered foster care at 15 after he got into trouble with the law, then lived in group homes. Mr. Anderson, who is now in community college and works at a printer cartridge company, receives education and other financial aid that has helped him keep an apartment. But he has made some missteps since moving out on his own, he said, like not paying bills in full so he could buy shoes and hanging out with old friends who were bad influences. Last fall, he was introduced to a mentor, an investor in Tampa, by a Casey program, Connected by 25. The two now speak daily, Mr. Anderson said, discussing “school and life in general, even to the point where he’ll say, ‘Hey, are you using protection?’ ” Had he had such a relationship earlier, Mr. Anderson said, “it would have saved me from a ton of bridges I’ve had to cross.” While younger children are often adopted when their parents’ rights are terminated, fewer prospective parents want to adopt teenagers. Recent research, including the new study, shows that most foster children, even though they have been removed from their homes, maintain ties with a parent or other relative. Some agencies are trying to support such ties or to locate relatives who might adopt the children or provide long-term support. Illinois, New York, Vermont and the District of Columbia now allow youths to remain in foster care to age 21, and some states help with transitional housing. Congress in 2008 passed a law providing matching money to states that extend foster care to age 21, something that the authors of the study call for. But in the face of large budget deficits, few states have signed on so far. | Foster Care;Education and Schools;Careers and Professions;Social Conditions and Trends;Research;United States;University of Washington;University of Chicago |
ny0166091 | [
"nyregion"
] | 2006/08/11 | Albany: Huge Bill for Health Benefits | It will cost taxpayers at least $47 billion over the next three decades to provide health benefits to government retirees, according to Gov. George E. Pataki’s budget office. The cost was provided in an update on the state’s financial condition. The estimate was required by the Governmental Accounting Standards Board, a nonprofit organization that establishes the financial accounting and reporting standards for state and local governments. | Accounting and Accountants;Governmental Accounting Standards Board;New York State |
ny0018736 | [
"world",
"middleeast"
] | 2013/07/28 | Netanyahu Agrees to Free 104 Palestinians | JERUSALEM — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel announced Saturday that he had agreed to release 104 Palestinian prisoners, most of whom have served 20 years or more for attacks on Israelis, to pave the way for a resumption of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations in Washington in the coming days. Mr. Netanyahu took the unusual measure of issuing what he called “an open letter to the citizens of Israel” to explain the contentious move, which many Israelis oppose, ahead of a cabinet vote on Sunday. Reports of a prisoner release had been circulating for weeks, but this was the first confirmation by the prime minister of the number expected to be freed. Mr. Netanyahu’s letter did not give any details regarding the identities of those to be released or the timing, but said the release would be carried out in stages after the start of negotiations and in accordance with their progress. The talks were expected to begin Tuesday after months of intense shuttle diplomacy by Secretary of State John Kerry. Mr. Netanyahu began his letter, which was posted on the prime minister’s Web site and disseminated through the Israeli news media, with an acknowledgment of the unpopularity of the gesture, which many Israelis view as a painful concession with nothing guaranteed in return. “From time to time prime ministers are called on to make decisions that go against public opinion — when the matter is important for the country,” he wrote. He added that the decision “is painful for the bereaved families, it is painful for the entire nation, and it is also very painful for me. It collides with the incomparably important value of justice.” On Friday, Yediot Aharonot, an Israeli newspaper, published an impassioned open letter to Mr. Netanyahu from Abie Moses, whose pregnant wife and 5-year-old son, Tal, were fatally burned in a firebomb attack on their car in April 1987. Mr. Moses said that faced with the likely release of their killer, Mohammad Adel Hassin Daoud, “the wounds have reopened; the memories, which we live with on a daily basis, turn into physical pain, in addition to the emotional pain of coping daily with the nightmare.” Mr. Moses added, “In our opinion, if his release will lead to attaining of peace, let him be released outside the boundaries of Palestine, exiled and never allowed to see his family members again, just as we cannot see ours.” Over the years, thousands of Palestinian prisoners have been exchanged for Israeli soldiers who had been taken captive, or for the bodies of abducted soldiers. During his previous term in office, Mr. Netanyahu reached an agreement with Hamas, the Islamist militant group that governs Gaza, and exchanged more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners for Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier who had been held captive in Gaza for five years. An Israeli government official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly, said many of those who remained in Israeli jails, like the 104 now chosen for early release, had been involved in particularly gruesome acts. “The goal here is to augment the political dialogue with confidence-building measures,” the official said, adding that the cabinet was expected to approve the release. In moves meant to appease the more right-wing elements in the government, the cabinet is also expected to discuss legislation for a referendum on any peace deal and to set up a special ministerial committee to deal with the negotiations. But the prisoner issue is the one that has inflamed passions on both sides. Palestinians view these long-serving prisoners, convicted before the signing of the Oslo peace accords in 1993, as political prisoners whose release is long overdue. A Palestinian official involved in the negotiations process, who could speak only on the condition of anonymity because of the delicate diplomacy under way, said the Palestinian side had given a list of all 104 pre-Oslo prisoners to Mr. Kerry, who conveyed it to the Israelis. Israel had previously balked at including 22 prisoners who are Arab citizens of Israel or residents of East Jerusalem. Israeli officials have so far refused to say whether those objections have been dropped. “This is the biggest achievement we will have had this year,” the Palestinian official said. He said the first group was expected to be released in August, and the rest within six months. | Political prisoner;Benjamin Netanyahu;Israel;Palestinians;International relations |
ny0097779 | [
"world",
"asia"
] | 2015/06/29 | China and India Are Sitting Out Refugee Crisis | HONG KONG — When a deadly earthquake rocked Nepal in April, China and India rushed to send relief supplies and search-and-rescue teams. But when another humanitarian crisis — boats bearing thousands of migrants — appeared off Southeast Asian shores a month later, Asia’s two most populous countries said and did little. Instead, offers to resettle the migrants came from Gambia and the United States . The wealthiest nations in the Asia-Pacific region stood back as well. Australia declared it would not resettle the migrants, mostly Rohingya Muslims fleeing religious persecution in Myanmar or poor Bangladeshis seeking jobs. Japan pledged $3.5 million in emergency assistance but also refrained from offering to take in any displaced people. More than a month after Malaysia and Indonesia agreed to provide temporary shelter for up to 7,000 of the migrants stranded at sea, there has been no sign of progress in finding them a permanent home, nor any hint that Myanmar would address the conditions driving the Rohingya exodus. And Asia’s most powerful nations are essentially sitting out the crisis. Their passivity is all the more striking because, halfway around the world, European leaders have been actively debating a response to their own migrant crisis, in which more than 1,700 people from Africa and the Middle East have died trying to cross the Mediterranean this year. President Xi Jinping of China and Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India often present their nations as emerging global powers, promoting regional cooperation. Both countries also share a border with Myanmar and enjoy economic leverage as major trading partners, and in China’s case, as a top source of foreign investment . But neither has pressured the government on its treatment of the Rohingya or played a significant role in efforts to resettle them. During a meeting of the United Nations Security Council last month, China insisted that the matter was an internal one for Myanmar to resolve. Image A Rohingya refugee in New Delhi this month. India has shown a grudging tolerance for Rohingya migrants, analysts have said. Credit Rajat Gupta/European Pressphoto Agency “The Rohingya issue is a complex multilateral issue,” said Zachary Abuza, an analyst with the consultancy firm Southeast Asia Analytics. The governments in Southeast Asia “want it to go away, but they are unwilling to solve it. China and India could play leadership roles but see it as a losing issue that would diminish their clout and bilateral interests. “No country has more leverage over Myanmar than China, even if it’s diminished in the past four years,” he added. But China sees the Rohingya problem “as such a toxic one in Southeast Asia that it is unwilling to make a deal of the issue. There is no political upside.” India has helped absorb past waves of refugees fleeing border wars and political repression in Myanmar, providing sanctuary to Burmese pro-democracy activists through decades of military rule, for example. It also hosts more than 10,000 Rohingya who fled earlier spates of violence against them. But India has refrained from criticizing Myanmar and adopted a policy of grudging tolerance toward Rohingya arrivals rather than engagement, analysts and refugee advocates said. Some government officials have expressed fear that Rohingya Muslims in India might be infiltrated by jihadists. “India sort of stayed away from this whole thing, and that is disappointing,” said Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director of Human Rights Watch , referring to the most recent crisis. “India wants to be more careful in maintaining its strategic and economic influence” over neighbors rather than criticize them over human rights issues, she said. Michel Gabaudan, president of the advocacy group Refugees International , based in Washington, said India was distrustful of the international refugee process in part because it had received little recognition for taking in refugees, including more than 100,000 Tibetans from China and another 100,000 Tamils from Sri Lanka. “India has taken refugees when it made political sense, but not out of a sense of international obligation,” he said. Many in India and elsewhere in the region consider the problem of refugees to be a legacy of Western imperialism and colonial-era borders. The origins of the current crisis, for example, can be traced to 1974, when the Burmese military government asserted that the Rohingya were economic migrants who had traveled to Myanmar during British rule and stripped them of citizenship. Video Thousands of Rohingya Muslims have been fleeing persecution in Myanmar. Recently the departures have abated, though the situation may be temporary. And many remain eager to leave. Credit Credit Tomas Munita for The New York Times As a result, Mr. Gabaudan said, there is a sense that responsibility for refugees rests with the West and institutions such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Only a handful of nations in Asia are among the 148 countries that are parties to the main international conventions that protect refugees. “Generally speaking, there is a lack of state responsibility for refugee protection in Asia,” said Brian Barbour, director of external relations at the Japan Association for Refugees. “Most countries in the region believe that they should be praised for hosting such large numbers of refugees, not criticized for refusing to grant asylum or allow refugees to locally integrate.” During the last major refugee crisis in Asia, which began in the mid-1970s, more than three million people fled war in Indochina — Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos — and arrived in destinations across Southeast Asia that grew increasingly unwilling to accept them, including Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore and Thailand. At an international conference in 1979, governments in the region agreed to admit the refugees temporarily only after the rest of the world promised to assume most of the costs and to resettle them elsewhere. More than one million people were resettled in the United States, with large populations going to Australia and Canada as well. Much smaller populations were resettled in Japan, Malaysia and the Philippines. China resettled 260,000 ethnic Chinese who fled Vietnam at the time. In the preceding decades, it also took in hundreds of thousands of ethnic Chinese fleeing discrimination and violence in Indonesia and Malaysia, and earlier this year, it offered temporary refuge for ethnic Chinese known as the Kokang who fled fighting in their home state in northeastern Myanmar. But the Rohingya and other refugee populations that are not of Chinese ethnicity are less of a concern to Beijing, said Yun Sun, a scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington who has studied China and refugee issues. She said Beijing helped ethnic Chinese refugees out of a sense of “amity,” but only if such assistance was not politically costly. “Beijing doesn’t want to be seen as interfering with other countries’ internal affairs,” she said. Unlike India, China ratified the 1951 Refugee Convention. But it limits registration of refugees and restricts access by the United Nations’ refugee agency to populations in China. The government has also refused to protect North Koreans who cross the border as refugees, treating them instead as economic migrants subject to forced repatriation. How Myanmar and Its Neighbors Are Responding to the Rohingya Crisis Myanmar and its neighbors see the people of the Rohingya ethnic group and the seaborne trafficking of migrants in the region very differently, complicating the refugees’ plight. “The domestic priority is internal stability,” said Alistair D. B. Cook, a research fellow with the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Mr. Cook said an emphasis on noninterference in Asia has meant that the only countries in the region that have responded to the migration crisis are those that had migrants leave or come ashore. “Essentially what we see now, we see going as far back as the Indochinese exodus,” he said. “How states responded then and how they respond now, there hasn’t been too much change.” What has changed, however, is the economic strength of the region, which has enjoyed several decades of rapid growth since the Vietnam War. Many countries in Asia are much richer than they were 40 years ago, suggesting at least greater financial capacity to assist refugees. While countries such as Thailand and the Philippines provide temporary sanctuary for migrants fleeing persecution, Japan is the only nation in Asia that has accepted refugees for resettlement through the United Nations’ refugee agency. Since beginning the program in 2010, though, Japan has resettled only 18 refugee families, according to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Even Australia, long a destination for migrants seeking safety and a better life, has taken a tougher stance against asylum seekers. After as many as 880 people drowned trying to reach the continent in 2012, the government adopted a policy of intercepting migrants at sea and turning them back, or holding them indefinitely at offshore detention centers and, most recently, flying them to countries willing to take them for a fee. Earlier this month, an Indonesian smuggler said the Australian authorities had given him and his crew more than $30,000 in cash to take their cargo of 65 migrants to Indonesia, possibly in violation of international and local laws. The allegation, which the government has neither denied nor admitted, was the latest sign of a further hardening under Prime Minister Tony Abbott. “It’s just a political choice,” said Paul Power, chief executive of the Refugee Council of Australia, an umbrella group of nonprofits that work with asylum seekers. “It’s all about presenting to a small element of the Australian population that they are tough. What’s discussed is actually just being tough on persecuted people. ” | Refugees,Internally Displaced People;China;India;Rohingya;Myanmar,Burma;United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees;Asia;Human Rights;Human Rights Watch |
ny0218678 | [
"us"
] | 2010/05/21 | Alderman Gives a Critic of the Mayor a New Vest and New Duties | They form an odd sight on the once-mean, now-trendy streets of Bucktown and Wicker Park: The bespectacled alderman of a young, affluent ward and his blue-collar aide, popping sewer grates and wielding shovels. Almost five years after the Daley administration fired Frank Coconate from the Water Management Department for allegedly loafing and lying about it, the unrelenting mayoral critic is again sticking his shaved head into the city’s plumbing system and wearing a yellow safety vest. Except the name written on the back of the vest is not Mayor Richard M. Daley , but rather Alderman Scott Waguespack (32nd Ward), who pays Mr. Coconate about $100 a week from campaign funds for part-time help as an “infrastructure consultant.” Mr. Waguespack is among the more vocal mayoral foes on the City Council, and he said this week that he did not fear angering Mr. Daley by giving a job to one of the most notorious political naysayers in a town of yes men. “I can’t believe the mayor had such a vendetta that he fired him,” the alderman said, describing Mr. Coconate, 52, as a good employee. Told of the alderman’s comments, Jacquelyn Heard, the mayor’s spokeswoman, said: “Isn’t that an easy excuse for hiring someone who has a reputation for not working? Real convenient.” In the final stretch of his 28 years with the city, Mr. Coconate’s co-workers dubbed him “The Coconut” because they thought only a deranged city employee would dare publicly lambaste the mayor. Mr. Coconate surprised the workers further in the summer of 2005 by passing out “Jr.” buttons to encourage United States Representative Jesse Jackson Jr. to challenge the mayor. (The congressman ultimately shied away from running.) The city fired Mr. Coconate in August 2005, just days before Mr. Jackson spoke to Mr. Coconate’s renegade political group, the Northwest Side Democratic Organization. City officials said at the time that Mr. Coconate’s reports of work sites he inspected as a safety specialist did not match the data recorded by a GPS tracker in his city truck. Mr. Coconate’s legal efforts to get his job back have failed, though he gained some retribution when the court-appointed city hiring monitor awarded him $75,000 in 2008 from a fund for victims of politically motivated job discrimination at City Hall. He found temporary refuge in a job in Bensenville thanks to John Geils, the suburb’s mayor at the time, who opposed Chicago’s efforts to expand O’Hare International Airport. Mr. Coconate lost that job last year, after Mr. Geils lost re-election to a candidate who dropped Bensenville’s opposition. Mr. Coconate — who also works part-time as a security guard and as a process server — spends three afternoons each week with Mr. Waguespack. On Thursday, they lifted sewer covers and shoveled out debris that blocked drains. Mr. Waguespack said he engages in these acts of vigilante city service to help constituents whose complaints have not been addressed by the cash-strapped city administration. The alderman, who was first elected in 2007 when he defeated a Daley ally, declined to address rumors he is mulling a run for mayor next year. Mr. Coconate is happy to again egg on a potential challenger to Mr. Daley. “He’s a very vengeful person,” Mr. Coconate said of the mayor. “I might not be a threat to him, but he wanted to send a message to anybody who thought of questioning his management style.” | Labor and Jobs;Daley Richard M;Politics and Government;Chicago (Ill) |
ny0102322 | [
"world",
"middleeast"
] | 2015/12/23 | Syrian Peace Talks Planned for January, U.N. Official Says | GENEVA — The United Nations special envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, expects to convene a new round of talks “sometime towards the end of January” aimed at ending the Syrian conflict, Michael Moller, the head of the organization’s Geneva office, told reporters on Tuesday. Representatives of the Syrian government and its opponents will participate, United Nations officials said, without giving a specific date or any details about exactly who will take part. Syria’s Treacherous Borderlands There has been no easy way out for many of the more than four million Syrians who have fled their country since 2012. “Almost everybody wants these talks to be successful, so that we can finally get a political solution to this really unacceptable problem,” Mr. Moller said, adding that he expected greater clarity towards the middle of January. On Friday, the Security Council unanimously backed a diplomatic road map for settling the Syrian conflict, including peace talks, a cease-fire and eventual elections. But the resolution skirted many of the most sensitive issues , including the future role of President Bashar al-Assad and exactly which elements of the opposition would be at the negotiating table. The council’s action culminated weeks of accelerating consultations among global and regional powers over how to end the conflict, which has raged for five years with an estimated 250,000 deaths and millions more driven from their homes. Secretary of State John Kerry said after the vote on Friday that decisions would have to follow within a month or two concerning the creation of a transitional government in Syria. | Syria;UN;International relations;Security Council UN Parent |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.